Films for Planes Review: Ad Astra

Ad Adstra ☀️☀️

I like space movies, generally speaking, so when I was having my dinner on a recent Emirates flight I decided to watch Ad Adstra, starring Brad Pitt. It was very boring, but I watched to the end because I thought that something interesting might happy and because I like Tommy Lee Jones. In the end, as one of my female colleagues put it, it was just “Pitt porn” and I probably wasn’t the target market. But even Tommy Lee Jones couldn’t save it.

I’ve no idea what Donald Sutherland was doing in this tripe.

The story, about Brad being sent to find his father who has gone a bit Kutrz round the back of Nepture, was almost completely uninteresting. The space story vingettes were unbelievable and irrelevant. The only midly interesting part, where there was a fight between moon buggies (because the Great Power were, apparently, unable to eradicate space pirates living on the dark side of the moon) was ridiculous.

I genuinely don’t understand how millions and millions of dollars can be spent on something like this without someone in the room saying “hold on a minute, this is trash, let’s send the money to starving people in Africa instead” or something similar.

Rating System

In case you’d forgotten, I use a five sun rating system. It works like this:

1. Movie gets one sun for interesting story with good acting.
   
2. Movie gets one sun for not having an English villain.
   
3. Movie gets one sun for not being too dark or having lots of special effects, so you can enjoy it properly on an airplane screen.
   
4. Movie gets one sun if I watched all the way to the end without falling asleep or turning over because I was bored.
   
5. Movie gets one sun if it doesn’t have Kate Winslet in it.
   

So any movie I watch on a place usually gets at least one sun, and if they pull out all the stops they can get five.

In the English film industry, the stunt men work in the accounts department

One of the oddest stories I've seen in the newspaper in months was that of the "fake" film gang who claimed to be making a Hollywood movie in order to obtain some ridiculous sleb-welfare lolly that the (broke) British taxpayer doles out.

The gang submitted claims to HMRC, explaining that they had spent millions of pounds on the film: paying actors and film set managers. Under the tax relief regime for film-makers, they reclaimed £1.5 million in VAT, and nearly £1.3 million in film tax credit claims.

[From Five jailed for fake Hollywood film tax scam - AOL Money UK]

Now, it's absurd that film makers should get this ludicrous subsidy at all. But what's truly absurd about this story is that the film, which went straight to DVD, wasn't that bad! It won a "Silver Ace" award at last year's Las Vegas Film Festival. Compared to an actual British film made with taxpayer money such as Sex Lives of the Potato Men (an unbelievable million quid of funding from the Lottery via the Film Council), it's Citizen Kane.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.

And the Oscar for most bored listener goes to...

I don't care about things like the Oscars, and reacted very badly to a radio report I heard the other day which had either an actor or director (I didn't catch who it was) talking about "British" success at the Oscars (I haven't actually seen "The Reader", the Kate Winslet film about underage sex, so I don't know how British it actually is) whilst simultaneously calling for more public money for the film industry. Why we should be subsidising rich people to make films I don't know -- if they want more money for films they should ask Kate Winslet for it, not me -- but the person on the radio seemed to think that wealth transfer from me to Kenneth Brannagh is a natural state of affairs and that only a churlish philistine would object to it.

Well I do. Although I like films, just as everyone else does I suppose, I'm not really that interested in them or the actors. I can remember years ago talking to someone about Alien, which is one of my all-time favourites, a film that I've seen countless times. They asked me something about one of the actors in it, and I hadn't got a clue, because I didn't pay any attention to them outside of their characters in the film, if you see what I mean. My all-time favourite film is the original Australian cut of Mad Max, and my opinion of that film wasn't changed one iota when I found out that Mel Gibson is an anti-semitic nutter, because I wasn't interested in him in beyond the context of the film. I'm not saying the Oscars should be banned -- I don't feel that strongly about them one way or the other -- but I do wonder what they are really for.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Carry on generations

I was slouching on the couch, tired and bored, flicking through the TV channels. I came across Carry on Cleo and started watching it. Foreign persons don't understand how the Carry On series both fits into and shapes our national psyche, but for British persons of a certain age (eg, me), they are special and comforting, like a spotted dick (tee hee).

Anyway, I was watching it while no.2 son came and slumped on the sofa beside me. He was bored too, waiting to talk to his mother while she was in the middle of an extended phone conversation with one of her friends. So there we were, watching Jim Dale, Warren Mitchell, Kenneth Williams and the rest of the gang. Now, no.2 son is not versed in the history of British light entertainment, the tradition of the double entendre or the Shakespeare tragedy that was the inspiration for the work. More interestingly, he had no idea it was a comedy, and just thought it was a boring and unrealistic (well, compared to Gladiator, his benchmark for films about ancient Rome) film about Julius, Mark and Cleopatra.

So, I observe, that unless you are schooled in a culture that believes Carry On films to be funny, they aren't. One reason may well be that they contain no actual funny jokes (except, in this case, the famous line about infamy, infamy, they've all got it infamy).

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

One up the Khyber

Surely I can't be the only one. If I hear on the news about Hamid Karzai, the President of Afghanistan, in my head I picture noted English actor Kenneth Williams. That’s because he starred as the Khazi of Khalibar, the head of the Pashtun (I assume) opponents of the British Raj in the greatest film of the Carry On series (in fact one of the greatest English films of all time) Carry On up the Khyber. It’s a natural mistake to make: The Khyber Pass (the geographical feature, not the restaurant in Woking) which is central to the story, is indeed on the border of modern-day Pakistan and Afghanistan, so the confusion – a result of my brain’s limited capacity – is understandable.

I won't direct the delicate to a dictionary of Cockney rhyming slang to point out what "Khyber Pass" means in the East End vernacular, and therefore the double entendre in "up the Khyber". That would be indelicate."

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.

[posted with ecto]