Matt writes: Labor Day weekend has kicked off the official start of awards season, with film festivals in Venice and Telluride currently underway and Toronto following close behind on September 5th. Go to RogerEbert.com over the next couple weeks for our daily dispatches, beginning with Glenn Kenny's coverage of the Venice Film Festival, including his enticing preview and review of Roman Polanski's latest film, "J'Accuse."
A great collection of new Blu-ray releases, including "Green Room," "Night and Fog," "Everybody Wants Some!!" and "OJ: Made in America."
A tribute to Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger, designer of the titular creature of the "Alien" series.
The first in a monthly series of video essays about unloved films, Scout Tafoya's video essay is an appreciation of "Alien 3," the debut feature by David Fincher.
Science fiction films of the 1950s gave women surprisingly prominent roles as scientists.
Released in the summer of 1985 to critical scorn and near-total commercial indifference, the sci-fi/horror hybrid "Lifeforce" has spent most of the following 28 years languishing in obscurity. If it was remembered at all, it was either because of its massive financial failure--which helped doom the futures of both its producing company and its director--or because of its status as one of the all-time favorite films of Mr. Skin, that beloved repository of on-screen nudity.
The visceral impact that Ridley Scott's "Alien" had in 1979 can never quite be recaptured, partly because so many movies have adapted elements of its premise, design and effects over the last three decades -- from John Carpenter's remake of "The Thing" (1982) to David Cronenberg's remake of "The Fly" (1986) to "Species" (1998) and "Splice" (2009). No movie had ever looked like this. And it still works tremendously -- but let me tell you, in 1979 a major studio science-fiction/horror film that hinted darkly of interspecies rape and impregnation was unspeakably disturbing. (It got under my skin and has stayed there. We have a symbiotic relationship, this burrowing movie parasite and I. We nourish each other. I don't think Ridley Scott has even come close to birthing as subversive and compelling a creation since.)
The thing is, the filmmakers actually took out the grisly details involving just what that H.R. Giger " xenomorph" did to and with human bodies (the sequels got more graphic), but in some ways that made the horror all the more unsettling. You knew, but you didn't know. It wasn't explicitly articulated. Dallas (Tom Skerrit) just disappears from the movie. The deleted "cocoon" scene (with the haunting moan, "Kill me...") appeared later on a LaserDisc version of the film, and then was incorporated into the 2003 theatrical re-release for the first time. The deleted footage:
Lesson for the day: How to have fun while wasting time... Marie writes: welcome to DRAW A STICK MAN, a delightful Flash-based site prompting viewers to draw a simple stick figure which then comes to life! Ie: the program animates it. You're given instructions about what to draw and when, which your dude uses to interact with objects onscreen. Thanks go to club member Sandy Kahn who heard about it from her pal Lauren, in Portland Oregon.Note: here's a screen-cap of what I drew; I've named him Pumpkin Head.
Welcome to a special Halloween edition of the Newsletter! Marie writes: the Cimetière du Père-Lachaise in Paris is considered one of the most beautiful cemeteries in the world, in addition to being the final resting place of many a famous name. From Édith Piaf, Sarah Bernhardt and Chopin to Oscar Wilde, Jim Morrison and Georges Méliès, the well-known sleep on the tree-lined avenues of the dead and which you can now explore in a virtual 360 degree tour...
ENTER Père-Lachaise
Q. You mentioned that Stanley Kubrick always has a bathroom in his movies, and John Landis always uses the line "See you next Wednesday." What about Dan O'Bannon's chickens? O'Bannon started screenwriting in college with classmate John Carpenter. Their first full feature together was "Dark Star" in 1974. I haven't seen this film for myself, but I believe there is a scene in it which involves the world's crappiest joke--pulling a rubber chicken from a jacket and shaking it to make it look alive. Ever since then, Dan O'Bannon has incorporated a chicken into each of his film scripts. In "Alien" a chicken's membrane appeared on the monitor when John Hurt was being scanned. In "Blue Thunder" a missile takes out a fried chicken restaurant. In "Return of the Living Dead" the joke appeared on a billboard in the background. In "Total Recall" me and a couple of friends are pretty sure it appeared at the end of the film--the alien "handprint" on the atmosphere-creating machine being in reality a mold of a enlarged chicken's foot. (Graham Keith, Haslingden, England)
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