Alien: Romulus (2024)

The seventh feature film in the Alien franchise was directed and cowritten by Fede Alvarez. Alvarez, 47, has proved himself in the horror realm (Don’t Breathe) and inserting himself into ongoing franchises (the 2013 Evil Dead). So maybe he was a natural for making the best Alien movie in nearly 40 years. In fact, part of his shtick here is drawing skillfully on the first two movies even as he gleefully careens around a barrage of excellent original SF predicaments. He uses the spooky confines of decrepit spaceware floating in space, as in the first picture, and he composes a closeup shot of our hero Rain (Cailee Spaeny) confronting one of the creatures in profile, as in the second. Rain’s android friend Andy (David Jonsson) saves her from one attack saying, “Get away from her. You bitch.” But my favorite hark to the past is reviving Ian Holm from the first picture as the android Ash. They had to obtain permission from the estate of Holm, who died in 2020, to use his likeness (from the Lord of the Rings shoot). The rest is busy-busy special effects. It closes a neat circle in the larger enterprise. Ash is just as deceptive and manipulative here as he was in 1979. Romulus also gives us a new word for the alien (or at least new to me), mostly replacing “xenomorph” with “parisitoid.” Whatever. The picture runs nearly a full two hours but rarely flags. Romulus is intense and can be scary and it was a relief that Alvarez never goes jokey on us, which would probably not be hard with this “perfect organism” we know so well now that we could likely pass a pop quiz with ease on its properties: the face-hugger stage, the chest-bursting stage, the unstoppable acid for blood, the speed and cunning. There might be a little more biology to Romulus, as some cross-breeding happens between alien and human, which I’m pretty sure is new. The result is suitably horrifying, though weirdly too reminiscent of Terminator CGI to truly enjoy. I liked Romulus nearly as much as the first two pictures in the franchise, Alien and Aliens, which is not a low bar. Forget 3, Resurrection, Prometheus, and Covenant. Romulus should be your next stop after the first two.

The Shrinking Man (1956)

Richard Matheson’s next novel after I Am Legend went on to become one of the great 1950s science fiction movies, huffing up the title to The Incredible Shrinking Man. Matheson wrote the screenplay and, in fact, improves the story by making it much more straightforward in time. This novel is constantly hopping all over the place, from when the main guy, the shrinking man, is trapped in the cellar, missing and presumed dead by his family, to sections labeled by his height: 68”, 35”, etc. It feels similarly unfocused by perspective. Sometimes things seem larger or smaller than they should from descriptions in the same passage. I could also do without the masculine panic as he goes from 6’2” to subatomic, which reminds me of another complaint, this thing about shrinking proportionally at the rate of 1/7” per day. WTF is 1/7”? Just say an inch per week and leave the rest of the math to us. On the other hand most of this takes place in the previous week, so maybe that’s what you have to do. Another point that worried me is the sense that the structure of the novel by definition makes the timeline 74 weeks, from 74 inches to nil. It wasn’t that clear and I had the sense more time was elapsing, maybe even years, but maybe Matheson was true to the concept after all. The Shrinking Man is thus disorienting but not necessarily in good ways. Maybe I’m not the one to ask. I didn’t go much for I Am Legend either. Matheson is a good, active writer and still highly readable even when he can feel a little lost here. There are too many Hemingwayesque issues with masculinity and it is too easily read in contexts that developed after 1956 as panic about losing positions of power men had previously dominated. To be clear, I don’t think Matheson thought of it consciously that way at all, but that’s where his imagination went. He liked the possibilities of steady shrinkage (as George Costanza once yelped) and somehow it became something about satisfying women (that is, pacifying them). Matheson is famous for an ugly imagination. His vampire stories are particularly hard for me to read. This one manages to evade a lot of that, but I take the movie, with its own flaws, as Matheson’s second draft, with improvements. Hard to talk about fears of sexual inadequacy in a 1950s movie, which also helps.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over. (Library of America)

The Band (1969)

I like the second album from the Band (or “The Band”) more than the first. It’s definitely a big-brother album in my life, in this case the big brother of a neighborhood friend. I felt pressure to like it even as I never connected much with it. In the aftermath of 1968, a lot of the counterculture-oriented groups seemed to be seeking a kind of downhome comfort-rock. Sometimes it works. It’s easy enough to just play the album and try to let it come to you, though it’s often boring. Sometimes it hits in spite of my larger misgivings about the project. I have never liked the song “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” for example, not by Joan Baez, not by the Band. It was written by Robbie Robertson—within the confines of the copyright disputes among the Bandmates—and always struck me as unattractive pretend-old stoic warbling. I’ve cringed though it so much I can’t even tell you. At one time you could not get away from it. The Baez version went to #3 in 1971 and I’ve had friends and read the critics who are into the whole Bob Dylan / Band industrial complex and made it part of the air we breathe. Yet the last time I played through The Band I found myself singing along with “Dixie.” Go figure. It might mean I’m in denial about liking it or it might mean I sing to cope when I should be just using the skip button. I’m not sure why I have so much resistance to skipping songs when I listen to albums. Somehow it feels like cheating. Anyway, the only song I actively like here is “Up on Cripple Creek” (a #25 hit in 1969), another good singalong, but even then it’s not like I love it. I give it maybe a 7 of 10. “Jawbone” is another song I like enough to notice; specifically I like its deliberateness. But most of the rest of The Band just passes me by like wallpaper. I will say one of the most interesting things about the Band is the range of strong lead vocals, provided on different songs by three of the five players, working and interweaving distinctly but within a range. Only Garth Hudson (my favorite) and Robbie Robertson abstain from singing (or yowling, as the occasion warrants). Last point: In recent years I’ve seen the album referred to as the “Brown Album” (presumably because it’s self-titled in the middle of their career like the Beatles’ White Album or a crayola rainbow of self-titled releases from Weezer). Maybe The Band has always been the Brown Album, but I have never in my life heard anyone refer to it that way. Brown like the loamy earth, I’m going to guess, not brown like shit.

Another Woman (1988)

USA, 81 minutes

Director/writer: Woody Allen

Photography: Sven Nykvist

Music: Erik Satie, Woody Allen’s record collection

Editor: Susan E. Morse

Cast: Gena Rowlands, Ian Holm, Gene Hackman, Sandy Dennis, Mia Farrow, Blythe Danner, Betty Buckley, Martha Plimpton, John Houseman, Harris Yulin, Frances Conroy

Director and writer Woody Allen’s movie about the bourgeois in New York City entering their 50s is surprisingly very good. I suspect a good deal of that, especially nowadays with his reputation in shreds, is because this is one of his rare movies in which he does not appear. It doesn’t hurt that the cast is stellar: Gena Rowlands and Gene Hackman are excellent, as usual. Others—Betty Buckley, Sandy Dennis, John Houseman—have small roles but make the most of them. I also got a kick out of seeing a youthful Frances Conroy, who went on to the TV series Six Feet Under more than 10 years later.

It's still a Woody Allen movie, specifically in his “serious” key, aping the greats of European cinema, usually Ingmar Bergman. For Another Woman he hired cinematographer Sven Nykvist, hailing from the Bergman stable (Scenes From a Marriage, Fanny and Alexander, Cries & Whispers). He throws a coat of brown / golden / sepia over the proceedings, which gives the picture an aura of something from the past. This was their first collaboration, but Woody and Nykvist ended up working on a few more films together. Another Woman draws on the reminiscing structure and wistful, nostalgic notes of Bergman’s Wild Strawberries with an interestingly complicated scenario. Gena Rowlands is Marion Post, a tenured professor of German philosophy who reads Rilke for pleasure. Her life has reached a point where it suddenly falls apart.

“The Premonition” (1992)

Here’s another remarkable story by Joyce Carol Oates from her Haunted collection. Kirkus Reviews called it the best of the bunch in a rave review from 1994. I’m more inclined to give that honor to the title story, but this one is awfully good too. It never outright tells us what it is at elaborate pains to make perfectly clear. A few days before Christmas, Whitney has a premonition about his older brother Quinn. He drives over to Quinn’s mansion to check on him. There is a rumor Quinn has started drinking again after 11 months of sullenly attending AA meetings under some type of intervention pressure. His wife and two daughters are often bruised or patched up. Quinn is the obvious culprit. He has been brazenly planning to spend the holidays in the Seychelles with a girlfriend. So it’s not surprising Whitney would have a bad feeling about Quinn any time he thought about him. He is trouble itself walking around. When Whitney gets to Quinn’s place Quinn is not there but his wife Ellen and the girls Molly and Trish are, all of them in strangely high spirits. Molly is 14 and Trish 11. The house is in some disarray, with half-packed boxes and trunks and suitcases all over the place. They don’t seem to know where Quinn is. He’s gone on business, and they say they’ll be hearing from him when he finishes his business trip, when they plan to meet in Europe. It’s all quite vague, but it’s obvious the traditional family Christmas is off for this year. Still, they are happy and excited to see Whitney, the girls’ “favorite uncle.” The clues become more obvious—by the shape and size of some of the boxes, and the bathtub has been recently scrubbed with kitchen cleanser. Oates establishes a narrative tempo that enables her to use misdirection skillfully. She never has to tell us what probably happened, and she never does. She just plants it in our heads, where it festers. It’s likely that the probable slaughter in its vivid details (as imagined) is what we will remember of this story, even though Oates refrains entirely from doing any more than suggesting it by implication. We learn enough about Quinn that we never lose sympathy for Ellen and the girls even as our certainty about what they did only grows. The story—the collection—is more evidence that Oates is one of the best writers of short horror we’ve got.

Joyce Carol Oates, Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque
Story not available online.

Pets, “Cha Hua Hua” (1958)

[listen up!]

The Pets were a group of studio hands—drummer Earl Palmer is the only name I recognize in the quartet—who had a #34 hit with this exotic and deeply silly instrumental, which became a staple among Latino acts. I see that my streaming service offers versions by the Crownstars, Tito Gomes & Orquestra Riverside, Orquestra Riverside with sole credit, and Joe Lubin & Orquestra Riverside again (I believe Lubin was cowriter of the song, with someone named Irving Roth, who is also apparently the arranger ... note that information about this song is scant on the internet). There are more, some sounding like the same recording with different artist credits. But it does not have this version by the Pets, unfortunately, which is the first I heard and still my favorite. For my fix I have to go to youtube or the Volume 3 CD of the Ace label’s invaluable series The Golden Age of American Rock ‘n’ Roll. “Cha-Hua-Hua” (pronounce it “chihuahua”) attacks with something that sounds like a bubbly game show interlude and then quickly pivots to churning, soaring proto-Star Trek vocals, women putting it over in the high registers. The falling-forward momentum behind it is irresistible—beautiful, driving, single-minded, full of the drama of science fiction. After about 30 or 40 seconds of that (on a 2:15 track) and a quick cha-cha-cha it lapses into more conventional rock ‘n’ roll, eventually with a chattering alto sax solo (Plas Johnson). Have no fear, it’s good classic rock ‘n’ roll and outer space is never far again. I seem to find myself playing it a lot on repeat until I’ve had enough.

The History of Sound (2025)

This period romance plays around with a few interesting ideas but the whole of it unfortunately ends up somewhat muddled. It’s 1917—at first the picture acts like it’s going to be a coming-of-age story about a musical prodigy, Lionel Worthing (primarily Paul Mescal as the younger version, with Chris Cooper finishing up as Lionel’s older self). Lionel’s musical abilities later seem to be merely the explanation for his worldly mobility, with scholarships and good jobs. As an adolescent Lionel studies at the Boston Conservatory, where he meets David White (Josh O’Connor). Two lonely gay guys, they soon bond over folk music. Lionel is native to Kentucky and knows lots of material from his family and neighbors. David knows lots of material too—he has been on numerous song-collecting jaunts, making field recordings. And it’s not long before Lionel and David are embarked on a song-collecting expedition of their own, with a box of wax cylinders in tow, in Maine. Maine struck me as an unlikely destination for such a venture but it’s not beyond the realm of possibility and in any event avoids distractions by keeping things race-neutral, if that was the intent. The picture reminded me of Brokeback Mountain in the way Lionel and David have such stark mixed feelings about their love affair. Lionel seems to be more accepting of his sexuality but David is obviously uncomfortable. And it’s not just the sex. David has lots of ongoing internal issues that he doesn’t talk about much. The History of Sound dodges around its many cliché traps and is often neatly done, with surprises and various wrenching turns. It finishes with a Joy Division B-side playing on the soundtrack, “Atmosphere.” How you get from Alan Lomax to Ian Curtis is something you might be wondering, and will likely continue wondering. For all the folk music and country blues that dot the soundtrack here, director Oliver Hermanus and writer Ben Shattuck (from two of his short stories) keep moving us beyond what we think we’re going to get. It’s not exactly coming-of-age and it’s not exactly ethnomusicology. It plays a somewhat tiresome fan dance with those elements before settling on further confusion. But the performances are good and the characters felt acutely real to me in many ways. I wanted to like this one more than I did—some parts are very good.

“Seymour, an Introduction” (1959)

[2010 write-up here]

This long piece by J.D. Salinger is generally considered among the least of what he published in book form. Its companion story, “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters,” gets most of the accolades for the #3 bestselling book in 1963. Fair enough. The complaints about self-indulgence and such are warranted. This is a writer drunk on his own talent and abilities. Formally it is Buddy Glass, oldest surviving boy in the Glass family, but arguably it may be J.D. Salinger perhaps working through his war experience, represented by Seymour’s suicide. When Buddy talks about his published fiction here, it can sound a lot like Salinger’s story “Teddy” and his novel The Catcher in the Rye. But for me, “Seymour, an Introduction” is the point where I fell for Salinger for the second time, after Catcher four or five years earlier when I was 15. At the time I read “Seymour” for the first time I was working nights full-time in a nursing home. On nights off I had to decide whether to readjust to a daytime schedule or just stay up all night and sleep through the days, maintaining continuity. Reading “Seymour” was on the latter schedule, reading all night, and there I was in step with Buddy, who was writing this chronicle at night, sometimes all night, for several nights. I felt right in step with him and loved his surges of energy. But this last time reading it I felt more the sadness that was giving Buddy such headwinds. He’s trying to keep up the brave front, but he’s writing less every night. He’s stuck on giving a physical description of Seymour, which is ultimately so shattered I still have only the vaguest idea of what Seymour looks like—or looks like, as Buddy would put it. It’s sadder and sadder and finally this “introduction” disappears into itself and walks away. I was left thinking the self-indulgence is all Buddy, and none Salinger himself, orchestrating a wallop that sneaks up on you sideways. It’s heartbreaking. It’s more than 10 years since Seymour’s death and Buddy still misses him so keenly he can’t stand it. And neither can I, in sympathy. I really think this may be the best Glass family story we have. UNLESS WE GET TO SEE SOME MORE. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER.

J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour, an Introduction
Read story online.

Revels, “Dead Man’s Stroll” (1959)

[listen up!]

The Stroll was a dance popularized by the Diamonds in 1958 with their vaguely bawdy #4 hit of the same name, following their moments in the spotlight, “Little Darlin’” (#2, 1957) and “Silhouettes” (#10, 1957). On the dance floor I understand the formal Stroll was a kind of descendant of the Virginia reel, with a line of men on one side and women on the other, facing each other. Couples step out one at a time, gyrating in unison to the slow tempo. The tempo suggests it was intended as a slow dance interlude, always popular of course at these affairs. In fact, chances are good that lots of dance occasions skipped the line part as participants wrapped their arms around their baby and swayed and shuffled with abandon. The next year the Revels, a Philly act, cracked the top 40 (#35) with this Halloween novelty. For delicate reasons of decorum, no doubt, the song was also released as “Midnight Stroll.” But they sing “dead man” in that version too. Two things I love about this oddball from late in the first wave of rock ‘n’ roll: the drumroll and gloomy church bell that opens and closes it, which with the tempo sets an appropriately somber and sobering tone, and the unexpected maniacal laughter that stands in as a solo at the break, girded by a phalanx of saxophones. “Ah ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha,” etc. Chilling, really, surprisingly so. It’s a cackle that belongs in the movies and would stand with the best. I get the impression the Revels & co. were doing all they could to make this as scary as possible and they basically succeeded by the standards of those more innocent times (compare Dickie Lee’s 1963 “Laurie [Strange Things Happen]”). The church bells, the laughter, the scenes described at the cemetery (“I never thought I could see such a sight / A poor soul doing the Dead Man’s Stroll”). It’s a pretty stiff drink overall, at least for its times and for me too. I almost think it should be as much of a Halloween staple as “Monster Mash.”

“If There Were No Benny Cemoli” (1963)

This story by Philip K. Dick is more like a paranoid dystopia all dressed up in sci-fi trappings. Aliens from Proxima Centauri have arrived to investigate, 10 years later, an all-out atomic war that occurred on Earth and led to massive destruction. There are a lot of levels and much complexity to the investigation and indeed to the story, with a Phildickian take on media coverage and distribution that he has used elsewhere and I’ve never quite understood, called “homeopapes.” Whatever it is exactly, it’s how news information gets around in this slice of the PKD universe. The group responsible for the war is still at large and they have taken control of the “cephalon” of the homeopape. My online dictionary defines “cephalon” as “(in some arthropods, especially trilobites) the region of the head, composed of fused segments.” So a somewhat distractingly precise way of saying brain or central processing unit. Maybe it’s me but I’m not sure Dick always gives us enough context. Anyway, the spy-craft villains are using the homeopapes to set up a more or less fictional character (albeit a real person, or patsy), one Benny Cemoli, to be framed for starting the war. They’re pretty sure they can outwit the alien investigators. This story is more short on Dick’s high concepts and works mostly as a kind of bitter, cynical spy story in a dystopic world. I’m turning to the internet for help on homeopapes. They also appeared in Ubik and I’m getting the definition “An automated device that produces a newspaper without human assistance.” In today’s parlance, a news feed made out of algorithms. So more of a production idea than distribution, presumably accessed via personal electronic devices, although who knows what Dick might have been thinking of in 1963. The subterfuge / propaganda work is only moderately compelling now. It feels like it’s been done a lot—start with Nineteen Eighty-Four—but maybe it felt more fresh in 1963. Sometimes it’s more evident than others that speed was basically Dick’s drug of choice. Paranoia gets to be a prime mode of thinking and then, in that frame of mind, the intricacies of betrayal and getting over can seem almost heroic, even though often they are not.

Philip K. Dick, The Preserving Machine
Story not available online.

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)

New Zealand / USA / UK, 228 minutes

Director: Peter Jackson

Writers: J.R.R. Tolkien, Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson

Photography: Andrew Lesnie

Music: Howard Shore

Editor: John Gilbert

Cast: Elijah Wood, Sean Astin, Ian McKellen, Liv Tyler, Viggo Mortensen, Cate Blanchett, John Rhys-Davies, Billy Boyd, Dominic Monaghan, Orlando Bloom, Christopher Lee, Hugo Weaving, Sean Bean, Ian Holm, Andy Serkis, Peter Jackson

A friend once told me he thought director and cowriter Peter Jackson seemed intent and focused on “going after the whales,” by which I think he meant the biggest and most popular film subjects available: eight or nine hours on one part of the Beatles’ career ... a complex restoration of World War I footage ... the Nth King Kong picture. And, of course, arguably the greatest fantasy property of the 20th century, J.R.R. Tolkien’s trilogy The Lord of the Rings (Jackson would unfortunately later show his predilections for bloat in his adaptation of The Hobbit, which ran about as long as his treatment of the trilogy, though it’s by far the shortest of the four novels).

Until The Lord of the Rings Jackson was something of a schlockmeister, tucked away Down Under in New Zealand and Australia, lobbing gore and chuckles in the spectacles of 1987’s Bad Taste and 1992’s Dead Alive. He had transition movies in the ‘90s, notably the exquisite and disturbing Heavenly Creatures along with the mockumentary Forgotten Silver. We can see better now that everything before The Lord of the Rings was the work of a craftsman who was very good and getting better at making movies—and had the making of this movie specifically in mind. But was anyone prepared for Jackson taking on something of the scope and ambition of adapting Tolkien’s classic quest tale, complete with Middle Earth elves, dwarves, orcs, hobbits, and other creatures of the ancient Anglo-Saxon imagination? It is something Jackson wanted to do all his life and I, for one, was frankly amazed to see him get the opportunity. But he did and he made the most of it.

New Year memo

Happy Unbearable New Year to those who do or don’t celebrate, or even merely soldier on in ghastly times. How did we get here? We have our theories. Things will get better, but they may get worse before that unfortunately. I know it’s not much but it’s all I’ve got. And I used to complain about Bush/Cheney. In further news, I’m sorry to note that a very good friend of the blog, Steven Rubio—who commented here as “Mon-sewer Paul Regret”—passed from this sphere last March. He has been sorely missed since and will be for some time, perhaps all of the rest of mine. In addition, a facebook friend, a high school chum who did all the heavy lifting of staying in touch, Bob Rosberg, passed in October. I always loved hearing from him. He had lived in St. Petersburg since the ‘90s and was an excellent photographer. In perhaps slightly happier milestone news, this blog passed 3,000 posts this past year. I shudder to think how long it will take to get to 4,000 (and to the ultimate goal of 257 more after that). I may never, but of course that’s the way things go around here. We know the rules. We’re doing the best we can and that’s all we can ask. Well, I mean, we could ask for a reasonable and judicious US Supreme Court and a lot more constitutional rule of law but at least maybe we’re more aware of that than a year ago? At long last? So to speak. The schedule for the coming year is the same as it ever was. Sundays are for writeups about books and stories. Mondays are for newer movies. Wednesdays this year will feature song writeups. Thursdays as always are for horror short stories. Fridays are for classic movies, and Saturdays are album reviews. That is all. Proceed with caution.

Lists:

Woody Allen (dedicated to his appearances in the Epstein files, which further cement his reputation for extremely poor judgment over the years, and noting that my one-time long-time #1 or #2, Manhattan, is out because I just can’t anymore)
1. Love and Death (1975)
2. Annie Hall (1977)
3. Radio Days (1987)
4. Another Woman (1988)
5. What’s Up, Tiger Lily? (1966)
6. Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)
7. Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993)

Stanley Kubrick
1. Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
2. Dr. Strangelove (1964)
3. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
4. Barry Lyndon (1975)
5. The Killing (1956)
6. A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001; a Kubrick project seen through by Steven Spielberg)
7. A Clockwork Orange (1971)

David Lynch
1. Twin Peaks (1989-2017; the franchise at large, including all of seasons 1-3 and Fire Walk With Me)
2. Eraserhead (1977)
3. The Elephant Man (1980)
4. The Straight Story (1999)
5. Blue Velvet (1986)
6. Mulholland Dr. (2001)