This is a true story. When I was in college, I entered a radio contest for free tickets to the Minnesota premiere of Ridley Scott's Alien. I no longer recall what the contest involved, probably just making a phone call and praising the radio station (it was old KQRS in St. Louis Park), but to my surprise, I won, and found myself with two tickets to the opening night show at the Skyway Theater on Hennepin Avenue. I had admired Ridley Scott's first feature film, an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's short story, "The Duelists". With my girlfriend, I attended the show with the movie projected to a packed urban audience -- it was an unpleasant experience, too intense, and the picture scared the hell out of me. Later, I read a review of the movie that said that it was a disappointment, "just a gorilla in a haunted house horror movie." That description cheered me up and can also be applied to the TV limited series Alien: Earth (2025) broadcast on HULU. The show is written by Noah Hawley, the author of the very good scripts for the Fargo knock-off series. Hawley is pretty skilled but Alien: Earth, so far as I can see, is a disappointment although the show has had good reviews and is impressively produced. Hawley has the difficult task of expanding on a premise that remains, now, fifty years later, still just "a gorilla on a rampage in a haunted house." He tricks out the show with a complicated plot involving intrigue and competition between two homicidal corporations and devises a good villain (the monsters have long since ceased to be villainous), a smarmy technocrat on the order of Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk named "Boy Cavalier". (Hawley's villain in the most recent Fargo series, played by the Golem-like Jon Hamm was one of the best bad guys in recent memory.) The corporations are distinguished by their different approaches to AI: one corp. uses so-called "hybrids", that is human clones in which the consciousnesses of dying people are installed; the other corp. produces "cyborgs" -- that is, half-human and half-machine personages with enhanced strength and intelligence. These two different types of artificial beings are ostensibly important but don't seem central to the plot, a story about a gang of 'hybrids' confronting the space monsters in the context of some kind of convoluted intrigue involving industrial espionage. A space ship transporting a menagerie of monstrous critters from deep space crashes into a huge tenement somewhere on earth -- it may be Singapore or Indonesia. The monsters who come in various forms have escaped on the space ship and massacred the crew. Of course, the crash into the apartment building allows the critters to escape, although, somehow, they are, more or less, captured and confined in some sort of laboratory, apparently on the island where Boy Cavalier is engaged in his sinister experiments -- in a parody of Peter Pan, Boy Cavalier has inserted the souls of a group of dying children into young adult bodies, a metamorphosis that much confuses the children who find themselves suddenly sexually mature and no longer riddled with cancer. This experiment is conducted on a lush island that looks a bit like the environs of Jurassic Park. The leader of the lost boys (and girls) on the island is a comely maiden named "Wendy" in homage to the pastiche of Peter Pan. Wendy is super-smart. She figures out how to communicate with the monsters and spends the last part of the series chatting-up the bloodthirsty critters and transforming them into her private army. Wendy's also equipped with a fully human brother who has to be protected from the machinations of the wicked Boy Cavalier and the onslaughts of the monsters. The creatures include some centipede-shaped bugs, malign walking stick insects like genus Argosarchus Horridus from New Zealand, ticks that creep into you bodily orifices and suck out all your fluids from the inside, and, of course, the so-called Xenomorph which exists in three instars: octopoidal face-grabber, chest-burster, and the primate-like, long-tailed adult xenomorph with is sloppy hydraulically-automated jaws and acid blood -- the Xenomorph, of course, is the canonical alien and well-known to audiences from films in the fifty year franchise. The best monster is a blob with squid-like tentacles and a globular, mucous head in which a half-dozen blood shot eyes are floating. This beast is very fleet of foot, dances around like a tentacular Fred Astaire, ambushes you, and attaching to the side of your head gouges out one of your eyes -- the parasite, then, inserts its spherical six-eyed head into the bloody vacated socket whereupon all six eyes, then, become one great blood shot orb malignly surveying the world from the head of the person or creature (in one case a goat) who has been so colonized. The monsters are great, but the special effects seem shaky -- the show doesn't seem to have much confidence in them and stages all the creature sequences the standard dim blue shadows that filmmakers use to conceal sketchy FX. As in the original movie, there are corridors full of flashing red lights, gusts of steam, dark shadows, and jump-scares. There's a lot of mayhem on screen but I found it weirdly soothing, soporific even -- I spent half my time ostensibly watching this show asleep, seized by slumbers just as the horrors became most intense. I suppose this was because I didn't care about of the characters, felt nothing when the monsters reduced them to heaps of gory innards, and, although I detested Boy Cavalier, my distaste for the character was apparently not enough to keep me awake. In the last episode, Wendy uses her powers to communicate with the monsters to unleash them on the various factotums loyal to Boy Cavalier -- apparently, the money had run out at this late stage because the climactic creature attacks are shown on surveillance camera footage, that is more grey-blue darkness with very little contrast, a very disappointing ending to the show. (It's been renewed and I expect we'll get, at least, another season of this stuff.)
M - Son of the Century is a baffling biopic of Mussolini. It's well-acted but seems to be completely pointless and mindnumbingly repetitive. Mussolini preens and struts and, then, delivers about three extended speeches per episode. When the Fascist isn't speaking, he's inciting his thugs to beat up and murder socialists in bouts of spectacularly choreographed street-fighting. Each show features several battles, staged like incidents in World War One -- hordes of blackshirted goons beat socialists (in one case with rigid batons of codfish), gouge out their eyes, or set them on fire. Mussolini watches theses fracases from afar, then, his libido stirred by all the ultra-violence -- it looks like poorly lit outtakes from A Clockwork Orange -- brutishly paws and fucks his malevolent-looking flapper girlfriend. Mussolini also has a long-suffering wife, Rachelle, at home -- she has frizzy red hair and he also has sex with her, slaps her around, and, then, has to deal with her attempts to kill him with a revolver that she hides under her pillow. Mussolini's rival is the poet Gabriel D'Annunzio who is also a flying ace. If anything D'Annunzio is farther to the right then Benito. Mussolini is very prone to speechifying -- he gives speeches in the streets, to crowds of his thugs, and, then, in the Italian parliament. His speeches are all the same -- in fact, each episode is, more or less, the same. Mussolini schemes and like an Italian Richard III sucks the viewer into his confidence, declaiming his various Machiavellian strategies. Between speeches, the Black Shirts beat everyone up and shoot many dead. Mussolini has sex with his girlfriend, using her so harshly that she seems about half-dead when its time for the Duce to hurry to parliament or a political meeting to give another speech. This material, which doesn't ever cohere into a plot, is extravagantly filmed -- the style of the movie is like Baz Luhrmann on speed: it's all elaborate tracking shots, weird camera angles, sweaty close-ups like a Sergio Leone movie, with a soundtrack that is either operatic (Puccini and Wagner are much favored) or techno-rock. The sets are seething with smoke and fog and gouts of fire (a lot like the corridors in Alien: Earth) and there are rickety scaffoldings everywhere, tenement-like slums, and misty riversides through which horseman ride in columns -- these scenes look like Bertolucci's 1900. It's all either stylized or staged in elaborately decorated rococo palaces. This show presents a single relentlessly frenzied libidinal texture that's almost completely featureless: bouts of gruesome violence, rapes, and orations by Mussolini. It's completely soporific -- I have never been able to stay awake for a single episode: I'm always asleep at about 30 minutes into the hour-long shows, awakened by the theme music at the end, or, even, more belatedly by the opera or techno-rock accompanying the next episode. Once, after I had fallen asleep to my dismay, I forced myself to watch the part of the episode during which I had been asleep. I wondered if it would be different from what I saw before succumbing to slumber -- it was not: Mussolini struts around, puffs out his chest, gives a long speech and, then, his thugs beat a score of socialists to death while the hero has sex with his mistress. The program is spectacularly made, full of startling and wonderful images, and completely without any interest -- so far as I can tell it's just the same thing over and over. (This is an Italian- British coproduction shot in Italian and directed by the Englishman Joe Wright).
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