There are very few Christmas movies I like and most of them were made in the 1950. One of the best is A Christmas Carol (Not Scrooge as many people think it's called), the one with Alistair Sim as Ebenezer and a host of British actors supporting him. It was made in 1950 and while film techniques have changed and progressed, there's something quite brilliant about the way the actors are allowed to carry this film, especially Sim who had the most glorious of 1950s starring in numerous brilliant films.
There are few films that embrace and encompass the true spirit of Christmas and illustrate it so well; but it is probably the closest adaptation to Dickens's original short story. I have a soft spot for Bill Murray's Scrooged however much it has dated and because I've never really liked the Muppets, I've never liked their version. You can call me a heathen all you want I can take it...
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I have to admit to feeling a little emotional when watching the fifth part of the final series of His Dark Materials, mainly because all my fears regarding the Mulefa have come to nowt. In fact, this section of the story is being handled wonderfully well, it's just most of the rest of it that I'm having problems with. I'm okay with Lyra and Will's story, but the rest of it has been turned into some loose adaptation similar to that what made me so angry about the first, failed, film adaptation, innit. It seems so unnecessary and strange to have the very much anti-progress Magisterium, their zealot President and this new fantastical bullshit of a Lyra Bomb forced onto us when they played such a fleeting - but important - part in the books and had a far more nasty and devious way of trying to end Lyra's life.
Father Gomez is still in it, but he's now been elevated into some higher power and is actually doing what he was supposed to do in the books but is now after Mary Malone instead of Lyra, which makes me question why Philip Pullman allowed such pointless changes to his original idea when much of that 'original' idea is so much better than the bullshit HBO or the BBC seems to think is a far better, more melodramatic and fulfilling direction. How often do we hear about massive criticism of a project because they simply couldn't keep to the simple brilliance of the book and opted for something 'better'? Did Pullman agree to this rewriting of half of the third book or was it dumped on him? Was it a case of him saying 'you can change what you like but you have to keep Lyra, Will and Mary's story as close to the book as possible or it will deviate far too much from what I was trying to say'.
It makes me glad I opted not to write novels because I think the most brilliant thing is having a story adapted into a film and the worst thing is being told by script writers and producers they think it will be improved by adding some bullshit that cheapens or lessens the overall impact, or simply because they feel it would improve on it. Who are these pompous cunts who think that taking a writer's original idea and fucking it up somehow makes it better? I think they're just arsehole control freaks who I wouldn't piss on if they were on fire...
Still episode five was Mulefa heavy and Mary's really learning a few things about the entire nature of the universe - exactly as she did in the third and final book and Lyra and Will are in the land of the dead and that also was going along fine, but then this outside influence of the Lyra bomb is unleashed and we're left on a cliffhanger designed purely for TV, except some TV can be watched all at once.
One thing is abundantly clear about Lyra's parents; they're both psychopaths in their own way and she has inherited the madness that infuses them. Yes, she's a good kid, but what the TV adaptation fails to deliver is why everyone that meets her falls in love with her (no, not in a sexual way, you perverts). Why she is so special to all of her friends; this isn't and possibly can't be conveyed on screen because it lacks the nuances that the written word has; you just get everyone professing their undying devotion to her and you wonder why.
Anyhow, more of this later...
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Ever feel you've been conned by TV guides? I hadn't until this evening when we sat down to watch something we recorded off of Film4 thinking it was an old horror film we'd never seen before and it ending up being a 2020 reboot.
Despite both the wife and I being huge Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans, we'd never really seen any of Sarah Michelle Gellar's feature films, so when I was flicking through the TV guide - on the TV - and saw that The Grudge from 2004 was being shown, I opted to record it. It was one of those films from that era that had a lot of publicity but having seen the first The Ring US adaptation we probably decided not to watch The Grudge for fear of being severely disappointed. A lot of time has passed and we've been watching a lot of things we haven't seen before.
So we sat down to watch it and it soon became clear that we weren't watching that film at all but watching the 2020 reboot/remake/continuation and when I checked IMDB and saw it had a 4.4 rating I thought we were about to watch 90 minutes of solid gold turds. Yet it wasn't, it was surprisingly creepy and quite well made; why did this film get such a shitty rating?
The thing I took from The Grudge is that while it calls itself a horror film it's really a psychological horror film because whatever spirit possesses an individual isn't the actual killer per se, but is the thing that drives the targeted individual completely mad allowing them to either hurt others or themselves. This is the underlying theme throughout the film as it jumps back and forth between 2004, 2005 and 2006. Andrea Risborough plays the cop who literally stumbles into a cold case and then really literally stumbles into the property that houses ... the grudge and from the moment she walks into the house her life, which is already a mess, gets fucked up even more.
The thing is it's a creepy little film with some jumpy moments and for most of it I was thinking 'this got a 4.4 and The Conjuring got a high 7s rating - how did that happen?' Well, I only had to wait until the end to find that out because after 90 minutes of it being one film it not only jumped the shark but it gave it right good fucking in its blowhole. It threw its own rules out of the window to give a shlock horror twist ending that had me shaking my head in disbelief. The grudge somehow followed Risborough from the house she burnt down, presumably ending the curse to her own house, changed into her son, who was not dead and then allowed the woman who did killed her family at the beginning of the film to manifest as a real 'ghost' and drag Risborough down her own hall to her eventual death. This film got it's low rating for it's 0.1 rated ending. How did the film's writer come to this appalling ending? Did he think that people wouldn't draw a line between the inferred and the absurd?
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Meanwhile, at Chapter 6 (of 8) of His Dark Materials, we were treated to nearly 55 minutes of entirely made up for television padding. The remaining minutes did actually take place in The Amber Spyglass but considering the aforementioned glacial pace of this TV series, why we needed an entire episode to explain away the entirely new and made up subplot introduced and how it has now been resolved just as we re-enter the world of the actual story in the book.
I understand why this TV show cannot leave the great and humungous war between Mankind and God and his angels to be a inconsequential subplot that mainly padded out Will and Lyra's story, because by the actual nature of the suggestion of the concept, it surely has to be the joint most important plot on the billing and people would probably wonder why the war between the Republic of Heaven and God and the Authority has been relegated to a mere sideshow. Therefore I understand why there has been a largely pointless interlude involving Mrs Coulter, the Magisterium and just how fucking psychopathic Asriel actually is. This is the redemption cycle for Marissa Coulter, because viewers couldn't possibly cope with the idea that she, like her ex-lover and co-parent, was just a nasty, slightly psychotic piece of shit who really only had herself in mind - she's the girl's mother!!! It was hinted at that Marissa had a soft spot for her daughter, but even when she was 'protecting' Lyra, there was always a Coulter agenda at play; at least in the books. Perhaps the production teams felt making Lyra's parents completely without fecks or attrition; just selfish, self-serving power hungry nutters maybe wouldn't go down with the much greater 'people-who-haven't-read-the-books' mass audience?
Yet they manage to get away with it with Asriel; there was always a suggestion in the books that he had a massively soft spot for Lyra; this was never conveyed in any of the three series and, if he wasn't the hero of this subplot, he would have been thought of as a proper villain by any third party bystander. His complete disdain and dismissal of his own daughter having some role to play in a specified destiny to his flat, cold and couldn't-be-arsed reaction to his daughter's death when Marissa is duped into thinking Lyra had been killed by the bomb.
With the penultimate episode came the interesting thing, despite all the above sideshow red herrings, it still had an issue to deal with and without giving anything away, it handled the battle between heaven and humanity the vague and slightly indefinable way it does in the book; there's a lot of 'staring' and heavy artillery and machine gun fire and posturing witches but nothing specific is really seen close up and yet it all managed to be resolved with the minimum of fuss. Despite Mrs Coulter's toing and froing she does the right thing in the end and in some ways the resolution hinged on one thing - a distraction. And then the sun comes out and the war is over and Will accidentally kills God and if you don't know the books you're wondering what happens next?
The finale, like the book, is the real ending, despite the feeling that it's almost an epilogue. There's no big bangs or crashes, it's a simple story about love and realisation and most importantly loss. There's a lesson to be learned from this and that is it doesn't matter what you achieve you have to lose something in the process or at the end. The story of Lyra and Will is the same as almost everyone has ever gone through - of first discovery, first love and first loss and while the concluding chapter of this sprawling trilogy might seem to be almost understated, it has always been Lyra's story and the TV series managed to capture that. There's been very few YA series that has captured the hopelessness and joy of a first love, this did that and despite many quibbles, I am happy with the series as a decent adaptation and the Mulefa were fucking excellent!
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Doom Patrol might be leading us towards this season's big bad at last or it might be running out of ideas and searching for a direction with some urgency. No sooner do we discover that something is after Rita's emotions and we're presented with an almost genuinely weird episode, the first in ages, than we go done the next path in Danny's shoes...
Rita's emotions are just part of something that appears to be bigger, mainly because whatever was after them isn't really interested in anybody else's whatevers just specific ones belonging to Rita Farr, leaving Rita comatose as the team returns from whatever psychological battlefield that was created by whoever wanted Rita's hopes and fears. While all of this goes on Rouge gets drunk as she agonises over leading the team and trying, again, to heal the rift with her and Rita.
Just as episode 4 starts you realise you're somewhere else, I suppose what surprises is that you realise after about 10 minutes that it isn't going to suddenly switch to the Doom Patrol and it's going to be an episode about lame ass Dorothy Spinner, the dog-faced girl. What this actually is about is that the perpetrator of Rita's emotion amulet is now after the one Dorothy recently (and conveniently) stole/acquired thus linking Dorothy back to Cloverton and the Doom Patrol. She gives it up pretty easily considering how important she sounded about it and the big villain now has two components for his Infinity Gauntlet.
So apart from a villain called Immortus, it's also the return of Dorothy Spinner, what could possibly go wrong?
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And that's been it really. What looked like an excellent week to catch up on even more films didn't happen. It was like the World Cup finished and my schedule got tighter than a gnat's chuff. So, the next one of these could be a year end review (but it won't be) or even a thing about Christmas week and what we managed to sneak in between festive shite (more likely).
What some of you, the ones who have followed my blogs over the last 20 years, might have noticed is that these 'review' blogs tend to be 95% of my literary output nowadays; I suppose I picked that habit up from writing a popular magazine column for 13 years - stick to a format you're happy with and don't deviate off the path unless you can see a palpable improvement by doing it. I write very few 'other' blogs and I've just about given up on recreational writing (which was once called 'ambitious writing' when I thought I could become a proper writer), although I have had an idea buzzing around my head for getting on for a year now; it's not so much an idea as a character who needs a story building around him and usually I do it the other way around and have a story that just needs inhabitants.
The thing is, it's not that big a thing otherwise I'd be all over it like a rash and re-watching old shite would be very low on my priorities list. Being very ill at the end of October and most of November has altered my habits to a certain degree. I think if you said I was pulling away from television during the 21st century I'd struggle to disagree despite having seen a reasonable amount. I'd say 6 months ago that watching the box (be it TV or film) took up about 12 hours a week, whereas now it's closer to 25 hours. I spend less time on the PC, less time on line and more time sitting in the lounge watching things - it's no more or less practical and, in general, I'd say I've had a few 'I'm glad I did that' moments than I haven't.
I am also aware that many, if not most, of my friends will watch a film three or four times, sometimes inside a couple of years, where I have a two year moratorium on all films and usually by the time two years has passed I've sufficiently forgotten about the film to even remember it so it ends up being six, eight, ten years, usually more, so I get that new movie buzz in a weird way in that I've seen the film but I can't remember a thing about it and that sometimes helps because you're more familiar with the characters in it than you would have been had you not seen it at all. I've seen a lot of films in 2022 I've watched before and didn't remember but the one I enjoyed the most is probably Limitless, made before Bradley Cooper became a serious thespian who made Oscar-nominated films, it was like Lucy with brains.
Before I started doing these blogs regularly, we watched Cooper's Nightmare Alley, [probably about a year ago this week] it's a big cinematic Guillermo Del Toro film, which looked atmospherically brilliant, but wasn't at all a keeper. You know, some films you'd like to cuddle but this one felt like it needed flushing away, even down to the pulp-like tenement story ending. Now that's a film we might watch again in about ten years when I've forgotten that I wasn't terribly impressed by it and it will either dazzle us or we'll go, 'that's why it's been 10 years since we watched it!'
I sometimes wonder if film critics watch a film more than once? The number of films I've enjoyed more second time around is a huge list that continues to expand - thankfully - and the need for retrospective views and opinions is, in my never humble opinion, probably more accurate and enjoyable than initial reactions, which is why I see a difference between me reviewing a new program and me reviewing an old film.
Which brings us to the point where I say have a very Merry Christmas and there'll probably be an end of year last one next week. Huzzah!
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