Current Entertainment:
DVD ¤ Matrix: Reloaded
CD-ROM ¤ D2X
CD Player
¤ Metallica - St. Anger
¤ Nine Inch Nails - Still
¤ Orff - Carmen Burana

Books Lying Open
¤ A Storm of Swords, George R. R. Martin
¤ The Complete Tales and Poems, Edgar Allen Poe

All three of these discussions, Alien then Seven then Red Dragon, will contain some spoilers, so if you've never seen either film and want to avoid any plot point revelations, read one or the other or neither.

I saw Alien, the rereleased director's cut last week, the day it opened. Seeing it was mostly Malaya's idea.  She'd seen it several times before and really liked it and wanted to see it on the big screen once in her life.  And yes, she can now die happy.

I liked it.  I didn't find anything scary, and I pretty much knew what was going to happen by following the conventions of the genre, but it was still enjoyable.  Even at 20 years old, it was far more enjoyable than most every other movie I've seen this year, mostly since it was maybe by talented people and took its time.  Ebert's discussion of it in his series of The Great Movies articles goes on and on about the gradually building suspense, and I suppose he's got a point, but since I knew from Aliens (which is one of my top 3 action movies ever) that everyone other than Ripley would die; and I knew from every horror movie every made that every time a character wandered off alone they would die; there wasn't much suspense.

The most interesting thing for me was that before the movie we'd had an hour to kill at the Emeryville mall, and since it was Malaya and me with time to kill, we of course ended up in the bookstore.  There's a huge Barnes and Noble there, with the requisite Starbucks attached.  Not that that matters to me since I don't drink coffee (if you can still reasonably term the absurd combo caffeine-based liquids they sell as "coffee") or pay $4 for a muffin on a whim, but I just find it amusing that seemingly every bookstore on earth now has a Starbucks grafted to it, lamprey style.  I always end up checking any new books I buy for brown stains.

Anyway, while in the bookstore, after walking past and laughing at the triple espresso-fueled people who occupy a cafe table with so many books (that they've not purchased) that they appear to be doing heavy research for their thesis, I wound up in the Art section.  And since they had a copy of Giger's Necronomicon sitting out, I looked through it, for about the 10th time.  I'd love to buy it and his other books, but I can't afford $50 for his weird but repetitive artistic visions.

I love his work though, especially the background aspects of things.  The aliens and such are nifty, but what I really enjoy is the busyness and texture and detail of everything, and the architecture and machinery and design.  He's very monochromatic and tinted; mostly in the black/grey/silver light that the aliens so famously use, but he's done a lot of other, less-famous work where an entire image is bathed in golden or greenish or red hues.

Watching Alien an hour after paging through an entire book of Giger's work was amazing, since I saw so clearly how the look of Alien was at least 95% dependent upon Giger's visions.  Virtually every scene; the ship from the exterior and interior, the machine rooms, the alien ship and the scale of it, the lighting through the entire movie, and of course the alien itself are all taken directly from various of Giger's works.  Many scenes in the movie (pretty much everything but the escape ship and the room where they went to talk to Mother) are practically 3d representations of individual Giger works, or else are his style of imagery, almost like painting he could have made, but hadn't yet gotten around to.

And since virtually every scifi or space movie since Alien has stolen from its grungy, dingy, dark, metalic design ethos, it wouldn't be going too far out on a limb to say that the entire look of space stations and ships and planets in modern cinema and fiction is largely derived from Giger's work.  The obvious exceptions are brightly-lit comic book style fictional universes (like Star Wars), and yes, I'm biased in my views, since I love and feel quite drawn to the grungy and dirty and rusty anarchic style of scifi design, ala Alien or Alien 3 (the Alien 3 art design, not the godawful movie itself), while the clean, well-lit, colorful, Disneyland look of movies like Star Wars Episode 1 and 2 does nothing for me.

As for Alien, I enjoyed it, but I don't feel any real need to watch it again.  I'd heard about but never actually seen the chest-buster scene on the dining room table, and found it pretty underwhelming.  The lead up to it was great, as he first starts convulsing and then the first splatter of blood hits the other crew members, leaving them shocked for a moment; but the actual alien eruption wasn't too impressive.  I thought the first one seen in Aliens had more dramatic impact, with great ripping sound effects and all of the tough Marines horrified, while Ripley just suffers in silence as she watches it on the TV and relives the horror.

I also found myself wondering about physical realities in Alien.  How did that little weasel grow into the human-sized beast, capable of secreting a whole nest and sticking two of the captured crew members into it (in a scene that Malaya said wasn't in the original movie), in like one day, without eating anyone else, on a ship where there's no food to be found?  I recall some critics bitching about the spectacularly rapid growth of the alien in Alien 3, and they had a point, sort of, but I thought the size-increase was even more blatant in Alien 1.

We also got to see the trailer for Aliens vs. Predator before the movie, and it's visually and aurally interesting, and it's a teaser for a movie that's not due until next August, but come on guys, don't you have any footage at all? The whole trailer is like 30 seconds, and it's nothing but super closeups of parts of aliens and parts of the Predator mask, while the scary grumbling alien and predator type sound effects play in the background, with an ending scene of a small ship crashing into a planet's (earth's?) atmosphere, ala the opening shot of Predator.  The obvious implication is that a Predator is coming to earth, so obviously there's a nest of aliens somewhere on earth, in what I assume is the far future, sometime after or concurrent with the events in Aliens 4, since they went to all the trouble of cloning Ripley and the alien queen from the DNA found in the molten metal she died in at the end of Alien 3.

Of course that was entirely ludicrous, as if DNA would some how come up with a human with a bit of Alien in her, who was born impregnated with an Alien that the scientists could remove, and who was born already about 40 years old, and who had some vague memories of her past battles with the aliens. Yes, Aliens 4 was about the stupidest movie script ever written.

The AvP trailer isn't bad, even though it lacks any footage of the movie whatsoever, aside from the space ship shot at the very end.  It's moody and atmospheric and evocative and all that, and probably cost about $75 to produce, which I'm sure was another point in its favor to the studio.  I can't possibly believe that it could be a decent movie, but how much worse could it be than recent garbage such as Underworld or Freddy vs. Jason? Both of which I paid good money to see, I must admit.

And true, evaluating upcoming films on an "it can't be entirely awful, can it?" basis isn't a real vote of confidence, but it's all I have at this point.  Especially since I'm surely going to be seeing AvP, since Malaya raised her fists and exclaimed, "Yes!" when the trailer title and movie release date came up.  I'm not sure why, but she's been waiting about 5 years for that movie, since the first rumors about it appeared, so my fate is thusly sealed.

As for Alien, I'd recommend the expanded DVD to anyone who likes horror or action or scifi movies.  You should at least know what ever movie is ripping off today, and it's enjoyable. Malaya said that the added footage was all good and added depth to it, and the movie definitely holds up in look; the special effects (aside from the cheesy Technicolor ship explosion) are quality, and the set design and print quality and sound and everything else are as good or better than movies made in 2003.  Whether you want to pay another $8 to see it in the theaters on top of buying the DVD when it's released in a few weeks is up to you.

The second film I recently saw for the first time was Seven.  I have no idea how I hadn't seen it previously; it's another of the "creepy brilliant serial killer" movies basically based on Silence of the Lambs, but a pretty well made version of it. I'd heard of it and heard about it, and the whole, "Gwynneth's head ends up in a box." plot twist, but other than that, and that the killer was carrying out amazingly creepy and clever killings based on the seven deadly sins, I knew nothing about it.

Brad Pitt is the young/dumb detective, hungry for success and fame and indifferent to inconvenient police rules, and Morgan Freeman is the wise old detective, just a week from retirement, but with more brains in his little finger than the rest of the department seems to have in their entire bodies.  This character dynamic is developed in the first 5 minutes, and never changes throughout the rest of the movie, except that Brad Pitt's character grows (or is shown to be) even dumber than you initially thought he was.

Well, not so much "dumber" as "weaker."  He is a naive fool when it comes to human nature and I can't imagine that he's ever solved a murder that wasn't a freebie; crime of passion, fingerprints everywhere, DNA matching, etc.  I suppose his character is realistic enough; I certainly find myself groaning through the totally unrealistic super-genius cops with infinite resources and time for every case that are presented on TV shows like CSI and Law and Order. So given that, why should a homicide detective who is as dumb as most real people throw me off?

Anyway, all the review discussion I'd ever heard about the movie was that it was incredibly dark and evil and gory and too intense for some viewers. I guess that's true, but since I'm pretty damn dark and gory myself, nothing in it bothered me.  In fact, I thought they were pulling a lot of their punches, not showing most of the bodies or any live action of most of the killings.  They had such cool ideas and set design and such, but it was almost Lovecraftian in the way they avoided showing the actual gore or a good view of the bodies in so many cases.  Couldn't we have had a nice look at Gwynneth's head in the box?  (And that whole section bothered me, since how in the hell did her freshly-decapitated head not entirely soak the thin cardboard box with blood, smell so much like blood that the delivery guy noticed, etc?)

The plot was very clever, especially the last two killings, but I thought a couple of the others were iffy.  The cool thing about the vanity and greed ones were that the murder victims were given a chance to survive, and tortured psychologically.  The Greed lawyer had to cut off a pound of his own flesh, and would be set free if he did and survived.  The Vanity model was mutilated and given the option to kill herself or call for help. Brilliant plotting there.

Lust was clever but sort of pointless, since the killer was the john who was forced to wear the knife strap on, and fuck the whore to death.  The victim was the whore, but what about the innocent (sort of) guy who came to do the fucking?  Why him?  I love that the killer forced him to decide between dying or murdering someone else in an especially painful way, but shouldn't he have been someone famous for not being lustful?  A straying evangelist or something would have really pumped up the irony and cleverness.

The Sloth one was dubious, since the guy was just tied to a bed and killed horribly and slowly. True, he was a bad person and it was a damn clever way to murder, but what was the point?  It wasn't like the murderer found some brilliant way to keep him from getting up, or forced him to make a choice between being non-slothful or dying of laziness.  He just tied him down for a year and kept him alive to suffer all the more.

The Gluttony one was similar, in that the guy was forced at gun point to eat himself to death.  I suppose the irony is that he was so painfully fat in the first place, and the killer just accelerated his eventual and inevitable death from gluttony, but aside from the cleverness and viciousness of it, why bother?  You could pick any non-fat person and kill them in the same way; you'd just miss out on the whole delicious irony of it.  My point is that there should have been some way for the Glutton to potentially survive the event, in a brilliant script.

Envy was pretty straight forward, but brilliant in the execution, since it led directly to the final sin, by the dopey Brad Pitt character himself.  The problem with it was that he was such a fucking idiot during the entire confrontation with the John Doe killer character that I lost all sympathy for him. He was soft and stupid and weak and easily led about by his nose by even the most blatantly-manipulative behavior that I didn't care about him anymore.  He wore his weaknesses on his sleeve, and was stunned when someone used them against him.

I couldn't help but picture him dealing with Hannibal, and laughing at the likely outcome of that.  If you ever thought that maybe Clarice wasn't brilliant in her ability to handle Hannibal in Silence of the Lambs, go watch Seven again and imagine how well Brad Pitt's character would do?  About as well as Miggs did, I'd figure.

Despite his obvious weaknesses, I still thought he'd pull it out at the end and not give John Doe exactly what he wanted by killing him.  I should have realized he was too weak to exercise the self control, but at least my expectations made the ending somewhat of a surprise.  The whole set up of the ending was brilliantly written and plotted, and very satisfying, and in retrospect I can't argue against what happened; it was perfectly in keeping with Brad Pitt's stupid character.  I just get annoyed at weak and dumb characters that I'm supposed to root for, so it's hard for me to enjoy a movie too much that stars one.

And he didn't even carry out his vengeance very well.  A quick kill from a head shot?  FFS, why even bother?  He wants the guy to suffer some, and he's a sitting (kneeling) duck; how about leg, leg, arm, arm, shoulder, shoulder, gut from the side, and leave him to bleed to death in agony?  If you're going to get revenge while simultaneously throwing away your career and ruining your life, at least do it properly.  (Yes, it annoys me.  I said I was annoyed by weak characters.)

I think making Pitt's character a bit smarter would have been better; I'd have rooted for him during the movie, plus the ending would have really been in doubt and therefore all the more shocking.  Or maybe everyone is as self-delusional as me and talked themselves into some suspense, just like I did?

At any rate, it was a pretty good movie overall and I'd recommend it.  It doesn't hold a candle to Silence of the Lambs, in any aspect (plot, gore, writing, dialogue, acting, characters, suspense, ending) but it's a well-made movie and I enjoyed it.

Red Dragon is the third movie I'll discuss today, and I have to put it a rung below the other two.  It's even more an imitation of Silence of the Lambs than Seven is, and isn't as well acted or plotted.  Plus with Silence for a direct comparison Red Dragon suffers, since the dialogue and plot and cop are all so much less interesting than they were in Silence.

I don't know if Thomas Harris improved greatly in his writing skills or plotting abilities between the novels (Red Dragon was written first, then Silence, then Hannibal.) since the only one I've read was Silence.  But it's a far better movie and more interesting story than Red Dragon was, and the Silence movie is virtually identical to the novel. The plot varies slightly, mostly since they streamlined and removed a few minor subplots from the novel, but the best parts of Silence of the Lambs, the verbal battles between Clarice and Hannibal, are all there, and the movie takes them virtually word for word from the novel. I'm talking 99% the same, down to the words, punctuation, pauses in dialogue, etc.

It really let me see what a great job Hopkins did in that roll, since what are just words on the page seem so much more alive and vibrant when you hear Hopkins speaking them.  He took great material and made it brilliant; that's all I can say about it.

So Red Dragon is more of Hannibal being brilliant and talking to a cop, but the cop is a lightweight compared to Clarice, and Hannibal is far less interesting.  For one thing, rather than being a nasty puppet master out for his own amusement, he's trying to kill the cop even after he's imprisoned, which seems beneath Hannibal.  I thought he was so civilized and clever and able to accept defeat like a man, and here is he trying for revenge on the cop that busted him like any corner crack dealer. It seemed out of character to me.

The rest of the movie wasn't much better.  For one thing, all of the killings are off screen, and done before the movie even begins. That's true in Silence as well, now that I think of it, but I liked that the killer was just going on with his own project and was not paying attention to the police, other than trying to avoid them.  In Red Dragon the cop quickly becomes the focus, plus there's no reason for the murders other than a crazy guy acting out madness implanted in him from his childhood.

There's the blind girlfriend, but she really seemed like a plot device.  It was like, "How can we put a sympathetic character in here and show the killer's humanity, and have all the killer's weirdness intact, but find a character who won't be bothered by it or notice it?"  So they made her blind, the only thing she could be and not notice his tattoos or collections, and also so she would think the decoy body was his, and also be in far greater peril from the fire.

I'm not sure why Red Dragon was so much less satisfying than Silence, and I'd put it below Hannibal as well.  Hopkins was far more compelling in both other movies, plus they both had better plots, though that's debatable due to the dopey story Hannibal devolved into at the end. But I was frequently bored in Red Dragon, and never had any doubt that the good guys would win, or that there'd be another twist after what seemed like the last one. It felt like some cheesy Silence rip off that was written after the death of the original creator; one without any of the creativity or talent in the film making or story construction.