Music Babble

What baffles me most about the 1984 Dune is that Lynch wrote the screenplay himself. I mean, really, do you hear his voice anywhere in the entire thing at all, final cut or no? It isn't just that he has no feel for writing pompous heroic sci-fi dialogue, it's that...well, no, that is it exactly. It's not his thing. And he said that he wasn't into sci-fi in interviews after Dune bombed, so...why's he writing the screenplay for an expensive movie based on the world's best selling sci fi novel? All the major supporting characters from the book are introduced haphazardly with little inference as to what most of them really even *do*, what purpose they serve. Really, he went through all this just to get to do Blue Velvet? (He's used the term "selling out" to describe what he was doing in 1983-84.)

Huge LOL on that Geezer Butler anecdote. I was aware that BS rarely covered sex as a topic.

Alien Anthology - I guess this is replacing Alien Quadrilogy, which isn't really a word, and which had theatrical and "director's cuts" of all four movies. Since the first thing anyone ever learns after the fact about Alien3 is that David Fincher has completely and thoroughly disowned it and hated making the film, the "Assembly Cut" has become the big point of contention amongst the fans.

Alien - I actually kinda like the Director's Cut shots of Ripley finding Dallas and Harry Dean Stanton and having to torch them, though I do get that is slows down the momentum, and the shot of the xenomorph swinging around in the chains before killing Harry Dean Stanton. Whatever. It's splitting hairs for me. Ridley Scott has since admitted the director's cut was a selling gimmick but it worked because I remember the movie getting a lot of great retrospectives when the DC came out in 2003, Ebert put it in Great Movies for one.

Aliens - I'll only watch the Director's Cut of this, "a zillion miles of bad road" as Cameron puts it. It really does feel like it should be that long. Carrie Henn has been made fun of for the "mostly come out at night, mostly" line her entire life. Just as it's remarkable to rewatch Raging Bull and find out that De Niro as La Motta only acts like a complete bastard in a few minutes of the film, there aren't really THAT many action sequences in Aliens and the setup is actually very long!! So is the setup in the original Alien really, which is why I thought it was boring the first time I watched it.

Alien3 - I like Ripley's death scene fine, but that's easily the big highlight. Everyone is bald because, y'know, AIDS, the big "signifier" of all late 80s/early 90s films. (People think Lynch's depiction of Baron Harkonnen is AIDS, too.) A couple good deaths like when the guy falls into the fan, and decent visuals and lighting and whatnot, but not a very good alien, you're right. Hey, it was 1992, the big computer graphics showcase that year was friggin' Lawnmower Man, which looks like hilarious ass to me now!! But everyone is right to hate the movie for killing Newt and Hicks, everyone is right to point out that there was no way the Alien Queen could have gotten an upside down egg onto the drop ship or whatever it was, and then don't we get a lot of graphic details about how Charles Dance's character had to examine Newt's naked body or something really sick like that?
I don't like the film but it's sort of interesting to think of its failure, as opposed to Alien: Resurrection which only had a good Weaver performance and a couple overblown deaths to hold my attention, so that one's still worse.

Prometheus isn't very good, but at least has one great scene and gets sort of a bad rap, I'd rather watch it than most other Ridley Scott movies which really blow for the most part, and Alien Covenant is worst of all, having nothing in it I liked whatsoever.