Two grumpy drunken Scots present their sweary, rambling, boozy and occasionally shambolic run through the good, the bad and the downright ugly in cult TV and films.
In case you've not heard, 80s kids favourite The Karate Kid is the latest classic to be put through the 'let's rape our childhoods' Hollywood remake meatgrinder.
Ralph Macchio and Pat Morita have been replaced by Jaden Smith (son of Will Smith, thus making him the Viscount of Bel Air, according to Debretts) and Hollywood's official Older Oriental for Hire, Jackie Chan (John Cho, this is what you have to look forward to in 30 years time...).
Judging by the stills released today, at least part of the film is set on the Great Wall of China (or at the very least, a studio backdrop that LOOKS like the Great Wall of China).
Which is all well and good. But time and tastes have moved on a bit since the days when everyone was doing karate classes after school before rushing home for Willie Fog and some Um Bungo.
Karate's passe now, and what da kidz is really interested in is MMA, innit.
Now, the Thumbcast's not adverse to a bit of cage fighting action, so my hopefully we'll see young Jaden battling through to the finals of his karate competition, clutching his bruised ribs and ankles in pain as he goes up on one leg to hit the famous Crane Kick from the first film.
Except this time, instead of the cocky karate expert and local school bully, prime to be taken down a peg or two, his opponent is this:
or this
or even this:
And what we end up seeing happen to young Jaden is this:
It's all Watchmen's fault, of course. Ever since Zack Snyder introduced this whole walk-on directors commentary malarky, there's been the danger of this happening.
And now, on Blu-ray, there's a way of making Terminator Salvation an even more irritating and worthless experience than it was at the cinema.
Now, I've no problem with director commentaries. They're usually enjoyable, they add something extra to a film you've seen before (usually) and they're a natural extension of the making-of process.
I don't even mind branching extras. They're optional. You don't need to do anything if you don't want to, and if you do then it doesn't disrupt the flow of the film too much.
But this is something different, taking the tedious and unnecessary Christian Bale growlathon sequel and extending the misery.
For, as you'll see above, at seemingly random points of the movie the display goes from a nice HD print of the movie to something resembling a cheap iDVD menu, while some irritating ginger twat stands in front of the picture and talks over what's happening.
'In this scene here,' proclaims McG, 'you can see...' Except we can't We can't see feck all, because there some ginger gitwizard standing between the screen and us. Get out the way, Nichol, some of us are trying to watch the film.
Although to be fair, I'm not trying to watch it. It's a bloody awful film. The man who managed to cock up Charlie's Angels, lets not forget, and who was going to rape the arse off Spaced, has now skewered the once-iconic Terminator franchise. A series which survived the indignities of the Terminatrix and the whacky adventures of the Sarah Connor Chronicles gets turned into a Transformers-meets-Mad-Max mashup.
Sam Worthington tries his best, bless, with an overbooked character, while Anton Yelchin - tagged as comic relief v1.2 in Star Trek - turns in a likeable performance as baby Kyle Reese. But up against Christian Bale's growly Batman With A Gun, it's not enough.
REM'S classic 1987 track It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) is a loud, raucous, nonsensical litany of seemingly random things, including extreme weather conditions and continental drift. It's regarded as one of their best, and remains popular 22 years after it's release.
Roland Emmerich's 2009 film 2012 also features the end of the world as we know it, extreme weather conditions and continental drift. It'd also a loud, raucous, nonsensical litany of seemingly random things. However, should this particular travesty of filmmaking remain popular 22 years after its release, it will prove the cinema audiences of the western world really do deserve to be collectively taken out and shot.
Emmerich, along with fellow celluloid molester Dean Devlin, set the tone for big screen FX-laden disaster flicks in the mid 90s, when Independence Day showed what happens when you take a bunch of quirky, likeable but not quite A-list actors, give them a piss-weak, cliche-laden script then throw all the money at the effects.
Fast forward 13 years, and Emmerich's trying the same trick again. Though it's not aliens destroying the world, it's nature, as the Sun somehow turns neutrinos into microwaves that cook the Earth's core. With three year's notice, the G8 set about building a bunch of giant ships in the Himalayas, offering hope to those who are carefully selected - either because of their positions of power or because of their bank balances.
In among all this, fighting to survive you have the President of the United States, an ordinary bloke who's separated from his wife and family, a noble but lowly scientist trying to do the right thing, some cute kids and a dog with unlikely survival abilities. Basically, variations on a theme from every other Emmerich production produced, be it The Day After Tomorrow, Eight Legged Freaks, ID4, Godzilla...
But unlike those heady days in the 90s, the world has moved on. Large scale disaster movies have lost their impact - it's hard to top the real life tragic images from New York, while effects expectations aren't what they were. Back in 1996, a mile wide alien spaceship blowing up the White House or the Empire State Building looked like nothing we'd ever seen before. Nowadays, we can see volcanoes exploding with gay abandon on your average episode of Doctor Who.
Plus, the FX in 2012 is all CG, as opposed to the model shots from ID4 - and for all there's more you can do in a computer, the physicality of that modelwork is desperately missed. There's a received wisdom that CG never looks as good as models and while that's obviously not true, there are moments in here that you long for a sense of solidity.
That said, it's not just in the FX work that there's issues over the solidity. There's some good acting talent gathered here - John Cusack, Amanda Peet, Jimi Mistry, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Thandie Newton for starters - who are trying their hardest with a script best described as weak. Character development is never a priority in these sorts of movies, admittedly, but when you've such an impressive cast it seems a shame to dispose and waste them. Only Oliver Platt produces anything like a peformance of depth as the nominal villain of the piece - even though, for all the moralising and humanitarian rhetoric spouted by Ejiofor's character, Platt's position of practicality is rarely wrong.
It doesn't help, of course, when the story is such utter bollocks. To the point, the accursed point of these kind of films, where stuff happens only because it looks cool rather than even advancing the plot. Characters die not out of sacrifice, or redemption, or because it even services the plot, but because the writers have run out of things for them to do. I hope Beatrice Rosen and Thomas McCarthy, two fine talents who manage to make their desperately underwritten characters vaguely sympathetic, were on some kind of bonus payment for the pointless way they exit the film.
There's also one moment early on, where a throwaway character is murdered in Paris, which is deliberately designed and staged to echo the death of Princess Diana, apparently only for the sake of lazy referencing than for any drama or plot advancement. It's horrifically tasteless and so out of kilter with the rest of the story as to be nonsensical.
2012 also turns out to be the first film where global events overtake the economies of scale on display. The world powers set a EU1bn price tag on buying a seat on one of the survival arks. A couple of years ago, when this was being written and prepped, that might have seemed merely offensively opulent. Now it just sounds offensive.
I wanted to like 2012, I really did. I loved ID4, and Eight Legged Freaks. I can even tolerate Godzilla and The Day After Tomorrow. There's nothing wrong with a bit of mindless, explosive, big screen spectacle. But this wasn't it. It wasn't even spectacle. It was just there, cliched and trite and dumb as a sack of lobotomised spaniels, wasting the talent on display.
Look, let me prove it, ok. Here's one of the main setpiece scenes, shorn of it's FX (and with a bit of that bloody keyboard cat, sadly):
And since the FX sequences are nothing to write home about, what have you got really?
Two American girls are on a road trip through Europe. In Germany they end up with a broken car in the woods. They search for help and find an isolated villa. The next day they awake to find themselves trapped in a terrifying make shift basement hospital along with a Japanese man. A German man identifies himself as a retired surgeon specialized in separating Siamese twins.However his three "patients" are not about to be separated, but joined together in an horrific operation. He plans to be the first person to connect people via their gastric system, in doing so bringing to life his sick lifetime fantasy "the human centipede".
The quirky, to say the least, casting of the new A Team movie has caught the headlines these last few days. But not, it would seem, in the way either producers or the actors themselves anticipated.
Liam Neeson, Bradley Cooper, Quinton Jackson and Sharlto Copley step into the shoes of George Peppard, Dirk Bennedict, Mr T and Dwight Schultz for the movie, due out next year, which updates the action from 'Nam to Iraq.
But it's Jackson's casting which is having the biggest, unexpected, impact on the production.
For those not familiar with him, Quinton 'Rampage' Jackson is a former Pride and UFC champion and MMA superstar, who's had the odd cameo role in the past but makes his acting debut, if you can call it that, with The A Team.
A hugely talented and charasmatic fighter, here he is in action:
Rampage is one of the two coaches on the currently airing season of The Ultimate Figher, UFC's reality TV show where hopefuls battle it out for a big money fight contract with the MMA league. And just two episodes in the expectation was that this year's season - leading to a showdown PPV fight between Jackson and rival coach Rashad Evans - was going to be the biggest yet. It opened to huge ratings on Spike TV and is being shown on terrestrial TV in the UK for the first time.
Jackson, a huge pro-wrestling fan, knows how to cut a promo and make the feud with Evans - which has genuine roots anyway - look superheated on TV. The blow-off fight at the end of the season was scheduled to be in Jackson's home town of Memphis this December. The signs were there that it'd be a huge payday for both men, and one of the biggest PPV cards the UFC's ever staged.
And then Jackson took the A Team gig.
The movie's filming now in Canada, and won't finish until November. For continuity purposes, Jackson can't look messed up - meaning no fight training during shooting. So he'd be out of ring shape and unprepared for a bout in December - meaning it was postponed.
Dana White, UFC's president, went apeshit, and blasted Jackson in interviews after Rampage's decision was announced. He accused Jackson of passing up big money for a far smaller wage doing the A Team movie. Evans was also left pissed off, since he'd put off other fight plans to take the Ultimate Fighter coaching gig - with the promise of the Jackson fight at the end of it.
Instead of their bout in December, it now looked like April would be the date for their showdown - four months later than planned, and losing the momentum of their TUF feud.
But Rampage didn't take kindly to White's comments - and announced he was retiring from UFC, and from fighting. For good. Writing on his website, he said he'd been forced to take the TUF job rather than fighting UFC Light Heavyweight champ Lyoto Machida, and was sick of being booed by fans.
Jackson also claimed he'd asked White to put the fight back by a month because of the A Team gig, which would have allowed him to do both and still capitalised on the momentum of the Ultimate Fighter feud with Evans.
"Dana went on the Internet and mocked me because of that and I still did nothing. Dana and I finally talked and we made up and then afer that he went back on the Internet and said some bullshit and he was talking bad about the movie when information is not even supposed to be released and talking about payments which is not even true could really hurt my future acting career, which could very well last longer than my fighting career."
"So I'm done fighting. I've been getting negative reviews from the dumb ass fans that don't pay my bills or put my kids through college. So I'm hanging it up. I'm gonna miss all my loyal fans but hopefully they'll follow me to my new career and I will gain more loyal fans along the way. And all you hater fans out there can kiss my big black hairy ass and anybody that don't like what I just said can come try and kick my ass."
So what now? Well, Jackson's got to sink or swim on his performance in the movie - making his debut in a $100m action movie, in perhaps the most high-profile role in that movie, with no acting experience. The UFC, depending on Dana White's mood, may go out of their way to not promote the film - as opposed to hyping it to the moon, which they would likely have done had White and Rampage not fallen out quite so spectacularly. And the fight group looks set to miss out on what could have been one of it's biggest fights of the year.
On an earlier edition of The Thumbcast, Iain said:
I can't wait for GI Joe. I'm really looking forward to it because I've a feeling it's going to be this year's Transformers. The first Transformers movie had so little promise. It was a Michael Bay film based on a toyline. It should have been pish. Yet the first one is great... But I think GI Joe's going to be this year's Transformers. I think it's going to be really good. Because it's Stephen Sommers, and OK Stephen Sommers has made some truly shit films, The Mummy Returns - in fact all the Mummy sequels he was involved in. But the first Mummy is great, Deep Rising is one of my all time favourite action films... it's a big dumb action film that knows it's a big dumb actioner... If he does it in that sort of vein, where it's slightly tongue in cheek and a bit knowing - and the reviews suggest it is - it might be allright. I've got quite high hopes for it.
Plus... I'm sorry, but it's Sienna Miller in a skintight catsuit and Christopher Eccleston doing 'accents'. Both of these are always entertaining.
After suffering through two hours of turgid, unwatchable shit in the name of justifying our Cineworld pass, we here at the Thumbcast now accept that it was in fact 'pish' and 118 minutes of our lives we won't get back.
As such, we here at the Thumbcast apologise unreservedly for our error, and to anyone who has gone to see the film.
