https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMtv1WfgJFA
Aliens Week: Aliens (1986) opening credits
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlfAokjSa2s
Direct Beam Comms #32
TV
Stranger Things Grade: A
The new series Stranger Things debuted on Netflix last Friday (July 15) and currently all episode are available to stream.
It’s 1983 and something’s not right in the town of Hawkins, Indiana. Outside of town sits a government installation out of which something has escaped. This thing found young Will (Noah Schnapp) riding home from a game of Dungeons & Dragons one night and stole him away leaving Will’s mother (Winona Ryder), the town police and Will’s friends searching for him.
Also escaped from the installation is a seemingly normal girl only known as “Eleven” (Millie Bobby Brown) from the tattoo on her arm who can do weird things like affect electrical appliances around her and has agents after her led by Dr. Benner (Matthew Modine) who’s willing to kill anyone who gets in his way if it means getting the girl back.
So far Netflix has promoted Stranger Things as a sort of TV version of Steven Spielberg’s movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. the Extraterrestrial and Spielberg produced Poltergeist. And while Stranger Things does borrow elements from this period in Spielberg’s career I’d say that Stranger Things takes more from the work of the other pop-culture titan of the 1980s: Stephen King. Well, King by way of straight to VHS horror films mixed with a pulsating synth keyboard driven soundtrack.
Part of Stranger Things were scary. Really scary.
In the beginning of the first episode when young Will’s being chased by the something I can only described as a human-looking shape, I found the hairs on the back of my neck standing at attention. And at another part of the show when Winona Ryder’s character gets a weird phone call I took a breath so that I could hear every creepy thing emanating from the receiver.
That’s not to say that Stranger Things is strictly a horror series, though if I had to peg it in one genera I’d peg it squarely there. It also has elements of sci-fi and a definite sense of nostalgia for the early 1980s and young geek life before video games and the internet changed everything. But it’s not simply some nostalgia throw-back series.
Stranger Things is a show that’s set in the early 1980s but it’s not something that’s defined by that. The series could easily be set present day or the 1960s and would work just as well.
I wasn’t quite the age of the 1983 middle schoolers in Stranger Things but having grown up in Indiana the series gets a lot of what it was like in small town life back then pre-cable. Adults are really into basketball and you may get to watch your favorite show that night or the TV might be on the “fritz” and you might not. If you wanted to talk to your friends and you didn’t want to call their home phone letting the parents know what’s up you had to be creative. And if you were a geek the details in pop-culture matter. In the first episode two characters get into a fight over whether the Mirkwood was in The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings which really struck home for me. The details matter to a pre-teen pop-culture junkie, even the seemingly inconsequential ones.
After having watched the first episode the only negative I can see with Stranger Things is that it’s going to be hard — REALLY HARD — to only watch one episode of this series a week and not blow through all eight in a packed Saturday.
The Bureau aka Le Bureau des Légendes Grade: B+
This French series that’s available on iTunes, the first episode of which is free, is an interesting show about spies that feels a bit like the classic British drama The Sandbaggers.
In The Bureau, French operative Guillaume (Mathieu Kassovitz) has returned home to France after eight years abroad on assignment for the DGSE (the French CIA) in Syria. He tells his teenage daughter, with whom he’s trying to rebuild his relationship with, that his job was to “make friends” of certain people and glean any information that might be useful to France from what they might say. He was less James Bond than someone looking to score a little intel for his side. But in Syria he made one mistake; it wasn’t falling in love with a Syrian national, it was lying about ending the relationship to his superiors.
Back home in France things are in a bit of a disarray at the DGSE where one of their operatives has gone missing also in Syria which might act as a domino and bring own several other operations he knew about. At the same time Guillaume, who’s now working as a case officer inside the DGSE, finds out that his love from Syria is also in France attending school. Which begs the question — is Guillaume being played by the other side?
It took a bit for The Bureau to get going in the first episode, and even when it did “get going” it was a slow, but satisfying burn. Here, the agents are less using secret gadgets, gambling at casinos and drinking martinis and more just getting close to important people to glean even the tiniest detail that might somehow be beneficial to France as a whole. But even if their job isn’t like James Bond’s, it’s just as dangerous as since capture of a DGSE agent outside of France might mean death.
And like I said it’s the slow burn, the bureaucracy of governmental work and the life and death stakes of the characters that reminded me somewhat of The Sandbaggers. Though admittedly by the looks of it the budget of an entire season of The Sandbaggers probably wouldn’t cover one episode of The Bureau. 😉
My only quibble with the series is that it’s not easily available here in the US. Overseas in the UK it’s apparently available on Amazon Prime but here it’s only out on iTunes. Which means if I want to watch the rest of the first season it’s going to cost me $20.
So, it looks like I’m going to be out of $20 in the near future.
Star Wars Rebels season 3 preview
Movies
Star Wars: Rogue One “Sizzle Reel”
Cool Sites
Saturday Morning Cartoons: “A collection of Saturday Morning (or Saturday-Morning-Like) cartoons and animated episodes.”
The Reading List
- Caution, May Backfire: Neuroscientists’ Open Letter To DIY Brain Hackers
- Sigourney Weaver says stalled Aliens sequel would ’give this woman an ending’
This week in pop-culture history
- 1984: The NeverEnding Story premiers in theaters
- 1985: Day of the Dead premiers in theaters
- 1986: Aliens opens in theaters
- 1996: The Frighteners opens in theaters
Aliens Week: Mondo Aliens posters
Aliens Week: James Cameron’s Aliens at 30
The first time I saw the movie Aliens I was 12 years old. It was a Saturday night and me, my brother and a cousin were all camped out on our living room floor one Saturday evening as we always did that summer. That particular night Aliens was set to premiere on HBO and we three had made it our mission that weekend to watch it since none of us had seen it yet.
And Aliens did not disappoint. Myself as a 12 year old loved it, my brother at eight was a little too young to get it but I think he liked it since his big brother liked it. But I think Aliens hit my ten year old cousin a little hard. When we finally decided to try and get some sleep after the movie had ended it was getting late and we all climbed into our sleeping bags in the dark of the living room. I’d begun to doze off when the air conditioner in the living room clicked on. At the time we had several window units around the house and when they’d automatically turn on from time to time there’d be a loud “snap” then a growl as the unit powered up and came to life.
To my cousin, this must’ve sounded like one of the alien monsters, which made him literally scream in reaction, jump up and dive for cover by the couch. It was only a momentary fright and he regained his senses a few seconds later and sheepishly came back to his sleeping bag and endless hours of ribbing from my brother and myself over him thinking the air conditioner was an alien.
That’s my strongest memory of the movie Aliens that turns 30 this year.
To me, Aliens is a seminal film. Before I always thought sci-fi was mostly things like Star Wars and re-runs of the original Star Trek. The universe of Star Wars might have been a lot dirtier than that of Star Trek, but both were similar in tone. The good guys always won and no one died who didn’t deserve it — or at least died in order to move the story along.
Aliens was quite a different “beast.”
The setting of Aliens from space ships to space stations to far off worlds feels real and lived in. Like a place that real people in a real future might call home. And in Aliens lots of people die — most of them just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Just like in real life, the universe of Aliens is a harsh place where things happen unexpectedly and not always fairly.
Even today I still watch Aliens about once a year and it’s still one of my favorite films. From the vistas of outer space to the Colonial Marines duking it out with the alien creatures to the character of Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), whom we knew had a strong survival streak in her from the first outing in Alien (1979) who gets to go into her “tough as nails get in her way and she’s going to throw you aside” persona Aliens works from start to finish. Even today in the era of movies costing hundreds of millions of dollars to create using specialized computer effects, the analog FX of Aliens are, dare I say, superior to what’s used in movies today.
The budget of Aliens in todays dollars is something like a little more than $40 million. To put that number into perspective, Captain America: The Winter Soldier cost something like $170 million.
And I think it’s these real special effects of real people in real environments fighting these “real” creatures that makes the movie work so well. Everything in Aliens feels believable and there’s nothing that happens that feels out of place or there to “show off.”
What I find fascinating is that the original Alien was brilliant and the different but also great Aliens was amazing, that none of the films that followed were ever able to match either the original or Aliens brilliance. I think that those two movies set such a high mark in the franchise as it were that everything that came after from Alien Resurrection to Alien vs Predator is simply trying to redo what was done so well in Aliens back in 1986.