Links post: Test footage from Alien, jewellery by Salvador Dali, behind-the-scenes photos from The Hollow Crown, and more.

Alien: Test footage of the original xenomorph actor in Alien, Bolaj Badejo, has surfaced on youtube. A while ago one of my friends said that one of the good things about Prometheus was the fact that Ridley Scott could now afford to do something "better" than just have a really tall skinny guy wearing an alien costume, and I was like WASH YOUR MOUTH OUT. "Necessity is the mother of invention" is like the first commandment of movie costuming and special effects, and most of cinema's most impressive and sneaky tricks have been invented by people working on comparatively low-budget movies like Alien. In my opinion that tall skinny guy in an alien costume is still as creepy as all get-out, and certainly better than most CGI monsters up until very recent times.  

Dali jewellery, 1950. From How To Be A Retronaut.

Kehinde Wiley. This artist paints strikingly intense, colourful portraits -- his homepage can be found here. I love the mixture of very modern contemporary models and this almost glowing, Renaissance-era background in some of the portraits.

The Hollow Crown: Henry IV Part 2.

Previously: Henry IV Part 2.

This post is gonna be wayyyyy less in-depth than the one I wrote for Henry IV Part 1 because nothing happens in this play. I'm serious. Maybe there was some heavy editing going on or something but as far as I can tell the only things that happen in Henry IV Part 2: Electric Boogaloo are:

• Random soliloquays about how hard it is to be king.
• The world's greatest collection of Rude Mechanicals, indicating that "LOL, he's a women's tailor" is a joke that remains hilarious for 500 years.
• An extended sequence of Tom Hiddleston's oiled and gleaming torso.
• Sad Falstaff.
• The King is dead; long live the King.

"I just can't wait to be King!"

It was like one of those situations when there's a really awesome, successful movie, and then someone's like, "OK, let's get a sequel up in this joint!" except instead of writing a whole new story they just erase most of the character development from the first movie and try to do it all over again a second time. Although this time round there's little to no plot, and the supervillain was defeated at the end of the last movie so instead of a battle there's just an awful lot of tragicomedy scenes involving an old fat conman slowly sinking into gout, despair and failure along with his new collection of comedy sidekicks. I don't know much about the circumstances surrounding the writing of this play, but I can easily imagine Queen Elizabeth writing to Shakespeare all, "More of this Falstaff fellow, my man! He makes one LOL!" and Shakespeare sobbing into his inkwell as he tries in vain to think up something interesting that happened to Henry V in the years leading up to his coronation.

The Hollow Crown: Henry IV, Part 1.

Previously: The Hollow Crown: Richard II.

I was a little more prepared this time round because unlike with Richard II, I'd actually seen this play before. And, perhaps, Prince Hal's story is easier to follow than Richard's because he's a less ambiguous protagonist -- a character you can root for. Richard's flamboyant incompetence was entertaining to watch, but was distinctly unheroic. For all that Richard II was aesthetically pleasing, it didn't have the same gleeful excitement of Henry IV, with its clear-set coming-of-age journey for Prince Hal and its cast of crowd-pleasing comedy sidekicks. Falstaff's constant supply of old-fat-coward jokes may have been designed for an audience of 16th-century drunks, but I'm easily pleased and found him hilarious. (Possibly because I have the spirit of a 16th-century drunk.)

Tom Hiddleson as Prince Hal was, put simply, totally awesome. I'd been looking forward to this play in particular both because I love Henry IV/Henry V story, and because Tom Hiddleston was clearly such brilliant casting. And having seen it? I'm now coming to understand why Tumblr is basically a giant online shrine to Tom Hiddleston. Within about fifteen seconds of him coming onscreen I had little hearts in my eyes like an anime character, like, what was even happening. Hiddleston's Prince Hal is so charming and handsome that I'm now desperate to see him play a genuinely unappealing character. Because, you know, the only other thing I've really seen him in is his role as Loki in Thor and The Avengers, who despite being a villain is still pretty lovable. I found myself comparing the two, and the one thing that stands out between them is Hiddleston's ability to play royalty. The level of automatic, commanding entitlement both Loki and Hal display is wonderful, although they show it in very different ways.

The Hollow Crown, Part 1: Richard II.

Caveat: I am no Shakespeare scholar. I come at Shakespeare from the perspective of a pop-culture nerd, meaning that when I lived in London I was the person getting weird looks from the ushers at the Globe Theatre because I'd be all like, "No, don't give me a programme! I don't want spoilers!" Spoilers for King Lear, that is. I get why some people like to read plays before they see them, but I wouldn't read the script of The Avengers before seeing that so why should Richard II be any different? Usually this works out fine as long as I pay attention to the performance, although I did have some trouble the other week when I went to see Alan Cumming's one-man Macbeth, which was kinda hard to follow because, you know, he was playing all the roles. Fortunately I'm Scottish, and all Scottish people are forced to memorise the plot of Macbeth while being beaten with birch twigs and standing on a blasted heath at midnight as a rite of passage, which certainly comes in very useful in situations like this.

The other problem facing me when embarking upon the first installment of the BBC's Hollow Crown series was a complete lack of knowledge about the Wars of the Roses. I'm pretty sure that the Wars of the Roses are a History class staple in England, but Scottish education system tends to concentrate more on the Reformation, mostly for practical reasons because people in Scotland still get into barfights on a semi-regular basis about things that happened during the Reformation. I watched Richard II with a group of Scots and even though we had at least one History degree among us, we still weren't 100% certain whether Richard II took place in the 14th or 15th century until we wikipedia'd it afterwards. (N.B. Watching Shakespeare's English History plays in a roomful of Scots is ideal because the entire plot revolves around English people killing each other, which gives us all a schadenfreude thrill.)
As soon as Richard showed up I knew I was going to love him. I'd never seen Ben Whishaw in anything before, but I can now go on record to say that he's my new #1 casting choice for any roles that require a slimy, effeminate dweeb to Gaius Baltar his way around all the other characters while flopping onto furniture and sobbing about how misunderstood he is. A+ KINGING, BEN WHISHAW.