Both are broadly classifiable as science fiction, but Alien is basically a horror flick and Aliens has all the conventions of a war film. That’s a pretty slick transition from one type of movie to another, especially since the switch was so immediate within the series. Most movie franchises don’t play with genre in such a way until they’ve gone through a number of sequels, and even then the series usually just simply takes its characters into outer space, a la Moonraker, Jason X and Leprechaun 4.
Genre jumping isn’t that easy, though, unless a franchise inhabits a whole universe in which to expand through. Like Star Wars, for example. Originally a film series, the Star Wars franchise spread out into novels, which has allowed for dips into the romance genre and now horror. That’s right, an upcoming novel by horror author Joe Schreiber, titled Deathtroopers, takes the Star Wars universe into frightening territory described by Schreiber as “in the vein of The Shining and Alien, with a little dose of William Gibson mixed in.”
So, if Star Wars can venture into the horror genre, what other movie franchises should attempt a genre jump? To toy with the idea, we’ve selected five film series in need of a change and suggested a possible redirection of genre for each. …Read more
The leaves are turning, the air is crisp, it could only mean one thing: the time is now for the best Simpsons episode of the year, The Treehouse of Horror Halloween Special. They’ve done a good job this year of building buzz, especially around the portion of the episode that spoofs Mad Men. The episode airs Sunday, November 2, and 8 pm on Fox.
In the above video we get a glimpse of the segment’s title, How to Get Ahead in Dead-Vertising. This is fantastic news: it means that the piece will be properly ghoulish, and it also means that it may not be only an homage to Mad Men, but also to the classic 1989 advertising satire How to Get Ahead in Advertising. In that film, a successful ad executive suffers from a horrible boil on his neck. One day he wakes to find that the boil has developed into a face, which becomes his evil alter-ego. I would love to see that scenario played out with Homer on the Madison Avenue of the 1960’s.
This also gets to the point of why The Simpsons Halloween episodes are always the best: there are way more movie references than usual. I was an obsessive Simpsons fan as a kid, and the Halloween episodes alone upped my pop culture literacy by several notches. The segment based on The Shining is a favorite of mine, and the Frankenstein spoof where Mr. Burns’ head ends up grafted on Homer’s shoulder gave me nightmares for weeks.
Over the weekend, a video called Jack and Hill appeared on YouTube. The clip strung together clips from Jack Nicholson films (including A Few Good Men, Five Easy Pieces and Tim Burton’s Batman) with white-on-black title cards summarizing Hillary Clinton’s qualifications to be president. Though first thought to be the work of the Clinton campaign, the Politico reported on Sunday that it was the brainchild of a number of Hollywood figures, including Rob Reiner and Nicholson himself, who produced it independently of the Clinton camp.
In the film blog world, the general consensus was that however Jack and Hill was produced, as a campaign video, it was pretty bad. “Just utterly pathetic,” was how Michael Newman put it in a comment on Chuck Tryon’s blog, and FILMMAKER editor Scott Macaulay sighed, “This election is getting too bizarre.” Beyond the obvious ideological problem that the clip has Hillary being endorse by various Nicholson villains, there’s something exceedingly lazy about the way it’s been put together. None of the characters repeat, and there’s barely a connection between their pullquotes and the titles on screen. It seems as though the idea was to stack one clip on top of the next in the hopes that, out of context, they’d play as a series of punchlines. Instead, as Tryon notes, anyone who can bring the context of the excerpted films with them to the viewing experience will be unable to refrain from doing so, and at that point, the whole thing backfires: ultimately, this is a clip in which the implication is that Hillary Clinton is going to make life better for the axe wielding psycho of The Shining, whilst restoring the Joker’s trust in the political system.
But of course, there’s already a reaction clip, one which, in particular, puts scenes from that Kubrick film to good use.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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