Cop26 — world-saving or a re-run of Star Wars Holiday Special?

So well done, then, too to Will Ferrell, who this week revealed that he turned down $29 million to make a sequel to the utterly perfect 2003 film Elf. Asked why he declined Elf 2: Elf On The Shelf — about Buddy’s divorce, and subsequent loneliness, before falling for another leading lady 20 years his junior — Ferrell replied: “I would have had to promote the movie from an honest place, which would’ve been, like, ‘Oh — it’s not good; I just couldn’t turn down $29 million.’ And I thought, ‘Can I actually say those words? I don’t think I can, so I guess I can’t do the movie.’ ”

I would like to suggest that Elf 2, along with the subsequent and inevitable Elf 3: Continental Elf — about Buddy’s crazy trip around Europe, featuring a cameo from Ed Sheeran — are two of the greatest movies never made. Long may they never be made, or seen, by anyone. Thank you, Will Ferrell.

Madonna

We begin this week’s business with a scandalised headline in the National Enquirer, which still retains a delightfully childlike ability to be “shocked” by the behaviour of Madonna, even though she has been doing Madonna-type stuff for more than 30 years, and the National Enquirer also covers stories where eg a man high on “crunk” has cannibalised his wife, neighbours and dog.

“MADONNA GONE WILD! The OG provocateur is still ruffling feathers — especially her kids’!” the headline ran, chronicling a month in which Madonna, 63, had done a “sexy dance” on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, and launched her Madame X tour documentary, in which she “spills about masturbation” and wears an “eyebrow-raising bustier look’’.

“The Queen of Pop’s six children have become increasingly mortified by their mom’s recent antics,” the National Enquirer insisted.

Now, I’m sure Madonna, of all people, doesn’t need comforting by me, but if she’s having “a wobbly day”, I’d just like to remind her of a stone-cold certain fact: it doesn’t matter what a mother does — at some point her children will be mortified by her.

In Madonna’s case the “mortifying” thing is that she has talking about masturbation and wearing a bustier. In my friend Rachel’s case it was that she was wearing a Boden “Hotchpotch” skirt and accidentally called Miley Cyrus “Miley Cyprus”. Maternal child embarrassment is a zero-sum game stacked 100 per cent against mothers. You can’t win. You might as well be Madonna.

Tom Holland

“Tom Holland is uncertain about his future as Spider-Man,” the headline on nme.com announced. “It’s the first time since I got cast as Spider-Man that I don’t have a contract,” Holland told Empire.

As Holland has been playing the Spider-Man for five years, there’s every chance some Spider-Instincts have Spider-Rubbed-Off on him, and he will now act as any spider would, when uncertain of its future: run out from under the sofa into the centre of the room while everyone’s watching Strictly, freeze — and then get smashed with a rolled-up copy of the Radio Times.

Adele

Everyone’s favourite north London girl, Adele, is back — and so successful that simply announcing the tracklist of her new album, 30, has been a huge event.

As the Queen of Women Experiencing Heartbreak And Needing Huge Power Ballads To Soundtrack Their Lives, it’s noticeable that there’s a certain . . . trope to the title of an Adele song. You see a title and you go, “Ah, yes, that’s very — Adele,” in a satisfied way.

Accordingly, I’ve listed below some of the real titles, mixed up with some I’ve invented — to see if you can spot which is which. Play along at home! Ten points for each one you get right! But don’t ring in — it’s just for fun!

Cry Your Heart Out; I Drink Wine; Woman Like Me; Hold On; Love is a Game; Life Laugh Love; Slide Into My DMs; Don’t Wait For The Rain To Stop — Learn To Dance In The Storm; Babe, He’s Not Worth It; You Can’t Get A WOWcher For Love; Looks Like I’ve Wasted This Wax.

The Tiger King 2

Talking of terrible sequels that should have been put out of their misery at the planning stage, Netflix is gearing up to broadcast the non-awaited Tiger King 2 this month.

The first Tiger King documentary was, as everyone will remember, a smash hit, as much a part of that first, giddy lockdown as banana bread, getting furious with joggers who passed within 200m of you, and saying “Zoom” in a slightly funny voice, because “zooming” was a new thing.

However, it’s almost 2022, and a Tiger King sequel is going to be met, I predict, with a pandemic of apathy. No one cares any more, Netflix! The first Tiger King was a moment in time! You can’t recapture that! Looking back now, 64 million people watched a show about tigers locked up in tiny cages — in the putative “care” of a charismatic, feckless dude with mad blond hair — because, in the US and the UK, 64 million people were locked up in their homes, in the putative “care” of Boris Johnson and Donald Trump. We were the tigers. That’s why we watched it.

Two years later, and things are different. Unless Tiger King 2 is about a bunch of tigers that have put on a stone, are newly socially awkward and don’t know whether to book a holiday to Greece next year or not, no one is going to connect with this new project. We don’t dig that tiger feat any more.

Garfield

To complete a hat-trick of bad sequels, this week it was announced that there is a new animated Garfield movie in the pipeline, with Chris Pratt voicing the titular, lasagne-obsessed cat. The remake is a surprise because the last Garfield movie, in 2004, got some pretty bad reviews — it’s approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes is a pitiful 14 per cent. I genuinely think there are more people who are upbeat about herpes: “At least the coldsores mean I get out of kissing my uncle.”

The awfulness of the 2004 Garfield is all the more surprising when one bears in mind that Bill Murray was the voice of Garfield. Why did Murray — one of Hollywood’s true gods and, in 2004, fresh from winning an Academy award — attach himself to the film? According to Murray, he said “yes” when he saw the scriptwriter was a “Joel Cohen”.

It was only when Murray was in the vocal booth, trying to rescue, in his words, a “miscarriage” of a movie, that he realised that there are two screenwriters with very similar names.

There is “Joel Coen” of the Coen Brothers who wrote and directed The Big Lebowski, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Raising Arizona, and Fargo. And then there is “Joel Cohen” who wrote Daddy Day Camp, Gnomes and Trolls: The Secret Chamber, Monster Mash: The Movie and . . . Garfield: The Movie.

All I’m saying is, I hope Chris Pratt has better reading glasses than Bill Murray.

The Moon

I guess it’s because the cinemas are reopening, but it seems as though there’s a lot of movie news about. For instance, this week the first stills have been released from a new disaster thriller directed by Roland Emmerich, who previously “helmed” — to use a bit of Variety-speak, which is categorically the maddest language on earth — Independence Day, Godzilla, 2012 and The Day After Tomorrow. Movies where big things crash into big things, basically.

And this time around, Emmerich has gone for the big one, “big things crashing into each other” wise. I’m worried because I find that the one-line elevator pitch for this movie makes me hysterical every time I hear it, or think of it — but I can’t tell if it’s because Emmerich has lost his mind, or I have. Want to know what this new movie is? It’s called Moonfall. It’s about the Moon — falling onto the Earth. HAHAHAHA!

No further details have been released about the plot, but I’m presuming it revolves around the moon lying, helplessly, on its back, in, say, France, and really getting on people’s tits. If it fulfils its potential to be the funniest movie ever, I’m in.

Duran Duran

If you’ve always wanted to know what it was like being the biggest pop band in the world during the crazy, excessive 1980s, Duran Duran have some insights for you.

“Duran Duran used to order drugs on room service when partying,” The Mirror roared.

“If you knew the right people. And we did! We partied!” Simon Le Bon, the band’s lead singer, admitted.

Drugs on room service? Amazing. I presume they adhered to room service lore and came with a handful of slightly stale crisps and a piece of frisée lettuce on the side.

Female students

Tough news for new lady bluestockings approaching their first half-term at university — MailOnline had unwelcome info for them.

“How ‘Golden Penis Syndrome’ is ruining dating for university women.”

Holy Jesus! I bet it is! That sounds incredibly painful. Who knew that King Midas a) had a son and that b) Midas Jr was at uni in Britain?

However, reading on, it turns out that Golden Penis Syndrome is “a deficit of male students — meaning men develop inflated egos and become ‘Casanovas’ who ‘cheat’ — despite ‘a lack of social and sexual skills’.”

Er, that’s not a new syndrome. That’s just, like, life. But at least it won’t give you 24-carat cystitis.

Cop26

On Tuesday morning I ventured a brief thought experiment.

“What,” I thought, as I did the washing-up, looking out into the back garden, with its three (3) species of birds, and two (2) observed butterflies all summer, “what if all the news from Cop26 was, well, exciting? Positive? Full of hope? What if this was the greatest and most productive conference ever, and everything from now on was brilliant?”

I imagined Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos coming out of a really good lunch, announcing that between them they had bought the world’s rainforests and oceans — to protect them for ever. Joe Biden saying: “I’m an old man, and I’ll be dead soon, so, f*** it, I’m signing every pro-eco proposal on the table.” Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping doing surprise guest appearances — like when Elton John came on stage to sing Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me with George Michael — and opening with: “Dunno. Just woke up this morning and felt quite . . . globally co-operate-y? Like, we could all be The Guys and hang out — doing world-save-y things together?”

Instead Cop26 has been, in terms of my nascent stomach ulcer, and to paraphrase Douglas Adams’s brisk review of Earth itself, “mostly harmless”. There has been agreement on rainforest protection and methane reduction by 2030, and some exciting stuff about global green energy grids, but it’s not concluding like Star Wars: medals for everyone, triumphant music, universe saved, and Chewbacca going “rargle rargle”. That’s how you know you’ve got a good ending.

By way of contrast, Cop26 has been more like the infamously shoddy Star Wars Holiday Special of 1978 — a testament to the truly half-arsed hosting that Britain put on. The Israeli energy minister — who’s in a wheelchair — spent two hours trying to get into the conference centre before organisers admitted that they had no ramps and sent her back to her hotel. The Queen tried her best — too “knackered” to attend, she sent a video message with some pretty stern words about everyone pulling their fingers out and cracking on before warning: “None of us will live for ever.” Was this a strong, Obi-Wan Kenobi “I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine” energy? Was she threatening to come back and haunt premiers who were slacking on their green votes? Or was it just simply a reaction to the photograph of Boris Johnson sitting, unmasked, next to the masked, 95-year-old David Attenborough, thus imperilling one of our greatest national treasures with exposure to Covid-19?

I have to say, given that it is a truth universally etc etc that all big events are in want of a single, defining image, our prime minister recklessly endangering the man who, to many, embodies the fragile Earth we live on is an agonisingly on-the-nose single-frame metaphor for Cop26’s “vibe”. Johnson — wealthy, powerful and careless — was reluctant to modify his behaviour even the tiniest amount, not even in the face of potential headlines such as “ATTENBOROUGH DEAD FROM COVID AT 95 — AND IT’S DIRECTLY AND PROBABLY BORIS JOHNSON’S FAULT”. It does, perhaps, explain why Greta Thunberg has spent her Cop26 outside the conference centre with a crowd of other teenagers, reduced to shouting, nihilistically: “You can shove your climate crisis up your arse.”

Imagine being Boris and having a chance to save the world and, somehow, just making it about what you can get away with. Again.