sigourney weaver

Working Girl (1988)

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I’ve been thinking a lot about Harrison Ford lately, mostly by happenstance. He’s in TV commercials promoting a new Captain America film as a tomato-red variation of The Hulk transformed by the magic of CGI. He’s lurking in the background of Awards Season ceremonies, disrupting live broadcasts with his signature geriatric-stoner aloofness. When I last went to the theater, he unexpectedly appeared against-type as a young, stone-faced villain in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation. Harrison Ford is everywhere, as long as you happen to be making the exact programming choices I am. So, when I was flipping through my stack of unwatched DVD purchases, I had to follow the pattern and watch the first movie that featured Ford’s handsome face on the cover: Mike Nichols’s late-80s romcom Working Girl, where Harrison Ford plays the lead romantic interest for star Melanie Griffith. Despite Ford’s lengthy screentime and central importance to the plot, it turned out to not be an especially great watch if you’re looking for pure Harrison Ford content. He’s mostly used as a sex-symbol prop, an object to be ogled. Like in my recent everyday life, he’s just kind of . . . there.

Besides the film being a star-vehicle for Melanie Griffith, the reason Harrison Ford doesn’t make much of a strong impression in Working Girl is that the cast is overflowing with a surplus of supporting players, of which he just happens to play the primary hunk. Alec Baldwin plays Hunk #2, a perfectly cast meathead himbo. Sigourney Weaver gives a hilariously broad performance as Griffith’s boss & romantic rival. Joan Cusack plays her even more eccentric bestie. Oliver Platt appears as her workplace enemy, a Wall Street slimeball. Kevin Spacey plays an even slimier Wall Street slimeball. David Duchovny shows up as a background player at her surprise birthday party. Working Girl has the kind of stacked cast of character actors that has you shouting “Holy shit, look who it is!” all the way until the final minute. The last one that got me was Suzanne “Big Ethel” Shepherd from A Dirty Shame delivering exactly one line as an unnamed receptionist in the final few minutes, one of two single-scene appearances from John Waters players, including an earlier appearance from Ricki Lake. Casting director Juliet Taylor was a real over-achiever, as evidenced by roping in someone as classically charismatic as Harrison Ford to just stand around and look handsome.

Working Girl is essentially a fish-out-of-water comedy about a Staten Island party girl (Griffith) who struggles to be taken seriously in the Big Business world of Manhattan across the bay. She rides the ferry to work every morning in her stockings & tennis shoes, switches to the sensible heels stored under her desk, and struggles to keep her hairspray-sculpted lioness mane vertical while battling sexist stereotypes in the lion’s den of stock trading. Her big break arrives in the form of a broken leg, when her much more refined Manhattanite boss (Weaver) injures herself skiing and is briefly taken out of the picture. Our titular working girl makes a power move by taking over her boss’s life & wardrobe, Single White Female-style, and attempting to broker a major corporate-buyout deal with a hotshot fuckboy broker (Ford) before she’s discovered to be a fraud. After the movie comes dangerously close to kicking things off with a date-rape meet cute, they genuinely fall in love and a series of silly deceits & misunderstandings ensue. The entire two-hour runtime is dedicated to the contract negotiations of their singular business deal together, but that doesn’t really matter. What matters is Griffith’s self-described persona of having “a head for business and a body for sin,” a line so perfectly written it belonged on the poster instead of in the dialogue.

Griffith’s sinful body is frequently put on display here, as lacy, overly complicated lingerie appears to be just as much of her Big Business uniform as her pencil skirt; she even vacuums in it. Harrison Ford is tasked to strip too, for a sense of balance, at one point taking a whore’s bath during a phone call in his glass-walled office while his female coworkers gawk & applaud. As a Reaganite cultural clash between the small-town vulgarity of Staten Island and the big-city sophistication of Manhattan, Working Girl is a little conceptually vague. As a collection of always-welcome faces, however, it’s exceedingly charming from start to end (Spacey excluded). You can tell it’s charming just by clocking that there are two overlapping cast members from Moonstruck featured here (Cher’s mom & Cher’s hairdresser), which is the undisputable masterpiece of this 80s NYC romcom subgenre. Harrison Ford is just one handsome face among many. He hadn’t yet learned how to be a dazed, scene-stealing agent of chaos, but thankfully there were plenty of other over-the-top performers around to pick up the slack (with Weaver & Cusack doing most of the heavy lifting in that respect).

-Brandon Ledet

Master Gardener (2023)

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Paul Schrader is a controversial figure. Once upon a time, the writer of The Last Temptation of Christ, Raging Bull, and Taxi Driver was an easy person to point to as, inarguably, a man who understood how to tell a story and tell it well. A professed Christian, it’s hard to pin down what exactly he believes in. In 2016, his online outbursts about the soon-to-be-inaugurated 45th U.S. president were so vitriolic—he even invoked the name of John Brown, the famous abolitionist who was martyred following his attempts to incite slave rebellions prior to the Civil War—that they prompted an investigation from the NYPD’s Counter Terrorism unit. Last year, however, in another social media post apparently inspired by the Academy Awards sweep by Everything Everywhere All at Once, he criticized the “wokeness” of the Oscars, and the year prior, he referred to the positive critical reappraisal of Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles in the Sight & Sound decade-ending poll as a “landmark of distorted woke reappraisal.” With that in mind, one has to wonder what he means with his latest picture, Master Gardener, as he was both writer and director on the feature. Technically, there are spoilers ahead.

Narvel Roth (Joel Edgerton) leads a team of groundskeepers at the historical estate of Gracewood Gardens. He is meticulous in every word and deed; his interactions with his staff and his employer include very precise word choice, his planning of the grounds and deliberate choices of which flowers should be planted in which quadrant to ensure complementary and continuous blooming demonstrate a profound punctiliousness, and his small home—which sits on the grounds just near the main house at Gracewood—is rigidly organized and maintained. In his journals and his dreams, however, we learn that his mind is not so painstakingly groomed and patterned. Early on, he refers to the moments of anticipation leading up to the blooming of a flower with the use of a violent simile: that it is like the moment leading up to the pulling of a trigger. As we learn through a series of flashbacks, Gracewood is not where Narvel was hired, but is in fact where he was placed, as part of the Witness Protection Program. A former member of a neo-Nazi militia, he turned state’s evidence and has resided at Gracewood ever since. (I know that, for some, this will constitute a spoiler, but I also feel it important to take note of this, since I went into the film with no knowledge that this would be part of the film, and this is a sensitive topic that I feel it is important to have some forewarning about.) 

His world begins to change when the ancestral owner of the estate, Norma Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver), informs Narvel that he will soon be responsible for the apprenticeship of her great niece, a young woman named Maya (Quintessa Swindell). Maya, the product of an interracial marriage, formerly visited the grounds with her mother, the daughter of Norma’s sister, when she was a child, but those visits came to an end with Maya’s mother took ill and died. In contrast to Narvel’s overt but distant racism, Norma’s is genteel but still very much present. She refers to Maya, derisively, as being of “mixed blood,” and in the scene in which we learn that there are elements of sexual transaction in Narvel and Norma’s relationship, we see that she regards the medley of racist tattoos that Narvel keeps hidden beneath his gardening clothes (the numbers 88 and 14, the Confederate flag, cracker bolts, and the obligatory swastika) with gratified admiration. While Narvel interacts pleasantly and respectfully with his diverse staff, Maya, and even his WitSec contact Oscar Neruda (Puerto Rican-American Esai Morales) in a way that demonstrates that he has shaken off the hatred of his past, Norma still occupies what is clearly and inarguably a former plantation house, and the way that she carries herself and interacts with both her staff and her last living relative, whom she considers tainted by her non-whiteness, demonstrates that her passive racism and white supremacy is harmful in the same way that Narvel’s past neo-Nazi activities were. Things take a turn for the worse when Norma banishes Narvel and Maya from Gracewood when she falsely assumes that the two have developed a sexual relationship. Narvel invites Maya to come with him, detox and get sober, and continue to learn to find meaning in the horticultural arts, but even though he has pruned himself in such a way that he has grown into a different person, his worries that his roots (pun intended) in violence and white supremacy may taint him and his actions forever. 

I see this film being listed as a crime thriller in most postings, and while it definitely has elements of that genre (there are certain segments involving vigilante activity that feel like they could have been lifted directly from the 2014 version of The Equalizer), Master Gardener is, first and foremost, a character study, and frequently has moments of black comedy as well. Narvel is a man of contradictions, formerly a member of the worst kind of terrorist organization who now stands as the human bulwark between the aging Norma and her staff. When Maya sees his tattoos and confronts him about them, asking why he hasn’t had them covered up or removed, he has no real answer for her, only stating that he had looked into it and decided not to (which I interpret as Narvel having left them on his body for Norma’s sake but not wanting to say this outright, but that’s just my reading of the text and is by no means canonical). In an early sequence in which Narvel’s journal is presented to us in voiceover, he recounts that while it was once thought that seeds had a lifespan of less than two centuries, but that some that had been uncovered by archaeologists millennia after they were harvested were able to be sprouted, speaking to the perseverance of nature, but in the same sequence, he refers to his tattoos as seeds as well, and it’s left ambiguous what this means. Does he think that hate is eternal? What does he expect them to germinate into? We never get a clear answer. 

This is a rich, beautifully photographed, and sumptuous film. Immediately after, when my viewing companion and I were discussing it over dinner, neither of us was sure if we had enjoyed it or not, and I’m still not sure, as I write this a day later. It’s certainly leagues better than the last Schrader film that I saw (The Canyons), and there’s a beauty in its ambiguity that I have to admire. It recalls Schrader’s most well-known film, Taxi Driver, insofar as it is about a man with a dark and troubled past whose obsessive devotion to a younger woman leads him to violent acts, but where it differs is that the older film is about a man who becomes a proto-incel because he can only see the ugliness of the world, while Gardener is about a man who is seeking redemption, and maybe finding it. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Galaxy Quest (1999)

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There’s something really special about Galaxy Quest that’s hard to describe. It’s not just the loving send-up of classic Star Trek that permeates the film, because if that were all it had going for it, then it wouldn’t resonate comedically with an audience that’s unfamiliar with the old sci-fi juggernaut’s quirks and foibles, and I’ve witnessed enjoyment of the film by many a non-Trekkie. My most recent re-watch of the film was at least the twentieth time that I’ve seen it in my life, including an attendance during its theatrical run the summer I turned twelve, and I still get a kick out of it every time. Other genre parodies and pastiches have come and gone, but Galaxy Quest‘s enduring popularity even led to a 2019 documentary about the film, twenty years after its initial release. I’m not surprised by how beloved it is, however, as its appeal has never worn off for me, either. 

The film opens some twenty years after the unresolved cliffhanger finale of kitschy old school space opera series Galaxy Quest, at a fan convention for the show. The show’s stars have seen little success in their careers after the show ended and the fan convention circuit seems to be the only way that they provide for themselves, other than Jason Nesmith (Tim Allen), who portrayed Kirk-analog Peter Quincy Taggart on the show. Allen plays Nesmith pitch perfectly, with a massive ego that’s just a few degrees off of William Shatner’s real life braggadocio, pairing it with a very un-Shatner tenderness with fans that makes him more sympathetic than Shatner is (sorry, Bill). He also hints at an ongoing attraction to former castmate Gwen DeMarco (a blonde Sigourney Weaver), who played Lieutenant Tawny Madison, whose sole function on the series was to look pretty and repeat everything that the computer said. Alexander Dane (Alan Rickman) is our not-quite-Leonard-Nimoy here, with a few shades of Patrick Stewart, as a classically trained British theatre actor whose role as the alien Doctor Lazarus—complete with a prosthetic rubber “head” that covers his hair—has so dwarfed anything else that he could possibly do that he openly laments that he will be repeating his character’s corny catchphrase until the day that he dies. True to his veteran stage nature, he can always be coaxed onstage with the reminder that “the show must go on.” Clearly (but for the sake of the film’s PG rating not explicitly) stoned Fred Kwan (Tony Shalhoub), who was the ship’s engineer Chen is also present, at least physically, as is Tommy Webber (Daryl Mitchell), who played the pilot of the Protector on the show as a child, like Wil Wheaton did as Wesley Crusher on The Next Generation. 

Nesmith overhears some teenagers mocking him while in the bathroom at the convention, which results in him blowing up at eager young fan Brandon (Justin Long), which even the castmates who dislike him find out of character. After blowing off a group of people that are presumed to be alien cosplayers at the convention, they come to his home to pick him up for a mission, which he interprets to be the group simply maintaining character as Galaxy Quest LARPers for a side appearance that he accepted. Hungover from drinking himself unconscious the previous night over the embarrassment of being mocked and then exploding at teenagers afterward, Jason fails to notice that he has been transported up to a real spacecraft, where the leader of the group, Mathesar (Enrico Colantoni), brings him into contact with Sarris (Robin Sachs), a reptilian warlord who has attacked Mathesar’s people, the Thermians. Jason directs the aliens to fire, half-asses a Kirk Taggart speech, declares victory, and asks to be sent home. The Thermians, worriedly, allow him to leave, but they send him back via teleportation via goo, which shocks him and makes him realize that his experience has been real. When he tries to share this news with his castmates (and bumping into Brandon again, accidentally swapping out the functional communicator that Mathesar gave him with the kid’s toy), they believe he’s having a mental breakdown, but when Fred points out that he might have been talking about a gig, they race to catch up with him and then experience their own epiphanic space transport. Also along for the ride is Guy (Sam Rockwell), a convention emcee whose sole stake in the show was playing a Redshirt credited only as “Crewman 6,” but who is also living off of the convention appearances. Once aboard the real Protector, he immediately assumes that his status as a “non-character” means that he’s doomed to die first, which sets off a great running gag in which he, as the only person who watched the show, is the only one who has any genre awareness about presuming that there’s air on a planet or that seemingly cute aliens might be vicious predators. 

So how did this all happen? Why is there a real starship Protector? The Thermians received the broadcasts of the Galaxy Quest show and, having no cultural reference for fiction, presume that they are “historical documents” and reverse engineered what they saw on the show into something that actually functions. Their pacifism, however, made them easy prey for the hostile Sarris, and so they did the only thing that they could think of, which was go to Earth and enlist the help of their heroes, not realizing that they were simply actors. Upon witnessing what happened to the previous leader of the Thermians, who was tortured to death by Sarris, the actors attempt to flee back to earth, but are unable to leave due to the arrival of Sarris, and have to do in reality what they’ve only ever accomplished on screen. 

There are so many little details that really make this one punchy. When we see some of the cast members’ homes, Alexander is living in squalor while Gwen’s bedroom looks comfortable but modest; Jason, in contrast, lives in a gorgeous mid century modern ranch style house with huge windows. He’s not hard up for money like the others are, which not only means that he’s been more successful but also that he doesn’t really need to go to these conventions to stay afloat financially like his old co-workers, but that he does it to stoke the fires of his own ego. Still, we remain sympathetic to him, as he does seem to truly love his old role, even being able to remember a monologue from an episode that he filmed decades before when he stumbles upon the episode on late night television. Another really great detail is the costuming in the convention; when Gwen poses with a group of fans who are all cosplaying as her character Tawny, each Tawny’s costume is clearly based on the one she wears in the show but are different from one another in ways that reveal their homemade nature. It’s really an inspired touch that the movie includes a half dozen people wearing their own interpretation of the same outfit, just like you would see at any other convention. Look at any photo of a real Star Trek convention and you’ll see the same thing, with several Doctor Crushers all posing together in variations on a style, a non-uniform uniform of black and teal and maybe a blue lab coat, but none identical. It reflects a love of not just the source material but the people who make up the community that enjoys it as well. There are hundreds of inspired choices throughout here, and you don’t have to know or care about Star Trek to get the jokes under the jokes, but if you do, it’s even more of a rewarding experience. 

Somehow, the easter eggs scattered throughout the narrative aren’t distracting. A perfect example is the scene in which Jason has to fight first a desert pig/lizard hybrid and then a full on rock monster. His friends decide to use the ship’s version of the transporter device, which the Thermians have never successfully tested. Fred’s first attempt to use it, a test run on the pig thing, results in the creature being turned inside out before exploding. On the planet below, Jason somehow loses his shirt while fighting the rock monster, all while being coached through the event by Alexander. In a second attempt, Fred manages to beam Jason out of there moments before he’s squashed. The scene is funny regardless, with the gross teleporter accident explosion, Rickman’s perfect embodiment of a true thespian whose patience with a gloryhound colleague ran out years ago, and Shalhoub’s panicked performance as Fred, but if you’re versed in the deeper Star Trek lore, you know that Shatner, when directing The Final Frontier, wanted Kirk to fight a group of rock monsters, which was then reduced to a single rock monster for budgetary reasons, and was ultimately cut because of how goofy looking it was; here, not!Kirk actually does what Kirk never got to do, which adds a layer of enjoyment that’s not strictly necessary but reflects a genuine affection for what it’s mocking. And that’s not even getting into the various transporter accidents that occur over the course of the franchise, perhaps most notably in The Motion Picture, where it’s a relief to learn that two people who are horribly mutilated when the device fritzes mid-transport “didn’t live long … fortunately.”

The chemistry between the cast is great, especially between the Allen/Weaver/Rickman trio. Weaver is the one most playing against type, a role she sought out largely because she was the opposite of her most famous character, Ripley. Her rising frustration is palpable and she deals with it very unlike Ripley would, but Ripley would also never find herself on a ship that has giant, functionless, metal chomping machinery in the bowels of the ship just because a writer in the late seventies/early eighties wanted to have Taggart fight a reptile monster there in one episode. Rickman so thoroughly throws himself into the role of an actor who loathes the one person with whom he’s been forever joined in the public consciousness that his eventual grudging respect for his longtime foil packs a true emotional punch. His reactions to the Thermians’ expectation that he resemble the character that he hates are comic gold, but when he repeats his despised catchphrase in earnest after the death of an alien who respected him, it’s genuinely emotional. Some things haven’t aged well (the goo transport thing in particular stands out as a bad effect), but for the most part, it looks like a movie that could come out this summer. In fact, to give the film a little extra verisimilitude, they forsook the traditional “shake the camera and have the actors stagger around” effect of demonstrating weapon hits and built the control room set on a giant moving stage called a gimbal, and there is a noticeable uptick in the suspension of disbelief as a result. 

For me, this is a comfort movie. It’s extremely well crafted, conceived, and executed, and it’s an easy pick if you’re looking for something that doesn’t take itself too seriously but gets everything right. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: Copycat (1995)

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For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss Copycat (1995), a post-Silence of the Lambs serial killer meta-thriller starring Holly Hunter & Sigourney Weaver.

00:00 Welcome

03:48 Swampboox
06:57 Murder, She Wrote
10:04 Malignant (2021)
11:27 Stories We Tell (2012)
15:48 Our Flag Means Death
17:50 The Batman (2022) & The Northman (2022)
21:55 You Won’t Be Alone (2022)
25:47 The Pink Cloud (2022)
29:02 Dual (2022)

32:20 Copycat (1995)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

A Swampflix Court Dissenting Opinion: Prometheus (2012) & Alien: Covenant (2017)

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The unknown is terrifying, and Ridley Scott used to know this. As much as I love A Nightmare on Elm Street, The VVitch, Get Out, Raw, Rosemary’s Baby, The Omen, and the Argento canon, 1977’s Alien is actually my favorite horror movie of all time. It’s claustrophobic and atmospheric, and the terror of it works on multiple levels. Atypical heroine Ellen Ripley and her compatriots are forced to contend with two different faceless evils that press inward upon them from different directions: the known and the unknown, the “company” and the alien itself. Both of these entities pose a different kind of existential threat to the crew of the Nostromo, and that’s a huge part of why the film works.

The xenomorph, as it would come to be known, is a horrifying Lovecraftian nightmare, an unknown and unknowable force that lies outside the realm of all previous human existence. It lives only to consume, kill, and reproduce, and its grotesque chitinous body is hidden in shadow and smoke, and our revulsion upon seeing it is primal; the alien is simply not right, and its existence is a reminder that space itself is an eternal night of darkness that extends in every direction, full of sights that chill the blood and churn the stomach. The quietly understated human characters who comprise the Nostromo‘s crew are not Starfleet’s finest or mystical monks with laser swords: they’re blue collar blokes like most of the audience was and is, and they, like us, are completely unprepared for the horrors that lie in the deep darkness beyond our tiny, sunlit hospitable zone.

My biggest problems with Prometheus when it first came out (I am much less willing to overlook or reinterpret its faults than Brandon is), was that the chain of events needed to create the not-quite-xenomorph seen in the finale was needlessly complex. First, the mutagen goo has to be ingested, then it has to mutate Noomi Rapace’s lover’s zygotes, then said sperm has to enter another person (perhaps with conception happening, although it’s not explicit), then the new lifeform had to leave the life form in which it was incubating to then seed another life form for another form of incubation, then we get the chest-bursting and the derpy alien that followed. There are simply too many variables and the requirements for too many different forms of life for the process to seem like a cohesive possibility, relying on contrivance and truly unlikely coincidence to exist. My suspension of disbelief is pretty extensive, but even I have limits. And I will give Covenant this: as annoyed as I am by the continuing revelations of where the classic xenomorph came from, at least the film makes it apparent that it took a significant amount of time and experimentation for David to create them.

Covenant on the whole feels wrong on multiple levels. Everything that happens after the xenomorph erupts and starts tracking down the remaining members of the ship’s crew works, for the most part, capturing a lot of the claustrophobic terror of the original (give or take the scene where David’s littlest newborn alien spreads its arms out like it wants to give him a hug, which is actually more unintentionally comical than the parody chestburster scene in Spaceballs was intentionally humorous). That outright horror, however, highlights how little this film works as a cohesive whole, as the deeper philosophical issues that Scott seems to think he’s exploring simply don’t mesh with the campier elements of the film (the aforementioned chestburster and its need for a hug, David’s laughable wig in his first scene, everything that Billy Crudup does) or with the frightening alien stalking the Covenant itself. More than anything, the film reminds me of 1997’s Lost in Space, a movie that I frequently cite as being a flick full of ideas, which is praiseworthy, save for the fact that all of those ideas are bad.

For me, the latest problem isn’t one of aesthetic nitpicking (why does the Covenant look so much more advanced than the Nostromo?) or valid scientific questions (why is no one wearing something as basic as an air mask when they go down to the planet?), although those are valid criticisms, it’s the fact that all this retconning has minimized the terror of the xenomorph by telling us too much about it. This is a frequent problem with prequels in general: in the original Star Wars, we’re never given any reason to believe that Obi-Wan’s robes are some kind of special Jedi outfit; the viewer is left to assume that he wears robes because that’s what you wear in a desert, just like the Jawas do. We never see Luke wearing robes in any of the later films; he wears what appears to be standard civilian garb. But the prequels decided to make the robes that Alec Guinness wore in A New Hope the uniform of the Jedi, for no reason that I can think of except that, perhaps, the assumption was that the audience was stupid. I suppose that this Jedi conformity could have been mentioned in the extended universe books, but I’m not going down that hole.

I’m not saying that Alien is ruined by Scott’s later works, but I would go so far as to say that he is doing as much damage to its legacy as The Phantom Menace and its follow ups did to the Orig Trig, at least in my opinion. Before Scott dreamed up a reason to call it an “Engineer,” the Space Jockey was just one more part of an unsolvable riddle: a giant dead body from an unknown race, seemingly eviscerated with its chest open, fossilized. It’s a tableau that induces anxiety because the riddle doesn’t seem like it can be solved, with the perpetrator and the victim both lost to time immemorial–or so it seems until the monster is born again when a group of little humans, completely unprepared for the horrors that exist beyond the fragile atmosphere of their world, stumble into the killing fields of an implacable star beast they cannot comprehend or reason with. Until Prometheus came alone, there was no reason to believe that the Space Jockey had anything to do with the creation of the xenomorph; instead, he seemed to represent a previous incarnation of the cycle of violence, another innocent stargazer who happened upon a living nightmare in an earlier time and succumbed to it, its titanic stature further cementing just how fucked Ripley and her comrades are.

By explaining where the Space Jockey came from, showing him to be part of another monolithic species (seriously–all the Engineers look the same) who are adept at genetic manipulation and space travel but live like shepherds, and also making them interstellar saviors, that awe and fear and majesty of that original scene in which the tiny humans approach the body of a dead giant is completely undermined and cheapened. The film series seems to be headed towards a revelation that David was responsible for engineering the situation that leads to the creepy scene that the crew of the Nostromo will eventually stumble upon, making the diorama less of a frightening exhibit that defies explanation and more of a crime scene with fantastic genetic weapons, which is not only insulting but insipid.

Further, by giving the alien menace a face in David, Scott further distances himself from the Lovecraftian menace of the original film, in which there was no human face that represented the xenomorph and its interest. Aliens featured Paul Reiser as a villain with a face, but he was merely the representative of the faceless corporation that had been in the background of the first movie, and it worked by giving us someone to hate as a balance to the xenomorph queen, which we fear. By putting a human(oid) face on the alien menace in the form of David and his devotion to the destruction of the human race for its folly in playing god and creating him by, um, playing god and creating new life, we cross into Marvel style supervillainy. For lack of a better term, it’s basic as fuck masquerading as deep. And hey–I like the Marvel movies, but that’s a different franchise for a reason (although I wouldn’t object to an MCU movie that featured The Brood, unlikely as that may be).

I’ve dwelt on this long enough, so I’ll wrap up my argument as well as I can: Covenant seems like Ridley Scott’s attempt to reinvigorate the Alien franchise with a soft reboot, akin to the reinvention-by-way-of-remaking of the Star Wars franchise using The Force Awakens to wash away the taste of the prequel trilogy. But instead of doing away with what Alien: Mission to Mars Prometheus did wrong and moving on from there to recreate the original Alien with a fresh start, there’s an attempt to smash Prometheus and Alien into one movie, and it simply doesn’t work to wipe the slate clean or build a new framework. It’s not a problem of design, or performance (I’ve been adoring Katherine Waterston since Queen of Earth, although I have yet to figure out what Danny McBride has been putting in the water that makes everyone love him so much), or casting, or editing, or cinematography. Frankly, all of these individual components work pretty well. The ultimate failure of both Prometheus and Alien: Covenant is one of Ridley Scott’s vision. He created one of the greatest horror movies of all time, and he just can’t stop himself from ruining it with his bad ideas and desire to explain what works better as a mystery.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Five Most Surprising Comedic Actors Lurking in Galaxy Quest (1999)

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As a full-length ode to what made the original Star Trek television series such a joy to watch, you can’t do much better than 1999’s sci-fi comedy Galaxy Quest. I guess you could argue that there’s a little influence from the The Next Generation incarnation of Star Trek mixed into the film’s DNA, considering that the spoofy homage was contemporary with titles like Nemesis, particularly noticeable in the design of the space crew’s alien enemies, but for the most part it feels true to the original Star Trek run. I suspect our resident Trekkies Alli & Boomer could do a better job explaining exactly how Galaxy Quest captures & lovingly mocks the post-Lost in Space philosophical ponderings of Gene Roddenberry’s 1960s cultural landmark, but I can say for sure that it’s difficult to think of an example of an homage that does old-line Star Trek better than Galaxy Quest. The depressive black comedy Space Station 76 might come close and JJ Abrams’s reboot of the franchise might nail a few stray details, but Galaxy Quest is more or less the pinnacle of lovingly farcical Star Trek sendups.

Besides the film’s accomplishments in capturing the spirit of its obvious, but unspoken source material, what always strikes me about Galaxy Quest is the strength & likeability of its ridiculously stacked cast. The film follows the actors who played characters on a Star Trek-esque sci-fi show as they’re misunderstood to be a real deal spaceship crew and unwittingly recruited by an alien species they mistake for enthusiastic fans of the show for a real, life-threatening outer space adventure. The casting of the Galaxy Quest crew has always struck me as inspired. The sadly deceased Alan Rickman is perfectly pitched as a Leonard Nimoy surrogate: a self-serious stage actor who’s annoyed by his genre nerd celebrity, yet still wears his prosthetic alien makeup around the house as he glumly performs simple chores. Tony Schalhoub turns “phoning it in” into his own artform as an in-over-his-head engine room technician amidst a constant state of crisis. Sam Rockwell’s role as a bit part actor justifiably paranoid about dying on the mission because he played a one-line, no-name character on the show is great meta humor. Similarly, Sigourney Weaver’s space bimbo with no real purpose on the crew besides displaying her breasts is a great subversion of her resilient, insanely competent role as Ripley in the Alien series. Even Tim Allen is a joy to watch here, bringing his iconic role as Buzz Lightyear to full live action glory as the crew’s self-important ass of a captain. Once Galaxy Quest hits its narrative groove each of these crew members helplessly find themselves slipping into their scripted roles and lift tactics from old episodic plot lines to problem solve their way back to Earth, much to the delight of their extraterrestrial fans/kidnappers.

Those famous actor crew members are largely what makes Galaxy Quest such an iconic work in the first place. It was on my most recent watch, however, where I discovered that they’re far from alone in terms of recognizable faces in the cast. It’s been a good few years since I’ve revisited Galaxy Quest, which always struck me so one of the heights of easy, pleasant viewing, and I was surprised by how well both its humor & its CG special effects have held up in the past couple of decades. What really surprised me, though, was the number of familiar faces lurking behind the film’s main flashy space crew. Here are the five Galaxy Quest supporting players that most caught me off-guard, listed form least to most exciting.

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5) Enrico Colantoni

I really shouldn’t be surprised that Colantoni is in this movie because as a kid I probably knew him just as much for his role here as an alien nerd as I knew him as the chauvinist photographer from Just Shoot Me (I watched a lot of trash television as a youngster). In the years since its release, however, memories of Colantoni in the role had faded thoroughly to the point of vague déjà vu and I’ve come to think of the actor solely as Keith Mars, one of the great television dads (from the cult show Veronica Mars, in case you’re unfamiliar). Colantoni is damn funny as the lead alien kidnapper/nerd here, bringing a distinct Coneheads vibe to the performance. However, I’d be a liar if I didn’t admit that I was waiting for him to say “Who’s your daddy?” at some point during the production, a moment that obviously never arrived.

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4) Missi Pyle

The eternally underutilized character actor Missi Pyle probably shouldn’t surprise me by popping up in a bit role as one of Colantoni’s alien underlings. Pyle’s career has long been relegated to supporting player parts on TV comedies & straight to DVD/VOD farces (she’s actually pretty phenomenal in her role as a drunken loser in the mostly unseen Parker Posey/Amy Poehler comedy Spring Breakdown, a part that seemed tailor made for Jennifer Coolidge). I think I was mostly surprised by Pyle’s inclusion in the Galaxy Quest cast because I had mentally placed Milla Jovovich in the role as I reflected back on the film. Her character’s space goth visage recalled amalgamation of Jovovich’s roles in Zoolander & Resident Evil and her super geeky, posi, genuine vibe in the role recalls Jovovich’s most iconic performance as Leeloo in Luc Beson’s ludicrous space epic The Fifth Element (a film Galaxy Quest resembles in a few production details, especially in the design of its alien weaponry).

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3) Justin Long

Much like Missi Pyle, Justin Long has been in almost-famous purgatory for decades, never quite breaking out of bit roles in low profile comedies while his friends & collaborators “make it big” without him. Outside a few standout parts in comedies like Idiocracy & *shudder* Tusk, he’s mostly a background player who’s asked to allow other comedians to take the spotlight. That small potatoes status is still true in his diminished role as a geeky, convention-going superfan in Galaxy Quest, but looking back I had no idea he was in this movie at all. It’s no wonder that I didn’t recognize Justin Long in 1999, since Galaxy Quest is listed on IMDb as his first credited roe, but I was still surprised to see him onscreen here, all bright eyed & babyfaced. His few scenes as the Galaxy Quest crew’s #1 (human) superfan, the kind of dweeb who obsesses over decades-old plot holes that don’t quite match the blueprints of a fictional spaceship, is more serviceable than scene-stealing, but he was still a pleasant addition to the cast. It’s a status I’m sure he’s used to filling.

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2) Rainn Wilson

In case you’re not noticing a pattern here, a lot of the more surprising supporting players in the Galaxy Quest cast are the alien kidnapper/fans that kick the film’s plot into action. Although the presence of Pyle & Colantoni caught me off-guard, what really threw me off was that Rainn Wilson was lurking among them. Much like with Long, Galaxy Quest was a kind of a career-starter for Wilson, who had only appeared in an episode of a soap opera before joining the ranks of this sci-fi comedy’s geeked-out aliens. As an unproven newcomer (this was obviously years before Wilson’s star-making turn as Dwight Schrute on The Office), Wilson mostly lurks in the background as a stealthy member of the extraterrestrial superfans. However, he fits in perfectly with his compatriot dorks & the film stands as an early glimpse at the total-weirdo energy he’d later bring to his iconic television role, as well as the strange diversity in his choice of projects, which include recent strange outliers like Cooties & The Boy.

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1) Kevin McDonald

Speaking of the ridiculous range of underutilized talents lurking in the film’s geeky alien troupe, I spent a lot of Galaxy Quest asking myself “Is that Kevin McDonald? No, it’s not. But is it, though?” while watching character actor Patrick Breen fill out their ranks as a Spock-like superfan of Rickman’s eternally inconvenienced personification of nonplussed stoicism. Patrick Breen, it turns out, is not Kevin McDonald. They are two separate people. Imagine my surprise, then, when the Kids in the Hall vet did show up in the film’s closing minute in a thankless, jokeless role as a sci-fi convention MC who announces the arrival of each crew member as they make their inevitable return to the Earths’ surface. Just when I thought Galaxy Quest could hold no more room for further casting surprises, Kevin McDonald swooped in at the last second, as if the film were reading my mind.

I guess that’s to be expected in a movie where Sam Rockwell plays a full-length tribute to the very nature of a thankless bit role actor, but how could Galaxy Quest’s casting director Debra Zane have known that all of those supporting players would eventually become such big names in the first place? Her intuition seems to have been just as futuristic as the film’s sci-fi setting and her work of gathering up all of these strong personalities is a large part of what makes the film such an enduring delight.

-Brandon Ledet

Vamps (2012)

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Amy Heckerling directed two of the most iconic teen comedies of all time, Clueless & Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and yet she hasn’t been afforded much leeway as a filmmaker. Outside her work on television there’s a dispiritingly low number of titles to her name and while I’m not willing to fully go to bat for either Look Who’s Talking or Johnny Dangerously, I will say Heckerling does have at least one credit to her name that’s criminally overlooked: Vamps. A madcap romcom about two party girl vampires trying to survive the afterlife in the big scity, Vamps is wildly fun & immediately endearing, recalling Herckerling’s best work to date in the high school satire Clueless. The two films’ connection runs much deeper than the directer reuniting with actors Alicia Silverstone & Wallace Shawn, however. They both have a genuine empathy for all of their characters, even the high school mean girls & bloodsucking undead (as well as their respective “enemies”), and they both find plenty of room for personality & biting wit within the rigid romcom formula. Vamps is Heckerling at the top of her endearing-but-satirical game and every time I revisit it I become more  baffled that it has yet to cultivate a solid cult audience.

An ultra-feminine precursor to What We Do in the Shadows, Vamps follows two NYC roommates as they navigate big city nightlife & supplant their thirst for blood (held at bay by feeding on rats) with an endless eternity of clubbing & casual sex. Silverstone more or less reprises her role as an all-growed-up Cher “Clueless” Horowitz & her bestie is played by Krysten Ritter, who’s essentially a much-less vicious version of her Don’t Trust the B character Tall Slut No Panties, uhh, I mean Chloe. Except, you know, they’re vampires. Injecting a little horror movie fantasy into this Sex and the City worldscape of trying to find the right guy by sleeping with all the wrong ones livens up the format a great deal. It’s amusing to watch these women lie about their age by hundreds of years, attend Sanguines Anonymous meetings, find work modeling clothes for other vampires who can’t use a mirror, and check out hot guys’ jugulars as they, in turn, check out their cleavage. That’s not where Vamps gets the most mileage out of its vampire genre gimmick, though. Its combination of sisterly camaraderie with old world nostalgia is its true undead heart. Silverstone’s character in particular struggles with memory of a world before cellphone addiction & cancer-causing sugar substitutes and it’s her combination of Luddite philosophy & aggressive femininity that affords this film it’s own unique voice.

Vamps feels a little like an entire sitcom’s run conveniently contained at a romcom’s length. It’s by no means breaking any molds in terms of genre or humor, especially recalling other feminine horror comedy genre mashups like Hocus Pocus, Death Becomes Her, and Sabrina The Teenage Witch. Its playful mix of bloodlust, fashion, cute guys, and immortality might not feel entirely fresh in the 2010s, but Heckerling keeps the mood consistently light, endearing, and bizarre. Besides, the movie delights in feeling outdated in a modern world it has little reverence for. Big time supporting players like Sigourney Weaver, Maclolm McDowell, and Dan Stevens are all just as charming & effective as the main cast and a few inspired gags like a rat blood spit take & a vampire’s hideous spray-on tan find some unexpected, as-yet unexplored territory in a genre that’s been mined beyond death. It’s Heckerling’s specific, unmistakable comedic voice that makes Vamps feel remarkable despite what you’d expect from it’s genre trappings & modern age griping. Unfortunately, because that voice is so rarely heard these days it’s a sound for sore ears.If Herckerling has any other projects cooking that are half as charming as Vamps we’d be lucky to have them in our grotesque modern world. I’m afraid they’d also go noticed & unappreciated, though. There’s little evidence in the last twenty years of her work’s public reception that would make me think otherwise.

-Brandon Ledet