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Filtering by Tag: Alien
When you're smiling, the whole world smiles at you. (20th Century Studios)
My Washington CIty Paper review of Alien: Romulus, the 45-year-old franchise’s first legasequel, is here. Lest anyone fear I have not had enough to say about these slimy, sweaty movies that I so love, even when they’re bad. Which this new one is not!
Cailee Spaeny, stompin' bugs. (20h Century Studios)
It’s a reunion of the unforgettable Silver Streak episode of A Degree Absolute! as I join pals Glen Weldon and Ronald Young, Jr. to dissect the latest Alien on Pop Culture Happy Hour. None of us recognizes the occasion by using the phrase “hug ‘n’ munch,” even though it would have been utterly appropriate to do so. Dang!
In space, no can hear your scream at your A.D.
No film franchise has had a more accomplished class of filmmakers explode from its womb than the ALIEN-iad. Extraterrestrial, extraterrestrial, read all about it in the Paper of Record.
The 1991-2 production of Alien 3 was by all accounts more of a slog than this photo of Sigourney Weaver and her tall, dark plus-one would suggest.
Here’s a Smithsonian piece wherein I put my lifelong independent study of xenobiology to good use by documenting curator Ryan Lintelman’s quest to sleuth out exactly which ALIEN flick the big prop egg in the Smithsonian Museum of American History. It’s not the first time I’ve recounted the tortured history of of Alien 3, a less imaginative exponent of the visual and thematic ideas that had made the first two pictures in the slime-dripping series so widely admired.
Katherine Waterston is more heavily armed than Sigourney Weaver was in her first xenomorph encounter. (Fox)
My fanboyish impulses mostly come out whenever there's a new ALIEN. Mostly.
I tried not to splash too much corrosive blood on the deck in my dissection of Alien: Covenant.
"Well, everyone knows Ripley died on Fiornia-161. What this ALIEN movie presupposes is... maybe she didn't?"
I have a long, long "Exposition" essay up at The Dissolve today inspired by (uncertain) reports that District 9 director Neill Blomkamp's upcoming Alien movie may be a ret-con scenario that undoes the events of 1992's Alien-little-three, or Alien Cubed – anyway, the one where Ripley died. The piece is about retconning in fiction in general, and why it doesn't much impair my ability or inclination to suspend my disbelief at all.
If you're quite comfortable in your chair, and you're stout of heart and nerdy of temperament... Onward!
H.R. Giger, 1940-2014
A brief remembrance, written this morning not quite as quickly as I can type, of the great Swiss artist H.R. Giger and his most iconic creation, for NPR Monkey See.
Because I routinely make awful decisions about how to spend my time, I paid $24.99 (50% of MSRP) for the four-disc, 3D Blu-Ray edition of Prometheus, a film I'd harbored huge hopes for but ultimately found disappointing. A Ridley Scott film, in other words.
I don't have the gear or the inclination to watch a 3D movie at home, but the deluxe set that includes the 3D version of Prometheus (along with the plain-Jane 2D in three different formats, because what price piece of mind?) is the only way to get The Furious Gods, a three-hour, 40 minute (!) making-of documentary by Charles de Lauzirika, a nonfiction filmmaker whose substantive, well-edited making-ofs for similarly lavish reissues of Scott's only two great films -- say their names with me now, everybody, Alien and Blade Runner -- have already claimed many irreplaceable hours of my life.
The Furious Gods is long, sure, but actually it's longer, because I've been watching in "enhanced mode," meaning that when an icon appears at the top of the screen I can press a button on my remote and watch an "enhancement pod" -- a video footnote, basically -- containing even more nerdily trivial information about whatever specific aspect of the film's conception and production is being discussed at that moment.
When Scott talks about casting original Dragon Tattoo Girl Noomi Rapace in the movie, you can watch her screen test. When production designer Arthur Max talks about creating the movie's titular spacecraft (which was still called the Magellan for a long time, did you know, even after the Untitled Alien Prequel acquired the name Prometheus), you can click through dozens of drawings and schematics of the ship -- which I think that all of us, regardless of our political affiliation, can agree is fucking rad. You can even watch an enhancement pod about the film's many rejected titles. Alien: Tomb of the Gods, anyone?
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