Hooray for Villains!

[Latimer]

But, for that matter, the true villain of the movie, Mrs. Danvers, portrayed by Judith Anderson:

 

[EddMarkStarr]

No two bad characters are exactly alike. Some antagonists are all action while others are all verbal threats.

I've always held a special liking for villains that can "talk ya to Death!"

Ohhh lordy . . . ya gotta give it up for this man: Jeremy Irons, as Scar, in "The Lion King" - 1994

 

[Alistair]

 

[pat grimshaw]

^ I loved the end when she was standing on the... oh, wait. Never mind.

standing on a grave?

 

[Peloso]

Willem Dafoe as Bobby Peru in Wild at Heart.

 

[EddMarkStarr]

In a career that spanned decades - this was Ricardo Montalban's finest hour!

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan - 1982

Look at his face. Listen to his voice. As "Khan", Ricardo is on top of the world!

 

[smokeshadow]

^^And he chewed Melville's text like he was chewing nails

 

[NotHardUp1]

I was so proud to see Montalban play that role. He did it perfectly.

People of my generation largely didn't know how famous he was decades before he play on Fantasy Island. It was almost a shame to see him reduced to playing that.

Handsome squared, and classy.

 

[NotHardUp1]

standing on a grave?

No. It's a recapitulation of what happened earlier in the plot to little Claude Daigle.

 

[Latimer]

Philip Seymour Hoffman often turned in a good performance. He was ambiguously evil in Doubt, but a true baddie in The Talented Mr. Ripley, which was great fun because he was actually the murder victim, yet still managed to play a man who needed to die.

I don't remember the character as "a true baddie" in either the novel or the earlier French film version, but it's been a long time since I've read the book, and I've avoided seeing the Anthony Minghella film. One of the reasons I've never seen the later version is that I couldn't image Matt Damon playing evil as well as Alain Delon, or able to play evil at all. The great genius of Patricia Highsmith's Ripley novels is that even as one understands that her protagonist is truly evil, one sympathizes with him and admires how clever he is. One wants him to succeed. That Delon is so beautiful to watch as he schemes and kills only adds to the emotional conflict. A very disquieting portrayal. A very disturbing film.

 

[johaninsc]

For down right scary, all one has to do is remember that the Alien in the self-titled movie of the same name, is only on the screen for a little over 4 minutes and isn't even seen until well over one hour in. A lot of it's impact goes to it's 7 foot 1 inch actor Bolaji Badejo: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0045993/?ref_=tt_cl_t8

I admire Alien, but I thought they milked the shadowy setting too long and avoided screen time too much. It made me wonder if the monster were poorly built or something.

that was by design

Ridley Scott and Carlo Rambaldi address this in the below documentary between 1:08:19 and 1:09:07

I saw ALIEN at an advanced preview when it first came out...won a couple of tickets from a radio show back when I was 14


that movie scared the shit outta me

for me, it's still the best sci-fi horror movie I've ever seen

the sequel, ALIENS was also good, but the ones that followed...not so much

 

[Latimer]

^

I saw a program a few days ago about the new Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences museum which will be opening in Los Angeles in the near future. The museum director showed a model of the head of the Alien monster and said that Ridley Scott would not allow the actors to see the monster before the scene was filmed to better bring the most frightened reaction possible.

I tend to avoid horror movies, and have never seen Alien. My partner tells me it is a very scary film.

 

[NotHardUp1]

I don't remember the character as "a true baddie" . . .

Hoffman's portrayal is of a clever but unsympathetic man who is cast as the one who is about to destroy the last chance the protagonist had at escaping his life of poverty and meagerness. His glee in finding out the truth is the director's culmination of corrupting the viewer to become the advocate of the killer, as the killer is painted in the more sympathetic light. The privileged class is paraded across the screen like so many pastries in the front window of a shop with a poor kid stuck outside without a penny.

And, I can sympathize with your sentiments. When a great movie or novel is already perfect, it is hard to get myself off the dime and see the remake to compare. Then there are denigrations like Disney's reduction of The Hunchback of Notre Dame to animation, which is quite unforgivable.

that was by design

Thanks for going to that trouble. But, I knew that it had been done so intentionally. I just disagreed with the technique. For me, it merely annoyed me. It was like having someone smear Vaseline on my eyeglasses. I wouldn't normally be prevented from seeing the antagonist for this long in an ongoing fight to the death, although in fairness, the ones who have seen the monster would have been eaten or taken, so the real crew might not have seen.

I'm an old sci-fi fan. It has probably colored how I can suspend disbelief. The degree to which the audience was held at back seemed like it had become a game of how long could it be protracted. I found it very offputting.

I'm more forgiving of bad special effects than I am of heavy-handed manipulation. I clearly remember being rankled when Dolores Claiborne's production forced perspective in that scene when they were back living in Dolores' old house. All the color pallet had been artificially controlled and/or filtered to create a desolate scene of grays and blues. No room or house has ever looked that dismal. I've seen dismal. It just felt like cheating. It didn't trust the human psyche to find the house depressing enough by tone of the scenes or screenplay. I felt it was cheating. It may come from my literary degree, too, as I believe the language is made less powerful when the technical is overly responsible in a drama.

That is why Shakespeare still works, despite the changes in culture, medium, and language. A man speaking to the Weird Sisters is still a grasping and naive victi of his own ambition, no matter when we live. The words and acting manage to convey that, without super spooky special effects, etc. Of course, in an actual monster movie, that precept fades.

 

[gsdx]

^

I saw a program a few days ago about the new Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences museum which will be opening in Los Angeles in the near future. The museum director showed a model of the head of the Alien monster and said that Ridley Scott would not allow the actors to see the monster before the scene was filmed to better bring the most frightened reaction possible.

The alien bursting out of Ash's chest was also hidden from the cast. They knew it was going to happen (it was in the script), but they didn't know when or how. The special effects crew designed it to literally explode out of his chest with blood and guts flying everywhere, including splattering and splashing on the actors standing around Ian Holm. Their screams and reactions were genuine and all caught on film the first take.

That's what appeared in the film.

The film was psychological horror. The mind filled in everything you didn't see on film. Not seeing the alien was scarier when you didn't know what the crew was facing. The same tactic was used in the classic 1956 film 'Forbidden Planet'.

 

[smokeshadow]

I remember seeing Alien with several college cohorts at the time. Very suspenseful and taught storytelling. There were a couple of coeds sitting in the row in front of us, and when the alien makes his first appearance out of Ian Holm's chest, I thought I was going to have to peel them off of the ceiling Regrettably, the BIG mistake I made was dining on Italian food before the movie. . .I was OK until the science officer looses his head just before the climatic denouement . . .fortunately, I was able to make it from my seat back to the lobby before loosing it entirely. And, I missed Ripley's showdown.

 

[Peloso]

"Alien" is probably my favorite film, for reasons not limited to it's success as a thriller and technological and genre-changing innovation. It was the first R rated film I didn't have to sneak into, as I had recently turned seventeen. I saw it with my friend who I had a crush on, and we spent the evening reflecting on how awesome it was, getting drunk, and eventually sucking each other off for the first time.

It was probably the first commercial science fiction to depict space travelers not as sterile scientists, but blue collar grubs just earning a living. Gone were the pristine, white sets and rows and rows of panels with blinking lights. You could almost smell and feel the dusty, oily interior of the ship. In the scene where they first landed on the planet where they would find the eggs, boring technical mumbo-jumbo was replaced with problematic malfunctions and a rocky landing. It brought real life into outer space.

Giger's work was largely unknown in the U.S. when the film was released, and Ridley Scott's wise decision to reveal the creatures appearance slowly and teasingly worked for me. On subsequent viewings it's clearly visible in some of the film's more awkward shots, but nobody had any idea of what they were looking at. It's design was unlike any other movie monster before, so it wasn't until the final scene in the shuttle when, after being disturbed, it emerges amidst the smoke and strobe lights to reveal it's elongated, eyeless head that that I really got a comprehensive look at it. It was terrifying.

Also, I don't remember any seeing any films prior to "Alien" that used strobe lighting to unnerve the audience in the same way.

And it made a star out of Sigourney Weaver, who has been a favorite actress of mine ever since. I admire her willingness to star in all of the sequels, no matter how awful they might have been. It was as if she was repaying the franchise for making her famous, unlike Jodie Foster (whom I also like) turning down Scott for "Hannibal" because it was too gruesome. Scott may have ruined "Hannibal" by seeing it as a melodrama rather than the thriller it should have been, but Jodie Foster's absence seemed to loom larger than anything else.

As for the sequels, "Aliens" was fun. I found "Alien 3" to be gutless and boring. Most people hated "Alien Resurrection", but I enjoyed it's goofiness and the return to portraying the monsters with men in suits, rather than the CGI in "Alien 3" that often gave the alien little more than a pesky insect-like presence. I also liked the fact that it ended with Ripley and company hurtling toward Earth. I was hoping the next installment would feature the monster running rampant through Times Square or something.

I was really bummed out by the reboot, "Covenant". It literally shat on all the loose strings left over from "Prometheus". In my opinion, the film worked OK until the alien showed up.

When laserdiscs first came out, the edition of "Alien" featured deleted scenes and all the special features that would become a staple of DVD's some years later. I was such a fan of the film, and so blown away by the unseen footage (a friend had a player and a copy and showed me all of it) that I shelled out $99 for a copy, even though I didn't own a player.

I define my "favorite films" as movies I can get lost in, no matter how many times I've seen them. I never get bored with "Alien", even though I know it forwards and backwards. My favorite sequences, which include the landing and Ripley's frantic sprint back and forth through the doomed ship at the end are never dull to me. I see something new every time.

I also especially like the scene where Harry Dean Stanton is killed. Inverting the "wandering through an old dark house" scenario by setting it in the bowels of a gargantuan commercial space mining vehicle has never been replicated so successfully. The water dripping was a brilliant touch. And if you watch closely in the moments where the creature closes in on Brett, you'll notice that it gets down on it's hands and knees behind him before rising to bare it's teeth when he turns around. My hypothesis is that the creature used those irregular spikey things on it's back to aid in camouflage. Perhaps they blended in with the vegetation on it's home planet or something.

 

[gsdx]

It was probably the first commercial science fiction to depict space travelers not as sterile scientists, but blue collar grubs just earning a living. Gone were the pristine, white sets and rows and rows of panels with blinking lights. You could almost smell and feel the dusty, oily interior of the ship. In the scene where they first landed on the planet where they would find the eggs, boring technical mumbo-jumbo was replaced with problematic malfunctions and a rocky landing. It brought real life into outer space.

If I'm not mistaken, the sets were 'wired', meaning that every switch and button and dial and keypad and keyboard, etc., did something when operated. Unlike casts who simply had to push random buttons during filming and things happened, the crew aboard the Nostromo had to learn which buttons to push right down to turning on lights.

 

[NotHardUp1]

I'm glad Sigourney Weaver was given credit. She was almost the only redeeming thing for me. And I had quite forgotten this was her breakout role. I had mistakenly guessed it had been either Ghostbusters or Copycat. I loved her in Copycat.

The hidden plot is interesting to contemplate. It surely did make for shock and awe. I agree with the strobe light being unprecedented in a blockbuster, but do thing grunts were depicted in several earlier films, but they just weren't big movies.

Whether I liked Alien or not, it was unquestionably a milestone release.

 

[EddMarkStarr]

I don't remember the character as "a true baddie" in either the novel or the earlier French film version, but it's been a long time since I've read the book, and I've avoided seeing the Anthony Minghella film. One of the reasons I've never seen the later version is that I couldn't image Matt Damon playing evil as well as Alain Delon, or able to play evil at all. The great genius of Patricia Highsmith's Ripley novels is that even as one understands that her protagonist is truly evil, one sympathizes with him and admires how clever he is. One wants him to succeed. That Delon is so beautiful to watch as he schemes and kills only adds to the emotional conflict. A very disquieting portrayal. A very disturbing film.

Of all the antagonists the most spectacular is, "the friend who becomes a murderer".
Alain Delon adds beauty to that horrible transformation!

 

[EddMarkStarr]

Gather round everybody!

Bette Davis is serving up more of her world famous Crispy Critters for lunch!