So, you’ve seen the news story – reported here in The Guardian yesterday – of Tom Hanks giving the cost of the cinema ticket back to two people who didn’t like his film Larry Crowne, that bombed at the box office this summer. Is that a dangerous precedent or the way forward for consumers?

I haven’t seen Larry Crowne because it didn’t play at my local flea-pit. It’s not 3D, you see, so doesn’t appeal to the mouth-breathers who frequent our shining diadem in the local entertainment crown. No wizards, no explosions, no interest. But, you know what, I did pay good hard-earned money to go see Harry Potter 7½ which was in 3D and consequently the picture was so gloomy I may as well have been listening to a radio play. That’s £7.50 I’ll never see again.

So, y’know, I think the Warner Brothers owe me some cash. And the gormless buffoons responsible for inflicting Clash of the Titans on the world, last year, that was them too, yeah? Right, fifteen quid then. I’ll be dispatching an invoice presently.

But holding corporations responsible for their cowardly refusal to grow a spine and take a stand is fairly pointless. Of course large companies are incapable of producing anything artistic, they’re full of middle managers desperately avoiding making any decisions lest they be held responsible for them. No, for full satisfaction, one needs to bring the actual film-makers to book.  Those unnamed cinema-goers who singled out Hanks at the garage had the right idea.

Having recently been dared to sit through the DVD of Basement – possibly the worst film ever made – I’ll tell you this for nothing, next time I see Danny Dyer down Tesco I’ll give him a piece of my mind!!

But, again, he’s really only mumbling the lines someone else has written for him. It’s the people behind the camera who are at fault! Hanks wrote and directed Larry Crowne, that’s why he, quite rightly, felt responsible for ruining that couple’s evening. So, which behind-the-scenes people owe me money?

5: James Cameron owes me three and a quarter hours of my life.

… Because I had to sit through Titanic. I was a film reviewer at the time so didn’t have to pay but, y’know, my time is valuable (I like to think) and I had to watch that creaking, groaning monstrosity which features a diverting 45 minutes of interest crammed into 194 minutes of film.

 

4: Adam Sandler owes me £6.00


… And all the time I’ve spent arguing with my deluded friends about the hollow, blank-eyed, emotionally stunted characters he and film-makers like Judd Apatow have used to replace what used to be comedy. Sandler doesn’t just appear in these God-awful unfunny films, he produces the damn things and fills them with his mates. All these adult actors who have spent the last decade acting like children (and, yes, Will Ferrell, Paul Rudd, Kevin James, Seth Rogen and Zach Galifianakis, I’m looking at you!) driving movie comedy ever deeper into the gutter, while American TV comedy has never been sharper and wittier. If Sandler were on network TV they’d just cancel his ass and be done with it!

Why £6.00?  Well, because I paid to see The Wedding Singer (I figured I had to prove to myself how lame he was) and eventually had to give in and rent Click at the insistence of the kids. Should have made them pay! Maybe I will. Note to self: Invoice the kids!

 

3: M. Night Showaddywaddy owes me £9.00

… For renting Signs, The Village and The Happening.  I wasn’t that taken with Sixth Sense because, y’know … I guessed! I’ve seen The Twilight Zone and Angel Heart … It wasn’t rocket science.

Same was true of Unbreakable but, in the case of that film, guessing the ending was part of the pleasure … The shared pleasure of “getting” superhero comics! You have to remember that this was before Spider-Man and X-Men and Batman Begins and Iron Man … Back in the 90s the superhero movie was a historical oddity, but not for ole Showaddywaddy. He plugged straight into my Inner Geek Mainframe with Unbreakable. He elevated his writing to far more than the Rod Serling doppelganger Sixth Sense made him out to be.

Turned out it was a blip, though. Lulling me into an entirely false sense of security. Ye Gods. Signs was all kinds of dumb. A baseball bat? Really?And The Village was best summed-up by the Blockbuster manager who rented it to me with the words “Yeah, I’m looking forward to this … So long as it’s not something lame like they’re not really in the past!” Yeah … that would be lame! And straight out of Rod Serling’s ‘Not Good Enough For TV’ file.

Then we come to The (non) Happening. Do you know why I saw this? So I could share the pain with my fellow humans. It was an act of pure empathy. I’d heard them whimpering in the dark and needed to know their pain. And there it was, as close to a self-fulfilling prophecy as I ever expect to see … For if ever there was a film that would make you want to lay down in front of a lawn-mower …

 

2: Steven Spielberg owes me £15.00

… Because, after he hit pay dirt in 1982 with his films about kids and families (ET and Poltergeist), there was no stopping him; he has spent much of his subsequent career wearing those same misty rose-tinted specs.

He wrote and produced Goonies – which is one of those films (like Karate Kid and Short Circuit) which have mysteriously entered the zeitgeist despite having been rightly seen at the time as entirely without merit.  Just because people who haven’t seen it in twenty-five years think it’s good doesn’t make it so. It made life intolerable for fat kids like me. And Spielberg’s to blame. Then, not content with having ruined the childhood of the rotund, he returned in 1993 with Jurassic Park and made the fat adult the bad-guy. So, having so resoundingly victimised the chubbies, I guess he’ll be going after The Gingers next.  But, it’s okay, I’m over it now, okay! Just pass me another packet of biscuits and leave me alone.

Hook. What the Hell was he thinking? Convoluted, sanctimonious garbage! The message of this film was that the only good parent is a parent who spends his every moment with his kids. Well, I can understand why the product of divorced parents might feel that way, but here in the real world where people have to work to earn a crust, it isn’t always so easy. We aren’t all billionaires who can afford to have a few years off to be with our kids when we feel like it, Steven.

Then Spielberg decided to start tampering with his good films!  ET – The 20th Anniversary Edition. What the – if you’ll pardon my Anglo-Saxon – fuck?  He tampered with the music, added some stupid, unnecessary CGI cartoon ET shots and then turned all the guns into walkie-talkies.  Well that madness was brilliantly lampooned by South Park here:

 

The only reason I don’t hate this is because, when it was released on DVD, at least he had the common decency to release the proper version too.  Unlike some tampering auteurs I could name.  Needless to say, the ‘special edition’ of ET has never seen the inside of my DVD player.

But time moves on and he got all that cloying sentimentality out of his system … At least for a while.  He returned to familiar home-ground with Indiana Jones and Most Convoluted Title About Skulls. True, the film was about fifteen years too late but the fans crossed their fingers and hoped this wouldn’t be a problem.

It was. They felt the need to hire a young Indiana Jones and chose Shia LaBeouf. Oh dear.  I’m sure he’s a lovely bloke that Shia but, rather like Orlando Bloom before him, he is the acting equivalent of an E number, an ingredient that adds nothing good to the mix. Maybe, when he starts acting with people rather than CGI cartoons, he might make more of an impression. But I doubt it.

But he wasn’t even the worst of it. The lead-lined fridge? Really? Is that really a great message to be sending out to the gun-toting rednecks of Pig’s Knuckle, Arkansas?

But not even that was the depths of the film’s failure. Aliens… Why’d it have to be aliens?

And now we’ve got Falling Skies – or ‘The Waltons War of the Worlds’. But that’s free … So I’ll just have to lump that, I guess.

 

1: George Lucas owes me … Well, more wealth than you can imagine!

Willow was his failed attempt to re-make Star Wars with Val Kilmer and Warwick Davis instead of Harrison Ford and Mark Hamill.

Land Before Time was his failed attempt to make a Disney film as though produced by his mate Spielberg.

Howard The Duck was his failed attempt to stop anyone who had ever read Steve Gerber’s wonderfully surreal and irreverent Marvel comic from projectile vomiting through its two interminable hours.

There were the endless re-issues of the Star Wars films … First at the cinema then on home video.

There was the full-screen release. Then there was the widescreen release. Then there were various editions with various collections of ‘extras’. Then, in 1997, there were the ‘Special Editions’ which were the equivalent of spitting in the eyes of the people who’d made him a billionaire by their sad devotion to his twenty-year old movie.  But they were released at the cinema … and we hadn’t had the chance to see them, even in an adulterated form, on the big screen for so long …

Then the Special Editions were released on video and laser disc and they became the only versions of the films we were allowed to see.  That was enough for me, for the first time I stuck my heels in and refused to cough up the readies; which at least means I didn’t contribute to the production budget for 1999’s Phantom Menace.

This was the final straw. An abomination of galactic proportions: A film, nay, a trilogy about a trade war. Lucas had spent so much of the previous twenty years in board-rooms winning battles with sycophantic suppliers that he had fooled himself into thinking that sales negotiations were exciting.

So, the bad guys are a Trade Federation and the Republic we’d been dreaming about for most of our lives was brought low by the equivalent of stock-brokers haggling over points.

It’s like making an action movie out of Bankers destroying our economy for a bonus payment … Only without flying cars.  Or, on the plus side, Jar-Jar frickin’ Binks.

Devastated, we realised that our money was all that Lucas loved. But we licked our emotional wounds and tried again with Attack of the Clones and then, the final insult, the almost completely incoherent sturm und drang of Revenge of the Sith. And what exactly were they getting revenge for again?  Oh, I don’t care.

The whole bloody lot is coming out on Blu-ray soon and, you know what … I really don’t care.  It’s all gone.  The polish has worn off and I can see the base metal beneath what I thought was gold

But … You know what else? He didn’t force me to buy and re-buy and re-re-buy his damn films. And, really, how much money have I poured into his bottomless Sarlacc money-pit?  Adding it all together, it probably doesn’t amount to more than a couple of hundred quid over twenty-four years.

Hell, I’ve spent more than that on biscuits. This week.

No one forces any of us to watch a film for the first time … And it’s always going to be a gamble.  Even if you watch something that’s a carefully constructed re-make, peddling overly-familiar clichés, advertised by trailers that take the trouble to reveal every single surprise the film may hold … There is still the possibility that they’ve made a hash of it.

Like Clash of the Titans.

How often have you emerged from a movie and muttered “Well, that’s two hours of my life I’ll never get back”?  Well, what else would you have done with them?  Cured cancer?  No, you’d have sat at home by yourself thinking “I could be watching that movie with my mates”.

So, if you’ve seen a movie you didn’t like, get some perspective. In the legendary words of that great film critic, John Brosnan (now looking down on us from his great airship in the sky) … It’s only a movie!

But Danny, if you’re reading this, I was serious about that Tesco thing!

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