The Screengrab : aliens

Dreaming Towards James Cameron's "Avatar"

Phil Nugent — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 17:00:00 GMT

Michael Cieply at The New York Times reports on the escalating storm of hype and anticipation surrounding James Cameron's 3-D sci-fi movie Avatar, scheduled for a December release. To date, none of the images from the film have been released to the public, not even a single still. However, Time magazine's Joshua Quittner was shown fifteen minutes of footage and subsequently "fed the frenzy when he reported feeling a strange yearning to return to the movie’s mythical planet, Pandora.... Mr. Cameron, Mr. Quittner wrote, theorized that the movie’s 3-D action had set off actual 'memory creation.'” (He told Cieply, “It was like doing some kind of drug.”) Others online have been busting their buttons without access to any actual evidence that the film exists, never mind what it looks like: Cieply has fun with one worthy at the IMDB message board who had had a dream that he saw the movie--on bootleg, no less--and proceeded to share his impressions of how it played in his unconscious. ("The film was unfinished, and the special effects were mostly drawings and cartoons, but they looked 3d still. But it was the best movie I've ever seen, too bad it was only in my dream! I really hope the actual movie is at least half as good as the one I saw in my sleep.") Meanwhile, Dr. Mario Mendez, a behavioral neurologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Medicine who has used "virtual reality therapy" in working with Iraq War veterans, "said it is entirely possible that Mr. Cameron’s work could tap brain systems that are undisturbed by conventional 2-D movies. One, he said, is a kind of inner global-positioning system that orients a person to the surrounding world."

Officially, Cameron and his studio, 20th Century Fox, are keeping their cards close to the vest while expressing a sanguine belief that it's only natural that people will be so excited about the chance to see something so awesome: “Jim Cameron," a studio flak opined, "is breaking new ground with this film. Like all movie fans, the studio is excited by the prospect of such an original piece of entertainment.” (The movie stars Australian actor Sam Worthington as a paralyzed man who, through an experimental process, is able to enter an alien world in a "genetically engineered" form that he controls with his mind. The cast also includes Zoe Saldana, Michelle Rodriguez, Giovanni Ribisi, and Cameron's Aliens star, Sigourney Weaver.) Cameron himself recently appeared at the ShoWest movie-exhibitors convention, in the form of a promotional video, where he said that watching his movie will be akin to “dreaming with your eyes wide open.” (Never mind that the phrase has been used by people trying to find a lyrical turn of phrase to describe the experience of moviegoing itself, going back at least to the Surrealists.) At the same time, though, even as they fuel the hype, Cameron (who did, after all, make The Abyss) and Fox must both be at least a little worried about setting a standard of rabid expectations that they can't possibly deliver on. “Whatever they think [the movie is] going to be," Cameron shrugged to an AP interviewer last year, "it’s probably not.”

Taxing Time: A Screengrab Salute To Beat The Clock Cinema (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 21:30:00 GMT

ALIENS (1986) & GALAXY QUEST (1999)

Life will be more stressful in the future, partly because of the ravenous extraterrestrials and tyrannical galactic tyrants we’ll encounter, but mostly because the ticking clocks in our race-against-time adventures will be replaced by soothing female voices announcing our impending doom every few seconds. That’s the case in Aliens anyway, a movie Roger Ebert called “so intense that it creates a problem for me as a reviewer: Do I praise its craftsmanship, or do I tell you it left me feeling wrung out and unhappy?” How’s this for suspense: not only does Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley find herself trapped in a space colony infested with slimy, ravenous xenomorphs (and the equally slimy Paul Reiser), but following a mishap with a nuclear reactor, the whole joint winds up on the verge of self-destruction! And then the evil Alien Queen grabs Newt (Carrie Henn), the sweet little orphan girl Ripley’s been trying to save for most of the movie!! And then, just when Ripley and Newt finally escape to the roof of the burning, exploding complex, they discover their ride is gone!!! And then it turns out the Alien Queen knows how to use elevators!!!! And she’s got David Fincher with her!!!!! And that damn soothing female voice won’t stop reminding everyone how close they are to death!!!!!! Aiiiieeeeee!!!!!!!!! Later, in the smartly high-concept Galaxy Quest, Weaver once again winds up in a desperate space race against time, trapped with co-star Tim Allen in a real-life starship designed by a much friendlier bunch of aliens to mimic the specs of their old TV starship...including the standard issue self-destruct gizmo that always counts down to zero in the most suspenseful possible way. (AO)

BLADE RUNNER (1982)

At first, time doesn’t appear to be much of a factor in the visionary sci-fi classic Blade Runner. Harrison Ford’s Deckard has to hunt down the escaped replicants, true, but they don’t seem to have a particular goal in mind, and for a while, his search for them is discursive, even leisurely. But it soon becomes clear that even if he’s not racing against time, the replicants are – their leader, Roy Batty, beautifully played by Rutger Hauer, knows that his kind is programmed with a finite lifespan, and that any moment could be his last. The brutish Leon taunts Deckard with this information in their confrontation, but in the end, Roy turns it into a tragedy. His death is the only thing that saves Deckard’s life, but by that time, it’s clear that something truly unique and precious is being lost, and the sensation is not one of relief, but of profound grief and regret. Fading from existence, Roy half-sneers, half-laments that he has seen things that Deckard cannot even begin to imagine; but because he is both more and less than human, it will all be lost at that moment the clock makes its final tick. (LP)

ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981)

Lean, mean and exhilarating, John Carpenter’s Escape From New York confirmed that the Halloween auteur was capable of delivering more than just horror. In a nightmarish future 1997, New York City has been transformed into a massive, walled-off maximum-security prison, and when Air Force One crashes on the island and the president is taken hostage one day before an all-important nuclear summit, badass criminal Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell) is recruited for a daring rescue mission. Plissken is given a 24-hour deadline that’s made more pressing by the fact that he’s been injected with micro-explosives that’ll blow if he fails his task in the allotted time-frame, a set-up that Carpenter mines for as much rousing action as possible. From a fight with an enormous bruiser, to a cab ride over a bridge covered in mines, iconic anti-hero Plissken’s efforts to save the commander-in-chief from the clutches of Isaac Hayes’ baddie – an undertaking that involves enlisting help from Ernest Borgnine, Harry Dean Stanton and Adrienne Barbeau – remains a thrilling, kick-ass sci-fi saga, and a testament to Carpenter’s still-underappreciated directorial greatness. (NS)

THE TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO THREE (1974)

There are endless thrillers and caper flicks that depend on split-second timing for the bad guys’ nefarious plan to succeed, but the genius of Joseph Sargent’s tight little ‘70s thriller is that it places the action on a New York subway train, a milieu in which people already get terribly bent out of shape if there’s any deviation from the strict timetable. Populated by a cast of old-school character actors (including Walter Matthau Robert Shaw, Martin Balsam, Hector Elizondo, and Jerry Stiller) who virtually define the word “craggy”, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three features a quartet of criminals – presciently given colors as code names, twenty years before Reservoir Dogs – who must ensure perfect timing and clever planning to overcome the fact that they’re committing their caper on a form of transportation that can’t possibly deviate from its course. A big-budget remake is being released later this year, but its flashy cast and jillion-dollar price tag almost guarantee it won’t have any of the grubby charm or jangling energy of the original. (LP)

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Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Nick Schager

Stan Winston, 1946--2008

Phil Nugent — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Stan Winston, one of Hollywood's reigning special makeup and visual effects virtuosos and, as anyone who ever saw him on TV or crossed paths with him at a convention can testify, one of the most likable fellows in his field, died Sunday at his Malibu home at age 62, ending a long struggle with multiple myeloma. Born in 1946, Winston graduated from the University of Virginia, where he studied sculpture and painting, before heading to California in 1968 with ambitions to make it as an actor. Instead, he landed at Disney as a makeup apprentice. In 1972, he founded Stan Winston Studio, the first of a string of companies that would eventually include Stan Winston Digital and Digital Domain (co-founded with Scott Ross). He proceeded to immediately attract attention for his work in television, including his memorable work on the TV movies Gargoyles, where he encased Bernie Casey in Satanic makeup, and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, where he aged Cicely Tyson a hundred years. (He won Emmys for both programs.) In the mid-1970s he began developing special makeup and effects for movies, gradually working his way up from such films as Mansion of the Doomed and the blaxsploitation non-classic Dr. Black and Mr. White to John Carpenter's The Thing (where he stepped in to assist an overworked and exhausted Rob Bottin), Aliens, Terminator 2, and Jurassic Park, all of which won him Academy Awards. Other notable credits included Predator, Batman Returns, Congo, A. I., Edward Scissorhands, The Island of Dr. Moreau, Galaxy Quest,, and most recently Iron Man. He also directed the 1988 horror picture Pumpkinhead and the Michael Jackson music video slash psychodrama Ghosts.

Chick Hits: The Girl Power Top Ten (Part 2)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 20:15:00 GMT

ERIN BROCKOVICH (2000)

Julia Roberts’ breakthrough film, Pretty Woman (about the magical romantic possibilities of being a whore) was a monster hit, if not exactly a high water mark in the history of feminism (be sure to look for it on our upcoming Girl Dis-Empowering Top Ten). Erin Brockovich, meanwhile, was the flipside of the equation: a realistically desperate woman who succeeds in spite of, rather than because of her prominent cleavage...and in this quasi-true story, the prize at the end of the fairy tale isn’t a rich millionaire, but a million dollars the single-mother-turned-investigative-paralegal earns for herself (as a bonus from Albert Finney's lawyer/mentor Ed Masry) through brains and tenacity during the course a battle royale with an evil...uh, utility company. And talk about empowering: Roberts went on to win an Oscar for Best Actress, she and director Steven Soderbergh got to hang out with George Clooney and screenwriter Susannah Grant went on to write and direct...Catch and Release with Jennifer Garner and Kevin Smith. Which must have been nice for her.

ALIENS (1986)

There were kick-ass female action heroes before Sigourney Weaver in Aliens, of course. Sigourney Weaver in the original Alien comes to mind, for instance, as does Linda Hamilton in the original Terminator, Karen Allen in Raiders of the Lost Ark and so on and so forth, all the way back to real life ass-kickers like Elizabeth I, Joan of Arc and Cleopatra. But the Ripley of James Cameron’s Aliens really redefined the female action star for the modern age. For one thing, she’s the star of the movie, and she’s tough all the way through, taking command of a doomed rescue mission to an alien infested colony when the indecisive (male) space marine commander in charge of the mission literally falls down on the job, then later rescuing her man-sel in distress potential love interest, Michael Biehn’s Corporal Dwayne Hicks. But Weaver’s heroine isn’t just a muscled, monosyllabic Rambo with tits: she’s a deeply human character who draws superhuman strength not from extra testosterone or the bite of a radioactive spider, but from the sweet maternal bond she forms with an orphaned girl in the midst of all the gunplay and explosions of the masculine world...at least, that is, until David Fincher went and fucked everything up in Alien 3...but I’ll save that rant until our Top Ten list of great movies with incredibly aggravating unnecessary sequels.

MEAN GIRLS (2004)

Mean Girls began with a book by Rosalind Wiseman, Queen Bees and Wannabes, about high school social hierarchies and how they shape the lives of those who pass before them. It is a serious journalistic-sociological study, which apparently came as a bit of a surprise to Tina Fey after she agreed to take on the job of adapting it into a movie. Fey, who appears in the movie as the math teacher Ms. Norbury, came up with a story about Cady (Lindsay Lohan), who moves to Chicago and enters her first American public school at 16 after being home-schooled in Africa by parents who emphasize the value of learning, and so has to endure the culture shock of discovering that "education" in the States is all about bureaucratic rules on one side and social anxiety and status on the other. Out of a mixture of anthropological fascination and a half-conscious but real desire to fit in, Cady "infiltrates" the top clique of pretty girls -- a process that involves her pretending to be dumber than she is in order to snare a boy she likes -- and begins to maneuver her way to the lead position by outbitching them in ways that suggest a Machiavellian Heather. The movie's official mouthpiece is Fey's Ms. Norbury, who ultimately gets Cady to embrace her better side by forcibly inducting her into the school's "Mathletes" team. She also has a strange but deeply felt scene where she hustles all the girls together in the gym and lectures them about why they behave the way they do and why it's not good, though the whole point of Cady's character would seem to be that it's possible to know all that and still find the seductive pull of the status sirens impossible to resist. A mere four years since its release, the most poignant thing about Mean Girls now may be that it serves as a reminder of a more innocent time when it was possible to cast Lindsay Lohan as a sensitive brainiac who, after a brief slumming phase, manages to get herself under control.

WAITING TO EXHALE (1995)

This episodic drama about the rocky-but-hopeful romantic lives of four black women in Phoenix (get it, Greek mythology buffs?) shocked the shit out of the industry by becoming one of the major sleeper hits of the '90s. It also surprised movie critics, who tended to notice that it kind of sucks. It's also arguable whether it merits inclusion in any discussion of movies with positive female role models: all of the members of its central quartet come across as a little brain-damaged, and not just because of how eager they are to define themselves as failures or successes depending on whether they've managed to land a man. (The director, Forest Whitaker, managed to wangle some money from HBO after the premiere of Sex and the City, claiming that the network had ripped him off, and it's true that the movie shares most of what's objectionable about the TV show.) But the public embrace of the movie, and the way it cowed professional opinion makers, marks some kind of landmark moment in empowering the audience, especially if you define empowerment as doing the hucksters' jobs for them. Viewers who loved the movie, especially black women, hit back at criticism of it so hard that newspapers and magazines actually started publishing editorials and what amounted to counter-reviews denouncing the people who had been so insensitive to the entertainment needs of those who wanted overplayed, demented soap operas geared to their own demographic group. The movie helped get a number of movies starring black women greenlit, but its real lasting influence can best be seen in the critical reaction to a movie like Dreamgirls, which inspired many mumbly, mealy-mouthed reviews by writers who clearly thought that it stank but also thought that it was going to be another phenomenon and were afraid of being seen as coming down too hard on the wrong side of it. For an example of what this looks like in practice, compare the Dreamgirls review that Slate critic Dana Stevens wrote when the movie was released , and her review of Hairspray, where she led off by revealing what she really thought of Dreamgirls -- six months later, when she thought no one was looking. Waiting to exhale can take many forms.

PERSEPOLIS (2007)

It’s one thing to talk about how women are empowered by watching the adventures of a fictional female space marine, lady cop, or teenage devil-slayer. But it’s quite another to consider the triumph over sexism and oppression represented in the animated big-screen adaptation of Marjane Satrapi’s beautiful, powerful graphic novel, Persepolis. Satrapi was born in Iran, not too long before the Islamic revolution against the corrupt and brutal Shah by the fundamentalist Ayatollahs. Her father was a respected civil engineer and her mother was an international journalist – living symbols of the new, modernized Iran that hoped to take its place among the elite nations. This aspiration was crushed with the Islamic revolution and the subsequent war with Iran, both of which Satrapi lived through as she and the women of her family (liberated all, three generations back) struggled to adjust to a new reality where they could be imprisoned for letting too much of their faces show in public. She managed to escape to Europe, but it was never home to her, and she eventually returned, hoping to balance her need to be in the country that was her true home with her need to be respected and taken seriously as a woman. Satrapi has always made it a point to illustrate the fact that there is more to Iran than the caricature of out-of-control religious fundamentalists, and in the scene where Satrapi, as a college art student, stands up to a panel of men who insist that her education take a back seat to their sexist dogma, it gives a stirring picture of a country that bristles at its every restriction.

Click here for Part One!

Related Posts: Girl DisemPowering: Nine Films That Didn't Do Feminism Any Favors (Part One & Part Two)

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

James Cameron Swears That Avatar is Getting Made

John Constantine — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 22:18:00 GMT

Do you guys remember when James Cameron used to make science fiction cinema that wasn’t only satisfyingly pulpy but also genuinely great filmmaking? Sure you do! Aliens, Terminator, and The Abyss were a long time ago though. It looks like Cameron’s finally coming home. In an email to Harry “My Beard Terrifies Children” Knowles, Cameron said that he’s wrapped principal photography for his long gestating sci-fi epic Avatar and is starting the painstaking process of creating believable, 3D world out of CG. Avatar’s still a long way off but from what little Cameron’s revealed about the picture over the years it might just revolutionize special effects to the same extent that his classic films did. Welcome back, Jim!

Trailer Review: The Happening

John Constantine — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 00:22:00 GMT

The end-of-the-world movie is typically accompanied by a hook of some kind. Zombies, natural disaster, aliens, giant monsters, biological/nuclear warfare, etc. The same goes for M. Night Shyamalan movies. Shyamalan trades in redemption stories with clever hooks like ghosts, aliens, or superheroes. People don’t just up and die for no apparent reason in disaster or Shyamalan pictures. That said, it looks like M. Night’s The Happening will at least be original. As you can see from this trailer, people just start dying — many of them appear to be committing suicide — for no reason. The people who aren’t dying freak out, there’s bedlam, Marky Mark shows up, and then Cameron from Ferris Bueller says that there’s been, you guessed it, a "happening."

I don’t know about this guy any more. The last Shyamalan movie I saw was The Village. I went into it excited because I thought monsters and colonial America were a good mix. All I got for my trouble was a retarded Adrien Brody wearing a pig suit and chasing around Ron Howard’s blind offspring. Needless to say, I was disappointed. I don't think The Happening looks very happening.

I apologize for that.

Video of the Day: Requiem

John Constantine — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 23:33:00 GMT

If you went to the movies or watched television this past summer, chances are you’ve heard a Guyz Nite song. These comedy-rockers managed a little bit of non-Youtube notoriety thanks to their John McClane tribute song “Die Hard” being part of promotions for Live Free or Die Hard. This video comes from Guyz Nite’s metal incarnation, Holy Light of Demon. It is the funniest, and most accurate, song you will hear about aliens and predators today. Probably tomorrow too.

Take Five: Resident Aliens

Peter Smith — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 20:00:00 GMT

The ever-busy John Cusack stars in Martian Child, opening wide this weekend. Based on an award-winning novel by legendary sci-fi author and Star Trek scribe David Gerrold (who also executive-produced the film and had final approval on the script, ensuring that, if nothing else, it’ll be loyal to its source), the film focuses on an older man — Cusack, essentially playing a straight version of Gerrold himself — who, battling his own personal demons, adopts a disturbed young boy who thinks he’s from Mars. It’s not your typical science-fiction scenario, but it’s one that echoes a number of other films in the genre that play on the ambiguity, or at least strangeness and charm, of the idea of an alien among us. As with many other types of genre films, science fiction is often at its most successful when it eschews the gimmicks, special effects, and labyrinthine plots and focuses instead on drama, revelation and humanity, even if the human is very possibly an alien. Here’s a fiver of films to get you in the mood for Martian Child.

THE BOY WITH GREEN HAIR (1948)

Directed by film-industry trouper Joseph Losey, The Boy with Green Hair gives us the spectacle of, well, a boy with green hair. Not technically an alien-among-us sci-fi story, it nonetheless functions in that same sort of parable mode, bringing us what is now a terribly dated and hokey message of tolerance. At the time, though, it probably seemed a lot more subversive; it was made even before the Hollywood blacklist was in full swing. Its post-war setting and refugee metaphors also must have scored some points about Jews and blacks that weren’t likely to be made explicit at the time. And despite how archaic it may seem today, it’s worth seeing for one reason: the ten-year-old protagonist is played by a young Dean Stockwell.

QUATERMASS AND THE PIT (1967)

The Quatermass series was something of a predecessor to Dr. Who, with many of the same themes and concerns, but the good doctor has never come close to cranking out a story this unexpected and unsettling. In it, a scientist discovers a Martian spacecraft, millions of years old, buried beneath the London underground, and as soon as it’s unearthed, it bequeaths the aliens’ final legacy to us: violence, madness and directionless hatred. Quatermass eventually discovers that it was these ancient astronauts who shaped us into the dominant species on Earth, by carefully guiding our predilection for mayhem; in this underseen and underrated sci-fi thriller, we have met the alien, and he is us.

THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH (1976)

In a role originally intended for Peter O’Toole, David Bowie — who was simultaneously, in his music career, playing at being an alien — puts in one of the finest, creepiest performances of his career. In this supremely weird, often affecting Nic Roeg vehicle, Bowie plays an urbane visitor to Earth who’s come here in search of water, establishing himself as a multimillionaire (using high-tech gadgets entirely familiar to the modern viewer) in order to do so. Admirable support is turned in by Rip Torn and others, but it’s Bowie’s ultra-frosty, near-reptilian performance, shot through with transcendent humanity at just the right moments, that will have you wondering if the guy really was an alien after all.

THE BROTHER FROM ANOTHER PLANET (1984)

John Sayles made this movie to raise a few bucks and bide the time while making Matewan, but it’s quite an accomplishment on its own. The story of a stranded alien who arrives in Manhattan wearing a black man’s skin — in which he is surprised to discover he merits different treatment — The Brother from Another Planet manages to rise above its exploitation origins (and often goofy genre conventions, such as grade-Z special effects and bizarre superhero subplot) and deliver some fine acting and interesting insights into matters of race and class. Taken on its own, it’s worth seeing, but it especially works in the greater context of Sayles’ work.

STARSHIP TROOPERS (1997)

Forget Showgirls — director Paul Verhoeven’s most misunderstood film is this adaptation (and subversion) of the classic Robert Heinlein novel about total war in space. Verhoeven, in typical black-comic style, takes the creepy, quasi-fascist tone of the Heinlein book and completely upends it, making one of the most damning statements on film about the futility and stupidity of war. It also functions, in its treatment of the utterly inhuman and thus utterly disposable buglike aliens, as a presciently barbed statement about our human tendency to dehumanize the enemy in times of war.

— Leonard Pierce

Aliens vs. Predator 2: Scenes from a Mall

Peter Smith — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 19:00:00 GMT

Aliens. Predator. Sporting goods department. It's nice to see that, instead of trying to honor once-respected franchises with abysmal scripts and PG-13-friendly violence, AVP 2 directors the Strause Brothers are aiming for "brazenly ridiculous". All this clip is missing is Genghis Khan riding a skateboard. — John Constantine