I started a Tumblr Blog (Tumblog?) called Bug Hunt. It is made up of nothing but pop-culture references to the Alien films. That’s seriously all it is. God hates us all.
Posts Tagged ‘aliens’
Bug Hunt
Friday, November 12th, 2010
Repeated Kicks To The Nuts: An In-Depth Analysis of Predator (and Aliens) Fandom
Wednesday, July 28th, 2010
A few weekends ago, I went and saw the movie Predators. My friend Matt and I are massive fans of the Aliens and Predator movies, so he took some time out from playing World of Warcraft to fly out here from Minnesota and see it with me and our mutual friend Ae. To prepare for what we hoped would be an epic experience, we developed the Predator drinking game. The rules are as follows:
- Three Red Dots – Three Drinks
- Predator Heals Himself – Full Beer
- Predator Self Destruct – Full Beer
- Shoulder Cannon Kill – 2 Drinks
- Levelling The Jungle Scene – Have to Drink The Entire Time Its Happening
- Jesse Ventura Spits – 1 Drink
- Jesse Ventura Says “Slack Jawed Faggots” – Half Beer
- Gratuitous Shirtless Dude shots – 1 drink
- Anyone Says “One Ugly Motherfucker” – Full Beer
- Disc Kill – 1 Drink
- Spear Kill – 1 Drink
- Decapitations – 1 Drink
- Skinned Bodies – 1 Drink
- Badass Wrist Blade Intimidation – 1 Drink
- Gary Busey does something weird – 2 drinks
- Bill Paxton Hits on a Chick – 2 drinks
- Boobs – 2 drinks (one for each boob)
To play the game, we executed the Predator movies in reverse, starting with AVP:R, then AVP, then Predator 2, then Predator. While playing this game, 2 things were difficult. The first difficult thing was all the drinking. Seriously, there are so many wrist blade intimidation/disc/spear/decapitation combos in these movies. A predator gets on a spree, and suddenly you owe the game 6 beers. Also, AVP, though it is PG-13 (and mostly terrible), is deceptively heavy on the kills and wrist blade intimidations and whatnot. We thought it would be a break in the action. It wasn’t. I guess you could say that whoever won, we lost.
By the time we made it to the first movie, we were all basically blacked out, and we never made it past the handshake scene, because we stopped to re enact it frame-by-drunken-frame about 16 times. So yeah, the drinking game was extremely hard, but it paled in comparison to the second difficult thing which is Being a Fan of the Predator (and Aliens) Films.
As I watched the whole series in reverse, I realized that the state of the Predator franchise has been in one big downward slide since Ol’ Painless came out of the bag. The same goes for the Alien franchise, which has deteriorated in parallel since the second film, but we’ll just focus on Predator for now.
Alien Versus Predator: Requiem
AVP:R is a joke. Some music video directors and some hack writers took a bunch of soap opera (and Lost?) b-team actors (Whoa its Rickety Cricket from Always Sunny!) and threw them into a pretty basic premise with some inspired moments and a lot of gore and still managed to fail. There are some cool moments (a trend that gets repeated throughout the series) but ultimately the whole thing is bad. Almost bad enough to call it “So-Bad-Its-Good”, but not quite there. I read somewhere that the directors wanted to cut out the human element, and start the movie off inside the Predator camp, with little to no dialogue…like Dances With Wolves or Wall-E. That would have been awesome. Why they chose to run the other direction, I’ll never know. The “human” plot of Guy-with-checkered-past coming back to his hometown to brood and make allusions to his checkered past while his little brother gets beat up a lot and delivers pizzas and a marine comes home from Afghanistan and a Predator runs around playing David Caruso “investigating” the Alien presence could basically be any movie plot. Switch out the Aliens with a serial killer or a shark or a coven of witches and swap the predator with Robert Shaw or a detective played by Morgan Freeman and you have…ah fuck it. You have every movie on TBS in the afternoon, ever. It was also DARK, not in a Texas Chainsaw Massacre kind of way, but in a “what the fuck is wrong with my TV?” kind of way. It also rips off the ending from Aliens completely.
Alien Versus Predator
Getting to AVP after AVP:R is like finding an oasis in the desert. Its a shitty oasis with no boobs and no blood and a stupid Buddy Movie subplot, but its still an oasis. From the beginning, its clear that AVP was created by someone with EXPERIENCE in making movies (The Resident Evil Franchise, Event Horizon). Its shot pretty well, you can see stuff (which we should all know not to take for granted at this point), and the effects budget was obviously pretty big. The characters are pretty hastily defined, but it sets up something fun: An Alien queen is trapped in Antarctica shitting out Aliens and a bunch of Predators are going to go hunt them while a whole bunch of humans show up to die in horrifying ways! Badass! Again, there are some awesome moments, but the second the Predator teaches the hero-chick how to be a Predator the whole thing falls apart. So stupid. The cool moments: An Alien and a Predator throwing each other around like wrestlers, and a pretty amazing boss fight, but the movie still fails to satisfy the irresistible premise of Aliens and Predators engaging in intergalactic conflict.
Then we go back 14 years to Predator 2. Note the time difference. 14 fucking years we fans have to wait for another Predator to appear on screen. That’s dedication.
Predator 2
Awesome fucking movie. I don’t care what anyone says, this movie rules. There is almost nothing wrong with it (ok there are some things, but fuck you), and it is also the only time we see boobs in the whole franchise. 4 movies and only two living, breathing boobs to be found! If anyone wants to dispute me on the awesomeness of this movie, do it now. It has Gary fucking Busey, a Predator picking off coked-up Colombian gang members, Danny Glover being too old for this shit, Bill Paxton hitting on chicks (seriously, he’s Hudson wearing a suit in this movie), a dude getting his spine AND skull ripped out, the first appearance of the bladed disc, the first appearance of the spear, the slaughterhouse scene, and the fucking subway scene. Like Alien 3, I have no idea why anyone rips on this movie. In the context of the Predator series, Predator 2 is perfect. It advances the mythology (and even sets up the Alien Vs Predator concept), has awesome action, great pacing, more explosions, more deaths, and a new setting. I realize that in the eyes of AFI or whoever decides that movies are good Predator 2 is hokey and weird and kind of dumb, but to Predator fans, this movie is the truth. I used to like this better than the first one, and shit…sometimes I still do.
Predator
The one that started it all. I’ve read a lot about this movie and the general consensus seems to be that Predator is an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie first, with everything else being secondary. I disagree, I actually think its the least Ahnold-y of his movies, due to the awesome supporting cast and the flipped premise. A lot of his early films are just him being Arnold Schwarzenegger offing truckloads of disposable extras and spitting one liners while some chick follows him around and almost gets killed a million times. In Predator, he’s surrounded by one of the most bad-ass tough guy teams ever to hit the screen, and no matter how many disposable bad guys he and his friends destroy (complete with awesome live action stunts), there is always one ultimate bad-ass watching him, waiting for his time to go one-on-one. Its like the Predator watched an Arnold movie marathon from his Predator-throne and thought “this dude looks pretty badass. I’m going to find him, kill all of his friends, and then challenge him to a fist fight.” Its a Predator movie. The Predator owns the movie the whole time, which is no small feat considering the awesome cast and engaging story. Sure, Arnold wins, but that’s the game. The Predator is ready to die for the hunt, and there’s a whole planet of these motherfuckers somewhere waiting to come and hunt again.
We didn’t make it that far though. We were blacked out with half full beers in our hands long before we could check out the “Leveling the Jungle” scene.
Predators
So we got up on Saturday July 10th after this movie marathon, and dragged our carcasses to Kips Bay to see Predators, the “re-boot” of the franchise, produced by Robert Rodriguez, starring Adrien Brody. Again, another case with a genius premise. A crew of ultimate bad-asses from planet earth (a Yakuza samurai, a hot-chick sniper, an African special forces guy, a Mexican gangster, a death row inmate, a black ops dude, and a Russian military soldier) all wake up on an alien planet, to be hunted by the predators. Wow. What an awesome idea for a movie. Seems hard to fuck up. Well, it doesn’t fail…but it does just kind of…under-perform. This movie is like a guy you work with who doesn’t always come in on time, and he does mediocre work, but he’s not bad enough to fire or even really care about. After the movie, I was overwhelmed with a feeling of “meh”. It should have been easy to make this one a blast, but for some stupid reason it took itself so seriously and refused to have any fun with its over-the-top premise. Or even when it seemed like something sweet was going happen, like a scene where the Yakuza has a SAMURAI SWORD FIGHT WITH A PREDATOR, it ended up lame and underwhelming. Seriously how is that possible? I was ready for it to be on par with the Zombie Vs. Shark scene from Zombi, but somehow, it was BORING, which is indicative of the whole problem with this movie (and the franchise as a whole), that it manages to take irresistible setups and render them boring as hell. More cool moments happened in Predators but it took itself so seriously that I ended up taking it seriously, which ended in just 90 minutes of no fun. And yet again, there is a “Predator and Human joining forces” subplot that fails just as bad as it did in AVP.
After this whole adventure I was forced to take a hard look at my fandom of the Aliens and Predator movies, and I concluded that not only is it hard to enjoy a lot of these movies, but its downright hard to stay a fanatic after each crushing defeat. I think we Aliens and Predator fans have it the worst when it comes to being fanatics. No one yells at the screen during the midnight screenings. Our video games, while once great, now generally suck. Our fan fiction and fan art is TERRIBLE (alright all fan fiction and fan art is terrible), and the films we love haven’t been good since the early 90’s. Its one kick in the nuts after another. I mean, Star Wars fans got it pretty bad, but at least they got bent over by a bazillion dollar over the top spectacle that at least finished nicely. And Lord of the Rings nerds, well…they’re pretty high on the hog with all their Oscar nominations and LARPing (not us…do you know how fucking hard it is to climb a tree holding a spear?). Star Trek freaks are kicking ass too with their awesome J.J. Abrams re-boot and good-looking cast. Twilight fans…well they’re are all doomed anyway once Breaking-Batshit-Dawn comes out, but at least they get boners. We get nothing of the like. We get Adrien Brody doing a batman voice…Ripley impersonating an Alien…and Gary Busey.
My point is: It’s tough being a fan of the Aliens and Predator franchise, but we shall overcome. I’m not giving up on these movies and I never will. I’m still going to buy Predators on DVD, and I’ll be waiting patiently for that Alien prequel I read about on some disreputable website 12 years ago.
That’s it. If you are a fellow fan, please feel free to commiserate and share your hardships right here in the comments. We’ll always have each other, right guys?
I Fucking Hate the Papyrus Font
Monday, December 7th, 2009
Not to get all Joey’s Blog on you, but let’s talk fonts for a second.
I fucking hate the papyrus font. Its hideous. I’ve hated it for years, and I’ve ranted about my hatred into many an uncaring ear. It’s a Microsoft Word font that looks dated the second you type a letter. It is supposedly elegant, but using a Microsoft Word default font to define your “elegance” is like putting on one of those “hot body in a bikini” shirts then telling everyone that you actually DO have a hot body.
My first time coming across the font, I was around 16 years old, and I was looking for something to use on the cover of a CD-R I was burning of a Camel album. Camel is a faux Pink Floyd shitty band and burning CD’s of their music will inevitably land you in Papyrus territory, the domain of shitty bands, christian bookmarks, organic groceries/perfumeries/drycleaners, and uhh…things like this:
via Papyrus Watch
Anyway, as I made my awful Camel CD-R packaging, I came across the font and thought, wow! What a great font to use for the COVER I’m DESIGNING for this awesome PROG-ROCK CD-R I’m burning! Are you starting to see the mindset of a Papyrus user? So I finished the cover, looked at what I had done, marveled at my genius, then (thankfully) caught myself, realized how fucking stupid the whole thing was, cancelled the CD in Nero and put on Formulas Fatal to the Flesh by Morbid Angel.
Ahh, with that, we can move forward.
Anyway, In college I used to work at an internet radio station. The station was staffed by bookish weirdos, date rapists, and kids in back braces. It was the Garbage Pail Kids (Ryan West excluded) running online shows for their parents and two other mutants in their hometown of Beloit, WI to hear. I’d like to think I was one of the few “cool” kids involved, but really I was just another variation on the dork/dweeb/spazz theme. There was one kid, whose name I will change, lets call him (Z)Evan. I absolutely despised Zevan, partly because he was a smarmy little prick with a face that could fit a thousand fists, partly because he loved ZWAN, and wouldn’t shut up about it. Ok, it was mainly because he loved Zwan…seriously…who listens to Zwan? People who like the Papyrus font.
Anyway, there was some kind of design discussion going on, and I pulled out my old routine blah blah blah papyrus, and he looks me straight in the face and says “Oh man, I LOVE the papyrus font”. Blood filled my eyes, my hands turned to bricks. If only he knew how close he came to becoming a vessel for my years of misplaced anger. That close.
Between the Camel incident, the countless awful coffee shop signs and business cards emblazoned with it, and the fact that THIS kid was a supporter, my hatred was eternally sealed. I would hate the Papyrus font for the rest of my natural born life, and anything written in it would immediately be translated to “This (book/movie/album/organic cous-cous) was created by a Zwan-loving asshole”.
Or so I thought…
Lets switch gears here for a second. I’ve covered “Things I Despise”, now lets swing to the other end of the spectrum. If you were to ask me, at any age (from age 8-27), what my favorite film of all time was, my answer would be invariably ALIENS. On an off-day, it would be Predator, but for 364 days out of every year of my life, Aliens has been my favorite movie. It’s near perfect in its pacing, characterization, script, story, production design, cinematography blah blah blah. Simply put, it rules. Next to Robocop, I think it is one of the greatest action movies of all time, and I will never bump it from my number one spot. I could go on for hours, but I will spare you.
A little bit further down the list of Awesome Movies I Will Quit Work to Watch on TBS is Terminator 2. Its SUPER Blockbuster-y, but not because it cheaply plays on our desires to watch stuff blow up, but because it tackles big subjects like time-travel, the end of the world, our perceptions of the word “villain” and comes out at the end with only the tiniest bit of cheese dripping from it. Then there is the first Terminator, which is way darker and grainier than you remember. In terms of tone, its the better movie.
Anyway, amateur film analysis should be written in the papyrus font, so I will cool it for a second. But, to make the connection, all of these films were created by James Cameron. James Cameron has made some great fucking movies. Aliens, Terminator (1 and 2), The Abyss, even Titanic has its place. Now, he’s coming out with Avatar.
And what is that font at the end of the trailer? BOOM! PAPYRUS! JAMES CAMERON JUST KICKED THE WORLD IN THE FACE WITH A SIX BILLION DOLLAR MOVIE (“he spent our entire economic stimulus package on Avatar” – Ogre) WITH A SIX DOLLAR MICROSOFT WORD DEFAULT FONT. What is this? Is Avatar a movie or a vegetarian three bean cruelty free lentil chili?
Fuck you James Cameron. You’ve thrown me into the greatest crisis of my life on earth. To date.
I can’t lie. This movie (though the script and plot was obviously written entirely in the Papyrus font as well) looks awesome. I’m being straight up, drunk-honest here, the trailer gave me chills, especially when the word “ALIENS” came on the screen. The graphics look sick, the action looks almost too big to comprehend, and no matter how much James Cameron is insulting my intelligence by carelessly packaging his own sentiments about The War into a blue-skinned propaganda film, I will still be seeing this movie. Probably more than once. Which brought me to an equation, the mathematical equation at the core of my being that, once solved, will be the agent of my undoing (like a Dan Brown novel, only gay-er and more pointless).
My Love for James Cameron Movies > My Hatred for the Papyrus Font
But not by much.
With that said. Fuck you James Cameron, you could have picked a better font. Also, fuck you, guy who invented the papyrus font, because you brought me to this place. I have now transferred all of my hatred to you sir. Whoever you are, because you allowed your faux-egyptian bullshit font to infect the mind of a decent man like James Cameron, whom I have sworn allegiance to for most of my life (even if I haven’t seen Dark Angel), I am making it my life’s goal to find you and kill you. You can have ZEvan, you can have all of the horrible wedding invitations and sweet-corn-exfoliating scrubs in the world, but shame on you for taking James Cameron. You better be a dead pharaoh or something buried in a pyramid or something. Actually even if you are, I will find you, dig you up and fuck you up all over again.
Fuck you. That is all.