Ghostbusters; More Holtzman, please

It doesn’t bother me at all that they’ve remade Ghostbusters with women. Women are in my top two favourite genders. I can’t think of anything women don’t improve. My problem is that on the one hand, they didn’t have faith in their new cast, and on the other hand they forgot what made the original movie really pop. It wasn’t the special effects; it was the swagger. The original, male, ghostbusters defied authority. They weren’t afraid of no ghosts. They also weren’t afraid of The Man.

The new ghostbusters? Not so much with fronting up The Man. Which is a pity, since every single actress there is more than equal to getting right up in The Man’s grill. I’d been looking forward to seeing Melissa McCarthy saying solemnly “Yes, this man has no dick.” Not just because it’s a great scene which could have withstood endless repetition, but because giving a woman that line would be even funnier.

From some points of view, the new version is an improvement on the first movie; it’s got a tighter, almost TV-episode plot, and this time the black Ghostbuster has some real weight as a character. These are useful improvements. And Chris Hemsworth’s idiot secretary is good fun, not least because it’s no longer practical to write a female character that transparently stupid.

But it’s a movie which struggles to get out from under its original, winking back at it all the time, and then dragging in more and more cameo roles from every surviving cast member of the original. I mean, I didn’t hate seeing Sigourney Weaver popping up over the credits, but if you want to make a movie, make that movie. Don’t keep reminding us that you’re making a copy of it.

The upside of it all is that it’s done well enough at the box office that a sequel’s more likely than not. And no-one really rates the “original” sequel. So it’s all to play for if they go for Ghostbusters 2. And if they do, they need to double down on this

That. Right there. Best thing in the movie, doing what she does best. Swagger.

Central Intelligence; Chekhov's inflatable gorilla

Central Intelligence is an anti-bullying PSA wrapped up in a bad spy thriller. And when I say “wrapped up” I want to you to imagine an elephant wrapped in a single serving cheese slice.

It’s also a movie in which Snowball gets funnied off the screen by Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson, which isn’t surprising, but after Kevin Hart’s wonderful turn as Snowball, it was a disappointment to see him doing a generic stressed out middle class black guy straight out of the 80s movie they seem to have wedged their bullying movie into.

Other than that rather obvious point, it’s kind of an amiable mess. It reminded me a lot of Knight and Day, if you could somehow imagine Cameron Diaz being played by a hysterical Kevin Hart while the Rock channelled Tom Cruise. There’s a ditz in over his/her head and an amiable super spy who keeps coming up with ever more lunatic methods to get the ditz out of trouble and closer to the McGuffin. The spy movie end of things feels as though it’s been sitting in a desk drawer for years waiting for a green light; it’s the same old same old notion of a widget which the bad guys want to to buy and the good guys want to keep. The bullying movie is more interesting, but only because the Rock has had his standard brand super hero rewritten to be amiably bonkers. Given that he’s obsessed with movies from the eighties when his character is written to be a teenager in the 1990s, I now find myself tempted to carbon date the script as more than ten years old.

Anyhow, there are occasional jokes, the odd interesting stunt, and an inspired use of an inflatable gorilla which I worked out about ten seconds ahead of time, making me slightly more intelligent than the desired audience for a movie which was advertised with the tag line “You need a little Hart and a big Johnson”.

The Secret Life of Pets; More Snowball!

The Secret Life of Pets had a fun trailer showing pets getting up to all sorts of things when their owners left, which seemed promising. Specifically, promising anarchy, which I am a fan of. The actual movie is, perhaps inevitably, another one of those things where a well-meaning idiot gets into trouble, undertakes an epic journey, learns some lessons and discovers the importance of friendship. I could blame Contour, I could blame kid friendly programming, or I could simply accept that by the time you’ve worn yourself out imagining cool things to animate, there might not be anything left in the tank for a cool story stringing it all together. And then I can sit there enjoying the lunacy, assuming that the lunacy has been delivered on schedule.

The Secret Life of Pets delivers an acceptable level of goofy stupidity, even if a week later I’m having trouble remembering any of the details. There’s a wander across Manhattan which is full of the kind of invention that wasn’t there for the plot. There’s lots of cat jokes. And most importantly, there’s Snowball, who provides about 110% of all the energy on offer in the movie. Once Snowball explodes onto the scene, plotting the overthrow of all humanity, I lost all interest in the domesticated heroes, and just wanted a whole movie devoted to Snowball wrecking things like some sort of demented cross between Heath Ledger’s Joker and Bugs Bunny on a bad hair day.

I could bend my own head into a pretzel wondering about how right-on it is to have Kevin Hart voicing a white rabbit who’s rebelling against the slavery of pets by humans, but while it was happening I was just enjoying the sheer audacity of it all. As the action builds to a climax, Snowball steals a bus and starts barrelling over the Brooklyn Bridge; the only nod to realism is that he can’t work the wheel AND the pedals, and if you stop to wonder how he stole the bus in the first place, there’s something dead inside you and we can never be friends, though I will happily engage you to manage my money because that’s the kind of soulless dedication to detail I like in a fiduciary. My actual friends will be nodding slightly to the Beastie Boys and hoping the bus ride goes on forever. It doesn’t, but until it stops, everything seems possible.

Snowball aside, it’s hard to buy into it; this is a movie where the side characters are more interesting than the main characters, because they all do one thing and do that well for just long enough to entertain us before bouncing off the screen. The main characters - well, it’s great that Gidget is an empowered female just driving things along, but if she has a conversation with a named female character which ISNT about her quest to get back her man, I missed it. At the time, that annoyed me less than the fact that Gidget was full of moxie and Max was at best an amiable moocher with a modicum of charm and not quite enough brains to notice that he was stupid. Gidget didn’t need to settle for that when she plainly could have had her pick of the pet world. 

But never mind that. Snowball. Who, like all criminal masterminds is eliminated at the end by irony, in this case getting suckered back into slavery by a little girl stroking him. So this time next year I damn well EXPECT a sequel about his rescue and riproaring rampage of revenge.

Independence Day: Resurgence. Hazard Moppets

There’s a moment in Independence Day: Resurgence when I said, out loud, in the cinema, “hazard moppets”. Emmerich conjured up a bunch of kids specifically so that they could blunder into the elaborate, stupid, trap which lies at the heart of his movie’s climax. Boldly led by Hazard Grandpa, because what could be more riveting than Jeff Goldblum’s dad running into him at the worst possible moment. Actual riveting, one of the most boring, yet noisy and dangerous, things in the world; that’s what could have been more riveting, and also more fun.

ID: R is one of those movies which succeeds only to the extent that it reminds you of something better. Skilfully loading the dice against itself on that score, it packs the cast with people who were fun in the first, better, movie and pretty much the only fun to be had in the new one. The kids never had a chance. If you’re in the mood to save yourself two hours and a modest sum of money, you can get most of the fun to be had in ID: R by watching the trailer up to the bit when Jeff Goldblum deadpans “They like to get the landmarks.” 

This is the kind of movie which sets out to trade on your fond memories of the original and winds up making you wonder if the original was any damn good at all. Well, I’m not going to make the time to check it out, just in case it turns out that twenty years ago I was easily pleased. But I do remember original ID as being a bit better paced. The new movies flails about trying to get us invested in the cast’s newcomers, and then throws a big mid-movie disaster in to get the stakes up, followed by yet another plucky attempt to take out the mothership by subterfuge. 

For all practical purposes, it’s the original movie, with more grey hair and more CGI. The grey hair adds something; the extra CGI takes it all back out again. There are some perfectly good ideas; the notion that the aliens would come back for seconds is a good one, and so is the idea that humans would have spent the last twenty years reverse engineering alien tech to get ready for the re-match. Good ideas are not, in the end, enough. Neither are CGI spectacles. And everything runs on coincidence; no matter what happens, there’s always a member of the principal cast to watch it. That’s a narrative convenience I can overlook; but when that rando runs into someone else who has no business ever getting near them … which runs to the grand climax of the Levinson family reunion, an idea so dumb it makes everything else look plausible by comparison. And of course there’s a dog which has to be recognised. 

I had way too much time to ponder the alien business model. In the first movie, they were just a bunch of dickish aliens come to take all of our stuff and kill us when we got in the way. This is a terrible business plan; if you have the kind of energy that can let you move from one star to another, you have the kind of energy which lets you make whatever you want, right where you are. However, compared to the new business plan, it’s bordering on genius. It now turns out that the aliens go from planet to planet, drilling into them to extract the molten core. Which they somehow use for building more ships or whatevs. 

Yeah. About that. The earth’s molten core is utterly unremarkable. There’s a bunch of iron, and there’s traces of other lighter elements, but nothing you couldn’t hammer together from other sources or find stuck in the core of pretty much any rocky planet anywhere. Even assuming that you decided it was cheaper to travel than to synthesise, for every inhabited planet with an iron core, there are almost certainly hundreds of uninhabited ones. It wouldn’t be worth the energy cost of wiping out the defence forces of an inhabited planet to get at the core when you could have your pick of hundreds of other ones without a fight.

And the science; the alien ship is so huge, it has its own gravity. Until it doesn’t, somehow. Extracting the iron core will switch off the earth’s magnetic field (almost certainly true) which will mean the atmosphere will disappear (complete crap; the earth’s atmosphere is not magnetic. Losing that much of the earth’s mass would certainly affect our ability to retain atmosphere in the long haul, and not having a magnetic field would play havoc with the delicate balance of electromagnetic fields and ionised layers in the atmosphere that keep a lot of solar radiation from getting down to the surface, but …) and so on. I hope there’s a DVD extra that consists entirely of a fed up physicist explaining that science does not work this way.

It’s not terrible. It’s just not good. It takes a couple of perfectly good ideas, and some half way fun characters, and just rehashes all the old story beats from the first movie. And fun and all as it is to watch Jeff rehash the David Levinson character, it would be just as much fun to watch him hash it the first time.

X-Men Apocalypse; Magneto is Donald Trump

X-Men Apocalypse is a profoundly stupid movie, as if anything based on a comic book has much chance of being anything else, but since Bryan Singer has clearly believes the whole X-men project is a platform for him to speak his mind about minorities, I’m going to take him at his intention, and ask him if he’s really thought this message all the way through.

We’ve now lived through six X-Men movies not counting Wolverine movies, which are the It’s Not Lupus of the X-Men infection. There’s the first three, which fell apart, and the next three which amount to a desperate struggle to reboot things into an alternative universe where Bret Ratner doesn’t exist. You think that’s mean? X-Men Apocalypse takes a moment from its busy schedule to lay down a sick burn on Bret Ratner’s master work X Men Last Stand. And the whole way through this, the underlying subtext is that we should be nice to minorities, and accept people who are different to us.

Which, before I go further, I completely endorse. 

What we don’t want to be going around accepting is rampaging arseholes. Accepting rampaging arseholes is a bad plan. Confronting them is messy, ugly, and the best you can hope for is getting way too close to arseholes, and everything that comes out of them, while the worst you can dread is no-one being able to tell the difference between you and the arseholes after a while. But if you don’t confront them, you’re going to live in a world run the arsehole way, because arseholes want things their way, and the hell with the rest of us. 

And whether Bryan Singer likes it or not, the X-Men movies are a celebrity endorsement for arseholes. Who, let’s face it, have things way too much their own way as it is, without well meaning efforts to cheer for entitlement.

That escalated pretty fast, you might be thinking. Well, so did the Man With Tiny Hands campaign, and I am now going to tell you why one thing leads to another.

One of the minor mysteries of our age is why so many people in dead end jobs think that a maniacal millionaire can possibly be their saviour. Surely, well meaning socialists of my acquaintance keep wringing their hands, people can see that a fair world would have equal rights and prospects for everyone. It turns out, that’s not how a lot of people think. A lot of people see nothing wrong with a grossly unequal society. They can see how sweet things are for the people at the top of that society, and they’d like to be just like them. That kind of life would suit them fine, and they can see damn fine that the people at the top haven’t done anything amazing to earn their wealth. Their only problem with the system is that right now, they’re not at the top. And in their minds, a “fair” system would give them a better chance of getting all that money for nothing. Just them, personally. Not all those other guys.

And X-Men is like the logical working out of that fantasy. All the X-Men are outsiders, ignored by society, but secretly brilliant, and as soon as they’re given a chance, they can be wonderful with way less effort than it take to learn to play the guitar badly. That’s the message of the X-Men; if we could just change the world so that we’d get the recognition we deserve, we could have all the nice things. And that’s a very lower case “we". It’s the “we" you hear from a basement dwelling internet troll who’s trying to pretend to be Legion as he explains how "those blast points are too precise for sand people and everyone knows this really”. It’s not the “we” of a community.

Movies like the X-Men movies help to popularise and cement that mindset. We’ve had twenty years of this nonsense, and it’s starting to rot people’s minds, just the way that thirty years of computer games have given us a generation of mid level economic decision makers who think that the simple-minded models of Sim City and countless other “sandbox” games are a meaningful parallel for the real world. 

But they’re just movies! No, they’re propaganda. Anything which costs a fortune - and these movies cost a fortune - is going to reflect the outlooks of people who have fortunes. And people who have fortunes want to keep them, and make them bigger, and they sure don’t want anyone knocking on the door questioning the status quo and looking for some of that money. So let’s not be seeing any movies which might get people’s minds working that way. If we can, let’s be seeing movies which make people accept the status quo; get them to buy the idea that the people in charge are unique, and special, and deserve to be in charge because of their inner greatness. You know what, we laugh at those idiots trying to make movies out of the works of Ayn Rand, but the only thing that’s really funny is that anyone thinks there’s a NEED to make movies expressly about Ayn Rand’s ideas.

Still, it’s a big jump to call Magento Donald Trump, isn’t it? I mean, Michael Fassbender is so dreamy. Dreamy, dreamy, dreamy. Happens I agree with that, but Magneto is a monster, and every X-Men movie gives him a free pass. And none more so than this movie. That’s what got my motor running.

Like all modern crap summer movies, X-Men Apocalypse has an - the word will come to me - oh yeah - apocalypse going on. There’s a monster from the deep past, and he wants to destroy everything and make the world suit him. Like most movie villains, he’s an assclown. Dug up out of the ground by accident, he wanders round the world, or Poland anyway, looking for henchmen. So Magneto; good choice, really. Certified monster, can manipulate metal, which is everywhere. And some other random chick with white hair, who can manipulate weather. Another good choice. Then two complete bystanders, one with the superpower of flying, which in this world is like having the superpower of eating your food with a knife and fork, and the other whose superpower is wearing stripperriffic spandex and cutting up things within about twenty feet of her. No way they’re going to be much help in conquering the world. Maybe if he just wanted to conquer, I don’t know, Podunk, Idaho.

Anyhow, his key henchperson is Magneto, who spends the back half of the movie destroying landmarks all over the world. Meanwhile his boss has completely levelled Cairo to make himself a pyramid out of the ruins. Between them, I don’t know how many people they killed. We literally don’t see a survivor in Cairo, population 12 million. Magneto is scragging everything from the George Washington Bridge to the Sydney Opera House; there’s no way that doesn’t come with a body count. By the time the “good” X-Men show up to do something about it, Cairo’s a pile of rubble and half the industrialised world’s infrastructure is ruins. And in the thirty minute punch up that follows, we don’t see a single living person who’s not a member of the elite. 

So far, so stupid Marvel movies. They level cities all the time. But this time the coda really got on my nerves. Because there’s a happy ending. Just for the good guys, not for anyone else. Half way through the movie, the Xavier Academy for entitled douchebags gets blown to bits [1]. And at the end of the movie, Magneto and Jean Grey are patiently putting it all back together again, just the way it was, using their superpowers. It’s not just that Magneto is completely off the hook for his latest monster fit (there’s a cute voiceover in which the TV tells us that he was instrumental in stopping the Apocalypse, which he completely was by, you know, stopping doing what he was doing). It’s that with half the world in ruins, Cairo flattened, and god knows how many hospitals and water treatment plants and what all completely buggered up thanks to Magneto he’s whiling away his time before disappearing rebuilding the Xavier Academy for entitled douchebags. And that’s when I cracked, really. That’s what makes Magneto Trump. Ruin everything around you, take the blame for nothing, and then do some small token thing which cheers you up and only benefits your rich friends, and ignore all the other devastation you’ve created.

X-Men. Screw those guys.

[1] Apart from the fact that it’s Xavier’s academy for entitled douchebags being blown up, which is objectively a great idea, it’s also the coolest scene in the movie, since it’s got the Speedster running around saving everyone. Just like the last movie, the Speedster is the best thing in it. And the actor deserves all the love, because it took him three and a half months, or something like four weeks for every minute on screen. He’s practically in another movie, and I’d much rather watch that one. 

The NIce Guys; why couldn't this have been a TV Show?

Maybe it’s just me, but the charm of detective stories is not the endless parade of murders, but your sense of connection to the working stiffs trying to figure out what happened to the not-working-any-more stiffs. I am inclined to think I’ve stumbled into the mainstream on this one, since it’s a good explanation for the endless parade of cop serials on TV.

The Nice Guys was in development hell for a while as a TV serial, and they made it into a movie when they just couldn’t get the pilot to gel. Based on the movie, they gave up too soon. It would have made a great TV serial, although if the money’s out there for a show about a couple of mismatched lunkheads who are stumbling through their lives as much as through their cases, just bring back Terriers. 

That said, the TV show probably wouldn’t have been able to afford Russell Crowe. They wouldn’t have had the money for Ryan Gosling either, but Ryan could probably be replaced by any number of smaller actors. I’m not sure that The Nice Guys would have worked as well without Crowe’s Jackson Healy. Crowe hasn’t been this - loveable - since Gladiator. Healy ought to be a terrible person, and yet somehow he’s not. I’m not sure how Crowe does it, but somehow he gets the most likeable character in the whole movie out of a guy who beats people up for money. Healy’s about the smartest man in the whole show, which is not difficult, but he’s also somehow the decentest. I could have watched Healy all day, but I’m pretty sure no-one could afford to pay Crowe to play him for that long.

Crowe apart, it’s a Shane Black movie. There’s a mismatched duo. There’s a young daughter in peril who’s also the smartest person in the movie. There’s any number of effete villains fleering around the place and beating up the heroes. There’s a briefcase, which I was amazed to see did not have a bomb in it. There’s an action climax at a big outdoor event full of rich people. There’s a McGuffin which gives away the tawdry secrets of rich connected scumbags. These are all good things. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is a great little movie. The Long Kiss Goodbye is one of the best stupid thrillers I’ve ever seen. I still watch The Last Boy Scout from time to time just to cheer myself up. They are all, in their own ways, assembled from the same simple bag of components that Black has been using since he was a screen-writing wunderkind introducing us to Martin Riggs - back in those happy days when we all believed that Mel Gibson was just acting crazy. 

It’s not a great Shane Black movie. That’s a split between The Long Kiss Goodbye if you just want thrills, and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang if you want something a bit more meta. But even a not-great Shane Black movie is a lot of fun. It probably helps to have seen some of his other stuff, because a lot of the jokes are sour glances at his earlier work. When things go wrong, and they go wrong all the time, it’s funnier when you realise that they’re things which would have been miraculously effective in more mainstream thrillers.

The running gag - and the thing which could have held up any amount of TV episodes - is that Healy and March are the worst detectives ever. Healy at least knows he isn’t a real detective, but he’s naive enough to think that real detectives exist. Meanwhile March is convinced that he’s a real detective, and the movie mercilessly undercuts every “insight” he has. March is the kind of person who can say “You know who else was following orders? Hitler.” and think he’s made the winning move in the argument; Healy’s look of utter incredulity as the camera comes back to him is almost worth the ticket price all on its own. If they could have found someone to swap in for Crowe, and a way to keep writing nonsense for him to react to, they could have had something which would run forever, or at least until the loveable precocious pre-teen kid got too old to be a proper foil for the so-called grownups. Donal Logue would have been great, but if you’ve got money and Donal Logue, bring back Terriers. As I keep saying.

The Lone Hero; The Gray Man, Orphan X, Victor the Assassin

I’m never getting any of this time back. Ten days of reading time, a snatched minute here, a distracted lunch break there, and all I’ve got to show for it is this sense of numb bewilderment. These books are popular - Orphan X (Greg Hurwitz) even got a favourable review in the Guardian - and that must mean they’re pushing a lot of buttons somewhere. 

I’ve mumbled before that our villains tell us what we’re scared of, whether it’s vampires standing in for shadowy elites poisoning our sense of community or zombies standing in for the faceless hordes coming to take our stuff. Now I’m wondering if our heroes tell us what we admire, or what. If today’s thriller heroes really do say anything about our values, it’s scarier than zombies.

The gold standard of lone hero narrative is - YMMV - Chandler’s endlessly quotable mission statement for the noir hero

Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness.

Today, we are not talking about those guys. We are talking about guys who can barely talk, for starters.

Well, let’s not be picky. Not everyone can be Chandler. Not every character can have Philip Marlowe’s voice. That’s not what I’m trying to pick at here. What’s bugging me is that today’s lone heroes are outsiders defined almost entirely by their ability to kill other people. Even though the Gray Man and Orphan X are explicitly put forward as people trying to be good guys, the way they go about being good guys is to schwack people who they think are bad guys. What makes them men of honor in their context is that they choose who to kill, rather than doing as they’re told by someone else.

I got down this rabbit hole because Back Blast - the newest Gray Man book - was cheap and I was curious about whether it sorted anything out for Courtland Gentry, proud owner of the weirdest name in state sanctioned murder. That hinted me into The Hunter, Victor’s debut. I’m ashamed to say that I bought Orphan X by accident; it looked cheap and I got it mixed up with something else I had in my “maybe” list. I’d finished it by the time I noticed it getting a favourable review in the Guardian. I sort of agreed with that review; Orphan X is competently written and the protagonist’s superpowers are credibly undercut by his knack for getting things wrong on the big picture. But what it all boiled down to was for a couple of weeks I was immersed in a peculiar world where men were men and everything else was some kind of target, and now I’ve emerged blinking wondering what the hell it says about the world we live in.

Back Blast sorts out all Court Gentry’s problems, at the expense of turning a whole five-thriller series into the world’s longest origin story; finally the Gray Man’s off the hook and rehabilitated, and the CIA wants to put his superpowers to good use killing bad people. I’ve got just enough respect for Mark Greaney to suspect this is all going to wind up not working out as advertised and his new friends in the CIA will spend the next few books bamboozling him. But; lots of people get killed, you can’t trust big gummint, and somewhere out there, there’s a factory churning out young men who can kill anything that walks and most things that don’t. Orphan X; product of an elite killing machine factory has gone into business for himself killing people because they look bad to him; by the end of the book, lots of people get killed, you can’t trust big gummint, and the protagonist is set up for a life of further adventures killing more people. And The Hunter; lots of people get killed, you can’t trust big gummint, and at the end the protagonist has been pushed into working for the CIA to use his killing powers for good - not that I imagine that will work at all as planned; see under you can’t trust big gummint.

And these guys are just the ones I was reading this last couple of weeks; Jack Reacher kills all around him and you can’t trust big gummint, and John Milton kills all around him, and you ...

You can never trust big gummint, and I wouldn’t argue that you should. But all these guys are loners, full of weird skills and no hobbies. Some have no money and possessions (Reacher, Milton, The Gray Man on his bad days) others have way more money than is remotely credible (Orphan X, Victor), but they always seem to have whatever they want and no real needs; maybe they like a particular kind of vodka, but half the stuff in their lives seems to be there because it struck the author as a cool signifier of some kind. There seems to be no point to them beyond their deadliness. You can read all the Marlowe books without ever getting a full sense of his life; family? previous career? thoughts for the future? A mystery, pretty much. But before you’ve got half way through any of them, you know what kind of person Marlowe is, and what he’s going to do when the going gets tough. All you know about today’s loners is that they kill stuff.

And we’re supposed to be OK with that; these are the protagonists, and the world’s their target range. They pick the people who are bad enough to kill, and by reading along we’re tacitly endorsing the choices - more than that, we’re tacitly endorsing the idea that it’s OK for lone murderers to decide who lives and and dies. Today’s heroes are vigilantes. Let’s hope I’m reading way too much into that.