January 16, 2010

The aliens are coming, the aliens are coming!


I want to believe... (cue spooky theme music)... or do I?

Despite my all-encompassing love for everything TV, movies, and pop culture, I have never watched The X-Files.

Why? It's science fiction, it's dark, it never got my attention and once you aren't hooked at the beginning, how many people really make the effort to immerse themselves? Stupid comedies, which I love dearly, are easy to jump into midstream, but a serial of any kind? Less likely. I also haven't ever watched Lost, for pretty much the same reasons - missed the start, don't want to jump into a long story arc midway, and don't really want to invest the time.

Although I haven't watched the show. I do have a story about the X-files: one day while chewing tobacco and hitchhiking outside the trailer park, I saw a large flying saucer slowly hover down on a nearby field. Okay totally lying, that never happened... or did it?

About fifteen years ago, when I was living in Vancouver, I was walking home from work, bouncing along to the music in my headphones. As I turned onto my street, my little Jewish heart froze --- holy crap, there was a phalanx of uniformed Nazis doing the march step right in front of my apartment building! This cannot be good. So remove sunglasses, pull off earphones, rub eyes, look again --- yep, them be Nazis! I soon figured out was the X Files from the signs and film crew vans, filming some flashback episode. So I waited for the Nazis to stop blocking my doorway and I went home.

Still didn't watch the the damn show, though always mildly curious to see that Nazi episode.

So many years later, and the X-Files has come and gone (it ran from 1993 to 2002), as have two movies, endless conspiracy theories, and what really become a cult-ish pop culture movement. And I skipped the whole damn thing.

Skip ahead to now (yes, think time travel, you science fiction geeks), and I still haven't watched X-Files, and am engaged to K who loves the series. So last weekend when we were renting a couple of movies, we included X-Files: I Want to Believe, the most recent movie, from 2008.

We watched the flick last night, and holy shit there was a huge surprise --- I liked it! Yep it was dark, and waaaay too gory for my taste, and still it was suspenseful and smart and visually terrific.


I don't know if I 'believe' or not, I think am more of the questioning Scully than the believer Mulder (yikes, I am using geek speak). Guess there are like 897 episodes of the show out there to watch and think about it...

7 comments:

ladytaryn said...

Bwahahaaha! Another convert... teehee. If you want, once you are done all 897 episodes of X Files, I can always lend you and K all of the Lost seasons...
Cat (who also prefers Scully)

bmat10 said...

I really liked the xfiles at first. But like all shows of that style it eventually really disapointed me. It went too much into consipiracy mode. Government coverups blackops located under the polar icecaps blah blah blah,

injaynesworld said...

I find it easier to jump into comedies, too. I hear great things about Dexter and know I would like it, but it seems like such a commitment. It's no mystery why I'm single...

Kevin said...

The aliens have always been here. The truth is out there.

Aaron said...

If you are into that check out Fringe
Its like the xfiles but updated for today.

Aunt Juicebox said...

I loved the Xfiles when it first came out. Never missed a show, even bought the sound track. But then it became more and more about aliens, and then Duchovny wasn't on the show, and by then I lost interest. I did watch the movies, and they were just eh for me. I had this huge crush on Duchovny too, until he married Leoni, for whom my hatred is second only to Sarah Jessica Horseface, and I was like, what?? Really? Ew.

Muffy St. Bernard said...

I only saw a few scattered episodes while it was on TV, but now I'm watching them all sequentially. Some of them are amazing, some of them are a tad wanky, and a few are terribly, terribly bad.

One thing I enjoy doing is evaluating the effects. Sometimes they were ahead of the game in computer graphics, but other times...oh nelly! There's an episode that's supposed to be in Atlantic City, so they put Duchovny at a pay phone in front of a green screen of a casino, and it is 1000 shades of awful.

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