51: Aliens (1986, James Cameron)

Owned version: The Fox Blu-ray released in 2010 as part of the Alien Anthology set.

Acquired: January 4th, 2016 from Amazon.

Seen before?: So many times on VHS, basic cable and pay cable through the years. Most recently from this disc on April 8th, 2017.

Gonna make this quick, if only to put it behind me and move on to the next item. Besides, what am I gonna say about Aliens? It's Aliens. It's one of the best action films ever made and maybe the single best hybrid of action and horror to ever exist. It stopped the Alien ripoff in its tracks - nearly every film that would use the template from here on out was riffing on the Cameron instead of the Scott. It pretty much singlehandedly popularized the idea of the Space Marine. Sigourney Weaver got an Oscar nomination for this despite it being at the intersection of two genres the Academy likes to pretend don't exist. It's major, and you and I and your granny know that.

What struck me about it this time is how much character work Cameron is able to do within the space of little gestures and signifiers. It's a relentlessly propulsive film, one that never really pauses for breath because to slow down is to die - indeed, the one sequence that explicitly has its characters try and rest turns into a battle for life. Because of this, there's not a lot of time to get friendly with the mass of new character. So, like everything in this film, the character work is done run-and-gun style, on the move. The comfortable nature of the locker-room jaw-jacking, especially the back-and-forth between Hudson and Vasquez, establishes an easy camaraderie between these meatheads and also evinces the confidence which the rest of the film works to undermine. There's also a number of touches that speak to a fully-realized person within the quick sketches of many of the Marines, a sop against militaristic anonymity. My favorite of these is Ferro having "Fly the Friendly Skies!" scrawled in chalk on her helmet, though there's also something to be said for Apone's grabbing his ever-present cigar as his first action upon waking from hypersleep or Hicks dozing off on the drop. It feels weird to say that a film that breaks the two-hour mark is a damn model of narrative economy, but that's what it is.

Also, it's a neat touch that the climax starts with Ripley taking an express elevator... going down.

50: The Alien Within (1990, Ted Newsom [and Kenneth J. Hall & Fred Olen Ray])

Owned version: The Retromedia/Bayview Entertainment DVD released in 2013.

Acquired: October 18th, 2016 from Amazon. (I also own a copy of the VHS which I bought on eBay before I found out this got a DVD release. I will likely never watch that tape as a result.)

Seen before?: No.

After the last couple longer pieces, it feels nice to get something I can basically blow off.

According to the back cover of the DVD, The Alien Within is "[...] a project undertaken by writer/director Ted Newsom... in which he would construct a new movie from the bones of an earlier film, Evil Spawn. In doing so, Newsom created a new universe of characters..."

Now allow me to translate this from box-copy hype to reality: The Alien Within is literally just Evil Spawn with twenty minutes of extra bullshit added into it. This extra bullshit is shot with an entirely different cast, so none of this interacts with the older film in any meaningful way. In fact, one of the rare times the story requires that the new cast actually come into contact with the old is when two investigators discover the body of John Carradine; while Carradine surely would have reprised his role had he not been dead for two years already, Newsom achieves the desired effect by cutting to a freeze-frame of Carradine with his head bowed into his chest. As a further twist of the knife, the new footage is video-shot where the original was film. Whatever, this is a garbage cash-grab of a film, akin to the old grindhouse trick of creating a new title and ad campaign for an old film in order to wring a few extra dollars out of it, and I'm not wasting any more time on it. I'll write a proper review when I get to Evil Spawn (which, hilariously, is included on this disc as a "special feature").

One small point of amusement: The cast in the new footage is expectedly terrible, and how could they not be? The majority of the new stuff is static scenes of people waiting in cars or in office buildings, observing things happening in another film or talking about the things that have happened and are going to happen. I did think it might be amusing to build a film like this, centered on and constructed around another film, and then never cut in the older film, just scene after scene of people talking about stuff that happened offscreen somewhere else. But I digress - the reason I brought up the cast is to offer praise to the one member who makes something of his role, the inexhaustible Richard Harrison. He alone seems comfortable with the assignment, finding ways to ham it up even when responding to nothing. Because of course he'd be good at this - as Godfrey Ho's favorite white guy, he spent much of the '80s emoting to material from other films, material where most times he didn't even know what the context would be. Now that's a damn professional. I feel like he would have killed in the modern greenscreen blockbuster era.

49: Alien: Resurrection (1997, Jean-Pierre Jeunet)

Owned version: The Fox Blu-ray released in 2010 as part of the Alien Anthology set.

Acquired: January 4th, 2016 from Amazon.

Seen before?: A few times in the late '90s - I estimate once from the VHS release and at least two more times via pay cable. I don't think that I've seen it at all in the 21st century, so definitely never from this disc.

What strange beast is Alien: Resurrection, anyway? If you're going to follow up an unrelentingly grim experience like Alien³, I can understand the impulse to course-correct into something a touch lighter. And, on the face of it, Jean-Pierre Jeunet seems like a good guy for that - Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children both achieve a tricky balance, indulging in fierce grotesquerie whilst maintaining a puckish, joyful spirit. But then, his subsequent career doubles down on the whimsy to rapidly diminishing ends, so maybe Marc Caro was the balancing influence he needed. And here, working with a Joss Whedon script that exhibits all the typical hallmarks of Whedonism, Jeunet gets garish. No, scratch that - he made a full-on goddamn cartoon.

Complementing the smartass personality of the script with a similarly outsized visual and performative lunacy seems interesting in theory. In other situations, it could work wonders. Here, though, the overblown comic-book mania, all tight sweaty bug-eyed closeups and odd canted angles, exists at odds with the studied writerly cool. (Not that I'm letting Whedon off the hook here - as usual, nothing bad in the film is his fault according to him, despite the presence of clumsy, possibly undeliverable, unmistakably Whedon dialogue like, "I am not the man with whom to fuck!") This turns Alien: Resurrection into a distended thing that works only in brief moments and flights of loopy inspiration, bits where the Venn diagrams of the disparate parts find a sliver of overlap.

Take, for instance, the bit with where Dan Hedaya, as hirsute human cartoon General Perez, straight-up eats a damn lemon. It's an interesting bit and instructive for the film. It occurs during an otherwise-dull dialogue exchange; Hedaya and Michael Wincott are dancing around the details of some illegal deal they've arranged, being kept vague for the purposes of silly late-film revelations. Meanwhile, there's the bright yellow of that lemon peel beaming a visual contrast to the silver, orange, khaki-brown and rust-brown that comprise the rest of the scene. The look of the film in general deserves comment - while it presages the orange/teal obsession of modern desaturated blockbusters, this practically blazes with light, with every surface rendered shiny, hot and reflective. All the better to illuminate small details, like that lemon - a sore thumb attached to a broken hand - and most of what is memorable in Alien: Resurrection is similar bits of little business amid the miasma: Dominique Pinon tearing his wheelchair apart to build a gun, Sigourney Weaver casually tossing up a basketball to make a behind-the-back basket, the spectacularly goofy acts of hypergore, a full-body cotton surgical dressing being pierced and shed like an amniotic sac, Brad Dourif pontificating in front of imprisoned Xenomorphs with his chin jutted out in a burlesque of delirious weirdness.

The casting is crucial (aside from poor miscast Winona Ryder) and a key reason why, for all its deficits, Alien: Resurrection is oddly, compulsively watchable. The cast is stacked with memorable, visually distinctive character actors - beyond Wincott, Hedaya and Dourif, there's also Ron Perlman, J.E. Freeman, Leland Orser; as the Easter-Island profile of Perlman, the sunken malicious grin of Freeman or the hyperventilating panic of Orser seem like they should be framed as splash panels anyway, they help the comic-book feel of the direction slide down a bit easier. Then, of course, there's Weaver. As in Alien³, she's the glue that keeps the film from crumbling into its component parts. Her Ripley here, cloned from a sample salvaged off Fiorina 161, is stranger, more ambiguous, a hybrid creature who is unsure of her purpose or capabilities but knows she's dangerous and relishes that. This allows Weaver to play much of this with a delicious sinister bemusement, a note she throws her lean, towering frame into with gusto. While some of the hardass stuff in the script doesn't come off, everything Weaver gets is delivered with aplomb, whether calmly sizing up a knife-wielding Ryder or threatening to rip out Perlman's tongue. Yet, as before, there is left room for other emotional beats, here expressed through the Ripley clone's uncertainty about herself and confusion over foggy memories. This culminates in the film's best scene and maybe only one where the screenplay and direction truly mesh, the discovery of the clone room; the sequence shows off Jeunet's kitsch-as-surrealism ethos at its most productively nasty, with its jarred mystery fetuses, grotesque warped mutations and suicidal quasi-Ripley with approximately a thousand tubes leading in and out of it. It also gets Weaver's best work, a heady mixture of betrayal, heartache and bewilderment. That the scene culminates in a frenzied explosion of violence is no surprise; that it turns out to be a mass act of angry mercy is.

Ripley's hybrid status is ultimately mirrored by the new Alien Queen extracted from her at the beginning and its offspring, a genuine human-Xenomorph crossbreed. But the new live-birth reproductive system granted the Queen neuters all the dangerous aspects of the Xenomorph - about the only good thing to come from that idea is a cocooned Dourif yelling marvelously ripe dialogue about, "HER WOMB." And the offspring is.... well, I'm not sure where the best place to go with this would have been, but a furious dewy-eyed infant with Marfan syndrome seems like not the best option. The object lesson, I think, is: Some hybrids are better than others. I wonder if the divided makers of Alien: Resurrection intended that.

48: Alien³ (1992, David Fincher)

Owned version: The Fox Blu-ray released in 2010 as part of the Alien Anthology set.

Acquired: January 4th, 2016 from Amazon.

Seen before?: Twice before these two most recent viewings - once probably in December of 1992 on VHS, at which point I thought very highly of it, and once on May 16th, 2017, at which point I questioned that previously high opinion and wrote it off as me being a know-nothing 12-year-old. This also happened with The Abyss, and I guess there's a potential pattern emerging... or maybe not.

 Alien³ is an open wound of a film and also an openly wounded film. It's a nihilistic howl of a film that follows up its adrenaline-fueled crowd-rouser of a predecessor by stripping away the triumph of Aliens, then stripping and cutting further until Ripley has nothing left to lose except herself and arranges it so she welcomes such an oblivion. It's also a film where the studio responded to this nihilism by taking it into the editing room and feeding its soul into a shredder. In an attempt to carve it into a certain running time and certain summer-movie shape, Fox ironically destroyed its actual shape.

Watching the "assembly cut" available on the Blu-ray drives home what a fascinating film this was set up to be and also illuminates why the theatrical cut, though better than my 2017 viewing would have it, is still something of a misfire. The version released to theaters in 1992 cruises along at a decent clip, devoting the majority of its time to Ripley's paranoia about a potential facehugger infestation aboard her wrecked escape vessel and the burgeoning relationship between Ripley and medical officer Clemens (played with great pursed-lip gravity by Charles Dance)... right up to the point roughly halfway through where Clemens has his brain unceremoniously ventilated by the latest Xenomorph-on-the-loose, after which it collapses into a series of scenes where anonymous bald men in sackcloth are picked off one after another. (To its credit, the film itself seems to realize this - witness the late scene where assistant warden Aaron tries to give an order to an inmate only to realize he doesn't know his name.)

The problem, made very clear by the longer cut, is that the Ripley/Clemens relationship gets emphasized at the expense of every other character - much of what was removed gives dimension to many of the prisoners, both in terms of individual personality and as pieces of a whole in the society on Fiorina 161. Whereas in the theatrical we're merely told about the religion practiced by the monastic inmates, the assembly gives a deeper look at the day-to-day faith that gets most of these guys through, especially Charles S. Dutton's fervent Dillon and Paul McGann's holy-fool Golic. Golic's presence doesn't even make sense in the theatrical - he witnesses a couple other inmates get kacked, goes assumedly bonkers and then gets tied to a bed in the infirmary, left and forgotten after Clemens's death, which hardly justifies McGann's fourth billing.

Turns out McGann had a whole subplot, one the film damn near hinged on - his witnessing of the slaughter, complete with baptism-by-blood, turns him from a believer in the apocalyptic religion of Fiorina 161 to one who believes the apocalypse has arrived and it's his job to see it through. Hacking that inelegantly out of the film not only loses the point of the character and not only loses at least one of the film's most extraordinary images (Golic's eyes framed in light as he releases the Xenomorph and, in a way, achieves a transcendent release), it castrates the whole reason behind giving these guys a belief system at all. Ripley's journey towards martyrdom and savior of humanity carries a lot more heft when her final stop on the way there is damn near literally her fighting the Devil escaped out of Hell and onto this planet of fire and steel and forgotten men who believe the End had been nigh for some time because they don't fit into society's plan any other way. Her final act of sacrifice makes sense on its own, but it's even more potent when made the climactic act of a film with a fanatical concentration on acts of sacrifice... at least two of which didn't survive into the theatrical cut.

But while the studio cut is significantly weakened, Alien³ is a difficult film to fully dismiss, because even its compromised form houses a significant amount of exciting work. Fincher has every reason to disown this film, but it's undeniable that his impressive visual sense gets a full workout - the dominant decaying metal-and-rust scheme, the ghost of industrial progress leeched of life and color on a dying corporate waste planet, follows logically from the collapsing systems depicted in both Alien and Aliens, so much so that the occasional splash of color (e.g. amid the chilled slate-gray of the mortuary lockers, the sorrowful scarlet of the flowers attached to Newt's locker) sears the eye. But the presence of the foundry, filled with hot oranges and overripe flesh tones, gives an early contrast that slowly bleeds out into the tunnels and ducts of Fiorina, lit only by torches as they are, until the moribund colony appears to have been overwhelmed by cleansing fire by the final chase. This is accentuated by the constant layer of sweat and grime that appear to be a constant feature of life on Fiorina; the heat becomes panic, and the panic becomes overwhelming, inescapable. (The famed shot of the Xenomorph confronting Ripley in extreme closeup works in no small part because Ripley is almost as moist and drippy as her adversary.) Fincher also favors low-angle shots that emphasize the notion that the Xenomorph could drop into any scene at any time, keeping the tension high even through the voluminous dialogue scenes. It's deliciously satisfying when one of those low-angle shots pays off, i.e. the death of Warden Andrews.

And then there's Weaver. The best justification for the studio gutting the religious angle is that they wanted the film to concentrate almost exclusively on Ripley and her relationship to the creature that she sighs at one point has been in her life so long she's doesn't remember what it's like not to fear it. Weaver's performance here is on the level of her Oscar-nominated turn in Aliens, if not a bit better. The autopsy scene, for instance, is a grueling watch; a lot of that work is done by Weaver's flinches and choked-back sobs, which cut harder and deeper than any bonesaw. I can't think of any other actress, for instance, who could deliver the line, "It's a metaphor, wanna come?" with the exact amount of wry, weary wit that keeps it from sounding too writerly. Nor could many, if any, make Ripley's quick jump into bed with Clemens work as an expression of sexual desire, a parallel desire for something like normalcy, a reaction to extreme stress and an outcropping of grieving all in one loaded look like Weaver does. The relationship with Clemens is as crucial as the previous film's relationship with Newt, as it allows Weaver a chance to access the full rainbow of emotions available to her rather than merely the panic and distress that the situation would demand; that this relationship is viciously severed at the midpoint should rend the film in two and nearly does. If it holds together at all, it's because Weaver's forceful turn, agonized in its despair and overwhelming in its ultimate catharsis, wills it to hold. By the end, even the one ally she was allowed, however briefly, to hold on to from Aliens has been torn away from her, turned into "a friendly face" meant to motivate her into cooperation with Weyland-Yutani. Her own body has been turned against her, a vessel for the death of humanity. Everything about her has finally been colonized, stolen, perverted, ruined. But her mind and will remain hers. To the end, that remains hers.

47: Address Unknown (1944, William Cameron Menzies)

Owned version: The 2019 Blu-ray release by Mill Creek Entertainment in partnership with Kit Parker Films, as included in the Noir Archive 9-Film Collection, Vol. 1: 1944-1954 set.

Acquired: From Amazon on May 3rd, 2019.

Seen before?: Never even heard of before this - a true blind-buy.

"Looks like a storm's coming."

I had no clue what this was about when I put it on, but it didn't take long to figure out. Ten minutes into the film, art dealer Martin Schulz has returned to his native Germany and is unpacking his belongings. His four cherubic blonde children cavort in the gated front yard, and we see them framed through the bars as a mysterious black-clad man man with a dog glares at them. As he stands, dark clouds begins to gather behind him; noticing this, the Schulz family invites him in.

As metaphors go, it's a pretty blatant one. But there are times for subtlety and times for immediacy, and Address Unknown is nothing if not a ferocious and immediate work crafted especially for and in response to tumultuous times, a bombastic work that confirms the above metaphor not five minutes later when Martin's partner asks in a letter, "Who is this Adolph Hitler who seems to be rising to power in Europe?" Martin's partner, left behind to run their studio in San Francisco, is named Max Eisenstein. The rising action in the film is Martin's indoctrination into Nazism, given a government post and comfort in exchange for his complicity (edging on approval) regarding the Jewish people - even those he once counted as friends, colleagues and family. His letters to Max become more curt, more official and couched in language parroted from the words spoken by his higher-ups and social betters (represented in the person of the Baron von Friesche, the man at his gate at the outset). Max is assured by Martin's son Heinrich, who has stayed in the US to help Max, that Martin is merely writing in a fashion that will appease the German censors, but soon, communication dries up entirely. This rising action, this gradual overwhelming corruption of an ordinary citizen, culminates in an act of violence, and Martin's refusal to offer a gesture of benevolence to prevent even this ends up being his downfall.

It's strange on its surface to see this included in a noir anthology - the plot certainly doesn't play out like a typical noir story, especially its second half, which more or less boils down to a series of aggressions manifested as telegrams. Formally, though, there's no way it could be associated with anything but - Menzies goes heavy on the looming shadows and light/dark dichotomy that plays into a strong majority of noir entries. Even in the earliest scenes, when things are still light and cheerful, he still lights a scene in the Schulz's bedroom so that the shadows of the iron grating outside are cast within, marking the homestead as a prison even before it's a proper home.

The second half of the film pays this off - as Martin begins to receive a sudden influx of letters from Max, all containing inscrutable instructions about the buying and selling of paintings clearly intended as some manner of code (the first missive in this series contains the line "YOU AND I WILL UNDERSTAND"), the home begins to feel as ominous as the country containing it. The barred gate becomes more prominent, a metal edifice meaning to keep in as well as out, and the mere presence of the postman becomes an existential threat; witness in particular the sequence of shots that stars with a wide shot of an empty room in which Martin hovers nervously in the background, then cuts to a shot of him foregrounded while the postman can be seen arriving in the background through a large picture window, a strong wind blowing the leaves in the courtyard away as though they were Martin's capricious good fortune. Isolated from the action, at the whims of forces above and beyond him, caught between a code he can't break and a governmental machine that assumes he can... he's a spectre in his own life, framed and shot like he already doesn't matter. The black-and-white checkered tile that serves as his flooring implies a chess match in which he is but a pawn, which is a clever touch; that the climax sees him locked out of his own home is another. This is sharp stuff.

He never did matter, of course - he was never more than a functionary. His actions only mattered inasmuch as they were extensions of the desires of the State, a State that demonizes a section of the populace to the point where it demands censoring of the Sermon on the Mount. (Again, a clever move - conflating an attack on Judaism with an attack on Christianity.) This attempt inspires an exasperated cry of, "Can that little man do this?" and while the immediate target is the censor, the larger import is evident: can these little men, these tyrannical and terrified little men, do this? And the answer: only if other little, terrified men do nothing to stop it. A bloody handprint on the doorframe of Martin's home signifies his irreversible transition into one of these little men - but where blood on the door was a sign of salvation for the Israelites, here it presages the sickness of Nazi Germany suddenly refusing to pass over Martin's house as a punishment for that whom he did not protect. The final, last-minute twist of the knife is a jaw-dropper of an affirmation: You never know who your inaction is going to hurt - or what response that will inspire.

46: Alien Agenda: Under the Skin (1997, Kevin J. Lindenmuth/Tom Vollman/Ron Ford/Michael Legge)

Owned version: Same 2002 DVD released by Navarre Home Entertainment that its sister anthology Endangered Species was on.

Acquired: October 18th, 2016 from Amazon.

Seen before?: No.

I took less than half a page of notes for Alien Agenda: Under the Skin. By contrast, I nearly filled a whole page for Endangered Species, a film which I reviewed by basically saying, "This all kinda sucks except for the Tim Ritter segment, which has SO MANY GOOFY THINGS IN IT, YOU GUYS." One of my notes reads, "theme song is some Toad the Wet Sprocket-sounding stuff with the refrain, 'Close your eyes and remember the good times / We'll all be dead soon.'" Another reads simply, "mmm, brain salad."

I mention this as a way to say, what the hell is there to say about this movie other than this is barely a movie? If it isn't as bad as the last time I saw Lindenmuth and Vollman team up (Addicted to Murder: Blood Lust), it's not for lack of trying. Vollman's piece is a half-assed crime thriller that burns its first ten minutes on a stubbly, sunglasses-wearing alien supersoldier pursuing, catching and ultimately de-limbing some putz who was late on his gambling debt. This has no bearing on anything - the supersoldier gets pushed to the periphery after this and the newly one-armed schmo disappears entirely - as Vollman instead reveals that his main plot is actually about some other guy, a low-level functionary in a crime family and how he gets caught between the cops, his higher-ups and a new syndicate that is, y'know, aliens in disguise. I cannot fathom the paucity of imagination it takes to be told to write a featurette about an alien invasion and your big idea is, "What if I tried to remake King of New York but in thirty minutes?" If you don't want to make an alien-invasion film, don't sign up for the alien-invasion anthology, chief.

Lindemnuth's, meanwhile, starts with the abduction of a biologist and then turns into... something. There's aliens in disguise and doubles and a chupacabra? As often happens with his films, it feels like Lindenmuth had an idea and didn't develop it very well. Or, maybe it's a case of him having a few ideas - this segment plays in halts and hiccups, like it might actually be several scraps of unfinished shorts precariously pasted together into an inexplicable shape. The sole highlight in this section is a series of abductee interviews, similar to the interviews that opened Endangered Species, but where Ford's broad caricatures (glimpsed briefly here as well, somewhere within the crazy-quilt second half) serve only to grate, these interviews play surprisingly well. The actors declaiming the dialogue are credible, and the way the stories slowly develop is satisfying. These bits were directed by Legge, an under-the radar mainstay of cheapo cinema with a corny yet ingratiatingly morbid sense of humor, and the modest, off-kilter sensibilities these stories display (one involving a man with one arm, another involving an alien with a yen for fast food) make them a refreshing oasis in a desert of inspiration. It doesn't provide the relief that Tim Ritter's segment of Endangered Species does, but we take whatever we can get around here.

45: Alien Agenda: Endangered Species (1998, Ron Ford/Kevin J. Lindenmuth/Gabriel Campisi/Tim Ritter)

Owned version: The 2002 DVD released by Navarre Home Entertainment featuring both this and 1997's Alien Agenda: Under the Skin. (There's a third film, 1996's Alien Agenda: Out of the Darkness that for whatever reason has been abandoned as VHS-exclusive.)

Acquired: October 18th, 2016 from Amazon.

Seen before?: Once on October 3rd, 2016 from a VHS I'd picked up previously. (My response was this Letterboxd capsule.) Never from this disc.

Upon a second look, this dismissiveness of that capsule seems, for the most part, appropriate. Ford's contribution, a series of interviews with various folks about the possibility of alien abductions, is negligible, mostly an excuse to open the film with some light shtick (e.g. the skeptical buffoon who pronounces "marijuana" like Mr. Mackey). Lindenmuth's first segment builds a deep conspiracy centered around two warring factions of aliens (the Shape Shifters, who want to coexist with humanity, and the Greys, who want to destroy humanity) and yet somehow comes out the other end as a banal relationship drama, with newscaster Debbie Rochon convinced her boyfriend Joe Zaso is cheating on her. (Zaso is, of course, actually an alien, which should be obvious just by looking at the dude. A unique look, that one.) Campisi's film is an endless series of scenes where its protagonist runs, drives or walks places, occasionally eluding two lumpy guys in black suits, though it does end with some pretty nifty stop-motion animation - essentially a pair of pint-sized ED-209s, but with laser guns that look like dicks. (It also looks significantly cheaper than the rest of the film, having been shot in 1992.) And Lindenmuth pops in to give us a closing segment that doubles, triples and quadruples down on the conspiracy angle to the point where no sense can be made out of the remains (though it has one great joke about the origin of the Greys). So, yeah, all in all, minimum effort. I was right.

........except for the part where I was completely wrong about Ritter's segment. Accrding to the closing credits, it's titled "Ransom," but fuck that - this is Florida Man: The Movie. See doughy Man of Action (and FL zero-budget legend) Joel Wynkoop shank a masked man holding a bazooka! See Wynkoop wander around the abandoned ruins of South Florida (played by some really shabby, run-down part of South Florida, so props to the location manager there) and have morose flashbacks to happier days! See the grafitti that screams WANNA PLAY TRUTH OR DARE? See the cannibal children chowing down on their own dad! See the bit that leads to the actual credit "SPECIAL APPEARANCE by: NATASHA the snake!" (The exclamation point is part of the credit, natch.) See Wynkoop almost drink worms! See the masked man return for a kung-fu battle! See Wynkoop get abducted by a Man in Black who fondles a silver mannequin, eats mystery meat from the neck of a severed head and threatens Wynkoop with the Meltdown Chamber! See the Man in Black tell Wynkoop, "I could have plucked your eyeballs out," right before chomping down on an eyeball! See Wynkoop sneer and snarl and kickbox and just generally do his thing! See the incredible bit where he's attacked by an alligator!

No, really, check this shit out, I can't do it justice:

What else is there to say? Amid the self-seriousness and poorly-mapped conspiracy nonsense, Ritter's overblown macho silliness is so, so welcome. The rest of the film can shrivel and blow away - "Ransom" justifies the myriad other sins this thing has. Sometimes, all you need is a little fun.

44: Alien 2: On Earth (1980, Ciro Ippolito [as "Sam Cromwell"])

Owned version: The 2011 DVD released by Midnight Legacy as their fledgling - and ultimately only - entry into the market. They had big plans, and the subsequent collapse of the label is quite the lesson in hubris and marketing. (Lesson 1: Maybe don't start your label with a bottom-tier obscurity even genre heads aren't crazy about.)

Acquired: April 29th, 2012, from a vendor stationed outside the theater as I was headed into Exhumed Films's eX-Fest, a yearly 12-hour marathon of exploitation films. This was the first and only time I've been able to attend, so it's nice to have this disc as a souvenier.

Seen before?: Once from this disc, on March 4th, 2017 - was at the time researching knockoffs of Alien and Aliens in preparation for an article I never got around to writing.

The title offers a ripoff. The subtitle promises the mythical sequel the franchise proper promised multiple times but never quite got around to making. The film itself... is all of the above and more. Alien 2: On Earth follows a group of young Italians (one of whom has telepathic powers) as they go spelunking in San Diego following a strange incident involving a returning spacecraft and some missing astronauts. Once they leave topside roughly half an hour in, they're on earth but might as well not be for all the available natural light, and this isn't lost on Ippolito. His main directorial trick is to have the intrepid climbers shine their helmets directly into the camera, which is obvious but remarkably effective and surprising in its versatility - he gets looming shadows and lens flares (there's a great one where he frames it so the lens flare stretches directly across the protagonist's eyes as she's trying to telepathically locate a missing member of the party), but he also pushes further, exploiting the enveloping darkness to send them into deep space without leaving the terra firma. Seriously, check these shot of the party about to descend, which looks for all the world like an extreme close-up of a constellation:

Or this subsequent one during the descent:

There's a conscious artistry here that belies the film's status as a low-budget ripoff - this is a film made by people who genuinely wanted to make the best film they could with the materials they had. In the world of Italian genre knockoffs, a world where people like Bruno Mattei and Andrea Bianchi can thrive, that's a refreshing thing to find.

It isn't just tricks of the light, either. The cutting is often functional but can be bluntly effective when the time calls for it, like a cut from an exploding alien rock to the flash of a Polaroid camera, or a quick shock-cut away from a little girl on a beach whose face has been turned into hamburger. (How she's crying with no face-holes left is a mystery, but the shot is kicked away fast enough that we're not left much space to think about that.) And while the cramped setting doesn't allow for much in the way of virtuoso camerawork, there's still the occasional stylistic flourish that catches attention, like the slow tracking shot starting from a rope at a man's feet that goes down the length of a prone woman's body, ending at her head, at which point her face promptly explodes and ejects something slimy.

As the creature emerges, it has one of the lady's eyeballs balanced on its head - a goofy, gross touch that puts this entirely in line with others of its ilk. Past the unique setting and the effective use of it, Ippolito's main stock in trade is enthusiastic, lumpy splatter; while the majority of the shock scenes are confined to the back half of the film, once they arrive, they're pleasingly gnarly. Heads explode, dangling bodies are emptied out, things burst from various fleshy hiding places, people are munched... it's a good time in that peculiar tempura-paint way at which Italian gore films are so skilled. The contrast between the beasts here and the one in its inspiration is interesting - where Giger's monster is sleek perfection, the low-rent cousins we get here are all blood and sinews, moist rubber mounds of tentacles and unidentifiable chunky flesh. If anything, they somewhat resemble a gluey mass of crimson, wavering stalactites, and whether that's a knowing tip of the cap to the setting, a nod towards their origins within mysterious glowing space rocks, both, or neither, it works in its way.

Alien 2 also reveals itself as a product comfortably nestled in a very specific genre/country movement when we get to the end. The missing-astronaut drama, after running as background noise for most of the first act and vanishing completely when they go into the caves, finally dovetails itself into the main story. Ippolito sets the stage tonally within the first thirty minutes - there's a concentration in finding the unsettling in the mundane, in the still darkness of a garage or the too-noisy clatter of a busy bowling alley - and that pays off once the survivors of the underworld fracas finally re-emerge into the light. For all its idiocy and dorkiness (Great Moments in Dialogue: "Where'd I find it? I found it where people find things!"), this carries with it a horror of oblivion and the inevitability of same, something it shares with Zombie and Nightmare City and Inferno and other such fully-limbic contemporaneous works. Once certain wheels have been set in motion, you can only ignore it for so long before it comes for you too.

43: Alien (1979, Ridley Scott)

Owned version: The Fox Blu-ray released in 2010 as part of the Alien Anthology set.

Acquired: January 4th, 2016 from Amazon as part of a promotional bundle they were offering combining this set and a standalone Blu of Prometheus.

Seen before?: Three times - once on VHS some time in the mid-'90s, once in October of 2003 during the theatrical release of the director's cut and once from this disc on March 9th, 2017.

 While a film student at USC, Dan O'Bannon wrote a script that would become the film Dark Star. That film, the directorial debut of fellow USC student John Carpenter, is a dry, amusing sci-fi comedy about a small crew of astronauts tasked with destroying rogue planets. O'Bannon uses this as a hook on which to hang his sympathies for the worker drone - above all else, Dark Star is about being stuck in a dead-end job, one where you hate your coworkers and they hate you and everyone is stressed and cranky and all you can do is plow ahead and dream of the day you don't have to do this shit anymore.

His next film was more or less the same thing.

If nothing else, Alien is one of the greatest portraits of the hazards of blue-collar life ever put on film. That it takes place in space and prominently features an ill-tempered murderous lifeform slaughtering its cast does nothing to diminish this - it is, in fact, a scenario only strengthened by the facts of its characters' day-to-day existence.This is, of course, not a new insight - it's been written about fairly often - but the fact that these people are just anonymous grunts doing a job, not scientists or astronauts or anyone else who might be prepared to deal with the situation makes the spectre of their potential deaths loom all the larger. Their expendability is the point - even before the appearance of the Xenomorph, there's danger enough in a job that requires those who do it to roam an isolated metal container light years away from any sort of help or backup. The hull-breach sequence is the most striking example of this - sirens screaming and flashing lights sputtering through the darkness as the crew tries to mitigate the damage while outside, the wind on an alien planet howls like a demon, shrieking a warning of disinvitation. Life is fragile, the job is dangerous and the crew is being asked to do things they shouldn't; when Parker files this exact objection, saying, "It's not in my contract to do this kind of duty," he's threatened with "total forfeiture of shares." (It's also made clear that Parker and Brett, the fix-it guys constantly working underneath the rest of the crew, are getting paid less than the rest. Hierarchies within hierarchies.) Any one of a thousand things could have gone wrong and killed everyone on board, which is one reason why Alien is already a nervous affair prior to the chest-burst.

Another reason is more sinister: The alien is clearly not the only villain on board. When things do go wrong, there's nothing and no one to reason with - all that surrounds is rickety metal run by indifferent, unfeeling computers under the thrall of the orders programmed into them by the corporate masters who sent these people into the sky to die. The opening scene contrasts the efficient workings of the autopilot system, humming away without a soul in sight, with the empty corridors of the ship proper, finally settling into the hypersleep room, a bright and fluorescently sterile room where the ship's ostensible crew slumbers away. The film hasn't even started and already the humans in the story are marked as superfluous. When things go south and the alien escapes its host, Scott keeps cutting back to Ash, his grim and impassive curiosity standing out against the screams and panic evinced by his crewmates, his inhumanity blossoming by the moment. The shock-reveal of his true nature, in retrospect, is telegraphed in a lot of clever ways; I especially appreciated his lack of sweatiness, the only being wandering through this hothouse without a drop of liquid on his brow. IN the aftermath of Kane's rupture, the crew is essentially left adrift - stonewalled from learning how to defend themselves by an unresponsive Mother(ship) and a corporate android mole. Ripley tries to find ways to reword a question about survivability to get a straight answer from Mother, utlimately settling on WHAT ARE MY CHANCES? The response: DOES NOT COMPUTE. Ash, reduced to a milk-spewing head, intones, "I cant lie to you about your chances, but... you have my sympathy." Both machines playing their part to crush the working stiff, beholden to their programming as much as the Xenomorph is beholden to its instincts towards predation. All that and it's a real motherfucker of a horror film.

Also, if this isn't the only film in which Harry Dean Stanton meows, it's definitely the best.

42: Alice in the Cities (1974, Wim Wenders)

Owned version: The Criterion Blu-ray released in 2016 as part of the Road Trilogy box set.

Acquired: Assumedly November or December of 2016, during one of Barnes & Noble's half-off sales.

Seen before?: No.

I feel like a lot of what Alice in the Cities is doing can be explained by the use of John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln on a television in a motel in which disaffected journalist Philip (Rudiger Vogler) is staying. Philip is traveling across America taking Polaroids for an ill-defined writing assignment. Televisions figure prominently in Wim Wenders' empathetic portrait of dislocation and ennui - televised images blare in hotels and motels and airports, displaying silent images of film stars and cheerful men shilling albums of Italian music and "ads for the status quo," as Philip grumbles - but nowhere does the motif seem more instructive as to Philip's journey than a brief glimpse of Henry Fonda portraying that most noble and deified of Americans. Young Mr. Lincoln is an excellent, stirring work of art that wears well the trappings of a mythopoeic construction of America the Beautiful, home to great men and great ambitions. It can be slotted neatly, if one cared to, into a certain nationalistic vision, a burnished vision of historical greatness. The film, of course, is not as simple as all that - Geoffrey O'Brien sums it up with, "Ford accepts triumphalism as a necessary evil - accepts the need for a Great Man and a monument to affirm his greatness - but his movie is not quite that monument. It is more a lament for what the world might almost have been, if there had been no need for a Lincoln to save it" - which is of course also The Point. It knowingly offers up an America that was never there, that cannot be found because to do so is to constrict one's vision.

Similarly, Philip's article is failing because he cannot find the America's he's looking for, simply because this America also does not exist - the America he hopes to find has no bearing on the country itself but is instead an outcropping of his own mind. When he exclaims about his camera, "It just never shows what you saw!" what he's really decrying is his inability to extricate the reality of his surroundings from his own lived experience within those surroundings. He can't get outside himself and really see. In this manner, it matters not what country he finds himself in - his alienation stems from within, not without. What he's searching for is himself. What he finds is a little girl.

Alice, the little girl, has problems of her own. She's traveling with a mother, Lisa, who loves her but cannot prioritize the girl's needs over her own and is fraying to bits because of it. Philip runs into the two of them at LaGuardia Airport after a pilot's strike in Germany strands them in the US for a couple days longer. Whereas Philip's existential malaise manifests as sloth, Lisa's turns into a desire for escape, and soon Philip finds himself with a new travel companion. What could (and often does in other hands) devolve into a pathos-sodden tale about a lost man who finds himself when forced to be a father figure to an adorable moppet instead blooms into something more flinty and sharp-angled, where the emotion seeps naturally out of the characterizations. A good deal of that has to do with the fact that Alice is anything but an adorable moppet. Yella Rottlander takes this assignment and runs with it, pushing forth a impressively modulated, sullen and spiky turn that nonetheless allows space for the sorts of small joys you'd expect from a kid who is still, after all, a kid (e.g. the scene with the photo booth, which also serves as a handy encapsulation of the changing relationship dynamics between Philip and Alice). Alice is, in no small manner, one of the most realistic children I can recall seeing on film - Wenders threads the needle perfectly in exactly how obnoxious to make her without tilting into Dutch territory - and Rottlander strikes nary a false note. (Interesting to see this so soon after Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, another film that recognizes that kids can be irritating without being monsters.)

Alice is a kid in a tough situation who's just old enough to know how she's being screwed and practiced at finding ways to evince frustration at not being able to do anything about it, and Philip is man without purpose or direction. In the course of Alice in the Cities, they don't solve each other's problems or change each other's lives - they merely drift together for a while, both at different stations in life yet somehow sharing a common outlook. (There's a beautiful shot where Alice is reflected multiple times in a developing Polaroid of Philip - a metaphoric depiction of a number of paths ahead of her into the future, one of which leads to becoming Philip.) Wenders's philosophical stance here can be neatly summed up in the sequence where Philip and Alice comb the city of Wuppertal looking for the residence of Alice's grandmother - a man who grew up here but recognizes nothing, having not been home in over a decade ("These old buildings are all being torn down"), and a young girl looking for a house she can't remember in a place she doesn't know, their twin levels of alienation dovetailing in ways that make them ideal travel partners. And if the film were them and only them, that would be enough.

But what really makes Alice stick is the observational notes Wenders throws in regarding the world and people around them. The two of them may be shutting out the world, but the world is not alienated from them, and there are times when, say, Philip is telling Alice a story and a tram roars by in the background, or when Philip is trying to sleep in a hotel room and NYC street noise roars in from an open window, that remind us that the world does not begin and end with these two travelers. There is, instead, a whole bustling world, one of bus passengers and greasy-spoon waitresses, sympathetic policemen and flustered ticket-counter agents, ex-girlfriends and frustrated copy editors, and every one of these people, whether glimpsed in passing or given passages of dialogue and interaction with our leads, is given enough of a suggestion of a rich inner life by Wenders than any of them could spin off into their own film. Where Philip is closed off, Wenders is generous and curious, and he understands that life goes on around you no matter what you think of it. My favorite sequence in Alice is directly after Philip, from the observation deck of the Empire State Building, spies Lisa leaving their hotel and realizes that she isn't coming back for Alice; as he trudges over to her, mulling how to break this news - or even whether he should do so - Alice is using the binocular scopes to follow a bird in flight. Unaware of the shift her life is about to take, lost in her joy, trailing a bird. Life goes on.

41: Alice in Wonderland (1976, Bud Townsend)

Owned version: The DVD released in 2007 by Subversive Cinema, after which they immediately exhaled their dying breath and shuttered.

Acquired: 2008, likely April or May, from an unknown source - I thought I'd purchased it from Amazon, but there's zero record of that, so I dunno.

Seen before?: Twice, both times from this disc - I watched the XXX cut on April 27th, 2009 and the X cut on March 11th, 2010. That second viewing led to this review.

As usual, I find myself in disagreement with my prior review, yet this time it has nothing to do with the film in question - indeed, I have little to add to my drive-by assessment. My disagreement this time comes in fobbing off an entire genre in the process of shrugging over this specific example of said genre. "who really deigns to watch porn films all the way through?" I said, and jesus what a dumbfuck I was back then, I've seen a few other classic-era porn films since then and of course you can watch them all the way through if they're good enough just like any other genre of film. Back then, with limited experience in the genre, I assumed I was safe using Alice to make that generalization; now I can simply point out that Alice is no Sex World. Always growth, that's our aim here.

If it sounds like I'm stalling, engaging in a bit of throat-clearing... well, yeah. I don't have anything to add, really, like I said. This is my third time through it, and it's not a complicated object. It hasn't gotten any less threadbare, the songs haven't gotten any more memorable, the jokes haven't gotten any less corny (seriously, they even throw in the "order in the court"/"ham on rye" gag) and Kristine De Bell hasn't gotten any less appealing. The only real point of fluctuation is on how much I think De Bell's innocent/smutty magnetism compensates for the shabbiness of the film she's in. This time around, I think that well may have finally been exhausted for me. I don't foresee going back to this disc ever again.
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Okay, maybe one thing before I go see what I can get for this on eBay - Alice hinges on the innocent naturalization of sexuality, on the idea that "good girls don't" is goofy and retrograde and everyone does it whatever their inclination because sex is good and fun and positive. Which I am very much in favor of. Yet, this film is so ham-fisted that it manages to fuck up even that easy lay-up. The "If You Haven't Got Dreams, You Ain't Got Nothin'" number is a paeon to keeping wonder and magic in your life, to avoiding the very adult temptation to get exhausted and jaded... but it does so by arguing for a certain child-like approach to the world, to the point of pleading, "If they'd just kept a little bit of kid in them..." Now, I understand that's not meant to be literal. But if you're taking a popular children's book, already made into a famous film by a children's-entertainment titan, and including a song wherein actors in children's-theater-level fur suits make the case that you should stay in touch with the child within, then immediately follow that song with a bit wherein the fur people lick Alice all over her body, including one (played, I believe, by adult-film mainstay Terri Hall) who goes for it and gives Alice her first dose of head... well, I can't help but think you're accidentally advocating pedophilia, is what.

Even if that's indeed accidental, Tweedledee and Tweedledum are totally intended to be brother and sister, it's right there in the dialogue, so all I want to do is scream WHY ARE YOU DESTROYING YOUR FLUFFY, CHEERFUL SEX-POSITIVE PORNO WITH UBER-TABOO FETISH SHIT WHY WHY WHY

40: Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974, Martin Scorsese)

Version owned: The 2004 Warner DVD release as included in the Martin Scorsese Collection box set (the same one I pulled After Hours from).

Acquired: March 5th, 2015 from Amazon.

Seen before?: No.

The child is telling a joke, his mother the only audience. It's a joke he's heard and is trying to remember, but the details aren't coming out quite right. He gets to a point, realizes he forgot something, runs back to fill in the detail. A pause, a stammer, a restatement, a change. Eventually, he arrives at a punchline, but by then the joke is obliterated, blasted out of recognizable shape by the heedless energy of the teller. His mother, his exasperated mother, evinces no response other than a grim relief that the fumbling attempt at a joke is over... so of course the child thinks she doesn't get it and heads forth to run through it again, expecting that this time she'll laugh. The mother's face crumbles into a burgeoning sob.

This joke - something about a gorilla and some testicles, if I remember correctly - is so important to Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore.

Firstly, the joke stands as a representation of realism and this film's curious relationship to it. The telling of the joke is a perfect encapsulation of Tommy, the pre-teen son of Ellen Burstyn's Alice - it's youthful loquaciousness as a verbal steamroller, awkward and oblivious and pointedly vulgar. Tommy is allowed to be unsympathetic and obnoxious to a degree that doesn't often find purchase in Hollywood, where children are often shown as precocious and/or wise beyond their years, and doing so makes him feel uncannily like an actual kid reacting to stressful circumstances. This general truth to character and circumstance revealed in small ways finds its way into every corner of the film - in the embarrassed hesitance of the first meeting between the widowed Burstyn and lounge rat Harvey Keitel, in the pastoral calm of Kris Kristofferson's ranch, in the nervous, frayed desperation of Burstyn at the end of a job hunt and the ever-weakening pronouncements about the bar's lack of a piano by the bar owner whom she's begging for a singing job. There's a thread here where Scorsese, ever the cinematic omnivore, is more or less using the structures of American melodrama to tip his cap towards Italian neo-realism, and the concentration on the economically downtrodden is part and parcel there.

Except that every little touch of realism comes with something to undermine it, to blow it up into something grand and brash. Harvey Keitel turns out to be a room-smashing monster; Kristofferson's ranch has grass rendered in eye-scorching Technicolor green; Burstyn's last stand is accompanied by a swooping fast-track zoom as she hobbles into the darkened bar. Too with the joke - the truth of the scene is a kid being a kid and telling a story while disregarding whether anyone wants to hear it, but the telling is allowed to wend so long that the realism breaks and the duration becomes its own meta-joke. This is appropriate for a sober ground-level drama frayed to bits by the fact that all its characters operate out on the far edge of their emotions. Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore is a woman's-picture in the same way Mean Streets is a crime picture - it has the shape of the thing, but the violent, nervous rhythms juiced into it by its young, excitable director give it an electricity all its own, melodrama tiptoeing just up to the raw edge of miserablism before letting off the gas and sliding back towards less painful outcomes.

Getting to these outcomes, of course, is never easy - a lot of detours and dashed dreams have to occur before these people find their way to where they are. And there it's back to the joke again - it's a perfect microcosm of this film's idea of life as a long wait for an expected destination only to realize that destination isn't on the horizon and life is moving on whether you want it to or not, so now's the time to act. Burstyn spends the film pulling up stakes and running whenever things get sour, towards an imagined future of singing success in Northern California; the hard-fought satisfaction and wisdom of the ending comes when she doesn't run from another series of letdowns. The film finds its truth in the small gestures because the big ones are always revealed to be folly, emotional blowups that solve nothing because after the blowup you still have to exist. There's a beautiful scene near the end of the film between Burstyn and Diane Ladd where the former pours her heart out to the latter in the bathroom of the diner where they both work, and it's moving and fulfilling and helps Burstyn make her ultimate choice about where she's going to go with her life... and in the middle of it Scorsese cuts to Vera, the hapless young waitress who works with the two absent women, trying to manage a lunchtime rush all by her beleaguered self. Life goes on.

39: Alice Goodbody (1974, Tom Scheuer)

Owned version: The Blu-ray released in 2017 by Code Red, packaged with Those Mad Mad Movie Makers (the sanitized retitle of the film better known as The Last Porno Flick).

Acquired: Late in 2017 or early in 2018 from Diabolik DVD.

Seen before?: No.

After the deep diving of the last couple pieces, it feels a bit refreshing to splash around in a puddle. Alice Goodbody is a silly Hollywood sex comedy about a sweet, naive woman sleeping her way up the ladder of fame in exchange for an ever-mounting big break in an epic about Julius Caesar. It has nothing grand to offer aside from the breathtaking body of Sharon Kelly. It is instead content to tell the same joke with slight variations - Alice finds out who she has to sleep with next while going down on "2nd assistant production manager" Myron Mittleman (that last name, I know I know), tries to accommodate the weird sexual proclivities of whomever she's been given with a modicum of success, finds her role subsequently increased and then suffers an on-set accident that puts her out of commission and demands a delay on set. This goes through five cycles, after which Scheuer hits the blackout on a hoary eye-roller of a punchline.

Much to my surprise, I found it kind of charming.

A lot of that has to do with the wide-eyed gee-shucks charm of the voluptuous Ms. Kelly, who has the difficult task of playing this material light and cheeky without letting the innate misogyny sour it or making Alice seem like too much of a dupe. She is blessedly more than up to the task, making Alice into a sunny and optimistic sort who's up for whatever because, hey, you gotta pay your dues and who wouldn't want to be in the movies? Or maybe I'm just responding to the fact that Scheuer skirts the edge of dizzy-dame stereotypes by turning Alice into a hardcore, omnivorous cinephile - if she's spacey, it's not that she's stupid but that she's lost in her head thinking about the film she just saw or looking forward to the one she's going to see later. Seriously - her first line of dialogue sees her waxing rhapsodic about Borzage's 7th Heaven, her fateful date with Mittleman sees her exclaiming, "This is exactly how June Preisser was discovered!" and one injury is met with, "I bet nothing like this ever happened to Maria Montez!" I'm just saying, I relate to being at your job and thinking about whatever you stayed up into the wee hours of the morning to watch, how could I not, I'm weak like that.

Ms. Kelly, with her open face and big easy smile, also serves as a beacon towards the script's feathery cheer. The light touch is critical in that it manages to differentiate it from the reams of contemporaneous comedies that come off as flat sitcoms, all sledgehammer jokes and dead-air timing (e.g. the film with which it shares a disc). It feints towards setting up a dichotomy between the wonder of the movies felt by Alice and the cynical sausage-grinding that actually produces those movies, but it never gets too insistent on that cynicism - it's too busy being goofy. There's a point-of-view shot from inside Alice's vagina. The director is a dime-store spoof on Erich Von Stroheim about whom is said at one point, "He thinks De Mille mighta made it if he didn't think so small!" The legendary George "Buck" Flower figures in a food-slathered sex scene that either doubles down on Tom Jones or prefigures Hot Shots!, I can't quite decide. Flower also has a bit where he spies on a neighbor of his having sex with a man in a gorilla costume. The accidents on set, as they get more elaborate and Scheuer starts to have fun with the fact that we know a crack-up is inevitable, start to seem like a lost Final Destination entry. An elephant psychiatrist boasts of having shown a frigid female elephant pornographic films. ("Of people?" "No, of elephants!") Hell, scratch that - all you need to know is that there is an elephant psychiatrist in this film. I can't defend Alice Goodbody on any real merit. I can't say it holds up over feature length. I can't even expect I'll ever watch it again. But it was a nice surprise to actually enjoy a '70s smutcom, to a degree, and that's more value than I had expected.

38: Akira (1988, Katsuhiro Otomo)

Owned version: The two-disc DVD released by Pioneer in 2001.

Acquired: Most likely around Christmas time in 2001, either from the Times Square Virgin Megastore or the Tower Records that was next to Lincoln Center. (Neither storefront is there any more, to my everlasting chagrin.)

Seen before?: Four times - once in the early '90s from the old Streamline dubbed VHS (the original version, not the later version co-released with Orion), once in probably 1998 or 1999 from the subtitled VHS Streamline released in the mid-'90s, once in April of 2001 during the theatrical re-release that featured the new Pioneer dub and once from this disc on March 9th of 2010, which led to this sorry punt of a review. As I'm typing this, I'm noticing that without meaning to my fifth viewing of Akira occurred exactly nine years after my last one.

The impression I feel I'm giving here is that everything on my previous Tumblr was tossed-off garbage. Which... I dunno. There's a lot of quick-sketch nonsense there, that's true. I was having trouble balancing my work demands with my viewing desires, as I often am. So a lot of what I threw up there was to get stuff out of the way so I could feel good about moving on to the next film. I feel less able to do that nowadays - if I'm writing something here, I want it to be worthwhile, and if I want to just toss off a bit of snark I've got Letterboxd for that. That said, there's a few times I went longer over there that I'm still a little proud of. In particular, I got a few decent pieces off the idea of the "Rosetta shot," a shot capped from a film that seemed to sum up the whole of the endeavor, whether for good or ill. (Here's an NSFW example.) To start my trip through Akira, I'd like to resurrect that idea. So here it is:

This is, in the middle of a melee, a riot cop shooting a protestor point-blank in the chest with a gas grenade. I'd never really registered this moment in my previous runs through this, because it's not really meant to be noticed - it's a small touch, a quick dose of grim color with which to add definition to the world Otomo has built. But it stuck out for me this time, if for no other reason than my brain kept entertaining the slim possibility: What if this guy wasn't a protestor? What if he was just an urban scavenger who happened to be in the vicinity, saw a piece of piping and a helmet that would be useful to him, and tried to make off with it before the situation exploded around him? And even if he is a protestor... does that mean he deserves a gas charge to the chest at point-blank range when he's already clearly affected by the gas from previous charges? This is, at bottom, a stark illustration of the heedless exercising of power; that it's quietly tossed off in the middle of a larger setpiece does nothing to water down the elemental truth it gets at regarding Akira. For this is absolutely a movie about power, about those who wield it and what they do with it and how that leaves any number of relative innocents crushed under concrete and steel.

Otomo is not subtle about this. His characters are aware of the forces they're given to control (or not control) and often discuss the morality of that duty towards these forces. (Upon being presented with Tetsuo's brainwaves by excitable Einstein-looking egghead Dr. Onishi, "Maybe we shouldn't touch that power," is the response of Colonel Shikishima - the closest thing to a good guy on the governmental side of the story, and even he stages a military coup later in the film out of what he deems necessity.) But... well, let's take a look at the context for the above shot. The protestor comes staggering out of the cloud of gas, head bowed, unable to see the cop. The cop sees the protestor, who poses no clear threat, takes a minute, draws a bead and fires away. This is not a heat-of-the-moment snap decision - this is as considered an attack as can occur under these circumstances. The cop knows not who he's firing upon, just that he's firing upon someone who isn't a cop, which means therefore in this situation they're an automatic enemy, something less-than. He's under the grip of The Suspicion. The Suspicion is enough to warrant action, to reaffirm the right of the strong over the weak lest the weak become the strong. The Suspicion is never wrong.

So it goes with any figure in this film with a certain level of power - they must demean, dismiss or otherwise dehumanize their targets so as not to feel conflicted about their actions. Onishi overlooks Tetsuo's humanity for the sake of advancing science, realizing too late that he's unleashed something uncontrollable; the ministers on the government board downplay Shikishima's authority and ignore his fears so they can justify their own station; the bike gangs fight as squadrons rather than individuals, in the manner of any war or biker film. By the time Tetsuo's immense rage (borne of a life of being bullied, of being seen as less-than) manifests into immense psychic powers, he's learned thoroughly how not to consider the effect - the crucial test is his first attack on other humans, in the hallway of the hospital where he's being kept, and Otomo depicts it from the far end of said hallway, in the distance and at a remove that matches the casual, almost accidental way Tetsuo turns what he views as his adversaries into streaks of blood on the ceiling.

This sort of power, this ability to kill with a thought that turns men into callous gods... the application of such seems a logical end point for the post-WWIII society depicted by Otomo, a society on the edge of disaster hurtling heedlessly towards another attempt at self-extinction. One of the shriveled children who serve as one of the lines of defense against Tetsuo has a premonition of this extinction, proclaiming, "The city will crumble, and so many people will die..." Yet it can be said that the city is already crumbled, already gone to seed under the weight of anger and political discord and grotesque self-interest and The Suspicion. Decay is all around, over and under and through the remains of the old city left to fester alongside the gleaming neon distraction of Neo-Tokyo, because all flesh will die and all flesh will rot and even a god can be reduced to component body parts hidden underneath a stadium. And if all flesh will die, and the world built by people can said to be an extension of them, what does that say about the permanence of the world? Skin splits, glass shatters, stone crumbles, metal buckles - everything is impermanent in the face of the kind of power that can crack the earth in two. That kind of power... should it even be in the hands of people? What positive application could it have? What could it be other than a gas grenade into the chest of society?

Yet Otomo also finds beauty in the destruction. His stirring compositions, skewed and emphasizing the enormity of the edifices and the lack thereof of the people dwarfed by and wandering through them, are consistently gorgeous. When windows blow out, the glass floats down like crystal rain; when smoke billows it does so in enveloping clouds like cumuli crashing to the firmament. His indulgence of body horror has a grotesque and memorable poetry, whether it be bodies erupting in blood like fountains, milk leaking from nightmarish evil toys or Tetsuo's flesh ballooning into an undulating mountain of undifferentiated slime-tissue. A brief jaunt into space is a beautifully silent ode to breakdown. More than a visual beauty, though, there's an emotional beauty in the ways its characters find to push back against The Suspicion. If unchecked power reigns free and gruesome self-interest is the way of the ruling class, defiance is still an option - a foolhardy one, but that's better than no option at all. Kaneda ropes a group of revolutionaries into trying to free Tetsuo and nearly succeeds. Ryu, head of the revolutionaries, gets betrayed by and shot by the government mole who's been feeding him information, yet still manages to outlive the man who shot him, however briefly, and achieve a sad sort of grace. Shikishima fires his pistol at the rapidly mutating Tetsuo, knowing he'll be overwhelmed by the tidal wave of flesh and willing to sacrifice himself for the sake of the three psychic children; his selflessness is repaid when Akira is reborn. And Kaneda rides into battle with just a laser gun and the knowledge that Tetsuo was once his friend, trusting that this will be enough to save him, willing to even leap into the heart of a cataclysm to try. If this does all lead to destruction, maybe something new can be built from the wreckage. Maybe something better - the birth of a new universe. One where The Suspicion holds no sway. We can dream.

37: After the Rehersal (1984, Ingmar Bergman)

Owned version: The Blu-ray released by Criterion as part of the massive Ingmar Bergman's Cinema box set they released this past November.

Acquired: Christmas gift from my mother, though it didn't arrive until late January due to the overwhelming interest in the set.

Seen before?: No.

"Many directors' paths are lined with the corpses of actors. Have you ever tried to count your victims?"

Ingmar Bergman's After the Rehersal does not open with a title card. It instead opens with the above image, a shot that drifts over the length of a dressed stage to find its protagonist, director Henrik Vogler, with his head down on a desk. Is he dozing or just collecting his thoughts? No matter - at any rate, he slows stirs himself into upright, conscious life. Soon Anna, the lead actress in the production of Strindberg's A Dream Play Vogler is currently rehearsing, will arrive on set, claiming to be searching for a lost bracelet. Vogler assumes this to be an excuse, that's she's actually looking to talk to him - and he's proven right in quick order. Their two-handed verbal and emotional sparring, with a midfilm break for another back-and-forth between Vogler and older actress Rakel, comprise the body of After the Rehearsal. Just as Autumn Sonata was built out of the sparring between Ingrid Bergman and Liv Ullmann, and as Persona was built from the tension between Ullmann  and Bibi Andersson, and as Scenes from a Marriage was crafted from the arguments between Ullmann and Erland Josephson... who plays Vogler in After the Rehearsal.

So this is familiar ground for Bergman - indeed, why should we expect anything less from a late-career work from a master with such an identifiable stamp? The value here is in how Bergman embraces the familiar - indeed, weaves it into the fabric of the work. Anna, played with beautifully by Lena Olin, is the latest muse for Vogler, but her connections run deeper than a simple working relationship - one of Vogler's previous muses, Rakel, was in fact her mother, and the role she plays in A Dream Play was one that her mother had previously played for Vogler. This is, in fact, the fifth time Vogler has directed A Dream Play, and there is much discussion not only of Rakel but of another actress, Maria, who had also performed the role previously. Both these actresses, it's revealed, are deceased. Further, it's not just the material that has been reused - the set dressing is also a hand-me-down, with the centrally-placed couch in particular cited as being a holdover from a production of Hedda Gabler. Ghosts and echoes abound this production, and that's even before a literal ghost drifts in for a chat.

But there's something else, another angle that I think makes the idea of old, repetitive material into something productive. Early on, Vogler chastizes himself in voiceover for "...this parody of conviction that's gone sour and crumbled," speaking to a weariness with something well-trod; when he follows this up with, "Why justify myself to this young person who doesn't care what I say?" there's a sense that he's struggling to find his place in the modern way of things. Making Vogler a theater director invites a temptation to read this as autobiography of sorts for Bergman, a temptation the material certainly encourages when, say, Vogler tells Anna, "I make sure the audience loves you," and the film cuts to an over-shoulder shot from Anna's point of view, placing us in Anna's shoes as The Director Himself talks directly to us. But it's more than that - there's a feeling that this is all foregone, that these arguments are not new, that the carpet on the stage has a path worn into it that is currently being followed because that's the way Vogler (and by extension Bergman) wants it. Olin follows in the path of her mother because Vogler demands it; even when she protests about her ability to tackle this demanding role, he responds with, "You can only be that bad if you're talented." Rakel shows up because Vogler incarnates her as a way to expunge lingering issues regarding her and her daughter, and when he says, "Not a day goes by that I don't think of you," is he working out his guilt for having let the elder woman irreparably down or justifying why he's sucked himself into her daughter's orbit? When Anna throws a wrench into the narrative Vogler has dedicated himself to playing out, he responds by charging ahead anyway and narrates in full a fantastic love affair for the two, directing it down the cruelest possible path that results in maximum misery for both parties no matter how Anna tries to get ahead of or redirect this narrative. There's a telling moment during this long sequence where the two are strolling around the stage as Vogler spins his preferred future - at one point, Bergman lets them walk off frame and then zooms down to the stage floor, highlighting the swatches of gaffer's tape that serve as marks to be hit during the play. That's quite the hand-tip there.

If Vogler is then controlling the narrative, as a director is wont to do, sending it along a certain line that satisfies him, it's instructive that we come back to the first shot. Vogler is at his desk in repose. Maybe he's thinking, maybe he's slipped into a cat nap. The film that follows is inexorably tethered to his perspective - he's the only one who we hear on voiceover, he talks to Rakel even though she's dead (with Anna out of focus in the background), and when the story doesn't go to his liking he starts telling a different one. With all the back-and-forth about sadness and aging and death ("I breathe decay. You think I don't know that?"), combined with the pointedness of making the central production A Dream Play and the openly-fantastic interlude with Rakel, I suspect what we have here is not a case of a director breaking down the psyche of a young actress but a director breaking down the psyche of an old director. This is, on at least one level, a feature-length argument Bergman is having inside his own head, and if the chamber up there leaks out some echoes onto the stage where his characters are standing, so be it. Everything around him has gone silent save for the voices in his head yelling at one another; when Vogler muses right before the blackout, "What worried me most in that moment was that I couldn't hear the church bells," it suggests that even God has gone silent. Bergman might know something of that.

36: A.K. (1985, Chris Marker)

Owned version: This is included as an extra on the 2005 Criterion DVD of Ran, of which this is a chronicle of that film's making. Of sorts.

Acquired: Probably in April or May of 2009, shortly after Criterion announced that the disc was going out of print, from my then-local Borders.

Seen before?: No.

"We will try to show what we see the way we see it."

I really should have written about this back when I saw it at the end of January. But I waited too long, and now most of what I thought I could say is lost in the fog of my brain, much as the horses that fade into the fog in a striking shot captured by Marker in this, a stirring and unique portrait of one great artist observing another great artist and creating art from what he sees. All I have are my notes, which are as always a rough sketch of things that caught my interest, meant to provide a path forward for the piece I intend to write. Try as I might, I cannot grasp the shape of that piece as of now. So, I'll put in pin in this. I'll note that Marker's resolutely observational approach here, an inspired choice, reveals this sort of epic, expansive filmmaking to be as arduous as stop-motion animation and not too far removed besides - both involve laborious, time-consuming setups meant to capture mere minutes of footage at best. I will refer to a few images that caught my eye - a series of extras being made up and armored for a battle scene, with one man stretching his jaw in a way I found worth comment; the film's composer strolling through the mist like a purposeful phantom; a period-appropriate army marching past a small cadre of parked cars, two time periods smashing together at an odd angle; a man carrying a sheaf of grass painted an absurd and eye-catching shade of gold; lighting rigs framed and shot so that they appear to be closeups of suns hanging in a fading blue sky; Kurosawa himself in the midst of all this chaos, exuding an extraordinary calm.

If the typical making-of featurette is a demonstration of how something came to be, it stands to reason that they exist as testaments of activity - memory aids for things that happened, films made to help us remember. In that, Marker exploits this, draws it out, makes it text - tape recorders, VCRs, these "imperfect inventions" are devices of remembrance. And, as befits this project, they are then objects of creation. As Marker says at the outset, "Memory is what you create from." His creation stands interlinked with Kurosawa's creation. And my writing about his film about Kurosawa's film would then be a further responsive act of creation. Yet I fall down at this task. My memory, in this instance, fails me. But I must move forward or stagnate. I will come back to this another time. It deserves better.

35: A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001, Steven Spielberg)

Owned version: The two-disc DVD released by Dreamworks in 2002.

Acquired: In 2002, from a used bin at a Blockbuster.

Seen before?: Three times before this. Once during its original theatrical run in 2001, most likely on July 1st, and twice from this DVD - on July 2nd, 2018 and on March 8th, 2010. (The latter led to this review, and as is now par for the course a glance over that piece makes me wonder why I thought I was any good at this whole writing thing back then.)

It's funny how the Dr. Know scene has always been my least favorite piece of the film - Williams' faux-German vocal mugging as the bouncy cartoon search engine never quite seems to fit with the rest of the film, not even amongst the searing garishness of Rouge City - yet this time around, it strikes me as the skeleton key to the whole endeavor. As robot boy David and smooth sexbot Gigolo Joe try to work around the multiple potential meanings of words so as to find the precise question that will bring forth the answer to David's Blue Fairy conundrum, they get at the heart of the story's tension regarding dual natures and shifting contexts - appropriate given the film's existence as a collaborative work between two of the 20th century's great artists.

The ability to exist in two distinct states within one object, even if - especially if - those states conflict is all over this. It's seen on the macro level through the nature of David, the little robot boy who wishes to become human, and by film's end does - indeed, the driving action is on one level David's search for the Blue Fairy and on another level David's slow, painful progress towards humanity. David starts as a shell, a pure machine running on programming without emotion; once his "mother" Monica activates his imprinting protocol and thus fires up his emotional circuits, the bulk of the film is then David's journey out of the safety of the home into the big bad world. This physical journey doubles as a gradual enlightening, a march through various emotional achievements until his final ascendance into full humanity via the embracing of mortality. And, until this very last moment, David is always defined by both the amount of humanity and the amount of mechanization he carries within him. The latter is always emphasized at the expense of the former - even the evolved robots at the end of the film define him as One of Them, a more primitive version but Them nonetheless, while also seeing him as a bridge to the world of the human, a world they were never present to witness - but David feels the former acutely and uses it as, essentially, his self-definition, produced via aspiration in absence of legitimacy. He's not "human," strictly, but he feels and thinks as acts as one. At what point does the artificial intelligence stop being artificial?

But in the period before that question is allowed to hang, David is a robot. Unquestionably a robot. In this space of the film, this film that is among the best Spielberg has ever made, exists the finest of fine work - the period before David's imprinting is spectacular, creepy, beautiful, unsettling and altogether perfect, maybe the most spine-tingling evocation of living with a new life this side of Eraserhead. In this early segment, Spielberg does his best to play up David's mechanical unnaturalness - in shots like the one where his face is refracted through a beveled closet door, or the God's eye shot of him at the dinner table, isolated in the frame from his "parents" by a large circular hanging lamp, or in beats like the payoff to the hide-and-seek gag where it's cut like a jump scare, this might as well be a horror film with David as the monster. Yet what he's doing is explicable in context; he's absorbing the world around him dispassionately but with an insatiable curiosity much in the vein of any young child, and if the extraordinary dinner table scene culminates in another horror-worthy sting - the barking forced laugh - isn't this essentially the logic of a child, thinking that Mommy and Daddy react positively when I laugh? And if we were to invert that emotional reaction into crying, wouldn't its inexplicability, its welling-up completely without an observable inciting incident, seem completely normal for a baby, which is the basic plane of logic David is working on at that point?

Another important beat in this early segment expands the idea of duality outside of David, as a precursor to where it ends up - there's a scene shortly after David comes to live with Monica and Henry where he's observing framed family photos, and he ends on a picture of Martin, their comatose young son whose absence David is meant to soothe. We see David's reflection in each photo he comes across, and his image seems to merge with Martin's in the final photo, emphasizing his status as an overlay, an inadequate Band-Aid stretched across raw throbbing pain. But there's something else there - David's ghostly reflection mirrors Martin's own state as a ghost within his own life. Martin is neither alive nor dead; he's instead in a place where he's both, denying his parents the ability to properly grieve even in the face of hopeless odds, which leads to rash but understandable decisions like Henry's acceptance of his company's request to test out the David robot or Monica's leap of faith when she puts forth the imprinting protocol. Duality strikes again. (There's also something to be said for replacing a boy who can't wake up with one that can't sleep.)

Once Martin does wake up, David's days in the household are numbered - a machine, even one that's bonded to you, is going to lose when the choice is between it and your flesh-and-blood progeny - and that's when the notion of duality and contrast becomes weaponized. Once David is left in the woods by Monica, Spielberg changes from shooting him as the monster to shooting the world as the monster, overwhelming and hostile and uncaring. Where David's guilelessness marked him as inhuman pre-imprinting, it merely casts him as an innocent once things get dangerous, and the mutability of that is the point - the light in which an action can feel justified can easily shift and reveal the action as less than (e.g. the climax of the Flesh Fair, the incident that turns Gigolo Joe into a runaway ["You killed me first."]). I do mean "light" literally in at least one sense, inasmuch as the rising moon, normally a benign sight, turns out to be a harbinger of genocide, and how after that every moment of threat or destruction is prefaced by a pale blue light similar to that of the Flesh Fair abduction craft. (A nice change of pace from the typical "red = danger," methinks.) It's in the film's harrowing midsection that David's innocence is most played up - a literal babe in the woods - and it's meant as a contrast to human cruelty, an impulse that David is not capable of at that point; when, in his search for answers, he encounters a threat that is less physical and more existential, he proves that he can also be violent and cruel, that's another marker on his progress towards being human. And then he gets to meet his maker (Gigolo Joe: "The ones who made us are always looking for the ones who made them.") and have his illusions shattered. Osment's performance in this is eerily good, pantheon-level work from a prepubescent, and the quivering, broken way he delivers, "I thought I was one of a kind," is possibly the best choice in a performance full of great choices. That William Hurt's Professor Hobby reveals the circumstances of David's creation makes him not so removed from Martin after all is another telling flourish. (God so loved the world that he gave to it his only begotten Son, right?)

The midsection really cranks up the cruelty and short-sightedness assumed of humanity, and no one could be forgiven for thinking that a cynical position on Spielberg's part. But beyond this outsized horror being needed as one end of a pole to balance the purity of David's quest on the other end as well as serving as a model for David's eventual behavior in Professor Hobby's office, I feel the cruelty serves as a misdirect of sorts, a big ugly manhole cover for the subterranean tunneling Spielberg is quietly setting up in the film's ending (one Kubrick himself admitted he could never quite get to to work the way he wanted it to). What's important when dealing with the human world here, I submit, is not the grand gestures of fear and anger but the small ones of kindness and empathy. When the advanced robots at the end tell David, "We only want for your happiness. You've had so little of that," it's a truthful sentiment but it's also a quiet watchword - within the shit and horror and chaos of modern life, there's still moments where we can be good to each other. We see it in a big way at the end of the Flesh Fair, when the crowd rejects the ringmaster's call to melt a little boy to death. We also see it in the bit where a hotel clerk warns Gigolo Joe about the Flesh Fair being in town, in Monica choosing the lesser of two evils when casting David to his fate knowing how difficult it will be to do so ("I'm sorry I didn't tell you about the world" is an all-timer of a heart-ripping line of dialogue), in Gigolo Joe rescuing David from his despondent dive into the ocean. And we see it early on, before David even comes into the narrative, in the fairy-tale figures that have been plastered onto the walls of the ICU ward where Martin is being held in suspended animation. It's a tiny, mostly futile gesture, but it stills smacks of the best possible version of humanity, one that tries in any way to bring a sliver of light to even the most agonized places. The use of those figures also presages David's ultimate encounter with the Blue Fairy in the submerged Coney Island, and both times the appearance of fairy-tale characters heralds the delayed granting of a long-held wish, an impossible dream as a bulwark against misery magically made real. Martin wasn't supposed to wake up but did. David wasn't supposed to become human but did. Why wouldn't a machine aspire to be part of a species that could maintain hope in the face of everything that says it isn't worth it?