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Friday 8 March 2024

VIEWING ANOTHER PILOT EPISODE – ABOUT A PILOT. SHŌGUN: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Anjin.
   Pilot.
   I sat down to watch a pilot about Goody Three-Shoes Galadriel and the Rings of Something or Other, Does it Truly Matter? Just to refresh your memory…

 

*

 

Galadriel returns home and has to attend a town council meeting to receive some kind of STAR WARS medal. These town council meetings are always the fucking same. The rebellious character is on to something, but the elders don’t want her interfering. So she’s dragged back from the latest scraped knee incident to be given a final warning about not doing the thing.
   At which point, she proceeds to fuck off and she does the thing she was not meant to be doing – leading to adventure. Except for that very last part. Her reward at the meeting is to sail to Elf Heaven on a boat that is so fucking viciously green-screened that I cannot say the visuals were the best thing about this pilot episode.

 

*

 

My conclusion? Clearly, the best thing about Galadriel’s pilot episode was the ending. In the sense that the torture finally ended.
   But The Rings of Pah! reminded me of SHŌGUN in one respect. Town council meetings. Except…these really are council meetings, and they all have meaning. It is a time of unease in Japan. The old SHŌGUN appointed a council of five regents to watch over his son until that young boy grows old enough to rule.
   Then the old guy died. And that’s when the differences of opinion came in.
   Five friendly lords. Four lords are allied against one. You may have seen Hiroyuki Sanada in a John Wick movie or an Edward Zwick production of The Last Samurai. The man has an impressive list of credits to his name.
   But this. This is his time. And this is his role. It helps that he’s a producer on the show. Often you are told a character is a master strategist. And you know this on the basis that you’ve just been told the character is a master strategist. Not here.
   Hiroyuki Sanada plays Tokugawa Toranaga, the lord who is given the shortest and shittiest end of the stick in these council meetings. You see, you are shown, in every scene he occupies that this character truly is a master strategist. Every furrow of the brow, each pause in speech, the concealment of his true plans, the shifting of his schemes to take account of outrageous swings in fortune…
   There’s lot of acting involved in SHOWING you that he’s a master strategist. And we need more television along the same lines. All I learned about Galadriel in that shit-fest of a travesty of a TV show was that…she’s blonde.
   Mm.
   James Clavell was a writer who worked in movies. Somehow, he ended up directing To Sir, with Love. Yes, that’s a film about an outsider. The movie was a box-office hit. It helped that he was a producer on the film. You’ll find his writing spread across cinema. He has an impressive list of credits to his name.
   Being taken prisoner in World War Two made Clavell as a writer. The Japanese put him in Changi in Singapore. His wartime book was King Rat. From there, in leaps and bounds, he worked his way up to writing SHŌGUN.
   Clavell wasn’t the first to take history and fictionalise it into a page-turner. The master strategist Toranaga is a thinly-veiled fictional copy of Tokugawa. But you can send your fictional fellow on different paths. You do this to keep a rein on pacing and the absurdity of life.
   History takes bizarre turns at times, and often outdoes fiction. Clavell worked on the script for The Great Escape – based on the book by Paul Brickhill. Brickhill’s account of a mass escape-attempt from Stalag Luft III was toned down for the movie version.
   Partly, that’s about pacing and turning in a film that isn’t as long as World War Two. Many of the escape efforts defy belief and would come across as ridiculous if you piled them on, one after the other.
   If you write a historical novel, you do so under the confines of history. You must colour your picture within the lines. But if you change the names to protect your own narrative, history becomes a broader canvas, and you throw buckets of paint at the damned thing.
   Did you write a history book at that point? No. Did you create a page-turner? Clavell wrote a page-turner. He involved one William Adams, a ship’s pilot who arrived in Japan in 1600. But he’s John Blackthorne in the book.
   Prison obviously shaped Clavell’s whole life when World War Two ended. Watching the pilot episode of SHŌGUN, you see John Blackthorne spend a lot of time as a prisoner of the Japanese. There’s no getting away from that.
   You’d think this would crush the narrative. No. It opens the story up. You get more scenes of interest from a character who is imprisoned than you view in the whole of that misbegotten pilot episode for Galadriel and the Masters of the Universe. Or whatever it is called. Amazon and the Folly of Bezos.
   Goody Three-Shoes spends an episode walking around Middle-Class Earth twiddling her fucking thumbs. Over in SHŌGUN, John Blackthorne, a man with the occupation of twiddling his thumbs while held prisoner, does more.
   Everything in the sub-Tolkien parody is so fucking earnest. Meanwhile, in Japan, practically every second character is a barbarian or calls another character a barbarian. I watched a shower of bastards being a shower of bastards to each other.
   And there was more sympathy for these rascals, rogues, rapscallions, and ruffians than there was for all the nice/twee characters across the way in Tolkien-ish land. Spoiler alert. One character has a man cooked in a big metal pot. We have sympathy for this swine when he almost dies in the sea.
   Not by drowning. He’s going to commit ritual suicide before that happens. Gchaladriel went about being nice and I didn’t care. (People became unaccountably Welsh when they uttered her name, hence the extra letters.)
   In Japan, a bunch of bastards thrived. Everyone had an agenda, and that agenda was often violent and bloody. The English pilot? Bastard. All the Portuguese? Utter shower of bastards. The four Japanese lords, intent on protecting the heir – but secretly plotting to kill him and each other – total bastards. Toranaga – under sentence of death from the start of the show – has to be a bastard in order to survive.
   His main rival, Ishido, is a complete and utter bastard who wants to kill everyone on the council. And then he wants to find more people to kill so he can die gloriously in a legendary battle. We even have sympathy for him.
   No sympathy for Gchchchchaladriel. Even less for the photocopied Indiana Jones who lumbered through a non-movie. These things were difficult to watch. SHŌGUN was easy to drink in.
   A character speaks out of turn at the council meeting. Well, that’s it for him. He must go off and commit ritual suicide. Oh, and his baby must die with him. Surely his lord will be merciful?! Toranaga allows the man’s wife to live. That’s it. No last-second rescue for a loyal follower who let his emotions get the better of him, almost creating a massacre right there in the room.
   Why does it work? The stakes are all-consuming and they are explained to us. Then they increase vastly at every turn. Is it a perfect TV show? Perhaps it’s asking too much that the characters speak in their own languages…
   There’s a little bit of The Great Escape here. The movie convention for the years 1939-1945 is that all the actors speak the same language for the benefit of the audience in that country. The Great Escape is in English for the English-speaking market. But you know everyone in the movie speaks German for the German market.
   Here, with SHŌGUN, the Japanese characters speak Japanese with subtitles. John Blackthorne “speaks Portuguese” to the Portuguese bastards who do their damnedest to have him hanged or crucified when they translate from Portuguese to Japanese. But for the English-speaking audience the “Portuguese” speech is all in English.
   I think they could have gone full subtitle with this show. Throw in all the languages with all the subtitles. It’s a weak mark against a production with so many strong points, and I let it pass without real complaint.
   Speaking of strong points. The production has such a great level of detail to the costumes that the costumes bleed character. I love the acting, particularly across the language barrier. It’s great. Some of these bastards truly are dressed like a shower of bastards. And others, perhaps even bigger bastards, are resplendent in the finery of peacocks.
   I understand there’s a degree of technical wizardry involved in portraying scenes. John Blackthorne at the tiller of a ship in raging weather simply can’t have been filmed in a genuine storm. But the scenes at sea look as good as they can look. You are right there with the crew as water dominates the deck.
   Contrast that with the choir of heavenly angels at sea in Middle-Class Earth. I watched two pilot episodes. One about an elf named Blah-Meh of the Beige. Barely a character. I’m having trouble spelling Galadriel. The other pilot was about a pilot. A bastard. Prisoner. Liar. Pirate. Heathen. A character we could care about.
   One story had no story and made me flee the series in search of sanity. The other story made me want to tune in for more. Which I did. The pilot episode of SHŌGUN was the least-impressive episode of the series. Stakes increased in episode two. No matter the awful things characters did, I’m guessing you’d be cheering them on at that finish to episode three. At least, in that show, the characters dive into the sea for a reason.

Thursday 1 February 2024

BELATED VIEWING OF A PILOT EPISODE. RINGS OF PAH!: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

 

This one I came late to, on the basis that I’m no Johnny Tolkien fan. More of a Clive Staples kind of reader, truth be told. Though Clive Staples Lewis sounds like an unexpected office brawl, come to think.
   I was invited to mock the opening episode of Johnny Tolkien’s Amazon Prime’s The Lord of the Flies, Damn Flies, and Statistics Rings: The Infinity Gauntlet of Bigby Rings of Power – brought to you by Darth Bezos and Weetabix.
   Indeed. I may have made some of that up.
   Context. I haven’t read The Hobbit. But I did read The Lord of the Rings. I’ve read The Chronicles of Narnia, which has such a huge spoiler for it as a series that it is a huge spoiler just admitting there’s a huge spoiler for it. And I won’t spoil it for you. Clive can do that on his own time. What else? I watched The Lord of the Rings as animation before I watched the live trilogy of movies.
   If I ever tell you I’m a massive fan of The Silmarillion, it’s a coded warning that I’ve been kidnapped for ransom.
   I had to check notes for this next bit. Apparently, I was once invited to watch a Hobbit movie. It didn’t matter if I’d missed one. And it wouldn’t matter if I didn’t see the next one. So I guessed I’d be watching the middle one of the three padded movies.
   Normally, I would never do this. I’m going out on a stout limb here and stating that I don’t watch the second movie in a series unless I’ve seen the first. What does this all mean? It means I’ve now done this terrible deed, this crime against cinema, once, and once was enough.
   Also, the movie itself was a crime against cinema, padded to fuck, and quite the terrible deed. Something about a giant gold statue of a dwarf melting like a pack of butter and filling a swimming pool for a dragon to bathe in. There were a few dwarf characters as well, but it wasn’t worth paying attention to any of that.
   So. You will understand that I could never be a butt-hurt Johnny Tolkien fan, coming in here with my brand of criticism while cultishly praying to The One True Text. (Yes, The Brand of Criticism is a magical Dungeons & Dragons sword. And that…is a roleplaying fact.) No. That’s not the angle, here.
   By contrast against the non-fun movie about a Hobbit, the Narnia movies were fun. Far from perfect, true. But there was enough spirit to see you through to the end. Unless you were Disney, who bowed out after the second film in the series for reasons of corporate soullessness.
   The problem was that Disney needed a lordly ringly movie spree of its own about a wizarding bunch of English schoolkids caught up in magical adventures. Far better to stick to the source material provided by Lewis, than attempt a mish-mash of other franchises for the sake of a quick buck. Would’ve made more money by not trying to make more money chasing other franchises and their Balrogian shadows.
   After the third one, minus Disney, the moviemakers were really pinning their hearts to their sleeves in plugging the idea of a fourth movie about Eustace and Jill. It was not to be, Chéri.
   I am no butt-hurt fan of the land of Narnia the book series being ruined for eternity by Narnia the movie series. No. Even the harshest fans of the books-to-movies will tell you that Will Poulter was terrific casting as Eustace. In other matters, matters of story, were there some bewildering choices for those movies? Yes.
   You didn’t have to go to New Zealand to make Narnia come to life. That was a Tolkien-franchise-based thing. Do I care about accuracy to the sacred text? I don’t see the talking lion as a big furry golden Jesus-figure, and you don’t have to either if you don’t want to.
   No matter how shitty the adaptation from book to movie, the book is still there if you want to read it. And that’s always the harshest lesson to remember. The thing that you liked initially…is still around. We need reminding of that, from time to time.
   I’m looking at you, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Dullness. Not merely the worst Indy movie I’ve seen, but one of the worst movies I’ve seen. But the trilogy is available to watch. The thing you liked is still here.
   Sadly, I must return to the business of Johnny Tolkien. Too many people turned Tolkien into a business. The movies based around Smaug the dragon and the giant dwarf statue and Tolkieny shenanigans…they were padded to fuck, but made their money. Yes. The business of Tolkien.
   Tolkien’s son Christopher was saddened to see that Peter Jackson’s crew gutted the book and turned it into an action movie…
   He referred to The Lord of the Rings, but he also applied that to the impending film about Bilbo. Should have been a TV series. It wasn’t. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Trilogy is something I won’t be watching. Tolkien’s lore deserved a long-form approach. Television. Episodic. Building a world.
   And so, someone somewhere decided they could do a prequel. There was a TV series. By Amazon. Bezos. Massive fan of Middle Earth shenanigans. He sat there in a Star Trek shirt on his dick-shaped spaceship, contemplated Middle Earth, pondered his orb, and said Make it so.
   Cue Game of Thrones with its introductory map sequence set to jaunty music.
   I guess it’s better to have a dick-shaped spaceship than a spaceship-shaped dick. Depends on the sci-fi franchise. Back to Tolkien, though we’ll be detouring into a testicle-shaped spaceship eventually.
   What are the criticisms of this lamentable TV project? I am not here to have a go at the acting. So what is worth criticising? This folly. The format of the show, which we’ll return to. Criticism?
   It rewrites Tolkien! Big fucking deal. Tolkien rewrote Tolkien, and he was Tolkien for fuck’s sake. Once The Lord of the Rings became a thing, The Hobbit underwent some revision to bring it into line with the later history. Tolkien’s choice.
   Criticism. Events in the history are compressed for the sake of the TV show.
   Big fucking deal. Go back to The Lord of the Rings at the movies and watch Gandalf ride majestically to the parchment version of the National Database, in search of evidence on the One True Ring. He might be gone for a few weeks. We’ll be generous and say a month. There and back again, he doesn’t spend more than…wait. Read the book. See how long it takes for Gandalf to reason things out. Seventeen years.
   Rewriting Tolkien and compressing events are hardly criticisms. So where does the TV show go wrong? It’s fucking boring. Nothing happens in episode one. There are no stakes. Evil is gone and we cannot find it. Well, fuck all the dwarf prostitutes, hide my lunch, call me hungry, does Gollum still shit in the woods – and would that make for a more exciting TV experience? No, no, it wouldn’t.
   Generally, my tolerance for a new TV show reaches the point of crisis after fifteen minutes. I’ll know, within that time, whether or not I am going to switch off. Rarely, I’ll finish the first episode in full and then decide the show is not for me. But for the most part your goodwill, as a writing team, as a production crew, dies in the sixteenth minute of a show if nothing worthwhile happens in the first quarter-hour.
   I won’t name two shows. One I quit after six minutes. The other I left two minutes in – but I was playing it at double speed. So I guess I quit in the first minute, two minutes in. Yes, I almost always watch YouTube videos at double speed, to save time. If I could do that with all of your empty movies and ponderous TV shows, I fucking would.
   Amazon wanted their Game of Thrones experience. Yes, that one ended well. I’d seen the first series of that show, and stopped reading the books after a while when it occurred to me that G.R.R. Martin was a step below J.R.R. Tolkien in the sense that Tolkien was still alive after the conclusion of his large fantasy tale. If Martin lives to finish writing, I may return to his saga – from the start, obviously. Or, y’know, maybe fucking not.
   The Amazon TV version of Tolkien didn’t move fast enough at the very beginning. We have Galadriel narrating past events for us, as happened in the movie version of Tolkien’s world. And that’s the problem. We need to make this like Tolkien, which means we’ve only vaguely made it like Peter Jackson’s version of something like Tolkien. We’re in the general area, right? There’s a map, to guide us.
   I believe Amazon spent most of the budget on Elf Wallpaper™ and Google Middle Earth Maps®. Seriously, what is it with this fucking map? It shows us we are in another part of the land, somewhere, and people are not doing stuff in each location. Okay.
   Yes, yes, the beginning. It’s…the opening of The Lord of the Rings again. Galadriel narrates the history of evil, which, in this case, is the story of Morgoth, who – in a fit of anti-social tree rage – cuts down the Christmas lights on two mighty English Elvish oaks. Or something.
   There’s no Christmas in Tolkien. No Santa Claus. There is a Santa Claus over in Narnia, though. That pissed Tolkien right off. You can’t have Santa in Narnia, but you can alienate your readers by placing Tom Bombadil in The Lord of the Rings.
  Why is Tom Bombadil the first to be cut from adaptations? Oh, I don’t know. Maybe it’s the way he treats that One True Ring as if it doesn’t exist and has no hold over him. No explanation. If you smoked weed while reading the books, you were into him. And if you were dropping tabs of LSD like Legolas dropping fools with his bow, then I guess you fucking loved Tom Bombadil, man. ABSOLUTELY EVERYONE NOT STONED READING THE STORY…not so much.
   Right. Morgoth is evil. He doesn’t like Christmas trees. They aren’t Christmas trees. Stop that. Even with the fairy lights. So Morgoth is ushered on and almost instantly ushered back off. His minion, Sauron, is soon ushered on and off again.
   It’s hard to care. The main antagonist in The Lord of the Rings is the One True Ring, not Sauron. Sauron has a walk-on part at best. He is remote. A pantomime threat. Where is Sauron? He’s behind you! The Ring, though. With its whispers, and temptations, promises, and sense of power. It’s the villain of the piece.
   And in a fucking prequel…is absent. Oppenheimer is having trouble gathering enough fissile material for its construction. So the story is about Galadriel and her search for evil. She piles helmets up into a muddy mound, commemorating the deaths of 300 Spartans, and regrets wearing clean willowy dresses on spattered battlefields.
   Don’t worry. She changes into Jeanne d’Arc’s battle armour soon enough. And we get this ice cliff climb that does nothing. Start that fucking scene on the icy wastes with the wind blowing and people falling behind, not on this sub-par Tomb Raider cliff climbing exercise. She’s looking for evil, but evil isn’t coming looking for her. Fuck. What’s the point of all this, then? Speed this up, for fuck’s sake.
   We are inter-cutting throughout, going to the prototype Hobbits and then to the doomed Elf-Mortal romance that borrows from The Lord of the Rings. Plots with not much going on in them.
   Who are the antler folk? Doesn’t fucking matter who the fucking antler folk are. Forget the fucking fucketty antler folk. Apparently, it mattered to Gary Oldman levels of EVERYONE!!!!!!!!!!!! when watching the trailer.
   But the trailer isn’t meant to showcase the TV show. It is just meant to promise you lies, damn flies, and statistics. Statistically, around a third of people watching actually finished the show.
   We’re in the realm of streaming and data-mining the streams to see who loved the…oh. Just below two-thirds of the audience fucked off before the end, sparing their eyes, ears, and brains, I guess.
   Too many characters spouting deep meaningful meaningless words from the ancient scrolls of Live, Laugh, Love. This is the internet bitches, and the fans turned up to Die, Scowl, Hate. Whole lotta nothing going on. But that doesn’t even begin to cover it. Back to the non-story…
   So Paladin GIRL BOSS Jeanne D’Arc LARA CROFT Galadriel and her D&D party go into this winter dungeon, see. They gaslight the lone inhabitant into being a monster, kill the beastie, and… gain experience points so they can go up a level. Oh, and Sauron’s been leaving a QR code around the place, to remind everyone that evil’s been up in ya business, ya bitches.
   I’d have started this episode with the testicle spaceship landing on a blasted heath. Fire up The Ride of the Valkyries, boys; sounds like Wagner’s back on the menu.
   Galadriel returns home and has to attend a town council meeting to receive some kind of STAR WARS medal. These town council meetings are always the fucking same. The rebellious character is on to something, but the elders don’t want her interfering. So she’s dragged back from the latest scraped knee incident to be given a final warning about not doing the thing.
   At which point, she proceeds to fuck off and she does the thing she was not meant to be doing – leading to adventure. Except for that very last part. Her reward at the meeting is to sail to Elf Heaven on a boat that is so fucking viciously green-screened that I cannot say the visuals were the best thing about this pilot episode.
   No. The best thing was the end of the pilot episode and the lessening of the burden on my shattered mind. I no longer had a shred of mocking commentary left in me.
   Commentary. You shouldn’t be in a position to provide live commentary for an opening episode. Or, indeed, for any episode. You should be swept up in a world and not swept out to sea.
   I’d have quit at the CGI snow troll fight if I hadn’t been asked to watch the whole pilot. Fuuuck. I am angered at the lack of quality in the writing of this non-episode, and, reminder, folks, I am no Johnny Tolkien fan. Even I was pissed off at this drivel.
   Galadriel’s reward is to sail to a big golden light. I thought for a second that Barbie and Oppenheimer had somehow come together in an imperfect fusion of mash-ups drawing The Lord of the Rings into the same orbit. Sauronheimer: The Barbie Incident.
   But no. That would have been a mercy. And faster-paced. Galadriel sails a stormy sea. On a boat with everyone standing upright and not swaying. At least on Star Trek they’d lean to the side when the ship was hit. Elf scientist Mr Spock confirms this, when he’s not singing about Bilbo.
   I think I’d rather just have the green background, if I’m brutally honest. Look at the amazing background visuals of the sea! And wince in pain at the truly fucking atrocious foreground nonsense going on there.
   Pros: it’s a pilot episode I never have to bother with again. Cons: everyone else listing pros and cons mentions great visuals as a pro. It’s a fucking lie. Watch and wince in agony at the CGI troll fight and this sheer buffoonery on the boat. Paging Ralph Bakshi. Ralph Bakshi to reception.
   ANYWAY, Galadriel is about five seconds from Elf Heaven when she makes the sort of rash decision that would get you killed under all other circumstances. This absolute megacorporate soulsucking fuck-muppet of a diluted non-character jumps overboard so she can swim an ocean in search of evil. Shit like that will get you killed in Dungeons & Dragons, real life, and most bleak movies.
   But not in Amazon’s version of Middle England Earth: The Land that Plot Forgot. What else is there? Racial slurs for Elf characters. Mysterious cow poisoning. More Sauron QR code nonsense. And waiting for the pre-Hobbit character Dolly MacGoodGollyMissMolly to run off and have a fucking adventure for fuck’s sake.
   Galadriel is not the only diluted fuck-muppet of a character in the show. And here, we must acknowledge that there’s a bit of a problem. When you are talking about the rings, three of them end up with the Elves. And we can quote the opening to the movie, for this bit.
   One word will do.
   IMMORTAL. Elves are immortal.
   I was there, Gandalf, three thousand years ago, when Tolkien himself signed away the movie rights.
   So how do you deal with immortal characters? This is what leads to time-compression in the timeline. You can keep throwing the immortals into the story, but your pre-Hobbits and your other mortal types will have story segments as long as the life-expectancy of a flailing fly. One option would be to do a detailed story of mortal characters, with the immortals restricted to cameos.
   Cameos for Galadriel? That would actually work. Mortal characters across many lands and many years are there to uncover the clues. Only the immortal Galadriel, Elrond, and Kelly Osbourne can fit the clues together, over time. Yes, you’d have to keep replenishing the mortal characters, but you’d do it from batch of episodes to batch of episodes, year after year.
   That’s one way. Incidentally, the very exact number of eight episodes was a contractual thing. The rights to TV shows longer than eight episodes live on in the land of Mordor, where the shadows lie. Something to do with the legal powers of the Witch-king of Angmar, Saul Zaentz. Operating from beyond the grave, beyond the pale, and beyond belief.
   No, Galadriel isn’t the only fuck-muppet of a diluted character. Yes, part of the problem lies in the immortal qualities of certain characters. In other words, all the Elf characters in this TV show are pointless. That’s despite having pointed ears.
   Did I mention I preferred the Narnia movies, and that I thought Susan’s romance with Prince Caspian wasn’t on my bingo card of things that really upset Hitler?
   The Rings of Power. Or. The Pangs of Hunger for a story. Oh, and don’t forget a guy fell out of the sky inside a ball-shaped spaceship disguised as a rock. At which point I declared him the Last Son of Krypton.
   And I just didn’t care. Evil made a cow ill. How evil is that? Galadriel didn’t go to Elf Heaven. She’d have to work her way through a Peter Jackson movie trilogy to gain the Golden Ticket admitting her at long last to that Great Chocolate Factory in the sky.
   But, in the meantime, in this TV show, night swimming. Lots and fucking lots of it. I’m sure I missed out loads of the plot from this pilot episode. Just as the writers did. Oh, Kelly Osbourne popped in to offer to build a few rings of power, but the show seemed reluctant to mention this. I may be pronouncing Celebrimbor slightly off-key.
   At least Sexy Shelob™ didn’t turn up to turn heads and drain bodies. Even if parts of this show looked like a computer game.
   Someone call the burns unit. We’re admitting an entire cast and crew.
   Is it a criticism to say nothing much happened in this pilot episode? You can criticise Tolkien for that, too. He built a fucking world. And used that as the backdrop, the foreground, the side dishes, and everything else. Plot takes a back seat to majestic travel at times. Then the Ents appear, and the story REALLY paused for breath. Why would you expect a TV show set BEFORE the main action to be any differently-paced?
   Don’t trust Bezos, Mr Frodo.
   This guy in a loincloth landed on Horsell Common , much to the dismay of the pre-Hobbits and H.G. Wells. Dolly MacGoodGollyMissMolly and her chums must face the mystery of discovering whether or not this truly is Kal-El, Son of Krypton. Or possibly Braniac.
   Maybe he’s Bruce Wayne trying out a funky ejector seat, given that his Batmobile was sliced in twain by a Balrog named Bane. That would tie in to Galadriel’s arrival in Gotham City in episode two.
   What do these TV shows do for us? Not much. To quote Michael Moorcock out of context…
   They don’t ask any questions of white men in grey clothing who somehow have a handle on what’s best for us.
   Moorcock’s criticism of Tolkien’s Middle England Earth, taken from last century, applies to the town council meeting in this century’s empty non-adaptation of bits of Tolkien’s wallpaper the writers were permitted to plunder from the back of that Weetabix packet for a duration of no more than eight episodes. Contractual obligation achievement unlocked.
   When the first thing out of their mouths is WE’VE PLOTTED AHEAD TO COVER FIVE YEARS OF THE SHOW, you know you’ll struggle to make it through episode one. Let me just watch the trailer again.
   Oof. That trailer music should have served as warning enough. Everyone in the trailer looks busy getting ready for some unspecified looming evil. Buy one Morgoth, and have a half-price Sauron whether you like it or not.
   The show has been out for a while, now. It is difficult to research any of it. When I go to the internet, the internet seems to be concerned with who Galadriel is dating. Is it the bad boy, Morgoth? Sauron, rebellious and daring on his motorbike, perhaps. Could it be Kylo Ren or Sauron-a-like Snoke? Rosemary the telephone operator? What about that mild-mannered janitor?
   Could be.
   And the reviews. Holy fucketty fuck. By all means, change your opinion over time. But some of those reviewers were breaking Olympic records when it came to doing the backflip over shifting the reviews around.
   If your initial review was about sweeping majesty and a show not afraid to take its time, I’ve got hot fucking news for you. The show was eight episodes long. You didn’t have time to climb an ice cliff, twirl a blade like a drum majorette waving off an ice troll as a joke, or go on a quest for evil only to find out evil’s gone away for the weekend.
   Your reward for your pointless side-quest shall be…retirement in Elf Heaven. Off you go, now. Remember, we know best. You are just a youngster, Galadriel. Don’t huff those mushrooms in the forest, now.
   Then the head of the town council is off to a wooden condominium in what will one day become Rivendell, with the rest of the afternoon spent scouring the Palantir for rumours of Sexy Shelob™. A massive burning eye blinks on there for a second, but it’s a known Microsoft Update glitch. Nothing to see here.
   What haven’t I talked about? Dolly MacGoodGollyMissMolly, the pre-Hobbit. That isn’t her name. No. Really, she’s Dolly O’GoodGollyMissMolly. The Hobbits, in case you haven’t read The Lord of the Rings, are unfeasibly, unswervingly, abso-fucking-lutely ENGLISH.
   This is not the case in the movies, but we’re here to talk about the pre-Hobbits from the TV show. The Harfoots. Or the O’Harfoots. Just call them O’Hare and be done, bejesus. When is a Hobbit not a Hobbit? When it is a pre-Hobbit, or a…LEPRECHAUN Harfoot.
   So there are these…
   …pauses, sensitively, then gives up…
   …travellers, see. Down-to-Earth. Salt of the very soil. We know that, as they are shorter people. And there’s a lilt to their accents, begorrah.
   Aye. Travellers, in wagons, who speak in a particular way. And they are scavenging for food. Soon the forces of Sauron will engineer a food shortage aimed specifically at the Little Folk. With their chirpy attitudes and their ragged clothes and their muddy faces, they’ll fuck off to America in search of gold.
   You won’t find America in Middle Earth, silly. Though you will find Amarehk in the works of Michael Moorcock.
   Why are they hiding from the antler folk? FORGET THE FUCKING ANTLER FOLK. We need to boost this plot with something. These pre-Hobbit travellers don’t live in the Pale. They live beyond it. Could we throw in a villain?
   Dark Lord Sauron, come on down, the price is right. For Amazon, the financial cost of being TV hobbyists was far from right. Sauron is wheeled on with all the subtlety of Darth Vader turning up for a cameo in your Spider-Man movie. Back to the Future we forgive for that kind of nonsense, but don’t push your luck.
   An episode devoted to Morgoth being a character…would’ve been handled just as badly, I’m sure.
   MORGOTH: I’ve left the keys in the ignition and you really have to use those sandwiches up by the weekend. Other than that, rock on my #dudebro.
   SAURON: (TEENAGE GIGGLING.)
   Other problems. A horse died making the second series of the show. And that is fucking tragic. Whether a show is great or not, any death associated with it is simply awful.
   If you whined about black people being in a TV show featuring magic fucking rings, I’ve no words for you. Why is there a black man in STAR WARS?! He’s a Stormtrooper! Yes, he is. And he’s in Tunisia, filming the very first STAR WARS movie. He’s removed his helmet for an informal photo-shoot, back in the 1970s. So why are you angry at John Boyega, decades later? Oh.
   I don’t believe there’s any way to finish on a positive note, which is why I kept these last points to the end. Hard to believe a horse died over this show. I’ve made it this far. Let’s wrap it up in a bow of barbed wire. I thought I’d type up an exercise in comedy. But you all know it is tragedy.
   They tore out Tolkien’s appendix and displayed it on TV, so we could watch it slowly decomposing into dust over the course of eight treacle-slow episodes. Or so I am told. I barely made it through episode one.
   One episode to ditch them all and to TV history consign them. In the land of Amazon, where the positive reviewers lie. Then they sit up and gasp as other people hold contrary opinions.
   Stop making insipid piss. Yes, it is a medical condition. The cure for insipid TV is to stop watching. Find something you like and watch that instead. Sounds like a plan. Luckily, it won’t take eight episodes of tree-porn to enact. And now we must take our leave of Tolkien’s appendix, the CGI festival of notes for an actual story, and we must watch anything else, maybe even everything else, instead.
   Gimli proffers his axe. But I’ll see your axe, Gimli, and raise a remote control.

Thursday 4 January 2024

INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DULLNESS: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Finally saw that movie. And by finally, I mean I don’t have to watch the entire film again. Just snippets, for the purposes of this chat.
   If you came here to read this, you came here after watching movies featuring Indiana Jones as the hero. I won’t be describing every single scene in detail. So if you came here randomly without having watched any of those stories, you are on stony ground.
   There are only three movies about Indiana Jones. Let’s clear that up from the start. But there are five, and that is worth mentioning in passing. RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK is marketed as INDIANA JONES AND THE RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK. Indiana goes on to have risky adventures at THE TEMPLE OF DOOM and on THE LAST CRUSADE.
   After that is anyone’s guess. Spoiler alert. In the third film, he rides off into the sunset as an adventurous cowboy should. And that’s that.
   Except, belatedly, he allegedly turned up on the quest for THE CRYSTAL SKULL. Following those shenanigans in a kingdom, BELATEDLY again, there was something about a dial of dullness. But with the characters populating that last movie, it was impossible to care.
   No one has ruined Indiana Jones. Those early movies are still available, after all. Spend your time enjoying what you love, and turn away from what you hate. If you hate the later films, that is. Maybe you are just rather blah on them, as expending hate isn’t worth the effort.
   In the first three films, the road to adventure kicks off with a transition from the Paramount logo to some sort of depiction of a mountain. There’s a transition to a mound in the fourth film, which shows the direction we’re heading in, but they just don’t give a flying fuck by the fifth and very final film in the series.
   Just couldn’t be fucking arsed, could they? The series is owned by Disney at that point. However, the Paramount logo is still present and they could have made the standard transition. But no. We get the sound of ticking. Time is running out for the franchise. We need to push one more movie out there before the star, Mr Ford, grows too grumpy to alter digitally.
   Indiana Jones heads off on adventures to stop the Nazis. But not in a fifth film. No. I grabbed hold of that fucking dial of destiny and went back in time to stop the film being made. And we’re all better off for that. Occasionally, expending a little hate is worth the effort. Where did it go wrong?
   Too long a gap in production between movie number three and movie number four. Same again, pretty much, going from movie four to movie five. The big problem with Indiana Jones was the trio: Lucas, Spielberg, and Ford. They had to get together to make these movies.
   A lot of heels were dragged over film studio floors to reach where we are now. The movies have dates to go with them: 1981, 1984, and 1989. Then, if we quote Sallah, we cut to 2008 and 2023: bad dates. The initial run covers the 1980s. In the 1990s, there was a TV show.
   Spielberg was dragged kicking and screaming back in for his last hurrah in 2008. The crystal skull beckoned. Ford was happy to make a fifth one as long as the gap in production wasn’t anything like the gap between the third and the fourth one. Bad dates.
   Lucas could have directed one. As long as he had his STAR WARS collaborators Harrison Ford and composer John Williams on board, no reason why not. Lucas reminds me of Sergio Leone – both being directors with great influence on the world of movies. They directed around a handful each. Spielberg keeps churning them out by way of comparison, chasing the output of Alfred Hitchcock.
   Indiana Jones. We always knew that one day you’d digitally walk back through cinema’s door.
   The first film featured great stunt work. This is true of the trilogy. Then the production gap kicked in and computer generated images were available for use in the fourth film. Too available. A lot of people say that the fourth film lost them when Indiana Jones dodged the effects of a nuclear blast by shielding himself inside a refrigerator.
   Not me. No. For some reason, I expected that level of nonsense from a story featuring Indiana. It was Tarzan in the jungle, later. The whole foliage-bedecked sequence. I’m sure on paper that a duel in the jungle, across vehicles, with swash being buckled…
   Yes, I’m certain that looked fun on paper.
   But on the computerised side of things…
   Fuck off. I mean…this is the crystal skull adventure. Misadventure. Fight scenes and chase sequences really show their lack of value and are revealed as padding in this fourth film. I haven’t reached the tedium of the mystical dial, yet. That’s a whole movie and many years away at that point.
   There are physical stunts in THE CRYSTAL SKULL. But there weren’t meant to be that many computerised effects. The opportunity slipped out from under them. Was the fridge a step too far?
   When Indy went to the doom-laden temple, that sequel/prequel had to go above and beyond, didn’t it? Did it? It didn’t have to. More of the same would have done us, I’m sure. Had that been the case, would we have complained about over-familiarity, though?
   The opening of the first film is great fun. It gives us Jones the adventurer. He hates snakes. And we meet his enemy. Belloq. More on him, during the fifth film. Shortly after that, we see Jones the academic. His friend Marcus Brody hands him a mission. It’s important that you understand the pacing of the first film. There’s the mission before the mission which somehow ties in to the mission – a set-up freely borrowed from the movies of Bond – James Bond.
   Action in the jungle. Meet Belloq. Return to academia. Encounter Belloq later. Yes, we’ll keep returning to Belloq. But remember this: SHORTLY after Belloq, we see Jones the academic. The short opening sequence sets the standard for the entire movie’s pace. Shame that wasn’t the case for the whole series.
   What about those opening sequences? In the first movie, Jones is in the field facing action. He encounters a villain he’s met before, and he’ll meet that villain again. Escaping off in a plane, we travel with Doctor Jones to the groves of academe. He’s Professor Jones again within the first quarter of an hour of the film’s opening.
   In the second movie, he’s in the field. This is a bit different. The opening gives us villains, but throws them away. Really, the sequence introduces us to Indiana’s sidekicks. Still, he makes an escape by plane just barely within the first fifteen minutes. Then it is on to other adventures.
   The third movie opens with a flashback. But it does relate to the later plot. We’re out of the flashback and back at the university just barely within the first fifteen minutes of the start.
   Then we have this gap in production. In the fourth movie, we start very directly with the villains. But we don’t return to academia until almost 25 minutes after the movie starts. This is true of the fifth film. We have a flashback, introducing the villain. And it is almost 25 minutes before we hit academia.
   So, just looking at these stretches of time, over time, the sweet spot for an opening is close to ten minutes. But we’ll allow for slight detours and go up to almost a quarter of an hour. The last two films take this too far. For a lot of people, that fifth film gives them the big highlight of the movie in the opening flashback. That wore off for me pretty quickly. It could have been cut in half, reducing the number of digital shots related to a Nazi train.
   Do I object to the absurdity of it all? No. The movies are full of improbable nonsense. We demand that, after a little while. Escapist fantasy is escapist. The only place to draw the line is at heavily foreshadowed plot points that lumber into view with all the subtlety of no subtlety. Watch the fifth movie and see. See what I did there.
   Escapism. The second movie, set rather puzzlingly before the first film, opens in a nefarious nightclub. You might say it’s a wretched hive of scum and villainy. The action becomes more and more improbable as the seconds pass. Escaping to an aeroplane and from the aeroplane is as daft a sequence as being saved in a refrigerator is, come the fourth film.
   No parachutes. Just an inflatable yellow raft. It falls improbably to a landing on snow. This is a Slalom on Mount Humol, going by the soundtrack. Yes, I am playing the music of John Williams as I type.
   The raft goes even further into the realms of improbability, leading to a river. Absolute nonsense, and every bit as daft as the refrigerator scene from the fourth movie. Let’s detour into that for a second.
   Indiana Jones survives a nuclear blast inside a fridge. Any radiation damage he suffers is offset by his experience with the Holy Grail from the third film. We’ll run with that. If you hate the refrigerator and nuclear bomb double-act, take note: you’d have fucking detested it in BACK TO THE FUTURE, where it was slated to appear originally. Spielberg’s a nut on the subject.
   Fortunately, Doctor Jones survives the nuclear blast and is warned by the military – don’t climb into fridges. They aren’t safe. That’s for any children watching. I think nuclear weapons are a wee bit more dangerous than fridges are. That’s for any adults reading.
   What stands out in the first film? Many things. The truck chase. Not just the truck chase…
   From the moment Indy and Marion start their escape from the tomb, the action is terrific. It doesn’t feel padded. The movie comes in at under two hours, even including closing credits. Okay. What stands out in the second film?
   The movie is a rollercoaster ride. Yes, literally. The mine cart chase is a theme park ride waiting to happen. But there’s more to the film than that. Willie Scott and Short Round are based on characters from old movies. I say they are great at conveying the mood. You might find them irritating.
   A fish-out-of-water nightclub singer and a gambling kid sidekick are just right for this second (first) story. They all visit the temple, take in the sights, see a spot of doom, and have spooky adventures.
   I suppose the second film is set before the first film to keep the hope alive that Indy would still be with Marion in a third movie. Maybe that was the plan at the time, but it didn’t pan out. Technically, I should watch TEMPLE OF DOOM first in the series, but I can’t be bothered. Maybe one day. We’ll have a detour into Sergio Leone in a wee while.
   What stands out in the third film? The tank chase. But there’s more to it than that. Marcus Brody is in the field, for once. And the last crusade they are all on…it’s just a great way to end a trilogy. This wannabe Bond movie has a James Bond actor in it, after all.
   So what stands out in the first three films? We are given characters to root for in dire situations. Those situations include a truck chase, a mine chase, and a tank chase. But without the characters, you would have padding and nothing but padding. We are also given characters that hark back to the days of Old Hollywood.
   Indiana Jones raids that lost ark, and, to do so, he’s borrowed items of clothing from Charlton Heston in a film called Secret of the Incas. If you are wondering why no one sued, well, it was a Paramount picture. Keep it in the company and all is well.
   Before he reaches the doomed temple, Indiana appears to be taking style tips from Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. And his (supposedly) last crusade is a Bond film with a Nazi coat of paint on it. (A pot Ian Fleming himself dipped into, in the novel Moonraker.)
   Characters we care about. Indy and Marion. The characters not everyone roots for in that doomed temple: Willie Scott and Short Round. But you need to be heartless not to care about Short Round desperately trying to turn Indy away from the cause of evil. There is heartlessness in that movie. And it is done practically, rather than digitally.
   Willie Scott is a hapless force of nature. And even if you don’t buy into it, hey, surely you still care about Indy in that second film. The point in this prequel is that Willie Scott is definitely not Marion.
   We could’ve been given more of the same, more of the stuff that appeared on the big screen in the first movie. But the temple is full of doom, and it is very bleak in places. Call it an experiment in giving you more Indiana, but in a different setting with new sidekicks and a departure from the widely globetrotting first movie.
   It’s pretty much about the palace above the temple, some nods to the cinema of Sir David Lean, the temple, and that literal rollercoaster ride. The movie is a little longer than Indy’s first cinematic outing. But not overlong. We’ll get to that bit.
   I like the combination of Willie Scott and Short Round. Yes, they are plunged into horror. There’s an old-fashioned movie-making sensibility at work, at the same time delivering a film that puts the gore on screen rather than in the shadows…though shadows always play a part in stories featuring Doctor Jones.
   Characters we care about. For the last ride into the sunset, we’re joined by Marcus Brody who provides a fair bit of comedy. Sallah makes a brief but welcome return. Connery clucks his way through the production declaring that everything is intolerable. But the movie is highly tolerable.
   For once, the love-interest is a villain. That’s hardly a spoiler. Obvious villains are obvious, and I’ve refrained from naming another obvious villain here. Still wouldn’t be a spoiler if I said the name. The movie doesn’t outstay its welcome. And the series doesn’t outstay its welcome, either. Near the end of the film, Spielberg is dangling over a cleft in the planet. The audience is there, holding him up. Spielberg reaches for another movie in the series…
   Spielbergiana…let it go.
   Let us turn to the cinematic masterpiece that is INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL. In light of the fifth movie, we can dub the fourth movie with this title: cinematic fucking masterpiece. Which version, though? Frank Darabont surfaced to kick the script around. He had form, having worked on the TV version of Indy’s adventures. But there were a lot of cooks in that kitchen. Hardly any are credited officially.
   Darabont isn’t credited in the opening. There are characters in the movie that weren’t in Darabont’s head or the script that fell out of his head. How much of his input made it to the finished production? Hard to say. Darabont was caught between Spielberg and Lucas. A rock and an even harder rock.
   When these new characters turn up after an agonising pre-production period, they feel bolted on. I knew none of the script chicanery when I watched the movie. Is it a cinematic masterpiece?
   No.
   Is it a bad movie? The first hour of the film is pretty much what you’d expect from a film featuring Indiana Jones if the actor hadn’t portrayed Indy in a movie in a long time. Nostalgia played a huge factor in the movie’s financial success. Also, Ford still had it, had it in spades, diamonds, clubs, and hearts, when he made the film. Spielberg didn’t really come across as a director who wanted to be there. But Ford was game. He made sure he was fit for the assignment.
   Ray Winstone has very little to do as Mac, a friend of Indy’s from the war years. He turns up a heartbeat before Indiana does, and then rapidly betrays Indy. So much for that so-called friendship. It’s hard to care when the instant character goes for instant betrayal.
   Indiana is built for instant characters. He meets Belloq. Someone he’s met before. For us, that’s our introduction to the villain. Indiana talks to Marcus, an academic colleague of long acquaintance. Indy meets Sallah, an old friend who guides Indy through the problems with the search for the lost ark. All instant characters. So much for the first film. Mac as a friend who betrays Indy in the opening scene of the fourth movie…just doesn’t cut it. And there’s no recovery from that, which is why Mac has very little to do thereafter.
   Cate Blanchett also has very little to do. She arrives on the scene as Irina Spalko – she’s a budget Rosa Klebb from a far better Bond movie, reminding us that the character is a budget Rosa Klebb from a far better Bond movie, and that she has very little to do.
   Igor Jijikine is the henchman. But, y’know, if they’d ditched Mac and Irina and beefed this guy’s role up and given him a memorable sub-henchman of his own, I think the movie would have played better.
   Jim Broadbent is okay, but he has the unenviable task of being a replacement character for Denholm Elliott while he walks past a portrait of Denholm as Marcus Brody. Broadbent is given a little more to do than that, but not much. I’d say he fares pretty well out of the experience. Denholm also puts in a cameo as a statue at the faculty.
   I’m not really a fan of Shia LaBeouf, but he does what’s asked of him and he’s okay. Except for the jungle sequence. Not his fault. He turns up in this film as Marlon Brando. No, seriously. If you missed the reference, that’s what was going on there.
   John Hurt was, presumably, well-paid for his appearance. I have the sense that he’s a soft replacement for Connery. Connery was to have had a cameo, but that didn’t suit Sean. If his role had been enlarged, he could have been off in the jungle, driven mad, and had a few key scenes.
   How to fit Sean in? At the wedding. That was the plan, I guess. We’ll return to the wedding.
   Crystal skulls abound in this story. The year is 1957, and the movie opens to Elvis singing for the entertainment of the people who had the most fun making this film. I’m talking about the American Graffiti rejects racing against the villains. The youngsters soon depart.
   Indy still has it. The Nazis are no longer suitable as villains. (That would change.) Hitler is out. Commies are in. Hell, they could have at least hinted that they’d saved Hitler’s brain.
   Lucas dragged the Roswell incident into proceedings from the 1940s, and here are the Russians looking to loot something crystalline and skullish from a top secret warehouse. They’d have been better off going after the ark…glimpsed in a throwaway joke.
   This opening sequence is long. Far too long. Reduce the characters. Cut the time spent on the opening. Leaving aside CRUSADE, as Indy is right there as River Phoenix in the flashback, CRYSTAL SKULL takes the longest of all five movies to show Indy as a character on the screen. Hell, that’s allowing for TEMPLE OF DOOM, which runs a whole musical number before he walks into the club.
   After a bumpy start, and clunky introductions of various characters, Indy is on the hunt for an old colleague: Oxley. This is John Hurt, who babbles throughout his performance, and then returns to sanity to babble an explanation involving creatures that are definitely not aliens.
   If they were aliens, that would hurt Spielberg’s feelings, as he didn’t want to be heavily associated with making movies about aliens. Says Spielberg, signing up to direct a fourth movie about Indiana Jones. Could we make the movie about a shark skull, maybe? One of crystal. No one would notice.
   Let’s deal with the mutt. Or Mutt. Shia is playing Marlon Brando by way of James Dean, filtered through the coffee-paper of American Graffiti. But the character is named…after a dog. See what they did there…
   There’s a motorbike chase. I quite like that chase. It’s a bit of fun. Musically, it’s enjoyable. Leading up to the chase, we discover Mutt’s mother’s name isn’t Martha. That would be too much of a coincidence. No, her name is Marion. This had to be the worst-kept secret in moviedom: Karen Allen would reprise her role as Marion Ravenwood.
   Why be so coy about this inside the movie, when the actress was on the poster and in the trailers? Oh, and credited in the opening. This was 2008, and the internet was a thing in a way that it hadn’t been in (checks notes) 1989. There weren’t even a million users of the primitive internet back in ’89.
   Reminds me of STAR TREK: INTO DIMNESS. A movie that went out of its way, in 2013, to hide the fact that it was THE WRATH OF KHAN remade. In 2013. With the internet. And phones. A worldwide squeal of internet annoyance over the phones and your secret is busted. What was all that shit with this John Harrison guy? In the non-build-up to this non-film, he’s definitely not Khan. Spoiler alert. No one cared.
   Excuse me while I veer off into talk of the Keaton-Jackman Effect. In 1989, irate Bat-fans physically wrote letters to complain about Michael Keaton’s casting as the lead character in Tim Burton’s BATMAN movie. The news that a sequel was announced off the back of the film’s success led to fans commenting that Keaton better be fucking involved, or there’d be no point watching the damned thing.
   This happened later with the character of Wolverine. Who the fuck is Hugh Jackman? Keaton had a dozen movie credits to his name and was derided as being a comedy actor with no business portraying Bruce Wayne, let alone the Batman. Jackman had two movies behind him and was slagged for not having a career yet.
   Presumably, if Jackman were the veteran of ten Australian comedies he’d have been wrong, so wrong, for Wolverine on that basis. After the release of X-Men, fans demanded a solo outing for Wolverine and that only Hugh Jackman could play him.
   We’ll call this the Keaton-Jackman Effect.
   One of the best portrayals of the character by Jackman is in the movie Logan, directed by James Mangold. I’ll return to him on the small matter of a dial. Of dullness.
   Things that don’t often work. Belated sequels to movies. Sequels so delayed that you are in another decade, or, gasp, a different century. Bringing back a much-loved character in a cameo role so that the torch can be passed down to the next generation. I think that worked once, in a STAR TREK TV show. In movies, not so much.
   I haven’t bothered to explain the plotting of these movies featuring Indiana Jones. Maybe I should summarise. Indy is an archaeology professor who would give real archaeology professors absolute fucking nightmares. In his first outing, he tries to stop the Nazis from claiming a powerful pile of dust made from rocks. This is before war breaks out.
   Stop the bad guys from obtaining the mystical thing. Have adventures along the way. That’s the formula.
   A word or two about William Hootkins. Hootkins is in RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, taking a lesson in biblical matters from Harrison Ford. Indy sketches out a staff and explains what the Ark of the Covenant actually is.
   Mr Hootkins is also remembered as Porkins in STAR WARS. Porkins is the recipient of the worst advice in a space movie. As he struggles to deal with some trouble aboard his one-man fighter jet, er, spaceship, while attacking dams in the Ruhr Valley the DEATH STAR, Hootkins is told to…EJECT.
      WHERE TO?!
   Oh, to the surface of the DEATH STAR, which Luke Skywalker will shortly demolish? That’s assuming there’s even an atmosphere on the DEATH STAR’S surface. I quibble over these things. Where are the clouds on the DEATH STAR, damn it?!
   To this day, I think all the lights on the DEATH STAR should flicker as the big ray gun is fired. A man in an orange jumpsuit sticks his head through prison bars and intones…dead planet walking. Yes, I’ve seen too many prison movies. Frank Darabont appears to be responsible for many of them.
   Why mention Hootkins in connection with Indiana Jones? CRYSTAL SKULL retreads that government guy moment in the hunt for a few nostalgia fumes. Jones is dumped by the Russians at the top secret warehouse. We’re introduced to the idea of aliens.
   They are extradimensional lifeforms, damn it!
   Jones is betrayed by Mac and escapes. Harrison Ford does his own stunts here. The safety wires are easy enough to remove digitally, and I have no problem with that. For some reason, there’s an experimental rocket sled that leads off in the direction of nowhere. Indy hitches a lift.
   In the morning, he reaches a deserted town. It is a nuclear test site. Let’s find out how American houses stand up to those atoms. Indy takes shelter in a fridge. The Russians race out of town in their car and die in a haze of sub-par digital destruction.
   Indy is discovered, decontaminated, and then interrogated by government guys. This section reminded me of Hootkins. Essentially, the scene goes nowhere. Then it’s off to academia. Is Indy a communist agent? The only enemy agent he consorted with was a suspect Austrian that time in Venice. And she could hardly be described as communistical. Ah, Venice. It’s okay. You get a pass for dallying with the Nazis, provided they are rocket scientists.
   Leaving the fourth movie under something of a cloud, Professor Jones boards a train. To emphasise that he is older, his hat has turned grey for a bit. Enter Marlon Brando and a spot of exposition leading to the motorbike chase.
   There’s some faffing around with a language Indy must work hard to understand. Being a movie, this takes a few seconds. He and Mutt are off in search of Professor Oxley. And possibly treasure, power, fortune and glory…
   There’s a bit of Indy stuff leading to the next location and the next location. This is all okay. Ultimately, once you’ve pieced so many clues together it is time for capture. Indy and Mutt are captured and taken into the commie camp of captured characters.
   John Hurt earns more money for babbling a bit. Karen Allen puts in a welcome return as Marion. We get some character stuff. And the repeat, I guess, of a thing no one wants to see. But there it is. And we’ll see more of it in the future.
   Two characters get together in a movie. The audience cheers. Damn. What to do in the rest of the series? I know. We can split them up so we can put them back together again. Now, in defence of Marion as a character…that’s how she starts. Indiana Jones walks back through her door in RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK. She’s an instant character from his past.
   They were together. And they split. Now he needs her help, and she joins his world of adventure. Marion vanishes from the other movies. It’s in the fourth film that she returns after a long absence which…
   Allows these characters to get back together again. Oh, and here’s your son. Marion is used as a hostage to force Indy’s hand. Indy, slow on the uptake, realises Marion Ravenwood is Mutt’s mother. He lags a bit behind on the rest of that story.
   Mutt takes the lead and mounts an escape that goes nowhere. Except, we all officially learn that Mutt is Indy’s son. Next, we shift into the jungle in daylight and a convoy of vehicles. And this is where the movie loses me.
   So, instead, for a bit, I’ll talk about STAR WARS. George Lucas, again. Once upon a time, in an earlier galaxy that just happens to be this one, STAR WARS was STAR WARS. As soon as you number them, and start at the number four, you’ve created scope for filming the first three.
   What then? Announce episodes seven, eight, and nine?
   When episode seven was announced, I believed four things. One. Harrison Ford would get his long-time wish and Han Solo would die. Two. Luke Skywalker would merge with the Force and become a ghost. Three. We would see Princess Leia use the Force in a big way. Four. They could do what they liked with the story, as long as they didn’t just repeat the attack on the DEATH STAR.
   It is the year 2015. Harrison Ford plays a character who had a happy ending with his Princess. Now, we find that they’ve split up over the thorny issue of their wayward son. Also, Luke Skywalker has fucked off somewhere.
   Much time has passed. Format? The original characters would appear, and pass the mantle of heroism to the next generation of new and interesting characters. But the original characters would still be involved in a major way. Up until Han Solo’s death, of course.
   Implementation? Utterly sideline the characters we turned up to see. Not how I’d have written it. You want to keep the fans happy, right? Start with the regulars from the very opening and add the fresh cast from that point on. You don’t utterly sideline people. In the much-delayed and frankly unwanted BLADE RUNNER sequel, you would like to think you could add a layer of interest to what was great before.
   You’ve done a man’s job, sir. I guess you’re through, huh?
   The writing is certainly through. If you must bring Gaff back in a sequel, meet him in a bar watching a dancer perform with a neon snake. Don’t stick him in a nursing home.
   TONY SOPRANO: It’s a retirement community!
   When there’s talk of retirement in BLADE RUNNER, it doesn’t mean taking it easy. No, it means taking it rather fucking harshly. Funny, that. Harrison Ford, again. Almost as if there’s a fucking pattern here. He had a happy ending with his replicant girlfriend in the first movie, and that went to shit in the sequel. Is this the default setting for films, now?
   Where was I? Just make what worked part of your plan. And do stuff with it. Don’t sideline it, remove it utterly, diminish, belittle, or berate it. We’re going to need the Roman numerals for this one. 

Episode VII. THE FORCE AWAKENS.

 It is a period of fragile peace in the New Republic. Sneaking away from endless politics, Senator Leia Solo plans to meet Jedi Master Luke Skywalker to finalise plans for a new and dynamic Jedi Fleet.
   Before the meeting can take place, they find themselves surrounded by space pirates on the Blood Red Moon of Bantonnay.
   This is no chance encounter, but an ambush arranged by sinister forces hoping to overthrow the Republic and bring about the return of THE GALACTIC EMPIRE.
   Now, Ben Solo, Jedi Knight, and his smuggler father Han race across the galaxy aboard the Millennium Falcon, with the mighty Chewbacca, to haul Luke Skywalker’s feet from the flames one more time…. 

It’s better to start with Ben as a good guy and then be tempted by the Dark Side. We would care, then. Also, Han would never admit to hauling Leia’s feet from the flames…but he’d gloat a bit over Luke, just for the nostalgia value. Han would also call Leia sister as a joke.
   As a Senator, Leia could reasonably sneak away from politics for a time. The New Republic is still rough around the edges, and Han smuggles supplies to good causes when bureaucracy stands in the way of decency.
   Those new characters come in to create factions. You’d look for at least three factions of good guys, duelling and blasting their way across the end of the movie in typical STAR WARS style. Drop a bunch of Darths in there for innovative duels, and you are all set.

ANYWAY. This shit about the characters getting together only to be split apart by the next movie just to get back together again…is really fucking annoying. But we haven’t talked about the mummified corpse in the room.
   The Mummy, from 1999, may give you that Indy fix for the ’90s. Its roots lie in the movie by Karl Freund, so maybe you are getting that Indy fix for the ’30s. There’s a game cast, sand, action and humour aplenty…
   And a couple who get together in this movie only to stay together, married, with a kid sidekick in the sequel. Well, isn’t that something? Okay, the actual mummy has a fucking tragic love-life, but come on – he’s the villain.
   Back to the CRYSTAL SKULL. It’s definitely not alien. The shape of it nods in the direction of H.R. Giger and Ridley Scott, but we’ll gloss over that. Truck convoy. Indiana Jones. Marion is with him. Hell, her theme is playing in the background.
   And then. We have a clunky combination of live stuff blended, in a blender, with the computer mulch. Where’s Vic Armstrong when you need him? Well, he was fucking available when he was fucking available, but you took too long to make this one so he wasn’t available for any stunt coordination on this one.
   Yes, Vic Armstrong is listed in the crew for that third Mummy movie that kept him away from Indiana Jones, but, as we all know, there is no third Mummy movie. Spielberg had the annoying habit of shooting down ideas based on films that were just released, but another four years would go by before any meaningful progress. It’s so tedious. They would lose actors from these lumbering projects and just have to make do later.
   Still waiting for Even More American Graffiti. Maybe Harrison Ford could come back and sink that franchise as well, completing the fucking run and scoring bonus points for shits and giggles.
   The jungle sequence is green, plastic, and cheese-laden. However, the music performs far more valiantly at this point in the movie than the on-screen action does. John Williams turns up for the job, no matter the failings in this chase.
   I am not here to root for the music in the chase, though. Music may compensate for certain technical deficiencies. If your rubber shark is broken, just show underwater sequences set to music and let the editing help you through.
   But the jungle chase sets the tone and mood for the declining half of this film. Long before we reach the scenes with the ants, we must contend with the business of the monkeys. Monkey business? Spielberg should have hired the Marx Brothers.
   Mutt is left behind in the jungle. He catches up by heading everyone off at the pass. This involves the use of vines. When Chewbacca impersonates Tarzan in the STAR WARS universe, it’s brief and that makes it funny.
   And then there’s this shit. Not Shia’s fault. Even when Mutt heads everyone off at the pass, he still sees them far ahead. So he has to head them off at the pass all over again. Woeful pacing. It all ends in tears, except that it all ends in ants.
   Computer generated ants. I don’t even know where to start with this. In other movies, there’d be snakes. Or a lion. Here we’ve reached the point at which computers are capable of generating swarms of ants. True, The Mummy movie gave us swarms of insta-killer beetles. Not the best part of that movie. Never mind all that.
   We’re in a race to reach the place. The refrigerator sequence is on the same level of absurdity as the waterfall sequence that follows the ant sequence. All that matters is reaching this lost kingdom with crystal skulls in it.
   Get there before the commies do. Is this important? Let the commies brave all of the tricks and traps first and then mop up after. But no, we’ll have our heroes do all the work for the villains this time around.
   I’m not sure about the guardians of this lost place. Either…they crawl along tunnels to reach thin walls that they burst out of…or they are imprisoned in the walls. You know, maybe they live in the spaces between dimensions, courtesy all that alien technology. It isn’t alien. No. It’s from somewhere…don’t know.
   Basically, all you have to do is open the doorway using the crystal skull. Then you reach the control room of the alien spaceship. It’s from another dimension, damn it. And the movie delivers on a mystical ending.
   By that point we’ve had Indy declare that this is intolerable, in a nod to an earlier movie. He also spouts the line about a bad feeling that you’ll find repeated over in STAR WARS. So who cares if an Indy movie gives you another mystical ending to a movie with Indy in it.
   It is an ending that seems pretty harsh on everyone who lived in the immediate area, protecting the immediate area, but the movie glosses over that one. Rosa Klebb’s stand-in seeks the knowledge that is too much for Indy and friends.
   They escape from CGI hell, and we head off to the wedding. Ah, the wedding. As originally scripted, I guess Henry Jones Senior and Sallah were to be bridesmaids or something and that pleased neither actor.
   The hat passes from Indiana to Mutt and…Indiana promptly takes it back. Everyone lives happily ever…there’s another belated sequel. Well, fuck. On the bonus side, this movie comes in at just under two hours and then they roll credits.
   Half of the film is worth watching. The first half leads you to believe that you are having adventures with geriatric Indiana Jones. Not true. That’s for the sequel. A sequel not directed by Spielberg and with no story input by George Lucas.
   I’d likened Sergio Leone to George Lucas. What’s the right order in which to watch these films? You could watch TEMPLE OF DOOM, RAIDERS, and LAST CRUSADE in that order just to keep the dates right. Chances are, you are just fine watching RAIDERS first.
   You could view The Good, the Bad and the Ugly before A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More. Try it. You’d be watching a film set during the American Civil War and then two films set after. Leone makes this quite clear by having the Clint Eastwood character do something very obvious at the end of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly to tie the other movies into a later timeline.
   There are dates on gravestones that also confirm this. But you can’t totally trust time in a Sergio Leone movie. His use of guns from crazy time periods is quite deliberate, as he evokes an atmosphere related to events beyond the Wild West. That’s how you can spot the MG 42 in A Fistful of Dynamite, even though the gun wasn’t invented at the time. Leone liked to draw the viewer’s attention to other wars, other massacres, and other revolutions in that film.
   We’re glossing over Indiana Jones attempting to blow up the lost ark with an unbuilt Russian weapon in RAIDERS. That brings me back to Belloq, in the end. In the end, there’s a fifth Indy movie. The DIAL OF DESTINY. My soul is prepared. How’s yours?
   Do you want to know the plot? It’s right there in RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK. Belloq explains it to Indiana Jones. And the makers of the DIAL OF DULLNESS were listening. You can see the director, James Mangold, having the spark of an idea appear above his furrowed brow.
   Look at this. It’s worthless. Ten dollars from a vendor in the street. But I take it, and bury it in the sand for a thousand years: it becomes priceless.
   Belloq is talking about a watch. And that is pretty much the plot. I’ve written at length about this movie without writing about this movie. Length. Yes. It overstays its welcome, running well beyond two hours.
   Part of the blame lies with the extended opening flashback to the war. An orc steps in from The Lord of the Rings to tell us the good news. Looks like Nazis are back on the menu, boys. Indy is hunting for a mystical object. Forget all that. It is nonsense of the worst kind. There’s a fake mystical object. But there’s a much better real mystical object. And…
   Why the fuck are you dithering over this multiple choice essay on which magic item the hero is after? Pick one and stick with it.
   Of all the people involved in the movie, the actor who appears to be having the most fun is Toby Jones in the flashback. What to say of Indiana Jones and the Rubberised face of Youth
   Harrison Ford’s face is de-aged for the movie. But not his voice. He’s too grumpy to alter digitally. Isn’t it great to see younger Indy battling Nazis again? If they’d treated it as a James Bond franchise and made one every few years, we’d have had movies set during the war.
   Would a full series have deflated and diluted the action? Eventually, any series tires out. I think I’d have preferred that to the fits and starts and sputterings of the way it all went. Am I going to explain this last movie to you?
   Too much CGI. Overlong movie. Ke Huy Quan should have come back in for the fifth film. Short Round would have handled the fight scenes, protecting Doctor Jones. This is the cry that went up. But he was better off out of it, I guess.
   The Nazi American Eagle has landed on the moon. It is the year 1969 and Doctor Jones is living in some sort of twilight existence, teaching disinterested students who would have been born after the war. Yes, bored feckless Baby Boomers. That’s the people he’s teaching in the seconds leading up to his retirement.
   TONY SOPRANO: It’s a retirement community!
   Indy is saddled with a trouble-prone force of nature who is also an instant character from his past. There’s a kid sidekick who almost knows how to fly. This will be important later. In a lumbering way.
   We could care, but the movie doesn’t go out of its way to help us in that direction. Disposable characters are murdered by disposable thugs. The chief villain of the piece would appear to be the writer. But we’ll settle for a budget version of Wernher von Braun in the form of a Bond villain who was a better Bond villain when he was in a real Bond movie.
   It’s not Mads Mikkelsen’s fault that he has this unerring ability to locate Indiana Jones. The chief villain is the writer, remember. The plot concerns a dial, or half of it. And an item that can locate the other half of it.
   So there’s…
   I am rapidly losing the will to type. That fucking digital train sequence at the start. Go and watch The First Great Train Robbery. That’s really Connery on top of that train. The train is real, too. It’s too much to ask Harrison to do that at his age. I get that. But does so much of the train sequence need to be faked?
   Anyway. Nazi flashback. Cut to 1969. There’s a lousy set-up that cannot possible pay off. Indy, in his apartment, puts a fridge magnet over the photo of Marion. Yes, you guessed it. They photocopied the STAR WARS thing and shoved it here. Just a reminder, for you…
   Harrison Ford plays a character who had a happy ending with his Princess wife. Now, we find that they’ve split up over the thorny issue of their wayward son. Also, Lucas Spielberger has fucked off somewhere.
   The thorny issue of the wayward son, in this case, is the off-screen death of Mutt. Did they? Wait. Did they just Admiral Ackbar the motherfucker? Foul set-up: Indy and Marion are no longer together AGAIN.
   Payoff? There isn’t one. They get back together at the end of the movie. That’s the plan. It lumbers into view the moment Indy pulls the fridge move. He’d have been as well climbing inside it and waiting for another nuke.
   If the set-up is lousy, I couldn’t care less about the resolution. An older Short Round or Mutt could have been here to handle the fights. And the quips. No level of nostalgia could save this overlong movie.
   Various villains cycle through and there are chases, I’m sure. Basil Shaw and his daughter Helena could have been so much more in this film. Sadly, not the case. Basil was obsessed with the dial, in much the same way as Henry Senior was fixated with the Holy Grail.
   This obsession has passed down to Basil’s daughter who is also Indy’s goddaughter, Helena Shaw. But it isn’t enough for this movie. After faffing about chasing around New York on a horse, Indy…that was his stunt double with a computerised face…I started to suspect that Ford just standing and sitting down might be computerised as well. Where were we?
   Indy is on the trail. The Nazis are on the trail. Helena is on her way, one step ahead of everyone else. There is a nice flashback to more of Toby Jones and a younger actress playing Helena. And there is a great shot of both Helena actresses as the older one remembers the past by staring at her younger reflection fading from an aeroplane window.
   If the movie had the promise of that one scene, damn it.
   This was the first thing I’d seen Phoebe Waller-Bridge in, though I’d heard her in the movie about young Han Solo. The promise of the characterisation was there in that aeroplane scene. She is playing to a movie type. The troubled character who gets into scrapes, and who, at some point, breaks through into a sheen of positivity that lasts for the rest of the film.
   I’m not defying anyone to play that part and overcome the script problems. Close, though. Phoebe was given stuff to do, but not enough of it and not enough of the right things for a movie about Indy and his supporting cast.
   It isn’t enough to think that the first half of the CRYSTAL SKULL is a movie about Indy doing Indy stuff. If the second half of the movie slides down the shitter, the overall movie dies. I feel that this is the case with people who frothingly tell me that the first half of Full Metal Jacket is great and this news alone makes it a great movie.
   Hmmm.
   DIAL OF DULLNESS. What is the plot? Just watch. Or. It’s just about a watch. It is not really watchable. Helena Shaw is there to pull a heel-turn in reverse and finally endear herself to the audience. Well, the end credits rolled…and I am still waiting for that bit.
   Indiana should have recognised his goddaughter. On the other hand, he was told that Mutt’s mother was Marion and he didn’t take that in. Anyway. There’s a sub-plot about a guy who was going to marry Helena. And she owes him money. Lots of chases. None of them memorable.
   And then Antonio Banderas shows up as one of Indy’s instant character friends. He should have made big Puss-in-Boots eyes. Spoiler alert. This whole sequence was shit. Spielberg directed JAWS, written by Robert Benchley’s son Peter. Peter Benchley wrote The Deep. That was a movie featuring JAWS star Robert Shaw.
   I’m playing six degrees of ten variations on something to do with Kevin Bacon. Basically, the idea of a treasure ship being concealed by another treasure ship above it…that’s been done before. We don’t quite get that here, but the earlier movie features a moray eel. And there are CGI creatures in this timed-mission level that Indy must face…
    Maybe it’s all the cartoony CGI from the start of the movie. Indy looked like younger Indy as long as he didn’t turn his head. But that train sequence was like a level in a computer game. And the build-up to this underwater action sequence was…to tell us that they only had three minutes.
   After which, it’s back to the surface and…Antonio Banderas fans, look away now.
   I’m reminded of the villain’s ability to keep turning up. Audiences didn’t turn up. The film took hundreds of millions at the cinema and still rolled over and flopped.
   Escape. Learn a few things. Oh, the villain’s breathing down your necks again. Raid a tomb. Well that’s not very ethical in the fifth movie in a series about thieving archaeologists. And then. The hard part of the movie.
   There are many variants of the Heinkel bomber, so I suppose you could add one more to the pile without being noticed. Of the thousands of aircraft built, there is a handful in existence today. Even with his connections, where did low-rent Wernher von Braun grab a Heinkel from?
   Did he just roll up to an air museum with a bag full of thousand dollar bills and wink in a full German accent at the museum curator? I’ll have it back by the weekend, Mein Herr. Actually, that would work on the basis that you aren’t coming back to this time. You are headed off to change history entirely.
   So it is off to the past we go. And then this ludicrous CGI battle in ancient history. With a bit of noodling and a load of anti-climaxes. With one mighty punch, our hero was free. In the future again.
   There’s the payoff. Marion turns up for reconciliation. When the actress starts bitching about how her role was reduced, you know there were twenty-five-plus scripts for this shit. There’s Sallah again. Blink and you miss him. Sallah’s contribution to this movie starts to make the bridesmaid cameo in CRYSTAL SKULL look appealing.
   Spoiler alert for the end of the movie. Indy hangs up his hat. But takes it back as the movie fades. It’s not the years. Definitely the mileage. The tyres are gone and the wheels are worn down to wishful thinking. Even the fumes in the tank are running on fumes.
   Who thought this was a good idea and can we use the dial of dullness to rewind? Normally, I write around 1,500 words in these blog posts. But the computer tells me that I’ve exceeded 8,000. I cannot apologise for my rambling rant. When the movie itself has no structure worth reporting, I am forced to veer off into other things.
   This film ends with Indy and Marion united all over again. The payoff did not match the set-up. Faces did not match bodies. Length of movie did not come close to original length of original movie. The people involved in producing and directing this were snakes. Why did it have to be snakes?

Friday 1 December 2023

MISTAKING WRITERS FOR OTHER WRITERS: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Really, truly, when I think of that bit about mistaking writers for other writers, if I think of the topic at all, I realise I’ve misplaced a story. I believe, with the rabid fury of a thousand frothing suns, that one writer wrote a tale penned by another scribbler. Simple as that.
   Then something awkward happens: a loose detail floats over the horizon, staining the otherwise unsullied sky. Now the sky is sullied by the fury of a thousand waxing moons. Wait a bit. This book was written a few years after the author’s death. How can this be?!
   It could be that the storyteller’s last manuscript sat forgotten by daylight, beneath a massive pile of socks in a holiday home untouched by time. Only now are we dimly hearing of this belated publication.
   Or maybe there was a bitter family dispute over the eventual release of the last great work/collection of notes for a story/a fragment little better than a receipt for dry-cleaning.
   Maybe, though, just maybe, I’ve mismatched the author to the wrong bit of scribble. And now I am on a (hopefully) short trail to find who wrote what, when, and possibly where. Complicated as that.
   Generally, I don’t think of the mystery writer Josephine Tey being mistaken for the children’s author Eleanor Farjeon. It’s never on my bingo card in any year, and won’t show up behind door number one on the advent calendar of strangeness. Or any other door.
   Except…
   I was staring into the middle distance of the internet, and squinting at a so-called picture of Eleanor Farjeon. My response was surprising.
   That’s Josephine Tey.
   Firstly, I was astonished that I knew this. Somewhere along the line, the strands of the interwebs were muddled in the weaving of it. And, from some polluted stream, from one slightly awkward source, I suppose a miniature industry of mistaken identity poured forth.
   Eleanor Farjeon wrote Morning has Broken. This religious ditty went to church in a shotgun wedding with an old Scottish tune by the name of Bunessan. You may know it as a pop hit by the singer/songwriter Yusuf. (Additional noodling provided by Rick Wakeman.)
   What else to say of children’s author Eleanor? She won a few literary awards in her day, and had one named after her. And she’s not the mystery author Josephine Tey. Did these two women write in the same area? No. Not even remotely.
   Misattribution. Who wrote this one? Maybe Ray Bradbury wrote that story. Or I thought he did. And it was someone else. Or I believed someone else wrote Ray Bradbury’s story. But, then, watching the end of DARK STAR by John Carpenter, I fucking KNEW I’d read that bit of the story before. And it was absotively posolutely by Ray Bradbury.
   Turned out to be the case. Well. Damn.
   So, yes, there’s plenty of scope for confusion. William Shakespeare’s War of the Worlds, or Much Ado About Martians, for example. Could’ve sworn he wrote that. He didn’t pen a word. Christopher Marlowe was the author.
   Marlowe famously faked his own death, polished all of Shakespeare’s plays, entered into a Faustian pact with the devil, became immortal, and passed his own stories off as those of H.G. Wells.
   Legit. As legit as an award for Legitness provided by the International Committee of Legititude™, based in Luxembourg. That is a lie. The organisation flies a Panamanian flag when operating at sea. A fiction was told there, surely.
   No worse than supposing that Lord Byron was in fact a vampire. Tom Holland appears to be the source of that story. Spider-Man wrote about Lord Byron the vampire? Fuck it. Yes, yes, he did. No, no, he didn’t. It’s an easy mistake to make. Is the writer Tom Holland not the same person as the actor Tom Holland? Oh. Okay then.
   Was Christopher Lee, the historian, also in fact a vampire?
   There is no real or unreal evidence of this. My source is that I made it up. Anyway, I invented my source. Even that bit is fabricated.
   Also, concerning Lord Byron, there is no proof that he was a werewolf, a herewolf, a therewolf, a mummified corpse, or a creature from the black/blue/dried-up lagoon. Was he the Invisible Man? I just don’t see it.
   That’s The Invisible Man written by Christopher Marlowe, naturally.
   I myself am often mistaken for the Venezuelan rocket scientist of the same name. It’s a light burden. Any questions that come my way concerning rocket science and the laws of physics are quickly farmed out to my scientific advisor: Doctor Google.
   Doctor Google himself made a Faustian pact with the devil to acquire that sort of knowledge. There is no direct record of Doctor Faustus making a similar Googley pact to gain control of the interwebs.
   Unless you count that play, The Tragical Search History of Doctor Faustus. There’s some evidence that the work was scribbled on the back of a hard drive by one Will Shaxberde, believed to be a French literary critic down on his luck, in need of funds, and lacking wine. Except that he wasn’t officially French. Just for reasons of beef tax.
   Often, facts are at our fingertips just as those facts slip from our grasp and bounce down the stairs into a million fragments. Honestly, though, it might as well be a hundred fragments for all the difference it makes to us.
   I was once told that I knew that song by the guy who was singing about the thing…
   An attempt to get me to provide the name of the singer, the song, and the subject matter. I DEFINITELY KNEW THE SONG. Gradually, based on the sliver of a crumb of an atom of a detail, I worked out the name of the song. And it was coincidence that I knew it.
   YOU DEFINITELY KNOW IT. THE ONE ABOUT THE THING THAT THE GUY SINGS AND THERE ARE WORDS WITH MUSIC AND STUFF. IT’S REALLY CATCHY. YOU KNOW. THAT ONE.
   You know it. It was that one-hit wonder. It keeps popping up on the radio. And on the radio’s successor. Internet radio. But you definitely know it. That song, about the thing. By the guy. Who sings about that thing, very specifically without any detail handed over to tell you what the fuck anyone is talking about whenever they raise a topic in so vague a manner.
   I typed that while listening to the song. It was featured on the interwebs. All I had to do was type the guy’s name and there he was. You definitely know, anyway.
   All I had to do, when staring at a so-called picture of Eleanor Farjeon, was to type the name of another author. And the same photo popped up. A picture of Josephine Tey. OR IS IT?! Maybe the photo of Josephine Tey is really the picture of Eleanor Farjeon, has been all along, and the whole thing was messed up since BEFORE the beginning.
   Despite the actors Anthony Quayle and Anthony Quinn looking nothing like one another, they are often mistaken for each other. That must be very confusing when they appear in the same movie together.
   I was about to include a photo showing both of them together in a movie. But they are both on the right in the picture I selected, and the temptation to type Anthony is pictured on the right is really too much. I must let the weak joke die where it stands.
   Checking stuff is difficult. You face the Dictionary Problem. What is that? To know what you are looking for in a dictionary, first you must know what you are looking for. And if you know already, then maybe you don’t need to look it up.
   When I saw the picture of “Eleanor Farjeon” I just knew she was Josephine Tey. So I went looking for Josephine Tey. And there she was, in several images, looking like herself in all of them.
   It’s a conspiracy. She replaced herself. Like, y’know, that big unsinkable ship. The one that hit the iceberg. Or did it?
   RMS Titanic was replaced in a last-ditch effort to pull the world’s supply of wool over everyone’s eyes in order to…
   (Checks notes in ever-rising levels of disbelief.)
   …swindle an insurance company.
   According to Robin Gardiner, the sister ship Olympic went to the bottom of the ocean instead and the real Titanic was in service until scrapped. The most remarkable thing about Gardiner’s career is the legit profile of the White Star Line he somehow managed to write. That appears, at least, to have been written by someone who was rational.
   Doesn’t explain The Great Titanic Rock ’n’ Roll Insurance Swindle vibe that emerges from his other writings. You see, if you measure the width of the sprocket found on the ocean floor, and you compare that against the detailed blueprints stored in the secret filing cabinet, you’ll realise it’s all a load of nonsense.
   Never Mind the Bollocks. Here’s the Fruit Pastilles.