Television Watch: Alien - Earth (Season 1, 2025)

I'm the first person to say Alien and Aliens are two great films, each for different reasons.  And while I understand people love Alien3, I just wasn't onboard.  And it's safe to say, I've wrestled with the subsequent sequels, including Prometheus and Alien: Covenant.  The desire to combine the Alien storyline with the Predator franchise, with the wink-wink connections to Blade Runner strikes me as a curious obsession in sci-fi fandom - even if I shared the excitement of everyone else when Predator 2 came out.  

And then I saw Aliens vs. Predator, and I thought "never mind".

I'd skipped the last Alien movie.  If Ridley Scott couldn't make me care, I'm not sure who could.  

But part of that was, even as Romulus was in post-production, I heard Noah Hawley got his hands on the franchise and had a TV show coming.  

For those unfamiliar, Hawley is the person responsible for Legion, maybe the most interesting superhero adaptation (loosely based on the Marvel X-character Legion) to hit a screen, big or small, and which ran on FX for three seasons.  But, more important, Hawley has helmed Fargo for five seasons and across ten years.  And, in this blog's opinion, it's one of the best shows to have graced screens, full stop.

Fargo is an oddball spin-off of the Coen Bros. film of the same name.  And I won't get into it here, but if Legion showed Hawley knew how to take a nut of an idea from source material and grow something fascinating with it, Fargo took the well-defined themes and characters of a Coen Bros. movie as inspiration and exploded their stories into multi-faceted noir epics, borrowing elements and ideas from across the Coen Bros. filmography.

So... yeah, I was jazzed when I heard Hawley was getting his hands on Alien.  And eight episodes later, I feel like my trust was warranted.

New Parker Movie Trailer: Play Dirty

One of the only book series I've read in its entirety, and re-read multiple volumes, has been the Parker series of books by Richard Stark (aka: Donald Westlake).  I tend to think of Parker as a criminal project manager, and that works for me in my world.

A while back I'd read of the casting of Robert Downy Jr. for the role of Parker in the Shane Black helmed film, but that seems to have gone away with Avengers stuff back on RDJ's slate.  To my surprise, the role here is occupied by Mark Wahlberg.  I'm not anti-Wahlberg, but after spending 20-something books with Parker, I was of the opinion that RDJ could do it, but he wasn't my first choice.  Look, Parker is supposed to be a towering figure and RDJ Is like 5'9".  I am a bit baffled by the casting of Wahlberg, but no one asked me. We have a whole Dave Bautista out there.

There have been many adaptations of Parker books to film, and all of them make the mistake of wanting Parker to have... feelings.  He does have feelings, like anger, mild-irritation, general crankiness...   but he's not a joker or hugger.  He does not quip.  And that's hard for folks writing him or playing him, and why Lee Marvin's take in Point Blank was probably closest.  He's largely amoral, and will put a bullet in you if you cross him, even if he's known you for years as a colleague.  He *does* have unspoken feelings and maybe even what he considers friendships, if Butcher's Moon is any indication.  

So, long story long, the trailer doesn't reflect the novels.  

Nor is it, exactly, one of the books.  It seems to be melding elements from The Handle and another book or two. But it's its own thing, in the end.

But what I have heard twice now is that the movie is not the Ocean's 11-vibe that I'm getting from the video above.   In my humble opinion, the closest to the vibe of the books is probably Payback with Mel Gibson, or the aforementioned Point Blank.  

If I may... Amazon is doing the wrong thing here in general, and should just make 3 Parker movies per year for maybe 3 years, and just stick to the books, setting the movies in the era in which the novels were released.  Stop at The Rare Coin Score, I think.  Bring in Claire and then decide if it's worth continuing.

Claudia Cardinale Merges With The Infinite

Actress Claudia Cardinale has passed at the age of 87.

Cardinale, who hailed from Italy, appeared in a handful of American films.  She's most famous for 8 1/2 and one of my personal favorite films, Once Upon a Time In The West, where she plays Jill - a deeply complicated woman arriving on the frontier just as industrialization arrives on the front porch.

Here's one of my favorite sequences in cinema, featuring Cardinale (with an American voiceover, because Sergio Leone).

Signal Watch Reads: The Midnight Assassin - The Hunt For America's First Serial Killer (2017)

Author:  Skip Hollandsworth

Narrator:  Clint Jordan

Some time around the turn of the century, I was an avid reader of Texas Monthly, a periodical covering a wide range of topics which I considered to have some of the finest writing one could come by in that era.  And in one issue appeared the odd story of a serial killer, pre-dating Jack the Ripper, who had lurked in my own backyard - killing women and girls in Austin the mid-1880's, when Austin was the capital, but still just sprouting up as a municipality.

I was stunned.  

Like a lot of young folks with too much time on their hands, I was aware of details around particularly famous serial killers, having read up on Jack the Ripper as far back as middle school.  And I recall being aware of Henry Lee Lucas, Ted Bundy, and a handful of other killers by the time I graduated high school, back when all of it was sort of an abstraction.  So to find out that Austin had it's own Victorian-era killer, and that we had our famed Moontowers because of the killer?  That was mind-boggling.  

Since that article, the general knowledge that Austin had a 19th-century serial killer has become more pronounced.  And, these days, if you want to go on one of those Ghost Tours of Austin, I believe there's some that cater to hitting up the spots where folks were killed.  

But I'd never read Skip Hollandsworth's follow up to the article, his 2017 book The Midnight Assassin: The Hunt for America's First Serial Killer.  I'd planned to read it in October as my Hallow-read, but... I get excited and jump the gun sometimes.  And here we are.   And, yes, I took the book in as an audiobook read by Clint Jordan.

Trailer: Maggie Gyllenhaal's "The Bride"

Longtime readers will know that The Bride of Frankenstein is, full stop, one of my favorite movies.  And Frankenstein is such a favorite book, I think I'm starting a re-read soon.  

I'm not really much of a purist, as these things go.  The book is 200+ years old, and folks can do as they please.  What *does* bother me is when folks either have never seen Bride of Frankenstein or gravely, somehow, against all odds, misunderstood the movie.  In either case it's believing that the movie is not 100% about the folly of believing you can make someone love you.  (in this case, make someone to love you)  And so we get all the cutesy merch with Franky and The Bride as a cute couple, and...  well, I have to remind myself it's all in good fun.

So, I could care less if someone does *an entirely new story* that doesn't just bobble the 1935 movie.  Take those basics of the Frankenstein movies and/ or book and go bananas.  And, this looks bananas.  Good on director Gyllenhaal.  I'm in.  I could care less that we already had Poor Things and Creature Commandos recently.  Keep it coming.

Your guess what this will be is as good or better than mine.  

Super Re-Watch: Superman (2025)

just some punk-rock kid from Bakerline

Watched:  09/21/2025

Format:  HBOmax

Viewing:  Fourth

Director:  James Gunn

So, before I forget...  surely James Gunn was referencing The Simpsons' Radioactive Man in the first minutes of Superman (2025) when Number 4 says he'll have Superman "up and at them", right?