Street fighting men  BAM celebrates John Carpenter's sci-fi-
inflected rage against the machine.    Add + <p>ASSAULT AND
BATTERY PARK Kurt Russell pins Harry Dean Stanton in <em>Escape
from New York.</em></p>  ASSAULT AND BATTERY PARK Kurt Russell
pins Harry Dean Stanton in Escape from New York.  He doesn't
know the band Portishead. And his involvement in Rob Zombie's
remake of Halloween was "minimal" at best (a polite euphemism
for cashing the check). But the influence of director John
Carpenter is huger than ever, with fawning nods in films as
recent as Grindhouse and Doomsday. After supercharging the
slasher genre in 1978, Carpenter spent much of the 1980s
pursuing a politically daring brand of sci-fi satire, to be
celebrated in a well-chosen mini retro at BAM. The four
movies—the instant classic Escape from New York (1981), a
paranoid remake of The Thing (1982), the cross-genre romp Big
Trouble in Little China (1986) and Carpenter's yuppie-invasion
nightmare They Live (1988)—are all to be screened in 35mm