Aliens

I did something kind of stupid last Thursday night. Don't regret it a bit.

Basically, I was flipping through the local paper and saw that one of the local theaters was showing Aliens that night at 10 p.m. as part of its throw-back program. (Old movies on Thursday nights. We live in a college town.) Aliens was one of my absolute favorite movies as a teenager. Saw it four times in the theater. Since then, I've wanted to see it in the theater again. I blew one chance in about 1994 when it was playing at the Pacific Film Archive more or less across the street from my law school. I blew it again about a year ago when the same local theater was playing it in the throw-back series. At the time, I thought, "Man, I'm old, I'm not going to a two-and-a-half-hour movie that starts at 10 p.m. on a work night." I of course regretted not going the following morning. So, this time, damn it, I went, with The Muse's blessing. Thanks, Muse.

And, man, I am glad that I went. The print was old, so there were little bugs -- not aliens -- on the screen most of the time. Lines, too. The theater staff was really irritating, not starting the movie until after 10 as they gathered written comments, talked about various types of lubes, held a raffle and made the raffle winners "roar like a Viking" to get their winnings. But that still is one hell of a movie.

The last hour of the movie is the most sustained white-knuckle ride I have ever seen. From about the time that the good guys determine that Paul Reiser's character Burke (he should try being a bad guy more often -- he's better at that than trying to be warm and funny) has tried to get the aliens to lay eggs in Ripley and Newt to get the eggs past quarantine for the Company's weapon labs, it is just aliens, aliens, ailens, Ripley and Hicks nailing aliens, Hudson yelling, Burke getting eaten, Hudson getting eaten, Vasquez and Corman getting trapped by aliens and blowing themselves up to kill aliens, Newt falling into water and getting abducted by ailens, Ripley going back to save her from aliens, Ripley slowly realizing that she's in the queen alien's lair, Ripley trying to blow up as much of the alien lair as she can, Ripley trying to get Newt out while the whole place counts down to a thermonuclear explosion brought on the earlier alien-induced crash of the initial transport ship, Ripley thinking she and Newt are stuck on the landing bay by the artificial human Bishop who took the new transport ship off the bay, the queen alien coming up the elevator chasing Ripley, Ripley and Newt getting on the transport, which can't quite get all of its landing gear up, the ship taking off as the whole place detonates, Ripley telling Bishop that he did a good job once they get back to the main ship, you thinking that the movie is more or less done, the queen alien stabbing Bishop and ripping him in half (although he lives because he's artificial), Newt and Ripley trying to hide, Newt getting chased by the alien under the cargo bay floor as the alien uncovers parts of it, Ripley coming out in the loading robot suit and saying -- in the single greatest line in an 80's movie -- "Get away from her, you bitch," Ripley and the alien fighting and then Ripley blowing the alien out of the airlock.

More than that, watching this movie after 20 years was really interesting. Some of the special effects haven't aged well. Many of the shots of ships clearly were shots with models moving against green scenes and kind of look silly (it's interesting to compare them with the shots of the rebel ships attacking the Death Star in Star Wars, which have held up much better because, I think, there was no green screen involved). The ending is still somewhat implausible. Ripley, Bishop and Newt are able to keep from flying into space when Ripley opens the airlock? O-kaaaaay. Ripley's shoe, but not her foot, gets ripped off when the queen alien finally can't hold on anymore? O-kaaaaay. But these are quibbles.

It was really interesting to see how Aliens both went with and played with some of the 80's action movie conventions. There is the obligatory gun-fetish scene, where Ripley straps together various space weapons and loads up on grenades as she's getting ready to go save Newt. That scene could have come straight out of Rambo or Die Hard or Lethal Weapon. Most importantly, though, I just can't think of another 80's action movie -- and really, until recently, any action movie -- that features such a prominent female action star. (Linda Hamilton in the Terminator movies is the only one who even came close.) And her motivation is done very well and not obviously as well. The set-up of Ripley basically being cut off from everything that she had going by the fact that she had been floating through space for 57 years after the end of Alien and had nothing going on, only to find this little girl Newt, who had lost her family, and basically become her mother as something to hold on to is not stated explicitly at all, but you know what's going on. God knows, the motivations of the heroes of other 80's action movies weren't that well-developed or that well-done. (For example, we learn in Lethal Weapon 2 that Riggs is mad at the South African bad guys because they killed his wife when one of the characters telling us that.) It shows you that James Cameron, Aliens' director and the director of the Terminator movies (see Linda Hamilton above), was once a really good director, before he started making hooey like The Abyss (although I have heard that the director's cut makes more sense than what was released initially) and Titanic.

And there are a lot of great lines. "Game over, man, game over!" "They come at night mostly. Mostly." "Ripley, she doesn't have dreams because she's just a piece of plastic." "How did they cut the power, man?!? They're just a bunch of animals!" "You always were an a--h---, Gorman." "Guess she don't like the cornbread either."

I give Aliens a Film rating, just like I would have in 1986 if I had met The Muse by then. So, in the end, I am really glad I did the stupid thing of going to see a 20-year-old, two-and-a-half-hour movie for the fifth time at 10 p.m. on a Thursday night. Try it sometime. Just don't expect to be running at full speed on Friday.

Johnny Cash

In my continuing consumption of American pop culture like a Whitman's sampler (this is known perjoratively as "being a poser"), I've gotten into Johnny Cash a little lately. I admit that I only got interested because of all of the publicity surrounding the movie "Walk the Line" last year. The Muse and I watched that recently and this post covers that too.

You've got to start with the music, so I bought a CD that's the "Essential Cash" or something similar to that. It's really interesting stuff. I've never liked country music. Partly that's a reaction to lots of people listening to country music where I grew up. Partly that a reaction to driving around in my dad's pickup with my dad, my mom, my sister and my first brother (who was a baby) listening to Willie Nelson's Stardust Memories tape on the tape deck when those things were the new technology. (Sorry, Mom and Dad, "Soft Sounds of the 50's kind of soured me on the Platters, too.) Partly because country music often seems to fall into one of three categories: (1) dumb genre stuff (Achy Breaky Heart); (2) my-woman-left-me-I-got-drunk-and-kicked-the-dog stuff (Kenny Rogers doing "don't take your love town" comes to mind -- I thought the line in that song was "four hundred children and a crop in the field" when I was growing up); and (3) overtly political/jingoistic stuff like Toby Keith singing "we'll put a boot in your ass/it's the American way." I'm sure that there are brilliant country songs expressing the subtleties of life and stuff, but I just haven't heard them.

Or at least I hadn't until I started listening to a little Johnny Cash. Man, you just don't hear lyrics like his very often. I obviously am coming late to this particular party, but it is striking to hear "When I was just a baby/my momma told me son/always be a good boy/don't ever play with guns/but I shot a man in Reno/just to watch him die." Who sings anything like that?

LAWYER WARNING: This is a warning to all those who are considering being an attorney. That last line comes out of the Folsom Prison song. Folsom Prison is in California. Reno is in Nevada. Having had my brain rewired by law school and law practice, my first reaction to Johnny Cash singing about shooting a man in Reno in a Folsom Prison song was more or less: "Why was he in Folsom Prison? He shot the guy in Reno. California courts wouldn't have had jurisdiction over that." Just a warning: if you don't want your brain to work like this, don't go to law school.

Then you get Johnny Cash's voice, which is this deep, deep thing that seems like it's coming out of some mine. The combination of the voice with the lyrics just convinces you that this is a guy who has seen too much and been through too much.

What's really interesting to me is how these tortured lyrics and this unbelievable voice got put over these almost cliched arrangements. The first song on my particular CD is "Cry, Cry, Cry," which is one of Cash's first songs. Now here is a song that goes into the Creepy Guy Song Hall of Fame with stuff like "Under My Thumb" by the Rolling Stones and "Every Breath You Take" by the Police. "You'll come back to me/for a little love that's true/when I remind you of all of this/you'll cry, cry, cry." Yet it's set over with plink-plunk-plink-plunk bass and guitar arrangement that seems like it came out Grand Old Opry in 1945. The juxtaposition is just fascinating. The same with what is apparently the original arrangement of "Ring of Fire." You had the idea to use a whole bunch of mariachi horns to accompany a song about how love burns, burns, burns with a singer with a deep, sorrowful voice that is just making you feel the pain? It's like no one -- including Cash himself -- knew quite what to do with the things that he wanted to sing. The only early song that seems to get the whole package just right is "Walk the Line," which has the foreboding guitar line throughout that really emphasizes how Cash is having a difficult time keeping it on the straight and narrow. I think that I have heard of some Cash albums with new, really spare arrangements and I'd really like to hear them.

Which brings us to the movie "Walk the Line." I thought that it, and Reese Witherspoon in particular, were quite good. Joaquin Phoenix really committed to playing the part and that's always good, although the results were kind of uneven. But, to me, there was a big, basically irresolvable problem with the movie. The actors sang their own music, which made for good believeability in the singing scenes. The problem with this, however, was that Joaquin Phoenix obviously doesn't have Johnny Cash's voice and his voice was a very large part of his appeal. So, basically, if you've heard Johnny Cash's music, you have to get past Phoenix's voice to like the movie, but Cash's voice might be a big reason you wanted to see the movie in the first place. It's a Catch-22 that those involved with the movie couldn't have avoided. But they did an admirable job of working with it. I give the movie a Movie+.

Johnny Cash

In my continuing consumption of American pop culture like a Whitman's sampler (this is known perjoratively as "being a poser"), I've gotten into Johnny Cash a little lately. I admit that I only got interested because of all of the publicity surrounding the movie "Walk the Line" last year. The Muse and I watched that recently and this post covers that too.

You've got to start with the music, so I bought a CD that's the "Essential Cash" or something similar to that. It's really interesting stuff. I've never liked country music. Partly that's a reaction to lots of people listening to country music where I grew up. Partly that a reaction to driving around in my dad's pickup with my dad, my mom, my sister and my first brother (who was a baby) listening to Willie Nelson's Stardust Memories tape on the tape deck when those things were the new technology. (Sorry, Mom and Dad, "Soft Sounds of the 50's kind of soured my on the Platters, too.) Partly because country music often seems to fall into one of three categories: (1) dumb genre stuff (Achy Breaky Heart); (2) my-woman-left-me-I-got-drunk-and-kicked-the-dog stuff (Kenny Rogers doing "don't take your love town" comes to mind -- I thought the line in that song was "four hundred children and a crop in the field" when I was growing up); and (3) overtly political/jingoistic stuff like Toby Keith singing "we'll put a boot in your ass/it's the American way." I'm sure that there are brilliant country songs expressing the subtleties of life and stuff, but I just haven't heard them.

Or at least I hadn't until I started listening to a little Johnny Cash. Man, you just don't hear lyrics like his very often. I obviously am coming late to this particular party, but it is striking to hear "When I was just a baby/my momma told me son/always be a good boy/don't ever play with guns/but I shot a man in Reno/just to watch him die." Who sings anything like that?

LAWYER WARNING: This is a warning to all those who are considering being an attorney. That last line comes out of the Folsom Prison song. Folsom Prison is in California. Reno is in Nevada. Having had my brain rewired by law school and law practice, my first reaction to Johnny Cash singing about shooting a man in Reno in a Folsom Prison song was more or less: "Why was he in Folsom Prison? He shot the guy in Reno. California courts wouldn't have had jurisdiction over that." Just a warning: if you don't want your brain to work like this, don't go to law school.

Then you get Johnny Cash's voice, which is this deep, deep thing that seems like it's coming out of some mine. The combination of the voice with the lyrics just convinces you that this is a guy who has seen too much and been through too much.

What's really interesting to me is how these tortured lyrics and this unbelievable voice got put over these almost cliched arrangements. The first song on my particular CD is "Cry, Cry, Cry," which is one of Cash's first songs. Now here is a song that goes into the Creepy Guy Song Hall of Fame with stuff like "Under My Thumb" by the Rolling Stones and "Every Breath You Take" by the Police. "You'll come back to me/for a little love that's true/when I remind you of all of this/you'll cry, cry, cry." Yet it's set over with plink-plunk-plink-plunk bass and guitar arrangement that seems like it came out Grand Old Opry in 1945. The juxtaposition is just fascinating. The same with what is apparently the original arrangement of "Ring of Fire." You had the idea to use a whole bunch of mariachi horns to accompany a song about how love burns, burns, burns with a singer with a deep, sorrowful voice that is just making you feel the pain? The only early song that seems to get the whole package just right is "Walk the Line," which has the foreboding guitar line throughout that really emphasizes how Cash is having a difficult time keeping it on the straight and narrow. I think that I have heard of some Cash albums with new, really spare arrangements and I'd really like to hear them.

Which brings us to the movie "Walk the Line." I thought that it, and Reese Witherspoon in particular, were quite good. Joaquin Phoenix really committed to playing the part and that's always good, although the results were kind of uneven. But, to me, there was a big, basically irresolvable problem with the movie. The actors sang their own music, which made for good believeability in the singing scenes. The problem with this, however, was that Joaquin Phoenix obviously doesn't have Johnny Cash's voice and his voice was a very large part of his appeal. So, basically, if you've heard Johnny Cash's music, you have to get past Phoenix's voice to like the movie, but Cash's voice might be a big reason you wanted to see the movie in the first place. It's a Catch-22 that those involved with the movie couldn't have avoided. But they did an admirable job of working with it. I give the movie a Movie+.

Entertaining Juxtaposition

Being a bit of a geek, I was listening to NPR driving home yesterday. With traffic on the freeway backed up, I was ducking off on an exit to take a side road to go around some of the traffic. At that time, the NPR started telling us that they shortly would have an oral essay by a woman discussing her decision to remain a virgin until she got married at 31. At this moment, I looked up to see the cars ahead of me on the exit and saw, two cars ahead of me, a big utility-type truck of some kind that had the following word painted like a brand name on the back:

SCHWING.

I found this audio-visual juxtaposition to be most entertaining.