"Where Do We Go (From Here)"

Now, I could rhapsodise on the true brilliance of The Dark Knight, but I haven't really had time to process it all yet. I may have to go back and see it again next week, just to appreciate the whole thing (I did the same with Prince Caspian a few weeks back and found I enjoyed it so much more the second time round). Let's just say right now that it's the film of the year.

So, complete change of tack, let's talk about me.

Yeah. My favourite subect.

So, I'm seeing this woman. Lot older than me. Slightly older than even Alison was. And we work together, which is so fucking awkward it is unbelievable. Because we met up and we shagged. That's the long and the short of it, she came round my house and we immediately got stuck into each other and then nothing. I asked her round a couple of times and she said no. Then she said she'd come round on the Wednesday night. But on Tuesday night, I got this weird text from her about me and my flatmate and how she didn't want to get in between us bickering, which is something we've never really done because the dopey fucker is never here - he much prefers the comfort of his mother's house. And then she didn't come round on Wednesday. I texted her and got no reply. Then I texted her on Friday and still got nothing. So here am I thinking that I'm somehow the most incompetent lover ever and God knows what else. Fuck, I'm paranoid enough without shit like this going down. And so at work on Saturday, a 9 hour shift when there's just the two of us in the shop, well, I don't exactly ignore her, but I'm not overly chatty with her. We walk up the cut and as we sya goodbye, I get the impression that she wants me to invite her in. But I don't, because I'm hurting. She's practically spent theentire week rejecting or ignoring me, so I think, "Fuck it," and I say goodnight, I'll see you on Tuesday, which is our next shift together. She walks off looking pissed. Later on that night, I get a text asking me why I'm giving her the cold shoulder. I reply, telling her the truth, that I feel she's been ignoring me. So she texts back and then through mutual agreement she comes round and we talk, get through a lot of the bullshit that was building up around us and I think, great, things are going to work out. Except they haven't. She was supposed to come round on Wednesday night, but she called it off, because she got invited out for a meal by one of her son's. Fair enough, says I. At least she told me about it. So we agree she's coming round tonight. Except she's not here yet. I texted her about ten minutes ago asking her if she's coming round and she hasn't replied yet. Fuck it.

So we come to the big crux of the issue: Why can't I get involved with someone who is even slightly normal?

Fuck fuck fuckity fuck.

So, instead of a nice evening in with a gorgeous woman and some wine I'm sitting here by myself, contemplating that last third of a tub of Ben & Jerry's ice cream in the freezer, watching Freaky Friday (the Jamie Lee/Lohan iteration, back from when Lindsay Lohan actually seemed like a promising actress and the alky/druggy slut that she was to become the second she turned eighteen was but a blip on the horizon - as Disney family films go, it's one of the better ones) and wondering what the fuck I'm going to do tomorrow when I go into work tomorrow and she's there and we have to spend 9 long hours together.

Christ. Take my advice, never get involved with anyone you work with. It's not worth the hassle.

So. Jamie Lee in a thong. It's not as horrific a prospect as it sounds. Despite her age, she's still quite shaggable. Admittedly, she's not anywhere near the height of her powers like she was in Trading Places or Perfect (one of the worst movies ever made but she looks so hot in it), but thongs in a Disney film? It's just on the interesting side of perverse, kinda like Daryl Hannah in Splash. But I might just watch something a little more... well, something with a little more oomph. I'm pissed off and in need of a movie with action and stuff getting blowed up. It's that sort of night.

Peace out.

Wanted: Dead Or Alive, But Preferably Alive

A Trip To The Arcade And The Unfortunate Incident Of The Pepsi Can

Now, I'm not a squeamish person by nature. I watched Robocop 2 at a very impressionable age and you know the scene where Cain has been killed and his brain and spinal cord are in a jar? My dad walks in at this point and, showing pretty much the only piece of fatherly concern he will ever show asks me if I should be watching this. Bear in mind he was the one who rented the video for me. If memory serves, and it usually does given my almost autistic knack for date retention, I would have been ten.

But go forward a few years and I get Terminator 2 for my thirteenth birthday. It sits on the shelf for a few weeks before I watch it. Why? It's not uncommon now for me to have movies and TV shows on DVD for months if not years before I finally get round to watching them. But I have thousands of DVD's now. Back then I maybe had twenty videos. And I didn't have a video in my room. The simple fact of the matter is that I was scared.

What?

Yes, I was scared. I was faintly traumatised by the sex scene in the first Terminator film and I imagined that T2 might be even more traumatic (there's a pseudo-rape scene in John Boorman's Excalibur that shook me so badly that it's only been since university that I've actually been able to sit and watch the film without suffering from palpitations - but in that case, I was expecting a nice jolly film about King Arthur and the Lady in the Lake, the adverts for it on Channel 4 didn't mention anything about sex). But I watched it eventually and loved it. Except for one bit.

It's at the shopping mall, near the start of the film. The two Terminators have just met, converging on little Eddie Furlong and they're out the back of some arcade, your generic corridor. And there's this bloke there, telling them that it's for staff only or some such shit. And then the Terminators just open fire on each other. The T-1000 kills this poor guy who was just standing there. I remember it vividly, because he's holding a can of Pepsi and that gets a few bullets through it as well. And this scene really freaked me out. Honestly. I'm thirteen years old and sitting there getting really worked up by the fact that this guy, who, let's face it was just some lame-ass arcade worker, probably some student looking for a bit of extra cash, has been killed.

And the worst thing? No one even mentions him. As far as I can remember, even when the cops come to see Sarah at the nuthouse and tell her that Arnold has gone on the rampage again, they don't say, "Oh, and he killed this poor schmuck." He's not even a footnote in the history of Skynet.

If It Bleeds, We Can Kill It

And so, yeah, that disturbed me. A couple of years later and there was I watching Total Recall, that classic Arnold film (yes, him again, you really can't be a fan of sf cinema and not be at least passingly intimate with the Governer of California's resume - The Terminator, Total Recall, The 6th Day, True Lies, The Running Man, Predator - he's in half of the classic SF movies of the eighties and nineties, and some of the duffers as well). And there's a scene when the mighty Michael Ironside is chasing the big lug. They catch him on an escaltor and just open fire. Fair enough, they are bad guys. But the bloke in front of Arnie cops the brunt of it. Here's another poor schmuck, this one just out doing a bit of shopping and what does he get? A chestful of bullets. To make matters worse, Arnie uses the poor fucker as a human shield (alright, the dude is dead by this point, but come on, have some fucking respect). And again, this disturbs me. I start having visions of going to the Metro Centre and getting gunned down simply because I'm between the bad guy and the good guy.

So why doesit bother me so much? I mean, I can quite happily watch movies like You Only Live Twice where hundred of people get gunned down, poisoned, and generally made dead. Or Kill Bill, where Uma Thurman chops people up in a frenzy of limb-detaching action.

The main difference is, I think, that those examples I have cited above are all about people taking action. It's one thing for a soldier - even a goodie - to be gunned down (I've never felt much sympathy for Donald Sutherland at the end of The Dirty Dozen, f'rinstance) but it's an entirely different thing for an innocent person, one who is entirely peripheral to the plot to have the same punishment meted out to them.

What If I Told You Bullets Didn't Fly Straight?
(Spoilers For Wanted)

And it's this empathy on my part which mars the otherwise very entertaining film, Wanted. Based on Mark "God" Millar's comic (I refuse to pander to the intellectual's use of the phrase 'graphic novel' - it's a fucking comic and that is something to be celebrated) and directed by the Russian dude who made Night Watch and Day Watch (an example of two DVD's in my collection that I have owned for months and still havent got round to watching yet), it's the story of a dick who works in an office who suddenly finds out that he's actually a superhero. Not only that, but his dad was a superhero who worked for a bunch of assassins and he has just been killed. So it's a story of revenge. Only his dad isn't dead, the bunch of assassins have hired him to kill his dad because he's the best assassin ever and his son is the only person he won't kill.

So far so good. It's a fairly standard plot (although I have to admit that I didn't see the plot twist about Wesley's dad being the one he's been sent to kill coming) but told with a great deal of visual panache and style. You can forgive a movie a lot when it looks this good, and since it's not too shabby to start off with, well, we're easily into 4 star territory.

But one scene sticks in my craw. Between them, Wesley, Wesley's dad and Angelina Jolie manage to derail a train. And not a freight train or a nearly empty train, but a packed to the gills passenger train. And pretty much everyone on the train dies, apart from our hero. There's a couple of scenes which make it clear that most of the other people have died in the crash. A nd it leaves a bitter aftertaste in your mouth. Sure, it's a film about an assassin, you expect people to bite the bullet (literally in some cases) but such wholesale slaughter, and such unnecessary slaughter sits ill with the tone of the film. It reminds me of something Martin Campbell said on the GoldenEye commentary, that it was alright for Bond to crush cars and stuff when he was in the tank, as long as you saw the people were alright afterwards.

If the deaths of all those people had a dramatic point at its foundation, then I might be able to get away with it. As it is, it's an annoying moral niggle (and yes, before you say anything, I know none of it's real and no one actually died, but they went to the effort of showing us all the people on the train and then killing them purely to provide an admittedly spectacular set-piece) that will annoy me and will continue to annoy me even after I have bought the Blu-ray, because, after all, it's fifteen years since T2 and that poor schmoe in the corridor still tugs at my heartstrings.

Peace out.

Knock Knock, Who's Here

So, Season 4 of Doctor Who. I've gone on record before how much of a Who fan I am. It's probably even more important to me than Trek or Bond or pretty much anything else. I've spent a lot of time over the past seven years writing fan fiction for various incarnations of the Timelord website (address to your right) and am currently engaged in what we at the site are calling Season 5. You see, following the end of Season 1 (that is Season 1 of Nu-Who, the one with Ecclescakes in, not the Billy Hartnell years) we did our own series called Season 2: New Gallifrey which was masterminded by a member of our group. The notion was that we would do a thirteen episode series in much the same format as the actual TV series, so there would be a rough arc over the course of the season (in our case, it was the resurrection of Gallifrey). It worked well enough; I contributed episodes 2 and 3 (the snappily titled "2046" and "The Architecture Of Morality", still one of my all time fave titles I'e ever come up with). So we did another season, still starring Eccles, because one of the conceits of our series was that he didn't regenerate at the end of "The Parting Of The Ways" and it was in fact this plot point that I seized upon when I myself masterminded Season 3: The Fray. I supposed that the Doctor's continued survival had such a detrimental effect on the multiverse that the entire thing was falling apart. I ended up writing five of the thirteen installments for this one, although that was not really the plan. What happened was that my season opener (as with the TV series, which has always had RTD writing the first episode and then the finale, the 'mastermind' behind each season has done the same, although we don't generally bother with the episodes RTD would write in between so we give more spots to other writers) got a little too big. My average story for the site is about 8000-10000 words long. "State Of Flux", Episode 1 f The Fray was something like 30000 words. A little bit more effort and it could have been a novel. And my two-part season finale, "A Shrine To Futility" and "The Wellspring Of Regret" both bottomed out at about 15000 words each. So "State Of Flux" was cut down into three seperate parts and formed the 'feature length' opening story and took up the first three episodes. I still think my work on The Fray, which saw the death of Rose Tyler, the Doctor's regeneration (we decided to keep Tennant, but saddle him with a slightly more composed, less manic persona) and the intoduction of Heather Jones, a companio I created, as well as the return of Robbie Bainbridge, a companion I had originally envisaged for my series of 5th Doctor stories and a new version of the Master from a parallel universe (this was of course long before the TV series resurrected the Master, interestingly, James, who created New Gallifrey had a Master in his finale for "New Gallifrey" who was, like the John Simm version for the telly, resurrected to fight in the Time War). Then we did "Shadows In Time", for which I contributed the middle 'returning monsters' two parter which saw the return of the Sontarans and the Rutan, "Storm Front" and "Foul Moon". They werea hard slog to write - I actually thought that I might have written Doctor Who out of my system with The Fray. But then immediately afterward, I came up with the idea for a further season which would see New Gallifrey engaged in a civil war. The idea got changed around massively until it became a story about the Cybermen invading New Gallifrey and I somehow ended up masterminding it with one of the other members of the site, who wrote the opener and finale and I took three episodes in the middle, a two parter ("Blood & Steel" and "Tempus Fugitives") which sees the actual invasion of Gallifrey and which I'm writing now and "Broken Kingdom" which... well, that one's a bit fuzzy at the minute. And already I've concocted Season 6: Rapture Of The Daleks (TBC) which will see the death of Heather. I'm writing a big three part finale fo this one and leaving the opener for James to handle, seeing as how the idea to do a Dalek arc was his idea. I might just destry New Gallifrey while I am at it.

The reason I'm going through all this is to point out the divergent route we've taken from normal TV continuity. Essentially, we started with what was in Season 1 and then, using that as our foundation, built up something that's entirely different. Sure, we've had our similarities. The TV show brought back Sarah Jane, we brought back Romana and Susan. My whole outline for The Fray shares a certain level of DNA with the story that is on telly now, dealing with the breakdown of the barriers between universes (the main difference is that I used it as a plot McGuffin and RTD used it so he could get Billie Piper back) but by and large, we've gone down a much more complex and mature route, most likely due to the fact that we aren't broadcast on national telly on a Saturday evening and our audience is composed largely of confirmed Doctor Who fans.

But Season 4 of the tv show has, interesting, been possibly the most child-friendly seaso so far. Sure, we've had the darkness of some stories like 'Planet Of The Ood' and Steven Moffat, despite a shaky first part to his two parter managed to pull of his usual genius, but the overall feeling for the season has been daft runaround. Even the Pompeii episode didn't hit as hard as it could have. And coming off the blinding run of stories since "42" (with particular mention for the darkest TV Who has ever really gotten with the Master trilogy) it's a bit of a let down. The Christmas special was all well and good - we like a daft runaround at Christmas, so we get high concept, the Titanic, Kylie and big shonky effects sequences. You don't want to challenge the viewer too much whe they're soporific after the turkey. At the time, I reckoned "Voyage Of The Damned" was the best Christmas special so far, but, like a lot of Hollywood blockbusters, they lose an awful lot on the second time around (conversely, "The Runaway Bride" has grown in my estimation - I really didn't think much of it after the first viewing).

So, while it's true that since Moffat's two parter the series has regained it's footing (and it's no easy task, given that the remaining scripts have all been by RTD, a variable writer at best - "Aliens Of London/World War 3" is possibly the worst episode of Nu-Who so far while episodes like "Turn Back", "Utopia" and "Gridlock" show that despite all his flaws, and there are many, he can still produce some of the best Doctor Who since Hinchcliffe's day) even if the finale so far has the feeling of scoffing an entire cheesecake in one sitting, one smothered in cream and strawberries - it's damn tasty while you're eating it but once it's finished, you start to feel a little queasy because it was so bloody rich.

Of course, there's always a danger in judging a story before you've seen the end, especially with RTD - "The Parting Of The Ways", peculiarly beloved of fans, is a damp squib after "Bad Wolf" and the ending of "Last Of The Time Lords" is - subtly telegraphed or not - an abomination (I'm talking here about the Doctor's miraculous rejuvenation, which belongs in fantasy like Peter Pan, not rational science fiction, rather than the quite brilliant death of the Master and Martha's coming to term with who she is). RTD has a habit of copping out ("The Parting Of The Ways" obliterates much of the Earth, only for it never to be remarked upon again, "Doomsday" features a huge all ut war between the Cybermen and the Daleks in present day London only for it to be dismissed as hallucinogens in the water or something. The existence of aliens is still not confirmed, despite the events of "World War 3", "The Christmas Invasion", "Voyage Of The Damned", "Army Of Ghosts/Doomsday", "Smith & Jones" and "Partners In Crime", just to name a few examples off the top of my head. The Master trilogy has a big huge reset button built into it - as soon as we see the Paradox Machine we know that's what it's there for - and the only thing that stops it becoming a huge waste of time, akin to the Doctor falling out of the shower and proclaiming to Martha that it was all a dream is that our principal characters remember it and are changed by the experience, meaning that it still has some emotional weight). So "Journey's End", due to be broadcast next Saturday, will doubtless paper over the cracks and everyne will conviniently forget that Earth was once zapped halfway across the universe, invaded by Daleks and generally put through the wringer.

Does it matter?

In the long term, yes, yes it does. In the long term it's essentially shock tactic storytelling, pretending to blow things up and kill people just to make an impact. In the short term, well, it makes for exciting TV, doesn't it?

Peace out.

The Rise And Fall Of The Unbreakable Man

Warning:
Contains spoilers for Unbreakable, The Sixth Sense, The Happening, The Empire Strikes Back and Swimming Pool.
Plus, some dodgy opinions regarding Zooey Deschanel

For many, The Sixth Sense is a truly great film. It's a tightly woven masterpiece where everything hangs together like silk bedsheets. The twist - that Bruce Willis is actually a ghost for much of the film is clearly signposted for the keen-eyed viewer. Like all good twists, it reshapes the movie before your eyes without deconstructing it. It makes you want to go back and revisit it with the knowledge of what the twist is so you can soak up all the clues.

For myself, I twigged to the twist about halfway through the film. It's when Brucie goes to visit his wife at dinner. He sits down in the restaurant, but the chair has already been pulled out some ay. He doesn't touch it when he sist down (obviously his arse makes contact, but he doesn't actually handle it). It's a little bit of an odd thing and the first time watching The Sixth Sense, it jumped ut at me. Of course, it helped that I knew there wasa twist and was actively looking for it. Had I not known abut it, like the twist at the end of Charlotte Rampling/Ludivene Sagnier starrer Swimming Pool, that Sagnier is actually some sort of spectral echo of Charles Dance's lover from the early eighties, it would have been even more devastating.

However, The Sixth Sense, a hugely elaborate piece of celluloid sleight of hand that it was, was a huge success. But then Shyamalan fell into a trap. He became The Twist Man. Unbreakbale ended with the revelation that Samuel L Jackson's Mr Glass was Brucie's nemesis and that he had engineered dozens of accidents purely to find the Unbreakable Man. It remains Shyamalan's best film, and the most original superhero movie ever made. At its heart it never forgets about the human element, always a strong factor in any Shyamalan film. It's not really about saving the world, it's about two people who have forgotten how to communicate.

Signs, however, is where it all falls apart. Like The Happening, his latest offering, Signs is all about the invasion of the everyday. In The Happening, it's malevolent plants, in Signs it's amore prosaic alien invasion. For some reason it's a movie which is inexplicably popular with the mainstream crowd. For them, this is probably how an alien invasion would occur. And I will admit to being impressed by it when I was in the pictures. However, it's one of those movies that, as soon as the lights come up, you start to question elements of the film. Unlike The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, it falls apart in the analysis. They find a way of defeating the aliens and don't immediately broadcast it? They have an extremely violent reaction to water but are harvesting humans who are something like eighty percent water?

Of course, it's perhaps not so much about the logistics of an alien invasion as it is Shyamalan's comment on the all powerful nature of God (or a movie director). But even that metaphor is delivered in such a ham fisted manner that it would shame a sixth form student. Everything is laid out in such signposted terms (no pun intended) that a five year old child with learning difficulties would understand it. Unfortunately Signs had a 12 rating.

In fact, Signs so upset me that I still haven't been able to watch The Village all the way through (my patience wears thin at around the forty minute mark, by which point pretty much nothing has happened - in his first films Shyamalan's mannered and elegiac pacing was a virtue, a glorious antidote to the overpumped plotting and relentless pace of most other movies, now it just seems dull) and although I do own a copy of The Lady In The Water, I can't work up the interest to watch it, not even with the ever-delightful Bryce Dallas Howard as the eponymous Lady.

But I went to see The Happening at the pictures. It's one of the benefits of having an Unlimited card; I can go and see pretty much anything I like and if it's dross it doesn't really matter because it's not like I have spent six and a half quid on a ticket to see it. Of course, the two main reasons I went to see it were A) Nobody seemed to have a bloody clue what it was about; the best theory I could come up with from watching the trailer was that it was some kind of Jericho-esque movie about the end of the world and a whole bunc of characters being stranded somewhere. And B) Zooey Deschanel was in it. Not only is she absolutely gorgeous and possessor of the most amazing eyes you will ever see, but she's also a truly talented actress. Now that Maggie Gyllenhaal is spoken for in the DC Comics world, can I suggest Zooey as a replacement for Lois Lane?

So I goes to see it. It's about plants producing a gas which makes people kill themselves. Alright. Fair enough. I'm a science fiction/fantasy fan. I can buy that. It's a bit of a stretch to have people kill themselves in such a controlled manner (one early, brilliant, scene has people just walking off the edge of a building - this I can dig, but then we have people slitting their wrists, or a cop shooting himself in the head, then someone else picks up the gun and shoots themselves in the head and so on - it's a little too much to believe that this gas which makes people go crazy would also allow them to act in such a premeditated manner).

There's a lot made of mobile phones going off (this is a big thing in the trailer, hence my theory of end of the worldness). But it's never explained. In fact, during the film, mobiles work when it's convinient for them to work. So, Luigi off of Super Mario Bros. can't contact his wife, necessitating a trip to Princeton, but once he's there, a woman can contact her daughter just long enough for Marky Mark to find out that everyone's dead.

Yes. Everyone. Even though he's only spoken to one girl, who is inside her house, he concludes that 'everyone' in Princeton is dead. And it's not a small place. In fact, according to some sources, Princeton has a population somewhere approaching 30,000. Has she gone and knocked on all the doors? Or is Shyamalan engaging in cheap info-dump tactics so that Marky Mark will know that Luigi is dead?

It's the latter of course. This is one of those movies where the world outside the frame doesn't exist (apart from those moments of pure amatuerishness where a boom mike bobs about in shot, once for at least five long seconds). It's exactly the opposite school of film-making to something like Star Wars or Lord Of The Rings where the world building (a massively underrated factor in creating a believable world that is not our own) suggests that what we are seeing is just a teeny weeny fraction of what is out there.

And the ending. Endings are difficult, especially to apocalyptic stories. Here, Shyamalan wipes out most of the East Coast in a laboured metaphor relating somehow to environmental issues (it's ironic that a movie that is so concerned with the environment and the threat mankind poses to nature should spend so much of its running time in green fields) and yet, at the end (after of course the gas has simply disapated, leaving our heroes alive, a deus ex machine of the worst kind, one that is both undramatic and blatantly telegraphed) 'three months later' as the caption informs us, everything is back to normal.

As if.

Seven years after the events of 9/11, an event that is probably one of the sources of The Happening's genesis (the first 'attack' is centered around Central Park in New York and is initially reported as a terrorist attack, something that brings to mind the WTC with a bitter taste in the mouth), we're still feeling the aftershocks. Surely something of the nature of The Happening (and just a quick word about the inanity of that title, it's so vague as to be absolutely pointless - it wouldn't be so bad if it was used in an ironic sense, like Jospeh Heller's superlative novel Something Happened, but you know, I suspect that Shyamalan doesn't have a sense of humour, the one moment of comedy in the entire movie - Marky Mark having a conversation with a tree before realising that it is in fact plastic, is tellingly his best best of acting in the movie, and we all know he can act, Boogie Nights taught us that, it's just that he needs a great director to coax the performance out of him and Shyamalan isn't that) in which millions of people surely died (the first incident occurs in New York City, home to about, ooh, ten million people on an off day) the entire country would be devastated, both socially and economically. But that doesn't quite fit in with the story that Shyamalan wants to tell, which, at it's rather illshaped heart is the maturation of Mark Mark and the triumph of the family unit, even if the aforementioned unit is thirty-three percent adopted daughter. So there's a happy ending. It's like ending a romantic comedy with the two lovers finally getting together and admitting that they are made for each other and then having one of them jump in front of a train. Except not as dramatic.

Peace out.

A Whole New World

It's a strange world out there. From fetishes about eyeball licking to the career of Billy Ocean, there's something for everyone. And so it doesn't come as much of a surprise that pretty much any man you care to ask who will be honest about it will admit to fancying a cartoon character at some point. Most lads' first crush is a cartoon character.

I'll be ridiculously honest here and admit that I still kinda fancy some cartoon characters. We've moved on from She-Ra, Princess Of Power and Ariel the Little Mermaid and we're now on Lois Griffin from Family Guy, Hayley from American Dad and Cortana from the Halo games.

Actually, that one is even more disturbing because she's not even human(ish). It's like that episode of Star Trek: Voyager, Ashs To Ashes when a supposedly dead crew member comes back to the ship having been transformed into an alien. And as an alien she's a babe (I think it's something to do with the contact lens they have her wearing) but as the Doctor helps her revert to her human appearance, she gets less and less appealing. There's something about alien babes, which is kinda like fancying cartoon characters because there's an added air of artifice. So, step up Trance from Andromeda, Chiana from Farscape and Illyria off of Angel (stretching the definition of alien, being that she's actually a God, but the principle remains) and that's leaving off those alien babes who are superficially human like Deanna Troi and Seven of Nine and Aeryn Sun.

The question is why?

It's not a question I feel comfortable with answering because I can only speak for myself and it's a can of worms (issues of the fact that they aren't real and therefore pose no actual threat of hurting/abandoning me and my whole obsession with adventures in the male gaze starting with my first crush being She-Ra, therefore every woman will be compared to something that is blatantly unrealistic leading to something approaching a Mother Complex but wearing golden armour and carrying an enchanted sword (Good God, now we're on to phallic symbols, next I'll be talking about how Castle Grayskull, which is the Sorceresses bastion of power is a vagina dentata and that Skeletor (literally a walking bone) is constantly trying to penetrate it) and then we get into whole tracts of psychoanalysis dealing with my reluctance to deal with the real world - I'm a writer for fuck's sake, avoiding reality is something I do on a day by day basis - which is really a subject I should be saving up for my trip to counselling next week). So let's just leave it at that and I'll say that as soon as I hit puberty, I transferred my allegiance to a combination of Kimberly, the Pink Ranger from Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, Clarissa from Clarissa Explains It All (and then later Sabrina when Melissa Joan Hart became legal and started wearing ridiculously shirt skirts) and Clare Buckfield in 2.4 Children.

Peace out.

Kong - A New Breed Of Terror

The 1976 John Guillerman King Kong. It's a bit shit isn't it? I mean, yes, it's one of the last glorious gasps of the 'man in a monster suit' genre, and there are some brilliant bits when he goes on the rampage in the Big Apple, and yes, Jessica Lange was extremely fit back in the day. And Rene Auberjonois is always good value for money.

But it's still bobbins. Whoever thought Jeff Bridges was leading man material (he's a good actor, but his is the domain of character roles, he's too low key to be a star) was nuts.

Oh yes. That would be Dino de Laurentiis, wouldn't it, responsible for, among others, Conan, Barbarella, Flash Gordon, Red Dragon and dozens of other films of highly variable quality. Always after the big bucks was Dino.

And King Kong Lives, despite a brief appearance by Linda Hamilton's boobs, is even worse. I hired the video out of the store way back when it first came out and for years was convinced that I had somehow made it up because I could never find it again. The same thing with The Garbage Pail Kids, which I still haven't managed to track down a copy of.

Which brings me, in a somewhat roundabout way, to the subject of this blog: Forgotten movies.

Not movies which have gotten lost n the mists of time, but those half-remembered movies from when you're a kid which stick with you. For me the list includes Howard The Duck (a fifteen year quest to track down a copy of that film), Supergirl (a strange one because it's got none of the weird shit in it tha most of the other films in this list have, but it never seemed to be on telly and you couldn't get a video of it for love nor money), Jaws 3-D, Brides Of Dracula, King Kong Lives, Child's Play (traumatised me as a kid that one, I now own a copy but haven't quite got up the nerve to sit down and watch it - 21 years after seeing it, forced to watch it by my sister, I still remember the nightmares I had about Chucky, and the scene from Damien - The Omen 2 where that woman gets er eyes pecked out by the Devil in the form of a crow and then wanders right in front of an articulated lorry, which is strange because I remember watching all three Omen movies with her and now, watching them as an adult, there's much more disturbing stuff in them than that - the death of the nanny ("It's all for you, Damien!"), the kid who gets trapped under the ice and for some reason the whole scene where Gregory Peck digs up Damien's real mother and finds a jackal skeleton disturbs me immensely). It's mainly stuff that I probably shouldn't have been watching at that young and impressionable age.

There was a video shop in the next village over (we weren't posh enough to have a video shop, hell, we didn't even have a proper newsagents until a few years ago) and because the guy who ran the shop knew me and he knew my dad, he tended to let me get out what I wanted. Sounds awful now I know, but my mam used to send me round the shop for her tabs and they would sell me them. My sister bought her own first tabs by saying they were for our mam. But it was a more innocent age. I suspect that if I had tried to rent out Nine and a Half Weeks or something he would have had something to say. But I wasn't interested in sexy movies. In fact, I got a little nervous when they came on. I was watching The Terminator with my gran and the sex scene came on. I got a little nervous - you don't want to look too interested in case they notice you getting excited, but you don't want to make your apparent disinterest too obvious. Needless to say, when Kyle Reese kicked the bucket, I was over the moon, because it meant that there wouldn't be any more awkward sex scenes. Of course, my gran was a very strange woman. When I was ten, shortly before she died, I went over to her house. She was watching Fatal Attraction and bade me to come and sit down with her while she watched it. That's another movie that's stuck in my mind, and put me off Glenn Close for life.

My Gran was always the first port of call for movies in my life. My mother never really took me to the pictures (in fact, I can only remember two occasions - Superman 4: The Quest For Peace and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: The Secret Of The Ooze, the latter of which I had won free tickets for and I can only remember her ever mentioned going to the pictures another two times - for Top Gun and Grease) but my gran would always take me. She would always fall asleep halfway through the film, but she took me. We would go to the Cannon in Sunderland, or the Empire Theatre, which has a small screening room and would tend to show slightly older films. After her death, I only remember going to see Jurassic Park at the Cannon. It closed down shortly afterward, stood derelict for the longest time then reopened while I was at university as a nightclub. Not that I've ever been in. Even when I was in the depths of my degree I still went out in Newcastle.I can't remember a single occasion when I actually have gone out drinking in Sunderland. Sure, I've had a few quiet drinks in the pubs round there (The Transporter, now sadly changed hands and name, The Royalty, Chesters, the Manor Quay) but Sunderland as a night out has never quite appealed. The Empire doesn't show movies anymore, at least, not that I'm aware of.

My first experience of a modern multiplex was when my sister took me to see GoldenEye at the Warner Village in Newcastle (a complex which no longer exists, they knocked it down some years ago to make student accomodation). I'd skived off school for the day, with my mother's persmission amazingly enough. It was the beginning of December and our Clare took me out to Newcastle Christmas shopping. I bought some Doctor Who books in Forbidden Planet - this was at the very beginning of my love affair with that shop. We argued and Clare almost didn't take me. But take me she did - our Clare has always had a very high tolerance for my idiocy - and I was amazed. The Cannon had two screens, obviously the bare minimum that it could have to qualify as a multiplex. The Warner Village had twelve. It was an eye opening experience, let me tell you. But that wasn't the big shock. The big shock for me was the fact that there were only around seven people in the screen with us. Now I was used to packed houses. I didn't believe that they could justify screening a film for this few people, but screen it they did (and I have subsequently been to screening with even less people in attendance, including when I went to see Shrooms and I was the only one in the theatre) and so my affair with modern cinema began.

And in a way my childhood ended then. Before GoldenEye, movies at the cinema were a transient, special treat, with the advent of my pilgrimage to the Warner Village, they became something that I could do whenever I want to. I was the master of my cinematic destiny, and I haven't looked back since.

Peace out.

You Can't Get There From Here

WARNING - CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR
"INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL"
AND ALSO, GRATUITOUS USE OF THE PHRASE
"THE EIGHTIES WERE THE GREATEST ERA OF FILM EVER"

Indiana Jones - or, as the adult, grown up version has him, Henry Jones, Jnr - is back. It's been nineteen years since we last saw him, at least properly. In the long hiatus, we've had the TV series but it was like a Stepford version of Indy, bereft of the thrills and matinee joys that made the original trilogy so damn entertaining.

Nineteen years. It's a long time, especially considering that Harrison Ford was not a young man even when they did Raiders Of The Lost Ark. It's also strange when you consider that Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade is very much a final act. It even has them riding off into the sunset at the end, father and son reconciled, evil defeated. So, while it's always nice to catch up with an old friend, sometimes it's better to leave the memories where they belong. Some fires should not be rekindled.

In the nineteen years since Henry Jones and Henry Jones, Jnr rode off into the sunset movies have changed immeasurably. CGI has risen swiftly, gone from its brash youth like a bull in a china shop to being a valuable tool in skilled hands. Superstars have burned brightly and then faded just as fast (and speaking of which, isn't it sad that all three of Indy's girls - Karen Allen, Kate Capshaw and the divine Alison Doody - seem to have faded into obscurity following their adventure). The global political scene has changed; the Cold War has finished, new enemies have emerged...

So Indiana Jones is a relic of a bygone age. And cleverly, they play with that notion in the film itself. It's nineteen years after the events of The Last Crusade. Indy is still teaching, but Marcus Brody has passed away, as has Henry Jones, Snr. There is a lot made of Indy's war record - apparently he worked for the Secret Service during the war - but at heart he's the same man, although older and crankier and he has the same zeal for archeology. And bringing Indy's dislocation into sharp focus, we have that young rising star, Shia LeBeouf, as a young greaser, looking exactly like Marlon Brando in The Wild One when we first see him.

The plot plays almost like a replay of The Temple Of Doom, but with better villains (the gorgeous and talented Cate Blanchett) but with the Roswell aliens/Erich von Daniken progenitors/The Mysterious Cities of Gold as the plot McGuffin instead of some borderline offensive Hindu mythology. It's a glorious hodge-podge of a dozen or so ideas that almost - but not quite - fits together perfectly.

It's probably no secret now that Mutt is Indy's son. Hell, it was no secret before the film came out. The rumour mill had been going full tilt and it would have been a surprise if Mutt hadn't been Indy's son. It's one element of the script that seems a little shoe-horned in. Sean Connery's role in The Last Crusade was thematically relevent and expertly woven into the plot. Mutt just seems to be there to fill in the youth demographic. One surprise is Ray Winstone's character. We all knew he would betray Indy (this is one area where the film differs from Temple - that film is the only one where he is not betrayed by a friend) but then he comes out as a double agent. It's a brilliant move and is only trumped later on when he reveals he was lying and actually has betrayed him after all.

Despite all of this, Indy IV is very much a film out of time. It tries to recapture the glories of the 80's action movie, because as we all know, the eighties were the greatest era of film ever, especially for fantasy films. And running along the spine of the 80's were the Indiana Jones films. Raiders was there in 1981 at the start and The Last Crusade made its bow in 1989, sandwiched in between them are some of the greatest fantasy films ever - Labyrinth, Star Trek 2, American Werewolf, Supergirl, Gremlins, The Fly, Terminator, Aliens, Blade Runner - it's the birth of modern fantasy movies.

Simce then we've had the rapid maturation of the science fiction movie followed by a rediscovery of its innocence with the rise of the superhero movie. Film has become aware of itself. In a very real sense, film has eaten itself. So much of film these days is post-modern, not in the breaking of the fourth wall sense, but in the sense that most movies are aware of their place, chock full of references to past efforts. It's a movement that gave Quentin Tarantino his entire career (even Jackie Brown is built on seventies blaxploitation). Indy IV doesn't do this.

And maybe that's a good thing.

It's kind of like a throwback. It wouldn't work for every film. Hell, it wouldn't work for many films. Indy gets away with it because of its heritage and the fact that despite his occasional misfires - naming no names but Hook, The Lost World, Amistad - Steven Speilberg is perhaps the greatest director of all time (and coming from a hardcore Scorsese fan, that's a funny thing to say) and if anyone can pull it off, it's the 'Berg.

So, four out of five for Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull, losing points for a slightly pointless McGuffin (the previous three films were all about saving the world, Indy IV doesn't have anything like that focus) and for Cate Blanchett's slightly wandering Russian accent and the fact that she wears overalls throughout the entire film and doesn't get into anything more... alluring, like Alison Doody in Last Crusade.

Advide to George Lucas though: Let the franchise lie. It's a happy exercise in nostalgia, but like Star Wars and James Bond, it's time to let it rest or to reinvent it into something new and exciting. But with Indy, I'm not sure that would work, and if it did, it probably wouldn't be the Indiana Jones we know and love. In a way, Indy IV is like a love letter to the 80's (and it's ironic that a fil which is so rooted in thirties chapter serials and fifties B movies - no doubt an Indy film set during the forties would draw upon war movies and film noir - is so adoring towards the eighties). And that is a thing of beauty.

Peace out.