Singin’ in the Dark 80’s
About time, eh? It’s been a month since Shawn Hitchins‘ Singin in the Dark, 80’s edition and it’s taking me just this time to write about the memory lane – or lack thereof – and the associations I remembered while watching his art piece.
Andrew McCarthy‘s face is so comically expressive that if was born sixty years earlier than he did, he would have given Chaplin a run for his money.
Did I have a chance to see Ferris Bueller’s Day Off on the big screen when I still had money to see and decided to skip it to argue with a good friend? Twice. Did I buy the DVD only to pop it in my laptop to get screen caps and never watch the whole thing? Yup.
We Asians are very visual. I caught more jokes from This is Spinal Tap than my mom while watching this on the big screen, but this ‘Big Bottom’ song flew right on top of our heads. Took some closed captioning to find it funny.
This song’s tune is really catchy but I didn’t realize the staccato lyrics were so hard to keep track of. Also haha, Lake Titicaca. And Appolonia. Purple Rain did not help my confused adolescent sexual identity at all.
Eh, close enough. Thoughts on Back to the Future here.
Remember that scene when he just eats a TV dinner without microwave-ing it? Yeah, me neither. We all know the scene but have never watched all or Risky Business, which is on tonight at 9 at the BLB. This movie is SLU-tty, like a straight man’s wet dream.
I love how I know none of the lyrics to any song in this series but when a Madonna clip comes on I don’t even have to look at the screen to sing the words. Anyway, the point she’s making in W.E. is that she wants to be that girl in this picture again. It’s up to you to decide if she can turn back the clock.
Beaches! It has the best post funeral scene ever which involves a fucking horse. Fucking rich people.
Thoughts on Flashdance here which I saw AFTER Dogtooth.
Andrew McCarthy again! Thoughts on Pretty in Pink here.
This song sucks without context.
I thought he was Robert Downey Jr. instead of Alan Cumming. Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion was my favourite movie when I was ten, playing the soundtrack incessantly on tape. I don’t know if it’s my third world view but nobody in the late 90’s dressed like that. Also if Mira Sorvino and Lisa Kudrow made a movie together this year, it would be indie and awesome.
…With Your Best Shot: Aliens
I’m back!
Things aren’t as solid as they seem, pardon the expression, in James Cameron‘s Aliens, although we’ve been taught that lesson in the first film, Alien. In Ridley Scott’s masterpiece we get the breakdown of facades, each crew member suspecting each other of harboring the alien inside of them. When he finally get to see the alien that everyone is afraid of, it doesn’t look as gooey with its shiny exoskeleton.
ph. Twentieth Century Fox
Running opposite to the impervious behemoth of the spaceship in the original film, Cameron takes this lesson further by making the inanimate featured in the film more flexible, as if they have a life of their own. We see this in the beginning, when Ellen Ripley’s (Sigourney Weaver) pod thing docks into this Metropolis like port, although there’s something fluid about the pipes, or the way that mechanic arm moves as it frees Ripley from her pod. The colony planet’s suspicious too. Would you set up a colony where rock formations look like arms? Even if I was the CEO of a greedy, careless, callous company, I’d say EFF NOO!
My ‘best shot,’ or the one that captivates me the most, is the one above when the new, militaristic crew enters the colony’s gates. Metal and wires jut out of the ceiling like tentacles. You’d expect a cheap scare to come out after, that’s how eerie this place looks. This animistic structure that this depopulated colony has become foreshadows the gooey tentacles insulating the underground levels for alien egg-laying purposes. Or when the aliens are actually crawling in the ceiling on top of the soldiers. You’d think that Cameron had a termite problem while writing this script in the 80’s. Did he?
An inanimate yet uncanny object of note is also Rebecca ‘Newt’ Jordan’s (Carrie Hehn) decapitated doll head, her most prized possession. A series of attacks and escapes leads Newt and the team to some water-filled sewage area where one of the aliens kidnap her. Since she can’t holler out her ‘final’ ‘Help me, Ripley!’ in her British accent, here’s the doll doing it for her. That doll and her fake eyelashes is the second greatest actor in the history of cinema.
The humans, in turn, become more machine-like. A close-up of Ripley that make her seem uncanny, Bishop who actually is uncanny, the muscular body types of the soldiers – speaking of which, it’s strange seeing guns, installed binoculars and exposed skin on these soldiers at the same time. On that shot above, Vasquez (Jenette Goldstein) isn’t ‘fully covered’ as soldiers would be in other movies about planets in outer space. And of course, the forklift Transformers-like machine that Ripley hops into that is really useful for her in one of the film’s most gratifying scenes.
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Apocryphal information: my first Weaver film is not the Alien movies. Maybe it was Dave but it was most likely her turn as Lady Claudia Hoffman in that Hallmark movie Snow White: A Tale of Terror. Do you guys know what I’m talking about? This TV movie was awesome. It also had “Dawson’s Creek’s” Monica Keena as our Snow White Liliana Hoffman and Sam Neill is the oblivious father. It’s strange seeing Keena as the good girl and Weaver as the bad woman, but that TV movie cemented Weaver as an icy villain/anti-hero in other movies where I’ll watch her. Also, one of the ‘dwarves’ was a tall guy with a scar who’s also hot.
Digression! I remembered my introduction to Weaver because of the first scene, where she is Snow White. The frost covers her pod and everything. I’m not the only one who sees this, Vasquez points that out too, using the comparison to point out how ladylike she in comparison to the soldiers. I’m not sure if and how the metaphor sticks, since the original story is about a young woman’s blossoming sexuality and Freudian issues avant la lettre. Here instead, Ripley has both lost her status as a mother and is an exile. The mother alien is thus her evil mother/stepmother?
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Lastly, Newt reminds me of the screaming child in The Bad and the Beautiful, both of whom remind me of young Cossette. I won’t be making more allusions.
This post is part of Nathaniel Rogers’ Hit Me With Your Best Shot series.
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Hunchback of Notre Dame ’86
ph. Burbank DVD
Mom came home with a DVD of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Not the Disney one, the Charles Laughton one nor the silent one. Turns out it’s from a Australian company that released the movie in 1986 and the guy who does the voice for Quasimodo is this Canadian guy who has a lot of acting work in Australia. His Quasimodo sounds like Laughton too. I like the shaded-in quality of the colour, which isn’t the way animation does colour today. The colours that dominate the movie are mostly brown and gray, depicting a Paris gritty like every Medieval European city, centuries before it became fashionable. And the way they coloured the bell is amazing.
This is my first time seeing a full adaptation of the Victor Hugo novel. There’s Quasimodo and his damsel of distress Esmeralda, fighting against the mob who judge them for their appearances. Oh, and where all the male leads have to do is talk funny and people think they’re great, Angela Punch McGregor has the difficult task of playing Esmeralda, and she fails. Her tone doesn’t change whether in distress or not. She doesn’t even sound convincingly in distress when needed.
The big leap.
ph. MGM
No one can do blasphemy like Woody Allen. Thing is I’ve been looking for this scene while skimming Hannah and Her Sisters and couldn’t find it, and I was gonna post a still of Barbara Hershey permanently coming out of the shower or the atrocious fashion. Oh, you want me to do that too?
When April (Carrie Fisher) makes Holly (Dianne Wiest) feel guilty about something the former did. Well, Holly didn’t have dibs on David (Sam Waterston), so finders keepers.
And when Holly and Mickey (Woody Allen) have a second chance. What kind of Jewish parent names their kid Mickey?
Also, Lewis Black, Julia-Louis Dreyfus, John Turturro and Richard Jenkins are in this movie? I need to rewatch this in entirety!
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