Never Mind The Three Sea Shells...

 It's become fashionable in recent years to point out how many things Demolition Man got right.

 For those who haven't seen the film - maybe your parents hated you, maybe you're some sort of pussy, I don't care about your reasons for failing - the film is an action sci-fi comedy starring Sly Stallone.

 In the impossible future year of 1996, Stallone plays a maverick cop (because of course he does) who is hunting evil crime lord Wesley Snipes. This is during the "Urban Wars" in mid-nineties L.A. which apparently didn't make the papers.

 Snipes' character abducts a bus full of people and Stallone bungee-jumps in to rescue them, because nineties action films habitually blew up the very concept of subtlety and then fucked its wife. On a related point, the building explodes during the gunfight, allegedly killing all the hostages. Stallone's reckless actions are blamed for this, and both men are sent to the "cryo-prison", to be placed in suspended animation until their lengthy sentences have been served.

 I'd kinda like a tiny frozen Sly to put in my ice cubes at home...

 Thawed out in 2036, Snipes escapes from his parole hearing and goes on the rampage in San Angeles, a mega-city in which everything deemed harmful (smoking, red meat, swearing, violence, alcohol, unregulated sex) has been outlawed, leaving the neutered and ultra-PC populace unable to handle Snipes' old school maniac. As a last ditch attempt to catch him, they thaw out Stallone to fight meat-headed violence with a slightly mumblier form of meat-headed violence.

 Aside from a few obvious gaffes like, say, the entire premise, the film is actually surprisingly accurate in a number of its future predictions. Not just obvious ones like Wesley Snipes going to prison, either. Characters are seen using devices that look suspiciously like iPads:

  ...the cars are self-driving and obey voice commands (something Google is rolling out imminently, if reports are to be believed) and there's even a joke about the "Schwarzenegger Presidential Library," which pre-dates his stint as Governor of California by ten years, and his term as President by twenty-five.*

 So far, so what? Lots of people have pointed these things out. Watching the film today, however, I realised that there's something nobody ever addresses.

 During one of their many fist fights throughout the movie, Wesley Snipes tells Sly Stallone the that hostages that were "killed" during their final encounter in the past were already dead, and that Stallone's character was set up to look guilty.

 Then, at the climax of the film, when Snipes is trying to release every violent prisoner from stasis, they have another fight, Stallone kicks Snipes' head off, and then there's a tremendous explosion that destroys the entire cryo-prison, which Sly runs away from in slow motion because that's how we did things back when movies had proper endings, god dammit.

Pictured: How "Inception" would have ended circa 1993.

 Stallone limps into the car park to make out with Sandra Bullock and, in the film's most disappointing scene, doesn't spend an extended fifteen minute sequence beating Dennis Leary into a lumpy red paste.

 Wait... What... What about the prison that just blew up?!

 Sure, it took out all the madmen and serial killers that Wesley Snipes was trying to release, but there must have been other people in cryo-prison? People who were in for minor crimes? In a society as uptight and puritan as San Angeles is depicted as being, surely there must have been scores of people serving time just for having sex with their partners, or having a beer, or any one of a thousand other trivial "crimes."

 And Sly Stallone blew them all up.

 So, in a movie with starts with Sly being framed for blowing up a building full of innocent people in his attempt to apprehend Wesley Snipes, he ends by legitimately blowing up a building full of innocent people whilst apprehending Wesley Snipes.

 Maybe we didn't do endings so well back in the day after all...





 *Probably.

Tony Blair: Oh Yes We Did...

 Because the internet was just crying out for another person to complain about politics, I've decided to put my two cents in on Tony Blair's recent advice on the situation in Iraq.

 If, as some people speculate, satire died the day Blair was made a Middle Eastern peace envoy, then Blair telling the rest of the world how to best handle tensions in Iraq must be the day that satire's re-animated corpse was finally decapitated and burned to make sure it was truly gone forever.

 Blair - in a statement on his God-bothering website - says that we "need to stop saying 'we caused this'" when it comes to problems in Iraq.

 Well, he's right. WE didn't cause this. He did. Him and a few others. Along with an estimated 36 million other people [1], I was quite vociferously against going into Iraq in the first place. Mr. Blair, of course, felt that there was no way to talk George Bush out of his omnishambolic desert folly, and so rather than growing a spine and attempting to stand on the right side of history, he instead followed Bush into a disastrously ill-thought-out war that seemed to benefit nobody except Halliburton.

 Indeed, it's the way the war was so badly handled that really rankles. I'll admit - because unlike Blair, I can admit when I'm wrong - that I was initially against the war in its entirety, largely because it seemed to be George Bush's idea, and if I cut my finger and George Bush told me to put a plaster on it, I'd probably chainsaw my arm off as a reflex action. However, having changed my mind based on new evidence (something else Blair seems incapable of) I eventually came to believe that removing Saddam Hussein was a good idea. The man was a monster and a tyrant.

 Unfortunately, the way that he was removed involved the deaths of up to a hundred and forty thousand civillians, largely due to the bull-in-a-china-shop methods employed.

 Then again, let's not forget that Hussein was only in power because rich white men in the West initially wanted him there. Whichever way you slice the almighty clusterfuck that is the Middle East, "we" always "caused this." We've been causing or exacerbating problems in poorer nations for generations, now.

 The only way for societies to make progress is for the downtrodden and brutalised to rise up against their oppressors. It happened in Libya. It happened in Egypt. It happened in England in 1649 and France in 1789. What revolutions against tyranny have in common is that they have never been instigated or aided by the intervention of rich foreigners. The best way to topple Hussein would have been to let the people do it for themselves.

 If Blair was any kind of real socialist, he'd understand that.

Epic Movie? Oh, You Mean a TV Show...

 Once upon a time, Robert DeNiro was an actor.

 This was before the wave of terrible comedies he's starred in of late, and the wave of mediocre action films he appeared in before that.

 DeNiro used to be an edgy and respected actor - to the surprise of anyone who's seen his work post 1995, in which he's contractually banned from being in a good film unless it also stars Bradley Cooper.

 In 1978, he was in Michael Cimino's "The Deer Hunter," a story about soldiers in Vietnam who are captured and forced to play Russian roulette against each other for the amusement of the Viet-Cong. Whilst all of the captured soldiers find this process hellish and scarring, one man (Christopher Walken's character) finds that he can no longer feel alive unless he participates, and after failing to escape with his comrades, spends the rest of his life in underground roulette matches until DeNiro's character, plagued by survivor's guilt, travels back to South East Asia to seek out his friend and bring him home.

 It's a psychologically complex and harrowing tale, riddled with high-caliber actors, that won Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Supporting actor (Walken.) I, for one, thought it sucked.

 Don't get me wrong - the themes and basic plotline are superb. It just drags on and on, when it doesn't need to. I actually preferred the novelisation of the screenplay, based on the script, that clocks in around 180 pages. This means that you can read the book as fast as you can watch the movie. Try doing THAT with anything that isn't directed by Peter Jackson.

Fun Fact: You can write all of The Hobbit whilst watching the first two scenes of The Hobbit.

 The writing should have been on the wall when it came to Michael Cimino and his overly long movies, but instead, he was treated as some kind of golden boy and as a result allowed to make a film called "Heaven's Gate."

 "Heaven's Gate" is a legendary film for all the wrong reasons. Not to be confused with the suicide cult of the same name, the film deals with the real-life "Johnson County War" in Wyoming between settlers and land barons.

 There are myriad stories about how much of a failure this movie was. As a film, it single-handedly bankrupted its own studio, United Artists, by running up a budget that quadrupled the agreed amount and then losing an estimated $39 million at the box office. Just how much money was pissed away by Cimino beggars belief. In an era when each foot of film cost money, Cimino demanded fifteen retakes of a guy mooning some settlers. He had an entire tree cut down, piece-by-piece, and then reassembled elsewhere just so it could be present in a shot. The film contains a five minute sequence of someone playing the fiddle on roller skates. Cimino once allegedly delayed filming until a cloud he liked the look of had drifted into shot.

 As a result, "Heaven's Gate" is almost singlehandedly responsible for the current Hollywood system, in which the money men can dictate what does or doesn't happen in a film. As a result of its excesses, the film is four fucking hours long. During the interval of the premiere screening (again: it's four hours long) Cimino reputedly asked his publicist why nobody present was drinking the champagne, only to be told "because they hate the movie, Michael."

 Yet it's just possible that "Heaven's Gate" and Michael Cimino were ahead of their time.

 The cast of "Heaven's Gate" is pretty impressive by modern standards. Kris Kristofferson (who has been in a mixed bag of films, but is undeniably one of the greatest songwriters of all time) takes the lead, but also featured are John Hurt (who starred in "The Elephant Man" in between "Heaven's Gate" being started and completed, and won an Oscar in the process), Jeff Bridges (whose Oscar winning film "Crazy Heart" was in part born of him sitting around on set with Kristofferson), Christopher Walken, Brad Dourif, Mickey Rourke, Terry O'Quinn (John Locke from "Lost"), Ronnie Hawkins (founder of what would eventually become The Band) and Willem Dafoe.

 It's Dafoe who struck my interest. In an interview many years later with Empire magazine, he said that Cimino's grand ambition was to have the film run so long, that as the conflict escalated, the background characters whom the viewer had become accustomed to would slowly whittle down. The screen would feel lonlier for the lack of people you had become, in cinematic terms, nodding acquaintances with.

 This made me think that maybe - just maybe - the recent trend for long-form TV shows has redeemed Michael Cimino. At least a little.

 I'm on record as saying that I hated "Breaking Bad" for its glacial pace, but in the most recent episode of "Game of Thrones," a background character was killed.

 The character was killed off screen, and I couldn't tell you the name of said character, but when we (as an audience) saw the body, I was genuinely saddened. The character had clearly died bravely and in a noble sacrifice, and I vaguely recognised the person in question from the previous thirty-eight episodes.

 This is exactly what Cimino had in mind for his sprawling cast and ludicrous run-time when he made "Heaven's Gate."

 Is "Heaven's Gate" a shitty film? Yes. Once again, it features five minutes of someone playing the fiddle on rollerskates. There is no reason in the world to include that in any movie, unless it's a movie about rollerskating violinists, in which case you should probably pick a different subject anyway.

 That does not, however, mean that the thinking behind it was all bad. It's just that the slow-burn effect which Cimino so singularly failed to create on the big-screen is tailor made for the small one.

 TV really is the new cinema, in terms of character and impact. Sure, I didn't like "Breaking Bad," but had I been able to develop an emotional investment in it then it would have been heartbreaking for me to see any of the relatively small cast killed off, no matter how many hours it took to happen.

 Admittedly, there will never be spectacle on the scale of "The Avengers" (which I loved) on the small screen, but as blockbusters become progressively dumber, how about we all make a deal? Movies can be big and stupid and feature a lot of explosions, and TV can be slower and smarter and make us care.

 Occasionally, there will be crossover points (big, bombastic TV and smart, caring movies - ideally a mixture of both like "The Avengers" or "Thrones") but it's increasingly looking like a case of one or the other.

 Choose your weapon.