This week in the Deep Hurting Project, I'm firing my VPN back up and trying to watch the 1998 film version of The Avengers. No, it's not based on the Marvel comics superhero team, but the 1960s British spy series. I'm not familiar with the latter franchise, but I do know that this movie doesn't hold a candle to the original.
- Of all the variations of the "hero shows how badass he is by having people try and fail to beat him up" trope I've seen, I suspect that having it be part of a checkup by a spy org may be the most realistic version I've seen in the Project.
- This has to be a bizarrely inefficient way of reminding someone to check their phone: having someone hand-deliver a note to someone else saying so.
- I've never watched an episode of the original series, but is it just a more normal spy series whose gimmick is that everything's a bunch of English stereotypes? From stiff upper lips so stiff that you barely even emote when it looks like someone's impersonating you while committing crimes (or even saying more than "it's a bit much" during a massive storm that's keeping you in a phone booth), or a car whose engine brews tea.
- Also, someone's impersonating Emma Peel and committing crimes; I hope they don't drop this thread.
- Huh. They make a good deal of Emma Peel's boots and they don't even show them. Then again, I've got 3436 shots of her feet on Wikifeet, with many coming from much better movies.
- Flowers that shouldn't exist? Wait until Anonymous comes out and creates an IRL Tudor Rose.
And, yes, I actually emailed an expert on roses a few years ago to confirm that there wasn't a - Are you shitting me? Sean Connery's heading a giant conference in a room where everyone else is wearing a Technicolour teddy bear costume. And he apparently kills two of them with a blow dart that somehow managed t go past their costumes straight into their blood streams.
- Somehow, I get the feeling that when Steed is giving his psych assessment of Peel, he doesn't actually know what he's even taking about.
- Man, the original prototypes of the ADIs from Hated in the Nation were a lot more grotesque and more prone to exploding than the final versions. But, hey, at least you could get rid of them with a car chase.
- So, fun fact, apparently, the cut of the movie we have was radically changed from the original. Apparently, they cut 26 minutes from the original cut after a disastrous test screening, which was apparently held in Phoenix for an audience that was mostly working-class and Spanish-speaking. And while I'd prefer to not make stereotypes about an entire culture, somehow, I doubt that a bunch of working stiffs who spoke English as a second language if that is the sort of audience one would expect for something so aggressively British as this. Then again, Morrissey is apparently huge in Latino communities, so maybe that's what they were thinking. Apparently, Jeremiah Chechik has offered to recut the film free of charge, but Warners no longer cares enough to bother.
- Why is Emma Peel in an M.C. Escher hallway?
- Huh, those boots are coming into play. But what little we see of her feet, she's apparently wearing a red body stocking that ensures that we see nothing of her feet.
- Why the fuck is there an invisible man, why are they keeping him in a room in a basement, and why is he being voiced by the original John Steed?
- So, Sean Connery can control the weather now? Why the fuck not?
- You know, I'm not sure if the longer could would have been any better, but I'm almost certain that it'd be a lot easier to follow.
Comparing the Universal Oneness of All Life to Yo Mama since 2010.
I was born with the gift of laughter and a sense the world is mad.
I was born with the gift of laughter and a sense the world is mad.