Can I say this?

I consider myself a film buff, or maybe I'm a snooty cinema fan, but I do try to expose myself to all sorts of movies throughout time and countries of origin, maybe more so than other people. I own a few movies by Akira Kurosawa, I enjoy Ong Bak in the original Thai, I'll watch Melville's Le Samourai anytime. Our movie collection has Scorsese and Brooks and Fincher and Peckinpah and Lynch and even Steve James. I like a wide range of things, and own a wider range of things I thought it'd be cool to have in a collection rather than watching all the time.

There are plenty of movies, though, that I haven't seen that people, when they hear I haven't seen, are flabbergasted. In high school, some friends were having a movie/poker/sober-fun night, a night I attended and cleaned up at the nickel ante gaming, and the movie put on was a "classic" that everybody remembered fondly and had favorite characters and lines. I didn't even recognize the name of the film.

"What the hell is this?" I think I remember saying, to which I was scolded by such a chorus of voices that I still couldn't place any one thing any one person said. The movie was The Breakfast Club.

Now, in my defense, the movies of my youth, the movies of the 80s that I grew up with were not the same as most of my friends. I had the Indiana Jones pair (before the Last Crusade came out), Ghostbusters 1 & 2, Dream Team, *batteries not included, Short Circuit, Beetlejuice...which are all movies most everyone also my age probably remembers, but I lacked the Molly Ringwald/John Cusack teen movies from the 80s. Molly Ringwald is from Roseville, CA, and I grew up in Citrus Heights, barely seven thousand feet from Roseville. I think the first project I saw more than commercials for that featured Molly Ringwald was the television mini-(mega-)series, The Stand.

What I'm trying to get at is that while I may have a wide knowledge and experience base for movies, sometimes I lag behind on certain movies that most everyone else has seen. It took me probably two years to see Gladiator, but once when I was recently bored, I looked up the list of films in the National Registry as deemed culturally significant and watched a few of the short films on Youtube if they were there. (How exciting were they? Have you read about them here?)

So, after a Pychonian digression or whatever, the meat of this post is about my reaction to a movie I recently saw for the first time ever, which, being at this age in my life, gives me probably the most critical and knowledgeable eye for films that I've ever had, and isn't such a bad place to be viewing a film...its merits will present themselves to me, its faults will glare like a bad reflection.

The movie in question: Ridley Scott's Alien. I was excited to watch it. It's another of the Great Salvage of Citrus Heights movies, though, having watched it, I can understand why my brother, who is I'm sure a fan of this movie, would be dumping it: the sound recording is terrible.

Finally getting to see it was going to be very cool. See, I convinced Corrie to watch it with me at night, with the lights off. That's significant because she doesn't like scary movies, or being scared, or anything that could keep her wild imagination running all night and make her lose sleep (The X-Files and Ghost Whisperer have, at times, proven too scary for her...but both of those shows, in their own different ways, have their own very tense and intense moments). Cuddling on the couch; perfect scary movie scenario.

Until Corrie passed out out of boredom. Maybe that's too harsh, if accurate. The fist ten minutes is the name appearing on the screen (which is a neat (long) moody mood setter)(I did enjoy it) and the stasis tubes opening. The next twenty minutes are people waking up and trying figure out why they're not closer to earth, and, like any vessel, some crew members bitching about pay. You get the feeling Sigourney Weaver's Ripley may have been promoted to Warrant Officer too soon, since she doesn't seem to have anybody's respect, and is basically second in command. Are we watching a moody labor strife saga confined to a malfunctioning space vessel, or one of the preeminent horror films of any generation?

I understand that it was made in 1978/9, so the computer is painfully outdated (watch it again...plugging in different 8-tracks to open the computer room's door?), but that can be overlooked. Maybe being in a leadership position in my own life now has clouded the way I view good leadership and bad leadership in movies I've seen. Here: Tom Skerritt doesn't have the kind of control over his crew that someone on a space mission aboard a space ship would absolutely need, and this is repeated by how his first mate (Ripley) is treated. No chain of command. (Russel Crowe in Master and Commander is a great example of good leadership.)

Who cares about outdated computers and bad captains? Because for the first half of the movie I find myself snickering whenever I see the computers and not really caring what happens to the crew, since they're all pretty bad at what they do and get themselves into trouble repeatedly. When the ship finally lands on the planetoid that has the eggs that start the whole main story into gear, does anyone remember what happens?

The ship descends, slowly, slowly, slower, almost touches down, almost there, then the moment it touches down everybody on board falls over like the school bus crashed and fires start and crazy warning sounds go off. I blurted out laughter loud enough to wake Corrie, if only momentarily (it was late and she was tired after a long work week...).

By the time the classic horror stuff goes down I wasn't emotionally invested anymore, so my overall opinion will be based on that. The gut-bursting alien-birthing scene was, I absolutely concede, very exciting, and must have been truly shocking in 1979 when the movie opened. But seriously, why the hell is he eating food with everybody? He'd just gotten some acid-bleeding face-hugging monster off of his damn face, and he's just chillin' getting some grub?

But, that kind of problem (recognizing plot holes and heavy-handed foreshadowing) sounds like my problem, and it interferes with my enjoyment of plenty of movies.

Thinking back on watching Alien now, I can say that my disappointment must stem from the ridiculously high expectations I had before watching it. Ridley Scott does do all he can to make it as moody as possible, and in one sense that's a component of certain type of horror or thriller movie.

Maybe I've been too harsh with one of the classics. I'll watch it again to see if my complaints about the timing are justified. Am I alone? Is this post treasonous?