Two different approaches to blowing things up

[davidn]

I'm afraid I've got some bad news, boys. Undeterred by their track record over the last fifty years or so, some Americans have decided to wheel out their world-renowned powers of adapting British television again and are doing a version of Top Gear that's to be broadcast on The History Channel for some reason.

There have been rumours about this for a long time, but having not heard about it for a while, I thought some sensible person involved with the project had gone "No, let's just leave it alone - clearly the British do everything much better, so let's start showing the UK version in its entirety rather than the edited-down cut-up version that we fob them off with just now.". But after a period of silence, a trailer for an adaptation starring some people you've never heard of, some jeans and two dazzling chequered shirts has emerged - you're welcome to draw your own conclusions.

I found out about this thanks to a preview that we saw in the cinema, where we had actually gone to see Red. I hadn't ever heard of the graphic novel that it was based on, but it's basically about a group of balding men and HM the Queen on the run from the CIA - they come after Bruce Willis, forgetting that he's Bruce Willis and can beat everyone up easily with bad Photoshop powers on his side.

It wasn't quite as hilarious as I had been expecting from the concept - the highlight comes somewhere in the middle where there's a nicely impossible part involving batting grenades back to the thrower with a rifle and shooting a rocket in mid-air, but it's still worth watching to see Helen Mirren with a Gatling gun.

Comments

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

Oh my god, she stole every scene she held a weapon in. She looked so... capable!

I've honestly never been one for gunplay, the whole 'machismo' thing is a little eye-rolling to me, whether played out by a man or a woman... but to see her pulling that off, the way she did... I dunno, the restrained elegance of it... I'm more than a little smitten. :P

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

Also, it's funny that you found the movie less funny than you expected, because it was much funnier than I was -- I tagged along with some friends who were seeing it, but I was expecting it to mostly just be a mindless action movie...

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

err... than I was expecting.

[davidn]

I think we came at it from opposite angles - knowing about the premise beforehand, I pretty much expected it to be at the level of camp impossibility of John Malkovich's scene at the airport all the way through. And it restrained itself more than I had expected, but I laughed a lot at it otherwise.

[kjorteo]

I haven't seen the movie, but I have actually read the graphic novel, and I assure you that there is no camp in it whatsoever. It's incredibly short (almost everything I know or could possibly infer about the movie--most notably there being any other characters on the retired guys' side at all besides Paul Moses himself, and I assume it has an ending of some sort?--had to be made up whole cloth because an actual faithful adaptation would be "here's a basic premise, the end" and run about twenty minutes) and incredibly dark and violent. If there were any laughs to be had at all, it sounds like they must have lightened it considerably while they were at it.

[stubbleupdate.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen or read RED, but I have read a lot of Warren Ellis.

Did the film have somebody say "Die now" or "Go Boom now" in a deadpan voice, or was a new portmanteau word created that began with murder, like murderscience?

[e-to-the-ipi.livejournal.com]

Red was a three issue mini Ellis put out around 2003, when he was doing a lot of that sort of thing. It's one of those times he stops being a self-parody, and produces something that's jsut really rather good.

Of course, there was essentially no plot to it, and one's been invented for the film, which looks like it could be excellent, if nothing like you'd expect a Warren Ellis film to be. [Well, except that it's about old spies.]

[kjorteo]

Hey, now. Ellis did Transmet. That alone makes him God-tier among writers pretty much forever.

[e-to-the-ipi.livejournal.com]

I know, I'm a fan. He just does have a tendancy to write a very specific niche to the point of self-parody

[e-to-the-ipi.livejournal.com]

Also, aetheric mechanics is also by him and awesome. Or PLanetary, but the other's cooler because no one knows.

[kibet.livejournal.com]

American top gear looks like if Top Gear and Mythbusters had a baby. They look like they are far too buddy buddy and what is with the high fives??

[stubbleupdate.livejournal.com]

I accept nothing less than this

[davidn]

That - as I believe I said when you posted it yourself - is the most wonderfully accurate summary of Top Gear ever and I have pretty severe doubts that anybody else could approach it.

[stubbleupdate.livejournal.com]

I love getting a physics please take because they've got a stash of videos by the Top Gear guys - Clarkson on the development of the telephone, Richard Hammond on super-slow-mo cameras and James May on engines.