Tag: the thing

Movie of the Week: John Carpenter’s THE THING.

I picked THE THING because Eldest Son needed some experience watching gory movies on the screen before deciding whether or not to catch a horror flick tomorrow. You can’t go wrong with the classics, right? — He found it very entertaining, too. Which means we’re probably going to go see SMILE, after all*.

Moe Lane

*Which I wasn’t gonna catch, but he wants to see it and I can’t just drop him off to go see an R-rated movie by himself. It’s apparently forbidden until he’s 18, or some other nonsense. I mean, have the ratings boards seen the video games kids play today?

#commissionearned

In the Mail: The Thing.

It was the weirdest, heh, thing. I saw that THE THING was six bucks on Amazon and said Hey, I should watch that again! And then I went into my video library… to discover that, in fact, I did not own THE THING. So I ended up buying it because, hey, six bucks for the Blu-Ray on Amazon. I ain’t gonna argue with that, you know?

There’s actually a bunch of decent DVDs in the bargain bin over there. And a whole lot of crap, but you probably knew that already.

The “WHO GOES THERE?” Kickstarter.

If I played board games OR had the disposable income, I’d back WHO GOES THERE?  It looks like it’s a lot of fun and they get full points for going back to the original story.  Mind you: I liked both movies just fine.  But the Campbell novella is something special.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/certifiablegames/who-goes-there/

Is 4K too many Ks for a restoration of The Thing?

I mean, don’t get me wrong: I’ve only seen low-resolution copies (relatively speaking) of John Carpenter’s The Thing.  I’m theoretically down with them doing a restoration of the movie. But I do wonder whether the special effects that Stephen Green rightly praises here will hold up under the impersonal glare of a 4K scanning process.

It’s the combination of time and expectations here that worry me. The Thing came out in 1982, and obviously the state of the art for special effects has improved significantly since then. And so have our standards as to what qualifies as a good special effect. It’s OK when we’re watching the movie at regular DVD levels; it looks old, and because it looks old we forgive it for being old.  But if we make the image too sharp, will we be able to forgive The Thing for remaining, ah, frozen in time like that?

I don’t honestly know.