Miscellaneous Movie Musings: Part XXX

As the title suggests, so forth.

This could be how I see Tenet in 70mm later this year, if it or any other blockbuster gets released at all in 2020

The polling suggests cinema may be done

It seems somebody had the good sense last week to poll Americans on whether they would return to cinemas once this coronavirus unpleasantness has blown over. The answer was yes. Certainly. But not right away. Rather like the beach on the 4^th of July in Amity Island everybody would stand back and let someone else be the first to paddle out into the water and make sure there were no killer sharks lurking thereabouts. But if people are serious about waiting three weeks or three months before they’d dare venture into a packed cinema again, how can the cinemas survive? How many days can you survive as a going concern when your biggest screens showing the biggest blockbusters at the height of summer garner an attendance more usually seen at an Alex Ross Perry movie in the IFI? Big releases have been pushed into 2021 with abandon: Fast & Furious 9, Ghostbusters: Afterlife, Morbius. I’d be surprised if MGM didn’t get nervous and shove No Time to Die from November to next April if they think that by November people will still be readjusting to the idea that going to sit in the dark with 300 sweating sniffling coughing strangers packed like sardines in a crushed tin can isn’t like asking for rat stew during the Black Death. I for one like the idea of taking a coffee into an obscure French film and listening to Jazz24 in screen 3 of the IFI after normal service has been resumed – but the kicker is, that would be a fairly empty screening. And too many years of press screenings, matinees, and unpopular art-house choices have made me unaccustomed to truly packed cinemas. I was already frequently exasperated at bustling audiences before the coronavirus; because of the constant talking, shuffling in and out to the toilets and sweets counter, and, above all, the feeling that I was looking out over a WWII night scene as the light from endless phones strafed the roof of the cinema on the watch for incoming enemy aircraft. To put up with that, and then be paranoid that anybody, not just the people sniffling or coughing, but asymptomatic anybody could have the coronavirus and I could end up with scarred lungs and no sense of smell or taste from watching a film makes me hesitant to go before the second wave.

Further thoughts on the xkcd challenge

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned re-watching Aloha and thinking about the xkcd challenge [https://xkcd.com/2184/]. To wit, it is easy to prove your independent streak by disliking films universally beloved, but less easy to prove your independent streak by liking films universally reviled. Randall Munroe gave a critical score under 50% on Rotten Tomatoes as the target, the other two parts of his trifecta being that the films came out in your adult life post-2000, and are not enjoyed ironically. Well, gosh darn if I didn’t find these ten films rated between 40% and 49% by critics on Rotten Tomatoes. And you know what, their critical pasting is, I would argue, largely undeserved. Some of them are rather good, some of them are not nearly as bad as reputed, and I would happily watch all of them again.

What Lies Beneath

I was astonished to see that Robert Zemeckis’ 2000 Hitchcock pastiche was so critically pasted when it features some sequences; in particular the agony in the bath tub; that rise to the height of genuine Hitchcock level suspense. Zemeckis’ increasing obsession with CGI-enhanced technical wizardry hasn’t yet completely swamped his interest in his characters, as he overtly toys with Rear Window expectations.

Orange County

Colin Hanks and Jack Black are the main players in Mike White’s knockabout comedy about a hopelessly bungled application to Stanford, courtesy of Lily Tomlin’s guidance counsellor, and increasingly ludicrous attempts to get the admissions kerfuffle all sorted out by any means necessary. It may not be as sharp as other White scripts but it’s always amusing for its less than 90 minutes.

xXx

Vin Diesel has valiantly kept the memory of this ludicrous 2002 film alive by somehow making it his only successful non-Fas & Furious franchise. The premise of an extreme sports dude being recruited into being an amateur CIA spook makes no sense what-so-ever, but it had better action, jokes, and humanity than the Bond film of its year by some measure – “Bora Bora!”

The Rules of Attraction

It was a genuine shock to see that this film was so critically reviled when I enthusiastically featured it in my list of best films of the 2000s. It stands beside American Psycho as the best adaptation of a Bret Easton Ellis novel, and Roger Avary draws career highlight turns from leads Ian Somerhalder, Shannyn Sossamon, and James Van Der Beek.

Daredevil

One of the last examples of the big blockbuster movie with the big blockbuster song complete with a big blockbuster video; the at the time inescapable Evanescence hit ‘Bring Me To Life’; this is an only semi-successful attempt at knockabout nonsense with the villains all trying to out-ham each other (and Colin Farrell’s Bullseye winning), but Jennifer Garner shines as Daredevil’s love interest Elektra.

Switchblade Romance

I will die on this weird Gallic hill! Alexandre Aja’s utterly blood-soaked shocker starring Cecile de France (and a chainsaw that spooked the next crew to use it) is a goretastic virtuoso thrill-ride, and the final twist, which was presented as it was on the advice of Luc Besson that it would be funnier that way, makes the film even more preposterously entertaining!

The Village

This was the final straw for critics when it came to M Night Shyamalan, but it’s actually a very engaging and deeply creepy film with a star-making lead performance from Bryce Dallas Howard. Sure the final twist is probably over-egging the pudding, and indicated that M Night was now addicted to twists, but it doesn’t undo the effectiveness of all the previous suspense.

Constantine

Keanu Reeves’ chain-smoking street magus powered a supernatural thriller with exquisitely deliberate pacing, courtesy of future Hunger Games main-man Francis Lawrence; here making his directorial debut. It had a fine sense of metaphysical as well as visceral horror, featured outstanding supporting turns from Tilda Swinton and Peter Stormare, a memorable magus versus demons action showdown, and was easily Keanu’s best film since The Matrix.

Super

I can’t believe that writer/director James Gunn’s delirious deconstruction of the superhero genre could actually have been this lowly esteemed by critics on release in 2010. Rainn Wilson and Ellen Page both give tremendous performances as the delusional heroes who decided to dress in absurd costumes and fight crime; suicidally going up against Kevin Bacon’s gangster, who is very much not a comic-book villain.

The Green Hornet

I will often stop on this if I catch it late at night while channel-hopping. It may not be a very smooth or coherent film, but it has scenes, lines, and ideas that still pop into my mind frequently; “You brought a gas mask?” “Of course I brought a gas mask!” “Just for yourself?”; and Seth Rogen’s DVD commentary is a hoot.

You didn’t build that, Disney

It’s been quite maddening to see bus after bus pass by in the last few weeks with huge ads on their sides for the launch of Disney+ and know that this lockdown is a gift from the universe to a mega corporation by making their new streaming service an obvious choice for harassed parents eager to occupy the time of housebound children with the Disney vault while they try to get some work from home done. Not of course that it’s really Disney’s vault, as is made plain by the attractions listed on the side of the bus. The Simpsons, which is to say 20th Century Fox. Star Wars. Pixar. Marvel. National Geographic. That’s Disney+? These things aren’t Disney. Matt Groening created The Simpsons, and I highly doubt Walt Disney would have approved. George Lucas created Star Wars and changed the cinematic world with ILM, and it was from Lucasfilm that Pixar was spun out, with the help of Steve Jobs. Not anybody at Disney. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko are responsible for most of the characters of Marvel, and without James Cameron and Bryan Singer and Sam Raimi there probably wouldn’t have been an MCU for Disney to buy. And Disney sure as hell didn’t found the National Geographic Society in the milieu of Alexander Graham Bell in the 1880s. Disney bought these. They didn’t build them patiently, they didn’t put in hard work, or exercise quality control over decades to build up a trusted reputation, they just waved a cheque book, and somehow regulators looked the other way at the increasing monopoly power being acquired. Disney bought these to accumulate monopolistic power and make mucho money, and in the case of Star Wars when they have attempted to build something themselves they have spectacularly managed to kill the golden goose, as can be seen by looking at the downward trajectory at the box office of the late unlamented Disney trilogy.

That Was The 2010s

The first Sunday Breakfast with Patrick Doyle of 2020 unveiled the pick for best film of 2019 as well sober reflections on the changing meaning of cinema in the 2010s.

I remember when this was all forced perspective sets

If you regard The Dark Knight as being the last great film of the 1990s, owing to its use of CGI as building upon spectacular practical special effects shot in real locations, then there are few better indicators of how the 2010s shook itself free from the 1990s than comparing The Lord of the Rings with The Hobbit.  The Lord of the Rings began production in the 1990s and so had location shooting, armoury and costumes and prosthetics by the truckload, and huge miniatures to complement CGI on top of these practical special effects. The Hobbit did not, as the above picture shows.

As the decade wore on the voice that spoke up for practical effects disappeared. It was unusual when George Nolfi decided to build a men’s bathroom in a baseball stadium in The Adjustment Bureau rather than use a CGI backdrop for when Matt Damon and Emily Blunt use a magic fedora to transport from one location to another. By the time we got to the fiasco of Cats there was no left to ask – why can’t we just use make up and costumes like the stage show?

As cinema ceased to be photography of actors in real locations or dressed sets with practical effects to be projected on a big screen in the dark for a communal experience with an audience of strangers gathered for a two hour experience did the term cinema cease to exist in continuity with a century of development?

From the Archives: Starman – Interview with Matthew Vaughn

From the pre-Talking Movies archives.

InDublin talked to Stardust director Matthew Vaughn about casting and CGI, Sienna Miller and celebrity culture, and a comic book he’d never heard of….

Matthew Vaughn is just dripping with enthusiasm for Stardust. He’s been trying to get the film made since the start of the decade, and asked what drove him to adapt Neil Gaiman’s acclaimed novella simply replies, “I loved the story”. Vaughn sees Stardust as closer to The Princess Bride than The Lord of the Rings. “The main theme for me – it’s a movie about a boy becoming a man, and he becomes a man by falling in love with the right woman. But it’s done in a way which is fun, not taking itself seriously at all, a feel good adventure romp. So it’s a movie for everyone: when you come out of the cinema I dare you not to feel good”. Gaiman, as producer, was happy to give Vaughn free rein. “He trusted me. Because every time I wanted to do a big change I always rang him up and said ‘Look, I’m thinking of changing this – what do you think?’ because I valued his opinion….If you’ve got someone who’s created the idea and it’s their baby. For me they’re the best person to ring up to discuss if you’re thinking of changing a scene”.

Vaughn was painstaking with his casting. Once he’d settled on Charlie Cox as Tristan “the poor guy had to do three months of auditioning for me to find Yvaine….it’s about the chemistry between the two. And I didn’t want to end up with Tango & Cash, you know, I wanted it to be the right chemistry”. Vaughn cast his Layer Cake star Sienna Miller as Victoria despite the potential for distraction given her tabloid fodder status: “She [Victoria] is the It Girl of the village so I think it worked for the character and that’s one of the reasons I cast her”. Vaughn laments Miller’s tabloid troubles. “I just feel it’s a shame her acting is getting eclipsed. Cos she does some good work, but – she doesn’t get known for it. But I say to her ‘Just keep persevering’ and eventually someone will say ‘Oh you’re a good actress as well!’” He also blasts the whole celebrity culture as being unhealthy for everyone. “The whole Jade Goody phenomenon I just scratch my head going, ‘WHAT does this tell you about England?’ I’m a big believer that fame should be a by-product of talent and success and I’m a big believer that years ago, and maybe its naïve of me, but great politicians or actors or poets or writers or comedians they weren’t trying to be famous, they were just trying to be the best at what they do, and then they became famous because of it”.

Directing Layer Cake after producing Guy Ritchie’s films reinforced the perception that Vaughn preferred small projects but he claims “I’ve always wanted to do big cinema”. But working on smaller projects made him determined not to have the CGI swamp the characters in his blockbusters. “A movie’s about having an emotional connection and telling a story and if you have that the special effects for me are an enhancement”. Stardust’s use of wirework for a dead sword-fighter is an example. “We had a big puppet sort of control thing to make him…we literally just said go limp and let us control him, in a way he was a puppet with the voodoo doll”. InDublin’s geekery finally erupted and we asked if he had any plans to film Neil Gaiman’s awesome graphic novel 1602. Only to end up explaining what 1602 is: superheroes of the Marvel Universe appear in 1602 at the Court of Elizabeth I…and Magneto is the head of the Spanish Inqusition. “Neil’s never told me about that!…that sounds cool – that sounds right up my street! I’m going to ask Marvel about that tonight! 1602?” After musing over the tangled film rights of the various Marvel characters Vaughn simplified the plot based on his friendship with Ian McKellen aka Magneto, “Make it at Fox. Have Fantastic Four and Magneto together…Spanish Inquisition. He’d get a lot of confessions…” Watch this space.

Miscellaneous Movie Musings: Part XVIII

As the title suggests, so forth.

Phase IV

FilmFour are showing Phase IV, Saul Bass’ singular movie as director, very late next Friday night. So late it’s technically Saturday morning at 2:20am. But it’s well worth watching. Mayo Simon, who also scripted the sequel to Westworld and The Man from Atlantis in the 1970s, provides the screenplay very reflective of its time. 20 years after classic creature feature Them! where the ants were scary for their size these ants are scary for their smarts, and the product not of atomic anxiety but burgeoning green consciousness. Them!’s practical monsters are replaced by wildlife photographer’s Ken Middleham’s stellar close-up photography of real ants. Who knows whether FilmFour are showing the version which restores Saul Bass’ original trippy finale, but the journey to it is wonderful as scientists under siege in their laboratory start to suffer paranoia and panic as ants seemingly become intelligent and aggressive. Michael Murphy as the naive idealistic scientist is unrecognisable from his Manhattan jaded sophisticate, while Avengers stalwart Nigel Davenport is customarily redoubtable as the cynical older scientist; whose determination to overcome his arm swelling to giant and useless size from an ant bite earned a special mention from Stephen King in Danse Macabre.

Oh, you thought I meant Phase 4!

No. No, I generally don’t have that much interest in business plans or announcements of new product lines. There is as much excitement to be gathered from Disney’s blustering about their plans to bother cinemas with a conveyor belt of green-screened grey-tinted generic CGI ‘spectacle’ as there is in learning about a new line of just super-duper hoovers from Mr Dyson. There are 5 TV shows that will no doubt be inexplicable without watching the films, so you have to shell out for your streaming subscription and head to the multiplex which might well be showing only Disney films because Disney might well have that much power soon. And in the multiplexes we will see Black Widow, surrounded by an air of pointlessness Natasha R having been killed off by the time Kevin Feige deigned to let her fly solo, Doctor Strange 2, bearing a notably silly title, and Thor 4, which seems suspiciously focused on Natalie Portman deigning to return to the MCU as female Thor and (insufferable since Veronica Mars) Tessa Thompson outing Valkyrie rather than on Taika Waititi’s winning comedy. Blade and Fantastic Four have no directors attached, but it doesn’t matter. Directors don’t matter. Edgar Wright was kicked off Ant-Man for having a directorial vision. Disney is wasting the time of directors like Scott Derrickson and Destin Daniel Cretton who will be remembered for their horrors and dramas, not their CGI assemblages. Shang-Chi and The Eternals will likely not be given the latitude that James Gunn was given to bring obscurities to success with Guardians of the Galaxy but instead rely on the Too Big to Fail ethos that now pervades the production and reception of the MCU. I see a lot of business here, but not much show.

Miscellaneous Movie Musings: Part XVII

As the title suggests, so forth.

A supposedly fine film I’ll never view again

I keep coming back of late to  a thought by GK Chesterton that I can’t seem to pin down anywhere in his voluminous writings. In which he said he didn’t mind how far an artist dipped the human soul into the mire so long as he didn’t break the mechanism. Well, Robert Bresson, J’accuse! You have broken the mechanism, and on purpose. I staggered out of Au Hasard Balthazar in the IFI this week considering that one ought not to praise excessive cynicism in art, because it is merely the other side of the coin of excessive sentimentality. If you want to criticise Spielberg or Capra or Dickens for sentimentality, that is to say painting in black and white with outrageous villains and suffering heroes, and no grey area of nuance, then you must also criticise Bresson for painting in black and black with outrageous villains and suffering jackasses (literally in this case) without any silver lining, a portrait painted entirely in black lacks also grey nuance, it is merely a picture of pitch. The rapist, thief, and murderer Gerard outdoes anything Dickens presents in Uriah Heep or Bill Sikes. He is pure evil, he inflicts suffering because he enjoys watching people and animals in pain, except that his blank face doesn’t seem to register much enjoyment of it. I have no idea what Bresson was getting at it in presenting Gerard’s rampage of brutality in southern France. And no interest in thinking more about this movie in order to find out.

The Wasp cries to be implicated in such mendacity

Lies, damn lies, and statistics

Kevin Feige et al boasted at Comic-Con yesterday that Avengers: Endgame had just beaten Avatar to become the most popular movie ever. No, it didn’t. Because they didn’t adjust for inflation. It’s a lie. It’s not that hard to adjust for inflation, go to boxofficemojo.com and then plug the relevant figures into westegg.com/inflation/. It shouldn’t take you even two minutes. If you would be happy to never have your salary adjusted for inflation then by all means repeat this Marvel talking point. (Which is a lie.) If not…

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/avengers-endgame-passes-avatar-become-no-1-film-all-time-1225121

What is a film?

This may sound rather like a film critic having an existential crisis but it seems like a rather pertinent question now that we’re drawing the curtain on two decades of the 21st Century. Not least because the idea that Twin Peaks: The Return is one of the best films of the 2010s seems to collapse all ideas into gibberish. The idea that a film is real physical action captured in camera on a piece of celluloid, with additional material added to it later as it’s assembled into a coherent assemblage of images, before being run thru a projector and by flickering light taking up a huge space in a public place where an audience of strangers sit without interruption for 2 hours to watch a story that only needs 2 hours of motion doesn’t seem to hold true anymore – it’s a very 20th Century notion. What is a film now? By the year 2030 we might have to define it as something released by Disney into cinemas where disruptive, almost exclusively under-20s, audiences play with their phones while flickering light projects a digital record of a semi-coherent assemblage of digitally animated landscapes populated by digitally animated characters with occasional humans interspersed to keep the pretence that the digitally animated action unfolding onscreen means something. And as many of these pieces of art (sic) will not be remotely self-contained stories within 2 hours, the MCU having revived the idea of the matinee serial but made it into the main attraction, that won’t even hold true for a definition of this brave new world.

It’s Jeff GoldBLUMSDAY, again

Yes, it’s back for a third iteration, to use a word that Ian Malcolm would relish, Jeff GoldBLUMSDAY returns to the Lighthouse on June 16^th.

Sure, some people will be dressing up in Edwardian boater hats and cycling around town pretending they’ve either actually read or read and liked James Joyce’s Ulysses. But some people will be dressing up in whatever feels right to celebrate the hesitations and mumblings of one cinema’s most famously uh-ing actors. Screen 1 is taken over for the day to showcase the charisma of Goldblum as supporting actor, leading man, and glorified but glorious cameo. Last year saw an unmanageable 5 films, but this year it’s much easier to sit in the same seat for 8 hours and Goldblum thrice.

Thor: Ragnarok

Screen 1 14:00

Thor and Loki come up against their long-lost sister Hela, and get their asses kicked. She takes over Asgard with literally contemptuous ease. And so Thor finds himself pitted against the Hulk in gladiatorial combat on a strange world presided over by an even stranger dictator: The Grandmaster. Is his character name a joking reference to Goldblum’s prowess at chess in Independence Day? Definitely not. But Goldblum is clearly enjoying himself as part of the parade of rambling, improvised tangents as Maori magician Taika Waititi produces the funniest film Marvel Studios have ever permitted released.

Jurassic Park

Screen 1 14:00

Sam Neill and Laura Dern are the palaeontologist heroes, but Goldblum steals scene after scene as mathematician, sorry, chaotician, chaotician Ian Malcolm; who pours cold water over the idea that the genetic power unleashed by Richard Attenborough’s genial proprietor can be controlled. It’s almost like he saw writer Michael Crichton’s 1973 movie Westworld about a theme park that can’t control the digital power it’s unleashed… John Williams provides a score of stirring majesty, Stan Winston provides incredible animatronic dinosaurs, and ILM provide sparingly used and therefore magnificent CGI for Steven Spielberg’s perfectly paced monster movie.

Jurassic Park: The Lost World

Screen 1 20:00

Goldblum becomes a sardonic leading man as Richard Attenborough convinces him to go to a second dinosaur-infested island, Jurassic Park’s B site. There he will find his girlfriend Julianne Moore already researching the terrible lizards along with Vince Vaughn and Richard Schiff. What could possibly go wrong? Apart from corporate malevolence dispatching Pete Postlethwaite’s great white hunter to bag a T-Rex and transport it to the mainland. Spielberg has disparaged his own work as Godzilla homage, but he deliriously appropriates a trick from Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps for the introduction of Goldblum.

Notes on X-Men: Dark Phoenix

The last chapter in 20^th Century Fox’s X-Men saga was the film of the week today in a return to Sunday Breakfast with Patrick Doyle.

This is the way the X-world ends, not with a bang but a whimper. Simon Kinberg first arrived as X-screenwriter with the awful X-3, and now he rehashes X-3 as X-writer/director and makes it even worse, which is perversely impressive. X-3 has some rather nice music from John Powell, strong acting even in minor roles, and a number of upsetting moments (that were doubly upsetting for how badly Brett Ratner handled them) that leaned on the good work of the first two movies. This movie has A-list composer Hans Zimmer only occasionally elevating the material with emotive minimalism, some of the worst acting outside of X-Men: Origins – Wolverine, and absolutely no memorable moments whatsoever in part because there has been no good work done in previous movies to establish anything. Cyclops was killed off 20 minutes into X-3 by Jean Grey to establish she was out of control, and here Mystique is killed off 40 minutes in by Jean Grey to establish she is out of control. Kinberg shamelessly reuses dialogue and the ideas of X-3, but doubles down on them to make what was once annoying now insufferable.

Prior to her merciful death Mystique spends her screentime whingeing about Professor X, after she dies Beast takes up the whingeing baton to the point where you just want to shout at the screen “Why don’t you just move out of the mansion you’ve been living in rent-free for 30 years if you feel that strongly about him being a bad man?” Professor X is the villain of this piece. Somehow. I’m not nearly as sure as Kinberg is that hiding from a girl, who just murdered her mother because she wouldn’t stop listening to Glen Campbell, that her father regards her as a monster and wants nothing to do with her is a morally evil act. How does he think Jean would react to hearing that? Badly? Would she kill many people in her rage? Oh, the rage. In a scene where Jean is moody at a bar one longs for Sarah Snook in this role as Sophie Turner renders Jean Grey’s transformation into Dark Phoenix the temper tantrums of a petulant teenager. Jessica Chastain barely acts as the emotionless alien Vuk, and Jennifer Lawrence projects only deep boredom.

J-Law may be the audience avatar in that respect, fed up so much talent could be squandered on a twice-told tale. Kinberg has Christopher Nolan’s regular editor and composer, and yet there is a cut with the X-jet arriving and the team appearing as jarring as the scene John Ottman apologised for in Bohemian Rhapsody. The cinematographer of Avatar is on hand to, well, hide the action under cover of darkness and big swirly CGI. Watching X-Men and X-2 in recent days they really are films of the 1990s rather than the 2000s with their emphasis on practical effects to which CGI is added; a quaint notion long abandoned by Marvel and DC films that superpowers are more impressive interacting with tangible physical reality rather than being a welter of CGI battling a big swirly thing of CGI in a CGI landscape populated by CGI extras. There is some pleasing practicality here, but this is not a movie to stand beside Guy Hendrix Dyas’ amazing sets for X-2. And let’s remember the big swirly thing CGI that reached its nadir in X-Men: Apocalypse began in X-3 for Dark Phoenix’s powers.

Kinberg reprises it here in another display of creative bankruptcy. What exactly is the point of filming the Phoenix storyline? To plonk an actress down in mauve garb to stare moodily/blankly at everything for two hours while everyone stands around agonising over killing her while repeating that she’s unstoppably powerful and therefore can’t be killed unless she wishes it? Does that sound at all interesting? At this point it seems safe to say that the writing credits strongly suggest that the only X-screenwriters worth a damn were David Hayter, Zak Penn, Matthew Vaughn, and Jane Goldman, and everyone else was just coasting off their story ideas. It seems perilously close to the truth to say that, as set up by Bryan Singer’s original decisions, these films rarely worked without Hugh Jackman as Wolverine – the best of the bunch were X-Men, X-2, X-Men: First Class, X-Men: Days of Future Past. Maybe the reason for X-Men: First Class succeeding was that the charismatic turn by Michael Fassbender as vengeful hot-headed Magneto stood in for Wolverine. This is a terrible way for the X-Men to end given that they started the Marvel era.

It’s especially bad given that Disney will fold them into the MCU and a Marvel executive seems to think the signal problem with the X-Men was not their farrago of continuity, their revolving door of writers and directors, their recycling of the same stories, their failure to properly establish characters, their over-reliance on one actor, their ever-escalating budgets, their out of control CGI, their limited palette of character motivations and plots, but the fact that they were called the X-Men.

Listen here:

A Perfect Circle

Disney should not own everything. This is not apparently a thought that has occurred to the compliant regulatory authorities in America who have allowed the House of Mouse to just swallow 20th Century Fox. But Disney should not own everything. And it would be rather nice if the American online media could also start repeating this proposition, instead of propagating the opposite. Every time I see Sony being lambasted for having the audacity to own Spider-Man rights, or Universal for having Hulk interests, or, previously, Fox for having the bad taste to continue to make X-Men movies, I wince.

Disney now owns the rights to the X-Men, Fantastic Four, Alien, Die Hard, Avatar, Planet of the Apes, Ice Age, Home Alone, Predator, Kingsman, Goosebumps, having already scooped up Marvel and Pixar’s rosters. Who’s next? Sony?

Ahab has not any peace while Naboth has his vineyard…

Fears: 2019

The Death and Life of John F Donovan

We have waited long,

Too long, for Dolan anglais,

Now we fear for Snow

 

Captain Marvel

Brie Larson arrives

To save the day, 90s day.

Nick Fury’s phone friend

 

Dumbo

Tim Burton is back

Pointless ‘live action’ remake

This will not fly high

 

Avengers: Endgame

Free at last, says Bob.

Downey Jr’s contract’s up!

Snap away, Thanos!

Godzilla: King of Monsters

Um, may not contain

Godzilla… going by last

bait and switch movie

 

Men in Black: International

Thor plays dumb, again

Reunites with Valkyrie

But where is Will Smith?

 

X-Men: Dark Phoenix

It’s X-3 remade,

with little context for Jean,

who cares? C.G.I!

 

The Lion King

Like the classic one

But now CGI drawings

Why not just re-release?…

Once Upon A Time in Hollywood

QT does Manson.

Bad taste abounds, but also

Pitt, Leo, et al

 

New Mutants

Fox does X-horror.

X-Men that is, obscure ones.

They’re affordable

 

It: Chapter Two

They’re all grown up now.

But fear never does grow old.

Yet may be retread?

 

Joker

Phoenix: Mistah J.

Dark take, from Hangover man.

I’m Still Here: Part two?

The Goldfinch

Dickens in New York,

Bret Easton Ellis Vegas,

Tartt’s chameleon.

 

Zombieland 2

Hey, the gang is back!

But what can they do that’s new?

A needless sequel.

 

Terminator: Dark Fate

Arnie’s back. Again.

All save T-2 not canon.

But Linda H back!

 

Kingsman ‘3’

Hasty sequel two-

Except, gasp, it’s a prequel!

So, but still hasty.

The Man Who Killed Don Quixote

Critics applaud, not

because the thing is done well,

but because it’s done.

 

Star Wars: Episode IX

Fans don’t give a damn…

Who to kill off next? Lando?

Money grubbing sham.

 

Little Women

Gerwig’s needless film-

(Winona forever!)

-version seven. Sigh.

And he built a crooked house

Stephen Errity, who has occasioned a few pieces like this, prodded me to mark 10 years since the first spark of this blog in 2008.

Talking Movies proper began on Sep 1^st 2009, but April 22^nd 2008 saw the staking of this claim in the digital terrain; and there is an obvious topic to hang an anniversary post on. Just over a week later the first review went up – Iron Man… 10 years later, that bloated business plan known as the Marvel Cinematic Universe is about to finally pay-off (HA!! Yeah, right…) in the shape of (The) Avengers (3): Infinity of Characters War. I will not be going to it. It’s not just that I don’t care about Thanos, of many of the other characters, or the Infinity Stones that have become a deadly serious ‘Fetch’. Marvel Studios’ omnipresence have made the last 10 years seem very long indeed, and have successfully killed off my interest in their characters, comic-book movies, and comic-books themselves. “Oopsies!”

I’ve charted my obvious decline of interest in the Marvel movies below. I saw the bold in the cinema, the italics on DVD, and the others remain unwatched.

Iron Man

The Incredible Hulk

Iron Man 2

Thor

Captain America

The Avengers

 

Iron Man 3

Thor 2

Captain America 2

Guardians of the Galaxy

The Avengers 2

Ant-Man

 

Captain America 3

Doctor Strange

Guardians of the Galaxy 2

Spider-Man

Thor 3

Black Panther

The Avengers 3

Working my way through the archives in the last week I find myself complaining over time that the Marvel movies lack the outrageous fun of Mark Millar’s comic extravaganza of these same characters, The Ultimates. I vividly remember being pedantically lectured by a bore on how audiences wouldn’t accept a scene as outré as the ultimate Millar action movie fantasy beat where Black Widow jumps from building to building and calls for a gun to be dropped from a chopper above her so she can grab it in mid-air and crash into the next building spraying bullets to save Hawkeye. Clearly, audiences wouldn’t accept this. I mean 3 movies into the MCU audiences had already accepted a bank vault being towed and used as a prehensile wrecking ball in Fast & Furious 5, and would later accept an endless runway in Fast 6, a man running up a falling truck at the same speed and so remaining in situ in Fast 7, and, oh yeah, cars driving out of one skyscraper, into another skyscraper, out of that skyscraper, and into another one. But yeah, Marvel actually adapting a panel from one of their own comics, clearly, audiences would rebel. Just as they howled in outrage and ripped up the seats when X-Men: First Class put the characters in their original yellow and blue outfits rather than the fetish leather that we were told was the only choice in 2000 because audiences wouldn’t accept those silly costumes. Oh wait, they didn’t.