GLADIATOR AGAIN: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Can I say anything positive about the Gladiator sequel? What is the title? Gladiator 2. That’s not it. Gladiators. Far too obvious. On the cover, it’s a very Roman Gladiator II. Unfathomably, Sir Ridley Scott™ harks back to ALIEN with the title lettering appearing in a vaguely animated form. So, on screen, the movie is GLADIIATOR.
   But really, the movie is Gladiator Again. A film you’ve already seen as Gladiator. By the numbers. Tick off the story points from a checklist based on the first movie. This time around, there are far more computer effects on display. And almost everyone in the film is miscast. Except for those who returned for the sequel.
   Connie Nielsen and Sir Derek Jacobi are cast perfectly as the same characters they played before. Jacobi was cast in Gladiator off the back of the grumpy director’s memory of the actor’s TV role as Claudius. And Jacobi was cast in Gladiator II off the back of the grumpy director’s memory of the actor’s role in Gladiator.
   It would be terribly awkward not to mention Russell Crowe. And also terribly awkward to mention Russell Crowe. He does indeed appear in this sequel, using footage from the first film in flashback. Can’t really fault the casting, there. But practically everyone else has wandered in from another film.
   Chief contender in the miscasting category is an actor who truly has wandered in from another film, and brought his own plotline with him to blur the thin story of this one. Denzel Washington is fucking great in this movie. It’s just…that he was cast off the back of the grumpy director’s memory of having worked with Denzel before.
   Every second on screen, Denzel fills the movie with crackling sparks…and a plot from somewhere else. If they’d stripped all the pesky Gladiator and Gladiator II stuff out of this film, then there’d be another film entirely. One starring Denzel Washington. And one we’d all be interested in.
   Okay. So what’s the thin plot, here? There’s a man lost in the turmoil of battle. Sad things happen. He is forced to become a gladiator. Quickly, he learns how to handle his new life in an arena out in the sticks. There, he meets Oliver Reed Denzel Washington. No one buys or sells any giraffes.
   There’s a shot at taking out the villain in the much larger arena in Rome. We do see a tiger. Villains must be overthrown. People scheme. These scheming people are, once again, Connie Nielsen and Sir Derek Jacobi.
   It’s Gladiator Again.
   Our hero is the down-on-his-luck adult who was the kid from the first film. At least that’s a valid reason for waiting over two decades to make a fucking sequel. I’ll almost give them that. It might have worked, too, if they’d cast the child actor in the adult role. But they cast, miscast, someone else.
   Spoiler. Russell Crowe’s character is very dead. Most sincerely dead. He could’ve been alive and in the sequel. We’ll talk about Nick Cave later. No, really. It was a whole thing.
   Back to the secret kid. Not that the kid was a secret. Maybe his real daddy was a secret, in the first film. Vague hints. We couldn’t have anything more than vague hints. You see, Maximus Derivative Sequelus…
   Fuck it. The whole point of Russell Crowe’s character in the original film is that he’d have his vengeance in that film and not the next. Maximus had to avenge the death of his wife and son. And for that reunion at the end of the film to have an emotional impact, out in the filtered wheat fields, his character couldn’t have a secret son after banging Connie Nielsen’s character.
   But here, as too many movie and TV scripts utter, here we are. The secret son has grown up, turned his back on the Evil that is Rome, and is now living a peaceful life in…aw, fuck, here come those pesky Romans. Our hero, Haribo, goes up against our anti-hero General Stand-In, who felt all inspired by Russell Crowe back in the day.
   I’ll see you…on the beach! That opening bombast is partly Saving Private Ryan, partly Ridley Scott advertising something – we aren’t sure what – and partly snippets taken from Frank Miller’s 300. The gladiatorial movies share the same stunning levels of historical accuracy with 300, I am happy to report. I wouldn’t have batted an eyelid if a tyrannosaur turned up in that fancy arena, replacing the computerised rhino.
   Maybe look for that feisty reptilian action in the third glorious movie: Gladiators Three. An epic return to form as the two dead fuckmuppet Emperors from this movie are brought back to life by ALIEN™ technology to ride into battle aboard their steam-powered pet dinosaur Duke Daisy. It’s a musical comedy. I can hear the critics sing, singing a song of angry men. Starring the desecrated digital bones of Ian Holm…
   I’ll stop there. Just don’t get me fucking started on that fiasco.
   How often do I think about the Roman Empire? I never think about the Roman Empire. Even when I’m thinking about how often I don’t think of the Roman Empire, I’m not even thinking about the Roman Empire. I wasn’t even thinking about the Roman Empire when I watched two gladiator-themed moves directed by Ridley.
   Really should stop calling him Ridley. People will think Daisy Ridley directed Gladiator II. No, even when watching a Rome-themed movie, it appears that I never think of the Roman Empire.
   There is no homo-erotic subtext in one film or the other film. (It’s in both films.)
   Plot twist. Gladiator Haribo and General Stand-In are now at odds with each other. Oh no. One is the secret son of Russell Crowe’s character Maximus. The other secretly worship’s Russell Crowe’s character Maximus. Only in cinemas.
   The opening of this movie is full of blood, thunder, thud, blunder, bombast, bomb blasts, napalm, death, and one or two digital sequences. I counted one or two. Then lost interest in counting the rest.
   There’s a new score featuring reheated elements from the original score. Inspirational speeches abound, though they are served up late from the microwaved leftovers from the first film.
   Speaking of microwaved leftovers from a better movie, the Emperor was replaced by two of the most miscast actors in a Mediterranean Sea of miscast actors. Least said, soonest mended. I just don’t have the energy. Should have hired Statler and Waldorf – though they, too, would have been miscast.
   What we do in life echoes in the sequel. Are we not entertained? You’re damned fucking right we are not entertained. Ridley has one eye on another pointless ALIEN sequel, showing us what would happen if the alien infected a family of baboons.
   They could have spent a whole lot more money on the computerised baboons. Wouldn’t have mattered. Strangely, I found the rhino a hell of a lot easier to accept. There’s a sliding scale of acceptance in this movie…
   It runs…rhino, yes. Baboons, no. Rubber sharks…fuck off. All of the computer models for animals are miscast in this film. Even the rhino. But that hardly matters. Here, they are outshone by the miscast humans. Loads of ’em.
   Pedro Pascal, General Stand-In, is miscast as a man who is miscast in a film. Yes, even his miscasting in this movie feels a bit off, a bit extra, in the department of wrongness. In the final analysis, that’s nothing. Nothing. Compared to…
   Matt Lucas as a Roman game-show host. Yes. That bit of stunt casting. Miscasting. David Hemmings wasn’t available. Death will affect the casting process that way. Yes, we miss Oliver Reed as well.
   This farce of a gladiatorial movie almost had me nostalgic for Gor. That’s a lie. I will never have nostalgia for Gor. Not even for all of the Oliver Reed scenes in Gor. They should have called this Gladiator: the Rematch. This time it’s personal. Only in cinemas.
   Gladiator: the Rehash. Okay. I get it. If the role is also part of the title, then we’re going to see some gladiatorising at some point. Gladiator Rising might have been a far better bet as a title. Is there any director out there, way out there, more inconsistent, more fucking random, than Ridley?
   Advertising jobs saved him. Made him. He owed it all to Captain Birdseye. If you listened to Captain Birdseye, though, Ridley was an arsehole. Mucking around at the BBC, Ridley was almost in a position to design the Daleks for Doctor Who. Why didn’t he design the Daleks? Because they’d have fucking resembled him. And Ridley wouldn’t have fucking cared.
   Scrolling down the patchy Scott filmography…it’s definitely a thing. By fuck, he veers wildly from film project to film project. He’s still going as I type, so, luckily for him, GLADIIATOR won’t be his last film.
   At least no one made the GLADIATOR sequel about Russell Crowe returning from the dead as an immortal assassin hell-bent on killing Jesus. Yes, that was my response when I first heard about it. Either Nick Cave was smoking everything while writing…or he was smoking nothing.

HOW MANY WRITERS IT TAKES TO CHANGE A LIGHT BULB: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

So how many writers does it take to change a light bulb? One writer. There’s no one else in the room when you are writing a story. Though, when a writer changes a light bulb, you are hoping for a really good twist that illuminates.
   And once the light bulb is in and switches on over the writer’s head, hell, that answers the question of where the writer gets all those ideas from.
   I could spend the rest of this blog post making jokes about writers and light bulbs, but I am recovering from the trauma of changing a light bulb. Don’t know what the fuck I was using for illumination before I performed essential maintenance.
   The dim bulb that flickered its last wasn’t really putting out any Lumens, Candles, or a hint of a Lux. Wattage could best be described as rumoured to exist at some point in the distant past – that faraway star snuffed it and died long ago, leaving only faint impressionistic memories of light.
   Typically, the inevitable death of a bulb happened after dark. Luckily, I have two lamps on this side of a Great Wall of Books. By the light of one, repair the other. I reached for a new bulb that isn’t new at all. It’s been lying in wait, ready to pounce at the right time.
   Well, the time came after sunset. And now, I can see. I think the replaced bulb was powered by a tiny candle hidden deep within the mechanism.
   Maintenance this month has been of the essential variety and attacked me from all sides. There was a lot of it. Had to be done. If I don’t blog now, I won’t blog at all. Yes, I could spend the whole blog doing a dog-ate-my-homework sketch.
   But instead, I’ll talk about a movie I watched. Fantasy movies still have a pretty bad rap in the film industry. Make them cheap, throw them out fast, see what sticks. Cut the budget for the sequels. Fade out.
   Occasionally, fantasy films are really good. They are few. We’ll go with the argument that STAR WARS is a fantasy movie about a wizard, a princess, a farmhand who doesn’t know he is a prince, and an evil knight with a magic sword.
   For Arthurian fantasy, there’s Excalibur. There’s a wizard…
   Okay, we can shuffle the elements around. We have a boy who doesn’t know he is a king. And there are plenty of lightsabres in Arthur’s story. For fire-breathing fantasy, there’s the Disney movie Dragonslayer. It’s enjoyable nonsense. I find Sir Ralph Richardson’s turn as a wizard quite appealing.
   When he’s miscast in a movie like Rollerball, you wonder who was on drugs during that computer scene of his: you, watching, or the casting director foaming at the mouth in a dark red corner somewhere.
   We’ll give old Ralph a pass in Rollerball. The computer scene itself looks like it wandered in from another movie and brought the actor along in its wake. My point is…Richardson’s standard level of whimsy works very well in Dragonslayer and also in Time Bandits.
   I could go on, listing this fantasy film or that one. Good. Excellent. Stellar. But that’s not the aim here. You don’t get far in the fantasy movie landscape before you fall off a cliff into a lake of acid.
   Of assorted Dungeons & Dragons movies, I will say only this: caution. I believe Jeremy Irons funded the purchase of a castle in Ireland off the back of his scenery-devouring performance as a misunderstood villain. No one could understand what he was in the movie for.
   For the money, clearly.
   Sooner or later…and I’ve come late to this one…you encounter a movie named Gor. I encountered it last week, in low resolution, at double speed, on the information super back road that is the internet. This is now the only acceptable way to watch Gor. You’ll save yourself a lot of time…
   By reading this and deciding not to watch the movie.
   We’re in familiar territory here if you know your Edgar Rice Burroughs. American man is transported from civilised world to barbaric planet and must learn epic combat skills or die trying. Yes, I have a review here…
   I don’t like sand. It’s coarse and rough and irritating…and it gets everywhere. (A. Skywalker.)
   Gor. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing. Our hero, if you can call him that, is Tarl Cabot – which sounds like the guy’s own porn name. Surely that’s a typo. I have the overwhelming rage in me to fix that and call him Carl Cabot.
   At least then he’d be in the company of characters like Lief Langdon from Dwellers in the Mirage by A. Merritt. Anyway, back to Gor. We’re dealing with a man out of his own time and place. He arrives in the most beige fucking fantasy world I’ve yet seen.
   I’m with Mr Skywalker here. Don’t like bland sand. This fucking movie. It’s cheap and filmed nastily on a dry golf course at the arse-end of the back of fucking beyond. At least, that’s how it feels.
   Our hero is a professor spurned by blondie. He drives off in the rain and his wayward vehicle hits a tree. And he dies. The rest of the story about being transported to another world is just a hallucination of the people behind this production.
   Anyway, Tarl – should be Carl – has a magic ring that sends him to the world of sand. He can be a loser there instead of back home. Meanwhile, Oliver Reed shows up to film his scenes on the weekend: in short takes between trips to assorted pubs.
   Or that’s how it all appeared to me. Ollie is up against it in this production. His whispered menace competes against an energetic soundtrack that has been hijacked from another movie. The composer is using notes in Morse Code to transmit SEND HELP.
   Action in the film just doesn’t live up to the adventure promised by the score. Maybe that’s a good thing. I can’t see the cast living up to any real action on offer if real action stumbled in out of the darkness.
   No, I’m not saying the leading lady was hired for her ability to emote with her tits. However…I am saying that. But we mustn’t lose sight of the plot, such as it is. Our hero, Porn Name Guy. Incidentally, that reminds me of Flash Gordon.
   Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. You’ll truly understand the pacing of Flash Gordon if you realise, in that movie, you are never more than ten minutes away from an Italian porno.
   Oliver Reed shows up as a budget Oliver Reed playing a toned-down Brian Blessed from Flash Gordon, minus the wings. And flecks of foam in the beard. Ollie wants this big glowing rock for reasons unknown.
   He might have explained those reasons during a whispered monologue, but, frankly, with characters like these it was hard to care.
   Ollie’s instant son is instantly killed by our instant hero in an instant accident. And then our hero flees. He gradually joins a low-rent Dungeons & Dragons party that’s too cheap to have an elf in it.
   There’s the first third of the movie for you. Our man wears native costume, and crosses the desert after a spot of training. Travel concentrates on viewing everyone from behind, to show off the hero’s arse-cheeks. It’s not all about the bikini-clad women in this non-epic.
   As far as the director is concerned, I’m starting to think Tuff Turf was the highlight of his career. We get into a spot of mischief at a settlement. This is the sort of crossroads you’d expect in four or five fantasy movies of variable quality.
   There’s no variable quality here. It’s consistently awful. The movie felt like one of those films you saw after midnight on a weekday that felt like a hallucination the next morning, whether alcohol featured or not. Particularly if not. Tiredness robbed you of half the plot, and that was no bad thing.
   Know what the movie needs? A heavy. Surely this guy’s the heavy from Crimewave…yes, yes, he is. We have a low-rent Brian Blessed in the form of Oliver Reed. To this festering stew of a film we must add a knock-off Bud Spencer look-alike in the shape of Paul L. Smith.
   This leads to a catfight. Our heroes win something or other. The right to continue into the depths of the dry golf course. Our D&D party is built up to include the hero and heroine, a wise older character, another dude who is too cheap to put on elf ears, and a little person hired for comedy relief purposes.
   They trek a few hundred yards into an elaborate built-up super-bunker on the golf course, and then must deal with…a hole. A hole opens up. And it pads out the movie. It could be the hole in the plot formed from all the tiny holes in the plot so far.
   Maybe the shoddy nature of the golf course has infected the production, and they’ve thrown a mad ad-lib into the mix. The mix of shit and gravel that is this film. What the fuck is this film? When fans of the Gor books write in to complain about the adaptation…
   Yikes.
   Our heroes attract the attention of a guard and dispose of him. The cunning disguise of putting on a helmet and pretending to be the guard…would work in a game of D&D. Not so convincing in this movie.
   Eventually, after much sand…
   I don’t like sand. It’s coarse and rough and irritating…and it gets everywhere. (Oliver Reed, coming back from the pub.)
   We reach the pointless infiltration of the villain’s lair. Some of the costumes may have been recycled from Flash Gordon, but I can’t be arsed checking the accuracy of any of that. Our villain, the wri…the dir…the produ…Oliver Reed…decides to invite our hero to join his merry gang.
   For, y’know, reasons ’n’ shit.
   Throughout the movie we see women in bikinis and men thinking about calling their theatrical agents and asking soul-searching questions about careers thus-far.
   Oliver Reed finishes his last remaining speeches. In his head, he’s playing Falstaff in Stratford, down by the banks of the Avon in some open-air performance. Pretending to be drunk.
   We’re about an hour in and there’s a dance number. Of course there is. And we have a character moment. This allows us to care about Tarl Cabot. It doesn’t. I lied. A woman is presented for branding. Our hero flexes his mighty thews and enemy guards fall before him like ripe grain before the reaper’s scythe.
   No. I lied again. He just watches. Maybe he likes to watch. Then, when it is the leading lady’s turn, our hero must mark her with the branding iron. He rebels, and starts a change of government right there. Cool.
   Except. Why didn’t he save the first woman? Dick. We move to the open revolt and getting the hell out of Dodge. But first, remember to grab the big glowing stone. It is really important. For…reasons. I mean…someone paid money for the prop, so fucking use it.
   It’s not enough to free the oppressed and reclaim the stone. No. It’s important to get captured and face Oliver Reed one more time. He has to pay…for luring us into this cinematic diarrhoea.
   Things I neglected to mention.
   One. An ineffectual flaming portcullis trap. Straight from the mind of Gary Gygax. Roll well enough on the dice, and our heroes easily survive Cabot’s Sphere of Conflagration.
   Two. The less said about trying to pick a lock with a sword…the better.
   Three. Oliver Reed would bounce back from this mess and deliver lines about queer giraffes in Gladiator. There, in his sober head, he’s still playing Shakespeare at Stratford, by the riverbank, in the pissing rain.
   But let’s deal this movie the final blow. I have to say, this is some feeble shit I had to sit through. It’s been more than a heartbeat since I sat through something this bad. The Acolyte still takes that crown, though.
   Wookiee Jedi? And he’s going to fight the bad guy? (Dies off-screen in his fucking chair. Still hurts. Dies in an office chair, staring at his accounts. Harsh.)
   Our hero has equipped himself with a bow. More importantly, he’s found ammo as well. Earlier in the movie he watched while a woman was branded. Here’s the same woman again. She’s threatened with fiery death…and he just watches.
   Did he really not like the look of her? Was she not using enough hairspray? The leading lady consumed the hairspray budget, it is true. Well, this ritual sacrifice goes as expected. Twice in the film our leading man has the chance to step in and save this woman. He fails spectacularly.
   What’s left? Save everyone else. Fire an arrow through Oliver Reed’s neck. No, seriously. Then he can fall to his fiery death – just to confirm that he’s still alive as he hits the flames, and then there is no way back for him in a possible sequel.
   Sequel?
   To this warm garbage? It isn’t good enough to be hot garbage. This reheated garbage. A sequel? You are fucking kidding me. But wait a bit. Here’s Jack Palance…who has form in the cheap fantasy section of cinema…
   He turns up to introduce himself. O………kay. Meanwhile, our hero returns home. Where he punches out the dude who annoyed him and stole his gal. There’s a moral in here somewhere. The moral is…YouTube should allow me to watch shit films at Warp Factor 10, Mr Sulu.
   The scenes in our world, at the beginning and end of the movie, should have been cut out of the movie – along with all the other scenes. But we return to sequel territory. The tale ends with Jack Palance, this time in a mad fucking hat. There’s a wild declaration about ol’ Jack’s drive for power, here.
   And the only man who can stop him is the guy who just fucked off back to his own planet. Right. Gotcha. No chance of making a sequel to this nonsense, right. Who is behind the production?
   Cannon. A hit-and-miss company with many a cinematic stinker under the brand. Some gems, it’s true. Cannon’s financial history is of greater interest than the film output. Of course Cannon would go after the sequel. I’m not sure I have the mental strength to see me through another one of these efforts. Not even at double speed, and skipping the credits.