Each Day, A Film:
January 18th 2012 (Retrospective)
Staying on the nostalgia trip, I'm going to stick with the one other film I can remember seeing at the old, small and beautiful Odeon; Blade.
Now, when you were a teenager in the town I lived in, access to a car meant asking a parent or knowing a friend who had one. One of my friends had a car, but tended to travel east to a giant leisure complex that happened to have a cinema there; an abiding memory is of being stopped by the police on the way back from there in a tiny, beige Austen Metro not because my friend was driving badly - he was too anal to drive badly - but because, frankly, we were teenagers, and it was a fair bet one of us was drunk, or taking drugs, or otherwise doing something nefarious.
Which we weren't, because, frankly, we were boring teenagers in that sense. But it was still funny.
The only time I got to go west to the Odeon was with a girl who, at the time, I had a crush on - although, again, I was seventeen, so - and a friend of hers who everyone seemed to assume was gay even though he was, frankly, just very shy.
Somehow, I ended up convincing them - and she was crushing, I believe, on him, although it could just have been that weird kind of extended teenage friendship that looks a lot like love - but generally it was a slightly strange atmosphere. So at the cinema, they wandered off a couple of rows behind me, and I sat down, with one crucial advantage.
I knew Blade was a vampire.
This knowledge came from teenage years spent reading comics and misplacedly watching Spider-Man cartoons, but I knew it in my heart; Blade was a vampire film, about a vampire hunter.
To them, Blade was a guy with a sword on the poster.
Now add in the fact that she was slightly tipsy, or at least pretending to be slightly tipsy - which makes me wonder how we got there in the first place, because I'm assuming the other guy drove, but he has a relatively small impact on my memory cache so he was sober, I suspect - and the fact that, in the first ten minutes, Blade signals its intentions by having a human in a disco full of vampires (with music played by Orbital, fact fans) which then, via judicious sprinklers, turns into a literal bloodbath - meant that two of the three of us were feeling queasy and neither one was me.
Again, like Starship Troopers, it felt like validation; that films were being made for audiences of people like me (and random people expecting an action film rather than an explosion in a jam factory), and that films were being made based on comic books that weren't Batman Forever.
And yes, I know that it is popular to hate on Batman Forever, but there's a reason for that.
But Blade is a weird proposition all of itself; it's part Mafia-film, part Kung-Fu, part Comic-Book, part Vampire, all rolled into one. It was almost a more supernatural film on top of that; check out the original ending:
Instead, they had the good sense to discard this in favour of swordplay - not that having Stephen Dorff saying "After I'm done with you? I'm going to fuck the whole human race" isn't a line worth keeping, because it's a keeper, all right - it's just... Well... More Jam isn't necessarily a good thing. Especially when your climactic scene is strawberry jam being beaten by blueberry jam.
I loved Blade; my fellow viewers probably didn't, so much, but at the time, I didn't care. It was like receiving a message that people like me were actually out there, a message which I hadn't really received before, in those heady pre-internet, pre-Disinfo, pre-Barbelith days.
Now, in these heady post-internet, post-Disinfo, post-Barbelith days, I don't feel so alone anymore, but in some ways, I almost wish I did, because now all the film industry does is take books that you could be mocked for liking fifteen years ago and turn them into mass-market films. But you can't always get what you want, after all, and even when you do, they say you should be careful what you wish for. Clichés, I know, but they're only clichés because they get used so often...
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