'Charm, bowler, umbrella, leather boots': remaking The Avengers

Longstaffe, Stephen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7561-0581 (2001) 'Charm, bowler, umbrella, leather boots': remaking The Avengers. In: Cartmell, Deborah, Hunter, I.Q. and Whelehan, Imelda, (eds.) Retrovisions: reinventing the past in film and fiction. Pluto Press, London, UK, pp. 135-147.

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Abstract

To judge from the responses to the 1998 film The Avengers, one thing you should not do is mess with the postmodern past. Critics and Avengers fans alike had nothing good to say about the film: ‘no story, no dialogue, no content, no point, no good’, ‘this film is an insult to cinema’, ‘a big fat gob of maximum crapulosity’.1 This is despite considerable alterations made to the film after unfavourable preview screenings in the US. The general release version lacks crucial linking and contextualising material, as is clear both from the original movie screenplay and the website, which carries photos of scenes shot but missing from the final cut. The film was a financial failure, and has since become a byword for ‘the archetypal Hollywood disaster’.2

1. From the Sunday Times, Daily Mail, and New York Post respectively, as quoted in Nick Paton Walsh, ‘Putting the kinky boot in’, Guardian, 21 August 1998.
2. Adam Smith, ‘A film you can afford to miss’, Observer, 16 April 2000.

Item Type:	Book Section
Publisher:	Pluto Press
ISBN:	9780745315782
Related URL(s):	Publisher
Departments:	Academic Departments > Institute of Arts (IOA) > Humanities
Additional Information:	Chapter 10 within book.
Depositing User:	Insight Administrator
Date Deposited:	10 Jun 2011 08:48
Last Modified:	11 Jan 2024 18:15
URI:	https://insight.cumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/523

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