The Fractal Hall Journal

I don’t know how many people out there have seen this yet (I’m guessing, a lot of you), but just in case I’ll drop a cut in.

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You know a film I’m really looking forward to? Rambo.

Please stop doing that snorty laugh thing.

Look, I’m part of the ultra-violence generation. Brain corrupting video-games, Robocop, staying up far too late to watch Mark Cousins on BBC 2, all of it. Action films have become anaemic PG friendly revenue generators, with no nasty swears and absolutely positively none of that Godless sexin’. I need my killfix. Quickly, before I lose myself and go out in a hoodie looking for a right-thinking common-sense member of the public to beat to death.

Sly’s actually written well about plans for both Rambo and in the run up to Rocky Balboa over on Ain’t It Cool News and please will you stop laughing now. I don’t care. It’s been great to see how enthusiastic he’s been to revisit the old characters, though it helps to love the original Rocky more than it probably deserves.

Which I do. It’s in the top ten somewhere, perched uneasily next to  other worthier works, like Twelve Angry Men, Fellini’s 8 1/2, and Predator 2.

What?

I still haven’t seen Rocky Balboa, not because I don’t want to but because I missed it in the cinema and there’s still a part of me that thinks it’ll get another showing somewhere so I can see it on the big screen. Which, I grant you, is a little odd.

Speaking of long-delayed sequels, I keep going back and forth on the new Indiana Jones. I read somewhere that Kingdom of the Crystal Skull will be thematically based on a 50s B movie, in the same way that the originals are 30s adventure serials. Which is a little worrying, because while I understand why Lucas and Spielberg need to put a new spin on it, I’m really not sure that grey melon-headed Aztec spacemen squirreled away in a New Mexico bunker quite suits the occult archaeology angle.

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Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

I really like the title, although I think it would’ve been a nice bookend to the series if they referenced the original Raiders by taking the good Doctor Jones’ name out, and just had “The Kingdom” in swishy red and yellow and “of the Crystal Skull” in the smaller font.

At first, I wasn’t particularly excited about this flick. It’s been a long time since the last one and we all know what happened last time George Lucas decided to revisit an old favourite, plus it’s taking them a while to settle on a script which suggests some kind of difficulty. But then the pictures and the poster came out, and I was right back in 1989 with my Dad in Caerffili’s long-destroyed cinema (honestly, if memory serves it burned down in the early 90s).

There’s a lot of nostalgic retread in this ‘08 preview aimed squarely at my generation, so fuck knows big business have hooked me in once again.

Bond 22

As yet unnamed. Like the previous character, and the series below, James Bond was a big part of my childhood, in particular the Bond seasons that HTV used to put on, a different one every week. And like Indy, before Casino Royale I was a little ambivalent about the reboot. It’s not that I thought it would be bad, only that it didn’t really capture my attention.

And then it came out and it was one of the best films of 2006, not because I was predisposed to like the character but because it was a genuinely brilliant film on its own merits, no nostalgia needed, and one of the few films of the decade so far that stayed in my mind for days after seeing it. Fingers crossed the sequel will be just as strong.

Star Trek

Due out all the way at the end of the year, this has got to be the film I’m most looking forward to. The original Trek has so much potential for a reboot by people who know what they’re doing, and Mission Impossible 3 was crazy awesome and very faithful to the original. Zachary Quinto as Spock is perfect casting, and I kind of get Karl Urban as McCoy, as odd as it seems.

I think the film will live or die on how accessible it is. The really should take a leaf from the Bond franchise and fucking chuck everything out. Trek has long since descended into fanwankery, but there’s nothing that a tidy script and sharp boot to the concept’s nads shouldn’t be able to sort out.

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