Quick thoughts on last night’s Alien/Aliens double-feature.
Alamo Drafthouse Cinema
- Alamo has the best “turn off your phone or else” spots I’ve ever seen. Very B-movie and pretty funny.
- I had the chili burger that had some clever name I don’t remember. It came with a good amount of fries, both burger and fries were very good, and it was reasonably priced. (By which I mean it was only 25% higher than you might find in a regular restaurant.)
- They had $4.50 soft drinks with free refills. That might be worth going there to the movies all by itself.
- More importantly, they had $4.50 tea with free refills. Forgettable tea, but still, tea!
- This was my first time to Alamo, and first time to a theater that serves food. It was not quite as annoying as I expected, but it was close. It seems a little hypocritical to be threatening people who distract you with your phones with a woman-eating bed when there are wait-people coming around every fifteen minutes carrying on conversations with people next to or behind or in front of you who weren’t clear with their order slip or who didn’t read the menu before the movie started or any of sixteen other reasons they feel the need to talk to them.
- Having a lot of really great-smelling food all around you for two hours is extremely persuasive. If you think you’re not going to eat when you go, think again.
- They debuted a preview of an upcoming double feature of Friday the 13th VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan and The Muppets Take Manhattan to a large round of laughter and applause. “Jason and the Muppets Take Manhattan” is a real thing, to be shown on the only Friday the 13th of this year (next month), and if Trump doesn’t make you scared for America’s future, that should.
- That’s still a pretty funny idea, though.
Alien
- What a great movie.
- When you know what to look for, Ash looks like a plant from the very first scene he’s in. Of course, we didn’t know to look for forty years ago.
- I’d forgotten Tom Skerritt was ever that young.
- The alien is on-screen, in one form or another, a lot longer than I remember. It’s only five minutes or so total, but I would have said “two” if you’d asked me before.
- What a great movie.
Aliens
- I’d only seen about twenty minutes of it prior to this, so this was essentially a first-time viewing for me.
- What a mediocre movie. A sequel, in other words.
- “Hey, let’s do all the exact same stuff as the first movie, but throw in a bunch of big guns and bombs (of the explosive as well as f- variety).”
- In spite of being seven years later, its special effects haven’t held up nearly as well as those in Alien. The original Star Trek aerial shots looked better than these.
- “Where are all the eggs coming from?” What do you mean, where are all the eggs coming from? There was a football field of eggs in the first movie. There were enough eggs to impregnate (their word, not mine) four colonies, much less one.
- If I was a Marine, I’d have sued Cameron for defamation of character.
- Speaking of him, I don’t understand the fascination. This, Titanic, Avatar, all entirely forgettable (and occasionally boring) movies, yet he made billions from them. Of course, people vote for Trump, too.
- For the SAT takers out there, Alien is to Aliens as Ghostbusters is to Ghostbusters 2. And Sigourney Weaver was in all of them. (She makes great initial decisions, but not so good second ones.)