The Brat Pack

Unexpected bonus on TV last night with the ever excellent Breakfast Club showing, the film where five students are put in Saturday detention and are told to write an essay telling who they think we are are deciding they are a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess and a criminal which i admit isn't selling it very well but it is an amazingly great film.
'Don't you forget about me' by Simple Minds will forever be linked with the film which is in turn forever linked with me by way of being released in 1985 which is the year that i left school and watched it with a bunch of friends who i never really saw again after that day.
What the film is most famous for is starring the Brat Pack actors, a group of eight who starred in either The Breakfast Club or St. Elmo’s Fire but never really hit such heady heights again.
Andrew McCarthy (Kevin - St. Elmo's Fire) turned up in Mannequin, Weekend at Bernie's, Pretty in Pink as well as St. Elmo's Fire and moved into TV work before directing while my favourite Judd Nelson (Alec St Elmo's Fire and the Criminal in Breakfast Club) has been on TV but not in much that i have seen.
Emilio Estevez (Alec St. in Elmos Fire and the athlete in Breakfast Club) made a few films such as The Mighty Ducks but become more famous for being Charlie Sheen's brother and being married briefly to singer Paula Abdul has now semi-retired from acting and directs.
Rob Lowe (Billy St. Elmo's Fire) is currently starring as a policeman in the British TV show Wild Bill but his career took a massive knock back when he filmed himself having sex with a 16-year-old girl, and the tape became public and it never really got back on track.
Demi Moore (Jules St. Elmo's Fire) famously married Bruce Willis and is the most successful of the Brat Pack actors, starring in some big name films while Molly Ringwald (the princess in Breakfast Club) got married, gave it all up and moved to France and Ally Sheedy (Leslie in St. Elmo's Fire and
the basket vase in Breakfast Club) struggled with bulimia and became addicted to sleeping pills.
Anthony Michael Hall (The brain in Breakfast Club) struggled with alcohol and was on many front pages for drunken brawling and although with the exception of Demi Moore, none really went on to bigger and better things.
The geek, the popular girl, the waster, the sports star and the cooky one who spent a Saturday in detention remains one of my favourite films ever, mainly because as a 16 year old girl at the time, all were all real life characters that we all come across during our time at school and had befriended, hated, avoided or in some way had crossed paths with.

Legal Porn

The sticky fingered Damian Green 'Porn on his work computer' scandal is starting to die down and the dust is settling and still he remains in his job although i think some people will be wary of shaking hands with him from now on.   
The Police have said that the Porn he had been watching while getting paid oodles of tax payers money to not do his job was 'legal porn' but i wasn't aware that there was a distinction between what is legal and what isn't in the World of blue movies.
The Government have helpfully written a guide to what is legal and what isn't and it last received an update in 2002 to clarify what is safe to watch and what will get you dragged into a court.
Hardcore pornography was prohibited until 2002 and the possession of pornographic images for private use isn't an offence with the exceptions being 'extreme pornography' which is illegal and carries a three-year prison sentence.
Extreme Pornography is the depiction of certain sex acts including life-endangering, physical or verbal abuse, non-adults, face-sitting, urination, female ejaculation and bestiality.
We must assume then that what Damian Green was watching was none of the above but still, you wouldn't want to use the keyboard after him would you.

Immersive Screening Not So Original

Back in the late 80's a local cinema would screen midnight horror films and the staff would dress up in costume and in the scariest bits of films would jump out from behind pillars dressed as Jason from Halloween, appear suddenly with a torch in front of their masked face or throw cotton wool balls at you and generally try to give you the willies while the film was going on.
Seems our local cinema was ahead of it's time because now it's a thing and they call it 'immersive screenings'.
During some cinema screenings of the disappointingly poor remake of 'IT', a real-life Pennywise the Clown would creep around the auditorium during the film, jumping out at them and basically scaring the living daylights out of everyone there.
'There's huge growth in this area' says Simon Oakes, CEO of British horror brand Hammer, who went on to explain that the younger generation want to be involved in a story rather than told it and they have come up with something completely original.
I am guessing Mr Oakes wasn't in the Portsmouth ABC Cinema in 1987 during the Midnight showing of Nightmare on Elm Street 3 so he probably didn't hear me and my friends scream when Freddie Kruger leapt up from the seat directly in front and lunged as us with knife gloves clicking so i can guarantee that immersive screening works but as for being original, thirty years ago it was but we
just called it scaring the holy sh*t out of the audience.

Not Quite So Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

There are some things that Americans just can't do such as cross the road where they like or make a decent cup of tea because nobody seems to own a teapot but one thing they fail miserably at is faking a British accent.
The high water mark has always been Dick Van Dyke's stab at a bit of cockney in Mary Poppins but he has finally seen fit to issue an apology for acting out: 'the most atrocious Cockney accent in the history of cinema'.
Very good of the actor to hold his hands up and say sorry for giving the British accent a proper mangling although i have never understood why Daphne's in Frasier was so strange, she being English and all.
Anyway, Dick may not have Chimmed his last Chimeney because he has a part in Mary Poppins 2 which is currently being filmed so we may yet have to dig out that spoonful of sugar and dig it in our ears to to help that terrible accent go down.

The King Is Back

Don't know if it is me getting older or Hollywood is to blame but i seem to be visiting the cinema less and less each year and looking at the list of upcoming films this year the cinema seat will be safe from my backside again this year until at least September when Stephen King's 'IT' arrives.
It would be fair to say that i fell out of love with Stephen King and his novels a few years ago, the decade between the 1998 and the late 2008 was a slog even for a keen King fan like myself but thankfully the King is back and 11/22/63 was a s good a King novel and anything he put out in his heyday.  
Luckily through the lean years we had the King adaptations on our TV screens and films in the cinema and 2017 sees four adaptations to feast upon, the Dark Tower, IT, The Mist and Castle Rock TV Series which is a mash up of Stephen King characters.
Boom times are here for Stephen King then and although there is a fair amount of snobbery about King books from literary types, you don't get to have such a long list of books and TV adaptations without being a great story teller and King, despite his wobble which followed his accident, has been at the top of that list since the mid 70s when he threw his book Carrie at us.
To many King is a Horror writer but those of us who have been what he calls 'constant readers', he is so much more and has an impressive body of work that means generations to come will be able to understand just why he may not be the best writer of our generation but is overwhelmingly the most popular.

Should Have Gone Straight To DVD

How bad does a film have to be to sell just one ticket in its opening weekend, as bad as Man Down it appears.
The film starring Shia LaBeouf is about a US soldier suffering from Post Traumatic Syndrome and grossed a grand total of £7 and the mystery viewer watched in Burnley.
The film now ties with the 2004, Polish effort, My Nikifor, which also sold 1 ticket and grossed the same £7 during its entire run.
Man Down opened at the Venice Film Festival last year to boos and walkouts from the audience and took a savaging at film sites with words such as 'confusing' and 'irredeemable' not likely to appear on the advertising blurb anytime soon.

Avoiding The New Star Wars Film

I saw the original Star Wars about 10 years after everyone else, i think it was on TV one Christmas Day in the 80's and i was unable to avoid it but i have made sure that i have missed everyone one since.   
It's just not my thing but this Christmas one of the challenges to negotiate will be to avoid the new film Star Wars: The Force Awakens which has just been released and will dominate everything for the next few weeks.
I do get the irony of writing a post about wanting to avoid all things Star Wars so on that front i have already failed but i see it as more of taking one for the team for other people like me who want to keep away from sci-fi geeks excitedly fondling their light-sabres
Google Trends show places where the most interest in the film is and if you live in the UK, Hungary, New Zealand, Australia, America or Canada then its not good reading because that were interest is at its height.  
The only option is to take an extended holiday until the Star Wars fans have retreated safely back to their bedrooms and the destinations where Star Wars interest is lowest is most of Africa, Central America and the North Korean's don't seem overly enthused either and Pyongyang is beautiful at this time of year apparently.

Want To See Something Really Scary?

I have seem more than my fair share of horror films over the years and they don't seem to deviate too far from each other in the way of scares but it doesn't stop the mirror scenes from frightening the bejesus out of me even though i know what is going to happen.
It is a pretty sure fire thing that if you see someone looking into a mirror in a horror film, they will move away at some point but the reflection will remain in the mirror and carnage will generally follow but according to science it is the fact that we know what is going to happen that makes it even scarier.    
In the name of science, the University of Nottingham attached receptors to volunteers to measure sweat, electrical activity in the skin and heart rate as they watched a series of horror films.
'The audiences experience the most dread and tension when the viewer knows what’s about to happen but the fictional character is completely unaware' they explained before naming the top ten films that caused the most sweaty hands, the fastest heartbeats and most change of underpants.

1. The Shining, 2. The Exorcist, 3. A Nightmare On Elm Street, 4. Ring, 5. Alien, 6. The Silence of the Lambs, 7. Poltergeist, 8. Insidious, 9. Halloween 10. Saw

Cubbies For 2015 World Series

I hold my hands up that i had no idea what the World Series was or who the Chicago Cubs were but Google have come to the rescue and i am now aware that it is a Baseball competition although it appears Baseball considers the World to be America. 
The only reason i found myself looking up the Chicago Cubs was because the World Series is due to start in October and in 1989, the second Back to the Future film had a reference to the Chicago Cubs defeating a baseball team from Miami in the 2015 World Series.
Wikipedia shows that the last time the World Series Trophy was sat in the Chicago Cubs trophy cabinet was 1908 and by all accounts they have as much chance of winning the thing as i have of becoming Mrs Johnny Depp but if the example of Tottenham Hotspur has taught us fans one thing, even the worst teams sometimes fluke it and end the season with a trophy so it mat be possible. 
Not only have the Cubbies got players with names like like Pedro Strop and Stalin Castro (he must play on the left side), the Cubbies also have fans such as Bill Murray, Jim Belushi, John Cusack and Gary Sinise.
So remember that you should practise winning because you should never rest until your better is the best it can be and never accept defeat, never quit and never leave a fallen team-mate.
Now let's get out there and throw some ball and do it not for yourselves but for Marty McFly, the man who played Dr. Peter Venkman in Ghostbusters and some women we never heard of in Britain.
Go Cubbies!!!

Differing Movies Tastes

There are many differences between men and women.
Not only are we better at driving, handling 2 X chromosomes, multi-tasking, reading instructions and looking at our hair in any shiny surface, we also have a better taste in movies.
A SkyTV survey of film buffs has found that Star War for men and Dirty Dancing for women were the tops for repeat viewings.
Action films Alien and Die Hard were among the top male choices, along with sci-fi film Bladerunner and jaunty mafia romp The Godfather.
Women are more likely to watch Grease, The Sound of Music, Pretty Woman and It's A Wonderful Life over and over again.
Sorry guys, but you can take your Millennium Falcon and your light sabres and stick 'em up your Wookiee.

Where Did All The Ghosts Go?

A TV remake of the Enfield Hauntings of the 70's has led to a few conversations recently and more than a few retellings of ghost stories.
As i have never seen, smelt or encountered a ghost of any kind i do find the whole business of hauntings as a bit of a lark and if Scooby Doo has taught us anything, where there are a ghosts it always turns out to be a team of burglars or the creepy old caretaker.   

My question is where have all the ghosts gone because i remember back in my youth you couldn't swing a cat without hitting a poltergeist or some such smashing all the plates in the kitchen cupboard and levitating young teenage girls in their beds.
Considering that almost everyone has a mobile phone with a camera attached, you would have thought that if there were spirits and things hanging around with us, someone would have captured a convincing image by now but if anything ghost sightings have gone down.
I have heard it explained that housing and the proliferation of moulds that give-off gasses that could be mind altering was the cause. A persuasive argument that relates to the modernisation of dwellings and the war on damp and rot.
In the 70's and 80's films there was films such as Poltergeist and The Exorcist giving us the willies and more people put the picture falling off the wall down to malevolent spirits and less to their own dodgy DIY skills.
Likewise in the 90s, shows like the X-Files saw a spike in alien lights in the sky with the suspected consequence of hordes of anal-probe armed Martians scanning the Southern States of the USA to complete their interstellar trip.   
On that point, why is nobody is asking why is it Americans who seem to get anally probed by aliens more than most nationalities and why would an alien intelligence travel across the vast unimaginable expanses of space just to put something up a hillbilly's backside? 
It would appear that ghosts have gone the same way as the Loch Ness monster, demonic possessions and Jesus's face in toast and been left behind in the last century.

Think I Will Skip American Sniper

I always go out of my way to avoid war films, with the exception of Full Metal Jacket which was an anti-war war film, so there was never any danger of my backside warming a cinema seat to watch American Sniper so i have managed to avoid the hype surrounding it until Michael Moore piped up with his 'snipers are cowards' comment.
I don't have much time for those sniping from roof tops, firing missiles from a ship 20 miles off the coast, dropping bombs from 35,000 feet up or controlling a drone from halfway around the world and my sympathies lie with the innocent people caught up in the willy waving of the leaders of the countries at war.
So not that i would have gone and seen it anyway, but i did start to read about the soldier whose story the film is based on, Chris Kyle.
I got a few paragraphs in and learnt that he was obsessed with guns from an early age, was deeply religious and believed that he was in Iraq doing Gods work and turned the page.
I'm not interested but as it has set a new record for films that open in January, seems the gun nuts, those who saw  the Iraq War as 'just', those duped by the rhetoric of the War On Terror and anyone with a bible in the bedside cabinet are enjoying it but it's not for me thanks.

Who Ya Gonna Call?

Back in the 70s and early 80s, i remember hearing stories about Poltergeists shoving around furniture and throwing pots and pans around the kitchen but for some reason they all seem to have gone into the light or whatever poltergeists do because we haven't heard of a poltergeist or any decent ghost story for years.
Considering that almost everyone has a mobile phone with a camera attached, you would have thought that if there were spirits and things hanging around with us, someone would have captured a convincing image by now but if anything ghost sightings have gone down.
Come to think of it, alien abductions and exorcism stories have also taken a nosedive and i haven't read about a demonic possession for a long time.
My guess would be that as the 70s produced such films as Poltergeist and The Exorcist, more people put the picture falling off the wall down to malevolent spirits and less to their own dodgy DIY skills and shows like the X-Files made us think any light in the sky was invading Martians armed with anal probes.
Of course there are no such things as ghosts and i know that and when things went bump in the night or the bedroom door was being scratched at, we just blamed Molly, the family dog.
I do admit though that although she died 3 years ago, the scratches in the bedroom door look remarkably new and i am sure there are more than there used to be.

Hello Means Hello Everywhere

Watching Asian films you do realise that wherever you are in the World, when you answer the phone you say 'Hello'.
Whether it's a Japanese, Chinese, South Korean or Indian film, they all answer the phone with the English greeting 'Hello' which seems a bit strange. It also seems strange they suddenly start speaking in English for a few sentences in an Indian film and then back into their own language again.
Not sure why some sentences are spoken in English and some in Indian but it does show up how bad the subtitles are when the English subs read nothing like what is coming out of the actors mouth. 
The song 'Happy Birthday' is also sang in English but that's probably because the words wouldn't scan if they sang it in Korean.
The English language is full of words from other countries but i do wonder if a family in Hong Kong watch a Hollywood film and say 'Wow, they say Hello when they answer the phone as well'.
I expect at some point in the future all the Worlds languages will meld together or we will hit upon a form of Esperanto that everyone speaks but at least we can go to Asia and greet people and know we will be understood.

What The Future Holds

It seems unbelievable that the first Back to the Future film was made in 1985 and showed a future of 2015 where people zipped around on hoverboards and there were parking zones for flying cars so unless science has been holding back on unleashing these inventions, they got this very wrong.
That's the problem with the future, we can only guess what its going to be like until we get there and i'm guessing it's not going to be DeLorean cars and flux capacitors.
The Pew Research Centre has been conducting a survey concerning what we want from our future science and our concerns about what the men in white coats and pens in the top pocket may bring.
65% said they'd be concerned about future robots, quite right to i say, while 53% said it would be a change for the worse if most people wore devices that constantly showed them information about the world around them.
What we do want is driverless cars (48%) brain implants to improve mental capacity (26%), lab-grown meat (20%) while 19% wanted flying cars or bikes, 9% wanted the ability to travel through time and 9% mentioned health improvements that extend human longevity or cure major diseases.
2% wanted Hoverboards, 2% immortality, 1% inventions to make household tasks easier, 1% new energy sources and 1% wanted science to bring world peace. 
11% of respondents said that they are not interested in futuristic inventions, or that there's nothing futuristic they would like to have but then i did warn them not to ask at the Luddite Fellowship. 
Quite rightly the advance of artificial intelligence is the publics greatest concern but i'm not quite sure how having Google on your t-shirt stacks up against being enslaved by super-intelligent robots hell bent on taking over the World but that's probably why i wasn't asked.

BAM POW WHAM Batman Sucks

This month sees the 75th anniversary of Batman or as i have gleaned from the episodes of Batman that i saw i the 70s, a man dressed as a bat who has gadgets with the word 'bat' in front of them.
Maybe its because i'm not geek enough to understand but isn't Batman about the worst superhero ever?
Firstly, he has no superpowers, he can't fly or shoot lasers from his eyes like Superman and bats are known for being blind and using radar to avoid flying into things which are not the first things i would request if i was to take on the bad guys of Gotham City.  
Take away his utility belt full of 'bat gadgets' and he is just a perfectly helpless guy in a tight fitting blue suit and cape. Why the Joker didn't do this in the first ten minutes of the first Batman film i don't know but it would have spared us all the rest of the awful Dark Knight films.
He did have quite a cool car though but then so did the Dukes of Hazard and they beat the bad guys with Boss Hogg and Rosco P. Coltrane harassing them every week!

Gravity Is Best Of British

It's the Oscars tonight and Gravity is expected to pick up a few statues with 10 Oscar nominations and as it's a British film, so well done us.
Some people are asking how can a film with a Mexican director, two American A-listers and the backing of a major U.S. studio and wasn't even set in Britain (or any country for that matter) possibly be British?
It is all down to the British Film Institute who can claim a film for Britain if there is 'significant British creative involvement'.
A film must score 16 points out of a possible 31 to pass. Gravity passes if you count its Mexican director, Alfonso Cuaron as British because he lives in London and it was produced by Brit David Heyman and was shot at Shepperton Studios hiring British artists and technicians and used a British company, Framestore, for its visual effects.
If that isn't enough British creative involvement' to claim it for Queen and country, Cuaron explained that: 'There's a series of rules that make a film eligible for a British film or not. And 'Gravity' definitely has all the requirements'.
Basically, it's a British film because we said so (and because we counted the Mexican as a Brit) so here's hoping that Gravity, which is actually an amazing film if a little slow paced in places, sweeps the boards and we can make comments about how we remember when America made films like this.
As a strange quirk of twisting the criteria to claim things as ours, George Clooney is now officially English and therefore qualifies to be Prime Minister and is officially allowed to start using the letter 'U' in words.
You snooze you lose America, now ya'll have a nice day and all that.

Paddington

This Christmas, for the first time, i watched A Charlie Brown Christmas and The Snowman. Charlie Brown was pretty much as expected by i was unaware that The Snowman contained no dialogue apart from a bit of Aled singing in the middle. As it was only 25 minutes or so long i watched it but was left wondering just why so many people love it, Frosty was far superior if you are looking for an animated Christmas film to watch.
Another animation i was never keen on was Paddington Bear and i have seen an advert for the film that is due to come to cinema screen and torrent website in the new year.
The adverting blurb says: 'Paddington follows the comic misadventures of a young Peruvian bear with a passion for all things British, who travels to London in search of a home'.
That's bound to set off the right wingers who are frothing at the mouth at the thought of millions of Bulgarians and Romanians travelling to Britain in search of a home.    
I don't know, those Peruvians bears coming over here, taking our homes, jobs and marmalade from hardworking British bears. It's an outrage. We won the War you know!
I will treat the Paddington film just how everybody should treat manic right winger nutters who think we are about to be swamped by East Europeans and swerve it thanks.

What The Dickens?

There are programmes on the television that point out errors in famous films and from that point on you always notice them and wonder why you never saw them before. I have watched Charles Dickens 'A Christmas Carol' so many times each Christmas but it was only this weekend that i noticed a massive faux pas which i wish i never.
I always assumed the reason Scrooges father despised him and didn't want him at home was because his wife had died while giving birth to Ebeneezer the same as his beloved sister Fan died in childbirth to her son, Fred, helping to explain why Ebenezer so despised his nephew.
The Ghost of Christmas past even says when talking about Fan that: 'She died giving him life as your mother died giving you life'.
That always made sense to me, Scrooges mother died giving him life and his father blamed him and his sister died the same way and he blamed the nephew and as his father never allowed him to come home for Christmas holidays, he hated Christmas and thought it all 'humbug' but at the end of the film, when he turns up for Christmas dinner and dances the Polka, he comes to the realisation that he was blaming Fred for Fan’s death the same way Ebenezer’s father blamed him for his own mother’s death.
But...Fan was Scrooges younger sister, Dickens himself said when Fan came to collect him from the boarding school: 'a little girl, much younger than the boy, came darting in, and putting her arms about his neck, and often kissing him, addressed him as her 'Dear, dear brother.'
Oh dear, mother died giving birth to older brother which is the background to everything that happens after but somehow manages to have another child and call her Fan.
I'll put it down to Dickens being distracted by being called away to drag a child out the chimney or something midway through writing that scene and try to ignore it.

Oldboy Remake

Reading the reviews of the remake of Oldboy, it does seem as though the film has tanked and i'm quite glad about that.
Anyone who has ever seen the South Korean version will now that it was going to be pretty much impossible to improve upon, every actor and actress was perfect, even the octopus in the restaurant scene hammed it up as it thrashed and curled its tentacles in desperation as it vanished into the actors mouth.
The only reason i can think of for a remake is because Western audiences dislike reading subtitles and a bit of arrogance that says it was a good film but Hollywood can improve upon it. Seems they couldn't and never.
I'm not even going to bother watching the remake, partly because the South Koreans done it so well the first time around that it can only be an anti-climax and partly because having seen the original, i know the twist at the end.
I'm not sure why Oldboy was chosen from the long list of fine Asian movies being churned out that could have been remade, when the whole point of the film depends upon not knowing the sideways jerk at the end, Spike Lee chose this one.
Anyone who likes these type of films and would pay to see it at the cinema has probably seen the 2003 original and therefore knows the last 10 minutes which changes how you viewed the previous hour and 50 minutes of it.
Just seemed a bit pointless really and Spike Lee or whoever decided an American version of Oldboy was a good idea should be locked in a room for 20 years and have their teeth pulled out with a claw hammer.