Xander ,'Lessons'
A place to talk about movies--old and new, good and bad, high art and high cheese. It's the place to place your kittens on the award winners, gossip about upcoming fims and discuss DVD releases and extras. Spoiler policy: White font all plot-related discussion until a movie's been in wide release two weeks, and keep the major HSQ in white font until two weeks after the video/DVD release.
My God, The Artist is delightful.
Yes, it really is.
I had dinner tonight with a friend who has seen a lot of silent films, and she says that The Artist was made very much in the old silent film manner, using the lighting and blocking and so forth in the way that the old silent films were done.
What I loved is that, yes, it was clearly made like the old silent films, BUT it was also clearly made today. The sense of humor and visual style were very modern.
Going back a bit to Aliens, the whole bit where Ripley goes to get Newt is enthralling. I timed it once, and it really does take ten (I think) minutes to get down and back. I've always been amused at the time games when they say "two seconds until it blows up!" but they have time for Significant Looks between all the major stars.
So much is done with sound cues to let you know that Something has just snuck up on you, etc.
I adore that movie.
I think Aliens may be my Platonic Ideal Action Movie.
I do think to myself "Ripley, if you'd just backed out of the nest without torching the eggs, the alien queen would have stayed put and been vaporized along with all her kids in about 5 minutes anyway."
Of course, "GET AWAY FROM HER YOU BITCH!" might have packed less of a wallop if said to a caseworker from Child Services coming to take Newt away to the foster home system...
"Ripley, if you'd just backed out of the nest without torching the eggs, the alien queen would have stayed put and been vaporized along with all her kids in about 5 minutes anyway."
Didn't she torch the eggs only after she saw one opening up and ready to spit a facehugger at her?
Didn't she torch the eggs only after she saw one opening up and ready to spit a facehugger at her?
Yeah. And Ripley even gave a "Oh why did you have to go and do THAT?" look before she opened fire.
What the heck happened to Michael Biehn? After The Abyss, I never saw him again. Did he run over Cameron's dog, who then got him blacklisted, or did he become a stay-at-home dad, or something?
Just checked IMDB (forgot about Planet Terror!), and he's been busy, but how did he wind up in bad movie land?
Biehn's worked steadily just in increasingly crappy movies and TV. Doesn't have a lot of range, so he keeps playing variations on the type you saw in the Cameron movies.
Did he run over Cameron's dog, who then got him blacklisted,
That dog's got some mojo.
A man shot a bear in his pajamas, too.