Harry Potter and the Limp, Sweaty Cock

This is really beginning to piss me off. I don't have a problem with media-crossover films; that is to say that I don't mind films borne out of adaptations from the stage of the page, be it in prose or in graphic novel form. But I do wish that they'd (and by they I mean the filmmakers involved) take the certain things into consideration when adapting. It's a difficult task, this adaptation business; and you have to balance a certain faithfulness to the source material so as not to piss off the fans, whilst making sure the new product (and I use that word deliberately in this cinematic circumstance) is appropriate for its new medium. This is normally where I'd rip into Zack Snyder's Watchmen for abandoning narrative concerns for aesthetic overbearance, but I'll do that later in a retrospective.

No. Today's main culprit is Team Potter; and before I say anything else, for those who somehow still don't know what happens at the end...SPOILER ALERT!

So I went and saw Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince over the weekend. It was ok, I guess, not as gripping as the fifth film, but it didn't suck. As a fan of the books, and as a fan of Potter films 3, 4 and 5 I can say right now with perfect certainty that this isn't an anti-Potter movie rant. But whereas the problem with the film version of The Goblet of Fire was that they tried to fit too much into one film, the issue with HP6 is that nothing really happens. Or at least that's what the movie tried to tell me.

I loved this book. If Order of the Phoenix signified a darker turn in the overarching narrative - much like when Oblivion, the ride at Alton Towers, stops and hangs on the precipice as you stare into the abyss - then this was the vertical drop. Let's not beat around the bush, only one thing of any note really happens in this book, and it is cataclysmic: Dumbledore's death. But the film would have us believe differently. The film would much rather sweep Dumbledore's demise under the carpet in favour of lots of little tidbits of wizarding life: Harry almost picking up a girl at a train station, Ron having girl trouble, Malfoy showing us that he has a bad smell under his nose not to mention a new cupboard that for some reason needs covering with a dark sheet everytime he uses it. And we know Jim Broadbent is good at what he does, we really do, but where the hell was Alan Rickman for the whole of that movie? It's two and a half hours long and it still feels like nothing actually happened!

We missed you Alan

Sigh.

I am being a little harsh. I was actually perfectly entertained for the first two hours of the film, even though some of the acting and dialogue was as wooden as an Ent looking at silver birch in summer. David Yates is probably the best director the series has had so far. Don't get me wrong, bits of those are important, particularly Ron's relationship trouble (God bless you Rupert Grint). But none of it was really explored, it was like the film showed snapshots of interesting bits and then said, 'If you want to probe deeper, learn how to fucking read!' But then, that's always been the case really. And I really did enjoy the first two hours, particularly when a certain long-haired friend of mine began correlating people we know with some of the less admirable characters onscreen. The set pieces were excellent, and the entire look of the film should be commended, the cinematography was on point. There were laughing moments, the quest for the Horcrux was distressing as it should be, and there was even a well executed jumpy fright moment. But from there it went downhill. And it really shouldn't have done.

I'm so angry about this that I'm going to ask this rhetorical question in capitals! WHERE WAS THE FUCKING EMOTIONAL FOCUS DAVID?

Dumbledore's death is earth shattering. It changes everything. Snape's betrayal seems unforgivable. It's so shocking and brutal and cold and terrifying. Or at least it is in the book. But where the hell was any of that in the film? The entire Malfoy-Dumbledore-Snape confrontation is rushed through faster than Speedy Gonzalez on amphetamines. The emotional fallout is pretty much ignored. The funeral is only glimpsed. And when Harry finally catches up with Snape, oh shit I blinked and missed it. After dealing with Sirius' end so well in HP5 I had high hopes for this one. But Dumbledore dies, we don't really care too much because it hasn't really been built up enough (film is a fickle, simple medium, which should technically make such things easier), we don't really see any of the fallout, and when Alan Rickman finally does turn up it takes a moment to remember who he is (so little is he in this film) by which time he's already gone.

Ents: Less wooden than Tom Felton's acting

And then it ends. Looking out towards the horizon. In a kind of Matrix Revolutions style moment that made me want to throw something at the screen.

Imagine if you will, that you are a girl who has been chasing a jock for some time. He's popular and muscular and has good hair and all of his teeth. He's funny and charming and makes you forget the meaning of time and so on and so forth. And you're excited. You know a moment of extreme passion and wild emotion is on the cards and you get ready and the clothes come off and there's lots of kissing and finally, finally...you're greeted with the image of a limp, sweaty, frankly ill-looking cock.

If you can't imagine that, watch HP6 and the underwhelming sense of being emotionally cheated will become clearly apparent.

A GoodFellas for the East End?

Martina Cole's The Take (ITV)

I never thought I'd see the day that ITV produced something of worth. For me, ITV has always been the shite channel, the televisual destination for Daily Mail readers and disgusted of Tunbridge Wells. For some reason I've always associated ITV with John Major, old boots and the colour grey. Don't get me wrong, they sometimes have good films on but they're always punctuated at the worst moments by adverts. And it's always just before a gunfight, or a killer line. It's the same with their attempts at sports punditry. Aside from having the worst commentary team for football, their camera work is appalling, the ad breaks threaten to miss the start of important games and the actual commentary itself makes you want to weep....or drink. In fact my friends and I got so irritated by this that we started our own ITV commentary drinking game which essentially revolves around two basic rules:

1. Drink whenever the cameraman/camera feed fucks up.

2. Drink whenever a commentator makes a sweeping generalisation or fails to make any grammatical sense.

By the end of the first half we were hammered.

But I digress......

ITV has turned it around for me, well perhaps not when it comes to sport, but my opinion of the network is slowly shifting. And it's all because of one little four part gem called Martina Cole's The Take.

I haven't read the book....but this was fantastic.

Tom Hardy (dear god he's one to watch!) turns in a magnificent performance as freed man Freddie, freshly released from prison and up for some violent mischief and ziggurat climbing. Imagine an East End Goodfellas and you're not far off. As things go on the plot twists and turns, the bodies stack up and Freddie's hands get bloodier and bloodier, pulling his cousin Jimmy down with him. It's a rollercoaster ride of murder, extortion, sex, drugs and betrayal.....and it's brilliant!

The cast are excellent in their roles, although Brian Cox's accent shifts all over the place. Hardy is a revelation. I can't speak highly enough of this performance. He is both menacing and sometimes endearing. Both at times incredibly funny and chillingly sadistic. His Freddie is both psychotic powerhouse and vulnerable child, driven at times into furious tantrums that always end in bloodshed. Whilst the plot may be predictable at times (after a while you can begin to anticipate a looming fatality), the character profiles are so well drawn by their respective actors that you are utterly sucked in to this world of grimy, sordid violence.

I wouldn't say that this is enjoyable television. Don't expect cathartic escapism or easy viewing. But finally we have a slick, sharp, gritty mini-serial to rival some of the American imports flooding our channels in lieu of programmes like Waking the Dead. There needs to be more television in this country like this: Ambitious, cinematic, gripping, story driven television. Television that grabs us by the throat and forces us to watch.

This is a primal scream of televisual achievement. Make sure you get to hear it.

Let It Die

So there are plans for Indy 5.

Yeeeeeah.

Not sure exactly how I feel about that one. ...Crystal Skull was, to put it mildly, bat-shit crazy and not really in a good way. Having finally seen it a second time I can safely report that the first half (hiding in fridges aside) is almost vintage Indy. Harrison Ford is the man. Yes he's a little bit old and a little bit rusty, but he's still got it. That's not a problem. Shia LaBoeuf's not even that much of an issue; I mean, yeah, so he's pretty much playing the reprobate smart alec that he always plays but that's fine. Apart from one little jungle scene, he fits in kinda well.

The problem, I have come to realise. is probably George Lucas. This is the man responsible for Jar Jar Binks. This is the man who butchered a hallowed trilogy by making a far inferior prequel of three. This is a man who thinks ewoks are cool. THIS IS NOT A SANE MAN! What is it with Lucas? Why does he have to fiddle with what's already good. I mean, ok, Temple of Doom was pretty crap in places but Raiders... and ...Crusade kicked some serious ass. You take an accident-prone adventurer who's basically Han Solo in a hat; you toss in some exotic locales, shitloads of creepy bugs, melting skin sequences (thank you very much ILM), and add a dash of Biblical mythology. Nowhere in there does it say aliens. Do you see the word aliens anywhere in there George? No! No fucking aliens!! And while we're here, was there any need for Tarzan Shia? Really? REALLY?!

Sigh.

This is why I'm afraid for Indy 5. Do we even really need another one? What's the point? Is there still more story to tell, or would this still awesome legacy just be best served by leaving it alone? There are arguments for both: On the one hand Indy 4 serves as a warning that stuff like this rarely works. Spielberg and Lucas aren't the same guys now as they were then....and it showed. But equally there's a case to be made for a movie of apology, a film that says, 'Sorry we fucked up guys. We promise this will be better.' Because it needs to be. Better, that is. No, it's not quite as bad as a certain Gungan, but at least that film had the decency to provide the sweetest lightsaber battle yet. We love you Ray Park. We love you.

Stick to the formula George. It's Indy, not the fucking X Files.

A Very Strange Night

The misery journey is an age old tradition. You suffer a break-up, a bereavement, or just one hell of a bad day and you go on an adventure. Always with mates, and always with booze. The principal is simple, and the adventure can take many forms. Many advocate a linear approach: you drive until you can only walk, and then you walk until you can go no further. Drinking all the way obviously. That's the principle anyway.

Yeah. About that.

We took a more improvisational route. It's 3 o'clock on Sunday afternoon, I'm in the midst of cross-continental break-up blues (the Atlantic is a bitch ain't it?) and I'm at a mate's house. He's busy killing pixels and stuffing nicotine into his lungs so I figure it's as good a way to spend an afternoon as any. But it's a lovely sunny day so after a while we decide to drift off to the pub to catch up with some friends who left earlier. We arrive to find out that they've already gone so, determined not to have wasted a journey, we hurriedly order a couple of ales and sit out back shooting the breeze for a little bit. It's as we drift back home an hour later that my mate turns to me and asks the fatal question: 'Dude, do you fancy getting absolutely trashed?'

We buy two crates of beer. It's necessary, I say to myself. Despite a frail, malnourished, withering bank account, it's fundamentally necessary. My friend agrees. We get back and the games begin.

Several hours later and the carnage is in full flow. Another friend pops by with another bag of beer, but he makes the mistake of returning home and leaving it with us. It doesn't last long. The living room looks like a battlefield, there's debris everywhere and my friend and his housemate have drunkenly decided to start playfighting. One of them is wielding a bokken. The other is waving a frying pan. If Soul Calibur ever got the Backyard Wrestling treatment, it would have looked like this. I decide a cigarette, a beer and a spectator seat are the best options.

Frying Pans: The samurai's secondary weapon

After a tornado of limbs, an accidental near strangling, several beery casualties, and the destruction of a dreadlocked rasta hat which leaves faux-hairy giant caterpillars all over the floor, it is decided that what is really required is more alcohol. Drunken logic is very very simple. It's time to find the mythical 24hr off licence.

Twenty minutes, some light public exhibitionism at the side of the road, and jumping into a car through the passenger window later and we locate the offie: a small hatch in the side of a nearby petrol station. Crates of beer are a no-no, so using our improvisational skills we plump for the largest bottle of Jack Daniels that they have and a two litre bottle of coke. Half of the coke will make it back. None of the whiskey will escape.

My shaven headed compatriot suggests we find a picturesque spot to drink and so, after picking up a couple of silver flagons, we opt to go midnight rambling and try to find the river. In flip-flops. Now I want to stress at this point that our decision making capabilities were probably shot to hell. But so were our pain receptors. Nettles, brambles, sinking mud, wayward branches, wire fences and complete lack of balance count for nothing; and so, after falling over quite a bit, some accidental trespassing, and a lot of profanity we end up down by the river, towns twinkling below us.

Flips: Apparently inadequate for midnight rambling

At this point the night gets fairly hazy. What I do remember is two of us forcibly suggesting that my other mate needed a bath in the river, the death of a mobile phone, a lesson in why not to piss in nettles when balance is an issue, a lot of whiskey going down, and a surprising amount coming back up. There may have been some singing. If you can call it that.

I wake up to find my housemate leaving for work. Except that there's two of him. I'm pretty sure that he doesn't have a twin or a cloning device so I can only assume that I'm still hammered. I try and say good morning but it comes out more like 'Graaflangrgftmmmblee'. He laughs. I go back to bed. I notice that my sheets are slightly flecked with blood and I look down at my feet. The ramble seems to have turned them into streaky bacon.

I can't say that it was the greatest night I've ever had by any stretch of the imagination, but it was certainly one of the most bizarre. Spontaneous? Yep. Alcoholic? Check. Improvisational? Undoubtedly. Fun? Absolutely. Finding oneself lost, in the dead of night, being beaten up by a forest whilst sipping from a silver flagon of whiskey with two of my best mates I had a sudden realisation. Every so often something happens, something comes along that changes you. I'm sure I learned something that night....

....but I'll be damned if I can remember what it was!

More Than Meets The Eye?

I'd been looking forward to this for a long time. From the very first photos that leaked out onto the net, to the wild conspiracy theories that plagued the movie's development about everything from the script to the number of robots to potential deaths. Everything was primed (excuse the pun) and as I stood in the queue with a couple of mates for the cinema having driven there with Lion's theme song blaring out the speakers on repeat, I felt utterly psyched.

So does Transformers 2 deliver?

The answer, for my money is a resounding yes. There are more robots. More humour. More of the fights and the spectacular pyrotechnics that made the first one so very awesome. I sat there begging for Optimus Prime to unleash the fury. And I got exactly what I wanted. The plot, what there is of it, is really very straightforward. Prime and the Autobots, with help from a handful of Americans, are busy hunting down Decepticons on Earth. The opening twenty minutes involves a tac team of robots (How cool does that sound?!) basically kicking the shit out of Shanghai. And other robots. Megatron is at the bottom of the sea, but back on Cybertron there's a bigger bad. A metallically bearded fiend named The Fallen. Anyway, the Decepticons revive Megatron and the Fallen decides that he wants to harvest the Sun. In the meantime, Sam (a frenetic Shia LaBoeuf) finds a shard of the AllSpark and manages to get the location of an energon source burned into his brain. What follows is essentially a massive capture the flag game (with Sam as the flag) as the Decepticons try and find the energon to power the Sun Harvester, but involving massive transforming robots, humans with tanks, guns, explosions, the desecration of several Wonders of the Ancient World. Oh, and Megan Fox.

What's your favourite kind of number? PRIIIIIIIIIIIIIIME!!

Prime now has double swords. Bumblebee kicks ass. There are robots beating the crap out of other robots. There are humans beating the crap out of robots. There are quick one-liners and reams of banter. The pace never lets up. Yes, it's film-by-numbers. Yes, it's big and loud and mindless. Yes, it's pure escapist fantasy. And I loved it. The entire cinema loved it. People laughed. People gasped. There were guys on the edge of their seats whispering 'More!' and weeping with delight. And Michael Bay delivered. He pledged to make everything bigger. To make everything more badass. And he did.

This brings me to the main crux of this post: the reaction from the critics. As I type Transformers 2 has amassed a 30% rating on RottenTomatoes with many of the reviewers positioning themselves on high and handing out heavy lightning bolts dripping with condescension. The Daily Mail called it 'big, noisy junk', although this is hardly surprising considering the average age of your Mail reader is around 50, incontinent and feel threatened by microwaves. But some of the other reviews were disappointing to say the least. 'Boring'? No. 'Preposterous nonsense'? Maybe. But that's what the best escapism is.

Pearl Harbor (you have no idea how much it grates the English student in me to have to leave the 'u' out there) sucked because it was marketed as this huge epic of war, love, betrayal and.....it was none of those things. We always knew exactly what this movie was going to be. Bay and his production team themselves had already flung the doors to this movie wide open. What irritates me is the tone of these reviews because it derives from critical snootiness. What pisses these critics off is that this is film-making at its most simplistic: Pick an audience. Blow shit up. Make lots of money. There are films made expressely with women in mind. Films designed for the family market. There are countless little indie films out there for little audiences about quirky romance and random offbeat humour. There are films for gun nuts and films for sexual deviants. There are gross-out comedies and weepy tearjerkers. There are films to make you scared, happy and sad. There are films to ake you crap your pants and bust a lung, sometimes at the same time. So why the hell shouldn't there be a film like this one. I'd like to say something profound about how memories of childhood are precious and we should hold onto them and embrace the things that....blah blah.....the bottom line is that, for myself and my compatriots that night, we got back that childlike excitement. For two and a half hours I didn't have a care in the world.

Grave-digging: Bay Style. With robots.

And I've never felt so psyched after a movie. So full of adrenaline. No film has ever made me so excited for such a long time after viewing. Some of the reviewers weren't far off when they termed it 'pulverising'. But, verbal presentation being everything, I'd prefer to go with 'a cavalcade of spectacular delights;.Now I realise that this might say more about me than the film, but I don't care. If the critics didn't get a kick out of Transformers 2 then I can't really slam a personal opinion. But in the midst of blockbuster season, to castigate it outright smacks of pomposity and arrogance. Maybe they're hurt to not be part of its target audience. Maybe their parents never sprung for an Optimus Prime bedside lamp. Maybe it's simply the fact that they know whatever they say that this movie is going to make big bucks. But if it does then it's because there's a market for it. A market that I'm actually really glad to be a part of. If you can't find the fun in a movie about enormous transforming robots blowing stuff up then don't watch it. But try not to ruin it for everyone else. This is an entertainment industry after all.

More than meets the eye? No. But when it looks this good, there really doesn't need to be.

The Start of Something Beautiful

It's time for a new one of these methinks.

So two or three times a week be prepared for some witty vignettes of life. I figure much of this blog will be taken up with movie stuff. Reviews, reaction and commentary. There'll be the odd bit of wild pontificating regarding the music and gaming sectors too, and every so often get your verbal taste buds ready for some anecdotal ramblings.

Let the games begin!