You should check out the original cut of Alien 3; the one that didn’t make it to theaters. The xenomorph gestates in one of the water buffaloes that the prisoners had, not the Rottweiler. It wasn’t bad at all. Not Alien or Aliens great, but good. Would love to read Gibson’s script though.
Oooops. What Limey said.
Awesome. You just made my day, Limey.
Not sci-fi, or even TV, but I had no idea about this. Wow!
The sequel was set in space so we’ll allow it.
And stop calling me Shirley.
You just now realized Airplane! was a parody?
Of course not. I just didn’t realize that they’d taken an actual movie and riffed off it. I thought they’d cobbled together a bunch of tropes and cliches, and riffed off that!
It had elements of lots of old disaster movies, but the primary parody, right down to the plot and characters were from Zero Hour. The producers even bought the rights to remake Zero Hour, just to make sure there were no copyright issues. I guess I assumed that was fairy well known.
Maybe it was, but I had no idea.
In a similar vein (and back on the sci-fi genre), Star Wars borrowed heavily from two British WW2 movies: “The Dam Busters” (true story) and “633 Squadron” (fiction). Clearly, it’s a bit of both.
On a side note about Airplane!..the writers wanted it shot in black and white and be set in the same time period as Zero Hour, but the producers said no, it had to be modern. As a compromise, the writers agreed only if they would cast “serious” tough-guy actors, not comedians. That made the movie.
It most definitely did. Leslie Nielsen is well known now for his spoof roles, but he used to be a 2nd-tier leading man in serious movies. Ditto Peter Graves and Robert Stack.
This also explains why the jet has the sound of a turboprop.
Nielsen was brilliant in that role. A lot of people only remember him for his comedic roles, but he was an old school Hollywood serious dramatic actor until Airplane! That completely changed his career and legacy.
And yes, silly and goofy would not have worked. What made that movie brilliant was how oblivious the characters were to the absurdity around them. That’s almost commonplace today, with stuff from the Coen and Farrelly brothers, and all manner of Will Ferrell. But that didn’t exist before Airplane! The closest was some of Peter Sellers‘s stuff, but that was more slapstick, aside from maybe Dr. Strangelove.
The “Dam Busters” and Barnes Wallis’ bouncing bomb are great examples of how innovation thrives in war. Here’s a rather nerdy explanation of the technology, the mission, the damage wrought (both infrastructure and human) and the ramifications for the D-Day landings thereafter.
You know who else was a big Peter Sellers fan? The infamous HD. One of his rare redeeming qualities.
That’s funny, I don’t remember that about him. But of course I was not among the group that evidently considered him reducible to the odd, as you call it, redeeming quality.
I watched a game with him, and you definitely could call him odd. Intense is another descriptive term which fit.
Yeah, see, that’s just it. Those things don’t really bother me all that much for whatever reason.
Don’t forget early Woody Allen with films like Bananas, Take the Money and Run, or Love and Death. Also Mel Brooks’ movies.
Did not bother me. He was kinda likable.
I like the early Allen films, and I love Mel Brooks’s stuff. Blazing Saddles is up there with Dr. Strangelove as masterpieces of political and social satire. Airplane! isn’t so much satire though. It’s not skewering people’s irrational attitudes, it’s just one gag after another by putting serious characters in ridiculous situations. It has no message, other than that oddball people are just funny. Raising Arizona is the same way, and like O Brother, Where Art Thou, demonstrates that big, cumbersome words are funny, especially when spoken by slack-jawed yokels.