The Fractal Hall Journal

It’ll be damn sight greener when Caerffili County Borough Council gets round to sorting out kerbside recycling. The fornightly trip to the local “Recycling Centre” with a boot-full of plastic is starting to get a little old.

I notice a bit of buzz about a Best Picture Oscar push for The Dark Knight. Ain’t going to happen, folks, not for a flick about a man in rubber. Although you’d be daft to bet against a post-humous one for Heath Ledger, because there’s nothing anyone likes more than human tragedy.

Speaking of the Academy Awards and on the subject of the film I got today’s post title from, the Academy has made some completely crackers decisions over the years. I mean, I’m as Wales-centric a person as you’ll find in the Fair Country, but How Green Was My Valley beat The Maltese Falcon and Citizen Kane to the Best Picture/Director Oscars. Really, 1940s Hollywood? Really? Maybe one for Batman isn’t utterly outside the realms of possibility, and to be fair I can’t really think of a serious grown-up film about grown-up stuff that’s come out this year. But then, that’s probably just me being mesmerised by all the big screen pretty pretty explodey.

There’s always the Bond, though, and Bond’s been on my mind. Via Mick, I’ve been making my way through snell’s Bond reviews. Well worth your time, the review of The Spy Who Loved Me being particularly good in that it’s spot-on in identifying the film as over-rated, and explaining why.

You know what, I don’t think I’ve seen For Your Eyes Only. I must have, because ITV used to do a Saturday night Bond season at least once a year and I wouldn’t have kept missing the same one. But I don’t remember a single thing about it, apart from the theme, but that’s just from watching those “Best Bond Theme” chart programmes they do everytime there’s a new one in the cinema (in fact, aren’t we about due a new one that includes the Chris Cornell track?)

As for the original Bond novels, I’ve only read Casino Royale, although I intend to make my way through the rest of them at some point. And the more I hear about the original Moonraker, the worse the piece of shit film looks, and the more I wish the BBC could do a faithful period Bond drama, with someone like Ben Cross in the title role. Brother Paul and I have talked about James Bond: The Series a lot over the years. You’re telling me people wouldn’t watch a three-part Cold War thriller mini-series featuring ex-Nazis and a plan to annihilate London? They’d shovel that up even without James Bond in it. Damn you, copyright laws, damn you all to hell.

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Big excitement in Caerffili yesterday, and by excitement I mean human misery. First, there was an armed robbery in the centre of town, and then in an apparently separate incident someone torched an old factory right behind where I live. My initial thought was, obviously, terrorists.

I think we’re going to need a little context for the rest of today’s post.

Prior to Casino Royale, I hadn’t thought much of any Bond theme since GoldenEye, and Live and Let Die before that. Which leaves a lot of Bond themes that I don’t really like. Hell, a lot of Bond films that I don’t really like. But that’s ok.

Bond themes have a tendency either to be done in a style I don’t like (see Madonna, or Duran Duran) or to be derivative to the point of, er, pointlessness (like Moonraker). The reason I like GoldenEye, despite the fact that it’s almost a pastiche of “classic” themes is because at that period in the franchise’s history, what Bond needed was a touch of tradition, a return to the fun action-romp. It was what was required at the time, which made it good.

With Casino Royale, something completely new was needed instead, and we got that with both the film and its theme song. I fucking love the Chris Cornell theme, because after boring traditional themes and substandard dancey noodling, Bond needed to rock out with his cock out. Many, of course, hate You Know My Name. Which is a shame. But in this small corner of the globe, I feel like someone wrote a Bond song specifically for me.

Which brings us in a roundabout way to Jack White and Alicia Keys’ Another Way To Die, and I fucking love that too. I mean, a theme with a bluesier tone fits with the darker direction of the franchise, and it’s the one musical style that’s never really been used in a Bond film, to my recollection. It gets to have all the string-arrangement Bondey call-backs, and be something new at the same time. And the drums; fuck me, that is some great drum work. I am incredibly relieved Mark Ronson didn’t get his hands on it, because we really would’ve ended up with another insipid take-off of Bassey-era themes.

While I’m on the Bond subject, I also love the new film’s title. But I am already sick of people making comments to the effect that “it’s about quantum physics or something.” No it isn’t. It isn’t the producers’ (or Ian Fleming’s) fault you don’t know what words mean. It’s a completely appropriate title, considering the events of the previous film.

As I’ve just switched to Moan Mode, can I have a quick go at the latest Sherlock Holmes films that are apparently in production? We’ve got Guy Richie’s Action-Adventure version with Robert Downey, Jr and Jude Law, and the Judd Apatow spoof with Ali G and Will Ferrell.

Why on Earth hasn’t anyone wanted to make a faithful adaptation since Jeremy Brett snuffed it? The last BBC one had Holmes running a incident room and profiling villains. For fuck’s sake, that is not the point. Holmes isn’t Cracker, or a CSI officer, he’s not a swashbuckling hero and he’s been parodied so often, do we really need another comedic take? His whole appeal, his super-power, is deductive reasoning. I think so many of the modern takes try and put a layer of contemporary paint onto their adaptations simply because the writers just don’t have the talent to construct a clever mystery or the inclination to just use one of Arthur Conan Doyle’s. And don’t get me started on recent portrayals of Holmes’ drug use. That’s a whole big can of missing the point.

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Before we carry on with today’s post, I just want to direct you good folks to the new blog of a dear friend, Paul C’s More Fun Comics. Please head on over and share your comments, and also the love. As for the Journal, fingers crossed but regular updating should resume on Monday.

Tim Burton’s Batman was marketed as a return to Batman’s darker roots as a sinister, pulpy vigilante. The last Bond film was a heck of a lot closer to the literature than any of the others, and I’ve written before about how much I like the original Golden Age Superman. But it’s actually a different kind of superhero that I really get fandementalist about, and a uniquely Welsh one: King Arthur.

Health and safety warning: This post has come out a little angrier than intended, so feel free to step around the thoroughly misdirected anguish.

I have bored my nearest and dearest rigid over the years while ranting about the common perception of the character versus his earliest roots. The bits that authors and screenwriters have picked up and run with over the years all seem to be later additions (Camelot, chivalry, stoned swords, knights in armour, fucking Lancelot), with the really interesting Celtic backstory largely buried. Good grief, you should have heard me whine when the last Hollywood outing decided Arthur was a Russian. First Knight? Scottish. Or John Boorman’s Excalibur: why of course Arthur was from the West Country! Anything at all, as long as he’s not a Welshman.

I used to get het up about it. Not so much, anymore, because five minutes on any given superhero message board is enough to pull me back from the edge. It’s all about interpretation, after all, and some stories become too big just for one world view.

That said, it would be great if the original legends were recognised once in a while. After all, Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote Arthur as a Brythonic war leader, propaganda that was almost a plea to preserve Celtic history in the face of cultural colonisation by Saxons, Norsemen, and whoever else took a fancy to Geoffrey’s island. The tragedy is that so much of this early culture, the language, myths and tradition of this group of people, were lost, through deliberate suppression and a lack of a coherent written language. What fragments we have, of poetry in Old Welsh, the four branches of the Mabinogi, Arthurian tales that predate Geoffrey, all seem to point to a richer vein of stories we will never be able to retrieve.

There is so much great stuff in the early stories. Arthur’s army was jam packed full of people with super-powers, for a start. Seriously, they were like the fucking Justice League. One guy ran faster than anyone else in the kingdom, another guy could see further than anyone else, one of them was a superb marksman. And instead, what we get is an endless retread of fucking Lancelot banging the king’s wife. Want to know how that part of the story came about? The bit about Lancelot, a French knight, stealing away the wife of the man perceived at the time as the greatest English king of them all, was cut-and-pasted into the legend by a Frenchman. Well, I know which film I’d rather see, and it doesn’t have Richard bloody Gere in it.

But the two characters who get the biggest shaft are the two original ‘knights’, Cai and Bedwyr. Through the various mutations of the story, they go from being Arthur’s closest companions and greatest warriors to the treacherous, obnoxious and ineffectual Sir Kay and Bedevere, the weak-willed buffoon who can’t bring himself to fulfil Arthur’s dying wish. Who do we get instead? Fucking Lancelot.

Anyway, this post should be enough to convince you that not even the passage of a thousand-odd years can quell the flame of fanboy outrage. But my final point is that some things really are better when taken back to their roots, when the accumulated bullcrap of successive iterations are scraped away, and that maybe the original Welsh superhero should get the second chance that reinvigorated so many of his 20th Century descendents.

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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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