GHOSTRIDER (2007) - wild at heart and weird on top

With every safe successive dull cookie cutter Marvel film, the zany Nick Cage mis fire from 2007 looks better and better.
Two years before the birth of the MCU in Iron Man (2008) this attempt to reboot the Blade franchise fizzled at the box office. Now it looks mood wise less a 4th sequel to Blade, more a precursor to Taika's Thor Ragnorak.
Steven Norrington, director of Blade was was tapped to direct this but it went to Mark Steven Johnson, who has previously dropped the ball on the Ben Afleck Daredevil (the extended version is better but it's still bad).

Big stars and set pieces just about overcome uninspired direction and tired plot

This is very much a Nicholas Cage movie and if you can embrace the crazy of something like Bad Lieutenant Port of Call New Orleans you should enjoy this. Ghost Rider had been a passion project of his for years, and 2007 was a time when the star was more important than the authenticity of the comic character- NC makes his Elvis pointing pose from Wild at Heart an integral part of the Riders judgement of the innocent and it pretty much works. In 2006 the relentless Nick Cage Elvisness of this movie was a bit tiresome - after a decade of dull superhero films since, a Las Vegas obsessed spirit of vengeance is quite refreshing.

Speaking of disappointing Marvel films, Peter Fonda is an infinitely better representation of evil than the awful version of Dormammu in Dr Strange. Marvel could do worse than adopt Fonda's likeness for Mephistopheles going forward. Best part of the movie by far is the star of Easy Rider looking at the Carnival devil and commenting is deeply evil overtones
"FAR OUT"

For motorcycle and cult horror movie enthusiasts Fonda co-wrote Easy Rider while filming an Edgar Allen Poe horror movie with his sister.
Eva Mendez makes the absolute most of a typically limited Marvel female part. Both the leads are too old for their parts but are at least age appropriate for each other abs have great chemistry. Mendez's Magic 8 ball at the date, which looks like onset improv, gets funnier with repeated watches.

First movie appearance of Rebel Wilson playing a confused Goth, and she makes the most of a brief cameo. Donal Logue, of Blade (inevitably) and Gotham also appears as Cage's mechanic

Plot has issues

First 20 mins doesn’t even have Nicholas Cage in it (you might see that as a positive). Young NC (Matt Long) is better at playing Johnny than real NC is, and perhaps a modern MCU version might have kept him.

This is 2007 however and the villain Blackheart is obviously a second rate version of Stephen Dorf's Deacon Frost from Blade, a real call back to to what this movie really is trying to be - an easy remake of that movie. Mark Steven Johnson's plot is at least heavily inspired by David S. Goyer's Daywalker plot. Blackheart and Deacon Frost are both new Generation villains sweeping away the old world, and the Blood God of Blade and the Contract of San Braganza are almost interchangeable.
Blackheart even claims "I’m the only one who can walk in both worlds" and it's difficult to imagine a more obvious call back to Wesley Snipe's Daywalker.

Norrington was reportedly tipped to direct this but sadly retired from the business after clashing with Sean Connery on the set of League of Extraordinary Gentleman. (Easy on those curses Alan).
Accentuating the positive, I'm not sure Steven Norrington's pre Matrix cool would suit this Ghost Rider anyway. Ghost Rider is more Carny and corny than Matrix and you have to accept it for that. Though it has the trappings of a Marvel movie Mark Steven Johnson is really directing a vehicle for Nicholas Cage, and this movie vehicle is wild and often on fire.

The Jail sequence is definitely the highlight but Blaze's flames highlights the lack of budget elsewhere.

Some nice moments

• "Is the bike ok?" - we've all been there for that
• Great to see Brit Demon classic Night of the Demon on tv
• RAGE neon a rip off of similar scene from mood similar Shoot Em Up, let's say it's a homage

The Bikes

Blaze's custom is a Panhead Chopper was custom built for the movie
Stunt bikes are Buell X-1's as detailed here

Most haunting aspect to Ghost Rider (2007)

You have to wonder, after the reception granted to Venom, if Ghost Rider (2007) would be considered such a failure if released now. Would Blaze's obsession with Carpenters, chimp video, and candy cocktails be given more of a pass after Tom Hardy's bonkers turn in that highly successful Sony movie?
This movie couldn't catch a break at the time but deserves one because there is one area where this Marvel movie stands out - Cage makes Ghost Rider an obviously blue collar superhero.
"I went to college , got a great job, but you - haven’t changed"

says Mendes's reporter to grown up Johnny Blaze.

Ten years before 2016 made this split in society horribly obvious, Cage makes Blaze an explicitly working class boy left behind by his peers. Blaze has risen from poverty to be a success only because of the indestructibility of his curse, making him a very distinctive Evel Knievel character refreshingly unlike the Tony Stark clones many many Marvel movies since. Johnny is no Silicon Valley middle class doctor lawyer techno genius, he's just a truly doomed kid from a poor one parent family that lived in a trailer on the road.
If they are really embracing diversity in the MCU these days - and I'm all for it, WAKANDA FOREVER! - there is some here.

This content is cross posted to two blogs

World In a Bottle

http://corben-dallas.blogspot.com/ 

DURANGO95

http://corben-dallas.co.uk/durango95/  

Norman Fucking Rockwell! and commuting midwinter

Lana Del Rey is a all powerful carnivorous orchid who will eventually consume all space and time

Grauniad reckons that Lana Del Rey's masterful

Norman Fucking Rockwell!

is the album of the year

The best albums of 2019, No 1: Lana Del Rey – Norman Fucking Rockwell!

.. I'm tool old and out of touch to know anymore if it's the best album of 2019. These days the guys at the end of The Irishman are probably more in touch with pop culture than I am.
But speaking as LDR fan anyway, from the exact moment I saw the first few seconds of Video Games in 2011
Norman Fucking Rockwell! is an awesome achievement

I particularly like the way LDR is introducing me to influences of my era that I've previously ignored, such as Carole King, and my god she is lyrically razor sharp.

 "“LA is in flames, it’s getting hot / Kanye West is blond and gone / Life on Mars ain’t just a song.”

I would agree with the Grauniad in that this is an improvement on previous albums but it's not a sharp uptake. She is still crooning about the Bad Boys but she's making it clear It Was Not Satisfactory (Marcia Williams, 1974).

The song 'Venice Bitch' being particularly haunting, illustrative I think that LDR's shtick is evolving, on the Lynch Scale, from Twin Peaks level romantic doomed to  Blue Velvet level romantic doomed. LDR's musical persona seems less and less like a victim and more like a carnivorous orchid which will play the victim initially, only to finally emit a smile and consume the real victim slowly in her lyrics over a period of eons.

Context might be making a difference in my case. News is generally so bad I'm avoiding podcasts but personal life is so much better I can listen to music again, and I have to because my commute so much longer.

If there are better visuals to accompany this album (in the UK, in December) than slowly trundling around a neon half built airport in a blue-lit bus beneath the obsidian void of mid winter,.. well.. there isn't one. And you know what?
This commute is so atmospherically doomed it makes all LDR's previous albums awesome as well

Jeremy Corbyn : the ultimate victory for Useful Idiots and Daily Telegraph readers

It's been very very difficult for me to keep quiet in last few years on this subject

I briefly joined the Labour Party in 2016 to vote against Corbyn as leader. My candidate, Angela Eagle, had to drop out of the Labour leadership race when her campaign office was firebombed. So it’s worth remembering Corbynistas were not only utterly deluded idiots but often abusive thugs as well.

My last political comment on Facebook in was defending a Labour MP in Exeter who dared question Dear Leader Corbyn and consequently was receiving abuse online. I suggested people get in a car and drive 50 miles in any direction outside London and try and find a Corbyn supporter anywhere - then I got abuse. That was 2016.

As I said in a previous cathartic post on Trump, the problem all along has not been an incompetent promoted way above his level, the real problem is his enablers. You can't blame Trump/Corbyn for not turning down a chance to become the leader of a major political party. You can blame the people that ignored the obvious consequences of putting these people in positions of real responsibility.

Obvious from v early on that this would boil down to an election pitting witless old diffident Corbyn against charming confident young Johnson. It's still faintly unbelievable to me that in an environment where vast numbers of voters in the U.K. were indicating their extreme displeasure with decisions and attitudes based in London, the Labour Party chose to elect a private school educated MP for Islington as leader.

A soft spoken weak out of touch airy fairy intellectual that confirmed every negative stereotype of left wingers perpetrated by the right wing, it is hardly surprising that Corbyn's initial election was heavily rumoured to be a result of a campaign by Telegraph readers. (This was enabled by previous Labour leader Ed Miliband's decision to massively simplify voting rules).

“Sign up today to make sure the bearded socialist voter-repellent becomes the next Labour leader - and dooms the party forever,” the Telegraph article reads.

“A lot of people, both in the Labour party and outside it, think that would be dreadful for Labour, the sort of political disaster the party last suffered in 1983 when Michael Foot’s leftwing views saw the party lose by a landslide to Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives.

“Not everyone thinks it would be a bad thing if that was to be repeated at the next general election in 2020.” 

Daily Telegraph July 2015

It’s a long right wing narrative that the liberal left are weak ditherers who can’t be relied on to make tough decisions and Corbyn supporters could not have found a better 'leader', in a breathless hesitant diffident substitute teacher who is totally out of his depth to fulfill that narrative for the Right. 

How does any political party manage to lose to this current Tory party in these circumstances - how? Disastrous management of public finances, disastrous management of a referendum, a clown as leader, how did Labour lose to this? How many Labour Leaders since 1945 would have lost to Johnson's TrumpLite Conservative Party?

The 2016 elections indicated a historic vote against wet ineffectual leadership delivered from urban central government. In reaction Labour chose to stick with their leader, a London MP for notoriously out of touch borough of Islington. In last night's catastrophic election apparently his vote in Islington has stayed firm. I lived in Islington for a bit, but mainly elsewhere, and none of this surprises me. Like much of London it feels like a completely different planet to the rest of the country.

Corbyn was blatantly, obviously unpopular and  un-electable right from the start but the Corbyn cult refused to accept any argument otherwise and brutally shouted down any opposition in every medium. This year Labour had a chance to enact a genuinely progressive set of policies; and to present them they selected a cranky, insecure back bencher, with nil previous experience of anything beyond undermining his own political party from the back of the room.

Out of touch? He called for Article 50 to be enabled the day after the EU referendum vote

https://labourlist.org/2016/06/corbyn-article-50-has-to-be-invoked-now/

Labour part members have enabled the hardest of Brexit and the worst kind of conservatives at the point when we most needed them, and have wrecked any chances for genuine reform of this country for a generation.

There will be many painful comparisons to Micheal Foot's disastrous result against Thatcher in the 1980s. Let's get this straight -Micheal Foot was an articulate intellectual who had the bravery to enlist and literally fight fascists in the Spanish Civil War (Roughly about the same time the right wing British press like The Daily Telegraph was cheering on Herr Hitler and Il Duce).

Micheal Foot resigned as Labour leader within days of the 1983 election defeat. Corbyn has suggested he will stay on for months.

Jeremy Corbyn makes Micheal Foot look like Richard the Lionheart. 

My blog From 2016

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I'd rather vote for Wolfie Smith than Jeremy Corbyn

Add caption

Leaving dystopia in the rear view mirror

So I could be blogging about how the G20 has somehow replaced the United Nations and no-one has noticed.
Or Br***t.
Or Tr***.
But,  *ck it, 2018-19 has been a pivotal year for me and I just didn't have time anymore for incompetent politicians dragging the world to hell. There will be less politics on this blog going forward, those of us with a braincell need to stay positive and ride this out.

I started this blog back in 2011 as a therapeutic exercise and in that it's been a success. As will be obvious when I finally post my opinions on TWIN PEAKS : THE RETURN, last year it finally became apparent to me how much I lost from a critical life decision in the mid 1990s. I relocated to a a very beautiful but remote part of the UK but I never settled, and I lost pretty much everything. Not only friends and possessions but eventually  - myself - as the enthusiasm and interests that used to power my own life had to be compromised by the need to fit in.

My attempt to create a first spin off music blog a few xmas's ago foundered on the first realisation of these choices I made in the 1990s. I will come back to that blog in time.

There were and are some big positives from that move into the wild, and you should never have regrets, but in line with what might be my long delayed mid life crisis, I'm getting back in touch with a lot that I thought I'd lost for good.

Part of that was motorcycles, and when I rediscovered my love for that my love of motorsport and the fractal levels of detail within motorsport returned as well, hence I'm writing a new spin off blog
focused on F1, MotoGP, World Superbikes, British Superbikes, MotoE, Formula E and Formula W (plus maybe GT, Endurance racing and Speedway if we can find the time)

PENNYWORTH is THE CROWN as an entertaining B-movie

Welcome world, to ... Skiffle Gothic.
PENNYWORTH is the new series from EPIX which goes even further into the past of DC's Batman, from the creators of GOTHAM.

(reviewed up to S1E7)

Supposedly covering the story of how Bruce Wayne's butler met Bruce Wayne's father, this isn’t just a ‘prequel about Batman’s butler’ as it is specifically about a particular version of that character, created by two Brits, Christopher Nolan and Micheal Caine.. and continued to some extent by Heller and Shawn Pertwee (two more Brits) in GOTHAM. It’s very difficult to see this Pennyworth as the early years of Gough's character in the Burton films or any version prior to that.

Even the most recent movie incarnation of Alfred, played by Jeremy Irons, seems far more Downton Abbey than the Caine/Pertwee/Bannon version, who is far more of a ex soldier with an interesting past then Mr Carson.

We are told the forthcoming JOKER film (similarly inspired by Nolan's take on Batman), the pleasure is in how it doesn't directly connect to the comics and I feel there is some of that here. The setting is 90% of the enjoyment of PENNYWORTH. London in the DC Universe is a fascinating place, simultaneously 1950s-60s-70s - and is some way away from Harold Wilson and The Beatles. In this world we  have televised public executions sponsored by the nation's favourite tea and a 'German Reich' is promising to give a degree of autonomy to the Netherlands.

Oh yes, this is an alternate reality, which British viewers will find parts of this distracting. Heller and Cannon Smart enough to put that constant signifier of an alternative reality- the airship- prominently in the opening titles and the occasional location shot.

In this alternative reality, travellers across the Atlantic have to deal with a brutal right wing state with morals from a previous century. It's a real switch from our world. Britain is in near civil war, with a right wing Raven Society having street battles with a left wing No Name League while what looks like a Macmillan era government looks on with mild disinterest.

If you think a plot of right wing coups against parliament as being a little far fetched, you might think differently after Season 3 of The Crown, covering the 1970s, airs this November  - and maybe you should watch current affairs more

Gotham creators have obviously been watching some of the great true crime thrillers of the 1980s (usually directed by the great Peter Medak) which cover this period such as DANCE WITH A STRANGER, LET HIM HAVE IT, THE KRAYS and SCANDAL. These in their original form are pretty much Skiffle Gothic as is and Heller and Cannon just run with that. I'm presuming some of the crazier stuff, like the Ripper crime family, is at least inspired by the comics. Be warned for those with kids some of this is really gory, with potentially disturbing sexual content, up there with GOT, it would definitely have been X-rated back in the day.

No less ridiculous than Absolute Beginners and a hell of a lot more interesting. There is a certain sadistic pleasure in seeing the cast of Heartbeat  in something like Star Trek's MIRROR MIRROR reality. Some British viewers will find parts of this distracting - notably Paloma Faith as Mira Hindley type gangster is going to be a big turn off for anyone over a certain age in the UK. Also the history of this other world bothers me constantly. Was there a WW2? There is a German Reich... Does this mean the DC Universe - Superman, Wonder Woman etc - at least as far as Europe goes, is MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE?

Amidst all this European grimness Thomas Wayne, future father of Bruce, is full of Kennedy era (?) optimism - “In 20 years Gotham City will be the Zurich of the Eastern Seaboard!”

It's very well shot, with a meanness and mood that alternates between noir and gothic and a nice hint of old ITV adventure shows, especially about the opening titles and theme. Individual episodes pop up with nice references to AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON and even THE WICKER MAN. My favourite is at a hospital straight out of a Ken Russell film where we meet 'Baroness Orczy' - a long overdue nod to the woman creator of the first masked hero, the Scarlet Pimpernell, and she's played by British National Treasure Felicity Kendal as a black magic Hannibal Lector.
(It probably helps to be a fan of GOTHAM to deal with this kind of shock).

Enthusiasts for period detail could have enough entertainment just spotting the Daimler’s, Fords and Rovers. As the interiors grow to include the genteel homes of far left and far right leaders even design cues and locations from A CLOCKWORK ORANGE start to appear. You might have seen this sinister decor in HIGH RISE, but it's no less creepy here, lit often like a tomb.

What often makes the difference in tv such as this is the casting, which is pretty much spot on, Bannon could really be doing a long flashback of Caine's character from THE DARK KNIGHT. This is a star making turn from Mr Bannon - I’m going out on a limb and predict that he will be the next Bond after current replacement.

Among some the other casting I have to highlight Anna Chancellor, playing a cozy gun toting Oswald Mosley fascist insurrectionist.

Pennyworth could be restrained, properly period and cool, like Portishead's Glory Box brought to life, but GOTHAM's creators can’t resist the pull of the vaudeville. Some might find that a bonus, that in these superhero saturated times PENNYWORTH has enough theatrical Sweeney Toddery to take itself a lot less seriously than most features actually set in the standard world of The Dark Knight.

At its most bonkers the world this series creates has a hint of Terry Gilliam - and I can't honestly find a better recommendation than that.

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Admission - I preferred the first episode of now cancelled KRYPTON to the first episode of the current media darling PEAKY BLINDERS. Also GOTHAM was ultimately a bit too much like a musical gone wrong for me, so I had low expectations for this.