A Spoiler here, a spoiler there, a spoiler every bleedin' where...
Several columns ago I tore Ghostbusters to shreds thus proving that a certain number of my friends never bother to read this column because I wouldn't have got away with it if they did. It doesn't bother me too much because they'd all probably hate me for this, but... Ghostbusters (2016) is head and shoulders a better movie than the 1980s original.
What is wrong about the internet now is it's actually a tool that can be manipulated by Incels, haters and misogynistic wankers to their own limp dick agendas and this version is the perfect example of that. It's roughly the same length as the original but it packs so much more into it; it has some fantastic nods of appreciation to the original without being too pandering; the special effects are brilliant; it has some nice cameos from the living trio of remaining Ghostbusters and instead of it being a vehicle to essentially show what a funny guy Bill Murray was, it's a nicely rounded bit of hokum, with a sharp script, interesting characters and a classy finale that is so much better than the original's.
For me it's Kate McKinnon's film; she's the hugely funny Venkman-esque character but with a science degree rather than just a smart mouth. Wiig and McCarthy make great a Egon and Ray and Leslie Jones takes the Ernie Hudson role and makes it less about the token black person and more about the bombastic enthusiast who completes the team. This Ghostbusting team is as good as the original but they add a certain, dare I say it, realism to proceedings. Then it's complimented by the quite brilliant Chris Hemsworth as Kevin, the incredibly ditzy 'secretary' who ends up being the vessel by which the villain returns from the dead.
The thing is, we watched this seven years ago and both of us admitted that we remembered so little about it I'm beginning to wonder if age is eating our brain cells faster than we want to believe. I also vaguely recall having the same thoughts about McKinnon then, but maybe not liking the film as much, but I think I know and understand why.
Neither of us had seen the 1980s original since the early 1990s; it was a film that became so ubiquitous with holidays that it was always going to be on TV at one point or another - like White Christmas or Die Hard, Ghostbusters became essential missing, but when it was on over Christmas this time around I watched it because it had been a long time and these fresher eyes saw it for the pile of shite it actually was. Okay, not a pile of shite, but an absolutely overrated film that people think about with rose-tinted memories. Seeing the revamped 2016 version brought all the original film's faults to a head. Because of that rose-tinted memory, watching the newer version made us think it was a pale imitation, but having now seen it recently it does the exact opposite, it makes you realise just what a great film the reboot was and what a shallow, facile and slight film the original was. This makes the hate directed towards it unfathomable; it simply doesn't deserve it (unless of course you're a woman-hating moron).
I can't dislike the 2016 version because it is in virtually every way a far superior film.
Now, BRING IT ON, Incel wankers!
***
Episode four of The English and my first real problem with the series. However, that problem very much takes a back seat to the brilliant Rafe Spall, who's just barrelled his way into this odd series. I remember watching War of the Worlds in 2019 - the BBC co-produced loose adaptation of HG Wells novel - when Spall played George like he'd read the script and doped himself up on Mogadon (nitrazepam) and phoned his acting in via Zoom. It left me wondering whether he was famous because of his dad and nothing else.
Then I watched Desperate Romantics (see a previous blog) and realised he was quite a good actor. As Melmont in The English he usurped any role he'd previously had and knocked it out of the park. Melmont is one of the greatest nasty bastards I've ever seen on TV; a proper Cockney geezer with a psychopathic streak that is both intriguing and devastatingly frightening. This fourth episode of The English was firmly about him and was mainly set 15 years prior to the events taking place in 1890.
It's worth watching this series for him alone and it also starts to knit the story together, making you realise that this isn't just a bunch of disparate stories but one loosely put together monstrous story where the person you think is the villain might not actually be the bad guy at all, despite some of the shit you've seen him involved with.
However, there is a major problem with this episode. When Melmont visits Cornelia in London, after he's been involved in a really nasty thing, he has instant access to her. Emily Blunt's character is the daughter of a Lord; she is probably aristocracy and lives in a huge house in London, yet there appears to be no staff; no butler, no housemaids, no personal assistants, nothing to suggest she is high born and when Melmont returns all there is is a piano tuner; still no staff or servants. This is Victorian England in 1875 and Cornelia is a much younger and vulnerable woman - where are the staff? Where is her father? Why is she all alone and in the company of a man who is a psycho working class cunt? This just doesn't ring true and I doubt it will be explained in the final two episodes...
The penultimate episode of The English was, like the others, a proper curate's egg of an episode. It was like whatever happened between #3 and #5 (#4 was all flashback) wasn't considered important enough to go into any detail because a character we'd seen for about one minute in #3 was [ahem] staring at us from almost the beginning of #5, briefly. It was like Hugo Blick couldn't be arsed to fill in the details and lurched from Cornelia threatening the dastardly Indian to threatening someone else and left it to the viewer to fill in the blanks. It was strange and so much like this series to go from hardly anything happening to shit loads in ten minutes.
The English was a TV series that astounded, baffled and infuriated me. Rafe Spall's David Melmont is without a doubt one of TV's nastiest bastards, a truly horrid human being. However, arguably Emily Blunt's Lady Cornelia Locke was one of the most tragic. Chaske Spencer's Eli Whipp had an air of Tonto about him, like he'd always been a few steps ahead of the story, apart from at the end. It twisted and turned and made you think things and then confounded you by directing you in another altogether weirder or different direction. The outcome was unexpected, unusual and I imagine when Hugo Blick sold the idea to the people with money they probably said, "You want to base an entire six episode series on that?"
The fact it boiled down to something simple yet far reaching is quite inspired; to base a truly awesome six-part series on something bizarre and pretty much historically extinct is probably a stroke of genius, but sometimes you don't need actual mega-complicated, labyrinthine plots to make something big, beautiful and ultimately heartbreaking.
Correction: last week I stated we'd seen all three Blade films. We haven't. If the wife is positive we haven't, I'm not one to disagree with her. We think we maybe watched the first one and decided not to bother with the others - this would have been when we were still hiring videos and DVDs and we possibly didn't bother wasting our money on sequels of films we didn't like, which might explain last week's Batman Returns.
Some interesting facts about Blade 2:
It's directed by Guillermo Del Toro.
The new version of vampires introduced in this film and championed by one Luke Goss were the inspiration for Del Torro's TV series The Strain.
The creative director on the film was Mike Mignola - who created Hellboy, the film Del Torro made after this.
It also stars Norman Reedus - aka Daryl Dixon from The Walking Dead.
Danny John Jules - aka Cat - is in this film.
It also stars Ron Perlman - who appeared in other Del Toro films; Cronos (GDT's first feature film), also the two Hellboy films (and probably a couple of others, but I can't be arsed to check).
It's a really dreadful film that doesn't do an awful lot to improve or further the first film. That said, Del Toro at least knows how to direct a film even if he doesn't have much to play with. The FX were considerably better than the previous film (but four years had passed) but the sets and set pieces looked more like something out of Star Trek meets the Bloodsucking Sewer Monsters [a direct-to-video classic] and there was this feeling of Deja vu about it; like we've been here before.
I wasn't aware that Blade had a cure for vampirism as demonstrated in the opening 15 minutes when he cures Kris Kristofferson of his blood sucking problem - it was this that made us realise we probably hadn't seen it. It dropped the high camp in favour of gritty Aliens style bad asses, but it was still a load of kitsch bollocks, incredibly overwrought and with a plot that pretty much telegraphs itself to you the moment the Vampire Nation recruits Blade to help them; Wesley even suggests it.
***
An aside: the other day, someone suggested I watch far too much television and maybe I do, but I'd probably argue that I watch considerably less than many of the people I know. Admittedly, since I was ill in November, we have watched about eight hours a week more TV than we did, mainly because I spend much less time on the PC and more time hanging out with my wife - who I will have hung out with for 40 years a couple of days after this gets published - but what I write about is probably about 30-40% of what we watch, but I've never sat down and worked it out.
What are the things I don't review? The things that we watch like QI, Only Connect, Mortimer and Whitehouse, Simon Reeve programmes, a couple of afternoon quiz shows: Pointless (when they're new), The Tipping Point, the wife watches The Chase and craft programmes will often be on like The Repair Shop and things like that - but that's because the wife is a crafter. I probably watch far less news and current affairs programmes than I used to, but that's because I'm no longer aligned to a specific English political party now and until Scotland is independent there's not a lot of point following Scottish politics, at least until England keeps its nose out of our affairs. There's also George Clarke, but we'll talk about him later...
We'll watch stuff like travel programmes like HIGNFY and if there's a special or something on that takes our fancy we'll watch it; but in general we're not ones for being swept up by public fervour or demand. We watched Line of Duty during lockdown and enjoyed it, but we've only recently decided to give Happy Valley a try and it could be a few months before we get around to binge watching that.
We don't watch soaps or 90% of big TV series, in fact, less than 5% of our viewing comes from ITV and that figures dips to probably less than 1% for things after 6pm. We've never watched Strictly, in fact we've never watched more than 5 seconds of it at any one point. Love Island, Big Brother, or any reality TV shite has never been on our screens. The fact we've watched The English is probably more to do with Emily Blunt than anything else.
Weekends tend to be made up of catching up with stuff or watching films; I'll watch a bit of Final Score (usually on the PC), the wife will catch up with her craft or game shows. I watch less live football since before the World Cup, but that's more to do with who I support rather than anything else. We'll watch Indian or Asian themed cooking programmes.
We also watch Dr Who but not because we're fans, but because it's a habit and we're always attracted to SF series and maybe horror ones, but they don't tend to be very scary or good. We might give the new Channel 4 sitcom a try, but I don't think we've watched a comedy situation comedy for 20 years, or at least one we've stuck with from start to finish... Oh, yeah we watched The Other One and found it fun, but we like Holly Walsh (who writes it).
No, I don't think we watch too much TV, but we do watch a lot of it. And this is really only a snap shot of at the moment, roughly. I can think of a couple of friends who really watch too much of everything and others who will watch shit loads and then watch it again. So we think we don't watch much.
***
Having never watched Michael Mann's Collateral - probably for some of the reasons mentioned above and previously - we recorded it off of ITV4 and watched it on Sunday night. The 2004 films stars Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx and is about a cab driver who unwittingly picks up an assassin and ends up getting drawn into his night of killing through no fault other than where his taxi was parked.
It also stars Jada Pinkett Smith and Mark Ruffalo and isn't a bad film until you start to actually break it down logically. It goes along at a cracking pace and Cruise plays a convincing psycho hitman, but with many films, especially Michael Mann ones, there's a few bits in it that stretch plausibility a bit much. Probably the worst one is the thing that ties the start to the end. Five minutes into the film Cruise walks past his intended fifth victim as she's going back to her flat; later in the film he uses a version of her name to threaten Foxx's boss and then asks Foxx if he's actually going to call her when all of this is over (although that might just have been psycho Tom being an arsehole), but the problem is why did Cruise go to her workplace at about 5am in the morning, why there and not her apartment and why not kill her at the start unless he didn't look at all five of his intended targets and just looked at the next one on his list. The plausible logic all but disappears.
I appreciate this was probably done to heighten tension and stretch it out, but it kind of ruined a quite tight thriller, but then again it wouldn't have spurred Foxx into becoming the hero if it hadn't happened, but you know, I have this thing about internal logic, especially in films. I like my plots not to have holes in them...
***
I forgot to mention that we also have a penchant for property and house programmes. We'll watch just about anything but not religiously. We're dippers, so if it's on and there's bugger all on elsewhere then it becomes default. However, we tend to watch everything that George Clarke is in. I don't know if it's because he's an affable Geordie or if it's the unpredictability of how far over budget all of the people he invades the life of go...
George Clarke's Amazing Spaces should be renamed George Clarke's Amazing Budgets or possibly George Clarke's Budgets, What Budgets? It's not just this particular series, it's all of them. Anything with Clarke's name attached has to go over budget. It's not just him though, is it? Escape to the Country every day (I'm generalising but expect I'm correct) has a budget and at least one of the houses shown goes over that budget.
"What's your budget?"
"£500,000."
"Have you got any wiggle room?"
"Not really."
"Here's a house priced at £550,000. I know it's a little over your budget but we're the people who put cunt into Escape."
With George it's usually, "How much have you got to spend?
"£20,000."
"Here's an architect who is going to charge you £18,000 before you even lay a brick."
I think it would be better if George asked how much they have to spend, laughed in their faces, commenting that his dog wouldn't piss in a hole in the ground for that kind of money and the only way these people were getting their 5 minutes of fame was if they sold their children's kidneys because that might pay for the windows in the extension. The cameras can follow the homeowners dying of starvation and then decomposing through various stages before being discovered by a distraught family member... While George talks to the camera about the need to overbudget. It could be called George Clarke's Budget of Death.
***
An interesting fact about Blade Trinity:
It's a complete load of horseshit.
It has Ryan Reynolds in it. Given what he appeared in prior to this film, it was probably his biggest part so far. One can see how he has become so successful despite doing nothing other than what he does in every film he's been in since. Be Ryan Reynolds.
This film also stars Jessica Biel, Parker Posey, Callum Keith Rennie and Patton Oswalt.
There's a weird feel to this movie. There's this thing - the second and final Ghost Rider film was made under the Marvel Knights name, as was the woefully poor Punisher War Zone - this short lived 'imprint' was notable for having zero budgets and producing fucking abysmal lo quality rubbish. This final Blade film had all the (therefore no) qualities of these Marvel Knights films. Everything about it felt cheap, sensationalist and like it was a conclusion but also a bit of a reboot. Plot wise it's all over the place and you know how I bang on about internal logic, well this has very little and one bit of ridiculous nonsense at the end that literally makes no sense at all - they manage to get the dead body of Dracula (who has the ability to shapeshift) to turn into a copy of Blade, so that our titular hero can once again escape the clutches of the FBI. It makes no sense. It's one of those things that is done on the hope that the person who has paid to see the film doesn't question it or how it was achieved.
The entire Blade Trilogy is the definition of the law of diminishing returns in three bite sized chunks. Over six years, with technology improving, superhero films growing more sophisticated, Marvel and New Line Cinema (owned by Time Warner bizarrely enough) managed to take a poorly made first film, make the franchise less believable and entertaining with the second part and then destroy any vestige of self-respect the films might have salvaged with a third part that literally gave up on a story and plot after about ten minutes.
A special mention for Dominic Purcell, who seems to have carved a half decent career for himself in the DCEU in TV shows like Legends of Tomorrow and guest starring in virtually all the other ones. That's not bad considering he plays Dracula - or Drake - in this film with all the gravitas and pathos of a Serbian house brick taken onto The Repair Shop where Jay Blades is told, as insincerely as possible, that the brick was originally part of a grand house worth millions and perhaps the team could reconstruct it with what's left. It was like a Spitting Image puppet of Jason Statham voiced by the bloke down the road reading from a faded script translated from Swahili. Who did he shag to get the job?
Further to last week's comments about Blade, the MCU and Disney aren't going to have to do a lot to improve on these films, it's just the nature of vampires and the films they appear in that might be the problem.
***
The second part of The Last of Us was, in some ways, a vast improvement on the first. In terms of the sets and special effects used to make cities look like they actually would after 20 years of neglect and ongoing apocalypse, you have to wonder just what kind of a budget the Walking Dead was using considering by the time that series concluded it was getting on for 15 years since the Zombie Apocalypse and it looked like an army of secret gardeners and odd job men were travelling around the USA - undercover - ensuring the undergrowth never got too bad and the houses never got too dilapidated.
Whether the fungal-infected zomboids (yeah, I made that word up) are frightening/menacing I'm not totally convinced; they're like a cross between the infected from 28 Days Later mixed with the 'vampires' from The Strain mixed with Athlete's Foot and they roam around in packs - which isn't particularly an original concept either; but I want to like this and the second episode had enough shocks, twists and turns to keep me watching.
We just haven't gotten very far; two episodes in and the three are now two and have travelled a few miles from the outskirts of the Boston Hell Suburb they came from at best. I expect this is going to run and run for as many seasons as it can milk before people give up or just keep comparing it to other zombie things. Apparently the next episode - #3 - will feature and focus on two characters who weren't in the original game story; what that actually means for the casual viewer I have no idea, but maybe it might temper the reviews a little because it's still being heralded as a kind of thinking man's serious zombie show and I'm not seeing anything - apart from the fungus - new around here.
***
The Personal History of David Copperfield is a bit of a strange film. I don't really know what I expected, but I've seen other adaptations of David Copperfield in the past and I don't know if I liked this new one. Armando Iannucci's unique take felt like one of those late 60s Dick Lester films where he let the writer loose on acid; there was a staccato twitchiness to the way the narrative was delivered. Like it was attempting to channel something like Ripping Yarns while simultaneously attempting to adapt Dickens in a Mama Mia contemporary way. Like the characters all knew they were in a film.
I was also sure the story of David Copperfield was slightly more interesting, but that's the dilemma one faces when you never take too much notice of Dickens for 40 years. This isn't a racial comment but I'm not sure the multicultural cast worked; it left my untrained brain too much opportunity to question what I was seeing which impacted on my ability to follow the story.
***
And that's about it for this week. I sometimes wonder what TV I have no intention of watching looks like. Take My 600lb Life - Where Are They Now? which, I presume is about unbelievably fat people and whether they'd lost enough weight to get out of the front door?
There's also this show called The Curse of Oak Island and it's like on its 10th season now and for years I kept thinking, 'what is this programme'? It's about two men who bought an island off South Carolina and they believe something valuable is buried there and so far in ten years they're still looking so I presume they ain't found it yet. It's not a drama; it's a documentary; it's Real Life TV and despite giving it a resume that almost makes it sound interesting, I can guess it isn't.
Sometimes when I'm looking on a torrents website you realise apostrophes don't appear, so something like Guys Grocery Games could actually be Guy's Grocery Games, is it a gay porn programme set in a greengrocer's, or a grocery themed game show presented by a bloke called Guy (who is probably C-List in the USA, maybe D)?
Anyhow... Next Time: I want to watch The Fablemans because everyone is raving about it (I've had it for 6 weeks) but the wife doesn't seem that bothered. I've also been berating said wife because she still has a season and a half of Supernatural to watch (and conclude) and now she's got me collecting The Winchesters. We have M3GAN, which I'm not convinced I'm that bothered about; Extraordinary, which I want to watch and enjoy, provided it's done well and isn't too silly. I'm waiting for the right time to watch the Banshees of Inisherin or The Wonder (both are set in Ireland) and the 'Older Films' directory is down to 21. Oh and the next Marvel film will drop in between these words and the next blog; so that will get a standalone.
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