Sometimes
it's impossible to stay cynical.
Last
night I went to the movies. That's noteworthy enough considering how
my enjoyment of theater-going has soured over the years, with half
the blame resting on the plague of advertising that precedes a
feature and the other on the degradation of movie patron's code of
behavior, a general sense that everyone under 35 is there for some
reason other than
to watch the damn movie. But last night, despite my encroaching
crotchetiness, I made an exception. The old Madison was showing Jim
Cameron's Aliens. I'd
call it incentive enough to see one of my top ten favorite sci-fi
films of all time on the big screen; no twisting of the arm is
required on that score. But the Madison has a history with my city
and I have a history with the Madison, for it was between her walls
of faux velvet and acoustic fabric I learned to love the silver
screen and forged friendships with a handful of noble cinephiles that
continue to this day. The place has fallen on hard times more than
once, endured fight-ending ribcage blows from bad financing, corrupt
management, urban renewal, corporate buyouts, the rise of megaplexes
and the march of time. But damned if the place isn't still kickin',
newly purchased, newly renovated and reimagined as a second-hand
movie house where classics – and ageless marvels like Aliens
– still decorate the wall for
two hours at a clip and set you back no more than a fair $5 punch. I
hadn't been in years.
The
neighborhood around the Madison has improved since I was a teenager.
The nearby college has swollen, blob-like, so it now incorporates a
swath of neglected properties and Gilded Age homes once gutted and
blunder-constructed into flats that sat ugly on their foundations
like badly-healed bones. Everything's been spiffed up, waxed,
glossed and emblazoned with the crosses and crests of St. Rose, and
the surrounding streets boast restaurant chains and coffee shops.
There's more students than ever there now, and where you don't see
them you see a burgeoning cross-section of working class diversity, a
sea of ethnic faces laboring like yeoman and not interested in making
trouble.
The
Madison's patrons last night were a mix of sci-fi geeks (we can smell
members of our own pack, like bespectacled wolves), bedraggled
hipsters, and a handful of couples old enough to remember the
original theatrical release of Aliens back
in 1986. After a glorious two – TWO! - previews for upcoming shows
(Hitchcock's The Birds and
Jurassic Park, in time
for the 20th
anniversary), the first synthesized notes of James Horner's
minimalist techno-dallied score thundered through the speakers and I
entered something akin to meditative bliss. I'm two shades too young
to have seen Aliens during
its first run but, being a resourceful geek and the product of a
symbiotic relationship with older relatives, I was exposed to the
xenomorphs at a pretty juvie age. I remember the days before CGI,
and more to the point I remember when filmmakers gave a shit enough
to sweat the details in ways you hardly ever see today, from the
straps on the space marine's armor to the length of ash on an actor's
cigarette from one scene to the next. (For that matter I can remember
when heroes smoked in movies without an obligatory line about how a
butt would kill him. Yes, I remember movies when there were worse
things than tobacco).
Five
minutes in and Ripley was just learning from slimy bureaucrat Carter
Burke that she'd been in hyper-sleep for 57 years when a couple
scurried in and sat in front of me. I got a good look at them
because the film was at one of the rare spots when the sets were
bright and the lighting was intense. They were young, these two,
probably no more than 20 and likely even younger than that – the
guy wore a St. Rose shirt but his hat bore a high school logo; he was
still holding on to the past. They settled in and snuggled like
young lovers are supposed to and it occurred to me that these two
possibly hadn't been born when Cameron's 1994 exploda-fest True
Lies had been released, much
less the infinitely more sublime Aliens.
I wondered if either of them had even seen the film before, watched
the special edition DVD or caught a criminally edited TV version late
night during midterms. Maybe, maybe not. It probably couldn't hold
a candle to Avatar in
their eyes anyway, right?
But
by the time Ripley and company landed on LV-426 I knew the girl at
least had never partaken. She fairly bumped the ceiling she jumped
so high when the first face-hugger appeared, straining against the
glass jar in med lab trying to attack the newly arrived Marines.
When the motion detectors started their iconic
chirp-ping and the
xenomorphs materialized out of the walls she sucked in her breath
like she was preparing for a pearl dive and I heard her first of many
gasps when, seconds later, the poor soldiers started dying in droves.
By the time the company's few survivors withdrew and the pulse-rifle
toting Drake took a face full of alien acid the boyfriend
had channels dug into his forearm courtesy of his date's fingernails.
When Act Two opened I heard her say “Oh my God, that was
horrible!” I knew
she wasn't referring to the rubber monsters or the exploding prop
dummies, the shaky camera work or the lack of computer-rendered guts.
She had been completely taken in by the scene, that frantic first
encounter with the xenomorphs where three-fifths of the cast are
butchered in a master class of negative-space action, proving what
you don't see is
infinitely more horrifying than what you do. The boyfriend moved in
a time or two after that, attempting a strategic repositioning of
hands and body parts in an effort, I imagine, to enhance his own
cinematic experience. But the girl was having none of it. She was
riveted, implacable, rooted to the spot. Cameron had her in his
clutches and Aliens had
another convert.
For
the rest of the film I enjoyed the girl's reactions almost as much as
I enjoyed my umpteenth viewing of the film itself. Here was a flick
closer in style if not in actual years to her mother's age, bereft of
sweeping computer-assisted Steadicam shots, denuded of flash and
visual excess with nary a 'modern' effect to be seen, a gritty
spit-'n-varnish action tale of yesteryear, and she was positively
enraptured. Sure the dropship sequences look cheesy today – holy
crap, that is so a
model dangling on a wire!- and I swear there's a
blink-and-you'll-miss-it shot where you can clearly see a prop guy
throwing one of the
aliens into the frame, but who gives a toss? We were never supposed
to care about that stuff; it's a testament to the quality of the
filmmaking that after two decades of innovation and special effects
'improvements' we still revel in the verisimilitude of the moment,
the illusion that what we're seeing isn't an 'old' movie but a
chilling story of survival on an uncaring rock peopled by good
characters. And what a joy it was after so long to witness someone
who had never seen the damn thing! I'd forgotten how exhausting it
was to see Ripley through her confrontation with the alien queen only
to discover the last dropship was gone, the placid android Bishop
having apparently abandoned her, yet here I was feeling it again by
virtue of my voyeuristic spying on this doe-eyed surrogate before me!
But the best was Ripley's final stand in the power-loader and her
timeless, utterly perfect delivery of the single best line in the
film: “Get away from her, you bitch!”
The girl uttered an excited “Yeaahh!” and clapped, just twice,
banishing the last of my mouldering disenchantment.
Yes,
much as it did when the last dragons died, some of the magic has gone
out of the world.
But
not all of it.
Not
yet.
No comments:
Post a Comment