For Your Eyes Only - 18th May 2011
It's anyone's guess then why they decided to A) have a ridiculous scene at the beginning where Bond disposes of Blofeld down a tall factory chimney in a very poorly executed opening action piece and B) include the image of Sheena Easton singing her moderately bland theme tune during the iconic titles. This is the first and last time this has happened, thank goodness as it makes the whole thing look like an irritating music video.
Luckily after these two misfires the film picks up quite a lot. Roger Moore relishing the chance to basically swan about some exotic locales, stand back while the stunt men do a lot of the hard work and chat up an array of women. Although even he was the first to admit that the ridiculously young and impressionable blonde skater character was too young and looked too creepy next to Moore who was, by the time this film rolled around, pushing 54.
The rest of the film is basically a good old romp with an evil mastermind, who has a craggy mountainous lair, a Bond woman with purpose who is trying to avenge her parents death, (just one of the scenes, along with Bond kicking a villain off the edge of a cliff in a car, that heralded a new, more realistic, harder Bond) and Topol joining in the fun at some point in traditional nasal flamboyant fashion.
The underwater scenes are excellent, beautiful and full of tension in some parts but the whole scene with the villain strapping Bond to the back of his boat and dragging him and the woman round and round in shark infested waters is utterly preposterous when anyone else would have just shot Bond in the face and as much as I am aware this is a cliche of the series, this doesn't come close or compare with Goldfinger's laser table.
For my money there are better Bond films out there but considering this is wedged between Moonraker and Octopussy, notoriously two of the worst of the series, it is the last seriously good film that Moore would do as the character (although I love View to a Kill but that is definitely more of a ridiculous comic, flabby, toupe wearing 'Carry On Bond' film.) This is, however, one of my wife's favourites because of the Greek locale and also because she saw it as a kid not knowing there was a series of films with this character and so it holds a special place in her heart.
007 out of 10
Points from the Wife - 10 out of 10 raised eyebrows
Escape from New York - 17th May 2011
For film snobs there maybe more duds than greats, but they rarely know what they're talking about, for the average viewer the quality may vary slightly but mostly I think they find them enjoyable and for the hardened fan, I would say that Carpenter barely put a foot wrong during this period.
Even if you like some of the films more than the others, it can't be denied that he has one of the most creatively interesting, diverse, artistic and fascinating resumes since Hitchcock.
Escape from New York is his second collaboration with Kurt Russell and both of them have spoken about how Snake Plissken is a character created by and very close to both of them, sharing their attitude, strength and political beliefs. Russell plays him like Clint Eastwood's futuristic 80s love baby with a chip on his shoulder. Every single one of his mannerisms is an education in purposeful cool. The one thing you can say about Snake is Russell is playing him as a hard man without a care rather than necessarily being a hard man without a care. It's almost a pastiche of a performance but I think that's maybe one of the in-jokes, especially considering everyone else in the film from Lee Van Cleef to Issac Hayes comes up to his level nothing feels out of place and the whole film plays like the greatest B-Picture ever made.
It's got the futuristic setting mixed with the decay of the past, it's got the lone gun man with an iconic look who rides into town to do a job he doesn't want to do but he has no choice, it's got ball busting militarised police, crazy sewer dwellers, a bad guy called The Duke, a strong, gutsy leading lady with a low cut dress, a cast that includes b-movie and genre icons Donald Pleasance, Harry Dean Stanton, Ernest Borgnine and it's all filmed with a slightly hyper-real comic book style where the fact that everyone is taking it so seriously is the biggest joke in the movie. It's often been imitated and never ever bettered.
As Carpenter's career moved forward so, often, did his role. Occasionally he was just a director for hire, other times he maybe wrote, maybe did the score and in the quintessential, pure Carpenter flicks he did all three. Well just as Escape maybe the best modern example of the B-Movie it may also be the most all round John Carpenter film of them all. From the cast and crew of friends to the oh so recognisable brilliant Carpenter synth score, Escape from New York is perfectly crafted, beautifully shot and interestingly written with intentionally cliche and familiar dialogue set against an original and creative plot.
The thing you realise watching it again is it gives itself time to breathe, it's pace is deliberately slower and more artistic, allowing you to create an eerie, unsettling mood and take in the incredible art direction and set design but maintains interest, intensity and drive by using the time-running-out element.
Nowadays this film would have 50 cuts a second, a charmless non-entity in the title role, utterly redundant action scenes and a hero who, deep down would really care. A modern day Escape from New York would suck big hairless balls.
Unfortunately John Carpenter's films were raided by studios unwilling to fund a Carpenter original and instead made atrociously shitty remakes from his staggering body of work. Why? nobody knows, it makes little to no sense. I could rant, kick and scream right now but I am too tired and I hope, now that the whole Gerald Butler *shudder* remake is not going ahead that they leave this one well alone because it is just brilliant, visually interesting, amusing and cliché while at the same time being seriously original and inventive.
Nothing about it needs to be remade, it looks incredible, yes it says the future is 1997 but that's part of its charm, we don't need to update things for children, they can understand the concept of a film from '81 considering '97 the future, what are we going to do, reprint all the covers and re-do the title sequence of Space 1999 to read Space 2099?
Plus just a little bit more on remakes because John Carpenter's films have been victim to this current irritating disease (as have friend and colleague George A Romero's) so it is sort of relevant. If you must remake films and I have no idea why you must, you creatively bankrupt bunch of childhood rapers, remake old bad films with good ideas that didn't have the money first time round to realise the idea don't realise established classics.
I, for one, will not be allowing my children, if I ever have any, to watch remakes. They will watch the originals as they were intended to be seen. So that there is someone left to spread the word, it's already depressing having to add either the date or the words 'the original' to a film now when you're discussing it, lets not let these remakes take over and re-write a whole history of amazing art for future generations.
There are three main exceptions to this rule: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (the 70s Don Sutherland version), John Carpenter's The Thing (because it draws mainly from the book and not the original film) and the Coen Brother's True Grit. The reason these ones are exempt from my wrath should be obvious.
Anyway, back to Escape From New York, it's a really great movie, one of my faves, one of Carpenter's best and one of Russell's best. With heaps of independent spirit, a great little politically charged twist ending and even a cameo from Tom Atkins, what more could anyone want? oh and I also like the sequel, haters of the sequel are stupid and have forgotten what it was like to be young and not so judgmental.
9 out of 10 snakes in a baguette
Points from the Wife 8 out of 10
Howard The Duck - 1st May 2011
Socrates, that old beardy weirdy, once said that the only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.
Well if this is the case then let us hope that, with hindsight, the audiences and critics of 1986 have realised their mistake and become amongst the smartest people in history because clearly when they made Howard the Duck a flop, they knew absolutely nothing.
I am not going to necessarily wax rhapsodic about how this is the greatest movie of all time but one of the worst? How can it be? Tyler Perry (or Ashton Kutcher) is nowhere to be seen!
This is just your basic fish out of water (or maybe that's duck out of water) story about an alien, who also happens to be an anthropomorphic duck, who comes to earth and ends up saving the planet from large, super-imposed, stop-motion beasties all for the love of a good, very large haired, rock chick.
What I fail to understand is how audiences but mostly critics seemed to have an inability to suspend disbelief. This is just a film, a fantasy kids film, featuring a wise cracking talking duck no less and yet it seems they reviewed it like it was meant to be 2001: A Space Odyssey or worst still like the film was so offensive it might well have featured Howard being anally raped by a nazi as he flips off the pope! Are they crazy? Did they all have their humor glands removed at birth?
It's also ridiculous that they now heap praise on the likes of Batman, Spiderman and XMen when, if we are all honest with ourselves, these modern comic adaptations offer about as much in the way of message or storyline. Tarting it up with a fancy score, ominous tracking shots, A-List actors and up-to-date CGI doesn't stop the fact you are making a film about a crazy person who wears a costume going up against a crazier person who wears a costume and hoping that you shift a few more units of the varied merchandise.
Now, is the film silly? Yes very and is it embarrassing watching Tim Robbins and Lea Thompson goof and flounder around like poorly paid, end of the pier, balloon animal making entertainers? of course but is it also a good old adventure film with some fairly impressive set pieces and it's tongue wedged firmly in its cheek? Yes it is and it's almost more enjoyable now as an adult than it was when I was a kid because now I get to marvel at all the hysterical yet completely inappropriate sexual humor.
In fact I would applaud the writer director for having the balls to try and make Howard the Duck a little edgier, a little adult whilst being able to move it along at such a pace you don't realise you've gone from a seedy dive bar brawl to a jolly cops versus Ultralight plane chase in broad daylight.
It also has all the sheen and professional quality of a George Lucas production so it looks and sounds great too.
The film also has one ace in its sleeve and that is Jeffrey Jones.
Now before I go on, I do know that, very sadly, he is currently on the sex offenders registry for taking pictures of a 14 year old boy back in 2002 and I in no way condone that, I talk now purely of the man's ability as an actor and with a body of work that contains Ferris Bueller, Amadeus, Without a Clue, Beetlejuice and Who's Harry Crumb? to name just a few, he has always been and remains one of my favourite performers.
His work in Howard the Duck is incredible going from a quizzical and mild mannered scientist to a Dark Overlord in gradual and more and more comically dark ways.
My favourite being a scene where he is driving a truck and comes to a traffic jam where he bumps into the cars to get them out of the way because he has to get to the laboratory in a hurry and a state trooper comes up and says "Hey! I need to see your license, Jack!"
and in full scary, deteriorating make-up, with an eerie croaky voice and with a dead straight face Jeffrey Jones says
"I have no license… and I am not… Jack."
A lot has been made of the implied love affair between Beverley, Lea Thompson's character and Howard (what with this, her own son in Back to the Future, Andrew Dice Clay in Casual Sex and Tom fucking Cruise in all the Right Moves, Thompson has had some unfortunate screen pairings!) but again, suspend disbelief, it's all part of the fun of the movie and for what it's worth, they have fantastic chemistry better than, dare I say it, Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks for example.
So what if he sort of walks and talks like Danny DeVito and has the face of Macaulay Culkin, he's a better actor than Culkin and can play the guitar as mean as Michael J Fox, no wonder the woman loves herself some Duck!
As do I and I won't apologise for it.
7.5 out of 10 cheese and quackers
Points from the Wife - 7 out of 10
This review, I am very proud and happy to say, will be appearing, in an edited form, in the New York based film 'Zine 'I Love Bad Movies' issue #4 out in June 2011. You can buy it here: http://www.etsy.com/shop/ksen?ref=seller_info
Masters of the Universe - 1st May 2011
Today's Hollywood recipe is as follows:
-Take a famous family friendly cartoon series with it's own line of lucrative toys
-Add a high budget from a company, Canon, that is actually unable to maintain it
-Then filter the whole disastrous affair through the patented 'Hollywood Fantasy Film Cliche Scriptwriter-o-matic 3000'
and you get the cheesy, fairly thick, yet fabulously nostalgic tasting, 1987 forgotten classic Masters of the Universe,
AKA there was a time when Dolph Lundgren was more famous than Courtney Cox.
For anyone growing up a kid in the late 70s and 80s, with hindsight, film-wise at least, we never had it so good. Cough and your saliva would hit a poster for the latest attempt to cash in on what Star Wars and ET had started: a highly camp fantasy craze.
Willow, Krull, The Beastmaster, Mac and Me, Labyrinth, the Never Ending Story, Flight of the Navigator etc. etc. The list is endless.
Now as an adult I have sort of had my fill of fantasy films, all of which basically contain bizarrely named people and/or creatures journeying either to or from some ridiculously named place to find something, retrieve something or destroy something or else their/are world would be decimated and/or over-run. Along the way there are tests, battles, laughs, love, prosthetics and some dated "special" effects.
However, you can sit a child in front of such things and it is all miraculous. Except, strangely, and I have noticed this in other 80s so-called kid's films, MOTU features swearing, quite a bit of gore and some genuinely scary/troubling scenes. Probably the reason I loved every neon drenched, ludicrous second of it.
Like all film adaptations of any thing, the Master of the Universe both contains elements of the original cartoon but also weaves a story and includes characters that bare no resemblance to it in any way. Adding to the utter joyous and laughable confusion you get watching it as an adult.
If you stop and think, even for a moment, then none of the film's mythology makes any sense what-so-ever. What is even more genius is at no point do they bother to explain it.
For example: Who is the Sorceress and why?
If He-Man is a prince, where's the royal family?
Why are the only good people on Eternia an old man who resembles an accountant (who might do war reenacting on the weekends and could slip a disk at any moment), his fairly useless yet tight buttocked daughter, a midget with a droopy face, who apparently has gills but also a nose, and this waxed, shiny adonis with a blonde mullet who wonders around in next to nothing. When the evil army, led by a man with a skull for a head, have some weird animal/human/monster half-breed killers and countless black armored goons waiting to get a face full of laser?
Also why are there lasers and swords but not guns?
I could go on like that for days. Like all good bad films, you just have to accept everything you see at face value and take the ride.
At least the script being utterly hilarious helps! At one point a human character (our wacky Eternians come to Earth you see) having found 'The Cosmic Key' (a cylindrical array of buttons, lights and twirling pointy things that resembles nothing at all) runs into a music store and claims to the owner "It must be one of those new Japanese synthesizers!" to which any normal person, when asking where they found it and finding out that they got it out of a spooky smoking crater in the graveyard, would say "It's probably an alien device for opening time portals, I would put it back where you found it."
The acting, thankfully, is mostly awful and hammy in the best possible way. The characters run the range of bland and unimportant to mildly interesting, weird looking folk who help, sort of, with some vague exposition. Dolph Lundgren fresh from Rocky gives the sort of performance where you get the impression that even the simple act of forming words makes his brain ache and as Skeletor, obviously taking his cues
from Max Von Sydow as Ming the Merciless, Frank Langella (that's highly respected thespian of stage and screen, Frank Langella) chews the scenery like a carnivorous and veracious dog. Spewing forth fantastically over-the-top, megalomaniacal shit like it was Shakespeare!
That is scenery which the rather disturbingly serious director's commentary confidently informs me was one of the largest sets ever constructed, utilizing two whole sound stages. Mind-boggling when you consider that they hardly use it. Must be where all that budget went, that and taking over the entire main street of a suburb of LA for months of night shoots when the whole thing looks like it was and could've been shot on the back lot from a Duran Duran video!
So with a dash of Flash Gordon, a pinch of Star Wars, a soupcon of Star Trek IV, a dab of Lord of the Rings, a morsel of Wizard of Oz and a healthy dollop of 'what in the name of Dolph Lundgren's loin cloth were you thinking/smoking last night?' this film manages to take a confused mess of light, colour, costume, effects and ridiculous hair, run it past you at such a speed and with just enough organisation that it might just be art.
Not bad for a first time director with, evidently, no sense of humor who honestly believed he was making and has made a classic.
It's all incredibly good fun however and well worth a watch if you fancy a good chuckle.
I am just not sure though, after all that, it's actually for kids.
6.5 out of 10 spaghetti hoops, bacon, fish fingers and toast - makes absolutely no sense but might just be tasty
This review, I am very proud and happy to say, will be appearing, in an edited form, in the New York based film 'Zine 'I Love Bad Movies' issue #4 out in June 2011. You can buy it here: http://www.etsy.com/shop/ksen?ref=seller_info
Cobra - 25th April 2011
The reason I mention this is that Cobra, the film I'm reviewing, I actually resisted buying back in the day. If I could go back in time I would find the younger version of myself and slap him round the chops quite hard, why on earth resist buying more films? especially one where the tagline is 'Crime is a disease. Meet the cure.'
That I saw this wondrously over-the-top, enjoyable and very 80s serial killer/cop/action movie at all was down to the persistence of my lovely and, at the time, far more knowledgable wife. You see, believe it or not but before I got married the only Stallone film I had any time for was Copland. In fact my action intake in general was fairly mainstream and obvious, as I think I have mentioned elsewhere in the blog.
Starting with Rambo:First Blood and Rocky, the bona fide classics of his career, my wife introduced me to Stallone. To my mind these were basically B-Movies, or at least had B-Movie sensibilities, which I mean as a good thing. They had simple, bordering on cliche'd, plots (maybe they started the cliche) and cartoonish characters (not in a bad way) but they were inventively written, well directed, had an engaging story and great set pieces.
Yes there was a lot of 'All-American' simplified message preaching and male ego chest thumping in there but not in a 'country and western ballad' type way and it was kept subtle enough so that if you embraced that as a staple of the genre and the man, rather than Britishly and cynically scoffing at it, then his films were just really a good, fun and exciting watch.
From growing up on mainly comedies, horrors and blockbusters I found another genre in Stallone's movies that I loved. I think of them as second tier pictures for some reason, although I know he's a big star, the films don't seem to have that horrible studio sheen to them, they seem more independently spirited to me and this may have something to do with the fact that Stallone often co-writes and directs his films too.
This brings us to Cobra which finally, after my wife's near inhuman patience with silly old me was stretched to breaking point, we picked up, watched and I, of course, ended up absolutely adoring every ridiculous, over blown, cheesy and excessively violent moment of.
Yes the morals of the piece are highly dubious. The idea that the only way to stop violent crime is to hit them back and hit them hard, killing, maiming or blowing up as many criminals as possible, without any due process or trial, seems as ludicrous as the concept of good and evil but that's the point, that's why it's so enjoyable!
It doesn't feel the need to be hampered by whining on about societies grey areas or making some big political statement, it's an action flick and no matter if it is the simpler eighties or the over thinking noughties, in the end, the lone, gun toting, man of few words (save for a few clever one liners) is going to either get his man or kill his man anyway, so why hold up or halt the process with a lot of naval gazing wank?! Just wind up the good guy, arm him to the teeth and set him loose.
As hard and as ruthless as Jack Bauer is, the makers of 24 could've learnt a lot from Cobra, stop the waffle and get the job done! I am adult enough and intelligent enough to realise this is not how things should be done in the real world, ok?
The action starts with a city in the grip of a crimewave. A crazy wacked out hairy guy with a green army jacket and a shot gun is terrorising a supermarket, we are never really sure why but it is something to do with anarchy and a new world order. Then, within seconds, the scene becomes an enormous police siege. After really what is only a few more seconds the decision has been made that it is all hopeless and the only way to stop this from escalating is to send in The Cobra.
What or who are they talking about? you'd be right to ask. Let me explain.
You see, when there's a situation that all of the police and swat teams couldn't possibly handle (like a single crazy with a shotgun in a supermarket) they use a special division of the police force called the zombie squad, headed up by the laughably named Marion Cobretti and his seemingly 75 year old hispanic friend Gonzales.
Stallone plays Marion 'The Cobra' Cobretti (like that's even a real last name) and he is a one man army against crime with a mean and righteous attitude, plenty of ready quips, some mirror shades, a pearl handled revolver and probably a whole heap of unresolved mummy and daddy issues tied to his silly name and he dispenses justice the only way he knows how, loudly and with maximum destruction. He lives in a shitty neighbourhood but drives a classic car and the moment he whiffs a pretty damsel in distress he is on the case and he doesn't care how loudly he has to shout or which desk he has to bang to make sure he stays on it.
The plot continues and as soon as Cobra has dispensed with the man in the market by cleverly using his carefully honed and highly trained detective skills to shoot him with a gun, he then exits, dismisses the press and their liberal, wet whining about human rights and drives off in his big black muscle car.
We then find out that a serial killer has been bumping people off all over the city and the police can't find a pattern so they don't know what to do or where to look. This is because actually it's a whole gang of nutjobs in a rented van, who in their spare time like to stand in darkened warehouses in front of giant fans blowing orange hued smoke everywhere, banging axes together like some sort of German death metal music video and they are hell bent on bringing anarchy, violence and fear to these murky, neon-tinged streets.
One night these muscley mentals mess up and leave a witness alive in the form of fashion model and professional tall blonde person, Bridgette Nielson. Instead of lying low and realising that the police have absolutely no other evidence other than an eye witness and, if they were caught, the case would be an easy winner, they decide to come out of the shadows and spend all their time and resources tracking down and killing this one woman.
After lots of arguments with his superiors, Marion Cobretti is on the case and he will stop at nothing to protect this young bit of tail even if he has to shoot or blow up everything from LA to San Francisco to do it, no matter how many innocent lives he endangers in the process and that's about it. I, for one, don't need any more than that.
Be honest, if you are reading this and you haven't seen the film, you want to watch it right now, yes?
Re-watching this film recently, for maybe the third time, I was struck with just how good and gruesome the first half of the film is. The bad guys, for all their stupidity, are genuinely vicious bastards and there is a good element of slasher horror film during the opening act. If you're more a fan of horror than you are of 80s action it is definitely worth checking out.
After that though the film basically becomes an all out action fest with an excellent car chase (not unlike the one in Blazing Magnum, untilising the bridges of Venice Beach to great effect), some shoot outs and all climaxing in a big battle with Cobra & Gonzales versus every anarchistic thug that team evil could muster, at a road side motel. Gonzales, because he's ancient and useless, is injured in the first 10 seconds and it's up to Stallone to take out everyone else.
This preposterous brilliance inexplicably ends with Stallone duking it out, mano a mano, with the head baddie in yet another orange hued warehouse.
So, is it the best film Stallone has ever made? no and is it the best action movie ever made? no, of course not but it is one of my favourites because it was a film, not unlike how I described Army of Darkness and The Expendables in previous blogs, that I finished watching and just wished there more films out there like this. Films where the hero says, in response to a villain wailing about 'blowing this fucking supermarket sky high', with a completely straight face, "I don't care, I don't shop here"
Brilliant, a guilty pleasure yes but absolutely brilliant.
9 out of 10 big fat, tall, all-American, hamburgers with all the trimmings
Points from The Wife - 10 out of 10
Ghostbusters - 29th January 2011
Once one of the biggest summer blockbusters and now both a quintessential family favourite that also has an almost cult following of dedicated fans, some of whom even showed up in costume and with intricate props for the midnight screening that we attended of this classic motion picture.
I don't really need to go on about how funny this film is or how the cast are all exceptional because you've all seen it and you know this. Anyone reading this that hasn't seen it is either 4 years old and probably shouldn't be on the internet or needs to stop whatever they are doing, run home, watch the film however they can and realise that up until now they had been leading a hollow, pointless existence.
The things I did want to talk about is how the film, essentially rooted in the old Hollywood comedies like Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein, takes a simple yet brilliant concept, which essentially boils down to the comedy A Team take down Casper, and just plays everything to its full potential.
There really wasn't much like it just before it came out and there hasn't been anything anywhere near as big, funny or with as many good special effects in it since. There have been action films that have comedy in and the odd comedy with a bit of action but Ghostbusters and its sequel (which is also good! all you naysayers and doom merchants!!) remain fairly unique in the realm of big budget, big star comedy, action, special effects, family friendly horror, rom-com movies and the film remains every bit as hilarious, thrilling, visually stimulating, emotionally satisfying and even scary as it was the first time we all saw it.
I would like to say that the effects have hardly dated because they are still, for the time, completely stunning but obviously against todays tedious, boring, unimaginative and flat CGI, they wouldn't stand up; also, on the big screen the matte painting work in the finale is a lot more obvious. Still the sets, the models and the physical effects are still genuinely impressive. The film is not afraid to be a little adult, and is all the better for it, it is a little racy and also has the odd frightening moment like the devil dogs and the zombie cab driver both of which I remember giving me shivers as a child.
As a love song to New York the film also succeeds on every level, utilising not just the classic locations (which now seemingly ever predictable rom-com film does) but also the vibe, the attitude, the smell, the sound and the spirit of the city. This is what modern film-makers sometimes forget to do and think that just by setting something in New York they are some how going to have the credibility of being a New York movie but that isn't the case. To be a New York movie you have to have all elements in place, not just the scenery but the people and the heart they give the place. Taxi Driver is a New York movie, The Fisher King is a New York movie and Ghostbusters is definitely a New York movie. This is all pure Dan Akyroyd, it maybe directed by Ivan Retiman but in Akyroyd's writing you get the details, the shape, the size, the sounds and the smell of things. You can see it, from the abandoned and iconic fire station that they set up shop in to the old beat up ambulance they adapt as their transport, from the cabs and street vendors to the grumpy mayor and all his subordinates, the film is just rich with authentic feeling detail.
All the gizmos, for example, while it's never fully explained how they build them or where the pieces and technology come from, feel perfectly real and by the time they start capturing ghosts as a living, you mind has already suspended disbelief and you are along for the ride.
The characters are all perfect too, not a bad or annoying one amongst them and like I said earlier, all played, by probably one of the greatest ensemble casts ever assembled, perfectly. For a film like this to work, with all its flights of fancy and ridiculous humour, there has to be this complete sense of reality and even broader characters like Louis Tully and the pantomime villain in Walter 'dickless' Peck feel just fine when put amongst everything that's going on.
The film is essentially an origin story and is more comparable to something like Spiderman than most other studio comedies, I don't imagine you could pitch an origin story of a gang like this these days without them being established and well liked characters elsewhere, either on TV or in print but then this was the 80s, the last time the major studios ever really took a chance (but that's a rant I have had before). Yet apart from certain bits of music in the film, or maybe the odd item of clothing the film does not feel dated, hardly at all in fact, which may account for some of its staying power.
The only weak moment the film has, at all, is the use of the montage to forward the story along once they capture their first ghost and especially the portion of the montage where there is a dream sequence with a weak ghostly blow job joke in it that should've been scrapped at script stage, when you look at the rest of the movie it's very very odd and out of place. However, is it the first time anyone used the dream sequence within the montage technique? I don't know but I am betting it was definitely the last.
Small quibbles aside though Ghostbusters is just one of those magically, almost perfect slices of cinema that will continue to entertain and amuse for generations onward. It has a place next to everything from Duck Soup onwards as one of the great ensemble comedy films of all time.
I have read, like everyone, that there is a script in the works for part 3 where they hand it over to another bunch of younger comedians and it isn't written by Dan Aykroyd and the sublimely wonderful Harold Ramis. Well, all I can say is don't do it, please please please don't do it and nothing against whoever they pick but the original group is iconic and should not be tampered with. Who wants to see Ghostbusters the next generation anyway? apart from some studio executive who wants to make more money for that swimming pool full of bank notes idea he's had. Leave it all alone, it is perfect as it is, even the second one has some simply amazing bits in it, if you disagree, you can beat it, we don't like your kind round here.
9.5 out of 10 big twinkies
The A-Team Movie - 17th December 2010
I have just finished watching this minutes ago and I couldn't rush to the computer quick enough!
I will start by saying that I am an enormous fan of the original series and believe it to be amongst some of the best TV ever written. It has incredible actors, a kick ass, unforgettable soundtrack, well drawn characters and some truly inventive set pieces in it. People who look at it and say things like 'well that could never happen', 'it's the same every week' or 'they never kill anyone but they shoot a lot of guns' are missing the point entirely, ignoring the genuinely well written scripts, I would say have probably never watched more than a handful of episodes and should be strung up in an uncomfortable harness and have the stuffing beaten out of them with a sock full of pennies.
When they started to rerelease my childhood Saturday evening viewing on VHS and then on DVD (Dukes of Hazard, Knight Rider, The Hulk etc.) I bought them all and the only one that could be viewed as an adult, still held up remarkably well, was charming as anything, needed no rosy tint of nostalgia and still delivered one hell of a rush was The A Team, everything else paled in comparison.
When the rumour mill threw around the idea of a movie over the last 10 years, I have to say I wasn't in the least bit interested, without that legendary cast and the fantastic writing they were never going to get it right. When they finally got a director and a cast together, most of whom freely admitted to either never watching the original or, actually downright knocking it in an annoyingly postmodern, I want to kick them hard in the danglies, smug faced, self satisfied way (I am looking at you Joe Carnahan you potato headed, incompetent hack!) my heart sank and my head screamed WHY?!?! repeatedly until I started to bleed from my ears. Then, finally, when I saw the trailer it honestly felt like the makers of the film had all lined up in a circle and taken it in turns to sock me in the gut with a rusty pipe. It was for this reason that I waited till it was on demand on my cable box before I braved what I suspected was going to be a bumpy and possibly sick inducing ride.
However, I was really willing to give it a smidgen of a chance, most of the actors I like, some of the cliched elements seemed to be there (the cigars, the van, BA's hair) and if it could keep the right balance between silly fun and high adventure, I was expecting to muddle through mostly ok.
I knew I down right loathed this film from ten minutes in when there seemed to be a preponderance of bad, ham-fisted, dialogue, inexcusably terrible editing and rap music and during the rest of the film, as the hope of it ever redeeming itself dwindled into a catastrophically bad CGI mess before my very eyes, I grew more and more tense and angry, shifting a myriad of criticisms around in my brain wandering which one would spew forth first. If I didn't have neighbours and if I wasn't conscientious you would've been able to have heard my screams, shouts and bellows from space. If it wasn't chemically impossible I would hunt down the director Joe Carnahan, who has possibly the most punchable face in movies this side of McG and Justin Timberlake, stand in front of him and literally explode coating his smug as tits, shit eating grin covered face in my bile, vomit, blood and fleshy chunks of my physically manifested hatred.
Ok, so as I can't order the following rants into which one annoyed me more I will just go for it and you can all try and keep up because trying to contain my sheer knuckle chewing distain for this film is like trying to ask a really heavy bowel movement to crawl back inside you and wait its turn.
Firstly, how do you make an A-Team movie and never use the Theme tune? How do you do that? Honestly! Christ on a jet-ski! Stop. Think about it, maybe download the theme tune, listen to it and then realise, quite sanely, that you would have to be a baboon eared lover of being anally fisted to the sounds of kittens screaming to make an A Team film without ever using what is one of the finest action scores in television history and possibly second only to the James Bond theme in terms of iconic air-punching, adrenaline increasing and joyously manchild type tunage. Now, ok, yes they play a section of it over the end credits, there is a little orchestral nod to it during the tedious and stinky finale when BA takes off his wooly hat and it is almost played in full, quite bizarrely and out of place during a scene in a mental institutions television room as if it is the soundtrack to an unnamed 3-D film that's being projected on a sheet in the background but apart from that the rest of the action, and I would use that term heavily in air quotes if it wouldn't make you all want to castrate me, plays out against either no music or an incredibly underwhelming, uncatchy, unremarkable, patchy and muted score by the once legendary Alan Silvestri. How is this possible!?
(insert shots of me slapping my head and screaming expletives at the moon here)
Get an old cassette recorder with a beat up microphone on it, put it next to the television while an old VHS copy of the original show's credit sequence plays and then take the new movie, turn the sound off and just play the old theme song over the top of it - hey presto! already it's a better movie.
Second, I am sorry to constantly be getting on the back of idiot monkey boy Carnahan and pummeling his worthless head in but he couldn't direct a decent action sequence if you strapped him naked to a hard wooden chair, waved a flaming baseball bat around and threatened him with some violent orifice intrusion, mainly because he'd probably enjoy that, the little fiend, but also because he is no damn good. In the original TV show, with it's ludicrous slow motion and some fairly dodgy stunt doubles, the action was filmed mainly in a medium or wide shot, you could always tell what was going on and it was always damn entertaining. Now while I am not advocating for a modern A Team film featuring early 80s TV style fight scenes (because even though I would thoroughly love that, I am not stupid enough to imagine any mainstream audience putting up with it for more than 2 minutes), when will these hack, hunch backed, imbecile directors learn that lots of blurry, close up, quickly and badly cut shots of various actors' shoulders, knees or wavy arms does not an action sequence make! Also, filming some actors grimacing on a green screen then drawing a bunch of unimpressive crap in afterwards is also not a substitute for some genuinely impressive real-life stunts.
The only way to have done this film correctly would've been in the vein of a License to Kill style Bond film. In other words some fairly realistic, hard nosed action with an occasionally lighthearted mood and tons of actually achieved, jaw dropping set pieces all played against an awesome and iconic soundtrack. The words hideous, faltering, flabby mess don't even begin to describe how slapdash, disappointing, woefully inept and mind-bogglingly awful this whole film was.
The original show had more fun, excitement and character in the voice over that preceded the show than this entire movie manages to muster in an inflated two hour running time.
Now before I go on, if anyone reading this starts to whinge and whine that I should stop comparing the movie to the sheer simplistic brilliance of the original TV show and I should watch it as a stand alone thing, I have this to say:
"you are a moron and you should probably go and sit in that corner before I phlegm on you in sheer disgust" because if you are going to call a film The A Team and have characters in it called Hannibal, Face, BA and Murdoch then expect people to compare it to a similarly set-up and much beloved TV show from the 1980s. If original integrity is your game and you wish to be critiqued based on your individual merits then A) Don't remake a TV show from the 1980s you bulbous half-wit! and B) this film would still fail miserably in my estimation because even as a 'get the gang together to get the bad guy' action movie it is shockingly feeble, relies way to heavily on really rather poor and shoddy computer graphics and has all the charm of skunk fart.
The whole catastrophic waste of time can be summed up in one image from the film and that's when, escaping from the hospital, the helicopter hits an air con unit down off the roof and right on to and totally destroying the A-Team van, right before your very eyes and not only that, then makes a joke about it! It's like seeing Jennifer Connelly in Requiem for a Dream doing a double anal dildo sequence in the hope to get money for smack when all you know her from previously is as an innocent in Labyrinth, or, to put it another way, it's like tuning into Sesame Street one day and Joe Carnahan suddenly walks on screen and urinates all over big bird, laughing manically. God, watching this thing was stunningly depressing in one way and vindication, in another way, that the original will always be the formula that can't be followed, played with or repeated.
Not even the cast can save this 'I have run out of ways to say utterly worthless' movie and some of them, at least, try really hard. Patrick Wilson steals the show because, despite some appalling dialogue, he comes across as a genuinely morally dubious, greed fuelled, slightly sociopathic and self satisfied villain, this is obviously what he should be doing with his career instead of playing nervous, twitchy, mumbling nice guys and Liam Neeson, although out of his depth completely and staggeringly miscast, is as watchable as ever. The tragedy here is that the usually great, yes, we know you're really brilliant and we aren't blaming you at all, Sharlto Copley, who, not only was one of the few fans of the TV show on set but could've been this film's saving grace as Murdoch, is really given nothing to do, struggles terribly with an American accent and is generally rather difficult to hear under all the horribly sound mixed effects. Bradley Cooper as Face could've been good too but the script is just so damn flat and the film edited like an ADD patient on amphetamines that it's all lost in the shakey, blurry wank of it all. The rest of the cast are uniformly bland and awful, especially Jessica Biel who wanders around spouting utter crap looking ugly and pale like the face of the woman in the film Brazil who is having it stretched out by Jim Broadbent, also in one scene I was completely distracted by the fact that she is wearing a very obviously un-ironed shirt, not unusual in life or the grand scheme of things but distracting in a film.
Lastly, and weirdly there were just a couple of minor plus points to the film.
One, they do throw enough of the original A Team stuff in there to keep recognisable. Things like names, little wardrobe choices, the odd prop including a style of machine gun that they use in the TV show that Hannibal uses in the early 'rescue Face' scene also, there's a little bit of an explanation as to why Murdoch and BA would have a fractious relationship and why the latter would be afraid of flying that isn't as shonky as it could've been.
Then there's the whole subject of the plot, which actually, isn't half bad, not only does it keep it in line with some of the themes explored in the TV Show (where they are convicted of robbing the Hanoi bank on the orders of General Morrison which is very similar to the film) but it does a good job of updating characters like Lynch, exploring them further and actually making the whole thing a little more believable, the moving of the action to present times doesn't jar either and feels just fine.
I think this may have something to do with original creator, the late great pipe smoking beardy, Stephen J Cannell shopping this idea around for ages before hand, they seem to have nailed the plot but completely failed horribly with the script.
Little pet peeve inserted here: I don't need to hear The A Team swear, makes little to no sense and has no place in the film and it's like watching James Bond orgasm in The World is Not Enough, it's just gratuitous and wrong.
All in all though, the plot not withstanding, this is a rancid, heap of steaming effluent that needed someone a million times more talented behind the camera and a little more of an inventive and unexpected cast, Dan Aykroyd as Hannibal for example (think of his character in Grosse Pointe Blank meets Ghostbusters 2 where he is seen with a cigar in his mouth at one point doing a perfect Hannibal 'beautiful!') and while I appreciate I may lose some of you there, at least I have thought about it, can picture it and it would certainly shake it all up a bit.
One of the biggest crimes, though, that our resident arse demon, Carnahan commits is leaving the cameos, from the genuine legends Dirk Benedict and Dwight Schultz, practically on the cutting room floor, sticking them, as he does, at the end of the credits. Very appropriate that when Bradley Cooper asks Dirk Benedict what do you do about the face? and he replies "Don't mess with it kid"
Leave it to a member of the original cast to sum up so clearly what I felt about the film. I absolutely hate and abhor this current Hollywood that rapes our memories and then coughs up these poorly made, rotten CGI filled, modern counterparts all over us. Next time they think about doing it, a big floating Dirk Bendeict head should appear to them in their boardrooms with a big booming voice and say "Don't mess with it!"
1 out of 10 nose blows into a filthy rag