The Thing

Cronenberg's films always too studiedly "illustrational" for my tastes: he's making a politico-philosophical DO-YOU-SEE point, albeit often quite an unusual one, at least the the time, before the point became a much-borrowed cliche. So yes, he's grossing people out, but with a (Perverse) Moral Nostrum embedded; he too often fails to goose-cum-creep those who are already onside with his idea, maybe. He's not as bad as Clive Barker in this regard.

Ugh/LOL

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qhqQ6F0l1o

lol'ing right off the bat at use of Friday the 13th trademark sound effect

da thing

this movie does not look very good.

you can use that for the pull quote

http://www.revelinnewyork.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/gallery_main/recommendations/photos/thething.jpg

really couldn't care less about the cgi but this looks so tragically BRIGHT and high-key and bland

no one knows how to shoot movies anymore

tell it to Christian Nyby

fuck off, Carpenter version's better than the Hawks movie.

^^^realness

nothing i've seen so far here is a deal-breaker; i mean yes i complained upthread about the look - it is all gleaming and contrasty and teal and orange and people's hair looks great - but that's just what movies look like these days. i mean regardless i am going to see the fuck out of this.

The final scene in the Carpenter version totally makes the movie for me

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=8faq5amdK30

a+

amazing! i thought it was a real Sinatra song for a good 30 seconds.

The prequel opens tonight at midnight...

this really isn't all that good.

but on the other hand it is

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWPx-fw0mI8

jed u talkin about the remake.... right???

which remake?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToCq_c3wOM8

oh boo

http://www.ebaumsworld.com/video/watch/82164665/

omg lol

^ remake stakes were impossibly high

Best scene in v minor (tho v beguiling) Thing-remake* "The Faculty": when Alien Jon Stewart -- for it is he -- is stopped in his tracks with a pen-case full of crystal meth stabbed into his eye

(The kids who defeat the alien render themselves inviolable by DOING DRUGS THEY MAKE THEMSELVES:
there's some script flummery that the drug is "caffeine and other household shit", but the guy saying it is TOTALLY LYING obviously)

This is the film that Reality Bites should have been: with Selma Hayek in the Winona role. There's even actually a Gen X ref in the tidy-up montage, alongside Elijah's mugg on a mag cover you only spot for a moment...

*They very carefully cheerfully and geekily lampshade-hang all the OTHER films/stories it remakes: viz Bodysnatchers, Puppetmasters etc. There's a whole Whedon-esque scene where they gameplan their fightback by discussing science-fiction plot cliches. But (TELLINGLY) they don't mention The Thing.

only beguiling thing in The Faculty was the bit where attractive woman from 'Defying Gravity' chases the 'hero' for extended period of time while nude

The Faculty was probably the best movie Robert Rodriguez has ever been involved in imho

i'm not arguing with that

beguiling in the sense that if it's ever on TV, i always think "not that again" but if by chance i flick onto it i end up watching it to the end: ie descriptive not evaluative

also: better than reality bites

A crowbar to the back of the head is better than Reality Bites.

only a beguiling crowbar

Mm.

Just saw the remake/prequel/whatever and while it was complete horseshit, it wasnt for the reasons you might expect - betraying the originals steez or whatever, it was because vast amounts of screentime were devoted to IDEAS THAT MADE NO SENSE. most tellingly the central conceit of the movie that the thing cant reproduce non-organic material so thats how people can be ided except uhoh what about the zippers on peoples parkas you stupid fucking sons of bitches, also just flamethrowers and grenades conveniently hanging out on an arctic research station and goddamnit fuck this movie in the eye

The Thing was just a really, really good seamstress.

the parkas probably aren't organic either!

when i saw it, i just figured the thing takes the parka prior to killing the victim - but then i found the movie "beguiling" so ...

haven't seen the remake, but in the original, it only duplicates tissue, right? not clothing and dog collars and such.

i thought it duplicated everything in the original?

well, it's always mutating and exposing tissue and organs and whatever. it never exposes bits of jackets and shoes from within. it's always just this fleshy ooze. i always assumed it just inhabited the clothes of whoever it duplicated/replaced, or found some others.

this "issue" is elided in the original because it doesn't fucking matter

The only thing that still makes me at all want to see the newest remake is this (quote is from an interview with its composer Marco Beltrami in Film Score Monthly):

And, like Morricone had his heartbeat, you wrote a motif to represent an organism breathing?

MB: There’s that homage to the original Morricone score but the real identity to this score is from three elements. One of them is this notion of treating the orchestra like a living organism itself that breathes. The way I envisioned it was to expand and contract down to a single note then outwards to a wider spectrum. Then it bends in and out, sort of like the billows on an accordion or a human breath. That was the impetus because in the movie you don’t really know who is a thing or is human. There is constantly a play on suspicion and fear that your friend or someone that you trust will be turning against you.

The next theme or idea I incorporated is the idea of being alone and isolated, which is what this movie is ultimately about. It’s set in Antarctica. Even though these people go as a team they really can’t rely on anybody. The main character is this girl Kate [Mary Elizabeth Winstead] and she has to deal with her increasing ostracism in the group and her loneliness. So there’s a theme for that. This is more of a melodic idea, very simple melodic idea. These two themes work hand in hand.

Also related is a third idea, which is an ever-present wind. The movie starts with it and plays throughout it. Rather than have it be a constant aural, audio presence, we decided to treat the wind as a musical identity as well. So we actually tuned it to the pitches of the organism, which was the first idea, so that the wind itself would subtly bend in and out one pitch center to this chordal, minor triad thing. Actually the movie starts out this way over the old Universal logo. It starts out with the sound of the wind and in the sound of the wind is the bending motif.

We achieved that in a couple of ways. Up here in the studio we get some strong Santa Ana winds. We put some bottles outside of the studio. We put microphones in the bottles to pick up the pitches then we were able to process those pitches. We also got the sound that the sound guys were doing and treated that. And we even had a glass wind player come in and perform some wind effects for us.

a monster that can sprout spider legs from someone's decapitated head needs to be scientifically realistic, yup

it may not matter narratively, but it does matter as a scientific technicality of the sort that sci-fi thrives on. in the original, under a microscope, we see the thing reproduce itself by attacking, destroying and then copying host cells. this suggests to me that thing can only duplicate living tissue, and i think this is a reasonable, common-sense conclusion. it raises questions about dead tissue like hair and fingernails, but that i'm willing to let slide on "doesn't fucking matter" grounds.

a monster that can sprout spider legs from someone's decapitated head needs to be scientifically realistic, yup

everything that happens in a story needs some sort of rationale, unless it's art for art's sake or deliberate dream logic or something.

the thing is a creature that can control the organization of its cells at will. that's a stretch, perhaps, but the fact that it's an alien lifeform does give us a good deal of wiggle room wr2 the seemingly fantastical. though we don't really know, it seems that the thing can't make itself into just anything. in reshaping itself it has to work with the patterns it's "learned" in the process of absorbing and copying other creatures, even if it's riffing more than faithfully duplicating. this is a nice touch, imo, as it sets some limits and implies a process.

this "issue" is elided in the original because it doesn't fucking matter

It's not elided. It's made clear that it destroys your clothes when you get taken over. Made clear more than once. It's a plot point and everything.

MacReady: [talking into tape recorder] I'm going to hide this tape when I'm finished. If none of us make it, at least there'll be some kind of record. The storm's been hitting us hard now for 48 hours. We still have nothing to go on.
[MacReady briefly turns of tape recorder and takes a drink of whisky. He looks at the torn longjohns and turns it back on]
MacReady: One other thing: I think it rips through your clothes when it takes you over. Windows found Bennings' torn and bloody clothes in the storage room after he was taken over. Earlier, Nauls found a pair of shredded and dirty longjohns in the kitchen trash can, but the nametag was missing. They could be anybody's. Nobody... nobody trusts anybody now, and we're all very tired..