There was a period when I liked the 1960s Batman TV series, but I was under 10 and it was great if you were under 10, but despite running and owning a comic book shop when Tim Burton's Batman came out, I never really got excited about it. In fact, I've seen the two Burton films once, when they came out, and I've never seen them again, so when I decided it was time to watch some Batman films, they were the perfect place to start, so I watched the Christopher Nolan reboot first; starting at the beginning with Batman Begins.
We'd seen this film way back in 2005 and the first thing I noticed was how little the film had aged; other superhero films of that specific opening decade of the 2000s now look terribly dated and of a specific era, but this has a timeless feel you don't know if it's the 40s or the 90s or any time between until mobile phones appear, they're obscured enough for you not to pinpoint an actual time in the 21st century.
The second thing I noticed was that it was surprisingly better than I expected; having recently seen Robert Pattinson's emo The Batman and having my customary dislike of it. This appears to be mainly because I was so vocal about hating The Dark Knight (despite it's 9.0 rating on IMDB) because I really disliked Heath Ledger's Joker - but that's for another review... But, yeah, Batman Begins was most enjoyable, even if all of the main actors, apart from Morgan Freeman and Katie Holmes, were all British and it was made mainly in the UK - not that that's a problem, it's just weird for a quintessentially American character and film style to have been made on this side of the Atlantic.
The third thing I take from this film is I probably think it's a better film than any of the Spider-Man films, in fact, as a superhero film it's remarkably level headed and as a DC film there's been nothing I've seen since that's a patch on it (and I liked Shazam a lot), but a lot of that might have been the approach taken and the unorthodox re-writing of Batman's origin - not the killing of his parents bit, but the way he eventually becomes the Dark Knight. I've always loved the line in Justice League when Flash asks the Ben Affleck Batman what his superpowers are and he replies, 'I'm a billionaire.' and Batman Begins expands on that idea despite being made 12 year earlier.
***
10 Cloverfield Lane is something of a curate's egg. Starring geek film 'superstar' Mary Elisabeth Winstead, it's essentially two films grafted to each other and for the first 90 minutes, with the exception of one 90 second incident with 'the woman from the car' there is nothing that makes you think this is a film about anything other than a survivalist nutter and the people he's 'collected' to keep him company while he sits out the apocalypse that either has or hasn't happened 30 feet above their heads, one he's been constructing for a number of years.
Then, of course, it goes a bit wonky and the rational part of your brain starts to wonder if 'the woman from the car' might be some kind of stooge, or maybe one of the victim's of Howard's (John Goodman) master plan. Winstead's Michelle, Goodman's Howard and John Gallagher's Emmett are 'trapped' inside Howard's nuclear bunker with just his word that the end of the world has arrived either by another country or possibly extra terrestrials. He's quite batshit crazy which doesn't help things and he never really looks like he's going to be anything other than a scary threat. Once Winstead manages to escape, the film wanders into the territory promised by its title as she inadvertently draws the attention of a space ship and the really strange and creepy aliens.
We get a bit of Die Hard meets Independence Day and then Michelle is on the road, in the car belonging to 'the woman' and not being hassled by aliens, deciding whether she's going to help with the resistance or going to help with the makeshift hospital that's been set up, all about which she finds on the radio on an open frequency, suggesting that while Howard knew there's was bad shit happening above, he just wanted his own little 'family' that he could control and... maybe... just maybe, be more monstrous than the things invading the planet.
The Cloverfield franchise/trilogy in itself is a weird set of movies; the found footage monster movie featuring a kind of fucked up Godzilla; this psychological thriller with an extra terrestrial twist of and then the final film which killed the 'franchise' off with bad ideas, acting and no budget. The thing about 10 Cloverfield Lane is the psychological part is both scary, feasible and well made and the wacky extra terrestrial bonkers is the same; I'm just not sure the two work as one even though it doesn't feel like a different ending stitched on. I'm sure the small and perfectly formed cast knew what they were making, at least Winstead must have. Watching this for the first time in 6 years, made me realise that had they made the 3rd instalment with half as much thought, the Cloverfield thing might still be going strong today.
***
Next up we went for the second of James Wan's horror films about the Warrens. This was The Conjuring 2 and where we quite enjoyed the first outing, this one was fucking awful. Let me explain why...
It was loosely based on the Enfield Haunting, a famously debunked 'haunting' that took place in Enfield, Herts in 1977. Ed and Lorraine Warren start this film by looking into the Amityville Horror where Lorraine encounters a malevolent nun demon who seems to have it in for everybody; she tries to persuade Ed that they need to give up on the demon hunting because it's getting dangerous and she fears for his safety. Then the Hodgson family turns up with their own demonic possession thing going on and they decide, at the behest of the Catholic church, to travel to England and find out if this is a hoax or real. So far so meh. Then as a natural born Hertfordshire lad things start to get a wee bit hokey...
Barely any of the film was actually filmed in London or Enfield; scenes with Ed & Lorraine outside the Hodgson house were on a soundstage with a recreation of the Enfield house doubling up. The house itself was remarkable - from the outside it looked like a simple end of terrace house in a normal English street, however inside it resembled a North American house - by its dimensions; every room was fooking huge; I mean big enough to fit your average poor family home into a couple of times over. It also had a back to the house that was more like the arse end of a US tenement building rather than an Edwardian house and then there was the cellar... Anyone who's ever had a cellar in this country would be amazed at the cathedral sized room given to this house, with its windy stairs and more space than the airship hangar in Cardington, Bedfordshire.
With two (almost) exceptions, none of the kids were English; their mother was an Australia actress who worked most of her acting career in the UK and the bloke playing Maurice - the would be psychic investigator was British and was last seen as the bishop in Rev, everyone else was either Aussie or American. The nun looked like Marilyn Manson - no, really - and it wasn't scary, creepy or particularly enjoyable; it felt like a half-arsed attempt at schlock horror and it failed on almost every level. I wasn't remotely tempted by the umpteen other Conjuring spin-offs, now I'm going to avoid them like a plague that's shit itself.
***
I have a confession to make. I hated Batman: The Dark Knight. It was more to do with Heath Ledger's Joker than anything else - I said then and still feel the same way now that his Joker is essentially him channelling Jeff Goldblum's Seth Brundell in Cronenberg's remake of The Fly and not at all what I feel the Joker should be. I kind of want the Joker to be a cross between Cesar Romero and, well, Heath Ledger. For me in 2008 this spoiled the film and led me to not bother watching the third part of the trilogy; I had enough of a bug up my arse about disliking Batman then, that I was going to stick with my principals - after all, I'd never watched the second Andrew Garfield Spider-Man film when it came out because I didn't like the first.
The thing is, The Dark Knight is arguably the best superhero film ever made. It is relentless, dark - very dark - and probably needed some humour in it, just a little levity to stop it from being ... um... dark and relentless. Apart from that it's incredibly well written and a much better film than Batman Begins.
There are some key things I noticed having watched the first part less than three days ago. The first is Maggie Gyllenhaal isn't Katie Holmes and isn't really a leading lady, but I can forgive that, Holmes had probably married Tom Cruise by this point and gotten involved in all of his scientology nonsense. The second is Gotham was now like New York and had lost all of its gothic feel; it was new and shiny and this was only about a year after the first film. There was no monorail any more and that sense of timelessness had gone, replaced by a, dare I say it, Metropolis.
For a film that's 2½ hours long, it's incredibly well paced and has some brilliant set pieces that would have graced any other film's finale and the finale of this was almost understated, like everything else had been awesome so you needed a little less dynamic; something with more pathos. There are elements of it that I found problematic, but in general the main problem I have with it is Batman's code which, considering what the Joker puts him through, should have been broken into pieces as he tore the Master of Mirth to shreds, but he doesn't and the Joker's 'demise' is almost anticlimactic. Ledger's death meant there was never going to be a reprise so in the end it felt a little pointless.
It is an absolutely brilliant film and I've changed my mind about it 180 degrees; if anything there wasn't enough Batman in it... Now we have The Dark Knight Rises, a film I can reliably say I've never seen. I know nothing about it at all apart from Tom Hardy playing Bane, who became the Caped Crusader's main antagonist in the era when I was running my own comic shop and Batman was one of my top sellers (I didn't read it then so all I know is it involved a broken back; whether that happens in the third part of the trilogy I'll find out this very soon).
***
Reach for the Sky was made in 1956 and starred the brilliant Kenneth More as Douglas Bader. More was much maligned because of his outspoken views - mainly about other people for which he was sued at least three times - but I always thought he was a genuine British star.
This has been one of my favourite films since I first saw it, a biopic about the British war hero with no legs and re-watching it this week it's a proper stiff upper lip tale of derring-do and one which perfectly suited Kenneth More (a sort of serious actor's Richard Briers of the 40s, 50s and 60s). Yes, some of the dialogue is questionable and it used a lot of stock footage of planes and air fights, but it had a solid cast of well-remembered British actors and the only thing that really let the film down was the way it casually breezed over Bader's time as a WW2 POW and the fact this man, who lost his legs in a plane crash that was undoubtedly because he was pratting about, caused the Germans so much trouble by continuously trying to escape while simultaneously treating Germans like they were all beneath him.
***
The Dark Knight Rises is a film we've never seen, mainly because of my now oft repeated disdain for The Dark Knight, so coming into the film fresh and with no real idea what it was about was interesting and obviously more so because of my about face regarding the film prior to this.
My first thoughts were that it was far too long and didn't have the focus the first two had. It soon became clear that this 3rd part of the trilogy was also more of a follow up to the first film, although it obviously has many links to the second film. Bane - played by Tom Hardy - was a strange one; he sounded like a Russian trying to do a posh Englishman reciting Shakespeare and apart from his vague origin - mainly spoken about - there was not a lot of explanation about him or why he had the strange contraption over his mouth - which at times made it difficult to actually understand what he was saying. Like the second film, you sometimes wondered why a carefully placed sniper bullet didn't simply remove him early on, but I suppose if your villain is offed in the opening hour it makes the rest of the film tough to make.
I liked the film and I really liked the little nods to the past, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the Robin character, who does what very few others were able to do and realised Bruce Wayne was the Batman almost immediately, which makes you wonder why if by the end of this film about a dozen people knew his secret why he insisted on putting on the gruff character voice when he was around them. The problems with the film, IMHO, are the pacing and the ... bittiness of it. It didn't feel like a film, it felt like three hour long programmes stitched together to make a film and the big reveal/secret towards the end was both unexpected and a bit silly. I say silly because there were clues to it but they weren't obvious enough and it was only when the three army guys trying to contact Lucius Fox and the Wayne Industries board had their cover blown for no apparent reason that you started to think that maybe there was a mole in the outfit. I also don't know if the copy we watched was cut for some of the violence or if they just 'looked away' when it was being done - to maybe secure a PG-13 certificate, but it kind of made Bane less psychopathic - not that I thought he was a particularly good villain in the first place, but they wanted to wrap up the Ra's Al Ghul and I suppose making him another disciple allowed that - but even that ended up being a sort of red herring.
I applaud Christopher Nolan for making this a finite trilogy with no real chance of Christian Bale returning to the role or them carrying on with this franchise in other ways, although the randomness of Selina Kyle and her Catwoman persona was a bit of a stretch, especially if you know about the character's comicbook origins. I just felt there was things in this film that felt like it was a showpiece rather than a story and the eventual demise of Bane felt, with the Joker in the previous film, like an anti-climax or the fact that it wasn't Batman who took him out or that there was no 'what happened to Bane?' part of the epilogue. I just had problems with this film that I didn't have with the first two; it was almost like in its attempts to be the biggest and best of the trilogy it ended up being the least effective and the most clichéd.
The next Bat films we have planned are the two Tim Burton films, which I expect I'll remember more about than any of these three, whether I'll like them is another thing entirely.
***
In 2007, a film came out that I was stoked up to see and when I walked out of the cinema I was almost apoplectic with rage. In fact I went on about how much I fucking hated The Golden Compass I swore I'd never watch it again and would kill anyone who didn't agree with me that it was an abomination, the worst of all anathema. The reason for this was the His Dark Materials trilogy, which I had just finished reading and still consider to one of the greatest series of books I've ever read - so much so I've read them three times in the last 17 years.
My dear best friend Roger made a passing comment after that fateful night, suggesting it would have been done better had the BBC done it as a series, so imagine my happiness - tinged with trepidation - when His Dark Materials was announced and eventually landed. The first two series were as good as I could have expected, even if there had been some changes to allow it to be made into a finite series, otherwise it would have been a lot longer and much of it relatively superfluous to the specific narrative.
The wife and I have both enjoyed the books, however she felt the entire story was slightly diminished by the third book - The Amber Spyglass - while I thought it was possibly one of the greatest works of fiction I'd ever read. If the story - essentially a series of YA book - was designed for the reader to grow older while reading them - from maybe pre-teen with The Northern Lights to young adult with the final part, then it worked brilliantly well. Philip Pullman became something of a hero for me. However, I've harboured a fear from the very first episode of the BBC/HBO series - how would they do the final book justice?
The reason is because it goes along at a cracking pace and honestly if they did it all they would have needed 12 hour-long episodes and had some dubious bits in it that neither broadcaster would have fancied dealing with; so I expected they would ... abridge it, and two parts in, with another two to watch before it debuts on BBC this coming Sunday I'm beginning to panic a little because we don't appear to have moved on very much. My biggest problem with series two was they cut a lot out and spent too much time dwelling on some things and overlooking others; now, without giving too much away because I will have finished the series (thanks to BBC America/HBO) before you even get to episode three, I'm concerned that chopping swathes of the book out and rewriting other bits means the most important part of The Amber Spyglass might get lost in the 'bigger picture'.
One of the segments of the third part of the book was when Will, Lyra and Mary Malone find themselves on an alternative earth that is vastly different from all the others, the world of the utterly spellbinding Mulefa and a world with the answer to everything. From the opening titles animation it's clear they will travel to this world because the opening sequence features the trees where the amber spyglass is fashioned, using the resin from the giant seed pods, but are they going to have the tripod-like Mulefa, with their wheels instead of feet and their totally wonderful and unique loveliness; their innocent brilliance and the fact that without them the entire story will lose so much? For me the Mulefa completed the books; they added that je ne sais quoi that set the trilogy above any story of its ilk. Yet every preview and clip of the third series has not shown them at all and I will be just as apoplectic if that happens. I'd fucking write to Director General of the BBC, the boss of HBO and to Pullman, asking him why he allowed it to happen, but I almost didn't forgive him for allowing The Golden Compass film to be made with such horrendous changes that ruined what should have been the start of a brilliant franchise.
That feeling doesn't change in episode three and I feel that with the exception of Lyra and Will's story the impending war with God and his angels has been exaggerated, changed and made far more prominent in the TV series than I remembered it ever being in the books. The books were about Lyra and Will, what her parents were doing in the background was secondary because Lyra and Will would eventually be the reason for the conclusion of the story. However, if you've got James McAvoy, Ruth Wilson, Will Keen and other big names, including Lin Manuel Miranda (who will pop up, unexpectedly, in episode five - unexpectedly because he doesn't re-appear in the book) in your cast, I suppose you want to give them something more than just act as supporting characters to a couple of teenagers.
The overriding thing about this entire series has been the glacial pace it's taken to reach where it's going to; so much so that there has had to be references made to how much older the two young protagonists have got and how little they've actually done compared to the books. That doesn't necessarily detract from the enjoyment, but by the time episode four gets underway, there is a distinct feeling that Pullman has allowed the show's makers carte blanche to change the story to whatever degree they feel in order to make it more... dynamic. So by the time I punched the air in sheer delight at the first appearance of the Mulefa most everything else about this final, concluding, series had changed in order to give Asriel, Mrs Coulter and the Magisterium more prominence. My personal jury is out as to whether I will be happy with the conclusion because it appears that Will and Lyra's story remains relatively untouched, just the supporting characters have been developed in a far greater, expansive, way.
The final four parts will be covered in next week's thrilling episode...
***
So, the World Cup is over and I can say, very honestly, that I watched a grand total of three games and about 90 minutes of all the others put together. I stuck to my principals and I'm aware that others either relented or showed no scruples whatsoever and just watched it regardless of the corruption, the pissing all over human rights or the corruption that swamps the world's most legitimately corrupt organisation. It was clear that FIFA wanted this one to be won by a South American country, preferably one with Lionel Messi in the side; the Qataris wanted it as well, with the head of their World Cup team suggesting it wouldn't have been a success if Messi didn't claim the trophy. Any follower of any British team needs to understand that FIFA doesn't allow teams it doesn't want to win this trophy.
I might have approached the 2026 World Cup with more enthusiasm, especially as only a third of it is held in the USA, but we've seen corruption, fixed matches, biased referees, laughable VAR decisions and no one is even trying or tried to hold anyone accountable; it's like FIFA told the BBC and ITV if they wanted to continue covering the tournaments they had to stop criticising them. It has been a vile spectacle of privilege and power, money and hatred stamping all over human rights, fair play and allowing normal people to think it's been a success. I think the one thing I'd like to see before I die is the end of FIFA - an organisation that makes the Mafia look like a benevolent society...
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