AVENGERS ASSEMBLE (IN MY PANTS) (NO PLOT SPOILERS BUT MANY FEELINGS)

HERE, THESE ARE ALL MY FEELINGS ABOUT THE AVENGERS, WHICH I HAVE JUST SEEN THIS VERY NIGHT:

1) PEW PEW PEW GUNS AND EXPLOSIONS AND WHEEEEE THINGS BLOW UP GOOD TIMES YES NOW. OW, I HAVE A HEADACHE.

2) SCARLETT JOHANSSON IS HOT.  BLACK WIDOW IS ALSO HOT BUT MORE IMPORTANTLY MORE BADASS THAN CAN BE REASONABLY SUMMARISED IN A SHORT AMOUNT OF TIME.

3) TOM HIDDLESTON'S VOICE GOES STRAIGHT TO THE KNICKER AREA.  THIS IS SCIENTIFIC FACT, PROVED BY ALL THE SCIENCE RESEARCH I DID.  TOM.  TOM.  SAY "ON YOUR KNEES" AGAIN.

4) HULK CAN BE DONE SUCCESSFULLY ON FILM BUT FIRST JOSS WHEDON MUST POINT OUT HOW INTRINSICALLY RIDICULOUS HE IS.

5) NOOOOOOOOOOOO, DAMN YOU WHEDON.  OF FUCKING COURSE THAT IS WHO YOU WOULD TARGET FOR YOUR DEMONIC WHEDONISH PURPOSES.

6) THERE MUST BE A HAWKEYE/BLACK WIDOW FILM NOW PLEASE PLEASE NOW I MUST SEE MORE OF THEIR PAIRED AND SHARED AWESOME, AND I MUST KNOW MORE ABOUT THEIR MYSTERIOUS AND SEXY PAST.

7) HAWKEYE HAWKEYE HAWKEYE.  RENNER, YOU SQUISHY-FACED PART-ELF ANGEL.

8) IRON MAN CALLS HAWKEYE 'LEGOLAS'.  THIS IS NOT EVEN THE MOST AWESOME THING THAT HAPPENS IN THE FILM.

9) SAMUEL L JACKSON HOLDS A BAZOOKA AT ONE POINT.  REPORTS INDICATE THAT THIS IS TOO MUCH BADASS FOR THE UNIVERSE TO CONTAIN AND IT WILL BE IMPLODING SHORTLY.

10) JOSS WHEDON AND LOKI VALIDATE THE COMPULSORY MIDDLE ENGLISH COMPONENT OF MY COURSE WITH TWO WORDS: "MEWLING QUIM".

11) LOKI IS SO FUCKING PIMP.  EVEN IN THAT FUCKING STUPID HELMET.  NAY, ESPECIALLY IN THAT FUCKING STUPID HELMET.

12) CAPTAIN AMERICA UNDERSTANDS ONE POP CULTURE REFERENCE AND WE ARE ALL VERY PROUD OF HIM.

13) TONY STARK'S EGO CAN ONLY BE SATED BY A PHALLIC SYMBOL THAT TOWERS ABOVE THE NEW YORK SKYLINE AND BY GOD, I WOULD NOT HAVE IT ANY OTHER WAY.

14) STILL NO-ONE HAS MADE ANY GIANT HAMMER JOKES ABOUT THOR.

15) LOKI JUST NEEDS A HUG.  I WILL GIVE IT TO HIM.  SERIOUSLY, I WILL MAKE THAT SACRIFICE.  FOR THE TEAM.

16) THERE WAS ACTUALLY QUITE A LOT OF HOMOEROTICISM AND I REALLY THOUGHT THOR AND LOKI WERE GOING TO KISS AT SEVERAL POINTS, AND ALSO CAPTAIN AMERICA AND IRON MAN.  I, FOR ONE, WELCOME THIS MORE FLUID APPROACH TO SEXUALITY IN MAINSTREAM MEDIA.

17) NOW THAT THE RAINBOW BRIDGE HAS BEEN DESTROYED, THOR TRAVELS BY THE POWER OF PLOT CONTRIVANCE.

18) I CANNOT REALLY SAY MUCH MORE WITHOUT SPOILING THE PLOT.

19) WAIT, WAIT, ONE MORE FOR LUCK.

20)  LOKI. GOD OF ARMANI.


I'm seeing it again on Tuesday.  I'll probably do a proper review then.  Don't hold your breath though, it's probably just going to be the word "awesome" copy-pasted 500 hundred times.

A Pop-Cultural Confession

I love bad TV. And bad films. And bad books. And bad songs. And bad sandwiches. No, wait.

Actually, I love a certain type of bad TV/film/literature/music. When you say "bad TV", you probably think of My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding or Take Me Out or my sister's latest favourite, some show with an awfully punning name that I can't remember where gay man have to sprint back into the closet for money by fooling a heterosexual woman into having feelings for them. I think it's called "Where Taste Goes to Die".* But these are artlessly bad telly. They know what they are. They make no pretensions to greatness, and thus are curiously humourless - despite their abundance of ribaldry and 70s era Brighton postcard naughtiness. I'm talking about the programmes that are preposterous. Absurd. Almost surreally bad. So much so that you're sure someone is wiping away tears of mirth behind the camera at the expense of the poor saps who actually pay the licence fee. If this was America, I'd say these are the programmes knocked out between the hours of the 11am cocaine break and 11.38am when it's time to take an early lunch and also more cocaine. Being Britain, it's more likely that these are the shows knocked out between a nice cup of tea and a biccy at 4.30 in the afternoon and weeping over your BA in Arts History at 5.15.

My criteria for detecting such shows (and films and books) is simple. If, at any point, I lean back in my chair, pull my (sometimes real, sometimes imaginary) glasses down my nose, chortle and say firmly "SILLY", it's a winner. Sometimes good shows have "SILLY" moments. Sometimes they have entire episodes of "SILLY". Being Human falls prey to this more than I'd like. Doctor Who too, especially in the Russell T Davies era. That episode with Agatha Christie and the giant wasp. I'd say that on paper they thought it sounded charming and off-beat but I've just typed it out here and it sounds like a parody of a Doctor Who episode. And a better parody than that Lenny Henry one with the Margaret Thatcher dalek. Saying that Maggie Thatcher is a life-destroying emotionless ooze encased inside a metal outer shell constructed by supremacist masters isn't satire, it's just fact.

Sorry, think I got some politics in your pop culture, there.

As I said, there's a difference between SILLY television/film/etc and downright bad stuff. There's the bad stuff like Take Me Out (upon my first viewing, I was reminded of a line from Jane Austen**: "Man has the advantage of choice, woman only the power of refusal." If the premise of your show aligns with the sexual politics of the late 18th century, you need to take a long hard look in the mirror). It's joyless. It's crass. It's (incoming snob alert) Lowest Common Denominator television. I'm aware that many watch Take Me Out et al because they find it hideously compelling, sort of like driving past a car crash on the motorway. I get this. I'm on board with this. And the game show format means you can catch the occasional episode here and there and not feel hideously guilty.

I differ in that I watch whole series that I think are badly written, acted and filmed. I follow the plot. I root for the characters. I decide it would be better if x happened to y instead of z. People are - understandably - puzzled by this. I don't advocate this relationship with the gogglebox: it's terribly unhealthy and please let us remember I am a terrible freak of nature and my mother should probably never have let me out of the attic. "But why?" People ask me. (In my head. Nobody actually cares about what I watch on TV.) "Why spend so much energy on shows you don't even like?"

Oh-ho, I say. Shows that are bad, yes. Shows I don't like? No, no, no. Merlin. The Tudors. Whitechapel. These are my crack. Silly, silly shows full of ridiculous dialogue, flimsy premises, unbelievable plot twists (yes, even in Merlin where they can explain things away with magic). And I love them. I love kicking back with a bottle of something cheap, a gal pal and iPlayer (or whatever) and roaring sniggery, joyful commentary at Rupert Penry-Jones pretending to have OCD because someone thought it would give his character on Whitechapel depth.

Whitechapel is especially dear to my heart, actually, because it started out pretty well. The first series operated on the premise that someone was imitating the Jack the Ripper murders with such exact detail and unstoppability that people started to think he'd come back to life. This worked. Jack the Ripper stands pretty tall in the Murderer's Hall of Fame. He's scary because he was never caught. There's a ton of theories about him. And the slight suggestion of the supernatural gave it a nice edge and saved it from being too...Red Riding-y, I guess. Then it got a second series. About the Krays. Yes, the Krays were famous people who did bad things who lived in Whitechapel. That's about as far as anything made sense. Copycat Krays...don't. The Krays did naughty murders because they were building a criminal empire. It was to a purpose. A bad purpose that we at Jane Shakespeare do not in any way condone, no matter how much I might casually drop into conversation my family's spurious connections with the Mafia, but a purpose nonetheless. So they spent an entire series avoiding asking the huge, glaring, obvious question:WHY? Why in heaven's name mimic the not-at-all-famous individual killings of two gangsters? As serial killers go, that's one spending a lot of time in the library. The third series is airing right now and they've basically run up against the wall that most of us saw coming a way back: there are no more crimes in Whitechapel to imitate. Instead, they've opted for a 'crime archive', run by Steve Pemberton, wherein is contained a record of crimes from the world over, many of which bear shocking and convenient resemblances to the crimes being committed in modern day Whitechapel. Hey. Psst. Rupert Penry-Jones. I'd start investigating the guy from The League of Gentlemen, if I were you.

They even have to spell this out in the first episode. "Are you saying it's another copycat?" asks RPJ handsomely (he does everything handsomely, he can't help it). "No," says Steve Pemberton, making sure the audience are paying attention, "but we can use reports of crimes that happened centuries ago or abroad in different social and cultural contexts to help solve ones happening specifically in a very small area of London today." Except that's preposterous and you're ridiculous and god I love this show. Every innovation they make is hilarious: they try and find RPJ a love interest and his initial (handsome) reaction is always along the lines of "Good God, a woman! Get it away! It might use its pheromones or wiles or breasts on me. I hear they have those." Whitechapel (as I said) is also a pretty small area of London, these days mostly populated by upper-middle-class hipsters who consider themselves daring for moving to East London and a handful of belligerent actual East End natives. Whitechapel on TV is a shadowy world of outrageous murders every week or so, Kensington Gore being slung around like it's going out of style, and a "community" of "locals" who are apparently something akin to the villagers in The Wicker Man as every week Salt-of-the-Earth Lady-Policeman reports back that "the word on the street" is that hapless innocents are being stalked by fell agents of darkness for Lucifer's own infernal damned purposes. And they always seem to remember murders that happened in the Victorian era. "It were a dark time," they shake their heads and say, staring traumatised into their builder's tea. Whitechapel: gotta love it.

It's not just crappy telly though. Films are not exempt. Again, I'm not talking obviously shite romantic-comedy-by-numbers bilge like New Year's Eve or whatever Jennifer Aniston is in now. I mean films that have ideas, dangerous ideas, that they wish to achieve. Take Thor. Since posting my review of it (here), where I was fairly "eh", if I recall, I have since watched it more times than any other superhero film I own. Including Iron Man, including The Dark Knight, including X-Men: First Class, all of which are legitimately good movies, which Thor is not. But it has Asgard! Shiny, shiny, camp Asgard! It has a rainbow bridge and a giant hammer and frost giants and I'm already laughing because it is so goddam gloriously ridiculously brilliantly SILLY that I enjoy it with a level of unholy glee good movies can't quite match. I even got over the whole Thor-isn't-really-my-type thing when I decided that Loki was really the main character but Kenneth Branagh didn't want to make Chris Hemsworth jealous. What? What?

The point is, you should try it. I'm not against crap TV, far from it. But there are degrees of crapness. Instead of watching My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding paint an entire culture in what can be generously described as broad brushstrokes, watch Primeval. It may be tosh of the highest order, but it's not exploiting anybody (except you, probably). Instead of popping on Twilight (which, by the way, doesn't count as enjoyably bad because the SILLY moments are outweighed by the THAT'S NOT OKAY moments), why not dig out Heart and Souls, a painfully 80s (despite being produced in 1993) comedy wherein Robert Downey Jr must help four dead people complete their unfinished business before his girlfriend dumps him? What I'm saying is that crap TV can be an innocent guilty pleasure. You too can sit for hours in front of Merlin's uncomfortable shirtless scenes, stuffing your mouth with popcorn and roaring indistinctly "SILLY". Live the dream, people. Live the dream.

*Apparently actually called Playing It Straight. I prefer my title.

** Yes, I'm aware of how pretentious that sounds. Come at me, bro.

5 Reasons Why You Should Be Really Fucking Psyched About The Avengers Film: Video Blog

And now for something completely different.

Just for a change (and because even typing is apparently too much effort now), I've decided to try something new and do a video blog. Possibly this is because I've been watching too much Nostalgia Critic and fallen into the dangerous trap of going "Pshaw! How hard can it be?", possibly because I am simply a dangerous egomaniac with far too many opinions. Who can say?

Either way, I apologise for the crappy picture quality, crappy sound quality and crappy editing. It's my first day.

Enjoy.

Clanger of the Gods: Review of 'Thor'

So yeah, it came out months ago. My instincts were that I was never going to pay money to see this Kenneth Branagh-helmed festival of the overblown and ridiculous. Having now viewed it by other (entirely legal, I swear) means, I can say I was right. Warning: contains spoilers.

Don't get me wrong, it's not a bad film. Well, it is, but it's so stupid as to be really quite entertaining. It's big, dumb, spectacular-looking and really pretty funny. In fact, it's the comedic moments that probably work best, which is not a regular feature of comic book films (let none of us forget that whole lift scene fiasco in Spiderman 2). Branagh has a history of directing films that are so grandiose you forget that they're bad, bad movies. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is a prime example: Helena Bonham Carter's Elizabeth dies at the monster's hand (so far, so good) and then gets her head reattached to the body of her former maid, decides she doesn't like it and then sets herself on fire. Utterly ridiculous, completely overblown but so audacious you just sit there and go "Oh. Ok, then."

Thor is kind of like that. I mean, the whole concept is silly in the first place; I don't know who had the idea of making the Norse god of thunder into a comic hero but they sure as hell didn't help by slapping a red cape and a stupid helmet on him (though speaking of stupid helmets, nothing quite beats Loki's goat horns, or whatever the hell that is). This is one scenario in which Branagh's ridiculousness actually sort of works - we want to be distracted from the sheer insanity of what's going on in front of us by kabooms and silly hats and rainbow bridges. If you can swallow that, you can swallow anything this movie throws at you, even the idea of Natalie Portman as a respected academic. Oh, hush, she's a crazy bitch.

A basic run-down of the plot: the backstory goes that King of the Gods Antony Hopkins/Odin has a shiny kingdom called Asgard somewhere...in space? I'm not too sure. He fights the villains (ish) of the piece, the Frost Giants. No, I'm not kidding. He wins, he creates lasting peace, he ensures that his two sons, Thor (golden-haired trigger-happy thug-in-training played by Chris Hemsworth's abs) and Loki (small, pale, dark-haired, soulful - gee, wonder which turns out to be evil in a Hollywood film? - played by Tom Hiddleston) are in constant competition with each other by telling them only one can be king and it'll pretty much be Thor. Cut to some years later (Twenty? A thousand? They're not too clear on this either.) and Thor is being crowned king while Loki raises the first of many raised eyebrows. Unfortunately the ceremony is rudely interrupted by a few rogue Frost Giants breaking into Asgard to steal back the mystical source of their power, defeating the guards and then promptly dying. In retaliation, Thor (who, we must remember, is the good guy) decides to go and do a little avengin', rounding up a pack of...Norse gods? Higher beings? Other superheroes? (Again, not clear, but hey.) to help him. To cut a long story short, shit goes down and Odin decides Thor needs to take a little time out and banishes him to earth, where he's promptly run over by Natalie Portman in an SUV. Cue what is basically a fish-out-of-water comedy for the next hour, which is actually quite fun. Thor goes into a pet shop and demands a horse. That's funny, right? Come on, that's funny. From there, it ping-pongs back and forth between earth where Thor is learning humility and falling in love with Natalie Portman and Asgard where Loki is scheming away, lurking in more shadows, raising more eyebrows and managing to become king. There's also this whole scene where Hopkins/Odin makes a spectacularly unadvised move and tells Loki he's not really his son and he's actually a Frost Giant baby that he rescued or something. Anyway, apparently this is all that's needed to tip him over the edge from 'Misunderstood Anti-Hero' into 'Full-blown Psychopath' and he gets this worrying manic gleam in his eye. To be honest, after the first half hour, the plot isn't terribly memorable, but Loki sends a big metal robot thing to kill humanThor, humanThor dies and has his little Jesus moment by being resurrected as godThor, complete with giant hammer (two things: a) this hammer may be called Molly, I'm not quite sure, and b) giant hammer. lol.) GodThor snogs Natalie Portman goodbye, flies off to Asgard and much angsty 'I-don't-want-to-kill-you-but-I-will' battling with his brother ensues. At this point Loki decides the only thing that'll make Daddy love him now is genocide and he tries to kill all the Frost Giants (yes, despite being one), and Thor is all "absolutely not" (which is odd, considering it's the exact same thing he was advocating earlier but I guess that's character development, folks) and Thor stops him. Basically. It's kind of an underwhelming climax. Also, the bridge by which Thor gets to earth is broken, meaning he can't see Natalie Portman again, except he totally will because he's in The Avengers film, and Loki throws himself off the bridge in shame meaning he's dead, except he's totally not because he's also in the The Avengers film and the post-credits teaser sequence. And that's it, really. There's a ton of stuff I left out but none of it adds up anyway so let's not mourn too hard, eh?

Structurally, the beginning is better than the middle and the middle is better than the end, which isn't great storytelling. Nothing really happens at the climax and you don't even have the "woah" factor of seeing Asgard in all its camp, glittery glory for the first time. The middle section is, as I said, a fairly decent fish-out-of-water comedy but in terms of dramatic conflict, the stakes are surprisingly low. There's nothing threatening the earth, no nemesis that must be stopped (the Frost Giants are barely in it and they're more a threat to Asgard than earth): our main source of tension is whether this guy will get home or not. I'm pretty certain only one thing's ever managed to pull that off, and that was called The Odyssey. Actually, therein lies my personal problem with the film: Thor is no Odysseus. He's just so not my kind of superhero: he's brawny, he's dumb-but-charming, his aesthetic is poorly thought through...he's Superman, basically. He even has the whole Jesus allegory thing going on for him. And we all know how I feel about Superman. After being spoiled recently with a spate of classy, intelligent superhero flicks (and classy, intelligent superheroes), I can't really love Thor. At the end of the day, it's too dumb. I enjoyed the ride, but won't be buying the DVD.

The whole thing is much more palatable if you think of the Thor-Loki storyline as a really stupidly costumed version of King Lear. Thor is legitimate golden boy Edgar while sneaky, pale, loitering-in-the-shadows-smirking Loki is pure Edmund, right down to the unorthodox parentage. This was another problem for me actually: the first half hour of the film made Thor out to be such a douche that I couldn't help automatically siding with Loki and his wobbly-lipped rage. Well, up until he started advocating genocide instead of explaining to daddy why exactly it hurt him very much that he wasn't informed of his adoption earlier and that blatant favouritism is not a great way to rear children who have the power to kill each other, and then just hugging it out. In fact, I'm not convinced that Branagh didn't actually want to make a movie about Loki instead, what with the way his degree of evil was hopping all over the place. One minute it's 'bit of a trickster, just wants to be loved', next it's 'wait, this movie needs a villain, KILL EVERYONE'. And before you ask, yes, of course I fancied him a bit. Snarky, dark-haired, pale-skinned, big-eyed, Not-Evil-Just-Misunderstood anti-hero with daddy issues by the bucketload. It's predictable as Joss Whedon killing off a much-loved character in The Avengers.

To sum up: Thor is (mercifully) never going to win any awards. But it's fun. And some aspects are very well done: it looks great (even if Branagh does have a penchant for tilted camera angles), it's funny and the foreshadowing, like Loki's ability to create multiple versions of himself and make me think unladylike thoughts was relatively subtle (well, I didn't notice it anyway). At the end of the day, it's not clever enough for my liking - not the hero, not the story, not the dialogue, and I apologise for my superhero-snobbery. I'll tell you one thing though - I am so looking forward to The Avengers.

P.S. I think another reason I was so tickled by Tom Hiddleston's performance is that it means I can tick him off a list of actors who I spotted doing minor or obscure things and mentally noted down for future greatness. I saw him as Cassio in a production of Othello at the Donmar Warehouse a few years ago and, as I recall, despite starring Ewan McGregor as Iago, the conversation on the way home was all about that charming young man who played Cassio. Cassio? More like CassiYO.

I'll get my coat. Bye.