Noiseless Chatter Archive

Alien 3 is a deeply terrible movie. I could honestly end this piece right there and move on with my life without regret, but…what the hell, it’s Halloween. Alien was a masterpiece. Certainly one of the best horror films and one of the best science fiction films ever made. It’s somewhere on my list of all-time favorite films period, though obviously it has a lot more competition there. It was moody, atmospheric, and tense. Watching it is an experience, and one that feels important. It’s a work of art. You can see immediately how influential and significant this movie would be for years to come. Aliens scraps the template, which is a pretty bold thing to do when the original worked so perfectly and was so well received. But the gamble paid off. James Cameron didn’t just have a different story to tell from Ridley Scott’s original; he had a different kind of story, which necessitated a different approach. It’s a step down in my opinion, as the film doesn’t feel ...

Fiction into Film is a series devoted to page-to-screen adaptations. The process of translating prose to the visual medium is a tricky and only intermittently successful one, but even the fumbles provide a great platform for understanding stories, and why they affect us the way they do. Dracula, I feel, has a damned good case for being the single most famous literary character of all time. Is there competition? Sure. There’s Sherlock Holmes. Ebenezer Scrooge. Ulysses or Odysseus. (You can’t have both.) Merlin. Hamlet. The list, of course, goes on. Dracula’s creative lineage is so vast, so varied, so deeply ingrained in our cultural DNA that it seems like he was always there. He wasn’t an invention; he was a force that was eventually set to paper. Even today, long after the novel’s initial rush of popularity, there are important echoes. He is the driving force behind the events of the Castlevania video games. He is hawking boxes of chocolatey breakfast cereal. ...