The XF Book Club's first annual mini-rewatch

[wendelah1]

And now for something completely different...

Why? Why not. Tomorrow's the official start of summer. The The X-Files LJ community hasn't had a mini-rewatch since the one we did in February at scully_fest. My other active comm is on hiatus until July. I have a new writing assignment so obviously the thing to do is put that off and watch some episodes!

While spontaneity is the spice of life, it's also good to have a plan. Except--there's no time! We just have to make it happen. So I'm borrowing from this list, but subtracting the episodes we watched during xf_is_love month and scully_fest. So that leaves "Ice," "Little Green Men," "Pusher," "Quagmire," "Detour," and "Small Potatoes." I'm throwing in "Humbug" (and keeping "Little Green Men"). Just because.

We'll start tomorrow with "Ice." I'll try to put up a post every day at 10:00 am my time, which is the middle of the afternoon on the East Coast, early evening in Europe and the middle of the night in Australia. My time zone sucks, folks, but that's the one thing I can't change. Here's the rest of the schedule.

June 21: "Ice"
June 22: "Little Green Men"
June 23: "Humbug"
June 24: "Pusher"
June 25: "Quagmire"
June 26: "Detour" "Small Potatoes"
June 27: "Small Potatoes" "Detour"

There will be fanfic recs where applicable. Publicize this far and wide. You don't need an account here to participate. Anonymous comments are enabled. Regular programming will resume in July.

So, watch "Ice" and come back tomorrow for discussion. Are you with me?


xf_book_club
Mini-rewatch June 21-27
<center><img src="http://i248.photobucket.com/albums/gg200/her_new_day/e86106de-1903-42b5-a89f-14da7f0198c1_zpsf1a88a05.jpg"> <user site="livejournal.com" user="xf_book_club"> Mini-rewatch June 21-27 </center>

Comments

[infinitlight.livejournal.com]

I'm excited about this! I'll watch Ice tonight and try to think of things to discuss!

[wendelah1]

Yay! estella_c has already watched the episode, so that's three of us for tomorrow!

[badforthefish.livejournal.com]

GO WITH IT SCULLY! Count me in. Off to pimp.

I'm sad Tesos Dos Bichos didn't make the list. I rewatched it last week and it was so delightfully bad. I can't get enough of Scully saying "partial rats body parts"

Ice has got to be one of my favourite episode ever. I am a big fan of The Thing, the black and white one and the Kurt Russel one. Please do not mention the remake.

[discordantwords.livejournal.com]

Totally agree with you on both Ice and The Thing (and oh god the remake).

[estella-c.livejournal.com]

I thought the Kurt Russel one was the remake. So out of it...

The Thing, if you don't know and even if your do, was based on the short story "Who Goes There" by John W. Campbell. Campbell was a legendary magazine editor (Astounding/Analog) I'm thinking, and ramrodded the science fiction community for years.

[badforthefish.livejournal.com]

If I ever knew this I had forgotten. I need to get my hands on that novel. The 2011 movie was supposed to be a prequel to the 1985 movie which was just an excuse for a remake with a model, paper thin script and CGI galore. The only part I liked was the "dog" escaping the Norwegian station at the end. The rest stank. Did you know there is a way to know who's contaminated in the final shots in the 1985 movie?

[discordantwords.livejournal.com]

I appreciated that the remake/prequel tried to tie in with the 80s one, by showing how some of the Norwegians wind up the way that Kurt Russell discovers them when he treks to the base (I'm thinking of the burnt Thing outside in the snow.)

But all in all it was just another CGI crapfest. I usually try to keep an open mind on remakes (and, in this case, remakes of remakes), but the Kurt Russell Thing is so close to my heart. I love everything about it-- the cast, the music, the intensifying paranoia, the horrifying creature effects. I still consider it one of the scariest movies I've ever seen, because no matter how many times I watch it there are still two scenes that make me fly off of the couch every time.

Also, there's no believable reason for a young American woman to be in Antarctica on a Norwegian base in 1982.

[badforthefish.livejournal.com]

Doh! Just saw that the release date was 1982 in the US, not 1985 like I thought. I'm terrible with dates.

I'd forgotten about that. Yes, that was a nice tie in. One of the only thing that worked.

Same here. I went to see The Thing in the cinema in France either in 84 or 85. I had to show an ID to prove that I *really* was over eighteen. It scared the living day lights out of me. It is definitely at the top of my list of scariest movies I've ever seen. And that soundtrack is so creepy. Dum Dum, Dum Dum. I loved it then and love it still. I rewatch it every few years.

The two scenes that turn me into a quivering jelly of fear are:
The dog in the kennel sitting so still before all Hell breaks lose.
The blood testing scene. The tension is unbearable.

What are yours?

[discordantwords.livejournal.com]

The dog scene is and always will be nightmare fuel for me, but the scenes that absolutely make me lose it are the blood testing scene and the chest defibrillator scene.

A few years ago I was watching one of those 100 Scariest Movie Moments countdowns that periodically make the rounds close to Halloween, and a friend of mine walked in and looked at the television right at the moment they were playing the blood testing scene. He'd never seen the movie, and had no sense of the preceding tension, but he jumped a mile anyway.

Part of what works for the movie is that the creature design is so uncomfortable to look at. It's human (or canine!) but it's so wrong in a way, so you have heads sprouting legs and mouths where there shouldn't be mouths and the whole thing is just so creepy it makes your skin crawl. I'll take that feeling over giant CGI monsters any day.

[badforthefish.livejournal.com]

Oh, the chest defibrillator one is definitely a jump-out-of-your-own-skin moment.

Eeh! Did you offer to show him the whole movie after that?

Carpenter says something to that effect in this interview (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0FhSHqGg74). The creature could not be just one creature to be scary, it had to be a mix of everything it had ever imitated. I'm trying to think of another monster that was equally scary and coming up empty. The wrongness of its misplaced organs, some of them recognizable, some not, is what makes it so utterly disturbing.

CGI monsters. Meh.

[discordantwords.livejournal.com]

I believe his response was "I think I've seen enough." Haha.

Thanks for linking that interview, fascinating stuff!

[estella-c.livejournal.com]

I think the alien in Alien was pretty scary. Along with the slow, uninterrupted build-up of tension.

Nobody seems to agree with me on this, but my sis and I saw Cloverfield in an almost empty theater (an exaggerated imitation of the old movie palaces) on a Superbowl Sunday. And man, did it ever work! I still love the scene in NYC, as hapless partiers are trying to find out what's making the big noises by rubbernecking on the balconies, and the head of the Statue of Liberty slams into the street.

[wendelah1]

Well, if this is even mildly successful given the lack of planning, we can do it again for xf_is_love month. Maybe rotate it to xfiles, then back to scully_fest in the spring? If the only way to entice people to LJ is to provide content, I can do that.

I want to restart the Scully in 155 writing challenge again, too.

[estella-c.livejournal.com]

yay. That's how my grand-nephew says Yay!

[discordantwords.livejournal.com]

Exciting! It's always great to have an excuse to crack open the DVD set.

[wendelah1]

Excellent!