Captain Marvel

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Hello dear reader! It’s been a while and for that I can only apologise. However, here is its entirety is my five cents on Captain Marvel and the MCU’s ever so slightly anticipated first female lead superhero film. Are you all sitting comfortably? Good, then I shall begin…

To paraphrase Star Wars and get it completely wrong, ‘Not so long ago, in a galaxy very close nearby…’ there was a very small but very vocal band of morons, cockwombles and general imbeciles, who took it upon themselves to make sure that equality in movies was not allowed and should under no circumstances be tolerated. These idiots or TWATS (Totally Worthless Argumentative Tosspots) were generally of the white and male persuasion and they all seemed to get very worked up when their beloved gender was pushed to the side-lines and not given star billing. This behaviour was further compounded and made worse, if the TWATS happened to find out that there was a film being made that dared to not have a male or males in it as the lead character. I enter 2016’s Ghostbusters into the record as evidence. When it was announced that this franchise was getting an all-female reboot, the internet was awash with digital rattles being thrown out of prams, message boards were clogged up with misogynistic mission statements and a very small corner of society cried out with one voice ‘it won’t be any good without men in it’. Thankfully the other much larger corner of society replied back in unison ‘Oh please do go forth and multiply and when you’ve finished doing that, please feel free to go forth and do it again’. As you can imagine, once the TWATS, who are always on the lookout for something new to complain about, found out that there was going to be a female led superhero film and a female led superhero film from the ‘boys only club’ that was the MCU, they couldn’t get to their keyboards fast enough. 

Apoplectic rage and a cacophony of unchecked prepubescent hormones poured forth from the TWATS. There were attempts to post negative reviews for it on various websites, in order to try and generate bad press, weeks before even the critics had seen it. These defective early review attempts were mostly ignored and Rotten Tomatoes, to their credit, removed all of the entries they’d received before its release and even went so far as to issue a press statement that declared that until Captain Marvel was on general release (and again I’m paraphrasing slightly incorrectly) ‘Any attempt to post before March 8th will result in the comments being deleted and your account being suspended and oh, the next time you find yourself in a supermarket, buy a life etc etc’. This of course resulted in some of the TWATS playing the 1st amendment card and having them say that you can’t stop freedom of speech. To which came the thunderous reply in unison ‘yes we can, jog on…’ 

I am very happy to report that despite the TWATS best efforts to derail this film and stop people going to see it. See it they did and to the tune of an opening weekend that took over $455 million dollars worldwide. And whichever way you try and spin it, that makes the efforts of the misogynistic misfits about as useful and practical as cheese socks…

So what about the actual film itself? You know, based on merit and not on some preconceived notion that estrogen and action are as bad a combination as say Trump & Taco’s. Well, I’m going to write this as clearly and as concisely as I can. The film ROCKS! It’s an absolute blast and just goes to show that even after the 3471 MCU films that have come before it, it is still possible to come up with things that we, the movie paying audience, have not seen before. There are bad guys that turn out to be good guys. Good guys that turn out to be bad guys. A cat called Goose that quite possibly steals the entire film and a well written protagonist that is capable of producing more power and energy than Brian Blessed after a dozen cans of Red Bull. There’s a shape shifting alien that has a very strong Australian accent, which does help you keep track of who he’s currently morphed into. A supreme intelligence that could very well be what Amazon’s ‘alexa’ will look like in about two hundred years from now. Oh, and did I mention the cat? Trust me you need to go and see Captain Marvel for the cat. 

It’s a two hour fun fest that doesn’t really require a PhD for you to follow the plot. Its mid-credit sting sets up Avengers: End Game very nicely and its post credit sting includes a very odd looking fur ball. If I do have any niggles about Captain Marvel, they are small ones. Agent Coulson is under used. I’m still not sure I like the reveal about how Fury ends up wearing his eye patch and Jude Law plays a character called ‘Yon-Rogg’ which to me sounds like a flat pack wardrobe you could buy in Ikea. However, as I stated before, he’s are small points that don’t detract from the film in any way at all.  Captain Marvel is very strong four out of five star film. It’s funny when it needs to be. It has a great cast that have the proven acting chops to deal with the subject material and make it looking convincing and although I’ve only just seen it, I would currently quite happily slot it into my top 5 MCU films. One day I may actually try and list all of the MCU films in order of preference but I suspect that may require wine and a little bit of concentration. I also haven’t figured out how to slip The Dark Knight into the list without anyone noticing yet either…    

Now, I do need to raise the subject of Stan Lee cameo in Captain Marvel but before I do I should state for the record that I was starting to get a little bit bored of them. Sure they were fun to begin with and more often than not, they raised a smile and a laugh but I was beginning to firmly plant my feet in the ‘enough already’ camp. That was until Captain Marvel. Stan actually has two cameos in this film. The first being his image being used in the opening Marvel logo, which has not been done before. However, it’s the second and bigger standard cameo that I need to discuss. In the past Stan has basically played various bit parts. Everything from a cleaner in a Library, a school bus driver, to a FedEx driver delivering a phone for Tony Stank. This all changed with his cameo in Captain Marvel. The film takes place in 1995 and from the looks of it Stan is practicing his lines for the cameo he has in Kevin Smiths ‘Mallrats’. So what’s the problem I hear you ask? Well, if that turns out to be true and accurate, then he’s playing himself. I’ll just let you think about that for a second…

If he is indeed playing himself and according to IMDb he is, then effectively he’s in a film populated with characters he created and inspired. Or to put it another way, he’s God. Now don’t get me wrong, this doesn’t or hasn’t detracted from my enjoyment of the film in any way at all but I do think it’s worth pointing out that as cameos go, it’s a bit of a game changer. For obvious reasons the Stan’s cameos will son stop but from what research I have managed to cobble together from ye olde internet, he has filmed cameos for Avengers: End Game and for Spider-man: Far From Home, which I’m now actually looking forward to seeing. 

Just a quick aside, has anyone else picked up on the fact that Spider-Man: Far From Home is not only the only MCU Phase 4 film that’s been announced, it’s the only one that’s been in production. I understand that they want to keep End Game under wraps as much as possible and the more films they announce for Phase 4, the more we’ll now about who’s left standing at the finish of End Game. But if that is the reasoning behind the decision, then why announce and make Far From Home? If you’re reading this then, and I’m going to assume you are, you’ll have watched last year’s Infinity War and you’re fully aware that Peter Parker did not survive ‘The Snappening’ but we know that he’ll be back.  For a studio that has consistently released two, sometimes three MCU films a year since 2008, I do find it odd that there is nothing else officially confirmed for 2020 and beyond. That said, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Kevin Feige held a press conference a week after End Game was release and announced to the world that they’d been secretly filming multiple projects on the quiet for the last six months or so. I guess we’ll have to wait and see. One this is for sure though. Given how much the general public seems to be in love with MCU films and how much money they are currently generating, there will definitely be a Phase 4. It’s a question of when not if…

So, in closing I’ll say this. If you only see one film this year, make sure its End Game. If you’re prepared to go and see more than one, I’d recommend Captain Marvel and possibly Star Wars: Episode IX at the end of the year as well. The rest of this year’s cinema going is of course entirely down to your own personal taste and preference and should I make it back to the cinema anytime soon, you will of course get to read about it here. Thanks for reading trough to the end. It’s very much appreciated.

Excelsior…

Twitter Review:

Captain, Coulson & Fury makes three. Smoke & mirrors with the Skrulls & Kree. 

#PilotsPerception&Power  

Useful Links:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4154664/?ref_=nv_sr_1

https://www.empireonline.com/movies/captain-marvel/review/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1BCujX3pw8

Ghostbusters

Hello dear reader,

9724 Days, or 1389 Weeks, or 233,376 Hours, or 14,002,560 Minutes.

That’s how long the gap has been between Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters and the Ivan Reitman sequel that hit the screens back in December of 1989. Twenty seven years of trying to get the third film off the ground. Several false starts. Numerous rewrites and more drafts than you’d normally see in your average double glazing advert. So why did Columbia Pictures spend put so much time and effort into getting what would have been Ghostbusters III off the ground? The simple answer to that is money. The original that hit the screens back in 1984 was, and by some considerable distance, the year’s biggest box office draw and although the 1989 sequel wasn’t as big of a hit. It crept in at number 7 on the top 10 of the year, with Batman, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Lethal Weapon 2, claiming the top three positions, it put enough bums on seats to get a script the green light. Now it’s one thing for a studio to want a another sequel but it’s a whole other ball game to get one made when one of the principle stars isn’t overly keen on making it. The star in question being Mr Bill Murray. Now, for those of you who don’t know much about Mr Murray when he’s not entertaining you on the silver screen or on your TV’s, Ipad’s, laptops etc, he is, shall we say, a little bit eccentric. He’s walks to the beat of his own drum and doesn’t really do things the way that others in Hollywood would consider ‘normal’. For example, he doesn’t have an agent, he has an answer phone and from time to time he’s known to listen to it. Rumour has it that when Sofia Coppola couldn’t get hold of Murray when she was trying to get Lost in Translation off the ground, she had to hire a private investigator to track him down.

So it’s safe to say that if Bill decides he doesn’t want to do something he doesn’t do it. Dan Ackroyd and the late Harold Ramis spent a long time trying to get Murray to change his mind but they never did. The closest they came was getting him to agree to it but only if his character ‘Dr Peter Venkman’ was killed off in the first act and then only appeared sparingly, throughout the rest of the film as a ghost. After about fifteen years of back and forth and several unsuccessful meetings Ackroyd, Ramis and Columbia Pictures gave up and the Ghostbusters franchise seemed to be forever languish in development hell.

Then came along Paul Feig, a man whose recent directorial efforts had shown he had a knack for making funny films. He set his stall out, made his pitch and before you could say misogyny and internet backlash he had a healthy budget to play with and marketing campaign that practically looked after itself.  The words ‘Female Reboot’ shouldn’t really be considered as dangerous. But given some of the reaction to this film, when it was announced that the four main lead characters were going to be lacking in that ‘ever so important’* Y Chromosome, you’d have thought that someone had announced that men were being rounded up in there thousands and being subjected to unspeakable horrors, like having their testosterone removed at needlepoint. I have mentioned kneejerk backlash, regarding casting decisions in previous blogs. Daniel Craig being a ‘Blonde Bond’ and Ben Afleck as Batman but the casting of four women in a comedy nearly broke the internet, at least twice.

*Sarcasm klaxon on full volume.

Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon, Lesie Jones and Kristen Wiig. Four names that shouldn’t really cause that much controversy and if they’d been cast together in any other movie, assuming that also hadn’t have been another reboot of a male-centric movie in the first place, it wouldn’t have caused so much as a ripple in the fabric of movie journalism, to say nothing of the internet itself. But because of, what I hope were, a small group of Neanderthal, knuckle dragging, cockwombles (I would have used harsher language but there could be young’uns reading this) these four actresses have spent the better part of the last twelve months having to deal with trolls, and other assorted inbred, dingleberry fondler’s (still trying to keep it clean). Not to mention probably having to answer questions on it, every time they spend the day on a press junket. And you know what, every single one of them. To all the naysayers, all the ‘You’re going to ruin my childhood’ bandwagon jumper-oners and all the people out there that decided to bash this film before it was even released, I say this. GO FECK YOURSELF AND WHEN YOU’VE FINISHED FECKING YOURSELF, GO FECK YOURSELF AGAIN!

Right, I’ve climbed down off my little soapbox and I’ll now get down to the nitty gritty of why most of you are hear, my opinion of the film. Well I have good news and bad news. I’ll start with the good. It’s funny, not only that, it’s very funny. Paul Feig and fellow screenwriter Katie Dippold have come up with what at times is a laugh out loud script and I can’t remember the last time I watched one of those in a cinema. It also isn’t really based around one main lead character with the rest ridding along on the coattails of their mirth and merriment. Everyone gets an equal share of the spotlight and everyone gets to steal scenes throughout the movie. The other thing that screams funny here is Chris Hemsworth as Kevin the receptionist. If you haven’t been sold on the trailers so far and I’ll be honest, I think I fell into that category myself. The film is worth the price of admission purely on his performance. I wouldn’t want to spoil Kevin too much for you but I will say this. He has a dog called Mike Hat (say it out loud) and he has removed the lenses from his glasses because they got dirty. He’s the sort of character that would try and shoot someone with a sword, whilst shouting bang at the same time. Just think Thor with the IQ of a tennis racket and you wouldn’t be too far wide of the mark. But back to our four main leads. They are a very eclectic bunch. Kristen Wiig plays Erin Gilbert, a former friend of Melissa McCarthy’s Abby Yates, who is now trying to make a name for herself in the academia. Which is made harder when it’s brought to her attention that a book on the paranormal, that she co-wrote with Abby, is now available on Amazon. Abby has set her stall out to prove the existence of ghosts with the help of her assistant, Jillian Holtzman. Played by Kate Mckinnon, who by the way is nothing short of astoundingly brilliant. The three of them end up ‘leaving’ their respective position’s and team up to confirm and provide proof that ghosts are real. It’s whilst they are investigating the paranormal they come across Patty Tolan, a no nonsense, hardworking and  very outgoing MTA employee, played by Leslie Jones. The four of them team up and pull their resources to form…..wait for it, ‘GHOSTBUSTERS’. (Bet you didn’t see that coming did you!)

So to sum up the good news, I’ll say this. It’s fairly obvious that Ghostbusters has had a lot of time and effort spent on it. Twenty seven years to be exact. Paul Feig has done a great job in assembling a top notch cast and with the notable absence of Rick Moranis all of the original cast appear in cameo roles. Even the late and great Harold Ramis puts in a, blink and you’ll miss it, appearance as a bronze bust. There is a credit sting and as for the credits themselves, I’ll say this. If you like your Norse Gods with a bit of the Saturday Night Fever about them, you’re in for a very big treat.

Now for what I shall call the bad news. Or as I suspect some of you will say ‘Bavin, you don’t know what you’re fecking talking about’. For me the biggest let down, and there aren’t many, is the third act. The first two thirds of the film are great and I’d go so far as to say that the opening ten minutes of the film could be described in some corners of the internet, as actually scary. But for me where things go south is the last twenty five minutes or so. The villain of the piece Rowan North played by Neil Casey, stops being creepy and uncomfortable to watch and basically becomes what I would at best characterise as, the big white hype. The whole thing then rips off Poltergeist, pretty much lock stock and barrel, and has people jumping into other dimensions with cables wrapped around their waist and has more continuity errors then you can shake a class four, full roaming vapour at. On the whole though it isn’t a bad film at all. In my humble opinion I would happily sign legal documents to say that it’s a very solid four out of five stars. Columbia Pictures have a film that is not only respectful of what has come before. It’s also good enough to be considered on its own merits. If the universe is a fair and just place and judging on what politicians seem to call normal these days, it must be somewhere! Then I fully expect to see a sequel announced within six weeks of its release date. If they don’t green light a follow up film then going on previous experience it’s likely to be another twenty seven years before someone else comes along and tries a reboot again. And if that happens dear reader, I’ll be just north of seventy and to be honest, unlikely to even be able to spell Ghostbusters.

Twitter Review:

27 years in the making and only slightly overcooked in places. Funny, fresh & full on. 

#We’reReadyToBelieveYou

Useful Links:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1289401/?ref_=nv_sr_1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6hlkIlGFCI

http://www.empireonline.com/movies/ghostbusters-2016/review/

Now You See Me & The Worlds End

Hello dear reader. Just like your local supermarket offering sacks of charcoal on a buy one get one free, or “BOGOF” as it’s known across the land in student union bars, it’s time for me to offer you a two for the price of one, never to be repeated (at least this week) offer for film reviews. No need to collect tokens or send off for something that could take up to twenty eight days for delivery, no, no, no. This ladies and gentlemen is my summer sale. So sit back, relax and enjoy the following appraisal, safe in the knowledge that its interest free, no deposit required and certainly no credit check paperwork to fill in either.
So with no further ado please make sure your seats are in the full and upright position and your tray tables are stowed.

Let me begin….

Recently I had a spare evening with nothing to do and I thought to myself, why not pop off to the local multiplex and see a film. My choice for my evening’s entertainment turned out to be Now You See Me. I’ll keep this brief but I think I can say without too much fear of contradiction that the film and the actors in it are very unlikely to be in contention for any Oscars next year.
Its plot centres around four street magicians who are going know where in their respective fields of illusion. Jessie Eisenberg plays J Daniel Atlas, the man with the generic magic wand. Woody Harrelson is Merrit McKinney, the cold reading specialist. Isla Fisher plays Henley Reeves, the Escapologist and rounding out the group we have Dave Franco (James Franco’s younger brother) who is trying to stay one step ahead of the police as a sleight of hand confidence trickster. These four are brought together by a mystery man in order to pull off the greatest set of magic tricks the world has ever seen.
The film basically follows this rag tag group, who are now known as the “The Four Horsemen”, through these tricks and in the process they take Michael Caine’s Arthur Tressler, for a very large nine figure sum of money. These tricks bring them to the attention of the FBI and Mark Ruffalo’s Dylan Rhodes. Ruffalo seems to spend most of the film trying to suppress his anger and I kept thinking that any second now he’s going to turn green, rip his shirt and start saying Hulk smash. Alas, this doesn’t happen but it would have improved the story a great deal if it had.
The whole film just feels totally formulaic and is at times perilously close to film making by numbers. There’s not much in the way of character development and even the inclusion of the usually good Morgan Freeman just seems like it was tacked on. The director, Louis Leterrier, seems to have put most of his time and effort into trying to visually distract you from the fact that once you take away the smoke and mirrors and it’s just a bit flat and empty.
Oh and before I forget this film does have a twist at the end but if like me you find yourself watching the film and your mind starts to wonder, you’ll figure it out. It also looks like this has been left so there could be a sequel. Should this happen I can only hope that they entrust the screenwriting duties to someone who knows what they’re doing I would recommend that they also trot off and go and ask for some input from the likes of Penn & Teller or even Derren Brown on how to keep an audience on the edge of their seats.
Now You See Me had the potential to be a great film but I did come away thinking that it’s less than the sum of its parts, which isn’t easy to do given the acting talent on display. If you want to see Hollywood doing magic well then I would suggest watching Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige. The story is far more compelling and it had more than one twist up its sleeve that will keep you entertained.

Now on to the second part of my cinema deposition, The Worlds End.

Dictionary.com’s definition of Surprise:
Surprise
[ser-prahyz, suh-] verb, sur•prised, sur•pris•ing, noun
verb (used with object)
To strike or occur to with a sudden feeling of wonder or astonishment, as through unexpectedness:Her beauty surprised me.

My definition of surprise:
Watching The Worlds End

For those of you not in the know this is the third and apparently final part in what is now being called The Cornetto Trilogy. The first two parts being Shaun of the Dead and Hot fuzz respectively. The reason it’s called this is simple. All three films have the ice cream treat in them in some form or another. Personally I think they could have also gone with The Leap Frog Fence Trilogy but you’d probably get more of those studio types happier with product placement with the former and they do say that money talks so I’ll let them keep their title.

When Simon Pegg and Nick Frost first graced our screens together it was in the Edgar Wright directed TV series Spaced. It only lasted fourteen episodes but you could tell even back then that the three of them together were a seamless match for each other. Then came Shaun and Hot Fuzz which cemented them as the big boys on the block when it came to home grown humour.
When it comes to The Worlds End the gang are all back in fine form. Simon Pegg plays Gary King, an anti-hero at the wrong end of his thirties with not much to show for it. He decides that in order to get his life back on track he must complete an epic pub crawl that he and four of this friends failed to complete back in their teens. This pub crawl consists of twelve pints in twelve pubs in their home town, culminating with the final pint being downed in The Worlds End.
As the gang try to reconcile the past and deal with the present they realise that all is not right with the current population and reaching the final watering hole is the least of their worries.

The reason I am surprised by the film is I went into it expecting it to be very good and for the most part it is. I think my problem with it is that the part Simon Pegg plays is so universally unlikable that at times he is hard to watch. I swung back and forth from revulsion towards King to genuinely feeling sorry for him. The rest of the ensemble cast which includes Martin Freeman, Paddy Considine, Rosamund Pike and Eddie Marsan play their parts perfectly as the long suffering friends of Gary. The other little gem in this film, that I far as I can tell, hasn’t been made common knowledge, is a really first class cameo from a former James Bond.  It has some great set pieces and some of the dialogue, especially towards the end, is nothing short of brilliant.

Without giving too much of the game away the baddies in this film are The Network and in order to save the day the main protagonists must rid their home town of Newton Haven of these dastardly wrong doers. This does not come without its consequences but if you like the idea of a film where Nick Frost kicks some serious but, drinking is a necessity and the C-Bomb gets dropped in the same sentence as the word Legoland  then this is a definite must for multiplex viewing. It also happens to have one of the best soundtracks I’ve heard in a very long time. Blur, The Soup Dragons and The Sisters of Mercy to name a few really help move this film along and all of the music used could be considered a co-star in its own right.  The best way I can sum this film up to say it’s the modern day equivalent of Withnail & I Robot.

Go and see this film as it could very well be the last time that Pegg, Frost and Wright make a comedy together. I suspect at some point in the not too distant future a studio will come along with a blank cheque or two and ask them if they’d be interested in making something together again but annoyingly I suspect all three of them are men of integrity.

Now You See Me
Twitter Review:
Hocus pocus with a touch of misdirection and twist so obvious that a rabbit in a hat could see it coming.
#IsThisYourCard?

Useful Links:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1670345/?ref_=sr_1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzJNYYkkhzc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_diRgwPCS8

The Worlds End
Twitter Review:
Pegg. Frost & Wright, saving the world one pint at a time. No designated driver & a universal hangover.....
#LetsBooBoo

Useful Links:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1213663/?ref_=sr_2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFo7eJR2cvc