Perfect Pauses: Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice

It's been (checks notes) nearly three years since I've done a Perfect Pauses post, but I had a perfect pause on Saturday night, so it was time to end that drought.

This was from one of my new favorite films of the year, a clever and funny time travel movie that also has a decent amount of heart, Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice. 

I won't submit a laundry list of the film's merits today, instead just concentrating on the pause itself.

This is a shot of someone trying to jump start a car. I believe they were ultimately successful. When do you ever remember someone jump starting a car in a movie and it not working? No reason to even include it otherwise.

Anyway, this flash of light was obviously only on screen for a split second, and I happened to pause the movie during that split second. 

Cool image, right? 

Not sure why it looks so out of focus, it might just be the lighting. 

Now I'm the one contributing to delinquencies, and other Scream VI thoughts

I've written at various times in the past about the movies my kids have been exposed to before we thought they were ready. I think I mentioned the time my older son sat in on a viewing of The Suicide Squad -- the really violent James Gunn one from two years ago -- when we were over for a dinner party in my wife's friend group, where each of the families has a child around my son's age, though in their case it's the youngest son while ours is the oldest. I know I didn't mention, because it only happened about a month ago, when he watched American Psycho under the same circumstances.

Well, we had a dinner party at our house on Saturday night, so I thought it was my chance to return the favor.

Of course the four 12- and 13-year-old boys wanted something aspirational, and it was clear my usual recommendation of a handful of Marvel movies was getting no traction. It was my own son, though, who was fixated on the idea of Scream VI.

Even though he's never seen a Scream movie, my son does have a history with the franchise. We came into possession of a Ghostface mask, and he's worn it on multiple Halloweens. Then last year on our trip to America, he sat next to me as I watched last year's Scream reboot on the plane. He asked questions and I'm sure saw selected images from it, and I know it lived on in his curiosity, fascination and probably deep-seated fears.

Having already planted the seed myself, through both the plane viewing and the mask purchase, it was obvious I was going to comply with his request -- especially since getting a kid to agree on a movie when his friends are over is a victory in and of itself.

Plus in the back of my head I had the fact that my younger son, who is still only nine, has friends who have told him they've seen The Exorcist, which is far more graphic than the umpteenth Scream movie. 

None of them stumbled out of the garage two hours later with any apparent scars, and I'm guessing the other three, who all have older siblings, have already seen a lot worse. (One could argue that both The Suicide Squad and American Psycho are a lot worse, and those are only the ones I know they've seen.) 

My own son seemed fine too. He acknowledged it was violent but he reminded me "I've seen American Psycho." 

When I watched it myself later, the rental having promoted it to the top of my viewing queue when otherwise I might not have seen it until October for Halloween, I was trying to figure out which there are more of: f-bombs or stab wounds. 

Did I watch movies like this when I was 12? I don't think so. I was not naturally drawn to horror as a younger viewer. By 12 I might have been trying to see R-rated movies that had boobs -- I can't remember exactly when that started -- but teenagers being chopped up was not a priority for me. Unless, maybe, they showed their boobs before being chopped up, which was much more of a thing back then. 

Every parent knows that today's kids grow up faster than they did, and whether that's actually true or not, there's no doubt we believe it. Even my wife, who tends to be a bit more careful with things like this, sort of shrugged when I told her our son wanted to watch Scream VI. She later told me it was because she considered it more horror comedy, which I don't think the Scream series really is -- at least not anymore. Sure they try to get a laugh here and there, but it feels more like typical serial killer drudgery to me nowadays. Which brings me to my next point ...

Scream and Saw are basically the same thing

Now that we have six Scream movies, it is becoming more evident that this series has quite a lot in common with the most enduring horror series of the 21st century, the Saw movies. I believe there are nine of those, though if it was double digits I wouldn't be surprised.

Consider:

1) Both series have an incredibly serpentine mythology that continues to revisit characters from earlier in the series who are presumed dead, or even if they actually are dead they still loom large over the proceedings.

2) Both series are founded on the idea of copycats continuing to carry on the work of the original killer(s).

3) Both series have an idea of who "deserves" to be killed based on some previous crimes of which they are guilty. 

4) In both series, the original killer is known for the sound of his voice in either pre-recorded messages or live telephone calls, and the exact timbre, vocal ticks, favorite turns of phrase or indications of sadism of the voice can be reproduced by multiple copycats despite them possibly never having heard the original voice, because most of the people who did hear that voice ended up dead.

5) Both series are utterly exhausted at this point. Having liked the reboot of Scream last year -- or "requel," as the characters in this film refer to it -- I felt pretty put off by Scream VI. No, I definitely do not think it's clever any more the way these films are relentlessly self aware, and try to give us credit by winking to us about what they're doing and then doing that very thing. At this point this is really just pandering, and I'm tired of it. In a way, Saw at least has a certain purity in that it presents the material more straightforwardly, without the equivalent of Murtaugh saying "I'm too old for this shit" in all the Lethal Weapon movies. Scream is basically nothing but that.

Perfect pauses: Scream VI

SPOILER ALERT if you care about who the killer was in Screams 1 through 5. 

In one of the many times I paused the movie -- which were a lot, since I was tired and a little drunk after the aforementioned dinner party, meaning I finished the movie Sunday afternoon -- I happened to randomly catch the exact screen shot to show who the killer was in every previous Scream movie.

I've warned you once, now I will warn you again: Don't continue reading or looking down this page if you want to be kept ignorant of this information.

Here was the perfect pause in question:

Now, this was actually a spoiler for me since I haven't seen Scream 3 or Scream 4 -- and in a way, since I remember so little about Scream 2. 

At first I was annoyed, and thought that if I hadn't paused it at this exact moment, the information might have gone in one ear and out the other and I might have just been able to ignore it. They continue to talk about all these past killers, but hearing their names wouldn't have been something I would have remembered on a potential future viewing of Scream 3 or Scream 4. The faces are the things that stick with me, especially if you recognize them. (Hello, Scott Foley -- it's been a while.)

But then I thought: Given how over this series I am, what are the chances I am going to go back and watch Scream 3 or 4 -- ever?

Yeah, we know my stated goal is to watch every movie that's ever been made. But just between you and me, I doubt that's ever actually going to happen. 

Perfect Pauses: Men

To get myself off the schneid -- that's a losing streak in sports, but it applies here when I'm in a bit of a rut in terms of ideas -- I decided to do a Perfect Pauses post, since it'd had been a while since I'd done one.

Of course, you can't do a Perfect Pause post unless you have, you know, a perfect pause. Fortunately, a pause during Men last night qualified.

In this case it's not anything that really speaks to the themes of the film, though I certainly don't think Alex Garland would have chosen a grapefruit for Jessie Buckley to cut through unless he found there to be something vaguely symbolic about it -- you know, cutting something open to reveal its pink insides. That's the way Garland's mind works I'm sure.

No, it's that the pause is perfect because the cut has already started to occur but the half that is not pinned down by Buckley's fingers has only just started to fall toward the cutting board underneath it. (A lot of my Perfect Pauses are action captured midway through its completion, in a moment you'd only have a split section to grab, like this post about Luca's title character in the final millisecond before he gets hit by a glass of water.)

Since I have you I might as well tell you what I thought of Men.

Well, for about a half of a movie I thought it was going to be a masterpiece. That scene with the echoes in the tunnel is so eerily beautiful that I think I could have watched it for about 45 minutes. But, the idea wears thin pretty quickly and ultimately doesn't bear very clear thematic fruit. There are some potentially provocative ideas in this movie but they are not executed with much coherence.

Loved all the stuff related to the husband who might have committed suicide or might have died of an accident, though. Garland is really good with such flashback scenes, one of the strengths of the far more successful Annihilation. 

Perfect pauses: Happening, and protesting America on 4th of July

The timestamp of this post won't show the 4th of July -- it's July 5th in Australia -- but as I type this, Americans are at BBQs scheduled to celebrate the independence of the United States from England. It's a day that has traditionally prompted patriotism even in those naturally inclined not to show it. American flags might not be their thing, but usually they'll throw America a bone one day a year.

Not this year.

As we are all still stinging from the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, I thought I'd put up sort of a protest post today -- in part because it was something I was planning to put up when I wrote about the movie Happening last week, only I forgot. (Plus, posting something French on Independence Day will stick it to a particular subset of the American population, who think France embodies everything they hate about countries that are not America.)

One particular pause during the movie -- what I have periodically identified on this blog as a perfect pause -- yielded me the image you see above.

The main character, Anne, is receiving the prompting from her professor to "continue," as all her classmates look on. It's a particularly fraught moment for her, as we saw her thrive in a similar scenario earlier in the movie. Now, she's been distracted by her attempt to attain a safe abortion and has fallen behind in her studies, leaving her incapable of answering the professor's question and all her classmates fixing her with accusatory stares.

However, in another way, these are stares of anticipation. And the word "continue" is particularly fraught, as it gets right to the core conflict of the movie -- whether to "continue" a pregnancy or not. Everyone in this shot, including the professor, can be seen to be challenging Anne to bring her baby to term -- the perception of a silent pro-life majority, even if the statistics do not bear out that such a silent pro-life majority exists.

Anyway, as an isolated image, it speaks a lot about the film on the whole.

It might be a bit of a flimsy tie-in for 4th of July, except the point is that it's supposed to fly in the face of the holiday. If we're really celebrating freedom and independence, give women freedom and independence regarding their own bodies and what they choose to do with them.

Perfect Pauses: 6 Underground

Don't worry, I'm not going to start telling you about it every time I pause a movie to go to the bathroom.

But this one did stand out to me, not for capturing a felicitously frozen moment, or for being an apt commentary about something going on in the story. No, this one stands out just for its beauty.

It may sound like I'm tiptoeing dangerously close to ogling actress Adria Arjona, one of the stars of the 2019 Netflix movie 6 Underground. She is beautiful, but that's not what I'm doing. The beauty I'm really talking about is how she is captured in a single moment that a fashion photographer would envy.

That hair could not be more perfectly blown astray by the wind, and the light giving her eyes the appearance of two different colors also adds an alien quality to her appearance. And anyone who's ever seen a model walk down a catwalk knows that they are considered the most optimal specimens of modeldom when they have a confrontingly alien quality to them.

I was actually going to initially write that 6 Underground looks so beautiful, overall, that every pause was a Perfect Pause. This was undone a bit by the fact that I paused it a half-dozen more times and none of the others were particular noteworthy.

But I was also given pause, so to speak, by a realization about 25 minutes in (after this Perfect Pause), when I was prompted to finally check my phone to see who the director was. 

Lo and behold, it's Michael Bay.

Which makes perfect sense given the subject matter and general appearance of the film, but I guess I never thought it was possible to forget that Michael Bay had directed a movie, and usually not possible for me to miss one of his movies at the time they came out. (I see them all if only so I can rip on them when I review them, as happened with Transformers: The Last Knight, but which did not happen with 13 Hours: The Secret Solders of Benghazi.)

I'd be lying if I said it didn't taint my enjoyment of the movie just a bit to know that Bay was the one responsible for it, though I've liked Bay films before. I still found it hugely entertaining overall, as it's both kinetic and funny, and never drags even at a very Michael Bay-like 128 minutes. 

It was also a reminder that Bay is indeed capable of some legitimate cinematic beauty, even though it's always undercut by one too many shots of helicopters or hot women (both of which appear plenty here). I do wish I had not discovered it was Bay until after the movie was over, as it would have created the rare unbiased consumption of a movie without knowing who is behind the camera.

I might have even given 6 Underground four stars out of five based on pure entertainment value. Learning it was Bay did not make it the 3.5 stars I gave it -- it's still the same movie that entertained me -- but it did make me conscious of some of Bay's regular preoccupations and cinematic tics that he should have progressed past at this point. That he's still stunted in some of his more pubescent tendencies is a weakness for the film when he's the director of it, maybe not so much when someone else is.

In any case, his films always produce good fashion photography stills, and probably always will. 

Perfect pauses: Luca and Murder, My Sweet

Haven't done one of these Perfect Pauses pieces in a while, so I figured, I might as well get in a twofer.

Of course, to do a twofer, you actually have to have two perfect pauses in the same evening, which I did Monday night.

The premise of this "series" -- which has had exactly five previous entries over nearly ten years -- is that when I pause a movie at a totally unpremeditated moment, and it captures a perfect frozen snapshot of some kind of sudden action or other fortuitous story moment, I consider that sufficient inspiration to write about it here. I think you can see what makes this one good, but let's get to that in a moment.

We got to our Luca viewing at the end of our first full day on holiday this week, after a lot of toing and froing about what night was actually best to project it on the wall of our holiday house. It was about 7:30 before we got started -- an hour later than we'd ideally like, so as to get our kids to bed at a reasonable hour -- but it did in fact work out best for the schedule, considering also our dinner options in the small town here where we're staying. Most of those places are dark Monday night, so eating frozen pizzas in front of a movie was the way to go. And I'd been planning to write about this screening here anyway, so now I can let this post take care of business.

The pause came during one of our many interruptions, to do things like check on the pizza and go to the bathroom. In this case I believe it was fetching ice cream. 

In any case, I think you can see why I considered it to be such a good pause. Giulia (left) is throwing a glass of water at Luca (right), and though I didn't know the actual reason she decided to do this -- I was distracted in the few moments before the pause, while working my way over to my computer to pause it -- I did know the consequences would be significant for Luca. Like Madison in Splash before him, Luca turns into his underwater form (a sea monster) when he's doused with water, and Giulia has never seen that form.

As it turns out, it wasn't quite as big a moment in the narrative as I thought it would be -- Giulia is the only one who sees the transformed Luca, and she's almost preternaturally accepting of the fact that he's a sea monster. But the pause is still great, as it catches the water in the air and Luca's hands up defending himself. In a way, it's like the final millisecond of innocence. 

Before we get to our second Perfect Pause, I'll spare a few moments to close the loop on the Luca viewing that I first mentioned in this post. 

As you will recall, my seven-year-old was inconsolable when it turned out he watched the first hour of a movie I had been saving as a surprise for this trip. I'm glad to say this did not impact the viewing whatsoever. In fact, I think he got a certain thrill from knowing certain things about the movie before we did. However, he was also really good about not saying "Oh, I love this part" or "This is the part when ..." In fact, I could see him actively resisting the urge -- a real sign of his budding maturity.

And here's a picture of him putting a smile on Luca's face:

After we finished Luca and shuffled them off to bed -- having to call them back once for a little post-credits sequence -- I left the projector up to watch my June installment of Knowing Noir. You'll get a full post on Murder, My Sweet tomorrow, so I'll only include the Perfect Pause here:

Nothing remarkable about what was going on on screen, of course. But if you look down in the lower left corner of the screen, you'll see something pretty remarkable indeed:

So yeah, when I had to pause this movie to get a Mini Coke from the fridge (I was pretty tired at this point), I happened to stop it on exactly the one-hour mark, down to the second. 

Did I time it? I might have if this were playing on my DVD player, where you can see the timecode running as you watch. I've actually been known to time a pause to an exact time landmark just for the fun of it. 

But in this situation, on an iTunes rental, the amount of time passed/remaining is not even visible until you actually press pause, at which point it jumps up on the screen. 

It puts one in mind of The Great Last Days in the Desert Pause of 2016, when I made an unpremeditated pause that exactly bifurcated the movie -- 49 minutes and 12 seconds on one side of the movie, 49 minutes and 12 seconds on the other. (Or whatever the case was. It's a 98-minute movie, in any case.) 

For some reason, I guess I did not see it fit to write about that. 

After a night of such twin perfection, I slept well. 

Perfect pauses: Code 8

Perfect Pauses is probably not only my most infrequent recurring "series" on this blog, but also the most inconsequential.

And yet I'm back, undaunted, with my fourth in about four-and-a-half years, and my first in just over two.

Technically speaking I did my first back in 2011, when I wasn't anticipating a series and called the post "Great pauses in movie history." It took until 2016 to start recognizing it as "a thing."

Anyway, the idea is that if I'm pausing whatever I watch and the pause happens to time out just about perfectly, I'll write about it here. Deep, right?

So the latest was Code 8, a movie that got a blink-and-you'll-miss-it release last year in the U.S. before becoming a hit on Netflix upon its recent release there. I'm quite attuned to what's new on Netflix these days, as I'm reviewing whatever I can on what I can now call my sister site, Reelgood.com.au. (I'm running it now, hence the "sister" designation.) Code 8 had already piqued my interest when I realized it was not technically a "new" release (though it's probably new to Australia). So I watched it Friday night even though I don't expect to review it.

I'll get to a little bit of my thoughts on it in a minute, but first, the pause:

Given that the fire out of the muzzle of a gun is visible for only a split second, I thought it was pretty cool that I happened to catch this one in its brief moment of ephemeral existence.

Of course, I considered the fact that this is not the natural action of the gun and it could have been enhanced by special effects, but that doesn't really make it any less cool, as it's still on screen for only a split second.

And that's really just about all I have to say about the pause.

As for the movie, I thought it was a pretty good little low budget sci-fi action flick, with a nice premise. (I say "low budget" more because it has inexpensive stars than because it looks anything less than first rate.) The premise is that in a near future world, some statistically significant percentage of the population is discovered to have been born with super powers. Not all-powerful super powers like Superman, but one specific type of power per gifted person -- some can read minds, some can control electricity, some have telekinesis, some can heal. In no case does it make them immortal, so they can be taken down through ordinary gunfire or anything else that would usually kill a person. Their powers are heavily regulated by the government -- you have to have a permit to use them, and they're only intended to be used for work. (Which makes them good day laborers, as you can build a building faster if you can toss cinder blocks to each other like it was nothing.)

The world is approaching a total lockdown of these powers, as there are numerous incidents where a "power enabled" person has been guilty of a crime/caused a disaster/etc. There are Robocop-type police who can identify the power-enabled via facial recognition and fly around in the type of transports you see in the poster above. In any case, one particular construction worker (played by Robbie Amell) is trying to save his sick mom and falls in with a gang of criminals.

It's pretty entertaining stuff. It joins a small fraternity of recent lower-budget sci fi movies that I liked more than I was expecting to, which also includes Kin. I don't remember it particularly well the morning after, but it was a nice little diversion in the moment, and well made.

I did have a funny moment during the end credits as I had turned my attention to something else while they were rolling. I looked back up a minute or two later and thought "These credits are still on? What the hell?" Then of course I realized that minute upon minute of credit time was being devoted to the names of the people who had helped crowd source the film. (That's 30,810 contributors, according to Wikipedia.) And at first I'd thought it was just a really big visual effects department.

Back sometime in late 2021 with another perfect pause.

Perfect Pauses: Mom and Dad

I haven't done a "Perfect Pauses" post in a while, not since Alien 3 in June of last year. Then again,
this is actually the shortest interim between two of these posts since I've been doing them, as the previous one was in January of 2016, and before that I hadn't even considered the idea since a 2011 post called "Great pauses in movie history."

Anyway, I'll get on with it.

My previous two had been on rewatches, but last night it was a first-time viewing of Mom and Dad, the new(ish) Nicolas Cage vehicle from Brian Taylor -- half of Neveldine and Taylor, the duo responsible for the Crank movies.

And boy did I love this movie. As it's still early in the year, I don't mind telling you that it instantly leap-frogged the other dozen 2018 movies I've seen, becoming my new #1 of the year. Which means it'll probably ultimately land in the 15-20 range, though I could see this one sticking in the top ten. I like it that much.

If you want some of what you got in Crank and the other Neveldine/Taylor movies -- outlandish, jittery visuals with a penchant for the sleazy -- then Mom and Dad will be right up your alley. However, it's also got a brain in its head, saving some of its sizable quantity of energy for subtle social commentary that'll make every parent in the audience say "Yep, uh huh."

If you don't want to know the setup for the film, which is known to most people but perhaps not to you, you may not want to read the next paragraph. However, I think most people learn about this film as a result of knowing what it's about, so I'm not spoiling anything beyond that. Besides, it's necessary for contextualizing the pause I've chosen.

Mom and Dad concerns a mysterious, never-explained phenomenon that causes all the world's parents to want to murder their children. Not any children, not all children -- just their own. It's a great premise, and you can imagine the ways Nicolas Cage delivers on it. (Giving a performance that can be described as good in a more traditional sense: Selma Blair, pictured, as his wife.)

This pause happened to come right at the moment when Blair's murderous intent locks in. She's been driving home in a state of confusion, and as she reaches her house -- which contains her two kids inside -- this is the look she gets in her eyes.

Of course, the premise behind "Perfect Pauses" is not that I find a great image in the film and pause on it. It's that I genuinely need to pause the movie -- to go to the bathroom, to deal with a child who needs something -- and this is what comes up. I think it was the bathroom in this case, as I think my kids were asleep by this point. I hope they were, anyway.

Oh, and if you need any more enticement to watch this movie, I'll give you three words, or really, five: Nicolas Cage. Pool table. Sledgehammer.

Perfect pauses: Alien 3

I rewatched Alien 3 (hate that I cannot write this film's title correctly, to the third power) on Thursday night, in preparation for a podcast Sunday night in which we are discussing all the Alien movies. Our emphasis will be on Alien: Covenant, of course, which would have felt a tad more fresh if we'd recorded the podcast two weeks ago, as we were meant to do. But technical difficulties postponed that podcast. I was in favor of moving on to a new movie, but the other two were not. Majority rules.

Anyway, I didn't need to rewatch Alien 3 because we will probably touch on it only briefly, if at all. But I decided to go full bore and also rewatch Alien: Resurrection, a viewing that will be forthcoming tonight. I happen to have seen Alien and Aliens in the last few years anyway, and of course Prometheus is only five years old and I watched it twice that year. (Not realizing until the second viewing that I don't really like it all that much.) So after tonight I will be conversant in all of them in time for tomorrow.

As I was watching, soon after my kids went to bed, my younger instigated one of his multiple bedtime diversionary tactics by asking for more milk. And this was the corresponding pause, which I suppose is a spoiler for a movie that is now 25 years old, so look away if you really don't want to know anything about Alien 3. And the rest of this post will be filled with SPOILERS.

This is the exact moment when Alien 3 announced what type of movie it would be -- the type of movie that repudiates the very notion of happy endings.

So having randomly paused on it -- the inspiration for this periodic series Perfect Pauses -- made me take special note of it this time.

Actually, I've always taken special note of the fact that Newt died at the beginning of Alien 3. Newt, whose salvation gives Sigourney Weaver's Ellen Ripley her entire motivation for strapping on a mech suit and fighting the xenomorph at the end of Aliens. The happy ending of Aliens, then, is entirely eradicated in one stark, chilling on-screen graphic.

Oh but it's not just the graphic. What I hadn't remembered, or possibly did not even notice the first time I saw it, was that you also get a brief shot -- just a second after this pause, the beginnings of which are already visible above -- of Newt's frozen death scream. So not only does the child die, but you also get to see that she died horribly. She wasn't struck on the head or impaled by some support column, like her unfortunate fellow traveler who is revealed as a bloody mess of viscera about ten seconds after this. No, it's possible the girl was actually scared to death.

Yep, and then later they do an autopsy on her body as well. And you actually get to see inside her.

This was not in keeping with my memory of Alien 3 at all, so I guess it's good I watched it again. I thought it had basically been off screen, like "Hey, Newt died," Sigourney Weaver crying for a minute or two and then on with the plot. But not only is there that autopsy, there's also a funeral for her and the guy who got crushed by the support column, before their mummy-style corpses are cast out into space.

It's all pretty hardcore, a real turn in philosophy from what is already arguably a bleak enough series. During this opening we also learn that the beloved synth Bishop (Lance Henriksen) has also been rendered with "negative capability" (chilling phrase) by this crash. Though Bishop does have a momentary comeback later on, in another sad scene. At least he gets a proper farewell.

Happy endings are something we rely on as lovers of film, and Alien 3 has the balls to take all the steam out of them. I mean, you could argue that the ending of Aliens is not a "happy ending" now at all because Alien 3 reveals that it wasn't an "ending" at all. In traditional terms, an "ending" would mean that the people's lives basically progress onward now in a boring state of happiness until they die 50 years later, having lived fulfilling lives. We can only call something an "ending" if we don't know what else happens in the story, and are left to believe that it's all happy (even though life is never all happy). So the "ending" of Aliens is only such because that's where James Cameron chose to stop telling his story. As it turned out, David Fincher picked up the story only like a day later, or however long it took them to crash on that prison planet (and if they were in hyper sleep anyway, then perhaps it only seemed like moments later to them). So not only does Alien 3 invalidate the happy ending of Aliens, it recontextualizes it as not an ending at all.

This made me mad the first time I saw it. Twenty-some years later -- I don't think I saw this until 1993 or 1994 -- it's probably my favorite part about the movie.

It takes the perspective of two more decades to recognize just how bold, how unusually despondent, the opening of Alien 3 is, especially in the grand scheme of the cinema that followed. The cold and clinical audit of which passengers are dead (three) and which alive (one) is the kind of shock to the system we just don't get in movies. Alien 3 is one of the weirdest third movies you are likely to see in a successful series, and it's certainly not something you would see today. Screenwriters David Giler, Walter Hill and Larry Ferguson would never be able to get away with killing a beloved child character from the previous movie at the start of the next movie, and they would certainly not be able to kill off the series' main character at the end of the movie, though that of course did not prevent (a version of) Ellen Ripley from returning in Alien 4.

Those kind of ballsy decisions pervade the first half of this movie. As I was watching, I felt myself immersed in a state of awe about how much I had underappreciated this movie. I hadn't hated it, of course, but I had subscribed to the conventional wisdom that the movie was hopelessly flawed, using the death of Newt as one of my primary examples of its wrong-headedness.

This time, I really appreciated the craft of David Fincher, then a nascent feature director (this was his first), but already boasting the wandering camera, perfect framing and moral bleakness of his later work. I love the setup and the choice for this movie's group of "expendables," the prison colony with a skeleton custodial staff of shaved-head religious fanatics. I loved some of the characters within that group, specifically those played by Charles Dutton and Charles Dance, and the leader, who always calls Ripley "leftenant." I loved that Sigourney Weaver spends at least the first third of the movie with a burst blood vessel in her eye, a probably unnecessary bit of realism that in most movies would be rejected by the star purely for reasons of vanity. All of this stuff was conspiring to make this a truly vital and not only underappreciated, but possibly flat-out great, entry in the Alien series.

Unfortunately, the second half of the movie is shit.

I can draw the line pretty much exactly with the (premature) death of Clemens, the doctor played by Charles Dance. Maybe this film just could not handle one more non-traditional narrative choice, but when he's grabbed by the xenomorph about halfway through, in a manner that is typically unimaginative (the deaths are not a strength of this movie), I thought "No, not him!" I really wanted this guy to be around for the finale. But no.

And after that it just progressively falls apart, to the point that Fincher's craft does not even seem impressive anymore.

All that running around in the shafts of the prison underbelly, trying to lure the alien here or there, gets repetitive and is not very impactful. I did not find it interesting at all to view the events from the perspective of the xenomorph, either. But I found it even less effective to view the xenomorph itself. Unless it's in the close-ups involving practical effects -- as in the iconic shot of the alien "kissing" the side of Ripley's bald head -- the alien looks absolutely terrible in this movie. That's because the moments of digital "magic" and green screen place this movie squarely in the year 1992. The alien looks distractingly awful as it scuttles through these subterranean passageways, just because it wasn't possible to make that kind of thing look good in 1992. In retrospect, they should have relied only on practical effects, though I suppose to a 1992 audience those sequences probably seemed reasonably impressive. Today, they are laughable.

And the film's ending, with Ripley's Christ-like back flop into a distant fire pit with the alien bursting out of her chest ... well, first of all, how far down is that fire pit? She seems to drop for no less than 15 seconds. What has otherwise been realistically rendered as a prison on a desolate planet has now become something out of Star Wars, bottomless pits of fire and all. It's all pretty laughable. (It's laughable here, not in Star Wars.)

So I guess my perspective on Alien 3 was not 100% salvaged by this viewing, but I do have immense appreciation now for its first half.

Maybe on my eventual third viewing, that's all I'll watch.

We'll see how my viewing of an insufficiently remembered Alien: Rescurrection goes tonight, post possibly (though possibly not) forthcoming.

Perfect pauses: Tangerine

When I first wrote this post in late 2011, I think I expected to make it a semi-regular feature -- to identify instances when I randomly paused a movie at a near-perfect moment.

More than four years later, I have yet to revisit the topic. But it's never too late.

Tonight we were watching Tangerine, my #8 movie of 2015 -- my wife for the first time and me for the second. We had to pause it to go deal with some nonsensical attention-grabbing stunt by our older son (who should have been sleeping), and this is what we got:

I love how much this one image speaks to this movie -- even though it contains nary a shot of a transgender prostitute. (Actually, that's not true -- if you squint there is in fact a tiny transgender prostitute in the lower right-hand corner.)

It's not just the wonderfully run-down retro sign for Color TVs, which must have legitimately still been up somewhere in Los Angeles even when this was filmed in 2014.

It's not just the sky, which is the perfect pre-sunset shade of pinkish blue (though it doesn't come across so well in a photograph -- a screen grab might have worked slightly better).

It's not just the tiny transgender prostitute, just any other small person in a big world.

It's not even the wonderful lines of the building as they converge toward the horizon.

No, it's the fact that the on-screen text fits perfectly into the building's available blue space, as though it were purposefully captioned this way for a photo.

I was glad to discover the word "perfect" coming to mind so regularly for me on my second viewing. This truly is a tremendous accomplishment for all involved, and to watch it again was simply a joy.

Great pauses in movie history

The exact moment we pause a movie -- to go to the bathroom, to answer the phone, to get a drink -- is usually somewhat random.

Unless you're trying to wait until the end of the scene, you usually just choose a moment and press pause. There's little to no premeditation.

And so I think it's kind of funny when you happen to get a really good one.

In fact, I've taken pictures of funny pauses before. After the one I got last night during Gnomeo & Juliet, I think it's time to start an unofficial, sort-of series on my blog.

I'll show it to you first, then I'll explain why I think it's so great.

Juliet (left, voice of Emily Blunt) has just told her faithful frog sidekick Nanette (Ashley Jensen) that she has just met a boy, and he's "a blue." Believing that she's kidding, Nanette, whose real life function is a plastic, water-squirting toy, bursts out in laughter, spraying water everywhere.

However, at the moment I picked up the remote, Nanette had not yet had her reaction. Right as I hovered my thumb over the pause button and pressed, she exploded into laughter, leaving water droplets floating in the air, and Juliet closing her eyes to avoid the spray.

Just struck me as funny. Nothing more profound than that.

To give you a little more of the background behind Great Pauses in Movie History, I took a picture of a paused Angela Bassett a couple months ago during Jumping the Broom. I can't actually remember what's going on in the scene, but this pause just struck me as very funny:


I am pretty sure she had not just taken a bite out of an onion, but beyond that, I don't remember.