The Freak Box

There was little better in my childhood than reading ‘The Hobbit’. I would set my alarm for about 0530 hours on a cold winter’s night so I could get up in the dark to read it while the rain, wind or snow pounded the windows. That was the proper setting for such a book. I was obsessed with it and to be fair I still am as I felt I was in it and its Fantasy world. It’s a cosy book filled with roaring fires and adventure and I still read it occasionally. I still have the original copy of the book I first read as I never returned it to the school library…. Basically I became the ‘Thief’ of the book, I didn’t want to to be this way but it was destiny.

From this point on I became obsessed with the genre known as ‘Fantasy’. This isn’t unusual for a 10 year old boy so at this stage I wasn’t too worried.

‘The Hobbit’ pushed me into Tolkein territory which as we all know means ‘The Lord of the Rings’ as you’ll be hard pushed to find anyone outside of pot-bellied bearded Comic Con freakery who has read anything else by him regardless of conversations about the virtues of ‘The Silmarillion’ and ‘The Father Christmas Letters’.

I first tackled LOTR’s in my early teens and quickly realised that it is really a bit of a rehash of ‘The Hobbit’. It’s a tough read initially and on that attempt I only made it through to the mid point of ‘The Two Towers’ before ‘Fuck this shit’ entered my head and I put it down. The second attempt in my early 20’s was much more successful as I worked out that you need to ignore everything in italics, as that was some sort of backstory song and anything under the extensive section marked ‘Appendices’ which accounted for almost half of ‘The Return of the King’. None of that stuff is relevant to the story in reality and unless you are the kind of prick who likes to talk about Tolkein’s ‘Third Age’ as some one did years ago to me in a pub you can rule it out of your life.

Anyway I got through it and the collective work is a worthy tome overall. The problem is that it gets more complicated as it goes on….and on….and on.. when it’s just a simple good guys versus bad guys ‘men on a misison’ tale. It also becomes more flowery in language and it progresses and veers towards a religious experience towards the end. You are a gnats chuff away from ‘Blessed are the Ring Bearers’ in some parts and fully in the ‘And lo! on a mountain up high’ area for much of the last book. However you can’t get too much of the arsehole about it as you have signed up to a 800 page effort with Wizards, Orcs, Hobbits, Dwarfs and giant Eagles who could have dealt with the problem within the first chapter rendering the rest of the book useless immeadiately.

I digress, back to ‘The Hobbit’ and my descent into the world of ‘Fantasy’….

As I said, this book opened up the fantasy genre to my pre pubecent eyeballs and I soaked up as much as I could. The problem was that outside of the printed word, Conan comics or the odd Boris Vellejo ‘Gentlemens art’ book you were struggling to get your fantasy chops and I was never going to be sitting in a scout hut playing ‘Dungeons and Dragons’ where I was forced to use my imagination in the company of the acne brigade for 72 hours with no outcome. At this time of my life ‘Star Wars’ was king and Hollywood didn’t have the budgets for special effects creating fantasy realms of multiple breeds of fantastical creatures so we got ‘Hawk the Slayer’ and the equally shit ‘Krull’ or ‘Krudd’ as it became known.

‘Hawk the Slayer’ was a particularly terrible effort mainly due to the presence of Carry-On acting vacuum Bernard Bresslaw as a giant facing off against Hollywood Titan Jack Palance who’s chewing up the scenery with the go-to villian name of ‘Voltan’. This is another tale of a man who has seen his parents killed and then is on a revenge trip against some nut job laying waste to all before him….. guess who prevails? shock….

Similarly ‘Krull’ is filled with an array of actors better than the shite it is. Alun Armstrong, Freddie Jones, Robbie Coltrane and Liam Neeson all form part of Ken Marshall’s (who the fuck?) merry band of men on a mission save a Princess played by the completely 80’s Lysette Anthony complete with massive Jon Bon Jovi barnet. Anthony went on to make low level ‘Electric Blue’ porn for Americans with lots of open mouthed gasps and thrashing heads and is occasionally seen now playing various grades of Essex Gangsters Molls in direct to DVD british Crime thrillers starring Danny Dyer and that Cockney Turkish lump whose name always evades me. The greatest thing in ‘Krull’ other that the boomerang weapon is the second fantasy appearance of Carry-On acting vaccum Bernard Bresslaw this time as a Cerebral Cyclops. The prostehtic head used was shockingly shit that was as they just seemed to give him a masssoooove forehead to accomodate the one big unmoving eye, an eye that delivered the greatest performance in the film.

Slim pickings indeed. Fantasy was in the bin until ‘Excalibur’ rocked up like an Iron Maiden album and tour in a bland period of Kraut metal. The difference with ‘Excalibur’ was that it mostly used gritty physical effects and it added some controversial sex scenes with Nescafe Coffee ad MILF Cherie Lunghi getting boffed in the woods by a now long dead TV actor. It also had Helen Mirren oozing slag sex appeal while dressed in black and Liam Neeson (again) as another rent-a-oaf killer. ‘Excalibur’ has some good deaths and some saucy moments making it the kind or VHS that all 12 year old boys need to get their hands on. ‘Excalibur’ attempted to bring the fantasy genre to the attention of adults. It didn’t. It failed but it became a cult classic and the next thing you know we are back to puppets courtesy of Jim Henson.

‘The Dark Crystal’ was physical effects heavy but made easier by using puppets instead of actual actors. All physical effects are limited and so you lose the majesty of a dragon or a giant if you use a puppet or big bloke walking around a miniature village. The worst parts of ‘The Dark Crystal’ (and there are a lot in hindsight) are the puppets. Clearly this is a fundemental problem in a fantasy epic where the main characters are speaking puppets whose lips don’t move when they speak and you never see any feet unless you get a close up which was reminicent of the the old hand shots in ‘Thunderbirds’. They also walked in that classic puppet way of bouncing up and down, proper Captain Pugwash turnout. The villians of this piece were tall long necked bird-like creatures in scratchy clothes. Looking back now they have something of the Theresa May’s about them, wizen, emotionless, power crazy but oddly more attractive and with more personality.

‘The Dark Crystal’ was essentially a kids film even though it had a few scary moments but they weren’t enough for a devotee of the genre. Fantasy in print was filled with decapitation, death, gore and amazonian women in a state of both constant peril and even more constent undress. This is what made it great when you were a kid as it was accessable violence and erotica overlooked by adults. No one took it seriously until the Austrian Oak rocked up in a pair of fur pants and no acting ability.

In 1982 and 1984 Arnold Schwarzenegger thrust his ‘walnuts in a pair of tights’ body into our faces as Conan in two efforts imaginatively entitled ‘…the Barbarian’ and ‘….the Destroyer’. These two films were sandwiched between the previously mentioned ‘Dark Crystal’ and another Muppet driven Henson effort in the form of ‘Labyrinth’ where David Bowie ponced about in an 80’s metal wig as the Goblin King while not being questioned as to why he didn’t look like the other Goblins in the film.

The Conan films were a big step forward if you took the genre seriously as I did when I was 14. They were dark and bloody and ticked all the boxes previously mentioned. Arnie was particularly brilliant in the ‘Barbarian’ as he played it, as he should have done, like a barbarian killing machine. If it moved he either pummelled it or fucked it, he spoke little and acted swiftly with extreme prejudice, most things were battered and slashed and rightly so. It was also written by Hollywood bad boys John Millius and Oliver Stone which gave it a certain amount of Hollywood gravitas which hadn’t really existed in the genre before.

‘Barbarian’ had the normal story of a lunatic despot from the heroes past attempting to take over and/or kill innocent women/princesses. Standard fayre on paper but delivered with the right amount of class given the lack of special effects in the 80’s and included James Earl Jones as the shape shifting bad guy, although in he looked more like Gene Simmons from Kiss sans make-up when in mid transformation.

‘Barbarian’ is a classic of its time and has some iconic moments including the famous ‘Crush your enemies’ quote. Proper Stuff unlike the sequel two years later made at the same time that Arnie had gone global as ‘The Terminator’ when he seemingly had more power and so demanded more lines for the Barbarian. The extra lines for Arnie in that Conan film ruin it. Conan is supposed to be a controlled savage and not really a comedian or intellectual.

‘Destroyer’ is really only noticable for a fight with Pat ‘Bomber’ Roach in a room of mirrors, French screaming nutjob Grace Jones weilding a spear while wearing a jockstrap-cum-G String and the worst final monster in the history of film as it’s clearly a bloke in a rubber suit and no attempt to portyay anything else was made. Appalling shite that even peak Arnie can’t save. It effectively killed off any more Conan films (there was a TV series) until Jason Mamoa returned as the Cimmerian in 2011. Funnily enough Mamoa is much more of a Conan than Arnie as he’s a more agile size but they fucked that film up with a poor rehash of the original story so it’s best we move on.

As I said earlier after a brief sorjorn into adult level fantasy with Conan the studios returned to puppet based trash in the form of ‘Labyrinth’ with Bowie having a wale of a time in the company Jennifer Garner and a series of fuckery mainly with no legs. ‘Labyrinth’ was really just a vehicle for Bowie to have a bit of fun, it’s just froth much like ‘The Neverending Story’ noticable only for its theme tune by one time popstar and Gambuccini slop bucket Limahl. This was all trash fantasy and placed the genre back in the dark ages it usually represented. By the time we reached Ridley Scott’s ‘Legend’ with a young Tom Cruise (with his birth teeth) phaffing about against a magnificent looking Tim Curry as The Lord of Darkness the whole thing was over and we were merely left with tripe like ‘Willow’ starring talentless ‘dwarf’ (apparently I can say this) and quilt invading recurring nightmare Warwick Davis as the dimiutive ‘never saw that coming’ hero. After this we were really in ‘direct to DVD’ limbo with fantasy unless you liked granite chinned Lucy Lawless as a Warrior called ‘Xena’ and a classic 80’s coiffered faux german metal singer Kevin Sorbo as Hercules. Funnily enough these two series paved the way for what was to become the apex of the genre as a little known firm called WETA did all the SFX for these two TV catastrophe’s.

In the late 1990’s it was announced that there was to be a live action version of ‘The Lord of the Rings’. A cartoon version was made but that ran out of money a book and a half in and although it was quite good it didn’t satisfy given the majesty of the source material.

Now to most people to whom sex was not an alien concept the prospect of a LOTR’s film meant little, but to us the fantasy geeks, this was about as big as it gets. LOTR’s is pretty much the dictionary description of ‘fantasy’ as it has the lot. All the cliches are evident from troubled heroes, pretty elves, grumpy dwarves (not dwarfs, Tolkein came up with ‘Dwarves’ plural), orcs, goblins, wizards… it’s basically a fantasy tick list if you were going to dabble in such a genre and all down to the amazing imagination of Tolkein and his quest to create a British mythology.

The man given the task to film this epic was Peter Jackson and most people were happy with this as we’d all seen ‘The Frighteners’ and ‘Heavenly Creatures’ and so we knew given the money he would deliver the goods.

The initial footage released was spectacular. It was as if the book had literally leapt off the page by way of magic but it wasn’t to all be fantastic. The problem with the film series is that much like the books they deteriorate with every new one as I said before. The later books suffer from ‘up its own arse’ prose and the films are killed by special effect overload in the later films. The first book and film remain the best with the story remaining almost pure with a minimum of poncitude (the books) and over the top unnecassary visuals (the films).

‘The Fellowship of the Ring’ made such a cinematic impact that even people not into fantasy liked it. It also had the greatest scenes amongst the three films with the Mines of Moria battle with the Balrog being the standout. It was so perfect it can be viewed mutiple times and you still get sucked in even if you do spot the poor piece of sped up special effects of the fleeing Fellowship. Then there was the death of Boromir which can never been forgotten mainly because of the lamest line ever to come out of professional northern and mostly killed Sean Bean’s mouth namely ‘They took the little ones!!’ which still makes me wince and want to smash the living room up. That being said his death is a perfect example of what the book was about being majestically placed on celluloid. You can hear and feel every thump as the arrows hit Bean and sense the dread from the Hobbits when they know they are captured. It is brilliantly done and bar the addition of the best fight in the film (Aragorn versus some massive Urak-Hai resulting in a tremendous beheading) it is almost as the book laid it out.

The reason ‘Fellowship’ is the best film is down to money and the lack of. All three films were shot with the actors in one shoot but a lot of the special effects were added later. As with all studios a proportion of the budget was held back just in case the first film bombed. When it didn’t they added more money and this meant that Jackson could add more special effects to ‘The Two Towers’ and subsequently ‘The Return of the King’ and in the process he effectively ruined them. Only subsequent viewings reveal this because at the time they were generally considered to be masterpieces but the reality is that the first one is pretty much perfect and the other two are OTT cartoons with only really ‘The Battle of Helms Deep’ and the appereance of Gollum cutting the mustard. These two films are brilliantly technical rather than just brilliant.

Now no one likes a smartarse less than me but I feel I can completely diss the LOTR’s as a book and film combo mainly because I’ve done the hard yards. I’ve watched it enough times in all formats including the absolutely soul destroying extended versions, listened to all three commentaries at least twice and read a recent tome about the making of it which included a wet fingered Hary Weinstein insisting a Hobbit was killed ( “Fuck Tolkein”) and the great story of Viggo Mortensson meeting Orlando Bloom for lunch in a burger bar in New Zealand where he turned up in full Aragorn garb complete with the sword which got its own seat at the table.

The other well known story about the making of the film is that Sean Connery was actively sought to play Gandalf and was offered a percentage of the gross later calculated to have worked out at $150m. Connery declined the offer claiming he ‘didn’t understand it’…. bit odd given he’d made ‘Zardoz’ where he wore a nappy and your classic ‘cum-catcher’ tache in a film that nobody understood or wanted. No Matter, McKellen stepped up and became the definitive Gandalf and we weren’t subjected to Connery talking about ‘Shauron’, ‘Sharuman’, ‘ Helmsh Deep’….. Imagine the battle with the Balrog:

‘…I am the shervant of the shacred fires, Go back to the shadowsh….. YOU SHALL NOT PASSH!!!!…. Fly you Foolsh!!!….’

To the film’s credit it is the rare beast in Hollywood as it’s a set of films that cannot be remade as it was too good initially and so any attempt to replicate it would be futile. A bit like ‘Gone with the Wind’, ‘A Matter of Life and Death’ and to a lesser degree ‘Ferris Bueller’s Day off’.

No remake then, thank God, but like everything in life where there’s money Amazon have snuffled up the rights and are making a $1bn TV show surrounding Aragorn in the Stryder years the exact thing that was supposed to be a mystery within the books… Bezos will fuck this right up as no one needs it.

So that was me done with fantasy. Nothing could beat that and I threw myself into a more realistic efforts like ‘The Wire’ and ‘The Sopranos’ and even the high comedy of ‘Breaking Bad’ where I just wished everyone would die horribly. I deliberately ignored the ‘Harry Potter and the Goblet of the Deathly Hallows’ gazilliology and its American counterpart ‘Percy Jackson’s and the lost Valley of Something Something’, both of these franchises are child friendly guff no matter how ‘scary’ you keep being told the latter films are. These are basically ‘jolly hockeysticks’ romps with the odd troll and fantastical animal chucked in for good measure….rubbish…

Equally bad was the charisma free ‘The Golden Compass’ with a star studded cast including monkey-man Daniel Craig, the once lovely but now a bit creepy Nicole Kidman and Eva Green who I always think looks like she needs a good bath and a hefty dinner. This ludicrous effort from the pompous pen of Philip Pullman ooze a religous undercurrent planting it firmly in the ‘young adult’ tosspot category and couldn’t be saved even with the addition of a fight between two armoured up polar bears where one has it’s jaw punched off.

Fantasy was deader than Sauron’s exploding eyeball…. but wait…

‘Just when I thought I was out, they drag me back in’

…. the wise words of Al Pacino as Michael Corleone in Godfather III (better than the reviews) moments before weapons grade overacting as he has a heart attack in the kitchen. This is a shockingly acted shouty scene which made me laugh aloud as Pacino goes all Charlie ‘Donkey!’ Chuck with the random words and the chest clutching. It is truly amazing how the worlds greatest living male actors can over step the mark so often when female leads get the balance right…. Frances McDormand being the finest exponant of it with barely a duff performance.

A three film version of ‘The Hobbit’ suddenly spewed out like humback chunder all over the deck of a Japanese whaling boat. A 300 page book made into a 9 hour trilogy…. Why? Why would they do this….? Obviously the answer was money, big sweaty bunches of cash in easy-to-carry bags. It was the dead cert, the moneyball, the big Kahuna…. it could not fail financially and it didn’t.

The biggest problem with ‘The Hobbit’ film is that it is a kids book and shouldn’t really translate to a massive audience. Initially I was excited as Guillermo Del Toro a visual magician of dark cinema was due to direct it. He didn’t though, Jackson reluctantly did and so it suffered from the ‘Return of the King’ syndrome of too much budget and as we all know you never give unused budget back you just get rid of it on things you don’t need or didn’t think you could do. ‘The Hobbit’ therefore became death by SFX right up to making Orlando Bloom a younger version of an ageless Elf which seems utterly pointless.

The cast did their bit when they had to but they looked nothing like the book in reality. The Dwarves were all kooky with odd beards, ticks and wanky haircuts when they were in fact simply Dwarfs in the classic ‘Snow White’ way, miserable miners with height complexes and the arsehole over a dragon. Simple.

Martin Freeman was drafted in to play Bilbo and that seemed inspired until he did what he does by way of side glances and half sentences and you feel the need to reach into the screen to give him a shake and a slap. The bloke playing Thorin simply got on my tits with the pomposity and I was glad when he died, I really was as I was fucking sick of the moaning. But the clincher was the arrival of Billy Connolly, Barry Humphries and Stephen Fry confirming that we were in celebrity tick list teritory much like ‘Harry Potter and the Goblet of Jub’. If you were a thespian and weren’t in it then your career was pretty much over.

By film three the title character is almost irrelevant as we are drowned in poor special effects and overblown unnecessary battle scenes. If you look closely you will see that even Jackson was bored with it as the Elf army is just the same character copied and pasted into place as opposed to LOTR’s where almost every CGI Orc had a personality of its own. The greatest scene in any of the three films of ‘The Hobbit’ is the one that the uninitiated complain about, namely the Dwarves arriving at Bag End to meet Bilbo and have dinner. This is as close to the book as the film gets, it’s a pure scene devoid of the spectacular but fantastically shot and fundemental to the main character and everything the film stands for. More of the film should have been like this.

I saw all three ‘Hobbits’ at the cinema and was thoroughly dissapointed however when I rewatched them on the small screen they came cross better as you can actually see what is going on. I warmed to it without really treating it with the reverence I hold the book in so overall a mediocre piece of eye candy.

Bizarrely my opinion in the global market of film is pretty much negligible and so we found ourselves slap bang in the grip of Fantasy once more. Dwarism was big business (see what I did there?) all of a sudden and so Sky snaffled up the rights to some mad hippy’s story of fueding families, dragons, an army of the dead, fire and ice. ‘Game of Thrones’ was upon us.

I refused to watch GOT’s for five years. I’d had enough. I was sick of all the fantasy cobblers and a British Dwarf actor haunted me in my dreams. I resisted even though I was constantly being told it was magnificent. I wasn’t having it. I was done with fantasy. I was finally an adult. I had slept with numerous women in reality….y’know… real life..

Then one afternoon in 2016 I thought I’d give it a go. I’m like that, bit random…prone to extreme switches on a whim. I was convinced it would be utter bollocks but I was at a loose end and I was keen to see Sean Bean die horribly once more. Next thing I know and I’m four episodes in and clearly I’m a ‘Stark’.

GOT’s isnt like traditional fantasy but its basically all the fantasy we ever wanted. Admittedly it is filled with massive CGI and SFX but its strength is t good source material and even better acting. It doesn’t have Tolkeinesque flowery dialogue ramping up the poncitude, it uses basic anglo Saxon more generally used in pubs up and down the country. It is gritty, funny, spectacular and more realistic than ‘Line of Duty’ which is also set in a brutal environment of snide and violence namely London. Within 5 weeks I had watched six series of it in preparation of watching the seventh ‘live’ as it were. I was instantly hooked by GOT’s because it was proper adult fantasy which incorporated all the fantasy staples (Gore, Erotica, heroes, dragons, dwarfs) required in the mind of 50 going on 13 year old fantasy geek.

The big drawer of GOT’s first series was the inclusion of the bizarrely popular Sean Bean. As Bean had played ‘Boromir’ in LOTR’s fantasy freaks were expecting something similar but instead we got the standard Sean as tortured Northerner wrestling with his own failings while oozing the hardness of a ‘brew’ strong enough to stand a spoon up in it…..basically ‘something similar’.

The money shot of the first series wasn’t the sight of a young boy being crippled after being pushed out of a tower by some bloke he catches hanging out the back of his own sister but the inevitable death of Bean who is decapitated on the orders of possible the most evil fucker in the entire programme. As we know Bean always dies in films, it must be a contractual obligation, but this one was particularly tense as you just assumed it wasn’t going to happen given the low level acting credentials of the rest of the cast including Mark’ fat bloke in The Full Monty’ Addy who did a booming impression of Brian Blessed. The beheading of Bean was the visual heroin you needed to kick start the obsession which resulted in me watching the next 70 hours of it in rapid time.

The genius of GOT’s can be summed up in one character. Tyrion Lannister played by Peter Dinklage.

If I had to pick the greatest TV character in the history of television it would be Tyrion and Dinklage was absolutely superb in the role. Every line was delivered to perfection, every look he gave was majestic and every movement was sublime. Without Dinklage as Tyrion GOT’s might have failed. Of course there were other brilliant performances within it. Charles Dance was suitably evil, Jonathan Pryce suitably scraggy, Jerome Flynn was the perfect partner in crime to Dinklage and watching the younger cast members grow in their roles was a joy and even Bean was solid but the peformance by Dinklage was worthy of any award you can think of. It is an acting masterclass where every second he is on screen is gold and every minute he isn’t you wish he was. Truly remarkable.

From a pure fantasy perspective GOT’s was delivering the goods on a weekly basis. The spectacular was common whether it be huge bloody battles where survival was impossibly possible (‘Battle of the Bastards’, ‘The Frozen lake’, ‘Hardhome’, ‘The Long night’ where the death of The Night King will stay with me for a long, long time…. it was magnificent, spectacular TV), Dragon attacks, (Kings Landing, Slavers Bay) horrific murder and toture (‘The Red Wedding’, ‘The Montain and the Viper’ which remains the single most horrific scene I have ever witnessed on film, ‘The death of Little Finger’ and the castration of Theon) it had the lot and was delivering a TV experience greater than most Hollywood blockbusters for seven and a half series.

….and that was the issue….

The eighth and final series (not season…fuck that) of GOT’s was heralded as the second coming before its release. The makers were pulling out all the stops and promised the Mother of Dragons of all endings in six feature length episodes as opposed to the 10 one hour episodes of the seven previous series. This sounded great as it would provide the viewer with a weekly cinematic experience whether we actually wanted that or not, the problem was that not much of it was any good.

The eighth series started slowly. It set the scene perfectly for a conclusion but not really the conclusion we were looking for. The peak of the last series was the third episode (‘The Long Night’) which was effectivley a 90 minute battle scene where the Army of the Dead led by The Night King attacked Winterfell but even that missed a trick as it should have been the conclusion to the entire story. The death of the Night King was superbly done but it really should have been the end and if there was a criticism it would be that it was slightly rushed and left you thinking ‘What was the point of the Army of the dead?’ as it really acheived nothing and didn’t seem to have any plan. The dead eh? fucking clueless….wasting my time….

After this series high it all went to ratshit. Clearly the writers got bored and had enough and so they simply wrapped it all up with poor editing and a stupid storyline which killed character arc’s off brutally. Daenerys ‘The breaker of chains’ Targaryen went from saviour to slaughterer in seconds because her mate was killed and the highly anticipated battle between The Mountain and the Hound was just dull. Next thing we know Jon Snow, the dullest individual in the whole programme due to a moral stance at odds with everyone else in the entire show, is exiled and the voyeur kid in the wheelchair is King. Total cobblers. They even left it on a LOTR’s happily ever after final scene…. wankers…

Now I’ve been disapointed before (Christmas 1982 when the Scalextric burnt out before Boxing day and a failed proposal in a candlelight ‘Basillica of the holy blood’ in Bruges (gawd that was a frosty weekend) stick in the hippocampus) but this was the most disapointed I’ve been since I was handed what was described as the ‘Greatest Burger in North London’ in The Angel Inn in Highgate only to find that it was a chargrilled mess in a sweet brioche bun with Bacon Jam. After two bites of that car crash I was forced to take a robust stance through the medium of weapons grade swearing with the barman who sold me it. My tirade resulted in him leaning on the bar with his head in his hands repeatedly saying ‘I don’t believe it… I don’t believe it…how could he not like it..’? How can you royally fuck up meat and bread and the most successful TV show in history unless it’s a deliberate act of rebellion or just a flippant disregard for the paying punter?

And so weeks of commitment by me (years for others) was fucked in a final 2 hours of wank conclusions from two writers who had another project lined up that they needed to start and who wouldn’t wait from the creator to finish the books so made up the end. Even the creator of the entire thing stated that he’d have ended it differently…..Scum…. Subhuman scum. I toyed with reading the books simply to see what else was ruined by the two septic ‘showrunners’ who destroyed it but quickly came to the conclusion that I’m not sure I actually have the heartbeats or the will left which would enable me to complete them.

And so once more fantasy was dead to me. I’m finished with it, it’s costume drama all the way for me from now on… if it doesn’t involve some form of pantaloon or smoking jacket I’m not interested, if Hugh Bonneville isn’t in it looking distressed as ‘war is imminent’ then it can go fuck itself. If I see one more dwarf actor other than Dinklage talking about ‘smoting ruin atop a mountain’ then I might lose it. Stay in my nightmares Warwick Davis….stay there and crawl up my naked, sweating body with your massive, flapping, probing hands but do not invade a cinema near me again….

….Dead….

Oh…one last thing. The greatest fantasy film ever made is ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’…. I’m not explaining it, just watch it… if you can’t be arsed then I can’t help you…

Onwards to Welsh Wales…. More crud soon…