Alien 3 (1992)

Director: David Fincher

Cast: Sigourney Weaver, Charles S. Dutton, Charles Dance, Lance Henriksen

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure.

Did I Like It: I get the complaints about the film. Hell, I feel the complaints about this film. Having an opening sequence designed solely to take the air out of any positive feelings one might have had at the end of Aliens (1986) feels like an injury one is not likely to overcome over the next nearly two hours. I think it is probably pretty fair to say—and Fincher would likely to agree—that David Fincher with one arm tied behind his back is not the filmmaker that James Cameron or Ridley Scott are in their prime. Editing problems abound. Early CGI effects abound that seem less designed to wow than to try and paper over some of those aforementioned editing problems. It all ends in a bummer. For a big summer movie, it’s a sad, not very thrilling affair.

And yet…

I’ve had the weird misfortune of watching a lot of misbegotten 90s sequels lately, and the more misbegotten those films are, there’s a rash of “Where’s Skippy?” moments. A beloved—or even liked—character from previous entries is missing from the entry. Inevitably, the actor reads the script and bows out of the prospect of more-of-the-same. The script isn’t re-written to be not include the character. Instead, there’s is fifteen seconds of dialogue about why the character is just off camera (“I broke up with Jack” Speed 2: Cruise Control (1997); “Taggart’s retired in Arizona” Beverly Hills Cop III (1994)), after which we are introduced to the same type of character so that the script wouldn’t have to be re-written and… gasp… the movie might lose its release date.

That doesn’t happen here. We can be horrified by Newt and Hicks’ fate (or lack of one in this film), but at the very least the filmmakers have something akin to the courage of making Ripley (Weaver, still good despite doing one film too many) always seem as if she is in mourning. The film may not care about characters from Aliens, but at least they didn’t send them to Arizona. It’s a film about mortality and mourning, and while the mangling of a big studio movie that would make any big studio nervous dulls that theme somewhat, the theme can’t be extinguished.

Mank (2020)

Director: David Fincher

Cast: Gary Oldman, Amanda Seyfried, Lily Collins, Charles Dance

Have I Seen it Before: Never. I know. It seems unlikely that I would have dodged this one, but I’ve spent more than a few years trying to keep my Orson and Kane-related palette as clean as possible, but no longer! 

Did I Like It: On spec, I’m probably obligated to dislike a movie where Orson Welles (Tom Burke) is clearly one of—if not the—villain of the piece, but honestly? The man probably has that coming. It’s difficult to say who was more put upon by the process of writing Citizen Kane (1941) but if the version of the story supported by Mankiewicz’s supporters (I’m mainly looking in your direction, Pauline Kael) has any degree of truth in it, then Welles was indeed the villain of his greatest triumph.

Stylistically, it feels like maybe Fincher was a bit too precious about the source material here, given that the screenplay was written by his late father. The constant sluglines as a visual motif grate on the nerves more often than not, but given the subject at hand can be forgiven. That obvious not in an effort to tell us this is about a writer doesn’t need to be there, though, it’s still a pretty tight story about a great writer often interacting with other great writers.

And, ultimately we come to the big question when it comes to films who depict Orson Welles in a narrative film. Some are eerie good, others are probably counting on memory of the man being dim in the public consciousness. Thankfully, this lands squarely on the first end of the spectrum. The voice is right, and there are several moments where Mr. Burke actually does look like the Welles of the era. It’s a fate many others have failed to accomplish, although it may help that Welles is far from a main character in the piece, and indeed flits through the proceedings as an ominous phantom.

Gosford Park (2001)

Director: Robert Altman

Cast:Eileen Atkins, Bob Balaban, Alan Bates, Charles Dance

Have I Seen it Before: I have the strongest memory of going to see it during its theatrical run. Based on its date of release, I can only be about ten percent sure about whom I was with when I saw it, and memories of the film itself are even thinner. I remember being pretty thoroughly bored with the film at the time, and I’m pretty sure my date and I got pretty bored with each other shortly thereafter.

I only picked up a used copy of the DVD after thoroughly. enjoying Downton Abbey and remembering the author of that show, Julian Fellowes, wrote the screenplay here.

Several years later, I have yet to even finish that series* (or its later follow-up film), and so the DVD lingered in my pile of to-be-opened discs.

Did I Like It: It’s only after watching the film in its entirety now that I come to the conclusion that I may have walked out of the film, because I remembered hardly any of it. It’s entirely possible I saw some other film way back when.

Oh, well. I’m all for a film eschewing a traditional plot, especially if there is a cleverness in its construction, or an undeniable wit in the dialogue. What always bums me out is when a film tries to rise above those constraints, offer up a depiction of life as it might very well have been at the time, but then tries to force a plot into the proceedings. While it’s clear that Downton Abbey owes a lot to this movie, that series always had a story that moved things a long. This film is about nothing for fully half of its runtime, and then takes a sudden turn into a murder mystery that... ultimately doesn’t matter?

It actually makes me want to skip any of those parts of Downton that missed. Good job, movie.

*I’m not even entirely sure why I stopped watching Abbey. It might have been similar to why I stopped watching Friday Night Lights, in that I always wanted to have new episodes to watch, or it may have been because there’s so much to watch, only so many hours inthe waking day, and the strange desire to re-watch other things.