Notes on watching "Aliens" for the first time again, with a bunch of kids
rogerebert.com
rogerebert.com
Fun fact: Jenette Goldstein (Pvt. Vasquez) runs several bra stores in the Los Angeles area that cater to women with difficult-to-fit sizes. She is a total sweetheart. If you have a small group and contact her via email ahead of time she may be willing to make accommodations for your group. We had about four couples and she opened the store a bit early for our group. The women got fitting sessions (she personally fitted my wife) and she chatted with us for a bit afterward, including answering some questions about Aliens.
Please be respectful of her time and the fact that she's running a business, obviously. The bras are fairly expensive (but worth it, according to the women in our group) and they don't carry anything smaller than a D cup. So if you're not a potential customer, this is not the way to meet "Pvt. Vasquez!"
Did you ask her about the auditioning gaffe where she turned-up thinking it was a film about illegal aliens?
Hence the Vasquez recruiting joke that made it into the film.
Anyway, I have found that it's pretty much impossible for a group of adults to sit and watch Aliens. Everyone wants to shout Hudson's lines, at least after dubbing-over Frost for the first 30 minutes. Completely spoils the atmosphere.
Did you ask her about the auditioning gaffe where she turned-up thinking it was a film about illegal aliens?
She said that she did mistakenly think it was a movie based on resident aliens going into the audition, but it was her understanding that the joke was already in the script and was not specifically based on her audition.
The way she phrased her answer suggested that she was pretty sure of this, but perhaps not 100% sure.
My personal and completely uninformed speculation: even if the joke in the script was inspired by her misunderstanding, they may have told her otherwise for politeness' sake. I have no idea how likely that is.
There will always be border disputes, but they don't usually last 200+ years.
The other cuts make sense. They're great scenes that make the movie better but they're not strictly necessary.
Invariably whenever we run into a dev problem, somebody on my crew will always blurt out, "Game over man, we're fucked!" We're an agile shop of course.
John? Where are you, honey? It's late. You should come home, dear. I'm making a casserole.
> Don't recall seeing her in anything else.
The first time I saw Aliens - it was one of the strange TV edits that included the sentry guns, but lacked the other salient bits - holy fuck, it immediately gave me the sense of "this is what films should aspire to."
Roughly seventeen years later, I always experience the same thrill that I did the first time I saw it.
On an unrelated but personal note, which I feel appropriate given the subject matter: it took me YEARS to figure out what the fuck was wrong with my memory, because that strange cut that had the sentry guns (CBS edit, I believe?) was not readily available until the director's cut came out on DVD - I was not fortunate enough (keks) to own a Laserdisc player, so I spent a good number of my formative years thinking I was insane for insisting that "ALIENS HAS SENTRY GUNS! IT'S BAD-ASS!"
Further unrelated note, because I'm that much of nerd, and couldn't afford it, but went nuts anyhow: I purchased a $4,100 replica of the M41A pulse rifle built by Phil Steinschneider, and while I no longer have it - wow. What an amazing piece of film history, even if to only have a meticulously researched, almost exact replica of an item that defined a good chunk of my existence.
TL;DR: Aliens is the greatest film ever, and I hope every future generation (and those that show it to them) have the same enthusiasm that OP and I do for the film. Masterpiece.
There's one in the Smithsonian Air & Space museum in Washington DC if you're in the area and prefer to window-shop without buying. :)
Wow. So there WERE sentry guns. For years (pre-Google years) I used to argue that there was a scene with sentry guns, though I don't think that's what I had called them. Those guns were awesome and they had made a huge impression on me. Problem was, no one else could remember seeing them. My family and friends swore I was crazy. So I asked for the uncut version of Aliens for Christmas one year (probably around 91 or 92) and I was so disappointed. No sentry guns. So I just figured everyone else was right. I must have imagined it or was mixing up my films. A few years later I purchased a "special edition extended version" on VHS which, sadly, also had no sentry guns. So that was that. I was wrong, there were no sentry guns, and that was the last I thought of it until now. I knew I saw those damn guns!
What threw me off is the the "extended cut" with sentry guns was seemingly shown on cable television right off the bat - like as soon as Aliens was shown on cable, it was the extended (or at least an extended version). I don't think that was very common, so it never occurred to me that's what might have happened. They usually saved the special editions for home video sales.
But I guess this is a cultural thing. We tend to be more prudish when it comes to violence but are a lot more relaxed when it comes to nudity or sexuality.
I do remember watching Alien under age (no idea at what age exactly) and thinking it's the scariest thing I had ever seen, though. However I think it's difficult to tell whether that did me any harm or not. We tend to overestimate our own psyche, just as we tend to overestimate how "adult" our children really are.
Attitudes vary. My own parents would never have let me see Aliens when I was 11. I think I was 14 or 15 by the time I finally saw it.
In other words, it's movies we're okay with kids seeing - but they need to see it with an adult, presumably one who knows it's something this specific child will be able to handle.
Then I realized I did it all the time with friends when I was 10-16 and we had a cinema 3 miles into town we would walk to, and I am only 24 this year. Its like the American Family went over-protectionist deep end in just this decade or something, because my brother who lives with his mother can't even walk to the school bus stop down the street by himself without it potentially resulting in a police call.
This was because the State Motion Picture Inspection Agency got greedy, and wanted to collect a new fee from the distributor who had already paid for the VHS releases.
Distributors had to pay to get a rating, but were allowed to release stuff as 18+ without paying. So the distributor of Little House just told the agency to go climb a tree and released this horrible nightmarish series with a 18+ rating, and since everyone now realised how the inspection agency had made itself completely ridiculous, they gave up and changed the rules.
since the advent of the internet, the world is now completely uncensored to everyone, and imposing these arbitrary and anachronistic restrictions on your child will only undermine your own credibility for the things that actually matter.
Reducing the graphic sexual content or violent content that children see is normal, rational, position that is widely held by individuals and society.
People who think it's okay to expose their children to graphic violent or sexual content are weird.
You certainly don't want to give your children free reign to watch all the sex and violence they want (Will I sit down and watch a porn with my kids? Heck no!) but I think that discussing sex and violence with them is probably a lot more valuable than simply shielding them from it.
I watched Aliens when I was 12 or 13, along with a bunch of other dumb 1980s action movies. I didn't grow up to be violent, because my parents gave me a strong moral grounding and I understood the line between fantasy and reality - blowing things up and doing martial arts on people was okay in a movie, but not okay in real life. I understood that, so no movie was ever going to be able to change me.
I also watched Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers somewhen around 13 and those movies deeply touched me. Yes, I was pretty much crying and trying not to vomit on the D-Day scene, but it left me with deep impression about horrors of war, something that school never gives you. I didn't become more violent because of that - on the contrary, it reinforced my wish for peace and compassion for people living in places trapped in war.
I'm not even disturbed by beheading videos or actual raw footage of violent murders (i.e. whatever's new on LiveLeak this month). I don't seek them out directly or find them entertaining. I just don't have any more visceral reactions than to a video of a guy getting kicked in the groin.
I think some part of what my parents taught me about TV got lodged in the wrong part of my brain: "What you see on TV isn't real, it's just make believe." I do have very strong (and natural) reactions when seeing violence or cruelty in person. I just barely react to seeing these things on tape (beyond the ick factor). Except for (real) violence against animals, that is.
It's actually pretty gruelling what's considered acceptable to show on the 8 o'clock news these days. But I'm not sure whether this is a cultural thing again -- I hear American news channels have a policy of never showing dead US soldiers.
So, I agree that over-protecting your children is probably a bad thing.
That doesn't mean that reducing the amount of graphic violent or sexual content your children are exposed to is over-protective. I might be happy for a teen child to watch Aliens with me at home, and less happy for them to watch it with their friends with no adults around. I might be okay with full nudity but less happy with sex.
But, as soon as someone says they want to restrict the content available to their children people just leap to the assumption that that person wants some fucking weird over-protective most restrictive cocoon where the child doesn't get to experience anything but Wholesome Christian Content of good people singing their praise for The Lord.
... without a single shred of reproducible evidence behind it.
I was surprised to see how little monitoring / filtering there was available on modern smartphones/tablets! Is there any filtering available on an iPad / iPhone? If so, I couldn't find it.
I certainly wouldn't want to give an iPad to my child and send them away for private browsing. The problem would lie with me in that I wasn't monitoring them; in the older days when you needed a PC, at least the PC could be in a public area of the house and everyone could see what was going on but it isn't so easy now.
Not just that, but more often than not I see children with expensive high-end devices. I don't think a child needs the most recent iPhone, peer pressure or not. I realise it's a fashion accessory in addition to its utilitarian purposes, but I don't think a child needs a Giorgio Armani suit or Louis Vuitton handbag either. If they buy it from their own money, sure, but I wouldn't buy a child a new $500 smartphone every two years.
Not that kids didn't see bad things in the bad old times - they probably saw more of it in real life - but the ubiquitousness of these devices is not necessarily only a good thing.
Are we now factory-farmed chicken (with our consent) and not humans?
Yes they're "people", but the young are also our charges, and we are responsible for their right upbringing.
If you found your 9yo kid-plus-friends going through your "best of" porn folder at a sleepover or whatever, would you stop them?
Also, we're not talking about 9yo kids/porn here - stop changing the goalposts - we're talking about 11yo boys and Aliens specifically.
Edit: Am I wrong? What exactly is the concern with Aliens here? Kids already like guys shooting aliens. Is there some sort of "alien-violence puberty" that I am not aware of?
Before you guys downvote me; I'm a parent. The boy is now 13yo and has been growing up with Star Trek, Dr Who, and whatever other sci-fi I like to watch. Even some Dr Who and Star Trek had material some of you would consider to be a bit 'iffy' to show kids. Doesn't seem to have done my son any harm - he's growing into a well balanced kid who goes to the Air Cadets, is popular, and does well at school.
As a parent, I see no harm in showing 11 year old boys Aliens.
Listen - you cannot wrap your kids up in cotton wool. The reality of life is way more brutal and uncaring than is shown in a mere film.
As long as these kids understand that it's just a story, that it involves plastic and latex models, these are actors, and so on and so forth - where's the harm for these 11yo kids?
Like I say - life is hard. I for one don't want my son growing up to be some limp-wristed little snowflake because I shielded him from all sorts of things. Seriously guys, get real.
No, people are arguing against films like Saw or their 1980s equivalents.
> Like I say - life is hard. I for one don't want my son growing up to be some limp-wristed little snowflake because I shielded him from all sorts of things. Seriously guys, get real.
What life lessons is a child going to learn from watching "Hostel"?
Also, "limp wristed"? FFS.
I despise people who try to 'win' their argument by constantly shifting the goalposts.
But, if you want to talk about Aliens: plenty of people in this thread have spoken about the distress they felt when watching Aliens as teenagers. What life lesson is an eleven year old going to learn from watching Aliens?
I'm also not trying to win any argument. I'm presenting my opinion - on that one specific topic of the original post.
A small selection of posters say they were 'distressed' when watching Aliens? What they call 'stress', I call 'being thrilled' - exactly the intention of the film.
"What life lesson is an eleven year old going to learn from watching Aliens?" - you learn whether or not you like watching these types of films or not. Don't like it? Don't watch another one. Lesson learned. Think you got traumatised over it in some way? Go find someone to talk about it and help you through it - nevertheless, a lesson was learned one way or the other.
I can't say I wanted or didn't want it, but I turned down some opportunities in high school and was fairly old, compared to the average in my circles, by the time I had sex.
I don't think the pornographic images (movies, not softcore, in my case) had much effect.
To this day, I struggle being alone at night. I'm jumpy, imagine all sorts of weird and nasties creeping and crawling around the dark recesses of whatever room I'm in. It's not debilitating, as I've learned to consciously reason out of my fear of irrational things, but it still pops up in my head. Still makes me jumpy. Still makes my heart-race, and still pisses me off that my mind would do that to me.
Needless to say, I'm not showing any such movies to my kids until they're at-least mid-teens.
Your anecdote shows that at least some kids do _not_ get those lifelong anxiety issues from the same.
How does yours "counter" zo1's in the slightest? That would be like the tobacco industry saying "but look at all the smokers who never got cancer!".
I'm (honestly, as a human being to another) glad you don't seem to have been affected (overly) by your caretakers abusing you, but you can't seriously be advocating this kind of behavior, enough to argue for it?
No it doesn't.
It shows that at least one person has lifelong anxiety issues that they attribute to having watched horror movies.
I don't have anxiety issues and I watched horror movies at a young age, maybe I would have anxiety issues if I hadn't? Maybe on average it has a positive effect on anxiety? Maybe it's completely unrelated. You can't draw any conclusions from a couple of anecdotes
I think most people do, actually, regardless of what types of movies they watched when they were little.
Darkness invokes a primal fear in animals that have not evolved to operate comfortably in it (such as felines).
Anyway, I think so too. Humans seem to have an innate fear of the dark, and any recent memory of danger will increase that effect. Heck, I'm an adult and still after watching something like Aliens I get seriously stressed when going to bathroom at night. And my closest friend openly refuses to watch scary movies when she expects to be alone home at night.
This is not evidence, it's an anecdote. It's speculation on your part that this is the reason you're scared. It could be, and maybe it's even likely--but it takes a wider study to have any kind of assurance that you're correct.
Don't get me wrong: Aliens was really freaking scary to me. Probably the most a movie has ever scared me. As soon as they encounter the first xenomorph it's pretty much sheer terror for the next hour.
I have seen a lot of movies rated for adult with my daughter but not horror like that. I think every person is different, use the common sense.
That is one of the reasons that I got a dog. Having another being in the house is a massive difference from being alone, even if that being can't talk and is a bit of a scaredy cat himself.
Needless to say, this is very widely disputed and fought over. It's possibly more controversial than climate change.
However, it's quite widely studied[3], and the consensus position is fairly settled.
[1] http://www.jaacap.com/article/S0890-8567%2809%2960387-7/abst... (This is a meta-study)
[2] http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/2014-41977-001/
[3] http://scholar.google.com.au/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&q=impa...
[1] http://reason.com/archives/2014/11/14/video-game-violence-a-...
I find his argument compelling, but that doesn't mean the consensus is any different.
Personally, I'm pretty unflappable, although things like horror movies don't do anything for me at all. My wife cannot tolerate gross stuff at all. Criminal Minds (prime time TV fare) kills her appetite.
My son is too little to develop preferences, but my one nephew hates movies where someone pops from an off camera to attack somebody. Freaks him out, even in a not scary movie.
I would be rather annoyed if my 11 y.o. kid came home saying someone's parent had shown them that film.
11-year-olds are young enough to get terrible nightmares from films like Aliens - if it was my child who wanted to watch something age-appropriate and got shouted down, I'd be pretty furious.
Which one? That lovely children's classic "The Wizard of Oz".
That witch was scary!!
Some of us weren't so lucky.
It only exists as a outtake (its on yahoo) as it was to upsetting.
I saw plenty of much more graphic stuff that didn't phase me for a moment.
It was The Care Bears Movie.
No nightmares.
If anything, I was the weird kid at school, because everyone else was watching Nightmare on Elm Street when they were 8 and 9, and mom wouldn't let me.
It's almost the same for all movies with just violence/blood in it. When I was 11, I used to watch a lot of them. I guess it's okay if the parent is there watching the film with them.
The only stuff I skip is really when there's a explicit sex act talk only because I don't want to explain jokes regarding specific sex acts and slang. My girls are 6 & 8, so I figure that's reasonable for another 5-6 years. Is that prudish? (I've only got cultural input from North America, which seems to recoil at stuff everyone sees in showers everyday, so all I know is that their scale is off, not where it should be.)
My comment was aimed at highlighting that the rating is not dumb BS, some movies contains really disturbing scenes.
People swearing, using drugs, and nudity will get an R rating even if the movie is fantastic. Those three things I'm annoyed that people find objectionable for children, as it only increases the stigma as they get older, for what should be very positive things. Violence, meh, so long it's not deliberately cruel or scary, I don't see why it'd be disturbing. Over-the-top stuff like you say sounds more funny than anything else. (The children's shows, Golden Compass, and RWBY, both contain scenes where the jaw/head of an enemy is blown right off.)
As another poster mentioned, Common Sense Media is a far better rating system. They address specific points so you can make a good determination. Even then, I find my kids often enjoy stuff that CSM rates well over their current age.
Also gives good age ranges, not just the broad certificates.
The answer is of course right there, by putting them in a "safe place" you've removed every adversary and every challenge - right when the mind needs those things the most so it can form abilities necessary to deal with and move forward in life (a life that will throw all kinds of issues, disasters, and curve balls at you).
Its kind of like the peanut allergy study that was posted here a day or two ago... The infants and children that don't get exposed to peanuts at an early age - so their systems can get familiar and use to it, are most likely to end up in the highly allergic group. [this is just an analogy]
edit:
This isn't about movies (that word is not mentioned in my post). Some of the replies so far are red-herrings (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herring).
I'm not suggesting that children should be constantly exposed (or made to watch) graphic and horror movies to prepare them for life.
And I'm sure there are cases of children who just can't handle these things at the age of 10-15... Though most will be fine - and won't need therapy, will not have their lives ruined, nor will their well-beings be negatively impacted.
I am also not suggesting that they should have no supervision.
What I am suggesting is that there are too many over-protective and helicopter parents who are making "special children" that can only live and function inside bubbles.
And if the child get's broken by watching "Aliens" at the age of 11, then the problem is with the parenting - rather than the friend's dad who let them watch it.
In which case, please, attach a note to the child with all the rather available things that he/she should not be exposed to or is allergic to (like peanut butter).
We live in a society where a child would have to sit on a park bench for 700,000 years before he/she would get kidnapped, but if you leave him/her in a car to pay the gas station clerk, someone can take a picture of that child being untended and send it to the police, which will then charge you with a misdemeanor.
...I'm not convinced that that was a good thing.
Where we're going, we won't need modern practices.
Libera te tutemet ex inferis...
Loved the movie when it came out.
I wonder if it was like seeing Salem's Lot as a kid vs as an adult? As a kid it terrified me (well, the floating kid in the window scene anyway) but as an adult I wondered how such horrible acting and filmmaking could ever get green lit. I've heard the same from others in my generation.
My own children are forced to hike adult distances and work hard on tasks they find unpleasant. Hopefully this will lead to strength in the face of adversity.
I grew up in a (relatively) rough part Chicago and in spite or because of the depressed nature of the place never saw a lot of horror movies growing up.
Now working with a lot of people who grew up and live in suburbia on a steady diet of horror movies, I am amazed at the amount of fear and anxiety they demonstrate when dealing with anything vaguely paranormal or the thought of an intruder.
I know numerous people who sleep with a gun under their pillow even though statistically crime (especially violent crime) is stunningly low in the places we now live. They take precautions I never even considered growing up even though break-ins and muggings happened regularly in the neighborhood.
This is 100% idle conjecture on my part, but I always wondered if horror movies played some part in such behavior.
If kids aren't scared by Aliens, then the movie failed. Being scared by Aliens even though they know it isn't real doesn't mean that the movie inappropriate for them, it means that they are handling the movie as adults do.
Sticking with your original context of people owning guns for home defense, while I would never assert that they do so directly in response to horror movies or suchlike, I would argue that such movies often serve an ideological function of embodying our social fears so as to domesticate them, and that this can heighten the perception of risk.
Drop me a line about this if you'd like to continue the conversation. I'm very interested in psychoananalytic approaches to film theory and would be happy to discuss it further.
Kids can get terrified by horror and violence. Sex? Not so much. I don't understand why we hide nudity from kids.
Because we are afraid of harming them, because we are conditioned to be afraid of ourselves. !Kung Bushmen often lived in hand-made temporary huts. Therefore it was basically normal for couples to make love in front of the kids. !Kung Bushmen brides were also once prized by neighboring agricultural people, as they were thought to be particularly uninhibited and enthusiastic sexually.
The US is still very much a puritan culture in some weirdly sublimed ways.
The second, more serious criticism I have is that the moral panic associated with exposure to children to onscreen violence, sex, and drugs can only diminish the real outrage that we ought to feel when kids in war-torn countries, inner-city slums, and refugee zones actually experience real-life violence and horror beyond anything Hollywood can conjure, and on a daily basis. If most of those kids don't grow up to be serial killers, I somehow doubt a movie is going to do it.
1. Anyone in those conditions isn't seeing violence glorified the way it is in movies, where the guys you were rooting for win at the end and you rarely see prolonged consequences. Someone in a refugee camp knows all too well that the bad guys can leave people broken and pay no consequences for it.
2. Perhaps not serial killers out of a horror film but it's not like the concept of cycles of violence is unknown: children who grow up in horrible conditions do have a higher rate of either becoming gang/cartel/etc. members, soldiers, etc.[1] or have escalated rates of suicide, domestic violence, substance abuse, etc. because they've never recovered from what happened.
1. either because they have no choice or because they're all too familiar with what happens when you don't represent enough of a threat to deter violence. Closer to home, This American Life had a great interview with kids talking about how they had to join gangs because they'd be getting attacked either way so it was a question of either being afraid to leave your house or having enough allies to be relatively safe most days:
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/487/h...
That's not why most people want to restrict the amount of violent content their children watch.
See, for example, the "You've been Tango'd" ads in the UK. There's a soda called "Tango". One advert showed someone drinking the can, than a fat near naked man painted orage runs in, and slaps the drinker's face with both hands. Children imitated this, causing several perforated eardrums. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_Man_%28advertisement%2... (see controversy section). That's one example of children imitating what they saw on tv, and other children being harmed as a result.
EDIT: i'm not saying children copy everything. But this example proves that children do imitate some behaviours; that children are influenced by some things they watch. Ask any parent about the children's show "Caillou" and the change of their children into whiners. Parents realise that some content will cause mild behaviour changes or nightmares and they want to be prepared.
We should be at least overrun by car-jackings at this point thanks to Grand Theft Auto.
A lot of those games involve hardware the children do not have access to. The games also often portray consequences in a way which the kids still know to be very bad. (As much as children play "war," they know viscerally that being in pain and bleeding is generally not fun.
We should be at least overrun by car-jackings at this point thanks to Grand Theft Auto.
There was one young man who enacted a GTA scenario and shot his way out of a police station with a gun he stole from a police officer. However, he is very much the exception.
What the orange advert did was to portray an activity with bad consequences as a trivial and harmless one, in a way that specifically worked around the built in understanding that otherwise deters kids from doing things like that. (Unless they mean harm. That's also within the possible range of behaviors of children. However, it's not so common in many places for children to want to really harm their playmates.)
I guess that's one theory.
You mean things like fists, feet, pipes, kitchen knives, crowbars, hammers, that kinda thing? Like others said, if video games made normal people violent you'd see a lot more violence.
That anecdote about the 'enacting a GTA scenario' would also have happened just like that without the GTA link. Then it becomes a guy with a gun in a police station.
Yes. Actually, there was an incident I was personally witness to involving someone's 8 year old son and an ordinary clawhammer. There is clearly such a thing as "desensitization," and opposition to the notion is usually the kind of unconscious bias one generally sees in politics. < http://lesswrong.com/lw/gw/politics_is_the_mindkiller/ > Note that my position is not so simpleminded as to be simply placed on one side or another of the typical Internet argument.
If you believe that widespread gun ownership generally increases the incidence of gun injuries, then you are subscribing to the same general theory, that availability increases likelihood. Do I believe that's a justification for banning things? No, but we should be honest about the existence of such effects. (Also, fists and feet are an entirely different category, as they are naturally part of your body. And while I said it wasn't common in some places, in others kids do use those to enact violence.)
Like others said, if video games made normal people violent you'd see a lot more violence.
I would put good odds on your repeating what lots of people angrily repeat on the Internet in defense of their hobby. In the grand scheme of things, people are violent! We are extraordinarily violent as animals. In particular, we have an ability to band together in groups and murder each other in a coordinated fashion, one that probably predates our getting language! We also accomplish fantastic things living together, so we also have fantastic mechanisms for coexisting. Seeing things in media does have the effect of reinforcing the portrayed actions and scenarios in our minds. However, human minds are very complex and robust. We have mental defenses, much as we have homeostatic mechanisms.
That anecdote about the 'enacting a GTA scenario' would also have happened just like that without the GTA link. Then it becomes a guy with a gun in a police station.
Read up on the incident and honestly tell me that GTA had nothing to do with putting the idea into his head. Of course, one could also find other pieces of media he was exposed to conveying much the same message. The systemic problems resulting in his violence are probably more serious and of greater import to society than the content of some video game.
?! Is this some leftover trauma from not being allowed in to an R-rated film when you where 13? The only people who are constrained by ratings are producers, and then only in the sense that producers push for an R rating (thereby pushing the envelope of what's acceptable for an 'R') because many theater chains refuse to show NC-17 movies for commercial reasons.
The same goes with what you put in your brain; if you watch slime, slime is more acceptable to you and what comes out of you is only a product of what goes in - slime. Just because someone in the past did horrific things doesn't mean we need to expose ourselves to a barrage of horrific things.
Precisely because!
As the Japanese say, "You only know true kindness through suffering."
A movie tends to be presented without an ongoing parental filter as the images go directly to the psyche without pause.
It's just not a habit people have.
When I was a kid, I read a lot of horror. Mostly Stephen King, and Clive Barker, which were far more than my 8-year-old self should have been reading, but for the most part, I could handle it, just fine. (Stephen King's It was really the only book that scared me beyond the moments I was reading). On the other hand, the violent films I saw (Aliens, Robocop, etc) proved much harder to shake off. Remember the end of Robocop where they guy gets toxic waste dumped all over him, and his flesh starts dripping off? I spent weeks trying to get that image out of my head. Hell, even the end of Raiders, or the Ceti Eels from Wrath of Khan disturbed me far more than anything I read.
As an adult, I watched Devils Rejects - a truly great film that I cannot recommend to anyone because of how disturbing I found some of the imagery in that.
Or, to take a real life example - plenty of us are fine with reading accounts of terrorist beheadings but purposefully avoid watching the videos of the events.
You have a point about terrorist beheadings though...can't watch them. I guess cause I know it's real life and the empathy is too much.
Other way around in North America.
I have same many films that I wish I had never seen as I can't "unremember" things or wipe bits of my brain out. The incessant flow of violence in films only serves to desensitise: something is truly shocking the first time, not so the next time, and repeatedly it isn't shocking anymore.
To see that some people use their own level of how shocking a film is to THEM to decide whether to show it to their children is distressing; "I wasn't shocked, so why would my children be??". Very sad.
“some of them had seen the first one anyway, and nearly all had seen at least one film with a xenomorph in it”
I'm sure there are plenty of kids who aren't ready for this but based on that and some of the other comments about recognizing cliches from similar movies, it sounds like these boys weren't pushing the boundaries too far.
People don't walk naked in the streets so why do you need to show naked people at peak TV times on public television?
It's "normal between adults" in private places.
And who said there's a "need"? Might as well why do you need TV at all? Nude bodies can look cool, so it seems as valid to show that as someone wearing sunglasses.
Everyone has the same bits...everyone! (for nipples, for other parts it's more like 50%)
I can't believe that people are still afraid of something everyone has
I'm not talking extreme scatological close-ups. It's an analogy for nudity, not hardcore pornography.
Relax and join for once? :)
They do in Germany.
...who does this? Who, anywhere, does this?
It's not unheard of for parents to want their children to consider them peers rather than parents. The problem is that you can't really be both. The roles and responsibilities of a parent and a peer in a child's life are very different.
Also, if you signal to your child that you would prefer them to act more maturely, that child can become pretty good at faking maturity without the emotional and psychological stability that would come with it if it came naturally. As a parent you have to look past that superficial behaviour.
And for a less personal example, just look at child prodigies, child actors, child pop stars, or for a particularly disturbing example, child beauty pageants. That a child shows a particular trait normally associated with maturity or adulthood doesn't mean the child should be treated as an adult. Yet, this is exactly what happens to many such children who happily play along because their make-believe is positively reinforced by the adults around them.
There are plenty of people willing to believe an eight year old is "very mature for their age" when they should know better. Heck, the entire premise of NAMBLA is a reflection of this (simply taking the illusion to its disgusting logical extreme).
Definitely not one for the under-tens...
http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/aliens-1986
> It's here that my nerves started to fail. "Aliens" is absolutely, painfully and unremittingly intense for at least its last hour. Weaver goes into battle to save her colleagues, herself and the little girl, and the aliens drop from the ceiling, pop up out of the floor and crawl out of the ventilation shafts. (In one of the movie's less plausible moments, one alien even seems to know how to work the elevator buttons.) I have never seen a movie that maintains such a pitch of intensity for so long; it's like being on some kind of hair-raising carnival ride that never stops.
> I don't know how else to describe this: The movie made me feel bad. It filled me with feelings of unease and disquiet and anxiety. I walked outside and I didn't want to talk to anyone. I was drained. I'm not sure "Aliens" is what we mean by entertainment. Yet I have to be accurate about this movie: It is a superb example of filmmaking craft.
It sounds like all of the kids were boys...It'd be interesting to hear the perspective of girls watching it for the first time. Aliens was one of the first action movies I ever watched (and remembered) and I don't remember ever, at all, thinking that it was odd that a woman was in charge (in fact, all of the strong characters are female). Only years later have I realized that Alien and Aliens (never watched the other Alien movies) were unique among blockbuster movies in how the heroine is both the savior and not written as an object of romantic interest (beyond a brief flirtation with Cpl. Hicks)...Unlike movies like "Kill Bill" (which I love), the woman isn't written as an oddity, but a down-to-earth character who happens to be strong and resourceful. I never even thought Sigourney Weaver was beautiful until seeing her in other non-action movies.
Edit: speaking of watching Aliens as a kid...I think it's the movie that caused the longest-running movie-inspired-phobia in my life...hearing something under my bed, and then not wanting to look under my bed for fear of a facehugger attacking me.
That's because the Ellen Ripley character was originally a man named Martin Roby.
That doesn't make sense to me. Martin Roby was the original character for "Alien" and in the first movie, for the most part Ripley wasn't the bad-ass character she would be throughout the second movie.
But the OP was anyway talking about "Aliens" and there Roby could no longer have been an influence for her character.
I felt the same about "The Pianist"!
It was first mentioned in a web comic, and Aliens is the example given.
This is, unfortunately, why I so rarely go to the movies anymore. I honestly don't remember if it was this bad when I was a kid, but I don't think I've seen a movie in the last 2 years where I didn't want to (or actually have to) tell some kids (late teen or younger) in my radius to stop talking. A few times other people even had to chime in when they scoffed at me, like I was somehow out of place telling them to not talk during a movie.
I told my wife "I think I can take her..." but she, being the voice of reason as usual, told me to stand down. :)
Also, we're getting an Alamo Drafthouse, which I'm really looking forward to: http://drafthouse.com/san_francisco/new_mission
Apparently it's much more common to need staff to intervene with talkers in shows than it was thirty years ago. One memorable case had a staff member explaining to some kid that he couldn't record the show on his phone. The kid seemed confused by this, taping things on the phone and sharing them with friends was just normal, how they engage with every experience.
Another fun thing I noticed from the vantage point of the projection booth: if you look down into any screening more than about one-quarter full, at any time during the show you will always, always see at least one mobile-phone in use. There is never a time when the full audience is giving the film their full attention.
But why go to the cinema if not to pay attention to the film? Maybe they were dragged along to crap films by their friends I suppose.
In any given theater, how many people were dragged there against their will to watch a movie they don't care about? Probably more than one.
This is unsurprising.
There is probably also never a time when the full audience actually wants to be there. I would guess that for most couples attending a given movie, one person wanted to see it a lot more than the other.
Comedies are the obvious one - they're funnier when laughing along with others. I also have no problem with audience comments during action or horror movies. For those kinds of movies I will actually tend to watch them in theaters where I know the audience is a little more lively.
If it's a more serious movie like Gravity or a Terence Malick movie then yeah, I don't want a lot of audience chatter. I'll see those kinds of movies at a stuffy arty theater where the audience is likely to be quiet, or I'll simply wait to watch them at home.
> I'll see those kinds of movies at a stuffy arty theater where the audience is likely to be quiet, or I'll simply wait to watch them at home.
Yes, there's a class of movies I watch alone in my home (at night, to avoid random people disrupting) (and it also works for some series; e.g. I always schedule watching Person of Interest episode when everyone is sleeping). In case of cinema, I choose the other end - I go to the one with sound turned up to eleven, so that most of the time it simply drowns all ambient noise.
I hate people talking around me as well, but the other thing I hate is people eating a whole bag of popcorn during a good half of the movie. It makes so much noise, for me it's as disturbing as someone chatting next to me. Yet seems like nobody has any problem with that. It just sucks.
[1] http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/well/2015/02/23/please-stop-...
The third-best thing is reading a well-written account of that fresh showing of the movie. Now I want to watch Aliens again with my kids.
The first boy was right. It felt full of cliches even then. I watched it in eighties as soon as it was distributed to my place and I all the time I had that feeling of "boring 'we're the marines' movie." And I still can't understand why would anybody consider Aliens an interesting movie. The first Alien is however something else. And I was always amazed to later watch "The Dark Star" made before the Alien and find it (among the other things) an Alien parody made before the Alien(!) It's really so thanks to Dan O Bannon. Now that's something. Aliens... not even worth mentioning.
Watch Alien, watch The Dark Star. Forget the boring Aliens.
Disclaimer: I'm old enough that I've watched the Star Wars in seventies in my movie theatre. And Mad Max. And and and.. Of course Aliens were already cliches and cliches.
In the first movie, there was only one Alien and it acted more like a lone hunter. In the second movie, there were lots of aliens and they acted like a hive. I think that it's possible for both of these to be consistent with each other.
I guess not liking Aliens much puts me well in the minority.
There was and is something undefinable about movies of that era (maybe everyone feels the same about the movies of their era) that modern films rarely capture for me.
[1] something I can't find anymore in nowadays movies.
These days, many movies seem to be about expensive special effects and little else. While there is nothing wrong with special effects, using them as a substitute for a story or atmosphere ruins a movie.
I think the main problem is that VFX has become so cheap that there's no check on including another action scene; neither the writers nor directors appear to worry about justifying the expense the same way they would if it involved paying people to build something real which could only be used once.
Also the Dark City -- the Matrix before the Matrix if you wish.
Looking back at it, special effects, the mood, is still so distinctive and well done. And that was probably the pinnacle of non-digital special effects. And we'll probably never get back to it but even after so much investment and so much advancement in computer technology, digital effects are still not quite there (thinking of modern Star Wars, Avatar...). At some point they'll be outmatched but we are still not there.
Personally, if I'd sent my 11yo over to Roger Ebert's house I'd expect him or her to watch whatever movie was on offer and thoroughly thank me for the experience years later.
I just watched Aliens for umpteenth time last week. The harsh language line still gets me. And I always am just a little more on edge when I walk outside after watching.
Many, many times I find that Director's Cut is just synonymous with "take the best cut and fill all the crap we did not think was worth it in the first place".
It's an excellent episode (and show) filled with cool trivia from the cast and film shoot.
http://iwastheretoo.wolfpop.com/audio/20250/aliens-with-ricc...
Also, Aliens is the 2nd greatest action movie (after Die Hard) of all time, and #1 sci-fi action movie ever.
[1] http://www.avclub.com/article/neill-blomkamps-alien-movie-wi...
[2] http://www.avclub.com/article/actually-blomkamps-alien-movie...
I remember sweating a lot watching it, and all the meta-references that psychedelics enhance seemed to work perfectly within the framework of this story and show.
More to the authors point, I have two grown sons and a 13yo daughter, and always, the best way for me to relive my (often misspent) youth is with and through them, by sharing the same or very similar experiences.
I watched the remake a few weeks ago. It was ok but it didn't leave an impression on me like the original did.
In these days a Cyborg was a thing to imagine, nowadays it's a possibility, and the ethical comments : 'should we really pursue robotics' and 'is man playing god', aren't just a sci-fi story anymore, it felt like watching the news.
If movies are correlated to societies subconscious, dreams have changed and the way we express them too.
When you look back at old movies, which were lacking technology to materialize the subjects, they still managed to convey the essence. Today it's easy to have precision to appease the senses (CGI, 3D sound, 3D images, etc) but I don't find them an improvement over their predecessors (more often the opposite). Hence my idea that it's more about feeding the imagination than anything else.
What bothered me was that they completely removed all the satire of the original. Robocop had a very dark sense of humor throughout—I love the scene where they're shooting the cans of baby food, and the one where the all news cameras follow the man falling out the window to his death[1].
Oh, and all the news reports and commercials. The new one played it really serious, where the original didn't take itself seriously at all.
The original clip showed him dying, and the machine just keeps firing and firing and firing. It becomes darkly funny.
Censors didn't like the scene but their suggestion was to cut down the length of time the gun fires. That turned the scene into something less funny and more brutal.
What I hated is how the rest of the cast failed to react after it was done. They had been trying to capture her, she gets away, gets it cut out of her, and then everyone seems to forget or forgive just because that old guy was coming out of cryo-sleep. They should not have been so easily distracted.
Funny thing is the first movie was scary when I saw it, but not something I dwelled on. I did get the big Alien that glowed in the dark for Xmas, and that scared the crap out of me when my Dad hung them by their tails in the basement.
Plus, for how many times you hear: "Nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure" or the actual quote "Nuke the entire site from orbit--it’s the only way to be sure", it had to have a bit of an impact.
I can perhaps imagine showing Aliens to my sons when they're 11, but it seems overly aggressive to show their friends, without getting explicit agreement from their parents first.
What a treat to see such a great dad and movie story on an exhausted morning. Joeri's comment about practical effects is spot on.
11 year olds must be hardened wee bastards these days.
Aliens is just one example. Consider also, "The Road Warrior" (a.k.a. Mad Max 2). It took the faded and failing civilization of the original and pushed that out to every extreme possible. Total collapse. Anarchy. Barbarism. Post-apocalyptic wasteland. It also featured some of the tightest editing, most impressive stunts, and most relentless action of any film ever made. However, it was far from alone.
"The Empire Strikes Back" took the light, fun, and somewhat corny adventure of "Star Wars" and turned that into a dark, brooding character driven film that was a non-stop roller coaster of tension. Empire is the film that makes people take Star Wars seriously no matter how much zany Ewok slapstick and standup-droid-comedy Lucas put into ROTJ and the prequels (I refuse to even type the full J-J word). The 2001-derivative "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" was followed by the "The Wrath of Khan", which itself focused on character development and featured a climactic battle between both leaders and star ships. This film, despite being made on a shoestring budget when compared to the first Trek film, defined Trek movies for all time. Arguably, the franchise has suffered as Trek film after Trek film tried to recapture the magic of "The Wrath of Khan" instead of blazing their own paths.
When you watch these films and compare them to today's action flicks, one thing that stands out is that the action is anything but non-stop. All of these films feature extended sequences of slow, careful character development that are punctuated by action scenes. Compare the most recent Superman film to Aliens for example. Aliens may have felt relentless and draining in its last hour, but the first hour is relatively slow. That slow, building action sets everything up. It made us care so much about the characters and appreciate how utterly alone and vulnerable they were that it was tough watching them go through the meat grinder of the second half.
"Man of Steel" on the other hand, begins with action, continues with action, and ends with action, taking only brief breaks to string along a flimsy plot and barely flesh out stereotypical characters. Halfway through the city-wrecking final action sequence one finds oneself wishing the film would just get to the point! Both the magnitude of destruction and sheer volume of film expended in "Man of Steel" dwarfs that of Aliens, but there is only a fraction of the tension. You could take your time going to the bathroom at any point in "Man of Steel" and, odds are, all you'd miss is some CG mayhem that has no lasting effect on the plot. Does it really matter how many buildings Superman and his foes level without resolving anything?
Today's film makers are too often afraid of boring their audience and too frequently sacrifice developing what makes the action matter for the sake of giving their audience non-stop action. Non-stop meaningless action is like eating nothing but ice-cream for dinner. Sure, ice cream is great, but it simply isn't satisfying on its own. Today's film makers should look to the early 80's as an example of what can be accomplished when you don't underestimate your audience's attention span.
It's like the cinematic equivalent of "the loudness wars" in music production. In music, the idea is that people like volume and it makes songs stand out on the radio, jukebox, or a test screening so the only way to compete with loudness is more loudness. The fear is that compared to competing tunes your offering will seem too quiet and boring and some ADHD-addled listener might (gasp!) change the channel.
In movies you also see this sacrifice of pacing and careful buildup of tension for wall-to-wall action and destruction. On the surface, more volume, more energy, more destruction, and more action seem like a sure way to ensure something memorable since you've maximized the "peaks" and avoided those dull, boring "valleys".
In reality, the whole thing is mentally exhausting and you end up with no stand-out moments. When you start off at 11 and stay at 11, you miss the buildup. I'd argue that in music and in film, it's the "contrast" between high and low that elicit the most memorable experiences.
A few years later I saw an advertisement for Aliens and declared "I never want to see that movie!"
When I finally did watch Aliens at about 15 it immediately became my favourite movie. AAWIL is also pretty awesome :]
The most obvious examples are Natural Selection and Halo ... but there are many others.
I don't mean to mean that my 5yo boy and I never eat pizza or play video games or watch anime. But when we do it's because we are on our own, a Sunday evening, after having gotten outside with friends, and I'm too tired to play Lego.
Also, alien is really a horror movie, playing hard with the nerves of the audience. Way too hard for 11yo kids if you ask me.
What good is it bringing to kids to see this? Are you better after watching a mediocre and violent entertainment movie? Good movies make you better. I don't think there is any good reason to spend precious youth time seeing movies that don't make you better.
I'm kind of tiger mom here, which some may not like. But I wouldn't be surprised if data analysis could demonstrate the success of tiger moming (success being the general well being and satisfying life of the resulting adult)
Yes, I'm sure that a single party on his birthday will make him fat. For all we know he's an athlete competing on the Youth Olympics, but it matters not, that single evening will forever condemn him to be fat.
The world is not like sports anyway, the most visible difference is that in the real world, the weak ugly computer geek wins in the end, which we all know here.
A slumber party is a party where the guests spend the night at the hosts house. This typically involves pizza, movies, and the kids trying to stay up as late as possible. I seem to remember going to maybe 1 or 2 slumber parties a year.
It's definitely a special occasion and the late night aspect of it lends itself to movies, since by the time the movies come on it's typically too late to make a bunch of noise outside.
> Do you want spoiled fat bored and boring kids? Because that's how you get that.
No, actually, slumber parties are not how you get that.
- Getting 11yo kids to officially stay up as late as possible is a weird idea. They will stay up late anyway but why make it official?
- Many games are suitable for some kids together in the evening. I mean non-video games.
- Watching a movie can be useful to cool down the atmosphere but watching an horror movie just before sleep seems not very advisable. I do not buy the argument that these kids did already see all suitable cartoons and movies. Did they really see all of Miyazaki, Chaplin, Buster Keaton, old Disneys, etc? If so,they clearly watch too much movies.
- I do not think pizza is a good diet for kids (and adults), and it is better, if possible, to not link in their mind fast-food and "having nice time together". I guess it is not convenient to cook a three courses meal with many kids around, but there are other, better possibilities including bbq, picnic, salads, etc. (My reasoning is that having a nice time together is in most culture synonym for having a nice meal together, and so the food can be more important than we think in these occasions.)
Almost every slumber party I went to/heard of watched an action movie or a horror movie that wasn't too hardcore for our preteen selves. I'm pretty sure it's cultural at this point. Also these kids are friends of Ebert's kid. I'm pretty sure they'll be much more movie-literate than the average kid.
We were a bit too old for nintendo and too young for n64 to be part of the culture where we lived, so no comment on video games. We did run around the backyard pool for quite a while.