Knowing full-well that it's my 60th birthday in November, Prime Video has just released trailers for two franchise shows dropping that month that are right in my wheelhouse: one a returning fantasy series, the other a new sci-fi spin-off from a great couple of movies.
BLADE RUNNER 2099
THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RINGS OF POWER, SEASON THREE
Rings of Power continues to chart the rise of Sauron in Middle-Earth, starting November 11, while all eight episodes of Blade Runner 2099 will drop on November 25.
Coincidentally, both shows have popular roleplaying games based on them, published by Free League.
The discovery of a dead bird on our decking earlier this month (I suspect it had flown into our glass doors at the back of the house) took my mind back to a more positive avian interaction five years earlier.
In June 2021, while Rachel was on a works' Zoom call, she alerted me to the fact that Alice was barking in the back garden and she thought our pup might have caught a mouse (which, we both agreed was totally out of character for her).
However, when I went to investigate, I discovered she had found an injured sparrow and was gently carrying it in her mouth to one of the flower beds where it could get some shade.
Having secured a small cardboard box, and filled it with packing paper and some of Barney's Timothy Hay, I gently scooped up the bird - which had a nasty wound on its hind quarters - and put it in the makeshift nest.
I tried to drip-feed it some water from a plastic syringe, but, despite still being conscious and breathing, it wouldn't take the liquid nourishment,
My next course of action was to phone the vets, who explained that this wasn't the sort of case they could help with, but referred me to a local wild animal rescue centre, Folly Wildlife Rescue, that I confess neither Rachel nor I even knew existed before this.
Calling the centre, we were given instructions to bring the bird in its box to their location, just outside of Tunbridge Wells.
When I picked up the box the bird, seeking the security of darkness, squirmed its way down to the bottom of the nest I had made for it.
Then we loaded up the car, securing Alice in the back seat, Rachel driving, and me with the injured sparrow in his box on my lap.
While stuck in traffic in Southborough - behind a car with a personalised number plate - I decided that the bird's name was Dan (because of the car in front of us and the classic Alan Partridge scene).
The centre was easier to find than the directions I'd been given had suggested (we relied instead on Rachel's sat nav on her phone), and Dan - in his box - was dropped off, after I filled in some paperwork.
I emailed the centre once we got home for an update, which arrived a few hours later:
"The bird was assessed on arrival and found to have bruising on its body and punctured air sacks. It was given immediate critical care and medication and is in the care of our vet and staff."
Over the bank holiday weekend I emailed again, seeking a further update on Dan's condition (having been warned by friends not to get too attached, should the worst happen) and this lunchtime, I heard back:
"The sparrow is continuing to progress well at this time."
This made me enormously happy and I aimed to drop them a, probably final, email later in the week, just to check up how he is doing (I realise their email is run by volunteers who have more important things to do than answer needy emails from rescuers).
Both Rachel and I have now donated to Folly Wildlife Rescue and it's a local charity I would definitely consider giving to again, as it offers an invaluable service to wild animals that I never knew was available.
SOME TIME LATER...
Fly, Dan, fly...
In an unexpected development, a few days later we received a phone call from Folly Wildlife Centre.
Initially, I feared the worst, but the woman explained that the sparrow had recovered and was itching to be set free. Would we like to come and collect him, to release him in our garden, she asked.
I was giddy with excitement and said we'd be there as soon as we could.
Luckily Rachel wasn't in a Zoom meeting and so once again, having made up another cardboard 'nest box' for Dan, we set off with Alice in tow.
When we rolled up at the rescue centre, we were met at reception, the box was taken away and Dan was placed carefully within.
Hailing his recovery as a "success story", they put a bit of tape over the top of the box to hold it shut, warning us to hold it tight as Dan was "a bit feisty".
The journey home was full of excitement, anticipation, and speculation as to how Dan would react when we could finally open the box in our garden, allowing him to fly free and (hopefully) rejoin his (imagined) family.
This is kind of where things didn't go quite as expected. I was looking forward to a dramatic John Woo moment or a shot resembling the end of Blade Runner, with Dan majestically taking to the air and soaring away.
Instead, as we all stood in the garden and I carefully opened the cardboard box, Dan flapped out... and crash landed on the decking!
At this point, Alice (being none the wiser) thought this was a game... and chased him.
Rachel was all geared up to video Dan's flight to freedom, as the woman at the centre had suggested when we picked him up.
Instead, she caught the farcical Benny Hill-style scene of me chasing (well, hobbling) after Alice who was chasing after Dan as he flapped around the decking.
He then proceeded to waddle under the sun loungers and hop down into the inviting darkness of the narrow gap between our decking and the fence.
We tried to look for him, but couldn't see him. Even Alice had a look a bit later on, but couldn't scent him, so we guess he recovered his composure and flew away.
Preparing for Dan's "spectacular" release!
THE DENOUEMENT...
When the the gardeners arrived for one of their last visits to finish the new planting (this was following our 'major redevelopment' of the garden) later that day, Jess volunteered to crawl under the decking and check to see if Dan was trapped down there.
It turns out there's a small bird-sized hole through to our neighbour's garden just where Dan dived down and we all came to the conclusion that he had "escaped" through there.
When I discovered the allure of DVDs in the 1990's, I made a short list of films I just had to own in that format.
One was a definitive cut of Blade Runner and the other was Howard The Duck which, to be honest, I thought might never see the light of day.
I'm a massive fan of the late Steve Gerber's original Howard The Duck comic book run - which I discovered as an impressionable youngster through black and white reprints in the back of some humour magazine in the style of Mad - but not so much of the newer stuff(where he looks more like an emaciated human in a duck mask rather than an anthropomorphic duck).
Many a duck appeared in my early games of Dungeons & Dragons (including more than a few "masters of quack-fu"), although normally as non-player characters, and so imagine my excitement as I turned 20 and a film was made about Howard... by the guy who did Star Wars!
I saw it at the cinema, loved it, read the novelization, bought the soundtrack and... and... nothing. It just seemed to vanish, buried under an avalanche of unfair criticism (much fuelled, I am sure, by a backlash against Lucas for his Star Wars success).
I eagerly snatched up the VHS release when it came out, but as the years went on and technologies changed it looked as though Howard The Duck would not be making an appearance in the 21st Century.
Then in February, 2008, I caught sight of a briefly snarky preview in some film magazine and I realised my wait was over.
Viewed from a contemporary perspective, I reckon the film stands the test of time; the only elements that really look dated are the horrendous 1980s street fashions which appear to be wardrobe rejects from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.
ILM's special effects - particularly those surrounding Jeffrey Jones' Dr Jenning and his gradual transformation into the Dark Overlord of The Universe are still pretty neat (although the Dark Overlord himself looks like he wouldn't have been out of place on the set of Men In Black... but then again I said that about the monster in Cloverfield!).
The script is genuinely quite chucklesome, Lea Thompson is as yummy as 'love interest' Beverly as I remember her and I still enjoy Chip Zien's voice for Howard himself, although Tim Robbins is more than a bit annoying as nerdy lab assistant Phil.
Where the film has issues is its inability to judge its target audience, the script has the leaps of logic you'd expect from a kids' film, but throws in some distinctly adult themes and ideas (from Howard's part-time job in a bath house/brothel to his cross-species relationship with Beverly; funny in the comics, but slightly uncomfortable in live action!).
There's also the rather preposterous and overlong microlite chase that segues the second act into the third, and just smacks of the kind of silliness that George Lucas seems to love (see the Ewok movies, various 'comedy' moments in the Star Wars Prequels, the mine cart chase in Temple of Doom etc for further evidence of this).
But the '80s music in Howard The Duck still rocks!
I've recently rewatched both cinematic efforts at bringing 2000AD's legendary lawman Judge Dredd to the big screen and I have to say my opinion on both remains unchanged.
Each movie - 1995's Judge Dredd with Sylvester Stallone in the title role and 2012's Dredd, starring Karl Urban - gets some things right, but also gets an awful lot wrong in its attempted adaptation.
Take Judge Dredd: the first eight minutes - the fly-through of a comic accurate Mega-City One and the Block War - are near perfect... right up until Stallone’s Dredd rolls up and slurs out “I am the law”.
In fact, things don’t really go off the rails until a quarter of an hour in and Dredd takes off his helmet - taking with it any credibility the film might have had.
So much thought has gone into the staging, the look, the costuming, and other characters (The Angel Gang and the A.B.C. Warrior are wonderful, for instance) that it blows my mind that that attention to detail was lost completely in the actual script and the all-important depiction of Dredd himself.
Meanwhile in the more recent attempt (which I can't help but think pandered more to those members of the Dredd fanbase who perhaps don't see the satire in the character), while it may have nailed things with Urban as Dredd (never taking his helmet off, of course) and Anderson (Olivia Thirlby), it totally screwed the pooch with its version of Mega-City One.
While Stallone's claustrophobic, future city not only looks like The Big Meg seen in the comics, as well as bearing a passing resemblance to the Los Angeles of Blade Runner and Coruscant in Star Wars: Revenge of The Sith, the city we see in the 2012 movie could be almost any contemporary city (with a handful of high-rise "blocks" CGI-ed in for good measure).
Judge Dredd's Mega-City One
Dredd's Mega-City One
Its roads are empty and buildings are spaced far apart. Even the civilian costumes and vehicles are just lifted from everyday 21st Century life, with no attempt to "sci-fi" them up.
The Judges all get nice paramilitary outfits, that bear a passing resemblance to the source material, but it's Stallone's movie that actually gives us "proper" Judges' uniforms.
There's no denying that Dredd is the better movie of the two, but its blatant disregard for so much of what makes Judge Dredd 'Judge Dredd' is grating.
Mega-City One and its inhabitants are as crucial to the verisimilitude of a Judge Dredd movie as the portrayal of Joseph Dredd himself, so what we really need is someone with the design chops of the team that built the world of Judge Dredd to work with actors who understand the material (as we saw in Dredd).
With the Judge Dredd: Mega-City One TV series - that was announced in 2017 - apparently, disappointingly, mired in development hell (I believe the big issue is financing, but don't quote me on that), it looks as though the best adaptations of the Dredd are still coming from unofficial/fan sources such as the incredible Judge Minty, from 2014 (see below), and this short animation, from 2019:
Look at the promising depiction of MC1 in this poster for the proposed TV series
For me, like many sci-fi fans I imagine, the original Blade Runner is one of those films as near to perfect as we can hope for... so I wasn't that sure it really needed a sequel.
After Denis Villeneuve's almost three-hour magnum opus had washed over me I still wasn't wholly convinced that we needed a Blade Runner sequel, nevertheless, Blade Runner 2049 is a mighty impressive piece of work.
While it may lack the finesse and subtlety of the original, it has an interesting and challenging story to tell, woven around the spine of a techno-noir thriller.
Ryan Gosling stars as K, a replicant blade runner whose job is to 'retire' rogue replicants (artificial life forms created as a 'slave' class to do the jobs humans didn't want to or couldn't do).
What should have been a routine case leads K to discover a hidden box, which contains clues to a shocking revelation that will "break the world".
Soon, he is following a trail of breadcrumbs, pursued by shady forces, and on the hunt for long-vanished blade runner Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) and maybe answers to questions he has about his own creation.
Blade Runner 2049 does an amazing job of extrapolating forward 30 years the technology we were shown in the first movie, rather than simply splicing in whatever shiny effects the computers of 2017 can create, compared to the film-making tools of 1982.
This allows for creative use of holographic technology (such as K's beautiful 'girlfriend' Joi, played by Ana de Armas, and cameo appearances from Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, and Frank Sinatra) while still relying on print photography to play a major role.
Villeneuve's mastery of Hampton Fancher and Michael Green's smart screenplay means the 164 minute film never drags; nothing feels like padding, even when we are simply revelling in the mise-en-scene (which is almost as beautiful as the original, but not quite) and cyberpunk atmosphere rather than cracking on with solving the mystery.
Had this, somehow, been a standalone movie, it would have been churlish to pick holes in its splendour, but Blade Runner 2049 will always be compared to its predecessor and always comes up that tiniest smidgen short (none of the villains, for instance, are as rounded and interesting as Roy Batty; there are no speeches quite as magnificent as "tears in rain" etc).
That said, aided no doubt by Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch's soundtrack that strikingly evokes Vangelis along with plenty of visual nods to the original, Blade Runner 2049 is an amazingly absorbing film that does a damn fine job of entertaining its audience.
My pop culture Odyssey: a slice of super-powered geek life with heavy emphasis on pulp adventure, superheroes, comic books, westerns, horror, sci-fi, giant monsters, zombies etc
