"Spinal Tap," "Alien" Deemed Classics
Everyone's favorite chest-bursting acid-for-blood Alien is going back into incubation, courtesy of the U.S. Congress.
The National Film Registry has unveiled its latest list of 25 American cinematic works selected for historical preservation, and heading up the class of 2003 are director Ridley Scott's 1979 franchise-launching sci-fi masterpiece Alien, John Singleton's Boyz N the Hood and Rob Reiner's side-splitting 1984 faux rockumentary This Is Spinal Tap.
The 2003 slate, chosen by the Library of Congress, brings to 350 the number of movies in the registry's vault since its inception in 1989. The works have been deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically" important enough to be saved for all time.
And like previous years, this batch is about as diverse as can be, with kiddie offerings like 1979's The Black Stallion and Disney's 1991 'toon Beauty and the Beast riding alongside Gene Autry's 1938 Western Melody Ranch and indie auteur Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise (1984).
Alien was praised for ushering in a darker type of sci-fi fare than moviegoers were used to after Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind and 2001. Combining the genres of horror and science fiction, the film also gave cinema its first space heroine in the form of Sigourney Weaver, introduced the world to Swedish surrealist H.R. Geiger, whose designs were prominent throughout and spawned three hit sequels.
And it's tough to get any more culturally significant than Spinal Tap, the heavy-metal spoof that followed the travails of the world's "loudest" and usually drummer-less rock band as it attempts to mount a comeback in America.
"I think the word 'mockumentary' was coined in response to Spinal Tap," Gregory Lukow, the library's assistant chief of motion pictures, broadcast and recorded sound division, tells the Hollywood Reporter. "It created a new form in American comedy. There were a lot of people who just didn't know. They weren't in on the gag until other people told them."
On the other end of the spectrum, John Singleton's urban drama, Boyz N the Hood was chosen for its revelations about the culture of gangs in America.
"It's kind of the Godfather of gang films," Lukow says. "It's a very good film. When John Singleton made it, he was only 23 years old. It has become iconic."
Among the old-time classic offerings are Vincent Minnelli's The Bad and the Beautiful (1953) with Lana Turner and Kirk Douglas, From Here to Eternity (1953) with Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr, Billy Wilder's seminal 1954 romantic comedy Sabrina with Audrey Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart, and Norman Jewison's 1967 Best Picture winner In the Heat of the Night, starring Oscar winner Rod Steiger and Sydney Poitier.
The Three Stooges aren't just for old Scooby-Doo episodes anymore. The registry also decided to immortalize the vaudeville trio's 1934 boxing comedy Punch Drunks.
Douglas Fairbanks' star-making turn in 1917's Wild and Wooly will be enshrined as will 1948's The Pearl, shot by famed cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa.For techies, 1952's wondrous This Is Cinerama, which demonstrated the then-spectacular brand new Cinerama format in all its curved-screen glory, and 1925's Theodore Case Sound Test: Gus Visser and His Singing Duck, which recorded the coming technological innovation of sound, made the cut.
On the documentary front, there's 1901's Star Theater, a visual record of the demolition of a New York theater; 1930's From Stump to Ship, a film about logging in Maine; 1953's All My Babies, about midwives in the Deep South; 1968's Saul and Elaine Bass short Why Man Creates; Through Navajo Eyes, a series of short films made by Navajo Indians; and 1974's Fuji, a travelogue of a train ride in Japan by experimentalist Robert Breer.And, in a nod to the pre-Jeff Spicoli era when surfing was associated with squeaky clean athletes, not stoners, the registry voted to preserve 1966's surfing documentary The Endless Summer, about two surfers looking for the perfect wave.
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