Created Survivals

What I Watched This Week #172 (Apr 14-20) Alien dir. Ridley Scott/1979/1h57m One of the greatest sci-fi horror films of all time, Ridley Scott's Alien stars Sigourney Weaver as a member of a deep space mining crew who takes a detour to an SOS message on the long journey back to Earth, finding a crashed ship full of eggs. My favourite thing about this film after seeing it so many times is how worn and lived in the ship is. I totally believe that it's real and functional and that this crew has spent months living in it. The opening sequence where we explore the empty ship while the crew is in cryosleep not only builds tension but allows us to take in the incredible details in the production design. Speaking of design, H.R. Giger's design for the xenomorph is the best in movie history (though the lil guy who bursts out of John Hurt's chest is kinda cute and goofy looking). The aggressively ph*llic look of it works well with the very male perspective fear of r*pe and childbirth. The whole cast is excellent, alongside Weaver and Hurt you have Ian Holm, Harry Dean Stanton and Yaphet Kotto, the latter two making a great comedic double team. 9.5/10 Lime's Film of the Week! Now You See Me dir. Louis Leterrier/2013/1h56m Now You See Me tells the story of a group of Las Vegas magicians known as the Four Horsemen (Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Isla Fisher, Dave Franco) who rob banks live during their show, distributing the money to their audience. They are being tracked by Mark Ruffalo's FBI agent Rhodes who is determined to uncover their secrets. Totally forgettable fluff, there are some nice moments in here, and I liked the twist at the end even though you can see it coming a mile away. The big trick showpieces are entertaining in that artificial Vegas way that also feels hollow and meaningless. My biggest gripe here is with the four main characters and that I didn't like any of them. Like real magicians I found them to be annoying and so far up their own *sses that I was actively rooting against them every step of the way. The exception is Harrelson, though he comes close at times. There's solid support from Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman, with Ruffalo giving the best performance in the film. This is the definition of inoffensive cinematic background noise. 5/10 Cinderella dir. Georges Méliès/1899/6m Georges Méliès here with some more ground breaking work from the dawn of cinema. Not only is this the first film adaptation of Cinderella, it's also the first film adaptation of any fairy tale and also the first film to use dissolves to transition between scenes (with this being his first film with more than one scene). Watching this is to watch the evolution of film in real time, and, like the rest of his work, it's nothing less than magical. This is Méliès becoming more innovative and inventive with his films becoming more complex and technically demanding. The sets and costumes are beautifully detailed and like illustrations come to life. It's amazing to me that a film from the 19th century can still be so magical. 8/10 How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies dir. Pat Boonnitipat/2024/2h7m This family drama/comedy from Thailand stars Putthipong Assaratanakul as M, a lazy young man who has dropped out of college to try and start a streaming career ("wow four viewers" his mother chides early on). When he learns that his grandmother (Usha Seamkhum) has cancer he thinks that he can weasel his way to the top of her will by moving in with her to care for her. A tender and gentle film that also surprises with some pretty dark humour, I found this to be incredibly charming with two excellent lead performances from Assaratanakul and Seamkhum. Seamkhum is particularly impressive in her late in life film debut as the wily old woman who sees through all the bullsh*t from her grandson, but also sees something of herself in him. The plot is fairly predictable - of course the two will grow closer to each other and form a real bond by the time she dies - but the journey to that point, and the touching epilogue, I really enjoyed. There's a lot of family drama with the grandmother's children but it always feels close to reality and not emotionally manipulative or overly melodramatic at any point. 9/10 Shock Treatment dir. Jim Sharman/1981/1h34m Shock Treatment is a sequel to one of my all time favourite films, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and picks up with Brad and Janet (now played by Cliff DeYoung and Jessica Harper) a few years later with their marriage now on the rocks. To rectify this they appear on a TV show with the result being Brad getting committed to a psychiatric hospital run by Dr. Cosmo McKinley (Richard O'Brien) and Janet getting groomed for superstardom. This is perhaps even more bizarre than Rocky Horror, certainly more cynical, with the world now seeming to exists as a series of TV shows, a live studio audience never leaving, sleeping in their seats as the film happens on screens all around them. It's a strange dystopia that seems to predict the dominance TV would have over our lives to an even greater extent in the era of commercialism and Reganomics. If there's not a camera on you then you don't exist, like the antithesis of Rocky Horror's theme of "don't dream it, be it". Many of the Rocky Horror cast returns with the exception of Susan Sarandon and Barry Bostwick as Janet and Brad (though DeYoung and especially Harper do an excellent job in the roles) and most notably Tim Curry. I kept imagining him in the role played by Barry Humphries (most famous for playing Dame Edna Everage), a garishly sleazy host called Bert Schnick. Humphries is great, but we all know Curry would have been better. Another slight let down for me is the soundtrack. As a musical this doesn't really compare with Rocky Horror, though there are some catchy tunes in there, the main theme still popping into my head occasionally. 9/10 #21xoxo dir. Sine Ozbilge, Imge Ozbilge/2019/9m This animated short from Belgium shows a girl (Indra de Bruyn) and her experiences with online dating, hooking up with several men before finding a genuine connection. The most striking thing about this film is the striking visuals, with the film being rotoscoped, a process where live action footage is traced over by animators giving it natural movement, a process used by Disney for Snow White back in 1937. Here it's given a thoroughly modern makeover, with the screen bombarded with text and images and memes representing the experience of being chronically online. The aesthetic also calls to mind pop art of the 60's, showing that the digital world may be new but the problems of finding a partner are anything but. It's at times overwhelming, purposefully so, but there's still a cohesion between all these elements. The ending is a bit on the nose but it's well done, wrapping the whole thing up maybe a bit too neatly. 7/10 Toomas Beneath the Valley of the Wild Wolves dir. Chintis Lundgren, Drasko Ivezic/2019/18m Another animated short, this time from Estonia, this tells the story of Toomas (Drasko Ivezic), a wolf who is fired after turning down his boss's advances. With a wife and children to support he turns to prostitution and then gay p*rn. Meanwhile, his wife Viivi (Chintis Lundgren) is learning some things about herself thanks to militant feminist Alexandra Horn-Eye (Lee Delong). This reminded me a lot of Bug Diner, another charming and cheeky animation about sexuality and relationships starring anthropomorphic animals. That was stop motion while this is animated in a simple yet effective style, the linework wobbling between frames like Doug, the 90's cartoon. Like Bug Diner, this is also a very mature film with more human characters than a lot of live action films that tackle the same subjects. 8.5/10 No Home But Cinema: The Spaces of Chantal Akerman dir. Jessica McGoff/2025/14m (no trailer for this, so here's one for a similar film) This short essay film explores the films of Chantal Akerman through her use of space and locations, how she films them, how she moves through them and what they represent. McGoff doesn't narrate this film, rather her essay is presented as text on the screen over clips from films that illustrate her points. I like this approach and how it's executed. The text isn't presented in blocks but line by line and is edited with the rhythm of the film clips so that they're unobtrusive and allow you to fully immerse in the various worlds of Akerman. This doesn't go too in depth with any of her observations as they are things you will pick up on by just watching the films, but it would work as a good introduction to her and what to look out for in her work. 7/10 Hotel Monterey dir. Chantal Akerman/1973/1h3m (no trailer so have an extended clip) Staying with Chantal Akerman, Hotel Monterey is an observational documentary in which she explores the titular hotel, a cheap one in New York where she stayed when she first moved to the city, from the lobby to the roof. It starts off at night where her camera captures people milling about in the lobby, taking the elevators up and down. She then prowls the corridors like a ghost, her very formally structured compositions bringing out the textures of the grimy yellow walls. Methodically we move upwards until we are on the roof, it is day now, and the feeling of escape is palpable. We do this all in silence, and I mean total silence. No music, no background noise, nothing. Not only does this make us even more aware of what we're seeing on screen, but it also makes us aware of our own environment. An exploration of space is happening on the screen and in real life at the same time and it's kind of amazing once you notice that. It's like Akerman speaking out of time saying here I am, where are you? This also feels like a prelude to her masterful film News From Home, in which she takes the same approach but expands it to the whole city, though this time with sound. This totally isn't for everyone, it's not even close to what you'd call entertaining, but if you give it a chance you'll get so much out of it. 8.5/10

Local Hero (1983) dir Bill Forsyth A great early 80s British light comedy drama. Peter Reigert (who I have never seen in anything else) plays Mac, a lawyer / accountant / fixer working for Texas based Happer oil. The CEO, Mr Happer (Burt Lancaster), sends Mac to oversee the purchase of an entire Scottish fishing village that they want to demolish to build a new oil terminal. Mac expects at least some of the villagers, led by their lawyer / accountant / hotel manager Gordon Urquart (Denis Lawson - Wedge from Star Wars), to put up somewhat of a fight. But they are not quite the simple folk he expects. They already know what is going on and Urquart intends to squeeze as much cash as possible from the big oil company. It also co-stars a young Peter Capaldi, almost unrecognisable at times, as Oldsen, a Scottish Happer Oil employee assigned to help Mac and Jenny Seagrove as marine biologist Marina, working for them in what she knows is really just a job to generate good PR in case of environmental problems. Marina has slightly webbed feet, making her seem a bit like a mermaid as she swims, which her job requires a lot of. This is possibly a nod to the Jerry Anderson puppet show Stingray that had a mermaid called Marina. (And maybe having watched Team America last week this is what subconsciously made me decide to watch this film that I have seen many times before). It also features a host of other faces, mainly Scottish actors, familiar to anyone who has watched a lot of British TV over the years, like me. But sometimes it takes a while to recognise them, because this was made over 40 years ago. One of the non-Scots is Christopher Rozycki, who is great as the captain of a Soviet fishing trawler that makes frequent visits to the village. He quite clearly is not a believer in the political ideology of his homeland. He has a great line I wish I could remember word for word, but at one point he says to Mac something like “Don't look so worried. You are doing a great thing here. You are making people very rich!”. It is a beautifully made film, technically very, very good. It's set mainly in the village, but starts in Houston and switches back there a couple of times and has some stunning scenes of the Scottish countryside and coast. There's no great tension to the story, no massive plot twists. It's quite a gentle tale of Mac falling in love with the village he has basically come to destroy, but the locals just wanting the money. Forsyth got a well deserved BAFTA for the direction and a nomination for the original script. It also got a number of other worthy nominations including Chris Menges' cinematography and Mark Knopfler's modern score that includes the iconic “Going home” guitar – saxophone instrumental that accompanies the end credits. The only acting one was for Lancaster but the rest of the cast are very good, even down to some quite minor roles. I do have to pick it up on a couple of factual issues. The village is shown on a map in North West Scotland, but the oil is (was) all on the east, in the North Sea between Scotland and Norway. And I know, from a friend who used to live there and remembers the filming, it was mainly filmed on location in various villages on the east coast. The other thing might have been a deliberate joke at the expense of Hollywood. This is when Marina is showing Oldsen a colony of what are described as grey seals, but what we see on screen are quite clearly sea-lions, the sort you might well see in California but certainly not Scotland! Those don't really detract from the overall film though which is one of my all time favourites. 10 / 10

@LimeGreenLegend I remember watching some of Threads when at school, maybe a year or so after it was released, as part of an English project on nuclear weapons. I didn't live in Sheffield then, which I seem to recall making it seem more distant and as teenagers we kind of dismissed it with a "this can't happen to us" type of attitude. I do intend watching it at some point, I noticed it on iplayer, probably not this weekend.