As the title suggests, so forth.
Mad Keanu
It is ten years to the day since John Wick arrived in Irish cinemas. It is quite weird to think that two years ago I also saw its final installment in the cinema on the same day. The most piquant praise any Talking Nonsense piece on this blog has ever received came from Beauregarde Hinkelmeister-Schmitt who read it and said “My, that went places”. And so did John Wick. From a low budget movie financed in part by Eva Longoria to a blockbuster finale. From a tightly coiled tale of revenge in an offbeat world, to a baroque phantasmagoria in an entirely different universe to reality. And what did we learn along the way? Perhaps this – at a younger age than either of them Keanu Reeves has joined David Lynch and Werner Herzog in an internet pantheon of appreciation, not for the art they produce, but for the work they do, par Salinger, in leaning against the bar not doing much but hold the universe together.
The Cowardice of IP
I was blindsided while walking recently with a thought about the parasitic relationship of Alien: Romulus to Alien: try to imagine the same scenario – for 1979. You would be releasing a film in 1979 that was slavishly riffing off of a 1934 original. You might have someone with a passing resemblance to, and then done them up with prosthetics to look even more like, a late Barrymore who featured in the original. That would be just a bit weird, wouldn’t it? And yet now, we have been inured to accept this sort of slavish hat-tipping and creepy resurrection as normal. I have written thousands of words across various formats that went absolutely nowhere: radio plays, short films, short plays, sketches, full plays, radio segments, comedy podcasts. And yet at no point did I start hoarding this material and trying to shoehorn it into everything else I wrote subsequently. It was all as a leaf on the wind, because I didn’t think that I wouldn’t be able to write more new material at will that would be just as good. And yet when you look at Star Trek Into Darkness or Alien: Romulus what you see is that fear. We must perforce recycle entire storylines and iconic individual lines because we are utterly convinced that we cannot measure up to what has gone before. Thus doth IP make cowards of us all. And thus the native hue of originality is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of imitation. And USS Enterprises and Xenomorphs with this regard their plot twists turn awry, and lose the name of action.
Fund Herzog!
Won’t somebody please step up to the plate and throw the needful at the good Herr Werner? It is absolutely maddening, especially after David Lynch died having been strung along by Netflix for nearly a decade without nothing to show for it, to see Herzog publishing his screenplay Mexico: The Aztec Account of the Conquest as an admission of defeat; because there is zero possibility of realising the blockbuster budget needed to produce it. As he candidly says even with advances in technology from when he wrote the script in the 1990s it would still need nearly 200 million to properly film it – and that is only something you get if you hit a home run for a major studio’s tentpole franchise. And yet look at the Russo Brothers. Still coasting off the success of a pre-COVID pair of films despite their 2020s work being hugely expensive but forgettable to the point of unwatchable paint by numbers dreck. If two major streamers can afford to set fire to over half a billion dollars for so little – can’t they throw 190 million the direction of Herzog?! Who wouldn’t want to help him, in his early eighties, to make his last great movie? To have that title in your collection forever would be worth so much more than having the Russo film whose title keeps tripping me up – to the point where I have filed it away under the name The Electric Free State of Jones. (As nobody will be talking about in 2026 it hardly matters) But that would suppose they are thinking in terms of movies, not content, in terms of visual impact and narrative strangeness, not audible exposition for second screen viewing. Oh, for a philanthropic billionaire.
Wonder Boys
An apparently unpopular opinion – Wonder Boys deserved to fail at the box office. It’s been 25 years since it didn’t do well, and then had a second go, and failed again, and the recriminations went back and forth between creatives and executives about marketing and budgeting. Well, it wasn’t the campaign. It’s not a great movie. It’s got a great cast, yes, but it doesn’t make the most of them. It has great source material, yes, but it doesn’t make the most of it either. Sure, there are some cute moments – such as Tobey Maguire’s derisive snort of laughter at the back of an enormous lecture hall as Rip Torn speechifies pompously. But they are outweighed by the disappointing moments. The transcendent ending of Michael Chabon’s novel, wherein Grady Tripp bids farewell to his cursed novel, felt flat translated to regular rainy Pittsburgh. And a personal favourite episode where Grady’s favourite writing student critiques his unfinishable unreadable stoned ramble of a novel (It’s like Gravity’s Rainbow! It teaches you how to read it!) falls very flat compared to the absurdist joy of that scene in the novel. Wonder Boys is an interesting failure, and, to heap some more shame on it, probably ended any hope of the likes of Moonglow or The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay making it to the screen with the requisite big budget and high-powered cast. (The less said about the low budget attempt at The Mysteries of Pittsburgh in 2008 the better.)
Talking Movies 