I've changed my mind on a longstanding belief. Opinions are not like arseholes, because to my knowledge most people only have one arsehole, unlike opinions. I often have lots of opinions about Marvel films, yet despite sometimes thinking I have more, I only really have one arsehole. For example, based on the trailers, I knew immediately that Thor: Love & Thunder was going to be a stinker because the trailer didn't do anything it was probably supposed to do; it left me thinking it was going to be unnecessary and frivolous - it was. However, sometimes I get a good feeling about trailers and wish I'd kept my mouth shut and sometimes - although quite rarely - I see a trailer and think positive, almost optimistic thoughts.
When the Ant-Man & The Wasp: Quantomania trailer dropped a few weeks back, I got something I hadn't felt for a long time, that frisson of 'oh hello, this could be different' (even if it did have a kind of Micronauts meets the Guardians vibe) and I'm still of the opinion that it's going to be a very serious Ant-Man film; it's going to be choc-a-bloc full of trademark Ant-Man silliness, but it's going to conclude the trilogy with something unexpected and slightly dark. How could it not? It's introducing to the MCU film franchise the next Big Bad. The villain who we already know will take on the next incarnation of The Avengers. That said, a friend saw the trailer at the cinema last week and echoed what I said last time out, it's a green screen nightmare and the SFX don't appear to be very good (this seems to be a recurring problem with post Endgame films; it's like they spaffed most of the next ten years' budget on that and are having to make do with old Pixar programmes.
The first Guardian of the Galaxy Vol 3 trailer also arrived last week and while I think this is going to continue in the theme of being a comedy film, I'm even more convinced that it's going to change tone very suddenly and fuck up a lot of people - on screen and watching it. The trailer starts off with a laugh out loud moment, but quickly grows dark and ominous...
I think the next two MCU films, considering they both feature the more light-hearted characters, are going to be what execs like to call 'game changers'. At least that's the impression I got from the initial trailers for both films and the dying embers of the child who fell in love with Marvel Comics is hoping these two films have something in them that will reignite my passion for the MCU, ironically by using two franchises I've had little or no time for thus far and by killing off people.
There are lines in both these trailers that suggest the gloves get taken off and things are going to get serious to the point of life or death serious. I got a palpable buzz of excitement when I heard Kang tell Scott Lang that he's way out of his depth because we all know he is, but we also know when the baddie tells the good guy something like this we're heading into the business end of the franchise.
In the Guardians trailer, you get the impression that Rocket is being serious again, like he was in Endgame and serious enough to know he won't be walking away. There's also the most angry, emotive and exciting 'We are Groot!' scene where the tree and Peter Quill are looking like they're fighting their last battle - it won't be, but if the trailers are anything to go by then both these films third outings are going to go out with a bang and at the moment I want to hold onto that feeling of pessimistic optimism... That might be down to the fact that I think a lot of main characters are going to die in Guardians, with my bets on all of them bar Quill and Groot!
I also really don't want to feel as excited about the Guardians film as I do, given that I had absolutely zero love for either of the first two, but, you know, I hate goodbyes and this feels like it's going to be a really, really, sad one - at least that's what my heart is telling me and the reaction I get every time I watch that trailer. You get the impression that the High Evolutionary is going to be one screwed up and twisted villain and there's a short burst of a scene where Peter looks like he's just seen one of his pals dissected on a table.
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever will stream any day from December 25th onward; the likelihood is that it will enter into our homes sometime in the first week of 2023. I'm told I'll like it, which is always a worry...
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Does anyone else feel like December is a really shit month? I get it that Christmas is coming and (usually) it's a happy time of the year with much excess, but in recent years the arrival of December has usually meant the departure of regular TV shows replaced by repeats and Christmas Specials that aren't at all special.
It's probably down to the amount of TV channels we have, the amount of streaming services and the lack of imagination - even things like Netflix, HBO and [insert any of the others here] seem to have given up on quality entertainment in favour of nostalgia and cheap reruns. I can remember when there was only three channels and Christmas week was so jam-packed with new films and proper specials that you had to carefully plan your viewing, because without a VCR, you had to sacrifice some things. This year, things have not been helped by the fucking World Cup, which I have largely boycotted for a number of political reasons but mainly because I fell out of love with international football around 1997 and I've never rekindled it.
It might have something to do with where I live and how I feel about my adopted (and ancestral) home, but it's more than likely to do with the fact that England are like Spurs, it's been decades since they won anything and it doesn't look like that run is going to end. My journey of watching England and Wales's progress in this year's FIFA Corruption Fest has been to watch old films rather than subject myself to a football tournament I feel can never achieve the hype because of where it is and because Qataris like the Saudi Arabians and other Middle Eastern desert state dictatorships are humans I wouldn't piss on if they were on fire, although I might help them to be on fire. I'm not being racist or religion intolerant, I'm being human and that's something these extremist wankstains have no concept of - whether they're Qataris or members of FIFA.
The reason we're watching so many old films is because there isn't an alternative. Bearing in mind we have a total of about 25 TV stations - which are essentially the BBCs, the ITVs, the Channel 4s, two Channel 5 offerings and some +1s; outside of this we get TBN - the God channel - and nothing else; not that it bothers us because I doubt we'd watch anything else because most of them are full of shit shows and repeats. When Roger Waters said something about 200 channels of shit on your TV screens he wasn't lying (and he has an accounting background, doncha know!).
Yet, I still manage to find something TV and cinema related to talk about, which suggests to me that I'm far more brilliant than any of you ever suspected - an easy trap to fall in given how modest and self-effacing I appear when people are allowed to meet me in person...
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The Riddick Trilogy... Do you know I didn't even know there was a third film? ITV4 showed Pitch Black and then three nights later The Chronicles of Riddick, which had [amazingly] Judi Dench in it and an extremely youthful looking Karl Urban. It wasn't what I expected because I'd always wrongly believed it was the prequel to Pitch Black, it clearly isn't. Chronicles is an odd movie; like the bastard off-spring of an obscure corner of the Star Wars galaxy and despite some excellent set pieces, a real sense of menace and a two hour running time, it ended up feeling like the poor middle part of a dodgy trilogy (which it is). You get the impression that lots was cut out of this film because coherence is less important than an accessible running time and how Judi Dench got involved is the greatest enigma of them all - perhaps she fancied a new conservatory or a foreign holiday?
The ending of Pitch Black was, at least, an ending, even if you didn't see Radha Mitchell's death coming. The sequel ends on an unfinished note, but is most definitely setting you up for part 3, with Richard B Riddick now in charge of the universe's Nazi Death Cult worshippers, the Necromongers and all that comes with it. One thing you can guarantee about Riddick films is he's completely upfront about things and doesn't shy away from confrontation - it's Die Hard on steroids. This film tries to explain why he is what he is and plays fast and loose with some of the things he said in the first film - like why his eyes are the way they are. It would have been nice to discover how this member of a super powerful race called the Furyans ended up with such a human name...
The Nazi Death Cult spends most of its time, when not usurping worlds, trying to kill off whoever's in charge. Being the boss is a dangerous occupation and frankly why anyone would want the mantle is beyond me. Plus whatever the Underverse is and what the Necromongers are actually seeking has been inconveniently overlooked in favour of naked torsos and tortuous posturing.
By the start of the third film, ten years have elapsed since the end of the first film and now the eponymously titled Riddick is about how he fell out with the Nazi Death Cult and ended up on a very inhospitable planet. The opening ten minutes pretty much explains how our shiny eyed hero was alone, vulnerable and injured on the run from crazy alien nasties.
From that point on, we essentially get Die Hard meets Aliens as Riddick first acclimatises to the planet, then decides it's time for him to get off of it. This is achieved by activating a Bounty Hunter alarm beacon, notifying all the mercenaries nearby that he is alive and well on this planet. Enter two teams of bounty hunters; one featuring Dave Bautista and a rag tag bunch of incompetents led by a wanker called Santana.
The other team is led by the father of the arsehole from Pitch Black who Riddick allowed to die because he wanted to sacrifice a young girl to save his own skin. Daddy wants to find out what happened to his son ten years earlier and for most of the film isn't interested in the truth. On his team is former Battlestar Galactica alumni Katee Sackhoff, who it has to be said didn't have the kind of acting career after that series finished that she probably thought she deserved; that much is proved when about half way through the film we get some gratuitous nudity from her. She's a fine looking woman, but I can't help thinking I would have felt better about it had she kept her tits to herself.
As an action/adventure film it's really top notch stuff - seriously - but like both the films before it, it suffers from poor dialogue and once the slightly far fetched conclusion arrives you're left thinking that the remaining arseholes Vin Diesel hasn't killed simply wouldn't have the change of heart they jump the sharkingly do. Then for an epilogue we're back to the Necromongers for a (not so) neat and quick bookend sequence setting us up for Riddick 4 or Furya as it is, at the moment, called.
Riddick was made in 2013, Karl Urban's brief cameo suggests to me that he agreed to his three minutes on screen as a favour to David Twohy, who had overseen the trilogy, despite becoming something of a bigger star in the seven years between Chronicles and Riddick.
Furya isn't likely to come out for another three to five years - it's in production, which could mean it's anywhere between script and final polishing. Diesel claims it's not far away and frankly it needs to be soon because our titular hero's now 55 and I'm thinking he's not likely to be doing many naked torso shots, especially as his moobs are going to be less interesting than Katee Sackhoff's boob.
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The old film fest ploughs on without a pause, as the wife and I re-engage with films we've seen and ones we've missed. The first bunch on our list were all from 2011 and began with the prequel to The Thing interestingly titled The Thing, which features weird SF alumni (and nerd crumpet) Mary Elisabeth Winstead. I remember watching this film the first time around and thinking, it's just a remake of the Kurt Russell film, but this time with more diversity in the cast, but while it's easily passed off as a 'remake' there are elements of it that work very well; not least the director's painstaking detail to recreate the Norwegian Antarctic based exactly as it was shown in the 1982 film and make sure the end of this film mirrored the start of the 'sequel'.
I have a few problems with it, such as what happens to Winstead after she blows up the alien on his ship and then fries Joel Egerton as he too has been 'assimilated'? Or did the grenade used to off the ship's alien create the massive collapse exposing the alien ship that is found by the scientists at the US base in the 1982 film, because it certainly didn't look like it? The other problem the film had was there were literally too many people in it, so it was difficult to even keep a track of who lived and who fried, but I enjoyed it much more than I did 11 years ago.
It's an interesting curiosity, especially if, like me, you think John Carpenter's remake of The Thing From Another World is one of the best SF/horror movies ever made.
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I remember watching Battle Los Angeles when it came out in 2011, but it obviously left little or no impact because watching it again the other night I felt like I was new to the party. This Aaron Eckhart vehicle originally involved the Strause brothers doing the special effects, but they quit the film to do their own version called Skyline (a film that hasn't aged well at all). The FX in the latter film are excellent even if the rest of the film is a big mound of poo; the FX in Battle Los Angeles aren't excellent, at least not when it involves the alien invaders and as one reviewer described - it felt like Black Hawk Down with aliens. It's a film full of testosterone (even Eckhart, who made a third of the film with an unknown broken arm) and actors who would go on to do other, more memorable, things and for the first time in literally months, I fell asleep during it a number of times.
It is a really boring film; even when the marines are fighting aliens. It's just a war film and not a very good one at that.
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Source Code also came out 11 years ago and we both remembered the premise but had forgotten just how totally fucked up it was. Jake Gyllenhaal plays a Air Force captain who finds himself repeatedly transported into the last eight minutes of a train journey that ends with total annihilation. I'm actually going to avoid spoilers for this because if you haven't seen it, you should. It's a cracking little film - weighing in at barely 90 minutes - and while the ending smacks a little of wishful thinking you can't help but feel it was right for the characters involved.
It was directed by Duncan Jones, who many might recall is also known as Zowie Bowie; son of the late great singer/songwriter/auteur and proves, without a doubt, that genius might be running in the DNA. If you've never seen it, go out of your way to.
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The Adjustment Bureau is a film also from 2011 and one I remember loving first time round. If anything it got a bit better watching it again because while I remembered the premise I forgot all the details. I think the only real problem I have with the film is that at its heart it's deeply religious and works on our acceptance that there's a supreme being in control of the destinies of everyone.
I think it was also the film when I fell in love with Emily Blunt and acknowledged that Matt Damon is actually an A list actor. For those of you who haven't seen it, Damon plays a politician who on the eve of losing his first attempt at being elected as a senator meets Blunt and they hit it off like they had always been destined to, except according to the person that writes the grand scheme of things that meeting was to be a singular one and Damon can't meet up with her again because she would prevent him from becoming President and he wouldn't be able to go on and do great things, so the Adjustment Bureau do everything in their power to prevent this, even resorting to exposing themselves to him to prove to him that it's the way it is for a reason.
Screw that, says Damon and spend the rest of the film trying to track down this woman who has had such a profound effect on him. It is one of the best examples of True Love Conquers All and I don't think there's been a stranger movie that sends the message out that God exists [he doesn't].
Interesting factoid: This film features the Falcon (Anthony Mackie) and Howard - Tony's father - Stark (John Slattery), but I'm thinking that most actors at some point are going to end up in an MCU film. However, last time out when I reviewed the two Deadpool films, I forgot to mention that The Vanisher - one of X-Force (but also one of the original Brotherhood of Evil Mutants) - was played - in the three seconds he was actually on screen; while being electrocuted - by Brad Pitt. I'm also sure Matt Damon has appeared in a Deadpool film as well...
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A quick mention for Silent Hill (from 2006, but who's counting). We switched it off after 20 minutes; for a creepy horror movie it was full of dire acting, illogical motivation and felt like the video game it was based on (although I've never actually played it). Radha Mitchell might have been a kick ass character in Pitch Black but in this she was reduced to running around a lot and shouting. Sean Bean also brings nothing to the film apart from a bad US accent. It had creepy ideas but these don't make an interesting film, that usually needs a decent script and a plot that is easily understood.
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This is the End from Seth Rogan and Jay Baruchel, with a host of other Hollywood A and B listers in a parody end of existence comedy, was funnier first time round, although Emma Watson is great in it. It's the kind of film that really needed to be half an hour shorter, mainly because some of it was really unnecessary, such as the five minute argument between Danny McBride and James Franco about where they can ejaculate in Franco's house to cause the most offense; which might sound funny but actually makes you feel a little queasy.
There's no shortage of massive penises in this film, some of which are actually erect (although only seen in shadow, in that instance) and a very poorly judged discussion about raping Emma Watson, which was also unnecessary and quite distasteful, even if the original intentions were supposed to be chivalrous. In fact, it's essentially a film about Hollywood A and B list actors (they all play vacuous, self-interested versions of themselves) and how offensive they can be and still get laughs; the problem with the film is the laughs are actually few and far between and become even thinner on the ground the further into the 2 hour running time you get. Plus the denouement is extremely weak and it struggles with consistency, even if it's supposed to be a zany comedy in bad taste.
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And that's it for this week... Next time: pick any number of films from the following - Troll - a new Norwegian film. Chappie a 2105 film about a robot. Chef, Cloud Atlas, Django Unchained, Interstellar, Life of Pi, Moneyball, Mystery Men, Prisoners, The Change-Up, Inland Empire, Mulholland Drive and a few other films I've recorded off the TV; I might also get around to watching Black Bird, a six-part TV series which I've downloaded on recommendation of The Guardian. Plus the usual rants, raves and cunts...
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