Day: August 12, 2024

My first reactions to James Cameron‘s Aliens in ’86 (38 years ago!) were “magnificent verisimilitude, great military vigor and excellent cutting, but it looks too grainy.”

I’ve always wanted to see Cameron’s de-grained 4K version of Aliens. but I never got around to buying it. After reading dweeb complaints about the lack of grain, I’m even more excited about catching this version.

The only problem is that $54 price tag for the Ultimate Aliens Collectors Edition 4K.

“Anti-Grain Kahuna,” posted on 8.17.10:

“During an Avatar: Special Edition interview last week James Cameron told a Coming Soon guy that he’s “just done a complete remaster of Aliens (the Bluray of which will be included in the Alien Anthology set, due on 10.26), and that he did the work with the same colorist with whom he had worked on Avatar, and that he’s “completely removed all noise and grain from the extended version of the film.” Yes!

“It’s spectacular,” Cameron said. “We went in and completely de-noised it, de-grained it, up-rezzed [and] color-corrected every frame, and it looks amazing. It looks better that it looked in the theaters originally.

“Aliens was shot on a high-speed negative that was a new negative that didn’t pan out too well and got replaced the following year, so it’s pretty grainy. [But] we got rid of all the grain. It’s sharper and clearer and more beautiful than it’s ever looked. And we also did that to the long version, to the ‘director’s cut’ or the extended play.”

“Flailing about for relevance since the legalization of same-sex marriage, many gay-rights groups [have] pivoted to a related but fundamentally different cause: transgender rights.

“Rather than emulate the movement’s past approach — seeking allies across the political spectrum and accepting compromise as a precondition for legal and social progress — they have taken hard-line left-wing positions. LGBTQ groups repeat the mantra ‘the science is settled‘ on the extremely complex and fraught subject of youth gender medicine and insist that anyone who questions the provision of puberty blockers to gender-dysphoric children is transphobic.

“They continue to spread this message even as many European countries have backed away from such treatments after concluding that the evidence supporting them is weak.

“The reflexive promotion of major medical interventions for minors should be a red flag for gay men and lesbians, considering the research indicating that many gender-distressed and gender-nonconforming children grow up to be gay.

“Last year, though, GLAAD, HRC, and other organizations staked their reputations on a foolish crusade against the Times, condemning the newspaper’s careful and empathetic reporting on youth gender medicine as ‘irresponsible’ and ‘biased.’

“GLAAD has placed the Harry Potter novelist J. K. Rowling and the journalist Jesse Singal, who has reported extensively on youth gender medicine (including in The Atlantic), alongside such people as the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones on a McCarthyite list of ‘individual public figures and groups using their platforms to spread misinformation and false rhetoric against LGBTQ people, youth, and allies.'” — from “How the Gay-Rights Movement Lost Its Way,” an 8.12 Atlantic article by James Kirchick.

The first time I ever heard “right cunt” was out of the psychopathic mouth of Ben Kingsley‘s Don Logan in Sexy Beast (’00). I’ve never used the term myself (too blunt and vulgar) but it’s definitely a thing in England.

Urban Dictionary caught up with the term in August 2003, via a “Diego” posting:

I’m mentioning this colorful British epithet because TikTok’s “therocknrollmom” recently used it to describe herself as a teenager.

@therocknrollmom I said what I said…get outta here with these feminine boys . . . . . #genxtiktokers #genx #genz #fyp #fypviral #fyppppppppppppppppppppppp #fypage #y2kaesthetic #y2k #millennialsoftiktok #millennial #savagemomsoftiktok #momsoftiktok #tiktokmom ♬ original sound The Rock'n'Roll Mom

On 3.21.17 Urban Dictionary’s “elzz” said the term refers to “a person who doesn’t care about anything or anyone or even his own self, and loves to cause trouble and misery to everyone on the planet…a person who farts in a room full of people and doesn’t care how bad it smells and owns up to it laughing his head off.”

That’s Don Logan, all right, but does this description remind anyone of any Hollywood Elsewhere commenters?

…a 4.4 magnitude shaker is next to nothing. A little swaying, dogs barking…blah. Only pussies get upset. In HE’s book an earthquake has to be at least a five-point-something to turn my head around.

But is it fair to mock a former Yalie for letting go with a little perversity? Where’s the harm?