I liked the first Alien movie, and loved the second. Thought Alien³ was dreadful, and found Alien Resurrection even worse, After that I quit watching. But I was encouraged this time around because I liked director Fede Álvarez' movie Don't Breathe, and hoped this latest installment in the Alien franchise would be a good one. Well, that, and it was my wife's turn to pick a movie.
Sure enough, Alien: Romulus delivers. It takes its time getting to the action, and the various characters aren't all that interesting, so it's slow going until the aliens arrive. But things are straightforward ... no artsy-fartsy stuff here. A decision was made to use mostly old-school special effects, and that's nice ... you feel for the actors when you can't deflect your fear into "well, they're acting against CGI in front of a green screen".
James Cameron's Aliens remains the standard against which all other Alien movies fall short, but Romulus is as good as the first in the series. And Cailee Spaeny in the lead pulls off a cool special effect of her own: Sigourney Weaver's 6'0" height helped make her Ellen Ripley an iconic part of the franchise, but Spaeny is also quite believable as a bad ass in Romulus, and it seems even more amazing, given she is only 5'1".
Alma's Rainbow has an interesting history. It was the first feature for writer/director Ayoka Chenzira, who had made several shorts. It was self-funded by Chenzira, and featured a cast of unknowns ... heck, 30 years later, and I still didn't recognize anyone but Isaiah Washington, who had a small role. The talent behind the camera was impressive, including editor Lillian Benson, cinematographer Ronald K. Gray, and costume designer Sidney Kai Innis, all of them new to me. The film looks great, helped by a fairly recent 4k restoration.
It's a coming-of-age movie, and I love the title: Rainbow is the daughter of Alma. It's a slice of life, and it offers a lot of insight into the culture of African-American women. There is a confidence in the film making that makes the movie feel "real". The acting is solid ... there's pretty much nothing bad I can say about the movie. It doesn't jump out at you, nor is that Chenzira's intention. It's never boring, and something is always catching your eye. It's an indie film that succeeds. It was ignored at the time, and was barely distributed, but the restoration resulted in the film finally getting the attention it has always deserved. It is one of 75 films selected for Slate's New Black Film Canon.
I used to tell an anecdote about El Norte ... well, "used to" isn't quite right, since I'm still telling it, but this took place long ago and I'm not sure anymore if I remember it right. El Norte was originally supposed to show on PBS, but a positive reception at festivals led to it being released first to theaters. Thus, it was a couple of years before it made it to TV, which is where I saw it, so we're talking around 1985. So don't hold me to the accuracy of this anecdote, but as I remember, there is a scene where Enrique, an indigenous Mayan from Guatemala, is planning to escape to the north with his sister. A friend explains that once the border patrol figures out they are from Guatemala, they will send them back home, and he advises Enrique to pretend he is Mexican. The way to do this, says the friend, is to say "fuck" all the time, because that's how Mexicans talk. (This actually works when they get to the border into the United States.) Here is the scene:
Now, what I no longer remember is whether the dialogue or the subtitles were censored by PBS. My memory is, it was the subtitles, and the words "fucking" and "fuck" were missing from the titles. What was funny, though, is that the soundtrack wasn't changed, so anyone who either spoke Spanish or knew Spanish street language could hear "chingada" coming through loud and clear.
El Norte came from the team of writer/director Gregory Nava and writer Anna Thomas. The two received an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay. Twelve years later, they were responsible for one of my all-time favorite films, Mi Familia, followed by the biopic Selena (which only Nava worked on), which made a big impact. Since Selena, though, Nava has only directed two films, written one, and created the TV series American Family. The last of these was in 2006. Nava is still with us, and is apparently a mentor to young film makers, but 2006 was a long time ago, and I can find nothing to explain his absence.
El Norte feels real. When the siblings get to the U.S., everything seems liberating, and Nava/Thomas allow us to experience this as the characters do. Eventually, reality sets in, but as in Mi Familia, we are meant to respect the experiences of the characters, both at home and in the States, with an emphasis on feelings ... there is no stinting on emotion.
Britney Spears, "...Baby One More Time". 17-year-old Britney puts the Mickey Mouse Club in her rearview mirror. In 2020, Rolling Stone named this the #1 debut single of all time.
Lou Bega, "Mambo No. 5". Lou Bega was born in Germany to a Ugandan father and an Italian mother. He reworked Cuban Pérez Prado's 1949 hit ... it was a worldwide smash. It was Bega's only top-40 recording in the United States.
TLC, "No Scrubs". Won the Pazz & Jop poll as the #1 single of 1999 ("Baby One More Time" was #19, Lou Bega nowhere to be found).
Your reaction to Civil War will depend, I think, on your expectations going in. I doubt I'm the only person who looked forward to a dystopic look at a near-future America, with clear parallels to the era of Trump. And that's not an inaccurate summary of the plot. What is missing, purposely so as far as I can tell, is a detailed examination of how America got to the point of Civil War. Alex Garland didn't want to "take sides", and he wasn't as interested in how we got there as he was is showing where "there" was, and how it affected his characters. So Civil War is less about the war, and more about its impact on Americans, in particular, journalists.
There is a lot of fine acting in Civil War, especially from Kirsten Dunst. Alex Garland has picked up quite a troupe over the years ... for example, half-a-dozen of the members of this cast were also in his mini-series Devs. They do what they can to enliven the interpersonal relationships between the various journalists, but I found those sections hit-or-miss, and I preferred the action scenes, which raised the film to another level.
Things could be worse. Civil War is an intelligent, well-made, thought-provoking movie. But for me, Ex-Machina remains his best.
This is the first film I have watched in "My Letterboxd Season Challenge 2024-25", a "33-week-long community challenge" where "you must watch one previously unseen film that fits the criteria of the theme for the week." This is the 10th annual challenge, and my sixth time participating (previous years can be found at "2019-20", "2020-21", "2021-22", "2022-23", and 2023-24). Week 1 is called "The American History of X Week":
Hollywood has a fickle relationship with the letter X. These days it's a popular (if increasingly uninspired) choice for the rare franchise that makes it to a tenth installment: The Land Before Time, Friday the 13th, The Fast and Furious, and Saw have all adopted the roman numeral. But before this new millennium fad, X meant something very different.
In 1968, in response to the desire for a more faceted system of ratings—and, in its early days, to promote the kind of artistic freedom the Motion Picture Production Code had quashed—the MPAA replaced its "approved" and "not approved" seals with a quartet of letters: G, M, R, and X. The X-rating indicated, simply, that a film was appropriate for adults only.
Soon after, in 1969, Midnight Cowboy burst onto the scene. Worried about exposing youngsters to the film's frank homosexual content and depictions of drug use, United Artists chose to self-apply the X-rating, hoping the choice would not only protect American youth but drum up publicity, too. Because the MPAA had failed to trademark their new content advisory system, everyone from Walt Disney to Gerard Damiano (director of Deep Throat) could slap any rating they wished on their work. And the porn industry wished. Once the floodgates had opened, however, the X-rating didn't last long. By 1973, Hollywood studios had given up on the rating (the adult film industry's tongue-in-cheek co-opting having soured it), and the purveyors of explicit films had done the same, instead preferring to use "XXX" to denote the strength of the adult content in their movies. The X-rating languished in Hollywood until 1990 (although independent and international filmmakers didn't shy away), when the MPAA replaced it with the newly minted—and trademarked—NC-17.
To kick off The Letterboxd Season Challenge's tenth installment (LSC10, incidentally, not LSCX), we take a look back at the original era of X. This week's challenge is to watch a mainstream (non-porn) MPAA X-rated film from the rating's 22-year lifespan, conveniently compiled in this list from C Collins.
In 1971, Huey Newton wrote an extensive analysis of Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, beginning, "It is the first truly revolutionary Black film made and it is presented to us by a Black man." Newton found the film ripe for explication, and his lengthy piece provides insight into the film and the times. Watching Sweet Sweetback in 2024, we recognize it as a movie of its times, but it retains relevance today, for the situation for black men in America is only partly improved from 1971.
Speaking solely in terms of its impact on American cinema, Sweet Sweetback is trendsetting. Yes, it was "rated X by an all-white jury", and it comes by that rating honestly, with several seemingly unsimulated sex scenes. There is also extreme violence, but these scenes affect us differently depending on who is performing the violence. When white men beat black men, we feel anger ... when black men retaliate, we feel redemption.
As a kid, I remember hearing music on FM radio made by Van Peebles. It was like nothing I'd heard, a combination of jazzy underpinnings and poetic readings. Van Peebles told of lives outside of my white suburban situation, and it was memorable ... it opened up some odd new worlds. Van Peebles is present on the soundtrack to Sweet Sweetback, backed by Earth, Wind & Fire, who released their first two albums in 1971. What sounded like music from outer space on the radio makes perfect sense as the accompaniment to Sweetback's adventures.
Van Peebles worked on a very low budget, partly because no big studios would finance him, although that gave him the independence he needed. He uses an experimental touch at times ... the film has roots in the French New Wave. Things get repetitive near the end, but it doesn't ruin the movie. There is a clear auteur behind the film, as befits a movie where the same person is producer, director, writer, editor, star, and soundtrack contributor. No one else could have made Sweet Sweetback. Along with Shaft, also released in 1971, Sweetback also kicked off the blaxploitation genre.