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Xmas is almost here, so I'll squeeze in a couple more of these awful xmas TV specials before we get to Xmas itself.
For those of you who may have missed this one, Family Ties was a sitcom about a squeaky clean functional family. Mum and Dad Keaton were both hippy activists and are still concerned left wing citizens. Their son Alex, played by the coolest kid on TV Michael J. Fox, is a conservative right wing kid who always gets in political arguments with his hippy parents. Hilarity ensues.
Justine Bateman, the Bateman that used to be way more famous than her brother, plays Mallory. Mallory likes boys. That's pretty much her character.
Tina Yothers plays the annoying little sister Jennifer, who says cutesy things all the time.
Family Ties is yet another 1980s sitcom that slammed my young brain with leftish views that I pretty much soaked up like a sponge. The best episodes were the ones that involved drunk Uncle Ned, played by Tom Hanks. Classic.
SO, the Xmas episode. This was a little dissappointing to be honest. There are no ghosts here or Father Xmas. Perhaps there is another Family Ties xmas special that includes those things, but I watched this one.
The family are all packed to go skiing for Xmas, but there is a snowstorm that forces them to stay home together. They give each other some early Xmas presents. Michael Gross gets a photo album that his wife has put together. The family look through it and continually flashback/camera-zoom-into-the-Xmas-tree-and-go-out-of-focus to the birth of their three children.
It all starts with Alex. The Keatons are on some peace corp mission in Africa, going on about how they should respect the culture and how there is a drought. Then Meredith Baxter starts to get labour pains, and the rain starts to pour.
Next up, we flash to 1967, where a crazy doctor with lame jokes is going to deliver the next Keaton baby. Michael Gross has some pretty sweet head gear:
and the doctor realises that he knows Mr Keaton from Camp Koyahoga. They do a terrible camp dance:
...and I stop myself from doing something other than watching this so I can deliver, as promised, another stupid Xmas Television post.
The strangest/best birth story is that of miss Tina Yothers. This birth takes place on election day in 1972. Nixon has just been re-elected and mini-J. Fox is yelling out "Four More Years!".
Thankfully there aren't too many closeups on mini-J. Fox because he freaked me out a whole lot.
Those are the cold, dead eyes of a mass murderer.
Tina Yothers gives everyone these ugly hats she's made, Michael Gross gets a new camera, and they take a smug photo, telling each other 'We're the best family ever'.
THE END!
Next up, a little X-Files, and then we'll dive into the unwatchable Star Wars Holiday Special.
jej
Okay.
I feel as if I need to get something off my chest here because everyone seems to think that Avatar was a good movie. If you are one of those people, good for you. I wish I was you. I honestly do. Unfortunatley, I am movie spoiled and I didn't like Avatar much at all.
The 3D effects are completely amazing and the special effects in general are also amazing. This is the best CGI I've ever seen in my life, but I think the Transformers films are a shining example of how much effects don't really matter if there is no story behind them.
Cameron is not quite as nonsensical as Micheal Bay (thank god) and there are some things that he is good at doing.
1) Cameron can pick something simple that most people can sort of identify with in some way so that I care about the main character, at least a tiny bit.
Titanic is dead boring, but at least DiCaprio was kind of an underdog who scored with a totally hot rich babe. I get it. In Terminator 2 John Connor is whiny little twerp, but he likes Guns n' Roses and finds out that his crazy Mum is actually completely sane. I get that.
In Avatar we see a cripple who gets to walk. I suppose I can care for this guy a little. Plus, Sam Worthington seems like a likeable guy. TICK
2) There will be mind boggling special effects that push the boundries of budget and visual amazement in a James Cameron film.
Aliens was a sequel to Ridley Scott's original, but Cameron upped the stakes by adding a bazillion aliens, instead of just one. In Titanic we saw people fall off a huge ship to their cold deaths and it was pretty believable looking. In Terminator 2 our minds were blown to pieces as the T1000 morphed into a bunch of different people.
In Avatar the 3D effects are sweet and more rounded and realish looking than ever before; the CGI characters don't look completely munted and actually resemble their human counterparts extremely closely; and we see some things that look like nothing we've seen on screen ever before in our lives.
3) Cameron like BFGs and so do I. In Aliens, Terminator and Terminator 2 there are plenty of huge weapons that look cool. I don't know why huge weapons look cool. They just do.
In Avatar there are a lot of sweet hug mecha things carrying massive guns, and I liked that a lot.
So three ticks for Cameron on Avatar. What this film lacks is a story that isn't completely cliche ridden and long and boring.
This is a message laden film, but the messages are so simple and obvious and not explored in any interesting way at all. There are ideas about the destructive nature of colonisation present, but they result in bang! bang! and nothing else. There is even a hint of 'what's real and what's a dream'; perhaps a commentary on online life and 'avatar's, but this is explored very little. Then there is the hippy 'save the trees/connect to nature' stuff which is smashed over your head every second. It's like Fern Gully all over again.
All these ideas are fine and worth talking about and making films about, but there is nothing interesting said about any of them. That would be fine if this was some popcorn festing film BUT IT GOES FOR THREE HOURS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
After about 40 minutes I was pretty much asleep. By the time any sweet action came I was already pissed at Cameron for making me sit through so many hours of pretty colours, and I was eagerly awaiting for the credits to roll. I am mostly a patient film viewer, but this was really, really boring.
If you want to see a sweet action film that can also tackle similar ideas in a new and interesting way then watch District 9 again. Okay, it's not in 3D, but Avatar sucked a lot. I liked it when Cameron directed 1.5-2 hour action movies that moved along at a nice pace and didn't bore me to death, and I eagerly await another one.
jej
The Ghostbusters; another 1980s phenomena that didn't make a lot of sense but was undeniably awesome. It all began as two films, with an all star cast of funny guys who caught ghosts with their zappy guns and then kept them in a huge containment unit. A film that had hideous ghost creatures and monsters was a huge hit with children for some bizarro reason, so an animated series was created. The series was called The Real Ghostbusters to avoid confusion with the OTHER Ghostbusters cartoon that was around at the same time: Ghostbusters.
I haven't seen the Filmation series since it was on television in the 1980s, but I have vague memories of it being a kind of whackier version of the Ghostbusters that were on film. Their car had a personality because it was a TALKING GHOST CAR, and I think they may have hung out with a talking gorilla at some point. In true Filmation style, the show came complete with it's own costume change sequence that ran at least once in every episode.
The Real Ghostbusters series, however, was pretty classy. The characters didn't all completely resemble their film counterparts, but they were characterised in the same way. It also had some strangley creepy moments at times, and as a kid I loved it.
Episode 13 of season 1 was a Xmas episode, and like many shows before and after it, it would turn out to be yet another version of Dicken's A Christmas Carol.
The team are driving out to a job on Xmas eve and they find themselves blown off the road by a snow storm.
As they're trying to find their way back to the car they inadvertently walk through some kind of crazy portal and end up in a ye-Olde-English-town. We see Tiny Tim and his father go to a store to get their Xmas turkey. They are so poor that the Turkey is minature and fits into the palm of your hand. There are awful British accents aplenty, and Tiny Tim makes up for his tiny-ness with some huge ass eyes.
This is the last we see of them. The next thing we know Egon has spotted some paranormal activity on his ghost-finder doohickey, so they follow the signal to investigate.
They find an old man being terrorized by three ghosts. They begin to zap the ghosts and are warned by one of them, "If you do this you will destroy Xmas!!!". They do it anyway. They are Ghostbusters, after all.
Little did the gang realise that they were saving Ebeneezer Scrooge. They find their way back through the portal and to their car and drive home. When they get there no-one has the Xmas spirit. There are no decorations and apparently that makes everyone an asshole. These two guys are yelling at each other:
Guy1 - "Bah humbug!"
Guy2 - "Ah, pencilneck! Bah humbug to you!"
Guy1 - "no, Bah humbug to you!"
The reason for all of this crazyness? Well, when Scrooge was saved by the Ghostbusters from the Xmas spirits he wrote a book called 'A Christmas Humbug'. He is also apparently real and not a Dicken's character, and he has magic powers maybe, but this is not explained at all.
The guys have to return the ghosts to Scrooge so that Xmas will be saved, but Egon has already put them into the ghost containment unit. Egon puts on a crazy scuba style suit and goes inside the unit to try and get the three ghosts out, while keeping all the other evil ghosts in. The inside of the containment unit looks like some acid trip dimension.
While Egon is doing this the three other guys go back to Scrooge and dress up like the ghosts of Xmas past, present, and future, in order to stall him from writing his amazing book that will make people angry for no reason. Peter dresses as the ghost of Xmas past. As he hands a 3D Viewmaster to Scrooge he says: "We're going to do our version of This Is Your Life". I think the only way to make that scene any more stuck in the '80s would be if Peter was wearing a Garfield t-shirt and Scrooge replied "Bite me".
Egon eventually returns the ghosts to Scrooge to haunt him forever so he can't write some book, and Xmas is saved.
Another 20 minutes of my life that I will never get back, and will re-lose again next Xmas.
Next Xmas post, another Dickensian travesty: Family Ties!
jej
ALF is yet another 1980s television phenomenon that I think you kind of had to be there for to really understand how popular and great this show was, because if you saw it for the first time in 2009 it would probably just look like some kind of bizarro sitcom that starred a midget that left his Ewok costume out in the sun too long.
The ALF series began when an alien named Gordon Shumway crashed into the garage of the Tanner family. Willy, the father, calls Gordon ALF, Alien Life Form. Gordon's home Planet Melmac exploded, so the Tanner family take him in, and save him from having horrible government experiments done on him because they are total left wing pinkos. I miss left wing pinko sitcoms. When I was growing up it seemed that most of the moralistic views of sitcoms were aimed at fighting the system and being good to people. Every series had its own anti-homophobia or 'dealing with our drugged out uncle' episode, and all the morals seemed to stem from a semi-conservative but still very left bent. Now sitcoms seem to just go for the laughs and I'm unsure of what they're political views are. I guess Charlie Sheen is a male chauvantist in Two and a Half Men, and he's the star. What does that mean? Does it mean anything at all? BAH! I'm starting to sound like more of a wanker than usual, so let's just move on.
There was a Xmas episode in season 1 of ALF which was nice enough, but season 2 had it's very own movie length special:
Willy drives the family to a cabin that he stayed in as a kid when his family was poor.
Willy still knows the kind owner and he has given the Tanner's the keys so they can stay there this Xmas, out in the sticks.
ALF is horrified that there is no electricity because he can't watch television. Instead he opens all of the Xmas presents. Kate catches him wearing Willy's sweater that she was going to give Willy on Xmas day, there is a big fight, and ALF is sent outside.
George Foley, the owner of the cabin, rolls up to see how the Tanner's are doing and tells them that he's on his way to dress up as Santa and give all the sick kids in the hospital some toys. ALF jumps into the back of Foley's truck to see the toy stash, and ends up being driven away to the hospital. He avoids detection by pretending to be a toy. Jokes about how ugly he is ensue.
I have to apologise for these tiny pictures. I've been screen capping the dvds for these Xmas posts, but the ALF dvds are are different region to the player in my computer, and I am technically retarded in some areas, so the tiny pics that google gave me is what we have to work with.
SO, this little girl named Tiffany get ALF and she thinks that he is a girl doll so she calls him Amanda. She dresses him up as a girl and she's so very lonely and sick. ALF stays completely still the whole time, until he is about to get his ears pierced, at which time he begins to speak and tells Amanda the truth.
Amanda and ALF have a nice little heart to heart and then Amanda agrees to help ALF get home by swapping him with another toy on the Santa cart. ALF overhears Foley speaking to a doctor who says that Tiffany will probably not live to see another Christmas. ALF sneaks back to Tiffany's room and they have long conversation about death and loss, and ALF stays with her until she falls asleep, and then sneaks out of the room, complete with a tear in his eye.
THANKS ALF! I'M CRYING!!!! A LOT!!!! MERRY FREAKING XMAS TO YOU TOO!!!!!
Then it just goes from sad to mega sad. While ALF is escaping he ends up trapped in an elevator alone with a woman who is giving birth, so ALF delivers the baby. The mother wants to know what to name their new little girl, and ALF suggests the name "Tiffany".
AWWW MAAAAN! I'M CRYING AGAINN!!!!!!!!! YOU SUCK BALLS ALF!
ALF finally gets back to the toy cart just in time and Foley packs him back into his truck and drives off. On the way home he stops at a bridge. The old guy's wife just died, so he's given away all his possessions and money and he's going to kill himself by jumping off the bridge. ALF gets out of the truck in a Santa costume and talks Foley out of it with yet another super heart to heart cry moment.
ALF!!!!! WHAT ARE YOU DOING!??!?! IT'S XMAS!!!! I'm SUPPOSED TO BE FILLED WITH CHEER YOU ASSHOLE!!
ALF gets back to the Tanners, and then in the final scene the Tanners go and visit Tiffany on Xmas day. ALF can't go inside, although he snuck in fine as a toy the day before, so Tiffany and ALF have a mega sad wave through the window.
UGH! Talk about a depressing TV special. It's all nice and touching, but it's also mega sad! The 1980s were a strange time to be watching television.
Next, yet another example of strange '80s gold: The REAL Ghostbusters!
