Some semi-random observations from a weekend in which I watched more TV than can
possibly be healthy.
What the hell is going on with the voice of the guy in the Guinness
ad who says "The challenge - to tame single-handedly a wild mustang!"?
The delivery makes me giggle like a schoolgirl every time I hear it. Exactly what
part of America is this chap meant to be from? He sounds like a cross between Yosemite
Sam and Popeye.
And then there's the ending, featuring the most naive warden in the history of the
United States Prison Service: "You lost him, you go get him!" Or, to translate:
"Oh, what's that, Mister Dangerous Convict? Your horse has run away? Well,
run along and fetch him, then. But you'd better be back here by teatime or it's
no gruel for you!"
What a terrible, terrible advert.
-
Talking of Yosemite Sam and Popeye - any list of the 100
Greatest Cartoons that can find a place for Woody Woodpecker, Inspector Gadget
and The Lady and the fucking Tramp but doesn't include Johnny Bravo, The Tick, the
Batman animated series or The Sword In The Stone is inherently worthless. The Dungeons
And Dragons cartoon made the top 30, though, which mystified me - I honestly thought
I was the only person on the planet who loved it. Although the fucking unicorn would
have gotten a fiery arrow through the head within about five minutes of the start
of episode one, if I'd been running the show.
Watching the show did bring back to mind something that puzzled me all through my
childhood, though. How come at no point in a hundred and thirty-plus episodes did
nobody ever twig that Prince
Adam and He-Man were one and the same person? Let's have a quick gander at the
evidence.
a) He-Man and Prince Adam were never about at the same time. Alright, so generations
of superheroes have gotten away with this, but then generations of superheroes didn't
have to contend with the fact that...
b) The two of them looked exactly the fucking same, without so much as, say,
a paltry
pair of glasses to change the look. Alright, so He-Man's tan is a bit better
but what, we're being asked to believe that the royal palace didn't have so much
as a single sunbed? Anyway, even this might have been surmountable were it not that...
c) Both He-Man and Prince Adam hang around with a huge, green-and-orange striped
tiger. To be honest with you, I think this is the clincher. Tigers, as a rule, are
pretty memorable in and of themselves. Green-and-orange ones at least doubly so.
Eternia, then. Planet Of The Pinheads.
What's that? You want to know what the all-time top five cartoon opening credits
are before we move on from this sorry subject? Oh, since you insist.
5) Duck Tales (A-woo-hoo! Shitty cartoon, great theme song.) 4) Justice League
(before they fucked it up for Unlimited. Swelling, grandiose orchestral score =
good, crappy, twatty, AOR guitar = bad) 3) The Simpsons (sometimes) 2)
The Tick ("Dub-dwee, dub-dub-dub-dwee DOW! Dub-DWEEEE, dub-dub-dub-dwee
DOW!") 1) Dangermouse (He is, in fact, the greatest secret
agent in the world)
-
While we're on the subject of terrible, terrible adverts... er, as we were half
an hour ago, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the twat from the Tresemmé
advert.
Pardon my paraphrasing, but I've gotten to the stage where just catching the opening
seconds of the ad from the corner of my eye is enough to set off a reflex reaction
toward the TV remote:
"People often ask me how they can keep their hair looking like they've just
come from the salon..."
They can't. That's what keeps you in business. Although why anyone would consider
putting their fashionable reputation in the hands of a man who plainly regards Michael
Bolton as the epitome of style is anyone's guess. Oh, sorry, we haven't gotten to
the really stupid bit yet, do carry on.
"I always tell them - and here's where I think I'm breaking some secret
stylist's code..."
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, WHOA there, l'il dogie!
Some secret STYLIST code? For crying out loud. First they decided that they aren't
hairdressers anymore, they're stylists. Now all of a sudden they seem to think they're
fucking Jedi. Or does this have something to do with that Gay Mafia we're always
hearing about?
I'd be lying if I said I wasn't intrigued, mind. Exactly what kind of secret can
each generation of stylists be handing down to their young padawans that the outside
world must never hear about on pain of... oh, I don't know? Being banned from ever
owning a Mazda, possibly.
"There is no Brylcreem. There is gel. There is no gel. There is wax. There
is no wax. There is Laboratoire Garnier Fructis Style Volume XXL Ultra-Strong Mousse."
[ Sing, Child Of Right And Wrong - Okay, Mostly Wrong ]
Modern music. Rubbish, innit? Just the same old tropes mashed together in random
combinations and endlessly repeated. There's just nobody around these days who can
hold a candle to the bands who were playing in the glory years for popular music,
which coincidentally enough was about when I was reaching an age when I could start
distinguishing between good and bad music and develop a distinct taste of my own...
We hold no truck with such rose-tinted nostalgia trips in these parts, naturally.
All the same, there are a good handful-plus-one innovations that pop seems to have
thrown up in the last decade or so that we - and by "we", obviously I'm
speaking for the entire human race - could manage without encountering again as
long as we live.
What might those be? I'm glad you asked.
1) Songs About Your Relationship With Your Dad, Especially If The Two Of You
Don't Get Along
Seriously. Nobody gives a fuck at this point. Unless you've got a song in your locker
about how old man was made you get up every morning at ten o'clock at night, half
an hour before you went to bed, drink a cup of stone-cold sulphuric acid, work 29
hours a day at the mill and pay the mill owner for permission to come to work, and
how when you got home he'd kill you and dance about on your grave singing hallelujah
then believe me, you're not going to be telling us anything we haven't heard ten
fucking thousand times before.
What is it with the entertainment industry and dads, anyway? Why does every second
movie I watch feel the need to define its main character by his relationship with
his old man? It drives me absolutely insane when a nice, unpretentious little flick
like say, A Knight's
Tale decides that we really need to really get us rooting for the hero is to
see a bunch of flashback sequences in which the his grizzled old pa tells him that
he can be anything he wants to be (a teeth-grindingly trite Hollywood truism that
really deserves its own post at some point). Rewatching the largely brilliant Babylon
5 over the last couple of months, it struck me that over the course of the show's
run, we were introduced to the father of every main character whose pater was still
in the land of the living - Ivanova, Dr. Franklin and of course, John "My Father
Used To Say To Me..." Sheridan. In G'Kar's case, we got to see his dad even
though he was dead - no mean feat, you might think.
Not once in the course of five series, a hundred and ten episodes, did so much as
a single character's mother ever turn up.
I remember this stereotype being brilliantly sent up in the hugely underappreciated
Due South, when
after a dozen episodes of listening to square-jawed Mountie Benton Fraser handing
down cross-generational gems of wisdom, snarky cop Ray Vecchio finally snapped:
"My father once told something that's always stuck with me."
"Your
father never shut up, did he?"
"He said that a man with no
future will always run to his past."
"And when did this come
up? Did he mention these things over breakfast, or did he come running into your
room and just blurt them out?"
"There's no need to be
sarcastic, Ray."
"No, I'm just curious how he worked this stuff
into everyday conversation. Did he say 'Hey, son, did you see the size of that moose?
And by the way, a man with no future will always run to his past'?"
Don't misunderstand, gentle reader. I love my dad, I admire him deeply and I realise
how much my worldview and my sense of morality has been shaped by him. I don't,
however, usually find it necessary during the course of my average day to stop and
re-examine all of my actions and decisions in the light of what my father would
have done. Possibly because my motivations are those of a living, breathing, occasionally
thinking human being, as opposed to being an attempt by a bone idle Hollywood hack
to lend me some illusion of a third dimension while I'm giving swarthy terrorists
Chinese burns.
Or possibly it's because my dad always told me to find my own way in life.
What was I talking about again? Oh, right. Music.
2) Songs By Rich White Middle-Class Fucknuts Who've Never Done A Day's Work In
Their Life That Try To Tell Us Money Isn't Important
Well, obviously it isn't to you, you cunts.
There's a sub-category of this sin that takes in songs by thin, achingly pretty
fucknuts that try to tell us that looks aren't important. In any case, this category
ties in with our next, which is of course:
3) Songs By Rich White Middle-Class Fucknuts Which Are Intended To Highlight
A Social "Issue"
Particularly if none of the profits from the song in question are going to do anything
about the issue that you're so obviously concerned about. This is otherwise known
as the Another
Day In Paradise rule. Fuck you for profiting from other people's misery, fuck
you for having the naked arrogance to think you might be able to deliver some devastating
insight from your ivory fucking tower that would, like, completely change the way
we looked at the problem, fuck you, fuck you, you self-righteous prick.
Ahem. Moving along...
4) Songs Whose Sole Purpose Is An Assault On The Christmas Number One Spot
In all recorded human history there has been precisely
one truly great Christmas single and, to help put to bed once and for all the
notion that the British record-buying public is somehow more sophisticated or discerning
than its American counterpart, that song was kept from reaching the top of the charts
by the fucking Pet Shop Boys.
It's quite difficult to decide which particular brand of Christmas single is more
annoying. I honestly can't work out whether as a species we're worse served by shrill
novelty numbers "sung" by brightly-coloured lumps of foam rubber, by saccharine
ballads with sleigh-bells gratuitously added to their percussion sections, or by
made-for-Christmas monstrosities which were plainly dashed off on the back of a
beermat in five minutes flat by otherwise at least vaguely respectable artists.
To settle this once and for all, I say we put Robbie Williams, Cliff Richard and
the Teletubbies in the Thunderdome and let them hash it out amongst themselves with
flaming trousers and fire axes. Who would win, if we could arrange such a battle
royale?
All of us, gentle reader. All of us.
5) Covers Of Barry Manilow Or Bee Gees Songs
I think this is some sort of initiation ritual amongst the sort of manufactured
pop acts that have a shorter life expectancy that the guy in the unit who's going
back to his wife and daughter in Idaho after this one last mission. It seems you
aren't really one of the gang until you've made your bones by warbling mind-numbingly
vacuous seventies toss at an unsuspecting public and somehow making it sound even
worse than it did before.
For fuck's sake, knock it off.
6) Great Songs Covered By Shit Bands
Okay, here's the thing. I do understand what motivates a band to try and punch above
their weight, I do. The lure of reflected glory, and all that.
That said, I do believe that by this stage attempting to cover How
Soon Is Now? should be a hanging offence.
There are two possible ways that attempting to re-work a song by a band whose boots
you are not fit to lick can go. Either a) - you'll produce a note-for-note carbon
copy of the original memorable only for its staggering pointlessness (ie, the otherwise
largely admirable Placebo performing 20th
Century Boy, or the Stereophonics covering the Tragically Hip's Fiddler's
Green), or else b) - you'll completely and utterly miss the fucking point.
Poster child for the latter category is of course All Saints' version of Under
The Bridge, which takes a song fundamentally about the ravages of heroin abuse,
and takes
out the part about the heroin abuse (I can only imagine the meeting. "Drugs?
What do you mean, drugs? We thought it was about... you know. A bridge.").
And, as an aside, if the Red Hot Chili Peppers are being cited as a band who're
out of your musical league - it's probably time to find a new career. What's that?
They have? Excellent.
One more victory for the forces of right and reason, there. Now, where are those
flaming trousers?
[ Next Week, Shaun Ryder Appeals On Behalf Of The RSPCA ]
Question - whose decision was it to have the Osbournes as the talking-heads for
the tsunami relief appeal TV ads?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking them for giving of their time to help others
despite
there now being a pricetag on everything that Ozzy says, it's just, y'know,
I'm puzzled as to what the thought-process was here, in the same way I'm puzzled
when I hear Lust For
Life being used to flog luxury cruises (is it the song's association with an
artist who used to roll around naked on broken glass during his stage shows that
appealed to the ad agency, or the association with lowlife
Glaswegian heroin addicts?).
"Well, I'm sure that the near-constant TV and press coverage has left people
thinking the situation's quite serious," the do-gooders must have
mused. "But what they really need to drive home the gravity of the crisis
is an appeal from a semi-coherent drug-crazed Brummie with a history of snacking
on small winged mammals."
Are you trying to tell me that not one celebrity with more gravitas than poor old
Ozzy was willing to offer their services? Not one? What were Hanson doing that morning?
Ainsley
Harriott? The
Chuckle Brothers?
Oh, hang on a minute. I get it. There's a hidden message here.
"How fucked-up do you think things have to be over there that even Ozzy
bloody Osbourne realises there's a problem? The man barely recognises members of
his own fucking family, and even he's sussed that things are utterly bollocksed.
For pity's sake, send cash."
[ You Silly Eeeeenglish Keeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrrrr-Nig-It ]
Those of you who consider yourselves Helmetball
fans may be aware that half-time entertainment at that Super Bowl thing you might
have heard of was provided by dull-as-ditchwater has-been former Beatle Paul McCartney.
I'm sorry, America, but you've no-one but yourselves to blame. I realise that after
the Janet Jackson/Justin Timberlake axis of evil you thought that anything would
be a step up but you know - damn.
Anyway, what I want to know is - how come at no stage during the buildup, performance
or aftermath did the American TV coverage ever use Macca's title?
How come he was never referred to as Sir Paul?
Don't misunderstand gentle reader, the Blue Man isn't getting all Telegraph-reader
on you. I'm not about to start writing letters to the editor condemning Yankee Doodle-Dandy
for his rank standing impertinence to one of Her Majesty's loyal subjects. Personally,
I despise the honours system as yet another relic anchoring Britain to its outdated
and contemptible class structure. I ask only because I really am honestly interested.
To me, it seems a little like British television refusing to refer to Your Friend
And Mine as President Bush, insisting instead on plain old "George".
Is it just leftover yah-boo-sucks-to-the-Mother-Countryism left over from the Boston
Tea Party? Is it straightforward republican all-men-are-created-equal sentiment?
Is there a deeper reason? Can anyone enlighten me?
Alright, alright, settle down, cancel the state funeral, tell the queen to stop
blubbing - the Blue Man is not dead. I hope the last month or so's been good for
you, whoever you are.
Unless whoever you are is Mike Riley, of course. Then I hope the last month or so
has involved necrotizing fasciitis, obviously. You big-nosed half-blind slapheaded
wannabe-Scouse fucktard.
And now, with the pleasantries out of the way...
Crimbo has come and gone, of course, the jolly fat man (hint - not Dom deLuise)
has made his trip down the chimney and, like every other male parent-figure in Western
civilisation, I found myself engaging in that guiltiest of yuletide pleasures -
buying things for my family that I wanted to get my own greasy paws on. It's not
big. It's not clever. I'm not proud of myself. But one of those no-really-dear-it-was-on-his-Christmas-list-type
gifts was sort've the catalyst for today's meander. No, not the copy of Pro Evo
4 that I was delighted to buy for Blue Man III, more's the pity. Nor Mrs. Blue's
Babylon 5 DVDs, even more's the pity.
Gentle reader, we speak of nothing other than Spider-Man
2.
Obviously it was a movie I wanted to check out - it's a comic adaptation after all,
and as such it craftily bypasses all of my carefully-erected quality control filters
and speaks directly to my Inner Sucker. I hadn't been overmoved by the first movie,
despite the presence of a sopping-wet Kirsten Dunst, but as
I might have mentioned before, hope never fails to spring eternal where four-colour
franchises are concerned . I mean, gawd, I'm the person who paid good money to see
The League Of Extraordinary
Gentlemen. And I can feel an irrational attraction building toward the new Fantastic
Four flick, despite the fact that its trailer features the startlingly talent-free
Jessica Alba, a Welsh bloke playing Reed Richards, and less convincing visual effects
than my
last HeroClix game.
I draw the line at fucking Constantine,
though. Jesus. There are limits.
What was I talking about? Oh, right, Spider-Man 2.
Comic-movies are tricky beasts, you see. The inherent difficulty comes mainly with
the sheer volume of source material. Given that by the time Hollywood realises that
a comic is worth adapting there is usually at least a decade's worth of story, character
development, sub-plot and soap-opera (and often there's much, much more), it's obviously
going to be a tricky task separating the wheat from the chaff. This process is especially
laborious in the case of a superhero-type comic which has likely been through the
hands of any number of writers and artists during its lifespan, each creative team
having brought their own interpretation of the character(s) to the table, with the
only connecting thread between the various incarnations being the protagonist's
name..
Take Batman, as an example. At various points of his sixty years in print, he's
been a gun-blazing pulp-fiction vigilante in the mould of The Shadow, he's been
a camp buffoon swinging around a Gotham City filled with oversized props and inexplicably
complicated criminal schemes, he's been an essentially cerebral detective, he's
been a hag-ridden urban legend, he's been a moody loner and he's been a part of
a league of the self-proclaimed World's Greatest Superheroes. Batman's seen more
villains than the bar of the Queen Vic, associated with practically every other
hero on DC's books - how in God's name do you pluck a couple of hours' worth of
decent cinema out of this seemingly-endless, largely self-contradictory morass?
Blue Man's First Law Of Superhero Flicks, then - In order for a superhero movie
to be worthwhile, it must cherish those elements that lie at the heart of its source
material, the stuff that makes the comics worth reading in the first place.
Corollary to Blue Man's First Law Of Superhero Flicks - In order for a superhero
movie to be worthwhile, it must not be afraid to alter, amend, bend, fold, spindle
or mutilate any peripheral elements of its source material in order to smooth the
transition from the printed page to the screen.
Summary of Blue Man's First Law Of Superhero Flicks - Get the big stuff right, don't
sweat the small stuff.
The trick, of course, lies in recognising the difference between big stuff and small
stuff.
It's as delicate a tightrope to walk as the difference between Batman
and Batman Forever,
two films which seem pretty similar at a casual glance. For the former film, Tim
Burton and his writers realised that almost without exception the best Bat-stories
were those which were mindful of the character's original concept - a man so tortured
by being violently orphaned that not all the riches of the world are enough to assuage
his guilt and his need for justice. With that ensconced at the heart of the film,
it then didn't matter that we flew in the face of comics canon and saw an origin
of the Joker, or that the Clown Prince Of Crime turned out to have been the chap
who had done the dirty dead, vis a vis Bruce Wayne's mater and pater. The big stuff
was right, and the result was a pretty damned spiffy movie.
Joel "Fucking" Schumacher, on the other hand, decided that "it was
time that Batman got over the death of his parents", and so the big stuff was
the contrast between the Caped Crusader's Bruce Wayne and Batman personas (some
might say that it was also a mistake to cast a relentlessly
one-note actor in a role that was conceived around the notion of duality, of
course, but that's by the by), and a couple of villains who had plainly escaped
from the c'est magnifique, mais il n'est ce pas le Batman Adam West/Burt
Ward 60s TV series. The big stuff was oh so very wrong, and the result was an utter
mess that only a man whose CV also includes The
Phantom Of The Opera could love.
These are not isolated examples.
See, Superman's
makers understood that the big stuff was Supes' iconic appearance, the clearly defined
morality of his world and the fact that Lois loves Superman but despised Clark Kent.
Bryan Singer and company realised that the X-Men's
big stuff was the group's "family" vibe, the irony that they were fighting
to protect a society that feared and hated them, and the broad strokes of the main
characters, and with those elements successfully in place it was OK to change things
like costumes, backstories and the general setting. In The
Crow, on the other hand, the decaying-urban-hell setting was part of the big
stuff. It's possible that the sequel to that movie screwed things up in a Batman
Forever stylée, but I can't comment on that because The Crow: City Of Angels
never happened. YOU HEAR ME? IT NEVER HAPPENED.
Look after the big stuff, and the big stuff will look after you.
On the flipside, the makers of Judge
Dredd plainly thought that the big stuff was the look of Mega City One and its
inhabitants, and that piddling details like Dredd's, y'know, personality really
weren't that important in the grand scheme of things. Ang Lee's Hulk
got close but eventually fell short of gaining a cigarillo, for despite realising
that part of the Big Green Wossname's narrative punch came from his status as a
metaphor for Science Gone Wrong, it somehow missed the whole Embodiment Of The Destructive
Power Of The Id tip in favour of some contrived standard-issue action-movie "They
Fuck You Up, Your Mum And Dad - Alright, It's Always Your Dad" rubbish. Meanwhile,
Christ alone knows what the makers of League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen thought
the big stuff was.
What was I talking about? Oh, right, Spider-Man 2.
Or, as we shall call it, Proof Positive That Adherence Blue Man's First Law Isn't
Always Enough.
Spidey doesn't give you the immediate problems of a Batman you see, in that give
or take the odd tweak he's more or less resisted reinvention since his debut forty-some
years ago. Pretty much from the get-go, Spider-Man's writers have remained mindful
that Peter Parker's appeal lies in his status as Marvel's resident Everyman. Alright,
not quite Everyman, unless there are a lot more genius chemists with the
proportional strength of a spider around than I've personally noticed, but you get
the drift. In recent years, it's become standard practice that superheroes' real
problems only begin when they slip off the spandex, but Spidey did it first, and
he did it best. Your friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man had to squeeze bouts of fisticuffsmanship
with folks like The Lizard and Electro in between the demands made on his time by
his job, his family, his friends, his love life and various other mundane problems
du jour. "With great power comes great responsibility" is the comic's
touchstone, and when handled delicately by skilled creative teams, that has served
to lend Spider-Man's characterisation a degree of honesty and humanity that's just
not attainable by fellas like the mighty Thor.
The problem is, that when this aspect of Spidey's concept isn't handled with the
requisite light touch, then he has a tendency to come off as... how can I put this
delicately? Oh, yes - a bit of a fucking whiner.
What was I talking about? Oh, right. Spider-Man 2.
The film's more or less divided into two parts. There are the action sequences,
which are much more inventive and feature much better CGI than in the first movie.
These, to be honest, are absolutely great, a personal highlight being Spidey's duel
with Doctor Octopus (for it is he) atop a speeding train. Unfortunately, they probably
account for no more than a quarter of the running time. The rest of the movie largely
consists of Peter Parker moping about with a face like a slapped arse, bemoaning
his fate and cursing
God for making him this way. Which was much the state of play in the first movie,
to tell you the truth, although this time he's graduated from sobbing
like a little bitch with a skinned knee an' shit to actually going out of his
way to emotionally torture those nearest and dearest to him:
"I can't be with you, Mary Jane."
"I think we can make it work, Mary Jane."
"We can never be, Mary Jane."
Call me insane, but watching Peter Parker fuck with the head of roughly the only
person in the world who gives a toss about his self-indulgent bloody hide isn't
really the right way to go about engaging my sympathy for the little shit.
Ho hum.
D'you know, Christ-knows how many hundreds of words later, and I still haven't
managed to wrestle this post around to the point I wanted to make. Not to worry,
there'll be other days.
