Alien - as classic as classic gets?/POO

Aliens spoilt by resemblances of formerly unheimlich creatures to, variously, men in (ill-fitting) suits and finger puppets, with distracting tendency to emit angry rhino noises when squished (and they're far too easily squished).

Alien 3, 2nd best, valiantly fatalist (as with the 3rd Terminator film. Is this a trend? Does American Pie 3, also, reassert the universal ascendancy of some mad demiurge's implacable design?).

Alien Resurrection spoilt by unwarranted introduction of French visual humour.

it also might be my favourite movie ever in any case

http://www.dvdanswers.com/index.php?r=0&s=1&c=2224

I'm all for the huge slew of extra features on the first two, hope these all get released individually...

And rewatching it -- yes, it's in there. My reservations about this interrupting the feeling of the final half hour remains, but I guess we'll find out when it gets released.

Normally in an American film you'd expect to see ALL those responsible suffer fates and/or condemnation DIRECTLY correlative and dramatically commensurate to the crime, but in AR that's restricted to Brad Dourif & co.

We aren't supposed to mind, or bear in mind, the involvement of the outlaws in the deal (no they won't have known exactly what Brad was going to do with their "cargo", but so what?). The film assumes it can force us to view them as morally neutral, ie. outlaws = worthy subjects for audience identification, Brad & co = fully deserving of ghastly fates.

Indifference towards cause and effect (and affect) like that might be OK (and commonplace) in bande desinee, but in a film with pretensions towards narrative cohesion it jars heavily.

I'd forgotten about the attempted rape scene in 3, which indeed aligns the inmates (Compo, Foggy, Clegg etc) with the aliens (as would-be violators of Ripley, as also with Ash's attack on her in the first film). No, not likeable AT ALL, but the film itself realises this - the attempted rape is yet another (alien-like, corporation-like) assault on her physical integrity, and it under-writes the pessimism of the whole.

In AR of course Ripley isn't "human", or vulnerable, any more, and in general the human/alien host/parasite oppositions, & consequent potential for interesting intersections, are thinned out.

i like all of them too. Ripley + the Alien may be the closest thing we have to the great genre-hopping duos of oldentimes - any major dude will tell you:

alien - inv of the body snatchers
aliens - hell is for heroes/the searchers
alien3 - riot in cell block 11
res - mommie dearest

(i remember hearing a rumor that jeunet's original design concept included weird wooden spaceships!!!)

1.) I find it hilarious that John Hurt, perpetual sufferer in film (Mel Brooks cast him as Jesus in History of the World Part 1), is the one who has the alien burst out of him.

2.) Even better, in the Mad Magazine parody, the head poking out of his stomach was Kermit the Frog.

3.) The Alien comic by (I think?) Walt Simonson was AWESOME.

4.) In my memory, Alien was the last sci-fi movie that obsessed me in that Star Wars/Close Encounters/2001 kind of way.

plus, it pays off the joke of Barf ordering the special, and then them watching the thing dance.

That was the first thing I thought of when I said "John Hurt, perpetual sufferer."

http://skeletonart.com/images/Art/334-Strange01-400.jpg

I'm quite curious to see the Director's Cut. Is it radically different?
-- Alex in NYC (vassife...), October 26th, 2003.

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Couldn't say, since I didn't see the first version. I assume the big dance number with Madeline Kahn and Burt Reynolds was in the original?
-- Skottie (n...), October 26th, 2003.

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No, it was pulled because RS was worried it'd be too scary for family audiences.
-- s1utsky

BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

That made my night.

Nine discs. Three billion hours of bonus material, including featurettes, screen tests, production artwork, interviews, and way more. All in a tidy little case. It's beauuuuutiful.

DVDS ARE A SCAM

Region 1 - 2 December.
Region 2 (UK) - 8 December.
Region 4 (Australia) - 10 December.

All the sets are identical.

I picked up both, but used and some time back. So I'm content to rebuy in this case.

Wow:

https://news.avclub.com/this-high-school-drama-club-put-on-a-stage-production-o-1833515613

"you need a WHATomorph suit by tomorrow morning?"

max fischer would be proud

I thought "Memory: Origins of Alien" was a really good doc. A bit of making-of/background (some of which was new to me), but it's mostly a lot of smart What It All Means discussion.

Memory: Origins of Alien on channel 4 now, I'm half way through. Seems to have a fair bit of interview footage from previous docs, still I'm always there for the story of the meeting of minds of o'bannon & giger & scott, especially the victory snatched from the jaws of defeat of giger being let go, then rehired by scott. Didn't know the comic book forebears of the script. I'm finding the 'what it all means' guy a wee bit much maybe I'm not against all that.

... but I'm not against all that.

A bit weird in the end, a mix of "making of" and "meaning of" but after they go all in on the chestburster scene it just ends, so nothing about the actual full size creature; I think there was one single mention of cobb, none of foss or moebius, excepting a brief shot of a moebius comic in o'bannon's archive.