Third 40th anniversary short is up, Night Shift:
Sound seems to be a little odd in this one, I had to crank my volume up and could still barely hear.
There’s a Grateful Dead song with the same name. Not sure if it’s a coincidence. Both were released around the same time (probably). The song is definitely quite a bit “Spaced Out”. Hippies.
I love this song.
“Wait. Wait! So that’s where that comes from?!?”
“Yep.”
“Cool.”
I watched Aliens last night with my son. I had reluctantly shown him the first movie about a week ago, and he was keen to see the second last night. I needed to do some podcast prep as we were going to record the Hellboy podcast at midnight, but I figured, “What the hell.”
Now I’ve seen Aliens more times than I can count, but watching it with someone who has never seen it, someone you love and are raising, was wonderful. I’m trying to teach my son things about analyzing a movie, in much the same way as I’m trying to teach him cooking techniques. I’m not an expert in either, but I want him to have a grasp on what to look for when he gets older. It’s kind of like planting a seed. It might not matter much now, but later in life he’ll have the knowledge embedded.
Anyway, I’ve seen this movie so many times, and I love it so much. But even so, I find new things every time. For instance, here’s an example of my missing something that is completely obvious, or at least me not remembering, but which my kid caught immediately. “Did Newt call her Mommy?”
I was all, “Uhhhhh.” And we ran it back.
Also, it’s far scarier than I remember, even having seen it recently. I see it through a different lens. As a different genre than the first movie, which is a horror movie. I always just label this one as an action movie. But my son found it really scary, and seeing it through his eyes, it is a terrifying action movie. James Cameron really does a great job of bridging between horror and action. They can often go hand in hand, but rarely this well. It was a joy to see it in this regard, with my son again hiding behind a pillow and me worried about all the “language throughout” in the movie. I know he uses this language with his friends. It’s much more casual for them than it was for me growing up, as I was a church kid, but it still makes you cringe as a parent to constantly hear the eff word when you’re watching something with your teenager.
One of my favorite moments in Aliens is when Vasquez takes a pistol, cocks it, and hands it to Bishop as he gets in the pipe to crawl through to pilot down the other drop ship. I love that bit. She takes it out. Cocks it. Hands it to him, and then looks away. Then he regards the pistol for a second, and hands it to Ripley. It’s a beautiful moment. Pointing that out to my son was so much fun.
And that he found the Vasquez line, “No. Have you?” hilarious was thoroughly gratifying.
It was sad to me to have to tell him that the movies only go downhill from here.
-xtien
“It’s the only way to be sure.”
Apparently my seriously cool friend, @marquac, read this post, and then made this for me. It basically made my day.
-xtien
“Not bad…for a human.”
“Why does that look like a green stamp?”
I realize these pseudo live-diaries of us watching the “Alien” movies might be getting tedious. But oh well.
My son insisted we watch Alien3 this morning. I warned him. I did. But he insisted. So we watched the thing.
The amount of crappy this movie is cannot be explained. And I have to say up front, that the guy who adapted The Hunt for Red October, Larry Ferguson, was one of the screenwriters. Face palm.
What’s great though is that we had a blast watching it because it’s so bad. My kid totally picked up on the screenwriting problems, getting increasingly frustrated in the first act as Ripley just blithely decides not to tell anyone, including the doctor dude she’s sleeping with, why she is concerned. She insists on an autopsy of clearly-not Newt, and he’s all, “Why?”
She tells him she is worried about a contagion. What the screenwriters pull out of their asses is cholera.
Cholera?
Whatever. They do this stupid dance of I-won’t-tell-you for half the movie.
-“What are we looking for?”
-“I’ll tell you later.”
-“Why were you locked up?”
-“Not now. I’ll tell you later.”
There is no reason for these put off excuses. In fact, it makes absolutely NO SENSE that Ripley doesn’t just tell them up front that she thinks there is a xenomorph on board. It is in her best interest to warn them, but the screenwriters choose that she is suddenly cagey about the alien. For reasons. As well as the doctor (Charles Dance), not telling her he’s in jail for getting drunk and prescribing the wrong pain meds to a bunch of people in a car wreck. I guess the writers thought it would be fun if we were left hanging about whether he had raped somebody or molested a child or something.
My kid went from hoping it wasn’t one of those things, to getting to the reveal and saying, essentially, “That’s the reveal? That was his crime?”
“He essentially murdered eleven people.”
“Yeah. But come on. If you’re going to hide it that long, it’s gotta be something more than a prescription mistake.”
As I said in my write up of watching Aliens with him, one of the points here is to teach him to analyze movies, as he does books at school. Before you go nuts, don’t worry, I’m not taking the fun out of it. I’m teaching him a deeper level of enjoyment of the way films are made, and what makes them work. He loves it.
Once again, we had a great time watching this movie, as bad as it is. It gets hilarious once the CG alien gets grafted into the frames. The puppet alien is fine, but the CG version is just ridiculous. My son described it as above, like a green stamp. It is literally laughable. And I use the word “literally” because we were both laughing out loud every time it showed up in frame.
It’s a terrible movie, but at least wasn’t a terrible viewing experience. Afterwards my son went to look at its review scores and was shocked.
“I’m telling you, this is one of my favorite directors. Who knows what happened.”
“This may be one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen,” he replied.
Also…as we watched the credits, I saw that an old friend of mine had been the Camera Equipment Operator on the movie. So that was fun. Also, Paul McGann was in it!
-xtien
“Don’t be afraid. I’m part of the family.”
I love these write-ups. I wish you were my daddy, Mr. Dingus!
Thank you for linking that, @JoshL. I hadn’t read your post about the movie and now have. I like your thoughts on it even if I don’t agree with all of them.
-xtien
“I’d rather be nothing.”
“No. Alien: Resurrection is far worse.”
“You’re kidding me. The third one is worse than the fourth one.”
“I don’t think so.”
This is a somewhat reduced (I did not use the word ‘redacted’ I’ll have you know) version of a conversation I had with Tom after my son and I watched Alien3. His contention was that the fourth movie, directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, is worse than the third movie, directed by David Fincher. He makes a good point, in that with David Fincher, you can see where he is headed. As crappy as Alien3 is, you can see his filmmaking style starting to develop. Up until that he was doing commercials and music videos. With Jean-Pierre Jeunet you have a director who had already made City of Lost Children and Delicatessen. So he’s not exactly emerging as a filmmaker. Sure, he would go on to make one of my favorite movies a couple of years later, that being Amelie, but he knew what he was doing, presumably. Maybe he didn’t understand the vagaries of Hollywood, but he could shoot coherently.
Man, Alien: Resurrection gives you no hint of that.
Tom is not wrong. I still do think that Alien3 is a worse movie, but only by a hair. The problem here is that I’m evaluating based on watching it with my son, and we had a good time watching that movie. We laughed at the silliness of it. We goofed on it. He came out to the kitchen during my conversation with Tom and talked about these things rather joyfully. There is a certain pleasure in watching a bad movie. Anyone who has listened to a Kellywand-opsis knows this.
But Alien: Resurrection is just a slog. Watching it is utterly joyless. I kind of like what Sigourney Weaver is doing in tweaking her character, but there is little to balance this. She has become harder. More abrasive. Which is justifiable when you realize who she is at this point. The problem is that it doesn’t help the movie. There is almost nobody to root for. My son liked a couple of characters a little bit, but had no real emotional connection with them, and often didn’t see how their actions were justifiable. And Winona Ryder just seems to be doing a wide-eyed, “What’s that again?” performance. She really should have paid attention to the humanity Lance Henriksen brought to Bishop. Even Ian Holm’s icy Ash had layers. She’s just out of her depth.
When we got to the part where the new creature was birthed by the queen, my son was pretty much done with the movie. “I hate this character,” he said. “It’s disgusting and stupid.”
He was right. There is an elegance to the way the aliens are designed. This looks like an alien Stuart Gordon made for one of his movies, and then dumped acid on, and then put in a giant microwave oven. There are moments that could have worked, emotional moments between the creature and Ripley, but they don’t really amount to much in the grand scheme of things.
On to Prometheus. God help us.
-xtien
“Don’t push me, little Call. You hang with us for a while, you’ll find out I am not the man with whom to fuck!”
I’ve always thought that was one of the few things in the movie that feels like Joss Whedon. That and maybe the horrible basketball scene?
There’s an old AV Club interview (here: Joss Whedon) where they talk about this movie a little. I always remember this part:
In Alien 4 , the director changed something so that it didn’t make any sense. He wanted someone to go and get a gun and get killed by the alien, so I wrote that in and tried to make it work, but he directed it in a way that it made no sense whatsoever. And I was sitting there in the editing room, trying to come up with looplines to explain what’s going on, to make the scene make sense, and I asked the director, “Can you just explain to me why he’s doing this? Why is he going for this gun?” And the editor, who was French, turned to me and said, with a little leer on his face, [adopts gravelly, smarmy, French-accented voice] “Because eet’s een the screept.”
Will young Maltanski get to listen to the opsis afterwards?
I just ask that he be capable and prepared.
Oh, boy, you are not gonna like my Alien: Resurrection write-up.
You mean other than the entire reoccurring subplot about Wayland Yutani wanting to capture and use the alien which Ripley spends the entire series trying to avoid? Or maybe she didn’t want everybody to think she was insane by breaking out the “I want to make sure there isn’t an alien inside her chest!!” line right away.
Alien 3’s title sequence alone is better than anythhing in Resurrection combined. Alien 3 is still not good mind you - there’s far too many characters and running back and forth to no effect in the middle - but between Whedon’s team of lovable quippy outsiders on the script level and Jeunet directing it like it’s a grotesque, baroque comedy, Resurrection winds up such a gurning tonal nightmare.
She’s on a prison planet. And she thinks the alien is there too. Ripley is all about survival. So no, worrying about The Company or being looked at as crazy is the least of her worries. She understands better than anyone still alive, as her character is set up in the first two movies, that they don’t stand a chance unless they get away, nuke it from space, or blow it out an airlock. She can do none of these things, so being coy about a xenomorph that “wiped out my entire crew in less than 24 hours” is pretty dumb.
The lack of weapons thing is a cool device, as far as the have-your-character-climb-a-tree-and-throw-rocks-at-her idea is concerned. But that has nothing to do with my objection to her pretending Newt had cholera instead of just saying, “I’m afraid there’s a xenomorph gestating inside of her.”
-xtien
“Affirmative.”
I do like the title sequence. I don’t quite understand what actually happened but I like the way it is put together.
-xtien
You will have to wait to find out. We just finished watching it.
-xtien
“Prometheus has landed.”