Now bear with me, because this is my inaugral attempt at blogging and so I warn you in advance that what you are about to read may be the most rambling body of text that has ever been created. This may appear overly pessimistic at such an early stage, however I feel I can justify my intital reservations in the fact that I fully expect that I, and I alone, will be the only person to ever lay eyes upon this blog (yes 42-year-old me, you are now reading the words you typed into your laptop two decades ago, scary I know!).
My first rant will mainly focus on quadrilogies (films which have four installments). To give context to this article, basically I'm halfway through watching Die Hard 4.0 and as such began to ponder it's merits in relation to Indiana Jones 4 (The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull). At the present moment I can't actually think of any more that I've seen (or attempted to endure in the case of Indy IV) but I'm (semi-)sure that I'll be able to conjure some more up when I get into full flow...
Let me start by saying that I absolutely love the original trilogies of both Die Hard and Indiana Jones. The third installment in both being two of my absolute favourite films. Let me also say that upon seeing trailers for the fourth edition of both, I was excited to the point of needing to change both my boxers and jeans. However, around Christmas time I downloaded Indy 4 with the intention of having a chilled-out night-in whereupon I could finish my emotional journey with Harrison Ford as Indy (something which I had previously managed before seeing the newest trailer). Without exaggerating, I managed eight minutes before having to switch off... It was terrible! To further contextualise my motives for downloading this (over two years after its cinematic release), I had seen an episode of South Park, basically in which they discuss the idea that Steven Spielberg and George Lucas had exploited the series inexcusably - depicting the two directors systematically sodomising Harrison Ford throughout the episode. In my eternal optimism, I contemplated Matt Stone and Trey Parker's condemnation of the film and thought that I had to see for myself (at the time for the mere sake of defending my love of all things Indiana Jones). So upon the completion of South Park, I began to download Indy IV. History lesson complete.
As aforementioned, I persevered for the film for an excrutiating eight minutes before the final nail was hammered with the revelation of Indiana discovering an alien in a crate. I know what you're thinking, but the answer is no, I am not making this up. With this, my present scepticism of quadrilogies was vividly painted.
Fast forward to this evening, Die Hard 4.0. I find myself torn between two contrasting schools of thought;
1) this will be Indy-esque terrible
2) this will be awesome like the previous three
Thankfully, two hours in, I can confirm the latter. In all fairness, I am writing this whilst watching the film so I cannot provide a full analytical assesment on the underlying politics and themes the narrative represents metaphorically. However, this is a Bruce Willis film so looking up every few seconds to see an explosion, baddie massacre or clever quip, I pretty much get the jist. Not only does the film have Big Bruce in it, we also see Timothy Olyphant as the main villain (The Crazies, A Perfect Getaway) and Justin Long (Jeepers Creepers, He's Just Not That Into You... second one slightly controversial but he was the ONE good thing in that film!). Admittedly, I miss Sam Jackson from the third one, but hey you can't please all of the people all of the time.
What makes "Live Free or Die Hard" so good I hear you say? (I concede the full title is pretty darn terrible)
Well personally, I love making lists, so here are my Top 5 Die Hard IV moments;
1) The quote "You just killed a helicopter with a car!!!!" screamed excitedly by JL to BW.
2) Timothy Olyphant being an absolute bastard, but still remaining ice cool.
3) Bruce Willis being an absolute bastard, but still remaining ice cool.
4) The hispanice FBI dude going crazy when told "It's above your pay grade".
5) Even with a gun to his head and half-dead, BO still mustering the energy to whisper "Yippee-Ki-Yay Mother Trucker (*interpreted*)" then shooting TO in the face.
Personally, as much as this is a quadrilogy rant, I would really love to see a fifth Die Hard (I'm really hoping that stupid film RED wasn't an attempt to rehash the series because it was truly terrible - only Bruce Willis can pull off the retired, crazy supercop. Yes, I'm talking to you Morgan Freeman, Helen Mirren and John Malkovich).
At this point, I feel I must apologise to my audience - my 42-year-old self of course. This rant was originally intended to encompass all quadilogies I had seen, heard of or even made up. Therefore to only include two is, I appreciate, more than mildly disappointing.
Due to this I'm going to continue ranting, and hopefully I can think of a couple more...
Back to IndIV (Indiana Jones IV), I was that unenthused I made the title into a befittingly poor abbreviation. Here's a list to demonstrate just how terrible the first 480 seconds of this film were;
- Cate Blanchett: If she's in it, it is automatically dire. She spells here name (Catherine) with a C instead of a K... how pretentious can you be!
- Alien in a crate: Stupid idea, not even slightly realistic, absolutely goes against the idea of Indy being a religious history professor.
- Russian bad guys: Again comes back to Cate Blanchett, her attempted middle-eastern European accent comprises of just speaking American but adding -ski to the end of the final word of each sentence. Nothing against the Russians, but with CB as your leader, you cannot be taken seriously.
- Indy still using a whip as a weapon when your enemies are armed to the teeth: A whip is fine when faced with crazy tribal cults or incompetent Nazi's. Against 1960's Soviets however I'm not buying it.
I would go on, but in my ever random thought stream I began to think about the most recent fourth installment of a quadrilogy that I saw and felt equally passionate about verbally destroying; Scream 4 or Scre4m as it is more commonly known.
Released a little more than a month ago, I went to see this film at the cinema as an exercise in pre-night out drinking shenanigans. I therefore was accompanied to the viewing by my customary two bottles of La Comida (£2.48 - Asda) red wine. As with the previous two quadrilogies discussed, I had absolutely loved the previous triology of Scream and as the others before it, treasured the third installment as the masterpiece of the set. Having seen the trailer for the newest Scre4m, I ensured I was there on it's opening night at the Nuneaton Odeon. Unlike with Indy, the beginning of the film offered so much - giving a kicking to "shitty torture porn garbage" and remakes of horror films (I cite 2010's A Nightmare On Elm Street as the worst case scenario of this). Some pretty cool deceptions in the opening ten minutes made Scream 4 look really promising. The remaining 80-minutes however were soul destroying.
Even wined up, I was unable to conjure any emotion except anger toward the film which had decided to become a poor expolitation of the previous three. Director Wes Craven had dubbed the film a "rehash", looked far more like a re-cash in to me. The plot (after the great first sequence was over) was a simple dot-by-dot copy of the original Scream, but more annoyingly than that, an exact copy that referred to itself as defining the horror genre with lots of clever in-jokes and self-depricating references. It was like listening to an hour-and-a-half of someone talking in the third person about how they didn't quite invent the wheel, but re-envisaged and conseptualised it, redefining the wheel - i.e. a pretentious ****.
In Scre4m I broke my golden cinema rule of never leaving to pee during the film (in case of missing plot points etc.) but here I made an exception - what made it worse was the fact that this was during the final "dramatic" act. A film had never disappointed me as much (Please note that I do not consider it the worst film I have ever seen, just the most disappointing due to my high starting expectations... Avatar, Bee Movie and Monsters Vs. Aliens were far worse, but I had been forced to go along to each of these and therefore expected, to an extent, how terrible they would BEE beforehand).
Right, I understand this is has become a really long piece so I'm going to try and conclude it now. So in summary, we have established that;
- All quadrilogies have their finest hour during the third installment
- South Park is ALWAYS right
- Die Hard IV is actually pretty good, the title is just pretty lame
- Scre4m really dropped the ball (let's hope there are no more)
- A quadrilogy only counts if there are (at this point in time) only four editions released (for example Star Wars 1-4 would not count because there are six in total - we would literally be here for the next week if I ranted about films with unnecessary amounts of sequels!)
- This article should have been titled "QUAD-RANT" - See what I did there?
- If you've read this far then future me, you are a patient man.
Thank you for reading,
Yours
Rich
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