Marian Schedenig

All right, Curly. Enough's enough. You can't eat the Venetian blinds. I just had them installed on Wednesday.

Perhaps they're trying to make it less like Hamlet for whatever reason. Which reminds me: I've read that one of the originals sequels was apparently based on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (with Timon and Pumbaa standing in for the two), and if that's true, I have to see that.

Right, how could I have forgotten about that!

My ranking: Alien Alien³ Aliens Alien: Resurrection/Prometheus/Alien: Covenant I don't really dislike any of them, although I have my share of problems at least with the prequels. The Jeunet is probably the better film of the three, but on the other hand, it probably has the greatest disconnect form the rest of the series, so I'd rather not try to rank those three at all. Alien³ may not be more than the sum of its parts - and that's not surprising, given its confused genesis (I keep forgetting that even William Gibson wrote a version of it). But many of the parts are first rate, so it still adds up to a flawed but striking experience. For comparison, Lynch's Dune also has stunning parts (though probably fewer than the Fincher), but ends up being decidedly less than the sum of them.

Dualists? For those who weren't scared enough by Alien: Isolation:

According to a review I saw, it was a newer type of AI than what used to be used for DNR, and I think they also had human passes over the results. According to that review, most noise is gone, but it looks much better than classic overused DNR. Cameron hated the low quality film stock they used (i.e. it was never intended to be as grainy as it turned out). Supposedly it still looks decidedly different/more modern, but apparently that's mostly an artistic choice/matter of taste.

Also on Amazon.de: https://www.amazon.de/Williams-Violinkonzert-Nr-1-Bernstein-Serenade/dp/B0CTJ8MSV9/

I like Shaun, but I first saw it years after everyone else and thought it was good, but not as brilliant or singular as everyone else seemed to think. It's good, but Hot Fuzz is better.

The "AI that has incompatible directives and in a surprise twist turns against the human crew" subplot seems too close to be a mere coincidence to me, especially only (rougly) ten years after the Kubrick/Clarke film. But of course, Alien as a whole is a very different thing - although I'm not sure now which of the two terrified me more when I saw them for the first times.

There's some pretty strong parallels to ASO that I'd never noticed until I re-watched Alien the other day. Visually, it's not just the planetoid approach that could be almost straight out of ASO, but the third Nostromo explosion looks less like an explosion and more like something from the stargate sequence. Ripley says "Open the door" to ash right before the android reveal/before the artificial crew member turns against the humans. Like HAL, Ash seems to be struggling with two different directives when he attacks Ripley. And when Ripley uses the airlock to flush the xenomorph out of the shuttle and regain control of the ship, that's also straight out of ASO (the book).

I - II - V - X: We need only a couple more for a complete scale from 1 to 10.

Remembered two more things: CC says that point & click adventure games are a niche, but they've always been a niche, and they're a consistent niche. I.e. they're hard to market, but there are still enough people to play and buy them. Publishers hate them, but they've done so since the 90s. He also recounted an anecdote about when they first presented a version of Broken Sword to their would be publisher. They had everything on one PC, hugely expensive for them at the time at 1,000 pounds. They brought it with them in the car to London the day before the presentation and went out for drinks. When he woke up hungover the next day, he looked out the window and saw the car windows smashed, and suddenly remembered that they had forgotten to take the computer out of the car. The thieves had taken everything - except for the PC. CC said that he can say with confidence that had the PC been taken as well, there would never have been a Broken Sword game, and there would be no Revolution today.