Modern Culture - Mostly Marvel Arse Drippings and Old Films

I know, it's not even December and already I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel to come up with stuff to talk about, but as this woeful World Cup will still be fucking up the TV schedules until a week before Santa gets here, I don't expect there's going to be that much to talk about after it, as there is usually very little new stuff unless you like pointless [small P] Christmas specials.

However, you can always guarantee that Marvel/Disney will come up with a pointless Christmas special and they did (albeit with a couple of Easter Eggs thrown in so that the next film makes more sense)...

The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special was a sort of entertaining 38 minutes of nonsense with a mix of piss poor special effects, some jolly bits of Christmas cheer and even Kevin Bacon - who was surprisingly better than I expected, even if we didn't really need his little C&W Christmas tune near the end. This was really all about Drax and Mantis fucking up Hollywood with a little bit of Starlord and some cameos from Nebula, Rocket and Groot (so obviously a man in a wooden suit rather than actual CGI). 

We've heard that Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 is going to be the last outing for this particular group of heroes, but the post credit scene of this Holiday Special suggested that until that film finally lands, Marvel and Disney is going to milk this particular subsection of the franchise until it bleeds from its putrid cock.

This wasn't a patch on the Werewolf by Night special, but that was the best thing Marvel has done since Infinity War and most of these 'specials' are probably never going to be that special. GotGHS apparently was an idea James Gunn had after the very first film; I do wish it had stayed an idea, but just to spoil it for you: Mantis is Peter's (half) sister and the Guardians have bought Nowhere - what they intend to do with it is anyone guess, but I expect the new and fucked up Adam Warlock will destroy it and the last dregs of my hope that the MCU might have a salvation movie in the future...

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Despite their ubiquitous presence on Film4, I'd resisted the two Deadpool films for a long time; not because I didn't enjoy them, but because whenever I've been channel hopping at the end of the day, I've usually ended up watching five or ten minutes of either of these films. They remind me, in a perverse way, of An American Tail, a film I've never actually watched from start to finish but during the 1990s when I used to visit my mate Maurice, the film was always on, being watched by his then 5 year old daughter. I've probably seen the film a dozen times without ever completing it in one sitting.

Deadpool and Ryan Reynolds seem to be one of those guilty pleasures that's a bit like flannelette sheets when it isn't freezing cold outside and don't ask me to explain that analogy because it would probably fall apart if I did. 

The films are essentially throwaway nonsense that take place in a Marvel Universe that seems slightly different from other Marvel universes - of which we now know there are multiples versions of - possibly a similar universe to She Hulk because, you know, fourth wall breaking. The thing about Deadpool is his films, unlike She Hulk's TV series, are actually funny; laugh out loud funny rather than mildly amusing if you get the joke.

The first film is great, even if far too much of it is spent on Deadpool's origin and it falls into that abhorrent old Marvel film category of 'mutants can be created rather than being born that way' which has always made any Marvel mutant film immediately shite. Cut away the superfluous bollocks and Deadpool is a monster of a movie, with excellent set pieces and some really funny jokes and one can see why it was such a huge hit. Reynolds is a genuinely funny guy who brings essentially himself to the ball and has great fun with it; the script is mostly as sharp as a tack and it literally spends most of the time pushing the limits of tastelessness. 

The villains are a bit stereotypical, the use of lesser known X-Men suggests that when the film was made no one wanted to potentially hurt the X-Men franchise, but Colossus and Negasonic Teenage Warhead (who?) hold the thing together and while it ultimately feels like a bunch of comedy set pieces stitched together with a weak plot it was one of the highlights of 2016.

Deadpool 2 on the other hand is far too long and has far too many unwanted and poorly acted characters... well... character, that of Julian Dennison, the New Zealand 'actor' who shot to fame starring with Sam Neill in Hunt for the Wilderpeople and probably should have retired after that film. I don't have a problem with actors from New Zealand, even if they do sound very odd, but I do have problems with actors who can't act and bring fuck all to the show and Dennison fits that description perfectly. The only thing that's redeeming about his character - Firefist - is his name and that wasn't exploited nearly as much as it should have been.

I would have enjoyed this film had it simply been a series of set pieces where Wade Wilson just kills loads of people in inventive ways, but this film tries to be really clever and it fails. Don't get me wrong, it's great fun and doubles up on the LOL moments, but so much of it is unnecessary and feels like padding. It's like they tried very hard to hide a serious film under the slapstick comedy exterior.

I thought the idea of X-Force was a cool one; I thought the idea of killing all of them bar Domino off at the start of their first mission was even more inspired; but I didn't like Eddie Marsan's character or what he represented; I found Cable to be just a tad annoying and in places ridiculous (although when Wade calls him Thanos that was his best moment, but when Cable uses the C word that was his worst moment; that was not needed - like when Loki calls Natasha a quim) and there wasn't enough time with the original supporting cast. Domino, however, was a class addition and I hope Marvel finds a way to keep her around.

I think the main problem I had with the sequel is despite being a thoroughly enjoyable film, the final post credit scene sort of ruined it all without ruining it at all... 

Huh? 

Let me explain: as an aficionado of time travel films, they're usually made with a degree of logic and common sense, but Marvel's excursions into time travel - be it The X-Men, Deadpool or the Avengers have dispensed with logic completely; it's just a vehicle not a plot and with Deadpool 2 it's reduced to being a trivial sideshow. Cable has come from the future (with his daughter's teddy bear) to kill Firefist before he turns into a psychopathic killer who offs his wife and kid; Wade stops him, converts Firefist to not being a killer and everything in the future become nice again. Wade wouldn't have been involved in any of the film had Ness not been killed by a token Russian mafia thug; he wouldn't have joined the X-Men and he wouldn't have ended up in the Ice Box (a stronghold for evil mutants) with Firefist... Cable not returning to the future also causes a paradox that could result in him never marrying his wife or having the daughter the entire film was based around... So far so good?

At the end of the film Wade using one of Cable's time travel doodads goes back in time and prevents Ness from being killed, which technically speaking would prevent any of his subsequent involvement in the rest of the film. She wouldn't die, he wouldn't be rescued by Colossus, there would be no X-Force, Cable would come to the past and kill Firefist unopposed and the same outcome would be achieved except we'd have one dead New Zealand actor. Deadpool 2 suffers the same paradoxical bollocks that made Avengers: Endgame such a stinker of a film when you put it under any scrutiny.

That said, I totally love the Deadpool films and I cannot believe that Deadpool 3 - whenever it arrives - will be a patch on the first two because I do not believe that Marvel/Disney would allow such a massively bad taste movie to exist under their banner. The MCU has embraced 'shit' as an expletive, even this week's Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special has at least one shit in it and that 'special' was essentially aimed at kids, but I can't see them allowing something that moves the boundaries of bad taste to entirely new horizons.

On a related subject, I was totally unaware that there is something like 30 Deadpool shorts - not the clothing, but little filmettes that Reynolds has made since the first film debuted in 2016. I get it that the character has essentially helped turn Reynolds into an A list superstar but this smacks a little of overkill.

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I don't like Christmas very much and I think the last decent Christmas film was made in the 1950s, but I've changed my mind recently when I saw a film - in November - called The Man Who Invented Christmas starring Dan Stevens and the late, great Christopher Plummer.

It's a fictionalised story about how Charles Dickens came up with and developed A Christmas Carol and it was absolutely delightful, extremely funny and felt like it should have been the Christmas Day afternoon film on any of the major TV stations. Oddly enough, one of the best Christmas films ever is Alastair Sim's version of Scrooge made in 1951, this wasn't as good as that but it's a close run thing and I urge you to watch it next time it's on TV and you get the chance. 

***

We watched Eternals again. Given that we found both Black Widow and Shang-Chi better the second time around (although I still don't get the latter and why it was even made), we expected to go into this one feeling like we might enjoy it more. I don't think we did...

One of our friends thinks this is the best MCU film of all time, but I'm now convinced he just likes being contrary, probably to be slightly controversial and maybe to get people talking, but how anyone can think that this abomination of a film is the best thing Marvel has ever done probably needs therapy, because it simply isn't. It's full of bad acting; it's driven by a implausibly bad script and it simply makes little or no sense. It has moments in it that are great, but these are so few and far between that they lose any impact they might have had.

It's also either far too long or not long enough (I'd go for the former because if this had gone on for longer than the 2+ hours I would have lost the will to live). The characters make little or no sense; we have an Indian guy, an Asian guy, a black gay guy, a deaf woman, another Oriental woman, a Hispanic woman and an American woman; we have a child, a Scottish guy and an Irish guy - why? Why are they a selected bunch of ethnicities when they arrived on Earth before even such a concept even existed? Why is there a deaf woman, but not a blind one or one that can't smell or one that is incontinent? Why does this film even exist?

In the comics, Thanos at some point (which has probably been retroactively re-written) was classed as being related to the Deviants - the villains the Eternals are trusted to protect the earth from, yet despite a kind of generally plausible reason for them never getting involved in the Infinity War, it kind of feels like they're not really protecting anything, especially if the entire reason for them being there is to ensure the population of the planet exceeds a certain number in the billions so that a new Celestial can be born, thus ending the lives of all those billions of people. Surely, when Thanos cut the world's population in half that would have been classed as a threat to the creation of the new Celestial and good reason for the bunch of mismatched heroes, with strange unrelated powers and accents, to get involved? Or how come there's never been a recorded sighting of the Deviants by any other hero or person in the MCU before this film?

It's a fucking abortion of a film. Laughable for so many reasons. Probably the biggest being that Chloé Zhao, the director, publicly stated she wanted as little CGI in the film as possible and it's probably the most heavily CGI'd film in the MCU's existence and most of it is shit. Or how about when Thena - played poorly by Angelina Jolie - goes all rogue for absolutely no reason whatsoever, out of the blue, with no foreshadowing and it takes nearly an hour for the script to even bother to address her crazy bat shit attempts at killing all her 'siblings'. 

I really wanted to like this film more than I did first time around and I ended up hating it even more. Only Avengers: Endgame, which I liked as a spectacle film, until you put it under actual scrutiny, has had such a negative reaction from me. Even the fact that a few of the Eternals are actually cunts and a couple of them are essentially cowards doesn't make this a good [as in clever] film and the most heartbreaking thing about it is at the end when you get ... The Eternals will return caption, like we've just watched an Avengers or Thor film. I don't want them to return unless they get killed off in the pre-credit scene before the film actually starts.

There has been some extremely ill-judged decisions by Kevin Feige and the MCU but it seems that both Marvel and DC, at present, seem to think that ideas Jack Kirby had in the 1970s are the next best thing to the ideas he and Stan Lee had in the 1960s - they're not. Kirby stopped having good ideas around 1964, by the 1970s if you weren't aware he was an old man you'd think was on crappier versions of the drugs that Jim Starlin and Steve Englehart were taking. Nothing this one-time comics genius created after 1970 is worth anything at all and this proved it beyond reasonable doubt; it is the worst Marvel film ever made; even worse than the Punisher films, the Ghost Rider films or that Man-Thing film they made in the early noughties. Eternals is irredeemable shit.  

***

I take that back. The Eternals is not the worst Marvel film ever... It's the third worst film but absolutely the worst MCU film. 

I said I wasn't going to watch the two Ghost Rider films having seen the first one 15 years ago and never having seen the 'follow up'. So we decided to be gluttons for punishment and watch both films in one sitting rather than subject ourselves to more World Cup bollocks.

The first thing I noticed was that Ghost Rider (2007) must have impressed us so much we put any memory of it out of our brains so that if we ever watched it again it would seem fresh and unwatched because neither of us remembered anything about it at all. The second thing is that it's described as 'action fantasy thriller' on IMDB and has an almighty 5.2 rating. What it should have been described as was 'action comedy bollocks' and been given a 3 rating, mainly because the special effects weren't that bad for a film with a budget of $25.

The third thing I noticed is that Eva Mendes - who played Roxy, Johnny Blaze's love interest, must have felt a little soiled and desperately hoping for her own personal 'Me Too' moment because the director obviously told her to spend most of the film with as much cleavage showing without her bra or nipples getting in the shot and the fourth thing about it was how utterly shite it was from Nick Cage's phoned in acting to the things in it that made so little sense I'm still scratching my head about them - such as why Sam Elliot was in it and what the point of his original Ghost Rider cameo near the end was. Yet, compared to the sequel it's an absolute masterpiece; a Titanic of a superhero film that at least had some ideas in it which might have been redeeming had it not been a load of diarrhoea gushing from the anus of abysmal films.

Yet, you might have noticed I said the words 'compared to the sequel' and that's because Spirit of Vengeance is a film that simply made as much sense as a drunken stoned Scotsman with no teeth explaining his theory of nuclear fission to a chimpanzee. For starters even though it was a 'sequel' it felt like the Marvel Multiverse was at play again with a twisted recap of Johnny Blaze's origin but this time really different from the first film and without Peter Fonda's devil, now replaced by Ciarán Hinds' Rourke - also the devil, but not, or maybe he is... The entire film had lost me within the opening five minutes.

Blaze was now in eastern Europe running away from his past and straight into a new story involving the son of the devil and the promise that he can be cured of his curse by Idris Elba's religious brotherhood - led by Anthony Head. A curse you might recall the devil offered to lift himself but Blaze turned him down (at the end of the first film). If the script, acting and general feel of the first film was bad this film's only redeeming feature is that the actual Ghost Rider looked a little more realistic than the first film's, even if very little of that film remained. This really must be another universe's Johnny Blaze unless the people who made it thought that people who watched the first film would do what we did and completely forget everything about it.

This is the worst Marvel film ever made, by a country mile and a half. This film makes Eternals seem like Citizen Kane or Casablanca. It is every bad shit you've ever had put into one of those washing machine balls and shoved into your entire wardrobe with some dynamite on a hot wash. Don't be tempted to watch it on that recommendation because you will want to die horribly at the hands of slugs with teeth.

***

The World Cup... As a fan of football (although as a Spurs supporter that is debatable at times) I have to say outside of this morally bankrupt competition, this has been one of the most boring tournaments I've ever witnessed. Yes, there have been a couple of thrashings and 6 goal thrillers, but generally it's been dull and uninspiring with a heap of 0-0 draws, which has made not bothering to watch most of it really easy.

However, putting my proper footballing hat on, I expect a lot of footballers will be retiring from the international scene at Christmas and a lot more managers will find themselves out of work before Santa brings them their massive payoffs. While I expect the eventual winners will be one of the chosen few (France, Brazil, Spain), it has been one full of weird results - such as Costa Rica losing 7-0 to Spain and then beating Japan 1-0 after Japan had beaten Germany 2-1. 

I expect whoever wins it no one outside of that country will give a flying fuck.

***

In the last couple of weeks, we've gone out of our way to watch two films with extremely high ratings on IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes, which for one reason or another we'd never got around to watching.

The first was Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain with Huge Ackman and Rachel Weiss. Despite its 7.2 rating on IMDB - even though it's almost 17 years old - we found it, like other Aronofsky films, a trifle weird, strange and probably not worth such a high rating despite it looking good and having some great acting in it. The film is essentially about love and loss and living forever all wrapped up in three different but interconnecting stories. As the wife said, it isn't a film we'd go out of our way to watch again.

The other was Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which we'd avoided largely because of Jim Carey, who neither of us like and the last film of his I watched was actually The Mask and that was like 1994. We were pretty much blown away at how good the film was and how, like The Fountain, it all clicked together - but in a far more coherent way despite the number of headfucks it dished out. Oddly enough, like so many other films - like Godzilla had Wanda and Pietro together in different roles - this had two Marvel alumni in Gwen (Kirsten Dunst - being ultra sexy) Stacey and Bruce (a young Mark Ruffalo) Banner in supporting roles, as well as a Hobbit and the often brilliant Kate Winslet. It's a film I wished we'd watched ten years ago so we could watch it again and not remembered much about it at all. I expect most of the people reading this will have seen it but if you haven't it deserves the extremely high rating it gets from all film websites; it's a cracker.

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We've been recording films off the TV a lot in the last four to six weeks - basically because since I was ill my lifestyle has changed and I spend about a tenth of the time I did on the computer; less social media, no games and pretty much blogs only, because I was not writing as much as I should have been and procrastination has always been very easy for me.

Our go to channels are Film 4 and ITV4, both of which have an array of old films, classics and things we've seen but not for a very long time - such as Pitch Black and Predator 2 - but lurking in the wee hours of a midweek I noticed the first Bill Murray film, directed by Ivan Reitman and scripted (partially) by Harold Ramis; yes, the Ghostbuster team and I realised that I hadn't seen the film for at least 40 years and given it was made in the mid-70s and called Meatballs I expected it was going to be dated and probably full of boobs (of the mammary kind)...

Oh heavens above... No wonder Film 4 had a warning about the themes and language of the film being from an era when it was considered okay. Meatballs is a deeply, deeply offensive movie that I expect most paedophiles have in their collections. Does Bill Murray look back on this film and wince with pain? We literally lasted until the first advert break, a little over 20 minutes, because it wasn't funny: a character was called Spaz; the older camp leaders (it was set on a summer camp for kids aged between 6 and 16) were making almost continuous sexual innuendos (and some not even innuendo) to 13 and 14 year old girls and while it might have been a realistic commentary on what the sexually repressed Mid West might have been like in 1976, it was more like a bad porn film than a comedy.

Why on earth did Film 4 show this film, even in the small hours? Are there not a bunch of better, more appropriate films to show? I can think of a list of films I have either never seen on TV or haven't been shown for donkeys years that would have been better and not caused such offense and while I'm aware that offense is a very personal thing, I expect any parent watching this film expecting to see Bill Murray in a film like Caddyshack (his second film) will feel dirty and slightly soiled and astounded that someone at Channel 4 and its sideshows didn't at least watch this first to see just how anachronistic and morally objectionable it is.

After I deleted it, we watched Pitch Black again; the first time in over 15 years and while it still has really poor acting and some of cinema's worst mumbling, as a creepy sci fi film it's still pretty good and has some of the best aliens since, well, Alien. One thing I did notice about it was that the only thing Vin Diesel does nowadays is the voice of Groot and given the vocal range of this alien tree, he probably doesn't spend a lot of time in any studio or sound booth.