Alien Covenant

I saw the very first Alien film at the old Capitol Theater during its premiere run.  Back then the theaters didn’t do matinée showings all the time, so Mom had to take me to downtown Charleston in the evening to see the film.  It was a haunted house on a spaceship with an alien in place of a ghost.

I really didn’t know what I was in for, but I was excited.  There were several points in the film where I remember being acutely aware of my heart beating a little faster than normal.  There were some genuine scares in the film.

When Aliens came along I was looking for more of the same.  What I got was a war film in space with a large dose of action movie heroics in the final act.  I found the early part of the film to be slow and it took me a couple of re-watches to warm to the film.  It wasn’t like Ridley Scott’s original.

Aliens 3 had a great trailer, but I missed it during its theatrical run.  When I finally did catch it, most likely on HBO, I really disliked it.  I really didn’t like the bald Ripley.  I also disliked the fact that they chose to kill her off at the end of the film.  I haven’t revisited the film, so my opinion could very well have changed.

Alien Resurrection was a little more to my taste.  I caught it at a theater in Beckley after work one Saturday.  For most people this was the nadir of the franchise, but I found it much more entertaining than Alien 3.  Once again this is a film that I have not revisited since my original viewing.

After this film the series shifted gears and did a couple of crossover films with the Predator franchise.  The xenomorphs most recently poked their heads out in Ridley Scott’s return to the world of the Weyland Corporation, Prometheus.  We watched and reviewed Prometheus on the Cinema Toast Crunch podcast (available on iTunes, Stitcher and at http://www.cinematoastcrunch.libsyn.com ).  The film was enjoyable enough, but it wasn’t Alien.

When word got out that Scott was working on a new film actually in the Alien world, I was intrigued.  The trailers looked great.  I was stoked to see this movie and to see it in 3D at the theater.  Unfortunately I wasn’t able to make it during the film’s theatrical run.  Thank God for home video!

The box art they used was eye-catching, and unlike many recent releases, they used the same art across all forms of home media.  The image, also seen in the trailer, is of a xenomorph clutching the outside of a ship and staring into the glass at the human within.  The human is omitted from the box art, but the look, the body language of the alien, tells you it has someone in its sights.  The amazing thing about this art is the use of white.  All of the previous Alien films as well as Prometheus have had very dark colors, usually the black of space spread across their box covers.

I bought the Target exclusive Blu-ray/DVD combo that came packed inside a limited edition book.  I love book packaging for discs and Target, Fox, and Titan really hit a home run with this one.  The design they came up with for holding the discs in place is the absolute best I have ever seen.  The book itself is also a thing of beauty, apparently borrowing content from Titan’s Alien Covenant art book.  I was especially drawn to the cover of the book with its simple line drawing.

Popping open my Sony Blu-ray player, I dropped in the disc and prepared myself for the Alien experience I missed in the theater.  About a week ago my podcast co-host watched Alien Covenant and had told me it was fantastic.  He said it had everything you want from an Alien movie.  I was stoked.  The film starts off slowly.  David the android from Prometheus is having a discussion with his creator.  From there we finally get introduced to the crew of the Covenant, a colonizing ship headed for a new world to settle down.  They also have an android (this one named Walter and also played by Michael Fassbender) who handles the day-to-day activities while the crew waits out the 7 year plus trip in cryo-sleep.

When a freak energy storm damages the ship, the crew is awakened early only to find their captain’s pod is malfunctioning and he bursts into flames.  While making the repairs, the ship picks up a transmission from an unknown planet.  Their scans show that the planet is perfect for colonization and is much closer than their planned destination.  They decide to check it out.

On the planet they find a perfect world with running water and free growing wheat.  There appears to be no animal life, but they know someone sent out the signal they received.  In the course of their search two of the crew inadvertently get infected by a biological agent that quickly gestates inside their bodies and soon produce a white skinned creature similar to the alien xenomorph.  The creature was referred to by fans and filmmakers as the neomorph.  These creatures don’t appear to have the extendable inner teeth of the original xenomorph, but they are still incredibly deadly with a mouth full of razor-sharp teeth.

For the most part this film does the cat and mouse game that the first film did so well.  Instead of trapping the “mice” inside a spaceship, this time they are stuck on a strange world with the creatures and David, the originator of the mysterious transmission.

I enjoyed Alien Covenant, but I had one huge problem with it before the first shot was hitting my TV screen.  We know that this is a prequel to Alien.  This means that the crew cannot survive.  If they survive, they would have warned Earth about the creatures.  Since this never happened, the crew cannot have survived.  At this point it just becomes a question of how they will die and in what order will their deaths occur.  Technically I guess you could argue that Daniels and Tennessee didn’t actually die on-screen.  They were shut inside their pods as the villainous David is revealed to have been masquerading as Walter.  He claims in his log that they died, but there is a chance they survived.  Survived to be killed at a later date by David, I would suggest.  This took away much of the suspense for me.  When someone was in danger I didn’t really feel any sense of hope that they would survive, because even if they did make it out of that peril, their fates were still sealed.  Nothing they could do was going to alter the fact that they were all going to die.

Despite this issue the film has much to recommend.  The effects look great.  The acting is top-notch with Danny McBride turning in a performance that truly surprised me.  Ridley Scott’s direction was good, but not nearly as sharp as his original turn.  All in all not a bad film, and one that I am sure I will like much better on future viewings where the fate of the crew will not be an issue for me.  Obviously on a second viewing I am expected to know who will survive.  I shouldn’t feel that way on a first viewing however.

I give Alien Covenant a 7.5 out of 10.  I feel certain that will rise to an 8 or higher upon a second viewing.  It safely falls in at #3 in my rankings of the Alien franchise, coming in behind Alien (#1) and Aliens (#2).  It is miles ahead of the other films in the series.

 

Cashback

Cashback is a rare film.  Every once in a while a film that I’ve heard nothing about will suddenly present itself to me.  In the case of Cashback it happened on a normal browsing session of the DVD section at Target.  One thing that I have to give Target props for doing, is helping highlight independent films.  Wal-Mart is great for finding blockbuster new releases and marked down catalogue titles, but Target actually has a small section in their DVD department set aside for indy and art house films.  You’re not going to find Criterion films, but you will find some low-budget gems.  I was scanning this section when I noticed the cover to Cashback.  I couldn’t help but notice it.  The cover features a woman in her twenties, walking down the aisle of a supermarket, a far-off look in her eyes and her top undone and draping down her bare midriff.  The banner with the film’s title conveniently covers the area that she has exposed.  The effect is mesmerizing. 

I didn’t buy the DVD when I first noticed it, but the cover image stayed in my mind.  I looked up the film on the IMDB and discovered it was an expansion from an Oscar nominated short film.  The next time I was in Target I picked up a copy, and Thursday night I popped it in the DVD player and started watching it.  The film has an R rating for graphic nudity, sexual content and language.  The back cover of the case shows a girl leaning against a stripper pole in an exotic dancer outfit.  All the signs pointed to this being a sex romp comedy like American Pie or Porkys.  This was definitely a case of not judging a book (or DVD) by its cover.  Cashback is at its heart a love story. 

The entire film springs from events related to a break up.  When Suzy dumps art student Ben (Sean Biggerstaff) he develops insomnia.  He can’t stop thinking about her.  Since he can’t sleep he decides to take those extra 8 hours a day and take a job at a local supermarket on the night shift.  He quickly learns that the workers at the supermarket each have their own way of fighting the clock.  Time is the enemy, he explains.  If you stare at the clock it seems to go slower, so the workers find every way they can to speed up time and get through their shifts.  Ben on the other hand takes a different approach.  He learns how to freeze time.  Literally.  He stops time and walks silently between the people stuck in the moment.  He takes his art pad and sketches them as they stand perfectly frozen.  He undresses the women and admires their beauty as he practices his life drawing skills.  When he is ready for time to start back up, he simply cracks his fingers and time is as it was before.

Ben soon develops an attraction to Sharon (Emilia Fox), one of his co-workers.  He spends hours in frozen time drawing her.  When they eventually end up going out, her kiss breaks the curse of insomnia he has been dealing with.  This is a truly wonderful movie.  It is not a laugh out loud comedy, nor is it a sex romp by any stretch of the imagination.  Yes, there is nudity, but it is not gratuitous.  It is artistic, like a walk through an art museum’s nudes collection.  The ending is especially magical as Ben, like the movie itself, is able to share the beauty he sees in these frozen moments.

The acting in this film is perfect as is the direction.  Certain shots continue to run through my head such as the intricate shot of Ben falling off the telephone into bed or the sleight of hand trickery shot of  store employee Barry (Michael Dixon) making his first appearance.  I highly recommend seeking out a copy of this film and watching it.  I give it 4 stars.

Tropic Thunder

I had thought Tropic Thunder looked interesting when it was in theaters, but I never got around to going to see it.  When the DVD came out, they did the now common practice of releasing a single disc and a two disc version.  Target went so far as to include an exclusive Tropic Thunder patch with their two disc version.  I wanted to see the movie, but I wanted to get the 2 disc version, and it wasn’t on sale.  I didn’t want the movie bad enough to pay full price, and if I was going to pay full price, then it was going to be the Target exclusive with the patch because I would at least get something extra for my money even if it wasn’t something I had any real particular interest in having.  Can you follow the twisted logic in that?  I came very close to picking it up one time while on vacation, but I ended up buying something else (the Target exclusive version of the 2 disc Star Wars Clone Wars movie, I believe).

When Tropic Thunder hit pay cable, I managed to catch a little of it.  It was the scene where Les Grossman (Tom Cruise) is trying to convince agent Rick Peck (Matthew McConaughey) that they can make more money by just letting the Asian drug lords that have captured Tug Speedman (Ben Stiller) kill him and collect the insurance than by saving him and finishing the over budget film they were making.  Watching Cruise in his Grossman makeup dance around to Flo Rida’s song Low while offering McConaughey a G4 airplane if he’ll just play ball was pretty funny and actually made me want to see the film even more.  Last week I finally found a used copy of the two disc version with the cardboard slipcover at KV Fine Jewelry & Loan in St. Albans.  I grabbed it up in a heartbeat.

The DVD features the Unrated Director’s Cut of the film which runs slightly over two hours.  Normally on Tuesday, I try to find a short film because I’m trying to get done early enough to catch Lost.  This week I managed to start my movie early enough that I would be done before Lost came on, even with the longer running time.  The movie starts with an ad for Booty Juice, a fictional product one of the stars of Tropic Thunder is pitching.  This is followed by trailers for Scorcher VI (a post apocalyptic action hero franchise that has seen better days), The Fatties Fart 2 (a comedy about a family of overweight goofballs all played by the same actor constantly farting), and one whose title escapes me (Satan’s Alley perhaps) about a forbidden love between two holy men at a monastery (or maybe an abbey).  From there we are taken right into the heart of the Viet Nam war.  Men are being shot, helicopters are spraying bullets and dropping bombs, and, as we quickly learn, it’s all fake.  A group of actors are filming a Viet Nam war film based on a book by one of the only surviving veterans of that particular skirmish, Four Leaf Tayback (Nick Nolte).  Tayback convinces the directer (Steve Coogan) to take the lead actors out to this spot he knows, drop them off and then make them learn to work as a team as they complete their “mission”.  Unfortunately, Tayback is a liar that created his hero story and was never in Nam.  The spot he has chosen is in the heart of a drug lord’s heroin operation, and it also still has active mines, one of which the director steps on as he briefs his actors on their mission.  When the director explodes, the actors assume that it’s a gag designed to heighten their sense of reality, so they start the mission the director assigned them, still thinking everything around them is all part of the movie.

The acting in Tropic Thunder is spot on.  Robert Downey Jr. plays an Australian method actor playing a black man.  Jack Black is the comic star of the Fatties movies making a serious film and trying to deal with his massive drug problem.  And Stiller, Nolte, McConaughey and especially Cruise, nail their characters perfectly.  The rest of the cast is great as well from Danny McBride as pyro effects man Cody to Brandon T. Jackson as Booty Sweat hawking rapper/actor Alpa Chino. 

Tropic Thunder is also a very well written film.  It is a satire with some very funny scenes and insightful gags.  Stiller’s character’s desire to adopt a child from overseas which backfires on him with hilarious results.  The concept of a white man undergoing surgery and makeup to play a black man and then trying so hard to live his life the way he thinks a black man would to get in character.  And then there’s the Simple Jack subplot.  Simple Jack was a role that Stiller’s character played in a fictional movie about a mentally challenged young man.  It is a role he obviously took with the hope of winning an Oscar, which he didn’t.  The conversation between Stiller and Downey’s characters over how Stiller screwed up by going “full-blown retard” is extremely funny and very sharp.  The problem with something like this is that some people don’t see the satire, they only hear the words, and they get their panties in a bunch.  Naturally that happened to Tropic Thunder and so the DVD also contains a public service spot extolling the fact that mentally challenged people are just like everyone else and should be called friend, co-worker, inspiration, but never retard.  Okay Dreamworks, where was the PSA telling people not to call overweight people fatties?  Oh that’s right, it’s okay to poke fun at the fat people.  We’re all jolly, happy folk.  Or maybe you understood that we’re smart enough to understand comedy.

The DVD is loaded with bonus features.  There are some great featurettes on the making of the film, an alternate ending is included, and there is commentary available.  This is a very well done DVD.  The movie is also very well done, and gets 3 1/4 stars.

Bitch Slap

One of the sites I frequently check online is http://www.traileraddict.com/ .  Last year I stumbled across a trailer and a featurette for a film called Bitch Slap.  The featurette in particular was quite funny.  I decided if I got the chance I wanted to see Bitch Slap.  Needless to say, the movie never made it to my little corner of the world, however this weekend the DVD did.  I was looking in Target and stumbled across Bitch Slap for only $12.  I figured if it was half as funny, half as clever and half as campy as the trailer and featurette had been, that it was easily worth the price. 

One thing I found interesting was the DVD case.  When Zack and Miri Make a Porno came out on DVD, the retail giants forced Miramax to offer a DVD case with the title listed as only Zack and Miri.  The porno was excised from the title (which is why I bought my copy at Borders in Huntington where the title was still displayed in all its glory).  With Bitch Slap they couldn’t just drop the word Bitch from the title, but they couldn’t risk little kids and the easily offended seeing the word and upsetting some of their customers.  The novel solution was a yellow sticker reading “Get Slapped!” placed on the shrink wrap over the offending word.  Just hope they don’t look at the spine of the DVD.

So Friday night I pop Bitch Slap into the DVD player.  Anyone familiar with the films of Russ Meyer would feel as though they were watching a Russ Meyer lite film as the movie starts.  The film starts with a woman in the desert surrounded by fires and carnage wailing to the heavens about why this had to happen.  Then Memento-like we are taken back to several hours ago.  A car pulls up and the three women emerge from inside.  The camera, however, lingers on the women’s legs and then travels up to stop and linger even longer on their breasts.  We get multiple angle shots of their breasts getting out of the vehicle, sometimes in split screen even.  The only differences between this and Russ Meyer were that the breasts were clothed and they were not freakishly large.  They weren’t small, mind you, but just the normal enhanced breasts that Hollywood seems to be full of.

From this point the film continues in two directions.  The main storyline barrels forward toward the scene of destruction the film opened with, while the secondary story moves backward showing us how these events came to pass and how the various characters came to cross paths.  The reverse reveal isn’t as clever as Memento, but it is much better than a low budget film named Bitch Slap would lead you to believe it could be.  The main storyline sticks to the basics of an exploitation film.  There are bad girls on the run with big guns and there are bad guys out to get the girls as well.  Of course the girls are also just as likely to turn on each other, provided they aren’t trying to “turn on” each other as each of them is shown to be either lesbian or extremely bi-sexual.  It should be noted that the sex in Bitch Slap is just a tease.  There is very little nudity in the film and what little bit there is involves background characters not the main stars.  In fact the main character that gets saddled with the most revealing outfit is not any of the three women.  It is bad guy Gage played by Michael Hurst of Hercules fame, who runs around in a tiny black leathery jock strap.  Trust me, you will never look at Hercules friend Iolaus the same way after seeing Hurst playing Gage.

Speaking of Hercules, the producers, writers and director were alums of Hercules and Xena, so they got Kevin Sorbo, Lucy Lawless and Renee O’Connor to cameo in the film.  Sorbo plays a super secret agent named Phoenix while Lawless and O’Connor play nuns.  The other big name in the film is Zoe Bell who acts as stunt coordinator, stunt double and plays the small role of Rawhide.  Zoe was heavily involved in the Kill Bill films and had a featured role in the Death Proof section of Grindhouse.

I got the feeling that several of the characters in Bitch Slap would have been quite at home in a Tarantino film, but the film itself is just not as fun as Tarantino’s work.  And Quentin wouldn’t have made such an issue of the girl’s sexuality.  Overall, Bitch Slap isn’t a bad movie for what it intended to be, but it seems at times that the filmmakers couldn’t decide if it was an over the top exploitation film or whether it wanted to be a satire of those types of films.  There is nothing wrong with either type of film in my book, but you need to commit to one or the other.  Bitch Slap doesn’t seem willing to do that.

One area where the DVD does excel is in the bonus features.  There is a series of three making of featurettes that form one large documentary on making a B movie.  It is very informative and entertaining as well.  In fact the documentary was easily worth the $12 by itself.  As for the movie, I give it 2 1/2 stars.  I’m not anxious to get Bitch Slapped again any time in the immediate future, but I would check out a sequel or future project from Rick Jacobson and Eric Gruendemann.  I also would love to see America Olivo (Camero) in another film with a more experienced director.  As the crazy one of the trio she plays her role perfectly and she has a great look in the way she carries herself.  The scene with her and the nuns was one of my favorites, and her battles with Kinki (Minae Noji, also a stand out) and her razor edged yo-yo were very well done as well.