5621/18641
My wife and I sat down to watch Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets tonight. I didn’t know much about it, beyond it had that woman off the Burberry adverts on it and that we’d thought about going to see it in Edinburgh, but I’d been too tired.
Correct decision because now we get to watch it for “free†on Netflix and also it was pretty terrible shit. And mostly not in the enjoyable way that bad sci-fi can sometimes be. Probably because it was trying to be brilliant, rather than cheesy, so when it in fact comes out cheesy, it’s not as much fun.
It’s not entirely terrible and there are some interesting ideas, but too much that seemed familiar from other sci-fi franchises, making it like a shit, unfunny and seemingly pre-pubescent Han Solo flying into Avatar. I thought that maybe the style and content were intended as some lame ass Luc Besson parody, until I found out it was directed by Luc Besson. Which doesn’t mean he can’t parody himself.
The lack of chemistry between the leads and the fact that the man one looked 12 and acted like a 12 year old who thinks he is cool and has no idea how to talk to women, was possibly the main problem. Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher might have lifted the awful dialogue (and Fisher might have rewritten it better), but it just felt like a kid was bothering his slightly older sister’s pretty but slightly annoying friend (who also believes that nonchalance and not trying are cool).
The funniest line, I think again by accident,but who knows, was when the unlikely pairing of people who are pretending to find each other sexy for some reason had just escaped a citadel with a mouse that shits diamonds and had been pursued by a monster who had ripped their space bus apart and killed the five or six men who had accompanied them on the mission. As they escaped by the skin of their teeth, they could obviously not express how close they had come to death or admit that they had shit themselves or express any sorrow for the dead comrades they had left behind. The girl one just said something along the lines of “He tore my dress.†Which isn’t a cool thing to say in the circumstances, but is psychopathic. To have been saved due to the sacrifice of those soldiers who she was kidding around with minutes before and then to not even mourn their death. It didn’t look nonchalant. It made her look mental. Even James Bond, the famed psychopath would only really mock the deaths of his enemies. But to be this detached.
If I’d been the pre-teen trying to sleep with her I’d have said, “Oh come on mate, some people just died. Being more upset about your dress doesn’t make you look cute. It makes you look evil. I retract my proposal of marriage.â€
And the film would have been better with that too. At least it would have shown a spark of some kind.
We got bored and stopped watching. It wasn’t working as a so bad it’s good level, though there was something gripping enough in it to make me persist for an hour, but give up all hope when I clicked to see if we were near the end. It’s no Total Recall, it’s not even late Adam Sandler. It’s just weird, though some of the alien designs are great. But it shows the importance of casting in making a film work.
So far on tour I haven’t ducked beneath 100 ticket sales (apart from Sutton Coldfield where the capacity was 80) - I got exactly 100 in Harpenden and 102 on the first night in Dublin. Will this be the first tour with no sub-century audiences?
Probably not. Here are the venues that need to up their game
Here are the latest figures for the lowest selling gigs Liverpool (late show) 15 (but early show nearly sold out)
Bishops Stortford 50
Scarborough 64
Newcastle (early) 77 (but late show sold out)
Bedford 79
Barnard Castle 81
Dartmouth 87
At the other end, the over 400 tickets sales (with some still on sale) are
400+ sales are London (still on sale), Salford, Nottingham (still on sale) Cardiff and on 396 (with 2 weeks to go) Leeds
It's a weird tour of big crowds and small ones, but I like it for that. And my guess is that the average comes in at over 200 so I am very happy with that.
