Shades of Caruso

The Blog Is Dead, Long Live The Blog...

2009-09-14T19:35:00.005+01:00

Regular readers of Shades of Caruso will have noticed that posting has become patchy of late. All three contributors -- myself, Canyon, and Masticator -- have had the usual Real Life complications stand in the way of regular posting, which is probably the way most blogs end up. There have been a vast number of posts I've started but not been able to finish, and the sight of them in my dashboard is like torture. The aborted Face/Offs (Knowing vs. The Day The Earth Stood Still; 28 Dresses vs. I Could Never Be Your Woman; The Fountain vs. Southland Tales), the unfinished Sci-Fi Through Time And Space entries (Charlie Jade, Dante 01), the incomplete BBC Breakfast Watch posts (so much fear of the future), the unstarted CSI: Miami recaps (dropped so long ago when they turned this blog into a weird battleground for some very very angry people)... Oh how I wanted to finish them. But I didn't. If I'm not going to write about all of the things I'm passionate about, what's the point?

And yet, at the risk of sounding unhinged, I need this in my life. It's the place where I keep my thoughts on pop culture straight. That's something that Twitter and the various message boards and comment threads I inhabit cannot do for me. Nevertheless, this unlovely blog template and the crappy functionality, which make me feel so depressed whenever I see it, have got to go. I know I'm not alone. One regular reader's very first comment on the blog was, "It's ugly". She did eventually said she liked some of the content. Still, the hurt remains.

So, I'm trying something out. Though I'm not going the whole hog by sorting out servers and downloading WordPress 2.8.1 or whatever the hell it's called (hours have been wasted trying to figure out what an FTP Client is. Embarrassing), I've started the new Shades of Caruso in a new, prettier place. It's still under construction, but I've been putting off doing this for way too long. Consider this blog an archive of the old stuff, and this the final post (unless something weird happens). The new stuff is over at shadesofcaruso.wordpress.com, and to commemorate this, I'm announcing the winners (and losers) of the annual Shades of Caruso TV Awards for the 2008-2009 TV season. Incentive! That's how these things work, right?

Bye bye Blogger. Hello Wordpress...

Rock Band Wish List #4: (Addendum)

2009-09-07T10:45:00.006+01:00

Recently I praised Activision and Neversoft for their eclectic range of songs in Guitar Hero 5, but today I come to bury them. Because this shit just isn't acceptable.

It might be hard to believe, but I do try to avoid preciousness or excess fragility when dealing with pop culture ephemera, and not get my knickers in a twist about, say, JJ Abrams coming along and making Spock and Uhura a couple (I thought it was quite sweet, actually), but with music, it's different. Music is more personal, and the connection to certain creators is more direct. When Kurt died, it fucking hurt. Hurt me, hurt my friends. I still remember the night his death was announced like it was yesterday. Years earlier my mother had been reduced to tears over the deaths of Elvis and John Lennon, and I hadn't understood why she would do that. When Cobain died, I got it.

This Rolling Stone article -- or should I say retyped press release -- claims that this only came about once Courtney Love (that brave defender of Cobain's legacy) signed off on it, along with Primary Wave Publishing and Dave Grohl, but it's unclear whether they're talking about the music or the image.

The licensing deal had been in the works for years, but Activision’s Vice President of Music Affairs Tim Riley is still pinching himself. ” ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ is a song that we’ve had at the top of our wish list ever since I came to Guitar Hero,” he tells Rolling Stone from his office in Santa Monica. “So it’s been a while.”

Indeed, securing the proper approvals was no small feat. Not only did Cobain’s widow Courtney Love have to sign off on behalf of the estate, so did former drummer Dave Grohl and Primary Wave Publishing, which administers the Nirvana catalog. “There’s a lot of moving parts to something like this,” Riley explains. “But it was about timing, not an issue of resistance. We almost did it for World Tour, but we couldn’t get it together. Then after three years of working with the different parties, it was like the perfect storm.”

Naturally, Love did have some concerns. Namely, Cobain’s physique, Riley reveals. “Courtney supplied us with photos and videos and knew exactly what she wanted Kurt to look like,” he says. “She picked the wardrobe and hair style, which turned out to be the ‘Teen Spirit’ look, then we went back and forth over changes — some subtle, some not so subtle.” In column B? Love’s reference to the Greek God Adonis, whose youthful good looks made the male deity an object of desire. “She certainly had a physical image in mind,” says Riley. “She wanted him to have that sort of athletic definition but not overly so.” And while Love has long had a reputation for being difficult, Riley’s experience was anything but. “She was actually great to work with,” he says. “She got back with comments pretty quickly.”

I'll bet she got back to them quickly. Milos Forman hasn't been rushing to cast her in another movie, I'll wager. Would Grohl have any say in image control rights? He can't have thought this was a good idea, surely. And what about Krist Novoselic? I'm unclear about how the Nirvana estate has been handled, but doesn't he have a say?

Whatever. I'm pissed, and I'm not the only one. I'm coming in late to the game complaining about this, but it needed to be said, my recent excitement about the game was done before I realised this had happened. Shades of Caruso does not endorse this bullshit.

Rock Band Wish List #5: The New Pornographers

2009-09-02T15:30:00.003+01:00

The Beatles: Rock Band's imminent release means I'm neglecting Rock Band II, which could well be a first for me. It doesn't help that three days ago I downloaded Drop7 to my iPhone and am now hallucinating numbers like Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind.

Nevertheless, as addictive as that game is (it's like crack and heroin got spliced in a telepod with a heap of bacon bits), it's not going to feature Here Comes The Sun, so it will have to take a backseat soon. As I've said before, I'm not the biggest Beatles fan, which makes my enthusiasm for this game all the more surprising. I'm so eager that I've decided against buying Batman: Arkham Asylum, instead saving those pounds so that I can belt out Back in the USSR a week from now. The Batman-loving part of my brain is very angry at the Rock-Band-loving part of my brain.

Until the day TB:RB comes out, or is superseded by potential follow-ups such as The Rolling Stones: Rock Band, The Beach Boys: Rock Band, Radiohead: Rock Band, or Dewey Cox: Rock Band...

...I can still keep wishing on a star for new Rock Band DLC. The recent additions to the library have been superb: ten Spinal Tap tracks, an assortment of Tom Petty and Fleetwood Mac songs, and the one Kaiser Chiefs single I like (I Predict a Riot, predictably). Even better than that, tomorrow will see the release of a five song Talking Heads pack, comprising Girlfriend Is Better, And She Was, Take Me To The River, Crosseyed and Painless, and Once in a Lifetime. All we need now is a Big Suit peripheral, and it's gonna be Stop-Making-Sense-HQ up in this bitch.

Of course, filling this blog with wishes is one very unreliable way to get my favourite songs on the game. The Rock Band website, however, is just fantastic, linking with the game and allowing you to make requests for future Rock Band songs on your own home page. Of course, I really doubt that my exhortations will be heeded, just as they probably won't here, either, but it's a lovely feature, as is the photo gallery, which allows you to create photos of your band members. Here is the full roster of The Vic Mackeyz, with (left to right) Daisy Hellcakes, McJoggah, Jen Sanity, and George Murderer:

Sadly, I am currently unable to rescue our Oscar night band -- Illitaritt Natzys -- from Rock Band I obscurity. Shame that. Also a shame I won't be able to customise the Beatles line-up in TB:RB, otherwise I'd have Stuart Sutcliffe, Pete Best, Yoko Ono, and Will Oldham (for variety).

Anyway, what do I want on Rock Band now? One song occupied my head completely during a recent trip to the States. From Electric Version -- an album I listened to after falling for the title track in Rock Band, aptly enough -- it's The Laws Have Changed, which is a strong contender for Greatest Pop Song Ever Recorded. (And yes, that is indeed Nicki "Cally from Battlestar Galactica" Clyne going mental in the video.

And then Harmonix can follow it up with all of Neko Case's magnificent album Middle Cyclone. For my forthcoming birthday. Thanks in advance, chaps.

Cinema In 2009 Just Got Real

2009-08-14T22:00:00.002+01:00

Blogs have many uses, and some of those uses might actually benefit humanity. Compared to Ben Goldacre's Bad Science, or the very wonderful Daily Hate Myself, this blog often feels like it does little more than allow me to list my likes and dislikes at painful length, when not harping on about Rock Band. Last week, I whined about Stephen Sommers movies. This week, I will be rather boring about Michael Mann.

Though I don't want to do a Harry Knowles and spend the next fifteen paragraphs talking about how I'm the biggest Michael Mann fan ever so there, there's no way I can talk about Public Enemies and not admit that I am, as Canyon called me yesterday, a Mann apologist. I liked Miami Vice. I forgave Collateral its flaws. The Keep is a misunderstood and flawed classic that deserves to be seen in its full glory. Heat is the best crime film of the last twenty years. Yes, I like it more than Goodfellas, though not by much. Tracking the practically incremental alterations in his style is as fascinating to me as assessing Spielberg's late-period career reinventions, or Zemeckis' technological experiments, or Scorsese's slow descent into what would be termed irrelevance in any other filmmaker.

And yet Public Enemies didn't excite me that much. Middling reviews and a boring trailer did little to increase my enthusiasm, though part of it was disappointment with the film year so far. Only a couple of films have really impressed me: In The Loop, Kathryn Bigelow's haunting Iraq movie The Hurt Locker, the few minutes of Up I could concentrate on between disturbances by the kids behind me. Public Enemies was on my must-see list just because of Mann and Depp, but the played-out subject matter and my annoying ennui conspired against it. Case in point: it was released weeks ago, and I only saw it yesterday. This is not my usual behaviour.

For the first hour, I struggled to commit to it. Much comment has been made about Mann's decision to use the same digital processes he used in Collateral and Miami Vice (That piece being one of the most interesting articles about it), with criticism aimed at it for being muddy and ugly. Personally, I love the look of Mann's digital movies, but am aware that debate about his use of this technology in his previous films has sometimes come down to a matter of personal taste. In Public Enemies, the argument has altered slightly. It's no longer a debate about whether it looks nice or not. It's more about why Mann would use what some see as alienating and anachronistic digital photography in a period piece.

If anachronism is meant to be avoided, then surely it should be filmed in black and white on analogue film, but I do get the point. This technology is modern enough that only a few filmmakers are committing to it, and the novelty of seeing this startling and textured imagery has not yet disappeared. Shots of Depp and Cotillard (playing Dillinger's lover Billie Frechette) together in bed are dizzying, with cinematographer Dante Spinotti getting the camera in so close you can see every pore on their faces, lighting the scene with one stark light mimicking the brightness of the moon. The look of the movie is a world away from even John Milius' Dillinger, let alone the monochrome of William Wellman and Raoul Walsh.

So why do it? Partially because Mann is attempting to create a continuum between now and then. The movie already explores contemporary issues, such as the use of torture and technology to fight a threat to the nation, the march of progress leaving behind those who are unwilling to adapt, the cult of celebrity, and the narcissism of those who become addicted to the limelight. Instead of cracking out old film, Mann is saying that was then and then was now. We've barely moved on from those times, a point that is especially affecting considering that we're watching a film set during the Great Depression while teetering on the brink of our own economic collapse. The timing of this film's release couldn't have been better.

If you're going to use a historical crime setting to highlight failings in our own modern culture, why not use a visual template that is utterly modern? Plus, it is one of many aspects of the movie that connects with Mann's other movies. The visuals remind one of Mann's last two projects. The look of Billie's cell in the final scene, the reliance on technology to pursue lawbreakers, and the beautifully shot night-time raid scene are all reminiscent of Manhunter. The portrayal of a man who ended up shaping the world around him comes from Ali. Elliot Goldenthal's stirring soundtrack is occasionally reminiscent of the more grandiose moments of Last of the Mohicans. And then, of course, there are the myriad similarities with Heat.

A friend of the blog has already made an arch comment to me about how Mann has been making the same movie for the past twenty years, which is harsh but obviously not far from the truth. The parallels between Public Enemies and Heat are many, with Mann showing two "professionals" engaged in a battle against each other from opposite sides of the law. As with Heat, they have similarities. Hanna and McCauley are both perfectionists, surrounding themselves with similar professionals, whose personal lives are affected by their determination to do what they do as well as they can do it.

Dillinger and Purvis (Christian Bale's ambitious and ultimately deluded crime fighter) have a similar attitude to their work, and surround themselves with a tight group of compatriots, but they are also forced to work with people who cannot match up to their standards. Though McCauley is brought low by the failings of his team, Dillinger distances himself from the losers in his crew, and is eventually undone by events outside his influence. More surprisingly, while Hanna is never compromised by his team, Purvis is forced to watch as his team becomes ever more desperate and foolish. Billie is tortured, innocent civilians are gunned down (he is directly responsible for at least two grisly deaths), and it is late in the movie before he realises how low he is willing to sink in order to get his man.

Heat also shows the toll this life takes on a man. The most memorable scene is the beautifully played meeting between Hanna and McCauley, a scene so powerful that not even the wretched Righteous Kill could not retroactively fuck it up. (Note that Pacino and De Niro share the frame, wearing similar grey suits, though with different coloured shirts).

Their realisation that they are so similar is enough to create a bond between them. At the end, Hanna guns down McCauley, and the final shot has them sharing the frame again, Hanna comforting McCauley as he dies (and yes, I cry every time I see it). From the beginning of Heat to the end, the two characters converge. Public Enemies is different enough that the criticism that it is a remake of Heat can be dismissed, though I appreciate there is enough similarity there to raise eyebrows. While McCauley and Hanna become closer in spirit, Purvis and Dillinger start off similar and become more different, and never reach that moment of reconciliation.

In the first half of the film Dillinger is a shallow popinjay who thrives on public approval, and Purvis, who is more buttoned-down, is more than happy to milk the attention he gets after shooting Pretty Boy Floyd by attaching himself to J. Edgar Hoover, quickly adapting to his role as Eliot-Ness-style G-Man hero. At film's end, Dillinger has lost the love of his life, but has achieved a kind of immortality. He infiltrates (with no effort at all) the Dillinger Squad office in the Chicago Police Department building, and sees first-hand the efforts made to capture him. He walks through the room in what looks like a state of rapture, delighted by his importance and his ability to dodge capture even at the heart of the web. Following that, the superb finale shows him watching Clark Gable playing a Dillinger-esque gangster in Manhattan Melodrama, a smug grin spreading across his face.

Purvis, on the other hand, has seen the law compromised and broken, his own morality dented, and his partner murdered. He too is alone, but doesn't even have someone who would sacrifice their own freedom for him, and though his team is responsible for catching Dillinger, it is Charles Winstead who fires the killing shot, and he is forced to watch as this event unfolds in front of him. The look of misery on Bale's face is ambiguous. Is he sad to see Dillinger die, as Hanna is to see McCauley die? Is he jealous that he didn't get to kill his nemesis? Or is he selfishly thinking about how he has lost everything, and all he has to show for it is the tawdry sight of a corpse on a high street, a brokenhearted but noble woman left loveless by his actions, and a career that forces him to be the stooge of a boss who doesn't believe in him?

Unlike Heat, criminal and cop do not share the screen in the final moments. Whereas Mann used colour to show play up the similarities between Hanna and McCauley, in Public Enemies he uses it to show the contrast. Bale's scenes are almost exclusively rendered in gun-metal grey, filmed in impersonal concrete buildings filled with drab, unglamorous furniture. Depp's scenes are mostly brown, occasionally rich and warm, but mostly muted, as if the glamour and lushness has been drained from the screen. One short scene at a racetrack is almost sepia tone, evoking memories of the past as Bale, surrounded by metal, machinery, and flashing lights, references the inevitable future.

Nevertheless, Dillinger is aware that by maintaining the public image of a dashing outlaw he will become a legend, and Depp plays up to that subtly, walking with a confident swagger and adding an Elvis-like twinkle to his speech. In one of the film's highlights, we see how thrilled he is, after being captured by Purvis' men midway through the film, to be transported from a flare-lit airport along a gauntlet of adoring bystanders, lauded by the public as a man of the people fighting against the monolithic banks. That confident mask only ever slips when members of his gang screw up (Mann's protagonists are perfectionists, as ever), or when he loses Billie and cannot get her back without jeopardising himself. Tragically, he never finds out that she protects him from capture at the risk of her own life.

These little glimpses of the scared boy inside the man leak out more as the film progresses, just as we see Bale's frustration and confusion manifest in expressions of despair and panic. Even as his quarry lies dead on the floor, Bale's face shows no relief, merely pain, lit by another flare as Dillinger's notoriety generates one last media frenzy, the same kind of berserker rage from a public who never cared if Dillinger was alive or dead, just that the outlaw tale was being told right in front of them.

As I mentioned earlier, it took me a while to settle. Parsing Mann's choices distracted me so much I foolishly lost track of the plot and performances. After an hour the movie began to grip, but even so, I didn't expect what happened next. Good movies can make me forget my troubles, but great movies transport you out of your body. Closer to the end of the film, Mann's visuals become ever more abstract, and his lighting more and more stark. The third act begins with a motel raid that ranks with the bank raid and subsequent street battle in Heat, or the nightclub shootout from Collateral. Its impact is visceral and terrifying, battering the audience with beautifully edited sound: one gunshot was so loud and clear that it rattled my chair and drew a shriek of terror from someone sitting behind me. During this scene we see Purvis crack. Losing his partner sends him momentarily over the edge, and he abandons his search for Dillinger to go after the truly awful Baby Face Nelson. Their showdown is breathtaking.

By that point, my previous qualms were forgotten. As Dillinger and Purvis approach their destiny outside the Biograph theatre, all of the careful set-up that I had mistaken for distraction pays off with astonishing cumulative power. As the final scene unravels, with Goldenthal's beautiful soundtrack rising over Marion Cotillard's moment of heartbroken revelation, I succumbed to awestruck tears. Mann did it to me again, that talented bastard.

Yesterday I thought I was all alone in this. Critical opinion seemed to range from dismissive to strongly negative, with some blogs picking it apart for not being The Roaring Twenties. The AV Club had one of the first reviews I read, and it made my heart sink.

In a parallel with my experience during the film, opinion might be swinging back in its favour. This brilliantly perceptive second look is far more in step with my own experience (and contains way more insight than this blogpost, so do yourself a favour and check it out), and these reviews by Nigel Andrews and Manohla Dargis make me wonder whether it will be reappraised by the end of the year.

I hope so. In a year that has provided so little of interest, and some thoroughly contentious toy-movies, this is one of a very small group of films that has generated passion in me. More than that, Public Enemies actually overwhelmed me in a way nothing else has since I saw Rachel Getting Married earlier this year. If things go right, by the end of 2009 critics will have had a chance to mull over this intellectually stimulating and emotionally engaging work of art, and will shower garlands and rose petals over Depp, Cotillard, and Bale, co-stars Jason Clarke and Branka Katic, writers Ronan Bennett and Anne Biderman, and especially Mann, who just made his best film since Heat. My head is still ringing like a bell 28 hours later. Goddamn, I love cinema.

Some Thoughts On G.I. Joseph, AKA The Cobra Also Rises

2009-08-07T01:25:00.001+01:00

Today I saw Stephen Sommers' first film since Van Helsing threatened to kill his career in a flurry of poorly CGI'd werewolf hair. As G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra bombarded my eyeballs with a seemingly endless parade of gloomily-lit bases, bland outfits, and incompetently filmed carnage, several thoughts flitted through my brain. I suspect these thoughts were my brain's self-defence program, to prevent my sanity from tumbling, unhindered by rational thought, into a swirling vortex of suicide-inducing ennui.

Things I liked about G.I. Tract: Cobrasonic:

The tech is often a lot of fun. There's a lot of force-gun action that's great for throwing people and jeeps around the screen, and for at least the first hour there isn't a single scene that doesn't have some peculiar technological madness kicking off in the frame. For a while, this was enough to make me think I would love the movie on some gut level.

It's mostly set in underground or underwater bases, and the antagonists are gleefully supervillainous. It's so unapologetically broad that it wins you over at first.

Sienna Miller has never been used well in a popular movie until now. She's oddly endearing as the tortured villain The Baroness.

Actually, the cast is very impressive, for the most part. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Christopher Ecclestone, Jonathan Pryce, Dennis Quaid, Saïd Taghmaoui, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (yes, Cesar and Mr. Eko finally meet beyond the grave!)... Some of them are actually good, as well. (Taghmaoui wins out.)

Things I did not like about G.I. Bill: The Rose of Cairo:

Unfortunately, those great actors are not only forced to play second fiddle to Channing Tatum -- who appears to be an especially inexpressive golem of some kind -- and Marlon Wayons¹, but also to gabble the most flat and silly dialogue at a speed that must have required some kind of fourth-dimensional voice-coaching. Every scene featuring dialogue is packed so full of exposition that there is no room for nuance, inflection, or emotion. It's just a long scream of "DUKE WE NEED TO LOCATE THE BASE AND FIND THE KILLSWITCH FOR THE NANOMITES I'M ON IT SIR WE HAVE TO GET TO PARIS BEFORE THEY WEAPONISE THOSE WARHEADS YOU GOT IT DUKE SUIT UP SOLDIER!" The action scenes should be a respite from the hectic shouting, but they're nothing but a tumult of shattering planet. By the time the credits rolled, I was draped across my seat, utterly defeated by the barrage of aggressive nonsense. Imagine being verbally assaulted by a gamma-irradiated Jerky Boy. That's G.I. Joe.

Why do that? Partially because Stephen Sommers, while having some expertise at handling the technical aspects of his movies, has absolutely no idea how to modulate scenes. As with everything else he's made, every scene is played like a big finish, with everyone operating at full tilt. This is, of course, a lot like Michael Bay's modus operandi, but even though Bay's movies are poorly paced, they are at least paced in some form. As I've said on here before, Sommers just does FASTslowFASTslowFASTslow, with the only variation being the length of the FAST scenes. In G.I. Joe, the first action scene is about eight minutes long. The second is thirteen minutes long. The Paris sequence feels like it lasts an hour. The big finish in the underwater base might still be going on. I left the cinema ten hours ago but the room was still shaking. THE JOES HAD TO FIND THE KILLSWITCH TO DEACTIVATE THE NANOMITES BEFORE THEY DESTROYED WARSHINGTON! I hope they did. Regrettably, I needed to put my head down somewhere.

That's why the dialogue gets rattled out like minigun rounds. Sommers is presented with a script containing 108 pages. That's 108 minutes. The action scenes probably account for 40 pages, which is not enough action for Sommers, who is like a little boy playing with toys, contriving ever more silly ways to keep his playtime going². So, those 68 pages of dialogue are squished down to 48 by making everyone talk like they're on fast forward, and the action is dragged out for 20 extra pages. There is approximately an hour of things blowing up. That shit even tires me out, and I usually thrive on this stuff.

Of course, Sommers also cannot film action properly. The camera is way too close, the explosions are shot in such a way as to obstruct what is happening, and the fighting is poorly choreographed. The swordfights between Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow are too short, set in spaces too small, and keep stopping and starting. No flow, no thrill.

There is also a poor use of environment, with every setting being used the same way (jeep flips over ten times, man flies through air, other man crashes through wall, another jeep flips through the air, thing explodes as jeep hits it, man flips through air and hits jeep, jeep hits man in mid-air, etc.). The main action scenes are in a forest, the G.I. Joe base, Paris, and the Cobra base, but they're all completely interchangeable. There are only one or two elements that differentiate them (a train in Paris, water in the Cobra base), but otherwise it's the same clanging bullshit. Plus, he underlights everything. I say this with all honesty: Bay the action director pisses all over Sommers the action director. It's not saying much, but I stand by that.

The effects are all over the place. Digital Domain are doing a lot of heavy lifting this year, now that Michael Bay runs the show. Their effects are generally very very good, and have a very distinctive textured feel, but they over-reach at times here. The Accelerator suits looked so cool in previews, but onscreen they're boring to look at (those glum colours are shown up by Iron Man's red and gold), and move really haphazardly. I know they're like mad exo-skeletons and make their wearers more agile and whatever, but in the Paris scene they just seem like ragdolls. There's no sense of weight or power. It's just circus flipping and stuff. The effects on Snake Eyes are marginally better, as he is not meant to be augmented like the other "Joes"³, but even then he's on a truck that doesn't even seem to be a part of the scene. None of them do. It's like Sommers got hold of some holiday footage in Paris and clumsily stuck some exploding ragdolls in the middle of it.

Plus, stop hurting Paris, you dick. Seeing some of the very streets we recently walked along get treated like a warzone made me surprisingly angry. When the Eiffel tower got wrecked, I felt the red rage. Leave the beautiful city alone, you crass douchebag.

Going back to the script problems for a moment, the majority of the important character beats are revealed through flashbacks, with the modern settings used primarily to display explosions of various size. That's not very sleek storytelling, but I wouldn't really have a problem with it, were those flashbacks not ushered in with the relevant character breaking off from yelling about NANOMITE TECHNOLOGY to stare into the middle distance. All it needs is the wobbly dissolve to be one step below Falcon Crest. Maybe Lost has ruined this old flashback cliche, but whatever it is, most of the laughs I got from this was from the use of this hoary old trick. If I were more generous, I'd say Sommers is having a laugh, but as the movie is devoid of intentional humour (don't forget, Marlon Wayans is in it), I strongly doubt that.

Anyone who has seen Ray Park act, as Toad in X-Men or Gurning Cockney Wanker in the Bertolucci-homage Ballistic: Ecks Vs. Sever, knows that you're best off hiring him for his prodigious martial arts skills, and for anything else you hire Peter Serafinowicz to voice him, or figure out a way to shut him up. This movie casts him as a silent ninja-type in a full body suit and weird visor, which is fine for me, but why oh why did they ruin the effect of the mask with a weird rubber mouth?

Those full rubber lips, perpetually in a half-open pose of surprise, make him look like a half-ninja/half yokel cyborg man. Remember the bit in The Man With Two Brains where Dr. Hfuhruhurr puts wax lips on Anne Uumellmahaye's brain jar so he has something to kiss? It looks like someone did that to Snake Eyes.

As for the rest of the costumes, the only ones that make an impression are the skintight leather catsuits on Sienna Miller and Rachel Nichols. Not because I'm a big horndog, but because the rest of the outfits are either bland Accelerator suits or generic camo gear. Sadly, Miller and Nichols appear to have the same sexytailor, but then Sommers apparently doesn't see a reason to differentiate (their hair is different colours, after all).

It's the same with the vehicles. The big underwater finale features a battle between Joeboats and Cobrasubs, with both kinds of vehicle looking almost identical. At the start of the battle they're on either side of the screen, so you know one is bad, the other is good. Two seconds later and it's just pixels swimming about. This is not a joke: I honestly longed for the Star Wars prequels. At least there the vehicles are distinct, and eccentric too (Naboo ships are just so pretty.)

So yeah, Nichols and Miller show much cleavage during the scenes where they are running around shouting "WE HAVE TO GET TO THE BASE BEFORE THE TERRORISTS FIRE THE ROCKETS!" or "WE HAVE TO FIRE THE ROCKETS BEFORE THE JOES GET TO THE BASE!", so I can imagine they will be popular with the millions of pubescent boys in the audience, but even though this is the usual shit, G.I. Joe is far less objectionable than Transformers 2. The leatherclad ladies of Joe are at least given personalities of a sort, and do stuff to further the plot, unlike Megan Fox in Bay's movie. Plus, there aren't two robots called Step and Fetchit or whatever they were called. So Joe has that on it's side, and I'm sort of grateful for it. This belongs in the "Good Things" list, FYI.

Things I wasn't sure about in Sloppy Joe: That's So Cobra!:

Midway through the movie, in Snake Eyes' flashback -- which, if I recall correctly, starts with the same "looking into the distance" thing even though Snake Eyes' eyes are hidden behind a bulbous visor -- we're treated to the sight of two twelve-year olds kicking the shit out of each other, kung fu style. I really don't know whether that was sick genius or deeply fucked up.

I was thrilled to see two of the most respected actors of their respective generations clad in silly masks or poorly animated metal heads walking around their submarine base and intoning dread words of purest evil. It was even better when they got captured two seconds after reaching their pinnacle of superevil, and then hastily shoved away in a hi-tech prison the end. Even with the SHOCK CODA that is utterly unshocking, it felt like Sommers just got bored of his toys and put them down to go and play Dropzone on his Commodore 64. By then, I knew how he felt. That it is left open for a sequel with shameless desperation just ruined my day. Probably because I know I'll see the damnable thing as well.

Luckily for Sommers, this has probably been my worst ever week for movies, what with Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li giving X-Men Origins: Wolverine a run for its money as worst film of the year. As a result I think better of G.I. Joe than I usually would, but it's still shit, because Stephen Sommers is a terrible filmmaker, and even if you get Stuart "Collateral" Beattie to script it, Sommers will still do his best to wreck it in the name of improvement.

I've said this before elsewhere, but it sums up why I don't like his movies, so I have to repeat it. When I was a kid, I hated when action movies would feature talking and boring stuff when they should surely just have wall-to-wall action. Now that I'm older I look back on those movies and feel deeply ashamed for doubting the wisdom of the directors. For example, I'm currently rewatching and loving a lot of Walter Hill movies, and those long, action-free passages are more thrilling than most action movies made in the last ten years because Hill's approach, imbuing his films with unapologetic machismo, raises tension levels through the roof. Sommers, on the other hand, has only one setting: GO JOES GO! It's too much and not enough, simultaneously.

¹ Sadly operating in Dungeons-and-Dragons mode, not Requiem-For-A-Dream mode.

² "I've finally killed you, Cobra Commander, after an epic two-hour battle!"
"Ah hah! Your bullet was deflected by my armour again. Now we shall fight to the death once more!" Etc.

³ The use of the term "Joes" to describe the soldiers causes much unintentional laughter, though it's an uncomfortable laugh when it's Dennis Quaid forced to talk about how "WE'RE GONNA GET ALL OUR JOES BACK!" I was hoping that, if he got some bad news from Ripcord or Duke, he'd growl, "SAY IT AIN'T SO, JOES!"

Rock Band Wish List #4: I Am PWNed by Activision

2009-08-05T23:59:00.010+01:00

Like Orly Taitz in the grip of another craziness-burp on national TV, I've gone on about Rock Band with off-putting regularity over recent months, which makes me feel bad after Canyon was kind enough to buy me Guitar Hero World Tour for Christmas. For the record, I think Neversoft have done a terrific job of taking over the Guitar Hero brand from Harmonix, though their note-placements on some tracks are kinda weird, especially on Guitar Hero III. Sometimes it makes sense, sometimes it can ruin a song. That said, I think their Medium level is more of a challenge, which is nice for me at my current skill level (bored by Rock Band Medium, taxed almost too much by Rock Band Hard), and there are some innovations on Guitar Hero World Tour that Harmonix should seriously consider adopting. Having a five-second pause after you restart a level is a brilliant move (how many times have I had to pause a Rock Band level and then missed six notes when I pressed Resume?), and I found their noteless Beginners level very useful for getting used to the drums. Also, the Music Studio is a superb addition, and though I've not had enough time to really give it a workout, even just a cursory attempt shows how much depth it has. My kudos to all involved. I'm sure they will all appreciate my fragrant and robust kudos.

Still, Rock Band is my ~~religion~~ music game of choice. The interface is cleaner, the flow of the note-placements is far smoother, and the songs available for download are incredible. At least one guest to our house has been converted to the Rock Band cause after seeing the awe-inspiring selection. Guitar Hero's selection is deeply disappointing, apart from the odd highlight: Born to Run and My Lucky Day by The Boss, an Eagles of Death Metal pack containing Cherry Cola, lots of Jimi. That's fine, but some of their selections are utterly overshadowed by Rock Band. Example: You can get Debaser and Monkey Gone To Heaven, but with Rock Band you can get all of Doolittle. Rock Band FTW. Even so, I know I'll be getting Guitar Hero 5, because the song selection is genuinely surprising, and has given the franchise a shot in the arm. The final list was released last week, and some inspired choices have made me very excited.

3 Doors Down - "Kryptonite"
A Perfect Circle - "Judith"
AFI - "Medicate"
Arctic Monkeys - "Brianstorm"
Attack! Attack! UK - "You And Me"
Band Of Horses - "Cigarettes, Wedding Bands"
Beastie Boys - "Gratitude"
Beck - "Gamma Ray"
Billy Idol - "Dancing With Myself"
Billy Squier - "Lonely Is The Night"
Blink-182 - "The Rock Show"
Blur - "Song 2"
Bob Dylan - "All Along The Watchtower"
Bon Jovi - "You Give Love A Bad Name"
Brand New - "Sowing Season (Yeah)"
The Bronx - "Six Days A Week"
Bush - "Comedown"
Children Of Bodom - "Done With Everything, Die For Nothing"
Coldplay - "In My Place"
Darker My Love - "Blue Day"
Darkest Hour - "Demon(s)"
David Bowie - "Fame"
Deep Purple - "Woman From Tokyo ('99 Remix)"
The Derek Trucks Band - "Younk Funk"
Dire Straits - "Sultans Of Swing"
The Duke Spirit - "Send A Little Love Token"
Duran Duran - "Hungry Like The Wolf"
Eagles Of Death Metal - "Wannabe In L.A."
Elliott Smith - "L.A."
Elton John - "Saturday Night's Alright (For Fighting)"
Face To Face - "Disconnected"
Garbage - "Only Happy When It Rains"
Gorillaz - "Feel Good Inc."
Gov't Mule - "Streamline Woman"
Grand Funk Railroad - "We're An American Band"
Iggy Pop - "Lust For Life (Live)"
Iron Maiden - "2 Minutes To Midnight"
Jeff Beck - "Scatterbrain (Live)"
Jimmy Eat World - "Bleed American"
John Mellencamp - "Hurts So Good"
Johnny Cash - "Ring Of Fire"
Kaiser Chiefs - "Never Miss A Beat"
King Crimson - "21st Century Schizoid Man"
Kings Of Leon - "Sex On Fire"
Kiss - "Shout It Out Loud"
Love and Rockets - "Mirror People"
Megadeth - "Sweating Bullets"
Motley Crue - "Looks That Kill"
Muse - "Plug In Baby"
My Morning Jacket - "One Big Holiday"
Nirvana - "Lithium (Live)"
Nirvana - "Smells Like Teen Spirit"
No Doubt - "Ex-Girlfriend"
Peter Frampton - "Do You Feel Like We Do? (Live)"
The Police - "So Lonely"
Public Enemy Featuring Zakk Wylde - "Bring the Noise 20XX"
Queen & David Bowie - "Under Pressure"
Queens Of The Stone Age - "Make It Wit Chu"
Rammstein - "Du Hast"
The Rolling Stones - "Sympathy For The Devil"
Rose Hill Drive - "Sneak Out"
Rush - "The Spirit Of Radio (Live)"
Santana - "No One To Depend On (Live)"
Scars On Broadway - "They Say"
Screaming Trees - "Nearly Lost You"
Smashing Pumpkins - "Bullet With Butterfly Wings"
Sonic Youth - "Incinerate"
Spacehog - "In The Meantime"
Stevie Wonder - "Superstition"
Sublime - "What I Got"
Sunny Day Real Estate - "Seven"
T. Rex - "20th Century Boy"
The Killers - "All The Pretty Faces"
The Raconteurs - "Steady As She Goes"
The Sword - "Maiden, Mother & Crone"
Thin Lizzy - "Jailbreak"
Thrice - "Deadbolt"
Tom Petty - "Runnin' Down A Dream"
Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers - "American Girl"
TV On The Radio - "Wolf Like Me"
Vampire Weekend - "A-Punk"
Weezer - "Why Bother?"
The White Stripes - "Blue Orchid"
Wild Cherry - "Play That Funky Music"
Wolfmother - "Back Round"

Of course, while that's a tasty list, Rock Band has already stolen some of the thunder by releasing some of those songs as download content. Over the last year, we have downloaded Nearly Lost You by Screaming Trees, Wolf Like Me by TV On The Radio and Sex on Fire by Kings of Leon, and The Rock Show by Blink-182 came out last week (how long until we get all of Dude Ranch or Enema of the State, sans stupid "comedy" tracks?). Many more of these songs will become available soon, I'm sure. Still, hats off to Activision for making Guitar Hero more inclusive than it has been in the past. As I've always maintained, these games can do more than rock out. They can bring different genres of popular music into the fold, and Guitar Hero 5 is definitely doing that.

I cannot even begin to express my joy at seeing Stevie Wonder represented in a game so often determined to plough a very boring pure rock format. It makes me wonder if there's any way to get all of Talking Book into the game or, even better, all of Innervisions (my favourite Stevie album). Indie nerds everywhere must be psyched at the appearances by Band of Horses -- with a track from their incredibly moving sophomore album -- and Elliott Smith. Actually, someone questioned the inclusion of the latter on the AV Club, worrying that Smith's family have become lax in holding onto the rights of his songs. To be honest, while that commenter has a point, I'd hope his family gets a chance to profit from his songwriting genius in a way he never really got a chance to. It's not because I'm eager to "play" one of his songs. Honest.

Other highly anticipated tracks in that list (for me, at least) include Bullet With Butterfly Wings by the Pumpkins¹ and Incinerate by Sonic Youth (the highlight of their last Geffen album Rather Ripped), but the songs that inspired the title of this Wish List post are Plug In Baby by Muse, Blue Orchid by The White Stripes, and A-Punk by Vampire Weekend. Muse are a band with a sound that usually makes me want to remove my skin and stamp on it, I hate it that much. Nevertheless, Plug In Baby is a madness-inspiring rock anthem I am unable to resist, even if I were to use protective enchantments from ancient Cimmeria, and had planned a Wish List entry about it. I'd even found the video out and everything. Here it is. It's a monster song.

I'm not sure I would have picked those songs by The Stripes and The Weekend - I'd plump for Seven Nation Army and Oxford Comma - but I'm thrilled anyway, especially by Blue Orchid. So far the only Jack White songs available are his Bond theme with Alicia Keys (and it's great fun to play), some Raconteurs stuff, and three songs from the Dead Weather album Horehound. Treat You Like A Mother is like Bohemian Rhapsody re-written and performed by a sleazy old tramp who has broken into your house and hides under the stairs with his collection of doll hair, and thus is one of the greatest songs of our time. The other two are excessively boring. That's why we need primo Jack White music in our music games, thank you. Preferably White Stripes stuff. What with The White Stripes being the best band in the world, and all. Just sayin'.

So, where next for the Wish List? As a lazy way to maintain the blog while I work on other stuff (by which I do not mean using Twitter to bitch about bad movies), I intend to keep going, especially because -- in these days where laziness and stress battle it out for dominion of my soul -- the game that once was just a pastime has now become a passion, so much so that I will almost certainly be buying DJ Hero even though dance music doesn't excite me as much as a well-gamified bit of Silversun Pickups². More than that, I see further scope for expansion of the songs available for download, branching out into unexpected genres. More on this as the year progresses.

¹ This song was included because eleven out of ten rock fans polled expressed a wish to whine the lyric "Despite all my rage I'm still just a rat in a cage" in a voice that sounds just like an angry rat in a cage. A bald angry rat in a cage. A bald angry rat in a cage wearing an ELO t-shirt and being chased around said cage by Courtney Love.

² That said, DJ Shadow worked on the mixes, the song list includes Herbie Hancock's Rockit (!!!!), and you can play the game as Grandmaster Flash or DJ Jazzy Jeff. If that doesn't make you want to play the game, well, fair enough. But it should make you want to play the game.

Be Seeing You, With Reservations

2009-07-29T12:17:00.003+01:00

Comic-Con San Diego happened a few days ago. It's an event I have heard so much about that it has filled my envy-tanks with enough spleen-fuel to send me to Neptune, especially as it featured what was sure to be the final Lost panel (I doubt they would do another next year just to wrap things up, though I can dream). Among all of the hype for high-profile projects like Iron Man 2: The Ironing, and James Cameron's epoch-shattering masterpiece Avatar (Steven Soderbergh wouldn't lie to us, would he?), was the The Most Anticipated Television Event Of 2009. No, not Community, starring Joel McHale. I am of course talking about the latest show from the mind of the man who brought us the bone-searing thrill-machine known to millions of fans as Lark Rise To Candleford. Yes, the world has gone crazy over The New Adventures of The Prisoner!

As a British sci-fi fan of a certain age, I adore the original Prisoner, and have been nervously watching the development of various remakes and adaptations in much the same way that a houseowner keeps checking the size of the crack in the kitchen wall for signs of imminent subsidence. Kevin Costner was going to be in a film version, back when people liked him, and Mel Gibson was going to be producing a version. Maybe even starring in it. That would be right up his alley, seeing as how he is obsessed with being seen as a tortured martyr (the man's psychology is so open to display you don't need to be Freud to see what's going on in his head). Neither happened, but it's funny that Jim Caviezel is in this remake. While Keanu has captured the market for confident post-Resurrection Messiah, Caviezel seems to be slowly accruing some credits as the pre-death tortured Christ-figure. Mel would approve, I'm sure. He might even get down from his cross long enough to mention this at some point.

As a nerd, I am gripped by the usual nerdly personality disorders: obsession with - and attachment to - trivia, condescending behaviour towards non-nerds, preciousness over the treatment of nerd properties¹. This is a terrible and debilitating disorder to suffer from, and I do try to get over it. As this is merely a short trailer for the mini-series (six episodes), and a lot of information is being held back, it could be a great show, but two things strike me immediately, and it's two things that I knew would happen but dreaded nonetheless.

1) The new Number Six is not defiant enough. Patrick McGoohan personified rebellion, playing a man with the ability to withstand coercion to an extent no human being ever could. As The Prisoner was about resisting the command of (directly) the bureaucrats of the Village and (metaphorically) society itself, he was inspirational. Yes, he was practically a metaphor for a mental state instead of a fully-rounded character, but it was beautiful to see someone triumph over and over again, even though, technically, he spent the entire series failing. Maybe that was the key to his appeal: transforming failure into a kind of victory, because all he needed to win was keep rebelling, even if he never left the Village. It was the kind of story that made you feel better about life, all while making you feel worse about the state of the world. Every episode was a rollercoaster of emotion.

Through it all, McGoohan's Six was cocky, obnoxious, tempestuous, hardcore, and utterly defiant. In short, one of the great characters in modern fiction. From what we can see in this short video, Caviezel's Six spends most of it looking shit-scared. This is not appealing. You can see him becoming more defiant as the trailer progresses, but the plot seems to show an arc for his Six. The original didn't have a namby-pamby arc. He just punched people, had tantrums, and smirked when he won a small victory. You just can't top that kind of swagger.

2) The new Number Six seems to want to help his fellow Villagers. Yes, McGoohan's Six sometimes felt the urge to help others, but of course they are working for Number Two, and betray him. Always. Who knows, maybe this will be the case in the remake, and I keep my fingers crossed that this is the case². A traditional hero will help others, but that implies he is in a position to seek help from them as well. If the story you are telling is one that hints that society is an enemy that wants to strip you of the ability to be whoever you want to be, or do whatever you want to do, and that every person in that society will consider you their enemy, then your character has to be alone. With other people around to save or be saved, it becomes a more formulaic tale of man vs. institution. The reason the original Prisoner still chimes with audiences is that McGoohan's Six is one man against everything, against even the concept of society. Turning it into "Everyman rebels against baddies" removes that metaphorical richness. If this is the way it turns out, it becomes an adaptation of just a précis of the original show.

Of course, this is a first impression, filled with entitlement and whininess. The show could be terrific, and I'll definitely be watching it with as open a mind as possible. My love for Sir Ian McKellan is so total that I will enjoy his presence enough to mitigate a lot of flaws. It's also fun seeing Brit actresses Hayley Atwell and Ruth Wilson appearing in something so expensive and American³ instead of the usual costume-drama nonsense, not to mention the presence of the excellent Lennie James. The Rovers look suitably dramatic while being the same as the originals, though the big bouncy balls of old were effective because of other elements, such as the eerie sound effects and peculiar behaviour of the Villagers whenever the Rovers appeared. Whatever. It's a terrific visual, and it's nice that they kept it.

If I knew nothing about the original series, I'd probably love the trailer. However, I know too much, and even though I'll give the new series a fair shake, I can't imagine that the story they tell using this framework will be anywhere near as interesting as the original. I'll respect the showrunners' choices, but already I can see they're promoting the show as something - a traditional Man Against His Superiors fable - that the original transcended. I enjoy those stories well enough, and they have their own metaphorical power, but let's hope they have found a way to make this more daring, otherwise it will have a tough time replacing the memory of the original, a show that genuinely made you think about the world you are living in, without giving easy answers.

One more thing. They got the "Be Seeing You" thing wrong.

That's more like it.

¹ Oh how I whined when Peter David made She-Hulk boring after Dan Slott had done such good work with the character. I deleted the post about that, you'll be glad to know.

² I'm quite happy to see a Christ figure in this tale: less so a Moses metaphor.

³ That said, apparently it is actually produced by Granada and ITV, and only distributed by AMC, hence the predominantly British cast.

Rock Band Wish List #3: Phoenix

2009-06-26T23:40:00.002+01:00

A lot of the songs I want made available as Rock Band download tracks appeal to me as possible challenges, probably because many of the tracks I looked forward to most have turned out to be depressingly easy. That's not the worst problem in the world, but just as some gamified songs have revealed levels of songcraft that I hadn't fully appreciated, simple songs make some of my heroes seem like charlatans. This is a mistake on my part, as Nirvana's talent often lay in the oppressive atmosphere and visceral impact of their sound, not in intricacy. Only when repurposed for acoustic did their songs become nuanced. When in their raw form, they were often a barrage of sounds, which is not as much fun to play, though still great to listen to. (N.B. I'm not just picking on Nirvana because I'm impatient for a future release of Lithium, Come As You Are, and Smells Like Teen Spirit, plus all of In Utero. Not at all.)

Nevertheless, when I spend precious Space Dollars (© Warren Ellis) I want the songs to tax me. That's probably why I play Blue Sky by The Allman Brothers Band so much. That enormous solo is pure joy from start to finish. A lot of Nothing's Shocking by Jane's Addiction is a test of dexterity, and my current favourite purchase is Texas Flood by Stevie Ray Vaughan, where all of the guitar tracks are difficult to finger-annihilatingly hard. Coughing up the big bucks for that whole album is the smartest frivolous purchase I've made in a while.

And then there are the songs I want just because they are outrageous fun. We recently fell in love with Green Day's Know Your Enemy after seeing them play some blistering versions of it on The Tonight Show With Conan O'Brien and Saturday Night Live. This would definitely have been on the Wish List, but we don't need to now that the imminent release as part of a three song track pack has been announced. And this excitement from someone who never took Green Day seriously? That's how much fun that song is. So, with that sorted out to our satisfaction, I'm exhorting Harmonix and MTV Games to make 1901 by Phoenix available as soon as possible.

I never got the appeal of Gallic popsters Phoenix before, but their latest album, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, is undeniably the album of the summer. It's a multi-hook pile-up on the joy highway, and I'm begging all readers to chase it down immediately. Just like previous summer albums from my past, like I Should Coco, Ill Communication, and Dig Your Own Hole, it feels like it's made of pure sunshine, and 1901 is the track that immediately caught my ear on first listen. Buy that album and you get a free suntan just by standing in front of your speakers. It's that good. Here's 1901 as a taster.

Gamify this immediately, gaming people, and I'll be playing it as often as other grin-inducing uplift-providers as Nine in the Afternoon by Panic At The Disco, Use It by The New Pornographers, and Dead on Arrival by Fall Out Boy. And that's a promise.

(Sort Of) End Of Season Review: Dollhouse

2009-06-24T18:00:00.002+01:00

::Disclaimer - It's hard to write a definitive End of Season Review for a show that, technically, has not aired all of its episodes. The thirteenth episode of Dollhouse has been held back for DVD release as a result of Fox's meddling with the original pilot, with the hint that it would be shown in foreign markets. That means England, right? And it's on Sci Fi UK? Hence my tardiness with this, waiting to see if it would air on UK TV. Of course, I won't know until Sci Fi updates its website, which is still saying they're only showing nine episodes. Well done, website.::

When I was trying to figure out how to begin writing about the almost completed season of Dollhouse, the only approach that seemed to give the proper background seemed to be the "Harry Knowles Approach", where I recount a long and disjointed series of anecdotes (linked by ellipses, of course) proving that whereas you, the reader, for example, might think that you are the biggest Joss Whedon fan, in fact it is I who is the biggest fan, and have the most Whedon-related memorabilia, and so I am more qualified than anyone to take on this task so there. If you don't believe me about Knowles, this is just one example of his weird impulse to be the biggest expert on every subset of fandom going. Or the man who has the biggest obsession with oral sex and defecation.

Of course, I'm not the biggest Whedon fan in the world, as I have yet to stalk him or name one of my children Xander or Illyria. I do have a cat called Zoe, named after Gina Torres' character from Firefly, but naming cats after TV characters, products, concepts, or smells is not weird or stalkery. However, I would not be here writing this blog about various TV shows if it wasn't for Whedon. Who knows, I might be doing something more constructive, like snowboarding, or rock-climbing, or being an alcoholic. So I owe my bones and my liver to Whedon, at the very least. At the very most, there is my immersion in the TV-obsessed corner of the internet, which has given me good friends, lots of interesting chatter, and a wonderful wife [who is also obsessed with Whedon -- Canyon].

I'd long been excited whenever a show ventured into long-form territory, but before Buffy, DVRs, and DVD boxsets, it was rare to see it in anything non-soap opera. Star Trek: TNG did it every so often, and of course there was Murder One, which was pioneering and unpopular. Buffy was lucky enough to have it both ways, with your monster of the week format plus a close-ended arc running through the season. Around the time that I fell in love with Buffy (a few years after smarter people than I had already figured out how good it was), 24 came along with the same approach to season arcs, and with The Sopranos mopping up awards everywhere, the format finally got enough critical, popular, and nerd acceptance to become the next big thing. N.B. Babylon 5 did it as well, with a five-year plan not dissimilar to that of Lost. I'm aware of that. Despite its rabid fanbase, it never captured the popular imagination. Though Buffy was a show with only a cult audience, it is still referenced by popular culture maven in a way J. Michael Stracsynski's show isn't. By the way, "maven" is the plural of "maven", right?

However, it's been a long time since Whedon did any TV stuff. Angel was cancelled about five/six years ago, and since then I've become obsessed with a number of different shows, some of which are more "respectable", but less fun. I've also been bitten by the Lost bug, a show that has become so complex and ambitious that almost everything else feels like Dallas in comparison. Happy though I was about Whedon's return, I felt a certain amount of ambivalence, partly because of concern that his style of show would seem clunky after experiencing the scope and eccentricity of Lost, but also, of course, because of the Curse of Whedon. A high-concept sci-fi show on Fox? As soon as the pilot was reshot and the show was relegated to a Friday night slot, in an echo of the way Firefly was treated, it was obvious that getting attached to it was a really bad idea.

To make things worse, the pilot left me totally cold. As part of the infamous Fox Fuck Five episode stretch, with Whedon apparently spaying his show at the behest of Fox executives, it looked cheap and poorly conceived, a world away from his last major directorial effort (Serenity), and in terms of audience satisfaction, not a patch on his last "minor" directorial effort (the epoch-shattering masterpiece Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog). The next four episodes were worse, with episodes two and five vying for worst of season. Or is it two and three? Or four and five?

What was so bad about them? Many of the negative points of that opening stretch of episodes have been picked at for months now, but I have to say I agree with pretty much all of them. Dushku-as-lead was never going to work out, even with the formidable Sexy Faith Dance on her side (she cracked that bad boy out in the pilot, just for sexiness fans everywhere). As a dramatic guest star she worked wonders on Buffy, but with zero range and saddled with the part of an identity-shifting woman of many faces, several early scenes felt like pranks being played either on us or on Dushku herself.

As Canyon said many times while we were watching Dollhouse, Sarah Michelle Gellar was no Streep (hell, she was no Jennifer Garner), but at the very least she was appealing and could sell a joke, and even had a few stand-out episodes (I think she did some great work in Buffy seasons five and six). Dushku has an even more difficult job: making the audience care about someone who has no personality for us to empathise with. There are some skillful actresses out there who might have stood a chance, but Dushku does a terrible job. From what I gather, we weren't the only viewers who tuned out whenever she appeared.

She wasn't the worst thing about that opening stumble. For a while the show feels like some kind of bizarre hybrid of Alias and Joe 90, an adventure show about secret operatives operating secretly, doing various odd jobs around LA. As we're to assume our characters will be working for some benevolent organisation, it's jarring to see the Dollhouse staff doing things that are morally repellent. With Boyd Langton (the ever-excellent Harry Lennix) representing the conscience of the show by questioning the motives of the Dollhouse, we realise we're meant to be rooting for the Dolls, not their bosses, but the show doesn't go far enough with that at first. We just get a sense that this is something the show will address in good time, once the benevolent adventurey stuff slows down a bit. Though Whedon does a good enough job of introducing some of that moral complexity in the pilot, the next four episodes are so formless that our disgust over the concept of removing the "self" from a person and replacing it with another isn't allowed to crystallise earlier. It didn't help that the first thing we see is Dushku willingly signing herself over to the Dollhouse. If that's the way it works, then it can't be that bad, right?

The "monster" of the week concept didn't work either. With Echo traipsing off to do various good things (such as saving a hostage, or infilitrating a cultist compound), we get hints that there is a bigger story to be told, especially as we see FBI loser Paul Ballard (Tahmoh Penikett) investigating the mysterious organisation. Perhaps it's because we also tuned out whenever Penikett and his Scrunched Up Face Of Impotence lumbered onto set [with his Constipated Ken Doll Walk, no less - Canyon], but this thread felt malformed as well. Hints and winks were one thing, and it was great to know the show was obviously building to something, but I got the sense that Whedon, after years of watching Battlestar Galactica and Lost gain the nerd fanbase he once owned so completely, realised that the old format, of a large amount of MotW episodes sprinkled with liberal amounts of long-form soap operatics and season-arc revelations, was due for a spruce up. Dollhouse's greatest early flaw was that it didn't get the season arc moving fast enough, which we can lay at the feet of Fox.

With only thirteen episodes, Whedon needed to get cracking, and instead we got museum robberies and bodyguard duty for some obnoxious singer. Fringe was luckier with more episodes, and still squandered about 65% of the season on nonsense. Dollhouse didn't get that luxury, and yet for almost half of its run it danced on the spot. That episodic format was a poor fit from the outset, a piss-poor attempt to attract viewers who enjoyed the week-by-week simplicity of pre-Buffy TV, which is why I couldn't help but compare early episodes with Bionical Woman (please forgive me for that, but it's true).

Sadly, Fox didn't realise that we're not just post-Buffy now: we're post-Lost. That show has rewritten the rules for what audiences are willing to tolerate. Yes, the show has lost a lot of the viewers it had in its first season, but as Cuse and Lindelof have said in interviews, Lost was never meant to be a ratings-crusher. And yet, despite that shrunken audience, it's still a bona-fide hit, watched around the world by millions, and discussed and debated more than any other show on TV. The likely audience for something as wilfully peculiar as Dollhouse has been watching Lost and Galactica for years and is not interested in that old way of telling a tale any more. Dollhouse could have been setting itself up for the long haul right away, and would have retained its modest initial audience. Instead, the show felt outdated and slight straight away, and that loyal audience departed in droves. A singularly depressing outcome for those of us who were still hoping the show would come good.

And yet there was hope. Early on in promotional interviews, there was talk of the mythical Sixth Episode, the game-changer that would make us all feel bad for doubting Whedon. This made me feel very uncomfortable, coming as it was from people involved with the show. In addition to thinking that playing up chatter about how the network had finally stopped meddling with the show was, to put it mildly, ballsy and suicidal, I just couldn't see how the show could pull itself out of its tailspin. Whedon had always managed to weave comedy and drama brilliantly, but Dollhouse's first five episodes were clunky, lifeless and laughably unmoving.

And yet it was I who was the fool, as Whedon -- who, I should never forget, is one of my five favourite writers in any medium ever for the very good reason that he's a trillion times smarter and funnier than me -- slapped me in the face with that sixth episode like a fish (though a fish with Patton Oswalt attached to it), and showed us all what the show was supposed to be after all. Viewers had several criticisms of the show, and after Man on the Street, almost all of those criticisms blew away like the chaff they were. Here's a quick rundown of what I thought were the failings of the show, and how they were addressed in the second half of the season.

1) You can't care about the Actives because they are just shells.

This was, for the first half of the season at least, a major concern, and seemed like the major dealbreaker for the series. Whedon may have started the pilot with Caroline giving herself up to the Dollhouse, but this glimpse into who she is before having her personality extracted isn't enough to create a bond with her. Dushku's flat performance certainly doesn't help. If anything, prior to episode six, the only real reason to give a damn about her is because Boyd does, and Lennix nails that caring mentor role so well we want Echo to prevail just so Boyd's day isn't ruined. As for Sierra, Victor, and the others, they're shit out of luck. For instance, Victor's affection for Sierra just seems creepy, especially as we realise how she is being abused.

The miraculous second half of the season solves that brilliantly, but not straight away. Episode six makes Echo seem like even more of a puppet, and episode seven adds confusing detail to Caroline's past, but episode eight, Needs, shows the core attributes of each Active and finally generates that empathic core we need in order to care for these people. Echo was heroic already, Victor was caring and traumatised, November was unable to cope with grief, and Sierra was defiant, though it was this trait that doomed her to a horrific fate.

That episode was so strong, and so brilliantly conceived, that from that moment on it was impossible not to root for these characters, but just to make sure, we see that the "soul" of the Active can bleed through the construct downloaded into their brain, as both Alpha and Echo become what they were always meant to be in the final episode. And yet people still complained about not caring about the characters by the end! I find this utterly baffling.

2) The show doesn't seem to be about anything, or know what it's about.

In an interview conducted after the show began its rise, Whedon uncharacteristically and undiplomatically carped about the interference with his show while it was still airing (he usually waits for his work to be finished and released before complaining). Even more surprisingly, he admitted that he was upset that some episodes of the show hadn't been about anything, and singled out Tim Minear's True Believer, saying it wasn't about anything. He later explained that his quote was taken out of context, and said he had to apologise to Minear, but even so, he hit the nail on the head, albeit inadvertently.

Up until the sixth episode, Dollhouse ironically suffered from an identity crisis. It wasn't just that the show had turned out to be a hodge-podge of action/adventure sub-genres (she's a bodyguard! She's working with the ATF! She's a cat burglar!), though that was confusing. It also had an ill-defined core idea. For the first five episodes it was a caper show that left a bad taste in the mouth, hinting at the ethical and scientific ramifications of Dollhouse technology but burying that enquiry under A and B plot business, as well as using up valuable TV real-estate setting up hints about the future. A lot of effort was being expended, but with the empathy gap listed above, Dollhouse needed to grab the mind while the heart was out of reach. Sadly, the first five episodes were unfocused and over-complicated, and without a sense of conceptual continuity from week to week, it felt as unsatisfying as late-series Battlestar Galactica, except with the added narrative complication of trying to get Dushku into as many fetishy costumes as possible.

Again, the sixth episode saved the day. With unusual but welcome directness, Whedon used a series of vox pops in which people discuss the urban myth of the Dollhouse, and its ramifications for society and humanity. Even though we had seen the Dollhouse through the disgusted eyes of Ballard, we're seeing his reaction, and therefore have our own reaction to his reaction. Is he just in this because of a fixation on Caroline? How much of his search for the Dollhouse is motivated by a need to prove his superiors wrong? With the sixth episode, we get context to realise that the Dollhouse truly is an awful place, and the tech is evil, to the extent that it could possibly poison the human condition irrevocably. Such a thought is available if you ponder it long enough, but having a fictional scientist say, out loud, that this is the worst thing in the world, and will ruin everything, is a sobering moment. Of all of the things I loved about this first series, it was that moment I remember most clearly. It shook me up.

3) Hold on. So, the Dollhouse is actually evil?

It's inevitable that sci fi action/adventure shows on network TV will focus on the heroics of a bunch of photogenic ladies and gents, as that is the acceptable story we identify with the most. Though villains and anti-heroes have their place, it's rare to see something from the point of view of the bad guys. Of course, Whedon has, in the past, explored dodgy morality in his heroes. Angel in particular explored the pros and cons of doing business with evil, and former show producer Shawn Ryan based an entire show (The Shield, obvs) around a bad man, and that resulted in seven brilliant seasons of TV.

However, the seemingly incomplete explanation of what the Dollhouse does meant we were never really sure if the Dollhouse was doing something good or bad. I'm not sure if this was intentional or an unwanted side-effect of the pilot reshoot. Ballard might maintain, from the very beginning, that the Dollhouse is a bad place, but he's such a self-righteous blowhard that it's difficult to side with him. Plus, Tahmoh Penikett has one facial expression -- extreme disgust -- so for all we know, he thinks PopTarts or living room furniture or friendly neighbourhood hotties are sickening.

Over time we begin to understand that the Dollhouse almost certainly is evil, but that jibes with the idea that we're watching an action adventure series, certainly in the early episodes. Thankfully, with the sixth, the action adventure format mostly drops away, leaving us with a fascinating moral puzzle to unravel. Brilliantly, the show keeps pulling the rug out from you, making sure the viewer remains unsure about those motives in a way that would make Lost showrunners Cuse and Lindelof proud. Painting ostensibly evil characters like Adele and Topher as lonely souls who use the Dollhouse to connect with other people humanises them, making it harder to see them as carton villains, though Fran Kranz' performance is so irksome that I only "sympathise" with Topher at a remove. Olivia Williams' performance is so much more nuanced that it genuinely becomes hard to see her saddened in later episodes.

Other characters are shown to have weaknesses. Dr. Saunders is obviously a tragic figure, disfigured by Alpha and seemingly appalled by much of what goes on in the Dollhouse, though later revelations about her character call some of those feelings into question, not to mention the actual workings of the Dollhouse tech (I'm trying really hard not to spoil here). As for Ballard and his relationship with Mellie, you can see that the writers had great fun making Ballard as big a douchebag as possible. Even though Angel was a character capable of good and evil, he always had a nobility, even when he became Angelus. Ballard is just a sleaze. For those who have yet to see the entire series, there is a great fight scene coming up. If you dislike Ballard as much as I do, you'll enjoy it greatly.

So, our notions of good and bad are tossed up in the air on a weekly basis, but even then, I cannot get Needs out of my head. When I found out why Sierra is in there, it settled something for me. No matter what the purpose of the Dollhouse is, I want to see it burn to the ground just for what they've done to her. Of all the things I've seen on TV this year, even including the finale of The Shield, nothing has upset me as much as that revelation. Fuck the Dollhouse, and fuck Adele for going along with it.

4) Is this actually going anywhere?

More than anything else I've said here so far, it hurts to admit that, in the first five episodes, I got the distinct feeling that the show had no plan for the future. It wasn't just the confusing concept, either. Even Whedon admitted in those interviews linked to earlier that he had not come up with a good enough reason for people to hire Dolls when they could just hire normal people. I remember fanwanking that, in the pilot, someone would want not just a good hostage negotiator but the bestest negotiator EVAH, but midwives? That just made no narrative sense, other than to have an action adventure show with a greater variety of possible scenarios, instead of just a spy show (how many times can we see Sydney Bristow trying to recover a MacGuffin of some kind? Hence, double-triple-agents and Rambaldi devices).

After episode six, the episodic format pretty much faded away, not just to provide some momentum heading into the season finale, but also to show that the Dollhouse writers were telling a different story. Instead of Bionical Woman resets at the end of each episode, it became apparent that a mythology was being created, with clues being littered everywhere. Things that seemed ambiguous early on began to be addressed, such as the revelation of the mole's identity, the reasons why the main Actives are in the Dollhouse, and what Alpha is. Even though we don't get the answers to everything, we now get the sense that things will be revealed at a pace somewhere between Fringe-fast and Lost-slow, especially as the introduction of Omega suggests that this season was merely prologue to the real story.

5) Is this format too much for Eliza Dushku?

Upon hearing about the concept behind the show, many people joked that Dushku would not be up to the task of playing multiple characters, as much of her work had shown she had minuscule range. Regrettably, the first five episodes did nothing to dissuade viewers' fears, with Dushku playing the various personalities with little tweaking other than changes to the level of sassiness or concern on her face. Thankfully, the sixth episode came along and...

...Sorry, don't know what I was thinking there. Not even that episode could fix her performance, which continued to be the weakest link in the show. What it could do was allow the other actors on the show to take up some of the slack.

Sadly, this is a mixed blessing. Scenes involving Tahmoh Penikett and Miracle Laurie are painful to watch, with her line readings garbled and his face scrunched up in eternal anger. Fran Kranz' Topher starts out obnoxious and overplayed, and continues to be obnoxious and overplayed right to the end. Dichen Lachman has difficulty projecting anything other than half-hearted sexiness or vulnerability a la Dushku, which is annoying and limiting especially when Needs reveals her tragic backstory.

Thankfully there are some terrific actors onboard who save the day. The ever-dependable Harry Lennix is superb as Echo's handler, effortlessly projecting machismo, authority, and tenderness. Olivia Williams' performance as Adele starts out well and becomes more and more compelling as new and unexpected character traits are layered on. Reed Diamond's Dominic has less to do at first, with some peculiarly broad villainy early on, but by the time Needs rolls around, he is firing on all cylinders, and is the only cast member who walks out of the egregious "comedy" episode (Echoes) with his head held high.

The real revelations are the performances by Enver Gjokaj, as Victor, and Amy Acker, as Dr. Claire Saunders. I was always a fan of Acker on Angel, even during her early, unsubtle hours with the broad accent. Though her character, Fred, annoyed many (including Canyon, who has never been able to fully accept Fred into her heart [she's not Jesus! -- Canyon]), Acker silenced a lot of her critics in the final episodes of Angel, as she became Illyria. Sadly, she only had a few episodes to show what she could do, but in Dollhouse she does excellent work as the agoraphobic medic. It's depressing to see her paired up with the fidgety and "quirky" Topher, though her sour stillness is a nice contrast. She particularly shines in the final episodes of Dollhouse's first season, as we find out more about Saunders and how Acker's character came to be the way she is.

And where the hell did Gjokaj come from? His laughable accent in the first couple of episodes made me ignore him whenever he appeared onscreen, but with the third-episoode reveal of his Dollhood, Gjokaj began to pretty much own the show, especially in Needs and Omega. As for his "impersonation" of another actor on the show, all I can say is wow. Of all the Dolls, Gjokaj is the only actor who has figured out how to make them sympathetic and distinct even though he is required to play different people each week. It's always a pleasure to see someone break out, and if Dollhouse had failed to get a second wind, I would still have been grateful to it for alerting me to the presence of this actor. Let's hope that, if the show only manages one more season, we get to see a lot more of Gjokaj.

There is another terrific actor on the show, though not for long. I shall keep quiet about that, even though the majority of the Internet knew about his casting about four seconds after it happened. Suffice to say, Mutant Enemy fans in the UK will be thrilled out of their minds when they see him.

6) Is this show going to be worth sticking with?

If the points above don't convince you that I think it is, then nothing will. I cannot deny that, even after the sixth episode, there is some shakiness. Echoes is embarrassing to watch, and desperately misconceived. Whedon fans know that he likes to challenge his actors and make them do things they wouldn't normally, but we don't know these characters well enough to respond to their "wacky drunk" selves. Other than Reed Diamond's unexpectedly funny turn, I'd much rather that episode didn't exist. Tim Minear's finale is also disappointing, with only the memorable scene showing Alpha's "Frankenstein's monster"-esque birth working well. Though it is packed with fascinating revelation and intriguing set-ups for the second season, there is some unforgivable reliance on cliche and coincidence, much of which neuters the drama. Also, Dushku is forced to share the screen with two actors who make her look even more foolish than usual.

However, this is nothing to be concerned about. The second half of the season features at least three instant classic episodes, filled with philosophical enquiry, rug-pulling narrative trickery, and action. Though all of Whedon's shows have had depth, this could turn out to be his deepest and most thought-provoking show yet. I wish I could go back in time and tell myself that it's going to be worth the effort, because months ago, I was despairing. Considering how I once unironically compared this to Bionical Woman and Knight Rider, it's testament to Whedon's formidable storytelling and showrunning skills that I now think that -- if allowed to continue for more than one season -- Dollhouse has the best shot of replacing Lost as the smartest and most challenging sci-fi show on TV. Let's hope it stays around long enough to prove me right.

...Where I Try To Defend Michael Bay, And Can't Even Convince Myself

2009-06-23T23:59:00.005+01:00

Canyon once asked me if I defend Michael Bay just to be difficult and controversial, and I admitted that the most all-caps-boldiest exclamations that I trot out are just nonsense. If I were to rank directors in a huge list from good to bad (don't tempt me to do that. I probably would if prompted), he'd be nowhere near the top, but more importantly he'd be nowhere near the bottom either. He's lazily blamed for everything that is stupid and awful about spectacular Hollywood product, and for tainting the cultural well so much that the whole world suffers. The hatred aimed at him is startling. I halfheartedly defended him on the AV Club once, and was told by another commenter that I obviously knew nothing about cinema, and should keep my opinion about everything else to myself. I'll admit I'm no Bordwell or Thompson, but my opinion on Bay is a little more nuanced than, "Me like when hot broads dance and the house blow up".

Any filmmaker who becomes successful enough to achieve name recognition status is bound to attract critical dismissal, and that will intensify if the filmmaker has annoying quirks that are overused. For example, Paul Haggis' inability to keep subtext subtextual, instead making his characters voice motivation or revelation out loud, drives me up the wall. Even his rewrite work on Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace makes that mistake. Tarantino's magpie tendencies irk a lot of critics, especially when he steals from disreputable pop culture artifacts that they already dislike. Spielberg has had his knocks many times in the past. I can imagine he's never going to invite Henry Jaglom around for dinner, as the guy has been bitching about him being a poor filmmaker for decades now.

Bay is a different beast altogether. He's directing movies by a set of rules he has made up for himself, and that style bears only a passing resemblance to the work of others. As if brought up watching nothing but early Tony Scott movies, he seemingly has no idea of how the big picture will flow, choosing instead to focus on each individual shot, making them pop as much as he can. As a result, it's not just the whole movie that doesn't flow. Even relatively short scenes are haphazardly paced. This car chase from The Rock has great individual moments, but stops and starts with no understanding of how jarring that must be for the viewer.

I would never think to defend Bay as a man who makes great films in entirety. Even my favourite Bay movie, Armageddon, is full of embarrassing, and indefensible, flaws. Even so, he's no Robert Luketic, or Shawn Levy, or Jon Avnet, three directors right off the top of my head who have never been responsible for even a single memorable shot, let alone scene or film. Of course, he's also not James Cameron (I make this point because True Lies is on ITV2 right now, and, as shaky as that film is, the action scenes are almost perfection). I think Bay's movies are fascinating, and with regards to the criticism he draws, Drew McWeeny brilliantly (and, obviously, accidentally) summed up how I feel about him in a Tweet I just spotted.

[To another Twitterer] How can you rail against the excess? Bay is what we have PAID Hollywood to evolve into. We reward the escalation of the absurd, then cry about it when it reaches its logical conclusion.

In the interest of not misrepresenting McWeeny, I'll point out that he later adds that he doesn't think he's the best action director in Hollywood. Neither do I, but he is the most spectacular director in the whole world, a Cecil B. DeMille with subscriptions to Guns & Ammo and FHM. When Bay gets to do his thing right, you are getting to see something that no other filmmaker on Earth would or can do. He shoots fast and loose and spends his money on the outrageous stuff, and can conjure up images that sear themselves into your brain.

As McWeeny says, this is not the same as saying he's a good filmmaker. He's just a unique one, and I feel an obligation to articulate my conflicted feelings, especially considering almost all critics are dismissing his movies with such kneejerk vehemence that they're not even bothering to fact-check, which is often a sign that the reviewer considers the movie beneath contempt. I've reviewed films in an almost professional capacity before, and I've had press packs, so I know most of these errors can be avoided*. (Though being annoyed by overly complex plots that make little sense are another thing: see below for my own problems with T:ROTF.)

So I was desperate to see Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, mostly because I was hoping he would get right the things he got wrong in the first one. As those flaws were the usual things (pacing mistakes, clunky humour, Jazz being a terrible racial stereotype, etc.), I was basically hoping that this would be Bay's best movie, removing some of the clutter but keeping the crazy. That's the key: keeping the stuff that he does better than anyone. Even though I want other filmmakers to create coherent movies with a steady, escalating pace, I want Bay to do what Bay does best. The worst thing he could do would be to play into the hands of those critics who say his movies are all BOOM and no plot, racing from one scene to another without a pause, doing nothing more than amping up every moment with no concern for character development. Sadly, that's exactly what he has done with T:ROTF, and the result is a deeply frustrating experience.

For the first ninety minutes, I was absolutely amazed at what I was seeing. Even more so than the shocking and ramshackle Bad Boys II, Bay is throwing the kitchen sink at the audience (and then shooting it with a sabot round). The first scene in the movie features a tribe of Cro-Magnon fighting early Cybertronians, for crying out loud. Okay, so they look more like they should be hanging out with Zoolander than hunting bison, but still, kudos to the man. For the next section of the movie, the film throws so many peculiar and outrageous visuals and concepts, that I drove Canyon crazy with my various quiet exclamations of joy. By the time Megatron and Starscream hang out on one of the moons of Saturn (seriously), I was convinced that this was going to be my favourite movie of the summer.

And then it all goes horribly wrong. The moment that the action abruptly shifts to Egypt, the movie slams into neutral, with scene after scene falling flat. The novelty of the early scenes disappears, replaced by a tedious crawl across numerous deserts, seemingly to showcase the cars that have been mostly missing by this point. Several scenes could be excised completely, and should have. It was nice to see Deep Roy as the ha ha ha so tiny border guard, but the movie would have been so much better without it. This is not the first time he's made this mistake, but usually he doesn't put so many of these extraneous and excruciating scenes in the final hour.

In fact, the endless trek from Egypt to Jordan and back again (I think that was the route) seems to only be there because, for some baffling reason, Bay and the writers thought that having the characters just appear at the Pyramids for the big finish would somehow be unbelievable, so we have to see their full trip. Why is he getting squeamish about this now? I don't care how they get there, especially if the trip seems to have been filmed in real time. If I want a travelogue, I'll watch a Michael Palin show. This is a Bay movie. If you're going to use a "Space Bridge" to teleport the main characters to Egypt, then teleport them to the exact spot needed to maximise the action. And yet no. Because audiences have been clamouring to see National Lampoon's Egyptian Vacation.

The desert setting also steps on the toes of the earlier film. Transformers had a perfectly fine and short action scene set in a desert, as the survivors of the opening base attack fight against Scorponok. It was about five minutes long, had Tyrese bellowing "BRING THE RAIN!" into a walkie-talkie, and featured a bunch of exploding buildings. Those wide open spaces worked well for a mid-movie action scene, and made the final city scenes even more exciting, as we got to see a bunch of robots fighting in contrasted dark and cramped streets with no respite. That scene remains one of my all-time favourites.

The finale of Transformers 2 just looks like a bigger version of that desert scene, with little of the original's intensity, though it does have some fun stuff involving the Pyramids¹. Sam and Mikaela make their way very slowly through a village, with intercutting of Josh Duhamel looking frustrated. No one says BRING THE RAIN!, though it does crop up on a napkin or something earlier on. Everything seems to move at normal film speed, which is like half Bay-speed. At this point in the movie my ass was really hurting from sitting in the crappy Waterloo IMAX seats, and instead of being riveted I just kept fidgeting. Yes, I use my ass as a guide to how exciting a movie is.

More exasperating than the inappropriate locale, even though Bay's movies have not been known for their well sketched character arcs, the finale is littered with momentum-robbing scenes such as the whole "I love you" thing between Sam and Mikaela (really? This is a big deal?), Kevin Dunn telling his son to go and do the right thing (an emotional beat that makes no sense as Dunn, at the start of the film, couldn't care less about his son leaving), and Sam's "death", which reflects the big "death" midway through the movie (I won't spoil it). Why does Bay suddenly care about these things? I can barely remember The Island, and maybe there was an arc in that, but I don't even think there was one in Pearl Harbor, the most conventional movie he has made. I expect tonal errors from Bay, but this was worse than usual.

Only after leaving the cinema with a deflated heart (it sounds like a deadly condition, but the only symptom is whining on the internet) did I realise that there was a lot more wrong with the movie than just the broken finale. McWeeny recently hinted that the first sentence in his forthcoming HitFix Motion/Captured review would be, "I have never felt more like a third nipple than I did, as a screenwriter, while watching Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen." I can't wait to find out what he means by that, though I think it might have something to do with how the excessive plot -- and I do mean excessive -- is crammed into about three five minute-long scenes filled beyond breaking point with insane amounts of exposition, while huge stretches of the movie would probably, on paper, look like a list of fight scenes. It's that rare kind of movie that is simultaneously overcomplicated and embarrassingly simplistic.

Instead of just trying to come up with a simple way to orchestrate some robot fighting, we get tons of backstory. Cybertronians have visited Earth before, and one of them was going to destroy us in order to harvest energy, but a civil war broke out and then there were a bunch of Primes, and they are magic or something, and the All-Spark is in Sam's head, or it's something else, and there is a key, and a cipher, and a Matrix of Awesomeness, and an afterlife, and probably a bunch of elves, and... It's absurdly complicated stuff, with one very silly plot-thread (Megatron demanding the world hand over Sam so he can extract his brain, or something) that takes over the latter half of the movie. For every quirky moment and fun concept, there's ten stupid complications that mean nothing. By the time Jetfire turned up for his shot at the Exposition Of The Year award, I had completely lost the plot, not helped by my efforts to guess the identity of the British actor playing the elderly robot².

To me, these are big problems, even when taking Bay's singular style into account. However, it's becoming clear that the biggest problem people are going to have with the movie are Mudflap and Skids, the comedy relief duo who shuck and jive through much of the finale. Why am I using this outdated African-American phrase? It seems apt considering that these two robots are the most startling racial stereotypes I've seen on the big screen since Crash, only this time they're meant to be funny and not "educational".

While sitting in the cinema I had huge difficulty reconciling what I was seeing with what I thought Bay was trying to do (have a couple of affable idiots break up the tedium of the cross-country trek with their wacky exploits), and for a while after I wondered if they were meant to be a spoof of Will Smith and Martin Lawrence from Bad Boys (a Bad Boys II poster is on display in one character's room, and their banter is as forced as that between Smith and Lawrence). Now, with hindsight, that I realise that's even worse than just two racist caricatures. Is he personally attacking two people he has worked with before? And the guy doing the voices for them is white? We're talking about Jar-Jar Binks-esque wrongness on an epic scale.

The disconnect I suffered during the movie was similar to the shock I felt during Star Wars: The Clone Wars when Ziro the Hutt appeared, but my overall opinion of that character is astonishment that Lucas could have thought that was all right. With Mudflap and Skids, I was uncomfortable during the movie, and now I'm outright pissed off. It's made the dreadful caricaturing of Jazz in the first movie (a black Transformer that breakdances and then gets ignominiously killed in the final act) seem even more glaring. Bay deserves the shitstorm that's heading his way.

I mean, it's becoming fairly obvious that he has a real problem with women, so much so that you could almost forget it's happening until the camera shoots so far up plastic "hottie" Alice's skirt that it qualifies as a proctological exam. Megan Fox does little more than pout and get dragged around the desert by LaBeouf and Duhamel, not even getting a hero moment like she did in the first film³. Other than Fox and Isabel Lucas, the only other female characters with any dialogue are the holographic women on the transforming motorbikes (ZOMG is Bay saying women are bikes?), and Sam's mother, played by Julie White.

Being the only non-simpering non-hottie in the film, she has to do several unglamorous things, usually involving pratfalls. One scene with her getting high on hash brownies is particularly uncalled-for. Nevertheless, she deserves all the credit in the world for managing to make these stupid moments work. She might give the best performance in the film. Maybe, in future, Bay should consider giving more roles to women who have talents beyond looking orange and pouty.

So, it was a washout, right? Except that for a while, as I said earlier, the film flies. Even with the inclusion of the awful Alice subplot, and lots of shenanigans involving kitchenbots, there is a lot to enjoy. The new set-up for the Autobots, working in conjunction with the humans to fight rogue Decepticons, is hugely promising, and the opening in Shanghai is astonishing and ambitious. Even better, the forest fight between Optimus and three Decepticons is one of the film highlights of the year, especially as it is filmed in full IMAX.

Seeing Optimus to actual scale is something I won't forget any time soon. Much is made of Bay's direction of action, and how the rapidly moving camera and quick cuts serve to render all of his scenes incomprehensible, but there are many worse action directors out there. Considering how overwhelmed I was by the terrible action in Eagle Eye, or by the much better but still swooshy Star Trek (both of which I saw on IMAX), this didn't upset me at all. That was something I was not expecting.

There is even some evidence of playfulness from the notoriously grouchy man. Considering his parodic sense of patriotism, it amuses me greatly that he manages to destroy Paris again (the first time was at the end of Armageddon, a scene that got a cheer here in England each time I saw it on the big screen), and I can imagine all sorts of noses being put out of joint by his destruction of a library about an hour in. If you're responsible for some of the most successful movies of the past fifteen years, you can afford to poke fun at your image like that.

As I've said, I did like a lot of it. I saw one person lazily Tweeting this morning that they thought this was as bad as Batman and Robin. Don't believe it for a second: this has much much more to recommend it, even if just as an occasionally exhilarating aural and visual assault. Also great: Glenn Morshower returning, this time as General Morshower (seriously); Tony Todd doing some great voicework as The Fallen, a robot with a fantastic gangly design; trying to catch sight of the cast on poor Shia's hand in early scenes; terrific sound editing, far better than critics are saying; a greater sense of the robots as actual characters, especially Starscream and Megatron. Plus, even if the finale is not perfect, it does feature some mind-boggling moments. I'm really hoping that the previous Academy snub of the Transformers effects team is not repeated. They've topped themselves this time out, especially as they're operating in IMAX for some of the most complicated moments.

Even so, it's a movie that wouldn't let me like it as much as I wanted to. If I'm going to defend Bay in future, the guy has got to meet me halfway. The awful Ebonicbots and the Auton women have got to go. Right now, I'd rather he tried to make another movie in the more sober style of The Island than keep this lower-than-lowest common denominator stuff going. It's becoming hard work waiting for him to grow up, but then, if we lose the racism and misogyny (which I'm sure he doesn't see as such), will we lose the rest? And is "the rest" worth keeping if the man is going out of his way to perpetuate bullshit jock philosophy like this? All of a sudden those Bay films in my collection look a little less appealing. Let's hope his next movie is either an adaptation of The Beauty Myth or a remake of Amistad.

* In fact, one of the first movies I ever saw at a press screening was Bad Boys. Maybe that's why I'm forgiving of Bay's films.

¹ Full disclosure. As soon as I saw the first trailer with shots of the Pyramids, my heart sank. A project I have been working on for some time had a big finale in the shadow of the Pyramids, and so I guess I have to scrap all of that. A shame, as it would have been so awesome that brains would have melted while watching it, even though the project involved a C-list comic character that no one likes. Nevertheless, my disappointment with the finale was not rooted in this, as I got over that frustration a long time ago.

² Amazingly, it's Jon Turturro.

This means he spends a lot of his screentime arguing with himself.

³ Though, to be honest, LaBeouf gets little more to do other than run into danger and get blown up. Another flaw of the film: adding human characters and not really knowing what to do with them, which particularly irks when you like LaBeouf, as I do.

ETA: Here is McWeeny's review of T:ROTF. Of all the reviews I have read in the past few days, this might be the only one that actually addressed specifics of what the film is like. Trust someone as perceptive and fair as McWeeny to watch the movie and review what he is seeing instead of just scribbling "Michael Bay is a douchebag" in his Moleskine a thousand times.

In The Summer, In The Cinema

2009-06-19T23:00:00.013+01:00

My most recent poll was put up probably too late to draw much attention, but for once that screw-up was only partially my fault. As I mentioned before, this is a particularly weak summer line-up, and we can perhaps attribute that to the after-effects of the writers' strike, as well as the stellar quality of 2008's summer season, which set the bar so high. How could this year compare to a line-up that featured such entertaining films as The Dark Knight, Iron Man, and Kung Fu Panda? Still, I should have at least made more of an effort, even if only for old time's sake. Here are the results:

JJ Abrams Risks Death by Unwashed Nerd Rage-On - 8 (47%)
Quentin Tarantino and the Broken Spellcheck - 3 (17%)
Transmogrifiers 2: Return of the Awesome - 1 (5%)
I’d Rather Be Dragged To Hell Than Watch Spider-Man 3 Again - 1 (5%)
Pixar’s Whassup, Bitches? - 1 (5%)
The Time-Travelling Bana - 1 (5%)
Harry Potter and the Thing in the Place with the Whatsit - 1 (5%)
District 9 (AKA Neill Blomkamp Rocks Your Face Off) - 1 (5%)
Terminator Franchise: Salvage Operation - 0 (0%)
The Curious Case of Wolverine Wutton - 0 (0%)
Angels, Demons, and Probably Ewan McGregor’s Schlong - 0 (0%)
Another Worthless Woody Allen Movie - 0 (0%)
Hott Sam Rockwell’s Lunar Oscar Bid - 0 (0%)
Depp and Bale in: Untouchablesque - 0 (0%)
Sacha Baron Cohen and the Inevitable Lawsuits - 0 (0%)
(500) Days of Self-Conscious Indie Movie Quirk - 0 (0%)
Demetri Martin + Ang Lee + Hippies = WTF? - 0 (0%)
G.I. Joe: The Struggle to Give a Shit - 0 (0%)
The Unnecessary Remaking of Pelham 123 - 0 (0%)
Final Destination: Rube Goldberg’s Revenge - 0 (0%)
Judd Apatow’s Self-Loathing People (feat. The RZA!) - 0 (0%)

What's weirdest about Star Trek's overwhelming success is that people were still voting for it weeks after it had come out. From what I can tell people were seeing it more than once, so perhaps this was a retroactive vote of happiness after people had already seen it. Whatever the reason, it's great to see so much support for something that was treated as a hubris-tainted disaster before even a frame of it had been shown. I had expected something approximating greatness for a while, hoping that J.J. Abrams would go for broke after playing safe with the frustrating Mission Impossible 3, but sadly my anticipation worked against me.

When I finally saw it I was a little disappointed, even though I liked it a lot. The hectic pace was necessary to get all of the characters into place while setting up the Trek universe for N00Bs and telling a story, but it might have been a touch too crazed even for me. It didn't help that seeing it in IMAX made all of those whip-pans and lens flares far more exhausting than they would be on a regular screen, as well as making Zachary Quinto's eyebrows and the... how can I put this tactfully... heavily-detailed face of Chris Pine hella-distracting. I have been trying and failing to see it again on a normal sized screen to give it another shot at blowing my mind. Even without that reassessment, so far it's the movie to beat this summer. Why? Because Abrams destroyed Vulcan. That takes balls of brass. Or dilithium.

After that, the only movie generating more than baseline excitement is Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. All the more surprising after the critical drubbing it received at Cannes. Not that that matters. Tarantino is one of those rare artists that have created a work of pop culture art of such great impact that they get a free pass for life. Just as I'll follow Eno or Dylan or Scorsese through thick or thin, Tarantino movies will always feel like an event, even when the result is a disappointment (I'm thinking Kill Bill Part Two). It worries me that a die-hard Tarantino fan like Bradshaw gave it a memorable slating, but he seems uncomfortable around schlocky b-movie stuff.

Yes, he gave Star Trek a big five-star review, but then claimed throughout the review that Nero and his grumpy cohorts were Klingon. It suggests he never really pays attention to the "baser" end of the cultural spectrum. Which is fine, of course. Thank God for him giving props to Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Andrei Zvyagintsev despite the whining of readers offended that he would dare like something "arty". Nevertheless, if the movie is going to feature more than one explosion or decapitation, or is actually colossally dreadful, stupid, and predictable on almost every level, best to take his review with a pinch of salt/gunpowder.

Speaking of things that explode, Disguisatrons Two: There Will Be Oil got my vote. Yes the first one had as many flaws as it had great moments. Yes it could be confusing. Yes it blah blah ah fuck it. I loved the first one just because it set out to be a robot mayhem movie with broad jokes and explosions and unearned drama, and it did that with zero apology. I wasn't a huge Transformers fan so I didn't weep because Mammothtron was the wrong shade of teal. I think Michael Bay's decision to make every action scene hectic and every conversation a series of unconnected smart-ass jokes is a terrible kind of genius because you can tune out every few seconds and never lose track of what's going on, because there's nothing coherent to lose track of, and nothing has any dramatic weight. It's spectacle for the sake of spectacle. Criticising Bay for not being Ingmar Bergman is as futile as criticising cheese for not being gaseous. (ETA: I wrote that sentence yesterday, and what do you know, Bradshaw hated it, using a customarily brilliant metaphor about sex to illustrate the point. However, when criticising the awful Megan Fox, he invoked the memory of Liv Ullmann! Spooky.)

Bear in mind, he's probably the only action filmmaker I'm willing to give this latitude to (see Stephen Sommers comments below), simply because he does this stuff bigger and better than anyone else. Without the outrageous spectacle, that dramatic emptiness is really apparent. As I feel obliged to say every time I get excited about a Bay movie, I'm not crazy. I'm fully aware it could suck, but I won't have to wait long to find out. I'll be seeing it on Saturday on IMAX, Crom willing, and if that format made Star Trek hard to watch, it will almost certainly render hardcore Bay nigh-unwatchable. But, you know, who cares? BOOM!

I'd be very very surprised if it gave us anywhere near the pleasure Drag Me To Hell did. Sam Raimi's gloriously silly granny-spitfest entertained parts of my brain I'd forgotten I had, i.e. all of the neurons that were born during my first viewing of Evil Dead II. Much as I have grown to dislike seeing movies with large audiences, I would have liked to have seen this with more people, even if only to drown out the noise of this one old guy who chattered away when we went to see it (my intense glare of disgust did not phase him, oddly). The few dozen people who were in there hooted and shrieked and laughed throughout, and it was great.

I can't remember the last time I saw a film work so well simply because it is so proudly base and silly, but then that's probably because Sam Raimi has not been making those films for a while. Seeing his return to his roots has been one of the highlights of the year, and not enough people have experienced it. For shame, humanity! If you've not yet seen it, you have to go see it right now, even if only for the fight scene in the car about twenty minutes in. I can't remember a more brazen attempt to get a response from a crowd, nor can I remember a scene that has been as successful in generating one.

Canyon's vote went to Pixar's Up, the long-awaited follow-up to Monsters Inc. from Pete Docter. This is a particularly hard movie to write about as the majority of Americans we know have already seen it, and we remain Ed-Asner-less. It's not out in England until October, meaning we're going to have the same silliness we had with Ratatouille, where we saw the movie on the big screen three weeks before the release of the region 1 DVD. Wall*E came out quickly, but we were not crazy about that. Up's trailers have been so wonderful, and unexpected, and glowing, that we're more excited about this than any other Pixar movie to date. Now I know how the Japanese feel (movies get released months late over there, for reasons I do not understand).

Then there's some weirdness. A vote for The Time-Traveller's Wife? Was this a Journeyman fan? An Eric Bana fan? Just for having Ron Livingston in the cast, I'll be giving that sucker a miss. Same goes for Harry Potter and the Wig of Translucence or whatever it's called. I'm afraid I'm not a fan, though that's partially because I stopped reading the books before they, apparently, got a lot more complex. While Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy captured my imagination, J.K. Rowling's books almost completely passed me by. I enjoyed Prisoner of Azkaban (the book), but never got any further.

As for the films, Chris Columbus' dreadful work on the first one put me off for good, even though Alfonso Cuaron eventually turned up to save the day. Of course, that fifteen-hour narcolepsy-inducing disaster is the one Potter movie that's in constant rotation on Sky Movies, so there's no getting away from it. I will watch them all eventually, even though the second one is full of icky spiders BAD BAD MOVIE!!! I like that they're becoming darker as they progress (just like the books), but from the impressive trailers for the latest film, if the next two are darker, they'll have to be directed by Michael Haneke. (Idea!)

One final vote, for Neill Blomkamp's District 9. Alien Nation without a rubber-headed Mandy Patinkin drinking sour milk? I can't wait either.

After that, the majority of the films on the list got no votes. Fair enough. I struggled to come up with a list, and most of these films wouldn't interest me either. I had high hopes for Terminator Salvation, though most fans had written it off just because McG was involved. For a good stretch of the film he did a good job, with two stand-out setpieces in the first hour, and the good sense to hire Bryce Dallas Howard, Christian Bale, relative newcomer and scene-stealer Sam Worthington (Marcus Wright rocked), and last but certainly not least, internet search engine sensation Moon Bloodgood, as Tough But Beautiful Post-Apocalypse Lady In Sexy Tight Trews.

Sadly, it all fell apart in the final twenty minutes, with action scenes dragging on for too long, before a horribly compromised final reel fell flat. Then there was the distracting and relentless tide of references to the first two movies. I had had enough by the time Christian Bale pulled out the CD player and cranked out You Could Be Mine, an act that suggested he had occupied himself during the nuclear winter by scavenging in burned-out record stores when not shouting into his walkie-talkie. Sadly, there was more to come, with numerous shots lifted wholesale from James Cameron's originals. By the time "Arnie" showed up, I half expected Rick Rossovich to rush in from stage left to hit him in the head with a lamp.

Still, at least I had enjoyed it for a while, and it exceeded my expectations by some distance. The opposite could be said for X-Men Origins: Wolverine, which could well be the worst Marvel adaptation to date. It's definitely in the bottom three. There are no words to express how awful the goddamn thing is, and even my fanboyish pleasure in watching Hugh Jackman do his thing was dented, probably because I know he got more involved in the making of it, which means the stink of failure is upon him. Sadly, that stink oozes off the screen like some kind of miasmic deathcloud, and settles on us as well. And when I say stink, I'm talking a mouthful of skunk-ass-juice stink right in the mouth. That stinky. That FAIL-y.

Even weeks later, after numerous failed attempts to remove the stink with lemon juice, Viakal, and Febreeze, I was still flashing back to some of the dreadfulness. The hilarious sped-up shot of Wolvie hacking away at a fire escape; Ryan Reynolds wasted as Deadpool; that horrible final fight in front of a green screen; the pointless last act retcon of one major death just to have that death happen all over again; Cyclops' eyes setting fire to things when any fule kno that his eyebeams are pure force, not heat; Wolverine meeting Ma and Pa Kent and getting them killed within a few minutes of showing up; "Why is the moon so lonely?", which has to be the funniest line of dialogue of 2009; the galactic-level stupidity of the whole sorry enterprise. Right now, not even an Uwe Boll movie written by Paul Haggis and starring Cameron Diaz and Paul Walker could topple it from the Worst Movie of 2009 position.

I mean, Angels and Demons was not as bad as Wolverine. How is this possible? Middle-aged man runs around Rome shouting factoids about Catholicism vs. adamantium berserker rage. It should have been a slamdunk. And yet the former was more entertaining, even though the identity of the bad guy was obvious as soon as they opened their mouth. I spent the whole film being very obnoxious to Canyon, acting like a cross between Rex Reed and Sherlock Holmes, and I was even more annoying when my suspicion was vindicated. Still, my mom liked it, so it all worked out well.

What else is there? I have high hopes for Moon, as my mancrush Hott Sam Rockwell is pretty much the only person in it, which is how I feel about a lot of movies he's been in. God knows when it comes out here. Public Enemies will thrill me no matter what: my love of Michael Mann is so strong that I liked Miami Vice despite its many many flaws, so the only thing this could do to disappoint me is to be less entertaining than John Milius' muscular feature debut, Dillinger. Bruno could be fun. Who doesn't love jokes involving dildos and rednecks?

Other than Woody Allen, who seems to have hired Larry David to replicate his own shtick but without the bite. No votes for Whatever Works, which tells me that this blog is not read by Larry King. He recently tweeted 'Just saw Woody Allen's new movie Whatver [sic] Works" It's his greatest movie, even better than "Annie Hall" I can't say good enough about it!' Considering the endearingly random quality of his tweets, which are not that far removed from the comments in this prescient Onion article, I'm not sure this is an opinion to be trusted. After the hysterical car-crash that was Cassandra's Dream, I just don't see how Allen can even recapture the dizzy heights of Alice and Another Woman, let alone Husbands and Wives or Manhattan.

I'm also uninterested in (500) Days of Summer and Taking Woodstock, partially because they seem super-quirky, but mostly because I can't help but think that Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Demetri Martin accidentally switched movies. Surely JGL should be working with Ang Lee by now? If we do see (500) Days, it'll be in the hope that a) Zooey sings, and b) we find out if that fucking irksome (500) is justified by the plot.

For a change, I'm even less interested in seeing the last two action movies on the list, which is odd considering my love of pyrotechnics. G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra is by Stephen Sommers and will therefore have the same tedious talkFIGHTtalkFIGHT structure, but without the exuberance of Bay, or his gift for composition. (I will ignore all flaming on this point, so don't bother.) Plus, it will not be anywhere near as good as the Warren Ellis-scripted cartoon on Adult Swim.

Speaking of futile attempts to improve on greatness, The Taking of Pelham 123 shouldn't even exist. Last week we rewatched the original Joseph Sargent thriller, and it's enormous fun. Plus, it's already been remade as a TV movie, and indirectly by Spike Lee with Inside Man (obviously it's not the same plot, but it has the same feel, and has great fun dramatising New York's infamous air of exasperated cynicism and multicultural tension).

Though I'm not surprised no one wants to see The Final Destination (now in eye-shattering 3D!), why does no one want to see Funny People? Okay, so it sounds like incredibly mawkish navel-gazing sub-James-L.-Brooksian tripe, but The RZA is in it! Bobby Digital, people! Have you seen Derailed? He plays a postroom guy who hangs out with executive Clive Owen, and it's the most out-of-place performance I've ever seen. Each time they interacted, my brain tried to leap out of my head. There's that bloke from Chancer, walking through the office, and OMG HE'S CHATTING WITH THE RZA! Everything's better with a bit of RZA in it.

So, anyway. Go see lots of movies, and in a couple of months, if I remember, I'll put up my usual end-of-summer polls to determine which movies sank, which swam, and which soared like celluloid eagles.

Today's Internet Highlight Is...

2009-06-17T10:14:00.005+01:00

I've got a lot to do today, none of it fun, which means I am bound to be procrastinating as much as possible, but thankfully I can scratch Internet off my Things To Waste Time Doing list, because nothing - not even the forthcoming iPhone OS upgrade - is going to make me happier than this: Funny Or Die has collected a bunch of Saturday Night Live Celebrity Jeopardy skits.

SNL Celebrity Jeopardy 5-14-05 - watch more funny videos

Linkblogging is a crime, but if you're gonna break the law, break it right. Just for Amy Poehler's brilliant impersonation of the pointless Sharon Osborne, it demands to be shared, especially as this single-handedly erases the uncomfortable memory of the Laugh-Vacuum that is Parks and Recreations.

Rock Band Wish List #2: Soundgarden

2009-06-15T18:00:00.001+01:00

While playing a quick Rock Band session yesterday (quick because ZOMG hot weather), we were randomly thrown the downloaded track Jesus Christ Pose by Soundgarden. As a grunge fan who still thinks Converse All Stars are the only acceptable form of footwear in anything but the most arctic of climates, it was great fun, but it struck me that Soundgarden songs are particularly challenging, and the game could stand to have a few more of them. Matt Cameron's drumming is often complex and unpredictable, and keeping up with Chris Cornell's vocals would challenge any singer ¹. Kim Thayil's guitar work can often be deceptively intricate, but from time to time he would just flat out rock the fucking fuck out, and though I've been enjoying some of the mellower songs in the game, more rocking in Rock Band is always welcome.

Rock Band has already irked me by gamifying (dibs on that word) a mere four Soundgarden tracks: the staggering Jesus Christ Pose, Black Hole Sun and Spoonman from Superunknown (two songs I'm cool on), and Pretty Noose from that album no one bought. I'm tempted to say that this Wish List entry should be dedicated to sending a desperate plea to Harmonix and A&M to make it up to me by gamifying all of Superunknown. Oh to be able to play My Wave and The Day I Tried To Live! Instead, I'll make a case for Gun, from Louder Than Love. Here is the track on Last.fm, and here is a video of Soundgarden performing it live.

Nice to see that Soundgarden can rock a fucking joint down in person. My only previous experience of them performing live was at the Reading festival in 1995, where they half-assed it out of a prior obligation and seriously damaged my opinion of them. Any Soundgarden fans who think I'm lying should know SoC contributor Masticator was also there (though we didn't know each other at the time), and he knows what I'm talking about.

So why make a case for Gun and not Rusty Cage, or Fresh Tendrils, or even that Audioslave track with the Vanishing Point homage in the video? Simply because it starts slow, and gets faster. That's all, but anyone who has played I Get By by Honest Bob and the Factory-to-Dealer Incentives will know that the device of starting slow and getting faster is not just fun but a terrific challenge to your sense of rhythm. Still, even at its most frenetic, I Get By is not that difficult, but Gun, with its howling vocals and insane shredding from Thayil at his shreddiest, could be as big a mountain to climb as Aerosmith's Train Kept A-Rollin' or Abnormality's Visions ². Harmonix would do well to chase up this suggestion immediately.

Or make all of Superunknown available. Whichever is easiest.

¹ I once suggested that he was easily a better vocalist than Eddie Vedder and was mocked for it at enormous, psyche-scar-inducing length, but Cornell has more range and power than old Grumbly Boots.

² AKA And Now Your Fingers Will Bleed And Snap Off.

Game Review - The Darjeeling Limited

2009-06-11T17:15:00.007+01:00

As gaming technology progresses ever closer to full immersion, with HD graphics and motion recognition tech like Microsoft's Project Natal pushing the boundaries of what games can represent, we have seen an explosion in abstract gaming genres, more concerned with telling convoluted and compelling narratives than merely giving the player an avatar to guide through a series of environments. This attempt to match established storytelling media such as books and films might be misguided. Arguably, games can do certain things that other media cannot, so why not continue to do those things instead of trying to imitate old media like movies? However, this has not dissuaded games developers, and the latest release from game developer Wes Anderson, in association with Tweesoft Games, is a notable progression in this abstract-narrative sub-genre.

The Darjeeling Limited is Anderson's first project since the critical failure of his first-person shooter / marine exploration simulator The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou. After sales failed to materialise, Anderson split from long-time collaborators RagnarokRain, a move that shocked the gaming community. The success of their previous games -- Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums -- cemented their reputation as purveyors of eccentric gaming experiences, with Anderson's fertile mind served by RagnarokRain's incredible coding prowess.

Nevertheless, it was risky to change their style from increasingly complex Sims-style strategy game -- with Rushmore allowing you to manage Max Fischer's career at school, and The Royal Tenenbaums expanding your responsibilities to controlling a large family in a New York brownstone -- to a peculiar cross-breed of other genres. Regrettably their gamble failed terribly. The character of Steve Zissou was promoted as being the next Master Chief or Gordon Freeman but, with the traditional macho couture of the first person hero abandoned in favour of a wetsuit and red bobble hat, Zissou failed to convince. To make things worse, the underwater sections were poorly designed and overlong, until eventually fatigue set in for most players, ditching the game before completing the fabled Jaguar Shark Forgiveness achievement. Not long after the game was released, it was Anderson who ditched RagnarokRain.

Following the acrimonious split, RagnarokRain's head project developer Colt Wendell moved on to collaborating with French game desginer Jean-Luc Godard on the heavily guarded project Weekend. Godard has confounded expectation in the past, which is a reassuring thought to hold onto after initial rumour hinted that it was merely some form of 2-D side-scrolling driving game. Anderson, meanwhile, teamed up with Tweesoft Games, in a move that surprised all of us. Tweesoft's projects to date have been the amusing on-rails shooter Snakes on a Plane, which featured infamous voicework from Samuel L. Jackson, and the diverting Singstar-esque Hustle and Flow. Though those games sold well, neither hinted that Tweesoft was a good match for the ground-breaking intellectualism of Anderson.

Thankfully, for the most part, The Darjeeling Limited is a return to form for Anderson, and a notable leap for Tweesoft after the choppiness of their previous projects. The player takes control of three self-obsessed brothers -- Francis, Peter and Jack Whitman -- as they search India for their estranged mother in order to connect with her following the death of their father. The majority of the game takes place on the train of the title, switching from first-person to third-person and back again, as you interact with a selection of beautifully written NPCs, with occasional excursions off the train providing some much needed variety. These adventures usually end with a mad dash, either on foot or by taxi, with a countdown clicking off the time until the train departs. Though most of the game is leisurely, these sections definitely get the pulse racing. (Click on screen grabs for greater detail.)

As you progress through the game, your primary goal is to monitor two variables: Frustration With Brothers and Obliviousness To Others, both measured as percentages. The first measurement must be kept as low as possible, a task hindered by the insufferable selfishness of all of the main characters. As you hop from brother to brother, you see terrible behaviour from each of them, bringing that frustration level to the boil several times. Only by acquiescing to their neediness will your frustration level drop, but this will stop you from progressing through the game, meaning you have to balance your frustration, and your efforts to bring your siblings closer, with the need to get to your mother's abbey to reconcile with her. If you fail to keep your frustration tempered, and the percentage counter goes past 90%, the game momentarily changes to a first-person shooter mode, with your currently controlled character attempting to incapacitate the other two brothers using pepper spray.

The second measurement, Obliviousness To Others, has to remain high. Any other gaming designer would require you to keep that level low, but this appears to be Anderson's satirical take on the selfish and clueless behaviour of American tourists around the world. The higher this level, the greater the chance you will be thrown off the train, which allows you to progress deeper into the game. This counterintuitive choice is one of the many delightful Andersonian details that have made him such a star of the gaming world, and belongs with other memorable game moments as the failure of Max Fischer to win the heart of his teacher in Rushmore, or the death of the father figure triggering the reconciliation of his family in the final level of The Royal Tenenbaums.

Once off the train, the rules change, and you are required to keep the Obliviousness meter as low as possible, which triggers the River Rescue level. Again, Anderson plays tricks with the player by making the level impossible. Controlling Peter Whitman, you attempt to save a boy from a raging river, sadly to no avail. No matter how many times we restarted the level, the outcome was always the same. Though the consequence of this failure is continuation to the Funeral In Two Timezones level, it might frustrate many players expecting some kind of heroic catharsis, and could lead to the same kind of protests that followed the unavoidable death of Ned Plimpton in the helicopter level of The Life Aquatic.

Hopefully gamers will see past this and continue onwards, as the final levels of the game feature a race against time to reach the sanctuary of the Abbey, all the while chased by a man-eating tiger. This antagonist is as relentless as Nemesis from the third Resident Evil game, and can only be distracted with the use of pepper spray, cobras, and bottles of perfume. After this exhausting series of challenges, the brothers finally reach the Abbey, where they attempt to reconcile with the mother, who has absolutely no interest in making nice and instead just vanishes. Again, this could alienate the gamer as much as the lack of Jaguar-Shark-killing action in The Life Aquatic, especially as the game doesn't finish there, and doesn't give you any hint of what to do next. At least an hour was wasted walking the characters through the halls of the Abbey, with the same five phrases being spouted by the other brothers over and over again (we never want to hear the line about Peter stealing a belt again), before we realised that we had to leave the Abbey to head back to the nearby train station. A comment on the lack of tidy resolution in real life? Or crappy quality control by the game-testers? Who can say?

Throughout The Darjeeling Limited are littered a number of mini-games, each one specific to a certain character:

Jack:

I Want That Stewardess: Can Jack seduce Rita while avoiding her angry boyfriend?
Hotel Chevalier: Here comes Jack's ex-girlfriend. Can you activate your iPod in time for her arrival?

Francis:

The Search For Brendan: Find your assistant and get him to laminate all of your itineraries before he gets sick of your nonsense.
Dinner Time: Can you order dinner for each of your brothers before they get a chance to interject?
Those Are $3000 Loafers!: Chase the young urchin through the streets to get your shoe back.

Peter:

Is This Meant To Be Sad?: Finish reading Jack's short story without anyone seeing you cry
We Think A Snake Might Have Gotten Onboard!: Hunt the cobra.
Are These Dad's Keys?: Find all of your father's belongings, which are littered throughout the train and the Indian countryside. Hint: The final suitcase is hidden in the Funeral In Two Timezones level.

While these distractions are enjoyable, they tend to get in the way of the central narrative, diluting the effect of all of the rug-pulling mentioned earlier. It's hard to become completely affected by the emotional rollercoaster of the Whitmans' reconciliation when you're interrupted constantly by crude racing simmulators. Another annoyance is the poor choice of unlockables, which are mostly songs by The Kinks. For some reason Anderson seems to think that gamers are only playing his games in order to access songs by British bands from the 60s, and has added Kinks unlockables to all of his games. Time to move on from that particular peccadillo, especially as there are very few unused Kinks songs left.

These are small quibbles. Technically the game is a marvel, with excellent motion capture of the main actors throughout. India is atmospherically rendered, especially during the final scenes as the characters beccome more in tune with their surroundings, meaning the avatars become smaller and smaller in the frame. Narratively, the game is unusually complex, easily surpassing the inexplicably lauded driving game Little Miss Sunshine and its gimmicky colour-blind level. After a disappointment, Anderson is back, and Tweesoft have established themselves as a force to be reckoned with. We look forward to their forthcoming collaboration with Alexander Payne on the wine-themed platformer Sideways.

Rock Band Wish List #1: The Who

2009-06-08T18:45:00.002+01:00

Do you know how incredible Rock Band is? Today, despite great pain in my hand caused by an ongoing medical condition that is minor and nothing to worry about, I felt the need to bust out some jams on my little plastic controller, just like Jimi would have wanted me to. Late in the game, while playing in Tour Mode with my band Vampure, and my legendary guitarist George Murderer, I chose to play Won't Get Fooled Again by The Who, Pleasure (Pleasure) by Bang Camaro, and I Get By by Honest Bob and the Factory-to-Dealer Incentives. Should have been a nice leisurely challenge in Medium (the level I still feel most comfortable with), but like an idiot with a death wish I accidentally selected Hard. Twelve hectic minutes later, not only did I prevail with respectable scores, but I also felt the pain in my hand lessen. It still hurt, but it was better than it had been before, even though my thumb had been slamming against the plectrum switch throughout.

That's how incredible Rock Band is. It heals the sick. Recognise.

Anyway, because I blog infrequently nowadays (blame bureaucracy and the economy), here's a piss-easy way to link-blog: The Rock Band Wish List! It's just videos of songs I like and want to see appear on Rock Band. Not exactly taxing. First up is A Quick One While He's Away by The Who. A recent rewatch of Rushmore brought this to my attention, and it's perfect for the game, especially now that Harmonix have figured out how to do harmonies. Those duelling phrases would be a lot of fun.

Even better, once Project Natal is installed in all our homes, we could get extra points for mimicking Pete Townshend's windmills and Keith Moon's mugging at the camera. Warning: Playing this song under those conditions might be so much fun that the rest of your life will be a letdown.

In additional Rock Band news, Wikipedia states that, among forthcoming downloads, there will be an Anvil trackpack, What's My Age Again by Blink-182, Would? by Alice in Chains, Rock Your Socks by Tenacious D, and, most amazingly, The Gambler by Kenny Rogers and ABC by The Jackson Five. That leads me to a point I wanted to make in my previous post about The Beatles: Rock Band game, that Harmonix are willing to expand past metal and rock and embrace other genres, certainly moreso than Neversoft and the post-Harmonix Guitar Hero series. There was a Funk track pack released for Rock Band download a while back, and they've even had a bunch of Spongebob Squarepants songs too. There's so much scope for expansion of the game, something I hope to come back to in the future of this new linkblog feature.

Miracles Do Happen

2009-06-03T17:30:00.002+01:00

Many a drink or chat or pop culture discussion has been ruined, by me, with my admission that I'm not too keen on The Beatles. Such a statement appears to be like some kind of neuron-stripping destructo-meme, so virulent and so dangerous to those who experience it that it has the effect of instantly atrophying all parts of the brain not devoted to the reflexive and deafening defense of the lovable Scouse quartet from criticism by heretics. Even when I admit I like about half of Revolver, and think Tomorrow Never Knows is one of the most incredible pieces of music in the entire 20th Century, this is not enough. "But... but... you have to admit they are the most important popular artists of the 20th Century!" Well, I don't really, as I think you could make a case for Elvis or Dylan, but fine, if it makes you happy, The Beatles are the most important popular artists of the 20th Century, and I still don't have any urge to listen to their music.

Or at least, I didn't until today. There were so many great games and projects announced at E3, including such inevitably-to-be-owned-by-me things as BioWare's Star Wars: The Old Republic, Bungie's Halo: Reach and Halo 3: ODST, the inevitable by-products of the seriously mindblowing Project Natal, the pure joy that will be Super Mario Galaxy 2, Alan Wake (a very welcome kind of reserved horror game after enduring the incredibly nasty -- and incredibly entertaining -- Dead Space), the baffling Metroid: Other M, and Valve's Left 4 Dead 2. And yet, I find myself most excited about a game I figured I would buy Canyon as a birthday present and not bother with myself. Consider myself surprised.

What was it that triggered my sudden overwhelming, concentration-wrecking enthusiasm for a game revolving around a band I care so little about? Marketing, baby. Stunningly well-designed marketing. First, this gameplay trailer shows ten of the forty-five songs available on the original disc.

Though I've never been a big fan of the band, I do love the iconography, and am fully aware of the progression the band took, and how their sound evolved. Seeing that captured within the game thrills me, as does the inclusion of Taxman -- which transcends its whiny origins to be a fun track -- and Here Comes The Sun. I'm very much a George fan. Oh yes. That song gives me chills. As does this other trailer, which is beyond belief.

Recently we saw Julie Taymor's Across The Universe, and I'm not sure who was more disgusted by it. Canyon is a huge Beatles fan, and was horrified at the dreadful reimagining of those songs, especially when the juxtaposition of the songs and images was so completely wrong. She almost completely lost it when Happiness Is A Warm Gun was played over a hallucinogenic scene with one character suffering PTSD in a military hospital after being wounded in 'Nam, man.

My main gripe with it is that I'm not crazy about the songs anyway, but I'd much rather hear the original band sing them than Jim "Wet" Sturgess, or Bono, who makes I Am The Walrus even more unappealing than I already find it. In addition to that is the awful shoe-horning of Beatles song characters into the Hair-inspired narrative. When Sturgess and Evan Rachel Wood are introduced as Jude and Lucy, I had to be restrained from turning the hellish thing off. There was much gnashing of teeth when a character called Prudence gets depressed and locks herself in a closet, which naturally means the other characters have to sing a song to coax her out. That song? Eleanor Rigby, of course. (This is a lie.)

The second trailer shown above does what Richard Lester once did, and what Taymor (and writers Dick Clement and Ian LeFrenais, on a really really off day) completely failed to do: capture the essence of the Beatlesniverse. They had a public persona that remains appealing even after all these years, four scallywags running through life with pure joy fuelling them. They also created a weird inner space of imagery and mood, with their interest in psychedelia manifesting as that sinister and candy-coloured alternate universe of Blue Meanies, Buddhist and Hindi imagery, and swooning surrealism. Across The Universe tried to get at this and failed. That short trailer nailed it, and did something else; addressed the enormousness of what The Beatles were, and what they achieved. I came over all emotional when I saw it.

So yes, I cannot wait to play the game. The new peripherals, shown above, are not essential, but I'm a little in love with the drums, even though I doubt Ringo's drumming will pose the same challenge that mimicking Jimmy Chamberlin or Keith Moon has in the recent past. Even more interesting, the vocal game has been expanded to include harmonies. I've long wanted to get a mic stand so I can sing and play guitar at the same time, and now I see that you can play this with three mics as well as the other instruments. Imagine playing this as a four-player game, but with one drum, two guitars and three mics. Even more exciting is the knowledge that some bands that I've had no time for in the past have become firm favourites now that I've experienced their songs from "inside" via Rock Band and Guitar Hero. I expect the same thing to happen here. Ninth September 2009. It's scribbled on my calendar, and I'm ready to finally join the only band bigger than The Beatles: their enormous, hyper-passionate fanbase.

End Of Season Review: Fringe

2009-05-28T23:59:00.004+01:00

While futilely attempting to catalogue the weekly TV events of the 2008-2009 season, I spent a long time agonising over Fringe, the wacky science fiction show from J.J. Abrams, Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci. As mentioned in my In Treatment review, there were many other shows on our to-watch list, some of which were actually reliably good (Friday Night Lights and The Shield spring to mind), and yet I felt compelled to keep watching this first, much to Canyon's bafflement. Much of this I can put down to my nerd heritage, but it was also a consequence of the imminent end of Lost. With that show on the final stretch, I need something to replace that, something with a needlessly complex mythology that is filled with Easter Eggs for me to feel good about spotting. Dollhouse looks to be building some interesting ambiguity, certainly about the history and purpose of the Dollhouse itself, but the clues about all of that are being introduced with actual narrative force, making these revelations story beats instead of just getting the prop department to mock up a poster for Massive Dynamic with a phone number on it.

The loss of Lost will leave a hole in my life that will be absurdly big for something as trivial as a TV show, but when Fringe turned out not to be just a procedural but just the kind of batshit sci fi continuity smorgasbord as Lost, I rejoiced. Could this patchy show fill the hole? Would it settle down and provide the brain fodder that Lost did? By the time the season finished, it was sadly still a long way off, with Dollhouse providing the mental workout. More on that some other time.

Of all the shows I watched this season, Fringe was probably the most exasperating. A lot of shows turned out to be just as good as I had hoped (returning shows such as FNL and Big Love), some surprised me (Party Down, Leverage, and Sons of Anarchy are currently making me very happy, though I had expected to be disappointed), and some were terrible from the get-go and never recovered (Knight Rider, Eleventh Hour, and The Unusuals deserve their ignominious cancellations). Dollhouse was the show I was desperate to love, started out hating, and then ended up adoring, but Fringe was one that tested my patience throughout. More than once I considered dropping it, until the episode Safe came along and showed that the glacial pace of Lost was not going to be replicated. At the midpoint of the season, everything kicked off, and it seemed like Fringe was going to be my favourite new show of the year. Except that Fox kept taking it off the air for months at a time, wrecking any narrative momentum, made worse by some dire standalone episodes that will be next to unwatchable when going through the season a second time. Lost's first season might not be a patch on later seasons, but it still maintained a higher standard than this.

It was foolish to assume the show would be Lost 2.0. For a start, ABC might not be the most daring network in the world, but they have been more than willing to give Cuse and Lindelof slack to create the oddest and most complex show on TV even as that oddness and dense narrative repels viewers who have lost patience with it. Fox are pretty much the opposite, as shown by their insistence on dumbing down Dollhouse long enough to put off any viewers who wanted something more intelligent than Bionical Woman. While Whedon seems to be incapable of creating anything that doesn't demand great attention from his audience, Fringe comes from the minds of a bunch of guys who are more than capable of creating challenging and entertaining TV, but also know that they have to play by the rules if they're going to avoid cancellation. The result is a show of dismay-inducing lowest-common-denominator standalone episodes that are filled with story beats that make absolutely no sense if you haven't seen every other episode. It's not quite the worst of both worlds, but it's close.

Compared to the first two seasons of Abrams' Alias (which had Kurtzman and Orci onboard as head writers), Fringe has been, at times, an appalling mess. Part of the failure is down to the main character, Olivia Dunham, who is nowhere near as compelling or consistently written as Sydney Bristow (and Anna Torv is no Jennifer Garner). Several episodes in, her mild-mannered responses to the death of her lover and revelation of his betrayal were obviously not working. At the time I thought Torv was underplaying great emotional pain, but in the sixth episode, The Cure, Dunham is suddenly a vengeance-crazed maverick, suggesting the character was rewritten to become more dynamic. Of course, it could also have something to do with her brain being invaded by the consciousness of her evil (or not evil) lover, but none of it felt like foreshadowing, merely tinkering.

As Masticator pointed out in another internet venue, the second half of the season saw her living with her sister and niece, probably in an attempt to make Dunham seem less like an unlovable career woman (can't have one of those on Fox!). If the network feels that's what Dunham needs, then fair enough. After all, Sydney Bristow lived with Francie Calfo and hung out with Will Tippin, and both of them allowed the writers to give Bristow more moments of vulnerability, as well as having a sounding board for her troubles.

However, Francie and Will were also used brilliantly to complicate her life, especially in the second season. For two characters that, at first, had seemed extraneous, the amazing second season finale would have been nothing without them. Dunham's sister Rachel (played by Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist scene-stealer Ari Graynor) adds nothing. She kinda flirts with Peter Bishop (the almost eternally smirking Joshua Jackson), and her daughter almost gets her brain melted by an improbable evil scientist in the desperately bad episode The No-Brainer, but other than that, there really is no purpose for them in the show other than to have a child around that Dunham can hug. Look! That woman is reading a story to a child before bedtime! I no longer hate and fear her. Good work, focus group.

Other characters have little or no purpose too. Astrid Farnsworth (Jasika Nicole) is little more than a lab assistant with a wicked 'do, added just so Walter Bishop (John Noble) has someone to throw exposition at when Peter isn't around. Phillip Broyles (Lance "Intensity" Reddick) either gives Dunham some props or some earache depending on what is needed for each episode. He also seems to be simultaneously jaded by the mad science events in the show, and absolutely shocked by them. Happy though I am to see Reddick getting regular work, I wish he was given more to do. He needs to shoot a motherfucker or two in the second season.

Nina Sharp (Blair Brown) has proven to be significantly less interesting than Ben Linus, or even Charles Widmore. There's a bit of back and forth about whether she's a good guy or a bad guy, but compared to my endless pontificating about the alignment of Linus, I'm really not that bothered about her. When it's revealed on the show, I'll give a damn then. Charlie Francis (Kirk Acevedo) has proven to be such a disposable character that he has been fired and not fired with great rapidity. I have no idea what the showrunners are up to there, though it does strongly suggest that people shouldn't drink consolation rum and then go posting on Facebook. Or wear certain egregious hats.

With almost all of the characters leaving me cold, the mad science has to keep me occupied instead, and a lot of the time it fails at that too. For every amazing, creepy visual like The Sealant (which makes your orifices close up, suffocating you to death), or a weird worm crushing a man's heart, there is some stupid Chimera monster on the loose, or a syphilitic cat woman that drinks spinal fluid (what the hell were they doing that week? Someone should tell the writers that three bad ideas do not equal one good one.). The main arc of the show is the thing that saves it, with Walter's tinkering in parallel universes causing a war with a technologically superior version of humanity.

The moment that was revealed was when I mentally committed to the show through thick and thin, as it promised some mindblowing stuff later on, but even then, we find out that Dunham was once a test subject for Walter and William Bell (Leonard Nimoy, in one of the most heavily promoted, and utterly awesome, surprise cameo appearances ever), in order to prepare her for battle as a psychic soldier. Shades of Scanners and X-Files there, and not a problem, except that Sydney Bristow, in Alias, was also trained as a child as part of the absurdly named Project Christmas. It's one thing to complain about how shows by J.J. Abrams seem to focus a lot on father issues, which is kind of unfair as it's not something he is alone in doing, but having two shows feature two special agents who have had a mysterious childhood is really taking the piss. Though still, psychic super-soldiers are a lot more interesting than just your regular super-soliders. I love Captain America, but is he as cool as Michael Ironside and his ability to blow someone's head apart? Exactly.

So, most of the characters suck. Some individual episodes are horribly goofy and uneffective. It can be dismayingly derivative. The format means most episodes end with a race against time, with, at best, a chase sequence or, at worst, Dunham talking someone out of setting fire to her with their brain (didn't they do that twice?). The science is offensively bad, even when you assume a daft sci fi show is liable to fudge the details somewhat. There is far too much evidence of the showrunners playing it safe and doing what the network demands. Why bother with it?

Because JOHN NOBLE IS LOVE, bitches! I can take any amount of dreary Dunham home chat, or Peter Bishop-style smarm, because every so often John Noble wanders into shot, and takes even the stupidest dialogue - yes, even the endless digressions about various foodstuffs - and turns it into a heartbreaking, shocking, hilarious soliloquy (yes, all of those emotions at the same time!). What's best about that is that he actually gets the best dialogue on the show, so imagine how incredible that sounds. His performance as Denethor in Return of the King left me cold, but in Fringe he performs miracles. In the season finale, There's More Than One Of Everything, he has some scenes in an old beach-house during which he has a minor breakdown in front of Peter. Kudos to Joshua Jackson for stepping up to the plate, but the real genius is being displayed by Noble, who is alternately terrifying and vulnerable.

Next to Gabriel Byrne and Michael Emerson, he's the best thing on TV.

He's not the only reason I keep watching, though. That amazing series concept, so much more interesting than "FBI investigates odd science things, has great potential. The episodes that furthered that arc the most were the season highlights, showing up the standalones for the silly mistakes that they were. The ratio of good to bad episodes is tilted in the wrong direction, but even so, the bad episodes often featured some moment of trickery that justified them. The Easter Eggs, mostly involving Michael Cerveris' cameos as jalapeno-loving curio The Observer, are always fun to look for, though again, how much the show will reward rewatching will depend on whether there are even more clues than we thought, and even more future plot twists have been foreshadowed without us even knowing it. Of course, that excludes the heavily sign-posted revelation that Peter is actually Alternate Universe Peter, a twist that was blatantly obvious very early on in the season (though I have to give props to internetter Diane Court for putting her finger on that before me). So far, though, I'm not quite sure what the lens flares mean. Is it to do with crossing back and forth from one universe to the other? Or just a test run for Abrams' dazzlingly bright Star Trek?

Speaking of The Observer, just how cool is he? His introduction in The Arrival was the first hint that Fringe was up to something more than just solving a case a week, and captured my imagination just as I was beginning to think the show was a misfire. It's a good thing too, as the pedigree of the showrunners promised something better than the humdrum introduction. As I am human, I tend to be more disappointed than usual when something doesn't live up to expectations. Kurtzman and Orci get a lot of flack for their film work, and sometimes there is a point there. Their script for The Legend of Zorro was a depressing failure, and the controversy surrounding The Island is the most interesting thing about it. However, they wrote some of the very best episodes of Alias, and only someone with a heart of stone couldn't love their Star Trek revamp. I also didn't hate Transformers, and will not apologise for that, even if judged by God him-and/or-herself (though I reckon God loves Transformers as much as me and has also watched it four times in one week like I did last month).

I'm not sure how much input they have in the show (according to Orci's IMDb page, they're developing nine projects, and that's in addition to their work on the next Star Trek movie), but hats off to them for hiding the real arc of the show for about half of the season, and for gathering together a strong team of writers and directors. Though it was sad to see X-Files legend Darin Morgan depart the show after only a few episodes, the showrunners managed to get some terrific writers like Jeff Pinkner, Zack Whedon, and J.R. Orci, and talented TV directors like Gwyneth Horder-Payton, Lost veteran Paul Edwards, and Christopher Misiano, among others. They also got Brad "Transsiberian" Anderson to direct some of the best episodes (including that excellent season finale), and, in a surprising masterstroke, brought in Akiva Goldsman. For a long time he has been loathed by cinephiles and nerds the world over for writing some of the worst movies of our time, but Bad Dreams, the episode he wrote and directed, was a taut forty-five minutes filled with creepiness, humour, and horrifyingly effective shocks. He can be extremely proud, and I can ease off the urge to scream when his name appears in credits. Give him some better projects to work on, and he might surprise even more people in future.

In the end, I like the idea of the show far more than I like the actual show. It's extremely gruesome, which I always appreciate. It's full of truly awful TV science, but the showrunners have at least made the mad science machines look like real world instruments - all dials and switches and rheostats - which is a lovely touch. The cast is largely forgettable except for one acting titan (Noble) and a bona fide sci fi legend (Nimoy), but I don't really mind, even though that's often a deal-breaker. This is your actual "damned with faint praise" review, but even though the things I love about few and far between, I still do love the show. A surprising amount as well. I can't really explain it. Maybe it's because it's the sort of show I get a kick out of even when it fails, like when you buy a car against everyone's advice just because you like the shape of it, and you can forgive it when the seats aren't that comfortable, or there's a weird smell that never goes away, or the windscreen wipers don't work when they get wet. It doesn't matter. This is the car you wanted! Sometimes that's enough.

People used to say that Heroes was Lost for Dummies*, but in fact it is Fringe that, right now, feels like the low IQ version of Cuse and Lindelof's epic. I don't mean that as an insult, especially as I strongly believe that after this opening season of promising set-ups, quirky narrative experiments, and interesting concepts, the best is yet to come. Let's hope I'm right about that, because after Lost leaves us fans bereft, with Dollhouse unlikely to make it to season three, and Goyer and Braga's Flash Forward an unknown quantity, this might be all we have left to cling to.

* In case you were wondering, Heroes is actually Smallville for Dummies. True fact.

End Of Season Review: In Treatment

2009-05-28T18:00:00.003+01:00

When new TV shows are announced, it's inevitable that, for someone like myself, it's the flashy stuff that catches my attention, because basically I'm a twelve-year old nerd in an adult's body. Sad, but true. This TV season it was Fringe and Dollhouse that caught my attention, even when they turned out to be of variable quality. The year before, it was Journeyman, and next year it will be Flash Forward that I spend most time anticipating. Every other new show will be extraneous. Everyone is telling me that Glee is great and must be seen, but it's like High School Musical for adults, right? So, it's the American Britannia High? Even if there was ten Jane Lynch clones in it I'd still not be too bothered.

Of course, this means I miss the real gems. Much as I liked Fringe and Dollhouse (and loved Journeyman), with all of their crazy sci fi speculative craziness, they will only occasionally give me as much satisfaction as, say, the whole second season of Mad Men. The rest of the time, I'll wince and hope the next episode is better. It's a sickness. I've not even watched Breaking Bad yet, despite the involvement of X-Files hotshot Vince Gilligan, just because a teacher making drugs doesn't interest me as much as a show featuring a big transgenic monster, even though that episode of Fringe was almost unwatchably stupid and boring, and Breaking Bad is apparently better than sex in a Ferrari, according to its many fans.

I'm my own worst enemy, because this bias stopped me from watching the first season of In Treatment, which struck me as a potentially tedious and earnest drama which would also require a huge investment of time. With the season running over nine weeks, and each week featuring five instalments of around twenty-two minutes in length, it was like watching nine two-hour movies featuring the same characters, the same structure, and surely the same dialogue. Descriptions of the show mentioned how it was the most realistic depiction of psychotherapy yet shown in TV or film, which suggested that development in the characters would be incremental, just like in real life. Why would I spend that much time with these people?

Sometimes I love being proved wrong. Canyon persuasively argued its case, and convinced me to give it a try (which is more than I have done for her new favourite thing in the world, So You Think You Can Dance [It is genius and you are watching the first performance show. Adam Shankman and L'il C 4-eva! -- Canyon]). After a few episodes, during which time I adjusted to the format (one-on-one conversations between therapist Dr. Paul Weston, played by Gabriel Byrne, and his patients), it became apparent that In Treatment was the most intense kind of long-form storytelling on TV right now, and if you’re interested in “The Golden Age of TV”, and how newly confident TV writers and directors have become so adept at creating and sustaining this relatively new form of extended narrative, you have to try it out. Based closely on an Israeli show called Be'Tipul, which ran for two seasons, the show has been described as a series of vignettes or short stories that just happen to be linked by the main character, but really they are "TV as novel" just like shows that run for a longer period (such as The Wire and The Shield), but in a more concentrated dose.

Paul's patients are protagonists in their own way, and we care about the outcomes of their therapy, but more than that the show is an intricately detailed character study of one man, either by reflection - we see who he is through his reactions to his patients - or by action, i.e. how he breaks the boundaries of his role as therapist, and how he treats his family and therapist Dr. Gina Toll (played brilliantly by Dianne Wiest). By the end of the first season, it became clear that, though we had been following five stories, we had learned the most about one man, someone who had lost sight of what he was supposed to be doing and had thrown his life into disarray by committing the same mistake his patients had: not listening to good advice from those who care about them.

Both Canyon and I fell deeply in love with the show after rushing through the first season at a rate we've not done since we watched all of The Shield in a few weeks. Nevertheless, I was concerned about the second season, which was no longer run by Rodrigo Garcia, the man who had done such a good job of adapting the original series for a new audience. This change of leadership struck us as an odd move, thinking it was perhaps brought on by the low viewing figures and minimal press coverage; other than the odd rave here and there, what little attention it got was to point out how boring therapy is and silly it was, with plenty of whining about the amount of episodes. God, it must be SO HARD being a TV critic.

Turns out that making a series of thirty-five to forty-five episodes, with a shooting schedule of two days per episode (with no time to rehearse), takes its toll. In this interview with new showrunner Warren Leight, he tells of the deep fatigue everyone working on the show feels, with Garcia dropping out after one season, and Byrne and Leight both ready to move on as well. Sad though that is, I can completely understand.

And when I say sad, I mean really sad. This season was a marked improvement over the already impressive first, and that terrible burden of thirty-five episodes, that so upset the poor TV critics, was just too small. Could the show come back? Though each episode of In Treatment is based on a corresponding episode of Be'Tipul, the writers and directors and cast seem to have fallen into a consistent groove, rattling out incredibly complex and honest drama at an amazing rate. If HBO were willing to spend more money on development time, letting the writers construct a new set of patients and motivations for Paul, and giving the cast and crew longer to rehearse, there is no reason this show cannot continue indefinitely. Fans are talking about how the show could carry on with a new therapist, perhaps Wiest's Toll. Anything to get it back for at least another year.

Luckily, as the chances of the show returning are slim, this season did provide some measure of closure, though it stretches the definition of the term somewhat. As therapy is rarely able to completely fix a person, the show could not have each patient walk out with all of their problems solved. At best we got to see that some characters were willing to continue their therapy after a breakthrough, and others left before that could happen. Unsurprisingly, after spending the most time with Paul, and seeing him deal with divorce, lawsuits, estrangement from his family, and the death of his father, we got the sense that he was nowhere near happiness, only getting to the point where he wants to continue being a therapist after a crisis of confidence. A nice set-up for a new season, and a nice way to end it if that doesn't happen.

So why do I love it so much? Mostly for the same reasons that everyone does. The performances are truly magnificent (especially considering there are no rehearsals), the writing is perceptive and complex (and is apparently sometimes amended on set as the actors make certain choices), and the direction is a feat of engineering (different directors are expected to keep different "days" visually and tonally distinct even though the show is set almost entirely in a single room). Technically the show is a marvel, and the performers are repeatedly giving their best work ever. All of the characters in Paul’s circle are brought to life with incredible detail, but Byrne in particular deserves most of the praise. His personification of this complex, infuriating, and defiantly sympathetic character is one of the great acting feats of our age. This is not hyperbole; his commitment to emotional truth is revelatory.

I also love that the show is constructed with such meticulous care, even though the tight schedule demands that scripts are sometimes altered at the last minute. Despite that, the arc of the season, with Paul losing sight of what it means to be a therapist, and slowly coming to a realisation of what he can offer, is far more fascinating than some end-of-second-act crisis. While the first season showed him wrecking his life over a futile desire, and perhaps taking the life of one of his most combative patients, the second season showed the aftermath, and his slow climb back to a semblance of normalcy. Threatened with the loss of his practice, horribly lonely now his wife has left him, and increasingly frustrated with his antagonistic patients, Byrne brilliantly portrays his weariness in each session.

That's to be expected. What is even more pleasing is how each patient connects to the other patients, and to Paul. As his father lies terminally ill in hospital, the patients remind Paul of his own familial strife throughout.

Mia (Hope Davis) dislikes her mother and loves her father, while yearning for a child of her own and, possibly, a relationship with Paul.

April (Allison Pill) is dying of cancer, and unwilling to accept the help of her mother after years of caring for her autistic brother.

Oliver (Aaron Shaw) is a young boy whose parents, Luke and Bess (Russell Hornsby and Sherri Saum), are acrimoniously divorcing, and feels responsible for their break-up.

Walter (John Mahoney) is a CEO on the verge of losing his job, and who is too attached to his daughter at the cost of his relationship with his sons.

At first the connections between them are slight, but over the course of the season they become more pronounced. April's nihilistic attitude, refusing to treat her cancer, reflects Walter's late-season suicide attempt (both triggered by their dread of burdening their loved ones), which in turn recalls Oliver's guilt over the events occurring around him. Oliver, Luke and Paul all have fractious relationships with their fathers, while Mia seems to have a loving relationship with her father that turns out to be a lie, and Walter feels he has somehow failed his daughter. Mia and Paul both hide from the truth of their childhood, constructing fantasies about which parent was the most supportive, in order to blot out uncomfortable truths.

Bess and Mia are faced with the conflict between motherhood and career, though while Mia opts for career and ends up regretting it, Bess opts for motherhood and regrets that just as much. Paul loses a father, and Gina and Walter are both grieving for lost loved ones to varying degrees. Paul and April have given up on their futures due to circumstances beyond their control (a potentially ruinous lawsuit and lymphoma respectively). Luke, Mia and Walter all want families around them in order to prove a point, because that is the way things are done. Luke is trying to negate the neglect he felt from his own father, Mia thinks other people will make her happy as that seems to be the way of things, and Walter goes along with it as that is just the way things were when he was younger.

All of these connecting issues are secondary to Paul and his relationships, and how he manages, at the last minute, to use those experiences to help his patients. After telling Gina that he thinks he can do no good for others as he himself is so screwed up, she gives him the advice to act as if he believes he is helping them all. In the final week, Paul uses his experiences to bring some form of peace to all of his patients. Mia, whose relationship with her father has been so close that she cannot let any other man get close, despairs of ever finding intimacy, and when Paul tells her that her confessional sessions with him are perfect examples of her capacity for intimacy, he's telling himself as well, and reassuring himself that he is not necessarily alone, which generates the later realisation that he needs to cultivate more non-work relationships. April is unable to imagine a future for herself, and Paul's advice is given from the natural perspective of someone who has lived longer and seen how possibility can arise. He also symbolically stops her from using her brother's needs as a barrier to living life, by giving her his father's hat to use instead of the itchy one, given to her by her brother, that she had previously been using.

In the previous weeks of the show, Paul's father dies before Paul is able to reconcile with him after years of neglect, an error that haunts him until the end of the season, especially as his separation from his own younger son is troubling him. Using this pain as a touchstone, Paul tells Luke to do everything in his power to never lose touch with Oliver, and Oliver is reassured that his father really loves him and always will. As both man and boy respect Paul's judgement, you get the very real sense that they will take his words to heart. Walter is given similar advice about reconnecting with his sons, even though he is adamant that it is too late for him.

Of course, as he heals these people, they heal him. April tells him that Sophie, his suicidal patient from the first season, has written about him on the Internet, and is proof that he has been able to save a life. By keeping in contact with Oliver, Paul finds a new connection, one he can keep and monitor from a perspective of wisdom and not emotional irrationality, as he does with his own children. The advice that he gives both Mia and Walter, about not giving up treatment even though it seems like it is too late to help them (because of Mia's perimenopause and Walter's old age), applies to himself as well, giving him the awareness that what he does has merit, and that the parts of his life that are lacking are easily filled, especially once the lawsuit against him is dropped.

This satisfying cross-cutting complexity is good enough to make this one of the best shows on TV right now. Only Lost matches it for storytelling ambition. It's no coincidence that both shows feature some of the most detailed characters in modern fiction, spending hours revealing enormous amounts of back-story. Lost's use of this device is for story reasons that are not entirely clear right now (other than to have some great characters in the show, obviously), but what makes In Treatment so special is that without distractions (smoke monsters, time travel, the unbelievable hottness of Sawyer and Juliet), the show can concentrate on doing just one thing; illuminating the human condition. That remarkable format means it is done in enough detail that it speaks to all of us.

On top of that are incredible individual moments: Walter's final tearful breakthrough; Paul's confrontations with Alex's father, played by Glynn Turman; Mia’s defiant resistance to any possibility of change, and her epiphany in her final episode; Paul’s eruption at the breathtaking selfishness of Luke and Bess; Oliver contentedly eating the sandwich Paul has made for him; and all of April's fourth session, a masterclass in acting and writing that left me shaking with emotion when it was over. By the time the final week aired, I was sobbing at the end of almost every episode, especially Oliver’s final appearance.

All of this could make the show sound like a worthy slog, but it does manage some light moments too. In the final episode, it was especially pleasing to hear Paul's rant about how much he hates his chair, which must have been added by Leight as a nod to Byrne's real hatred of the prop he has been using. I also love that he is just about the least funny character on TV, occasionally cracking out some dreadful pun to lighten the mood (the only person who seems to enjoy his jokes is Gina, who is similarly nerdy). Nevertheless, the show deals with such bleak subject matter that the tone couldn’t sustain wisecracking from the characters. It’s not something you miss, though I appreciate that this might be a deal-breaker for some.

Right now the show is not watched by many in the US, and the UK is currently not showing it. Hopefully someone will buy it soon. It's on region 1 DVD, so US readers can hire it or buy it, and when it eventually gets shown in the UK, hopefully it will be on BBC Four and that format (one episode each weeknight) will be retained. If so, ignore the critics who label the show boring (it's actually horribly addictive), and don't be put off by the big commitment (you'll be gutted when it finishes). It's more rewarding than any other show in recent memory, and more moving. It's the kind of intelligent, daring, and compassionate experience that makes you glad to be alive. Good TV can help you pass the time. Excellent TV can change the way you see the world. In Treatment is so perceptive, and so profound, it might actually change the way you see yourself. Do yourself a favour and hunt it down immediately.

Adventures In Awesome: Want! Now! (5)

2009-05-27T20:53:00.005+01:00

A bunch of fun things happened to me tonight. Seeing a really really good episode of Party Down (essential viewing for all Veronica Mars fans), playing Mario Kart Wii with Canyon (ruined only by the utterly useless driving from Funky Kong. Stupid fucking funky monkey!), seeing this incredible trailer for Werner Herzog's Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans...

Essential viewing for fans of Nicolas Cage (surely everyone with any sense), Ghost Rider (that would be Canyon), and post-Knight Rider Val Kilmer (probably no one). Even better than that (even though that is pretty damn good), I found out about a TV show I must see immediately. Even though I'm in the UK, I try my best to keep up with whatever interesting shows have come out of the US, but that's a relatively new thing. Back in 1991, there would have been no way to stumble across the obscure experimental non-comedy Fishing With John, a thoroughly bizarre and lovable idea from the mind of musician and actor John Lurie, who made such an impression on me in a run of 80s independent movies.

This article on the Criterion Collection website will tell you all you need to know about it, and more. Of course, with money being as tight as it is, I shouldn't be coveting it, as it is readily available on YouTube, but this really is the kind of thing I would love to have in my collection, just so it's not totally full of Jerry Bruckheimer and Joel Silver movies. Plus, who would want Criterion to go out of business before they get to do a special version of The Island to go with their Armageddon and The Rock DVDs? (Yeah, Ozu, when did you last crash a space rock into Paris? Huh?)

Adventures In IMDb Discussion Boards: Robin Hood And The BBC’s PC Agenda

2009-05-20T17:45:00.001+01:00

A couple of weeks ago, a discussion was started on the IMDb boards for the current BBC version of Robin Hood, with the title “Ruined By PC Casting”. Since the beginning of the third season of the show, the casting of black actor David Harewood as Friar Tuck has caused some controversy, with the rightwing press spinning some bland utterances from historians into “fury”, and the inevitable online commenters railing against the BBC’s so-called “politically correct agenda”, which is supposedly to undermine historical fact and encourage the nation’s children to believe that Britain has always been a diverse and tolerant society. (Oh, the humanity!)

The IMDb has often been a hotbed of such discussions, and the first post in this thread covered familiar ground although taking a slightly different tack.

Robin Hood is an enjoyable show, but unfortunately it has been spoiled by yet another example of Politically Correct BBC casting.

One of the Merrie Men is clearly not the person described in the many accounts of Robin Hood's life. The BBC, with its agenda of encouraging multiculturalism, has cast an exotic actor in this role to indoctrinate children with the idea that people of all races and backgrounds have always been tolerated, or even welcomed, in England. The historical facts DO NOT SUPPORT this and it means the historical accuracy of the programme is completely skewed. This "update" of the Robin Hood story is basically a LIE.

The Merrie Men were not a diverse group. They were a bunch of local yeomen, bred in the environs of Sherwood Forest. For the BBC to suggest otherwise is patronising, arrogant and misleading. How are children meant to learn about our history when a supposedly historical programme like Robin Hood is based on falsehood and propaganda?

What I am saying is, everyone knows that Little John is ENGLISH and not SCOTTISH! And yet the role is clearly CALEDONIAN in this version of the legend. Surely GORDON BROWN is to blame!!

I (yes, I – did you see through my cunning obfuscation?) thought my point was fairly obvious. People complained about Harewood as Tuck but did not seem as upset about the casting of Gordon Kennedy as Sherwood stalwart Little John, despite his strong Scottish accent. And yet those people all claimed not to object to the fact that Harewood was black; they were up in arms because this casting was not “historically accurate” and smacked of “political correctness”. These protesters weren’t racists, you understand. They were simply standing up for truth, justice and the English way.

By using the same sort of language and arguments in reference to a seemingly unobjectionable piece of casting, I was trying to make it clear that the protesters were (a) ridiculous and (b) despite their claims to the contrary, racist. I was interested to see what the response would be to this (I thought) transparent bit of frivolous satire. User axtonuk quickly obliged.

How long will it be before your called racist?, I agree the BBC has bastardised the legend, its part of our English heritage, the BBC doesn't seem to care that Robin Hood is close to our hearts. The series is rather crap though, so will probably be forgotten in a few years!

Seems to me that the BBC is a mouthpeice for Labour and its multicultural dream. They don't think twice about rewriting historical facts, respect for other cultures doesn't extend to English people.

This sums up all the predictable, clichéd elements of internet discussion of the matter: accusing the BBC of being government stooges with an invidious agenda of multiculturalism; confusion over the distinction between “legend” and “historical fact”; complaints that English heritage is overlooked in favour of more exotic or trendy cultures, and that you can’t speak up for Englishness without being called a racist. I was gratified that my parodic opening post had been taken so completely at face value, and looked forward to many similar replies.

But then something odd happened. User crazy_girl2 posted the decidedly non-crazy response:

Does it really matter that much as long as the actors can act?! We all know Robin Hood wasn't a fox but that doesn't make the Disney version any less enjoyable.

The enjoyability of the Disney Robin Hood is debatable, naturally, but I was surprised to see this response appear so quickly. Such eminent good sense is not what I expect from teh internets! And then auroracat-1 blew my whole premise out of the water, exploding it point by point.

From the very beginning of this show the writers/producers said it would be a "modern" take on the Robin Hood Legend. I seriously doubt that children are watching this and thinking that it's historically accurate in any way. They've been off on the dates from the beginning, a casino, camafloge material, women wearing pants, black leather biker outfits,......the list goes on and on.

Given all this - I really don't have a problem with the casting anyone for any of the roles. (Remember to, that this is a lond tradition. Shakespears plays were originally performed with men in ALL the roles.)

The show is meant for entertainment purposes only it has never put itself out there as an educational/historical documentary type program.

Finally, Robin Hood is a legend and it has had many incarnations. It's not as if the subject matter has ever been hard fact.

When I posted again in an attempt to provoke a little more discussion along the lines of “The PC BBC is anti-Enlgish and rascist!!1!”…

The historical facts are well established. Everyone knows this. The BBC has simply ignored them. A Scottish Little John, really - whatever next?!

…I was quickly put straight by wieldy:

No they're not. The historical facts of Robin Hood are almost non-exsistant. No-one really knows who he was and what he did. All the 'robbing the rich to give to the poor', Nottingham forest, evil Sheffif etc etc is a romanticised legend based on a few scraps of evidence. Even the Major Oak in Sherwood forest, supposedly Robin Hood's hideout, is from the wrong era.

There is no truth about Robin Hood so the BBC hasn't taken any liberties with history. It's comparable to the Arthur legends, where there are a hundred different stories and very little tangible truth.

I could hardly gainsay this level-headed, intelligent post with any more ill-conceived rubbish. Fortunately axtonuk returned to do it for me.

The origins of Robin Hood come from: Hereward the Wake, Eustace the Monk and Fulk FitzWarin. All of those people existed! Either way Robin Hood is an old English legend set in a historical period, the BBC should respect that. They should also have respect for English heritage and culture. Its the English getting shafted again, we are supposed to respect everyone elses culture/heritage but no one respects ours!

Following this, a few posters picked up on other historical inaccuracies in the casting (Toby Stephens being too old to play Prince John) and the plotting (the show apparently named the wrong pope at one point), but pointed out that these either fell under the remit of dramatic licence or were too minor to affect anyone’s enjoyment of the programme. The killing blow came from theunderstudy1610, who stated:

Here we go again...

Look, if we're sticking to the original legend, then there should be no Tuck, or Marion (Robin would be too fixated on the Virgin Mary) and Robin wouldn't be some brave defender of Richard the Lionheart, or rival of the Sheriff. People have always been taking liberties with the legend.

Even the legend takes liberties with the history, sad to say that outlaws often weren't very nice people, killing, raping and robbing anyone who crossed them.

What the BBC have done is they've modernised it - they use modern cultural references (think the casino episode, biker gear etc.), Robin Hood wears a hoodie, Guy of Gisbourne eyeliner, and the women raid the foundation, they killed off Marion etc. etc. What's wrong with using actors of different races? There are plenty of other versions to watch if you don't like it.

It's not like it's historically correct anyway, more of a fantasy programme, if everything was historically correct (and they actually looked like 12th/13th century peasants) then maybe Tuck would stick out, but it isn't, and he doesn't. I'd hate to think there were any children out there who were learning their histoy verbatum from this show! Regardless of the race of the actor's there are just so many mistakes it would be ridiculous!

I just like that they've put a new spin on an old story - lets face it some of the classics would get dull if they weren't being presented in a different way. I don't care that David Harewood (Tuck) is black, same as I wouldn't care if he was aisian, aboriginee, or whatever, all I want is a good actor with a good characterisation, and I think David Harewood is delivering this.

Surely no-one can argue with any of that. In fact no-one did, and after a few more posts the thread petered out. I confessed to starting it as a joke, and was pleased when theunderstudy1610 admitted that he/she had fallen for it because my original post was so convincingly authentic:

I've just reread your post and yeah, I guess it does come across as more of a parody the second time around - sadly I know far to many people who say this stuff seriously AND for some bizare reson I never noticed that Little John was Scottish - hence I took it seriously, tbh, I read the first couple of lines and thought here we go again...

So what have I learned from this trivial but fun exercise? Mainly that the IMDb discussion boards are perhaps not as densely populated with anti-PC idiots and out-and-out racists as I suspected, and that there are numerous intelligent and reasonable people in this country who don’t act as if our birthrights are being sold when they spy a non-white face in a British TV programme set before the Empire Windrush docked. In fact, it seems from this – small but hopefully representative – sample that the people who are best informed about history are the least concerned about “accuracy” in history-based drama and the most prepared to allow licence in entertainment, preferring to criticise flaws in the writing or acting rather than searching for some pernicious hidden agenda.

I guess it’s something to bear in mind next time I see a news article about the “controversy” stirred up by a historical film or TV show. These controversies are often created by PRs in search of easy publicity and/or the media in search of an easy story, and the people who are offended are those who make a habit or even a career of being so. And the problem, of course, goes way beyond such trifling issues as BBC Saturday tea-time dramas.

In The Future...

2009-05-19T17:56:00.007+01:00

...all human communication will sound like this. And we will have evolved so that pop filters come out of our chins to stop ourselves from dousing everyone else with our saliva.

You know those muscles under the tongue? Mine are aching after watching those. That Daichi kid really is something else. Here he is impressing a bunch of blue-rinse-wig-wearing Japanese courtiers, or something.

These clips have, as ever, taken me back to my childhood. Those dark years, when I thought Steve Guttenberg was a role model.

Is it just me, or does Michael Winslow's voice sound just like Eddie Murphy's "White Nerd" voice? (14 seconds in.)

::sigh:: Linkblogging is piss-easy.

End Of Season Review: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles

2009-05-18T15:00:00.000+01:00

The first season of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles was reduced to a measly nine episodes by the 2008 writers’ strike, but it was none the worse for it. Those nine episodes crammed in almost a full season’s worth of time-travelly, robot-fighty thrills, not to mention a murderous, shocking climax that heightened expectation for the second season. Unfortunately, the 22-part season two delivered, oh, about nine episodes’ worth of similar excitement.

T:TSCC’s second run can be divided into three parts: the slow burn of the first third, up till the Connors dealt with the evil T-888 Cromartie (Garret Dillahunt) in episode 8; the headlong rush of the final half-dozen episodes, which hurled story and backstory at the audience at a dizzying rate; and the plodding middle section in which Nothing At All Happened.

Season two picked up where season one left off, reasonably enough, with John (Thomas Dekker) and Sarah Connor (Lena Headey), Derek Reese (Brian Austin Green) and their Terminator guardian Cameron (Summer Glau) pursued by Cromartie. This mini-arc concluded satisfyingly with a nicely-shot takedown set in Mexico and had a couple of meaty self-contained episodes – such as “Allison From Palmdale”, which provided some welcome information about Cameron’s future-past – but it had one large and irritating failing. Being the prey of a relentless, almost indestructible killing machine was deemed not enough to drive the plot, and instead the show relied for storylines on an unnamed resistance soldier travelling from the future to somehow find the Connors’ house and scrawling a few cryptic messages on their wall (in his own blood, natch) before inconveniently expiring.

Who was he? Why did he come back? How did he find the house? Why did he not make his bloody points more clearly? This event is an extraordinarily tenuous premise on which to base a TV drama, and yet T:TSCC did so brazenly. Need a way to set an episode in a nuclear power station? Put it on the Wall O’ Clues! Need to get Sarah fixated on an idea that will eventually lead her to a key Skynet facility? I think there might be a mysterious reference to it on the Wall O’ Clues! Need to introduce a psychologist to the show for a bit of scientific gravitas? I don’t suppose the Wall O’ Clues has the name of a good one, does it?

After the Cromartie situation was apparently resolved the show drifted, focusing mainly on John’s tentative romance with Riley (Leven Rambin) and Derek’s liaison with another future resistance fighter, Jesse (Stephanie Jacobsen), and the tension these relationships created. Which was, er, not very much tension. The better episodes in this period, such as “Self Made Man”, in which Cameron’s nocturnal library visits uncovered some early 20th-century cyborg activity and foiled a planned assassination (with an agreeably brutal Terminator punch-up), felt as if they’d parachuted in from a different show.

It was obvious at this point that the producers were severely restricted by budgetary constraints. Showrunner Josh Friedman may have claimed that he is just as interested in exploring Sarah Connor’s psyche as in watching killer robots having a scrap, but it is surely more than a happy accident that the likes of “Some Must Watch While Some Must Sleep” – set in a sleep clinic where Sarah tries to overcome her insomnia, and just as interesting as it sounds for a good two-thirds of the running time – are much cheaper than explosive, stunt-heavy showdowns. Given the lack of funds it’s forgivable, but it still doesn’t make for great entertainment.

Frustratingly, most episodes touched only briefly on one of the most intriguing aspects of the season: the supposed Catherine Weaver (Shirley Manson), another Terminator posing as the head of technology company ZeiraCorp, who had rescued Cromartie’s body with the help of former FBI agent James Ellison (Richard T Jones) and implanted it with a brand new AI, renaming it John Henry and instructing Ellison to rebuild its mind from the ground up. Ellison’s struggles to educate John Henry in the basics of ethics, forcing him to confront his own flaws, were compelling – as were Weaver’s attempts to appear human, not to mention the mystery of her motives.

The pay-off of the Riley storyline set in motion the events that brought the Connor and ZeiraCorp families together, and few could deny that the final six episodes of the season – which saw the deaths of three of the good guys, neatly explained Jesse’s mission and betrayal with a tense two-part flashback/forward, and, in the finale, turned the show on its head by separating Sarah and John in time – marked a new high for the show. Whether they made up for the preceding tedium is another matter.

One problem T:TSCC has is that almost every character’s emotional level is set to either “stoical” or “enigmatic”. Sarah, Derek and Jesse are forced to overcome hardship and swallow their feelings daily with the greater good – saving humanity – in mind; and John, increasingly, is of the same mindset. He seems prepared to jeopardise the Connors’ mission for the sake of Riley but when he loses her, he falls back in step with barely a murmur. It’s inevitably difficult to know what Cameron and Catherine are thinking, because they don’t actually think as such. The Terminatrices’ inscrutability is well played by both Glau and Manson, but they naturally struggle to make the characters truly compelling – and are given little to work with by the writers. Glau in particular was criminally sidelined for much of the season, her potent physicality and deft comic touch surfacing only sporadically.

Riley divided fan opinion but at least she displayed recognisable emotions and, in the crunch, she acted decisively and admirably. Rambin’s performance was sympathetic and, at times, verging on adorable – as was Jones’s as the conflicted Ellison, both actors lending a human face to a dramatis personae consisting of actual robots and people acting robotically. Curiously, though, it was the childlike John Henry who proved the most affecting character, with his wide-eyed efforts to understand the world and desire to protect Weaver’s daughter Savannah (Mackenzie Smith). This was by far the sweetest relationship on the show, sensitively written and skilfully handled by Dillahunt.

When I started writing this blogpost the future of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles was in the balance, but Fox has just announced that the show will not be renewed. The middling-at-best ratings of its second season made it unlikely that there would be a third – and yet there was enough quality in the season, and in Friedman’s attempted gamechanging in the finale, to suggest it was merited. But surely the only way a third season could bring in new fans – and please the existing ones, many of whom grumbled online about its lack of action – would be to up the budget to allow, at the very least, a few more balls-to-the-wall fight scenes. Hands up who ever thought Fox might start throwing money at an underperforming sci-fi show?

Well, stranger things have happened.

Formerly Much-Liked Welsh Rock Band PWNed By Bobblehead Predator

2009-05-15T17:39:00.003+01:00

A friend of mine just called and asked if I wanted to see Manic Street Preachers in London next month. (The friend and the call are both real, by the way, and not just contrived into existence for the purpose of having this blogpost hung on them. The only part that isn’t really real is the “just”, because obviously it’s taken some time to compose the post, source pictures and so on. I’ve left it there for the sense of immediacy it confers. But I don’t want Shades Of Caruso to face accusations of lacking authenticity. There really is a friend, and he really did call me.)

Anyway, a friend of mine just called and asked if I wanted to see Manic Street Preachers in London next month, and I surprised both of us with the vehemence of my refusal. At one point in my life I would have dropped everything to attend one of the band’s gigs; indeed, between the spring of 1994 and the summer of 1996, I saw them a total of six times. Three times before Richey Edwards’s disappearance and three after, including Edwards’s last gig and their first show as a three-piece (supporting the Stone Roses at Wembley Arena). But now… I believe I actually used the words “You couldn’t pay me to see the Manics.”

So why is this? They were my favourite band in my late teens and early twenties, so even if their recent recordings haven’t exactly given me the Welsh horn, there should be a certain nostalgia value in seeing them live. Although they’re promoting their new material, the setlist will include plenty of old favourites for the fans, right? I couldn’t be less interested if you told me Ocean Colour Scene were the support act and threw in a copy of Kula Shaker’s Greatest Hits.

Why? Because of the new single – and I’m physically cringing as I type this title – “Jackie Collins Existential Question Time”.

I still rate The Holy Bible as one of my favourite albums. All four Manics unarguably hit a creative peak with the 1994 record: lyricists Edwards and Nicky Wire mined a seam of raw, confessional/political poetry combined with a literary quality not evident in pop music since the heyday of the Clash; songwriters and chief musicians James Dean Bradfield and Sean Moore pummelled the senses with ominous riffs, disconcerting rhythmic changes and thunderous beats. It was, and remains, an astonishing major-label release.

Either side of THB, the polished, more radio-friendly rock of Gold Against The Soul and Everything Must Go brought the band’s passion, integrity and songwriting nous to the charts – the albums contain most of the Manics’ biggest hits and best pop songs, while never less than fiercely intelligent. Their debut Generation Terrorists is mainly fuelled by angst and bravado, and certainly lacks much in the way of musicianship, but it still has a few great moments (“You Love Us”, “Motorcycle Emptiness”). However, it’s been downhill ever since 1998’s This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours, and “Jackie Collins Existential Question Time” marks a nadir.

In the early days, detractors sneered that the Manic Street Preachers were the worst kind of pseudo-intellectuals, using big words that they didn’t fully understand to show off and living up to the “preacher” part of their name. While it’s true that their lyrics are often awkward and make little sense at first glance (leading to countless “magnolia despair tumbles beneath basketball jumpsuit vegetable misery”-style parodies), fans pored over them and discovered – especially in the Edwards days – they were allusive, literary, even erudite, betraying the lyricists’ sharp intellects.

But surely even fans can’t defend bloody “Jackie Collins Existential Question Time”. The title is the worst kind of sixth-form non-profundity (the 40ish band members don’t even have the excuse of callow youth any more), with the use of “existential” particularly heinous. Its clever-clever juxtaposition of lowbrow and highbrow subjects is intensely irritating, not least because it’s hard to believe any of the band would actually read a Collins novel. Also because it has nothing to do with the song itself, which seems to be a reactionary rant about the supposed coarsening of society, with some nonsense about the marital fidelity of Catholics and the chorus a repetition of the question, “Mummy, what’s a sex pistol?”

“Your Love Alone Is Not Enough”, the lead single from the Manics’ otherwise unlistenable last album Send Away The Tigers, employed the Cardigans’ Nina Persson on vocals (it was almost as if they were trying to win me personally back as a fan). Although it did go on a bit, it was a decent track with a big chorus that harked back to the Everything Must Go period. “JCEQT” is a screechy, repetitive nonentity of a song whose aluminium-y production sets my teeth on edge. I gather the new material, including this song, uses lyrics left behind by Edwards (who has been declared legally dead). Perhaps there’s a reason they weren’t used in the intervening 14 years.

Manic Street Preachers seem to have reached that period of their career where every album is hailed by critics as a “return to form”, which is a pretty obvious journalistic reduction of “Bloody hell, are they still going? Can anyone remember their last album? Fuck it – let’s just say this album’s their best one since that really successful one they did.” I seriously doubt whether there’s any form to return to. On the evidence of “Jackie Collins Existential Question Time”, Wire’s and Bradfield’s breaks to record hugely underwhelming solo albums didn’t recharge any creative batteries, and if the rest of the album sounds like the lead single, you might be better off with a good book. Or even a bad book.

Adventures In Miscellaneous Pointlessness: Shopping With No Money

2009-05-14T21:00:00.005+01:00

The fifth season finale of Lost aired in the US last night, but it's still hanging in the air for us UKers. To a lesser extent, so did the finale of America's Next Top Model (go Allison and/or Aminat!!!). Therefore I'm hiding from the Internets in order to avoid spoilers, which I've managed to stumble upon for the past two years running. Easier said than done, as Digital Crack is unavoidable in our home, even with a computer that breaks down more often than a car in a horror movie. (Tip for readers: never buy Dell!)

So I stepped out this morning to buy broccoli (The Fart-Inducing Green Brain of the vegetable world), and browse in shops, rather than run the risk of absent-mindedly opening Twitter and seeing something spoilery. Browsing in shops is fun when you have money. When you don't? Not so much. Anyway, to pass the time I took bad pictures of things that caught my eye, using the iPhone. And now I'm sticking them on the Internet to distract myself from the excitement about the finale of ZOMGLOST, which I'm hoping will be ten times better than the finale of Fringe and twelve times better than the finale of Dollhouse.

How in the hell did this become so cheap so quickly? Hasn't it only been out for about six months, and it's being sold for tiny pounds? I thought this would be much more successful. Everybody likes horror games based loosely on almost-competent Paul W.S. Anderson films, right?

Maybe it would have been more successful if it came with an in-game option to throw Sean Pertwee out of an airlock. Of course I'm being terribly glib. I know this was partially written by Warren "Evil" Ellis, and so has the mark of excellence branded on it. More than anything else I saw today, this almost convinced me to spend money on something that wasn't essential, like bills, or medicine for me and my cat, ~~or Allman Brothers Band downloads for Rock Band,~~ or broccoli.

Usually when I browse in game shops, the prices never seem to come down. Today? It seemed like the recession finally convinced shops to drop game prices, which is one good thing about the crunch, I guess. There were bargains everywhere, and not just in the Pre-Owned racks. This caught my eye, however.

Yet another Red Storm game, only this time one that is based on a movie adaptation of a Jack Ryan novel instead of being directly developed by Tom Clancy and his team of macho pro-army coders. Clancy is a total gaming whore (in a good way), developing dozens of average-to-great games over the years. Something tells me that a first-person shooter based on a very dull movie by an otherwise intriguing director (Phil Alden Robinson, improbably enough) is not going to be listed up there with Splinter Cell or Rainbow Six. It did make me wonder if there was scope to develop games based on other Phil Alden Robinson movies:

Sneakers - Give me the controller, right now, or I will shoot you, right now! Guide your team of hackers, security experts, and piano teachers through a series of heavily guarded facilities in search of gadgets and doodads that do very exciting things to computers. Levels include: avoid a trace on a phonecall for one whole minute! Solve multiple anagrams using Scrabble tiles! Drive a van across town with no visual aids whatsoever (the first entirely pitch black game level ever devised)! Try to convince Sidney Poitier to explain just why he was thrown out of the CIA! Have long chat with Sir Ben Kingsley and his stylish ponytail! Bonus level includes first-person-shooter scenario inside the Setec Astronomy moonbase.

All Of Me - Get out of my mind, Lily Tomlin! Guide Steve Martin through LA while the controls on your joypad are randomised to mimic the disruptive influence of body-sharing crank Tomlin! Bonus level includes first-person-shooter scenario inside Steve Martin's brain.

Field of Dreams - You've built it, but will they come? A baseball simulation featuring many famous disgraced players of yesteryear. Featuring voicework from Kevin Costner, James Earl Jones, Billy Crystal, Ray Liotta, Amy Madigan, Jimmy Smits, Patti LuPone, and Timothy Busfield, and expanding on the franchise campaigns of Football Manager and the Madden series, you are given the task of earning enough money to keep a baseball stadium and a farm going over several years. Bonus level includes first-person-shooter scenario where Costner has to shoot the tears caused by the heartwarming final shot of a million hippies visiting the farm.

I can say, with full confidence, that those games would be better than this.

Fuck you for allowing this to happen, Nintendo. (ETA: I just noticed the title of the game isn't even grammatical. GAH RAGE!)

It wasn't all browsing for games. Zack Snyder's movie adaptation of Moore and Gibbons' Watchmen split nerd opinion down the middle, often within the same nerd. I liked some of it, but was utterly unmoved by it in the long run. A shame, as Snyder was obviously expended a lot of effort to recreate the shell of it, though he didn't seem to have figured out what was supposed to go inside, i.e. a point to the whole thing other than slavish imitation. Even if you really hated the movie, however, you could console yourself with the thought that the original book was still there, and remained unsullied by the film. Until now.

I don't know if that t-shirt design is really drawn by Dave Gibbons, but the thought that his wonderful character designs are being slowly replaced in the popular mind by the faces of these actors upsets me greatly. Far more than is deserved, I'm sure, but still, it's a dick move by DC and Warners. If Gibbons did draw it, I hope he got paid well.

Speaking of movie adaptations, here's something for every miserable emo teenager in your family; yet more Twilight merch!

Here is an exclusive excerpt from the book, just to give you a taste of what's inside:

Monday 3rd. Just got back to my trailer after a hard day half-assing it. Much harder than I thought it would be. The director of photography kept making things harder by putting the camera in some really interesting places, but that's missing the point. Teenagers see the world as an ugly place, and so we have to make sure that the movie is as ugly as possible. If I could switch off the lights altogether, that would be perfect, but no one will let me even though I'm the fucking director. Even so I've managed to drain the film of as much colour as possible. The rest can be removed in post. Director of photography is unhappy about this, but I'm in charge, dammit!

Tuesday 4th. My teenage stars were wonderful today. Almost none of the dialogue was audible, with Kristin doing a great job of turning all of Melissa Rosenberg's words into exasperated noises and facial twitches. Robert was even better. There was one shot where his eyes bugged out of his head for about two minutes straight! I think it was acting, though he might have been expressing horror at Stephenie turning up on set to stalk him again. She's getting really good at avoiding security.

Wednesday 5th. Big effects sequence to be filmed today! I'll let someone else handle that.

Thursday 6th. Robert keeps giving interviews about how stupid Twilight is, and how much he resents being in the film. If I wasn't so entranced by his beautiful hair and unnecessarily complicated face, I'd fire his ass. Kristin is much easier to work with, though it's getting harder and harder to keep her awake during takes. Oh, the glamourous life of a film director!

I have a terrible feeling there will be some poor emo girl who will stumble across this blog and be very very upset. It will look something like this picture I spotted on the way home.

Don't cry, little emo girl! I'm sure there will be another Paramore album coming out soon.

And now, LOST FINALE!!! You'd better rock my world, TV show.

Another Day, Another TV Channel Boycott...

2009-05-07T14:15:00.003+01:00

As Canyon recently mentioned on her Facebook page (yes, we have both succumbed to Facebook's inexorable pull. I even have a Twitter page devoted to what I'm eating and what's on TV), we have been greatly angered and saddened by FX's decision not to renew its contract with Comedy Central, meaning the UK has become Colbert-free once more. A ~~very small but piercingly intelligent cross-section of a~~ nation mourns.

We have been dreading this since The Colbert Report debuted a year ago, a dread that intensified after FX (short for FuXX0rz) pushed the show back from 11pm to midnight (we even predicted it here). If a schedule is being tinkered with, something is going wrong. Was it low ratings that sank the show in the UK? Even the lovely folks at Late Show UK have not had any official confirmation from the channel as to why this has happened. That said, we are talking about a channel owned by News Corp, and they're not big on listening to the little guy, preferring instead to take on the role of Heartless Corporate Monolith with such complete dedication that it's almost parodic. I honestly believe they run on the tears of rage shed by the people they crush underfoot like so much blood-filled gravel.

So yeah, we're fucking pissed off. And we're not the only ones. An overwhelming two people are so annoyed at FX that they contributed to this forum. I smell the beginning of a grassroots campaign to change FX's mind. Considering how News Corp got excited about the Tea Bagging parties recently conducted across America (shouldn't that protest have been called Balls Across America's Forehead?), perhaps we should send teabags to FX. Used teabags. That I've rubbed on my forehead.

Or we should just stop watching the stupid channel. I mean, they don't even air the best shows US FX makes; The Shield is aired on Five and Five US, and Sons Of Anarchy is going to Bravo instead. Funny how the US FX business model is to make shows to sell around the world, and UK FX's model is to buy other shows cheap and then dump them when they don't fit their macho line-up. Though it's nice that they're showing Generation Kill, I'd rather see it all in one gulp on DVD. What else does FX have that's worth watching? More Dexter? I'm dutifully plodding through The Most Overrated Show On TV™, but I can just get that some other way. I have no interest in The Listener, or the various Canadian or Australian police procedurals that keep cropping up, and I've got The Wire on DVD so I don't need to watch that any more. Neither does anyone else, now that it's being shown on BBC Four. The only other things they have to offer are Family Guy and American Dad, but seeing as how they are to comedy as Stephenie Meyer is to literature, that's not exactly enticing.

So, we shall find another way to watch our beloved Stephen skewer the right-wing mindset so completely that conservatives don't even realise it's happening, and in the meantime, I'll avoid FX and stick to watching Bravo (so much A-Team!), Sci Fi (Star Trek: TOS is getting a lot of rotation in anticipation of the new movie), Current TV (I can't see enough documentaries made by well-off American post-teens during their most recent backpacking vacation through South America), and Controversial TV (it should be known as Edge Media TV but our EPG has renamed it so that it sounds like it was created by 1980's-Ben-Elton). Fuck FX, fuck Fox, fuck News Corp.

'Twas Here My Summer Exploded

2009-05-05T17:30:00.002+01:00

Summertime! Or, as Prince of Freshland Willard Smith once put it, summersummersummertime! All of its joys (such as the sunshine, the wasps, the ever-present sheen of sticky sweat) pale into insignificance next to my favourite thing in the world ever; the summer movie season. As usual, the anticipation is bound to be much more nourishing than the actual movies themselves, though last year saw an unprecedented bumper crop of excellent popcorn entertainment which should, technically, raise my excitement to even greater levels, what with the summer movie season finally offering brainfood as well as robot wars. Sadly, that 2009 highwater mark and the recent writer's strike means I'm less excited about this year's line-up. Sure, I'll see a fair few, but there's only one or two I'm goggle-eyed with obnoxious enthusiasm over. My face is sad.

Those who know me have a pretty good idea which movies have me froth-mouthed, but I'll save that for now, because I'm more interested in what you, the readers of this blog, are most excited about. Just like last year, I want to see what is getting this small cross-section of people most pumped. Sadly, due to RL complications, I forgot to do this earlier, and have therefore included a film that has already been released (The Further Adventures of Logan T. Loganstein And His Whirring Claws Of Kill), but perhaps, if you've already seen it, you enjoyed it so much you can't wait to see it again! I gather it's ~~depressingly bad~~ hella-exciting. Anyway, here's the list.

Terminator Franchise: Salvage Operation

I’d Rather Be Dragged To Hell Than Watch Spider-Man 3 Again

JJ Abrams Risks Death by Unwashed Nerd Rage-On

Transmogrifiers 2: Return of the Awesome

The Curious Case of Wolverine Wutton

Angels, Demons, and Probably Ewan McGregor’s Schlong

Another Worthless Woody Allen Movie

The Unnecessary Remaking of Pelham 123

(500) Days of Self-Conscious Indie Movie Quirk

The Time-Travelling Bana

Harry Potter and the Thing in the Place with the Whatsit

Demetri Martin + Ang Lee + Hippies = WTF?

District 9 (AKA Neill Blomkamp Rocks Your Face Off)

Hott Sam Rockwell’s Lunar Oscar Bid

Pixar’s Whassup, Bitches?

Depp and Bale in: Untouchablesque

Sacha Baron Cohen and the Inevitable Lawsuits

G.I. Joe: The Struggle to Give a Shit

Quentin Tarantino and the Broken Spellcheck

Final Destination: Rube Goldberg’s Revenge

Judd Apatow’s Self-Loathing People (feat. The RZA!)

Seriously! The RZA is in the next Judd Apatow movie! I can't wait, though I'd much rather see a full-length Bobby Digital film than some navel-gazing James L. Brooks homage, no matter how good it is. Anyway, the poll will be up in a sec, and will be around for approximately numerous weeks.

So, I Guess That's That

2009-04-30T19:30:00.004+01:00

As I said in this post, for years I have been soaking in a morass of shoddy prose, poorly researched science and arts stories, trivia so trivial it doesn't even deserve to be called trivia, and mean-spirited, transparently biased opinion from nasty men and women with empathy deficits so bad that I'm surprised they're not serial killers. And now, I am released.

Though my escape from this quicksand-pit of faux-knowledge has its downside (a very big downside, obviously), it also has a big upside too. I never have to read the Sunday Express ever again, or endure Peter Hitchens' deranged honking (though his 29th April ode to America was unexpectedly touching, despite some madness breaking out here and there), or stare goggle-eyed with disbelief at Christopher Booker's conspiracy theories. Even though I'm kinda curious to see who will win the gilded shit-crown belonging to the one-true Glenda Slagg (formerly owned by Lynda Lee-Potter), I'm done with Carole Malone and Allison Pearson, who can contradict themselves every week for the rest of time, for all I care. I'll also never get to find out if Sam Wollaston ever joins a writing class to jazz up the dreariest "funny" prose in England.

So now it's goodbye Richard Littlejohn, you blustering homosexuality-obsessed buffoon. Au revoir Julie "Mrs. Tony Parsons" Burchill, with your Martian logic and your reflexive/risible contrarian streak. Farewell Kelvin Mackenzie, you absurd curio from another age. Auf wiedersehen Garry Bushell, and all of your adamant - and unconvincing - denials of bigotry, not to mention your shitty, shitty jokes. Arrivederci Deborah Ross, you solipsistic word-fountain. No tears at our separation, Charles Moore, you inconsequential rattle-throwing windbag (looking forward to reading your missives from jail after your licence-fee martyrdom goes horribly wrong).

Don't let the door hit you in the ass, Amanda Platell, you repellent, small-minded phony/failure. So long Crazy Liz Jones and your equally awful ex-husband Nirpal Dhaliwal, and extra goodbyes to your attention-seeking, column-filling "feud", which allowed Fleet Street's assembled hacks to tongue-bathe themselves for a month or so. Never darken my door again Lowri Turner, responsible for some of the worst journalism in world history.

Take care out there, Catherine Townsend, ~~tawdry fantasist~~ sex columnist extraordinaire. Your increasingly outrageous sexual escapades have been sorely missed. Live long and ~~don't~~ prosper, Martin Kettle, you laughably biased Blairite. Don't try to get in touch, Rod Liddle, for I shall not miss you, nor your swinging-dick public image.

Adios Jon "Gunty" Gaunt. I shall not miss your ill-informed ravings, your attempts to become a cross between Jeremy Kyle, Rush Limbaugh, and a disembodied, yapping mouth connected to a bucket full of rattlesnake venom, plutonium, dark matter, pondscum, and dogshit. Get out of my life, Melanie Phillips, and take your defensive, ignorant, and belligerent worldview with you. And Simon Heffer? Forgive me for betraying my coarse manner in this way, but please go fuck your fucking self, you berserk oompa-loompa. It would be greatly appreciated by me and the rest of us here in the 21st century, who are enjoying modernity and don't need your screaming ab-dabs from the past. Thanks in advance.

Naturally, there were sapphires gleaming in the Everest-sized shitpile. I'll still be buying the Saturday Guardian, so I'll get to read Ben Goldacre's Bad Science column, as well as The Brooker's Monday columns and Screen Burn (once he's finished justifying the licence fee with Newswipe, that is). Matthew Norman's nuclear-level sarcasm will keep me warm, as long as he doesn't leave the increasingly poor Independent (well done Roger Alton, you wrecked another newspaper). Every Friday I will check to see what's going on in the brains of Peter Bradshaw (5 stars for In The Loop! Good work, my son) and Nigel Andrews (Two stars? WTF?). I shall keep an eye on Sarah Dempster, who, eve since her tenure at the Scotsman, has been slowly been building a reputation for wit and passion that shames her colleague Wollaston.

I'm not sure I'll be able to keep reading George Monbiot's weekly column, simply because I'm already going to be feeling low and though he's a terrific journalist he can really ruin your day. There's a very very good chance I'll keep up with the magnificent Caitlin Moran, still the only journalist who can talk about celebrity culture without making me want to kill myself by dropping 300,000 copies of Top Santé onto my own head (though kudos also go to the highly entertaining Marina Hyde). I was also fond of Jeremy Clarkson's Sunday Times columns, but that might have been because they were an oasis of vibrant writing in the middle of an Arrakis-sized desert of nothing; outside that arena they might not stand up to scrutiny.

I might once have thought he was utterly without merit, but I've grown to enjoy Johann Hari's column; his recent piece on Dubai was chilling, essential reading. I'm also in two minds about Nick Cohen, whose slide into David-Aaronovitch-territory masks the fact that he can still be a fascinating, passionate writer. The same goes for Robert Fisk, whose rage can be intoxicating if you're not careful. Though I never really realised it at the time, I've enjoyed many columns by Deborah Orr, who has quietly been a sane voice in the Indie. Now that he has been (foolishly) let go by the Telegraph and (wisely) snapped up by the Guardian, I look forward to reading more by Sam Leith, who was the only reason to read that dreary Middle England rag.

Other than those examples, it's a lucky escape. I surely won't miss the transparent campaign against the BBC by News International's roster of worthless junk pamphlets, or the woeful research in the Observer, or the Independent's slide into even more irrelevance than it had already been sliding into. Even better, no more exposure to the most inept newspapers in the world, by which I of course mean the Northern and Shell disasters, the Express and the Star, which pollute the soul more completely than being employed as an assassin by Dick Cheney. Best of all, I can wave goodbye to the Mail and the Mail on Sunday, publications so evil and mendacious that reading them daily is like enduring serialisations of The Turner Diaries and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. With swastika-shaped bells on.

So I can at least rejoice as I fly, like an eagle, out of the lovely old building that has been my workplace for ten years, safe in the knowledge that I don't have to put up with that shit any more. Long ago I had already begun to realise that I was not reading the credible opinions of hyper-educated denizens of Brainworld, but in fact was enduring the puddle-shallow witterings of a bunch of overworked shlubs whose hectic output was such that they would never be able to keep an eye on their views from week to week, meaning we, the readers, were never sure exactly what their consistent beliefs were. As a result, we could never trust a thing they wrote.

That's before we get to the piss-poor science reporting (as regularly exposed by my new hero Goldacre), or the generally shoddy practices of many journalists, editors, and proprietors, as revealed by Nick Davies in his superb book Flat Earth News. When I started reading newspapers for a living, I thought I was going to learn a lot about the world, and I did, but only because I was coming at it from such a position of ignorance. If I have learned anything truly substantive since those first few years, it's because I was intrigued by a subject and endeavoured to find out about it on my own time. Midway through the decade, I realised that trying to educate myself using newspapers was futile.

And so I turn my back on the British press, but not without singling out my other favourite pieces of the past few weeks, written by journalists not included in my Hall of Fame above. I was particularly pleased by Gaby Wood's article about In Treatment, bemoaning the fact that the UK has yet to pick up this wonderful series. As an In Treatment addict, I fully understand her frustration. When it eventually arrives on TV, please don't be put off watching it by the absurd protestations of former ITV director of TV Simon Shaps, whose howl of rage at how unfair it was that no one in the UK media press was willing to compare Lost in Austen and Whitechapel with The Sopranos made me simultaneously enraged and amused recently. In Treatment is the best performed, best written, best directed show on TV right now. It would be a crime to miss it.

Also pleasing was this Times blog post that dared to suggest that gaming is not necessarily as bad for kids as studies suggest, if by "suggest" you mean "are often distorted by lazy journalists who understand that scaremongering plays into prejudices and sells papers". It's rare that games are treated with any kind of respect, and articles are often written by journalists who know nothing about gaming, so this article from The Independent on Guitar Hero and Rock Band was hugely appreciated. Except for the odd lapse into hand-holding, it's a fun little piece with a lot of interesting little snippets from programmers and developers, not to mention fans and the obligatory critic. As I fear I will spend my next few days obsessively playing both games in order to drown out the dissonance in my brain at my new situation, it acts as a nice bridge between the two states. Let's just hope that second state is an improvement over the first.

The Annual Culling Of The Shows

2009-04-21T10:45:00.004+01:00

When I say culling, I'm not referring to us cutting back on shows. Don't be ridiculous. We're so far behind on most shows that we're following that it is tempting, but it's not going to happen any time soon, because I hate to give up on anything. Of course, I'm actually referring to that awful time of year when the networks pass judgement on the underperforming programmes on their rosters, slicing out much-loved cult faves and giving the kiss-of-life to some real oddities that no one is really passionate about. Hollywood Reporter has a report on the status of many shows here (this information is arranged in a more pleasing list format by Herc in this AICN Coaxial post), and it contains good and bad news, as ever.

Most upsetting is the unequivocal cancellation of Reaper, which has improved by leaps and bounds this year. Having shaken off first season nerves, the showrunners and performers have allowed more oddness and format-shaking looseness in, with some episodes doing away with the ponderous soul-hunting stuff in the cold open in order to follow the protagonists as they bumble along in their super-amiable way, and others just running with gags that would never have occurred last year. In a recent, very entertaining episode, more time was expended upon Sock (seeking chemical castration to prevent his lust for his step-sister) and Sam (dealing with his zombie dad's attempts to bond with him) than was spent on what would once have been considered the A plot, which was just fine by us. Nevertheless, that burst of energy came too late to save it. Sam, Sock and Ben (and Ray Wise, of course) will be missed.

The woeful state of Jerry Bruckheimer's roster of shows surprises me. While the CSI franchise is not going anywhere (especially now that the original series is on such consistently great form, courtesy of Morpheus), Without A Trace and Cold Case look like they're in trouble, with one of them probably cancelled. I get that this is due to the financial pressures of running both shows, but they always seemed like they'd be around forever, like bigotry and flatulence. I say that despite the fact that I watch neither of them and have exactly zero interest in them.

I'm much less surprised that Eleventh Hour is facing doom. It's only just started airing in the UK, on Living (which means watching it exposes me to endless adverts for Grey's Anatomy; a seriously nauseating experience, especially with Kevin "Journeyman" McKidd popping up every couple of seconds to remind me of our favourite recently cancelled series). A less apt channel I cannot imagine, as Eleventh Hour has yet to display a pulse. Is this the most boring show on TV? Yes, despite the insistence of the ever-present Clicking Clock Of Teh Doom, it's much less silly than Fringe, but it's not like it gets the science right even in such unambitious circumstances, so it hasn't even got that going for it.

At least Fringe, while being full of risible science, is not ashamed to forget about realism and just go all out, showing us people turning into rampaging porcupine monsters, or macrophages that burst out of your mouth and crush your windpipe on the way out, or teleportation devices that are just fucking wicked cool and if you don't agree then I'll never love you. Eleventh Hour, on the other hand, is sober but utterly joyless. It also features a lot of googly-oogly eyes, as Rufus Sewell and Marley Shelton have intense ocular orbs that scare the piss out of me. Not for much longer, though. Farewell, Dr. Hood and Thingy Gunbabe. I hardly knew you ~~or cared~~.

Two other shows I don't watch are Num3e7501019 or whatever the hell it's "called", and The Unit, pictured above (that's First African American President David Palmer carrying what looks like a life doll for people with a fetish for deli-shop owners). While Numbronics has a few fun character actors on it, I cannot understand how a procedural about numbercrunching has managed to last for five seasons, and is likely to come back for another. I saw the first three episodes, and tuned out because I couldn't see how the concept could sustain itself. And yet there it is, running even longer than the similarly restrictive Bones (though of course the charm of that show, apparently, is the chemistry between Boreanaz and Deschanel). What happened to the Numberation format to make it run this long? Was I wrong to drop it? (This is a rhetorical question; I'm not going back to it no matter what I hear.) Maybe a long-running character will turn out to be a serial killer, to the delight of its many fans. Or am I thinking of another show?

In contrast, the possible cancellation of The Unit saddens me despite my utter ignorance of it. Why? Because this year creator Shawn Ryan treated TV watchers to one of the classic seasons of one of the greatest shows ever created. The final season of The Shield was a nerve-destroying tour de force, and to think he's lost one show (on a high) and then maybe lost the other one without fair warning makes me unhappy on his behalf. For providing us with such a thrilling conclusion to The Shield, he should win awards, not get thrown off TV with such disregard. Fingers crossed that, if worst comes to worst, he can come up with another show as great as The Vic Mackey Glower Hour (twice as thrilling as The Jack Bauer Power Hour, even on a good day, tension fans!).

After a whole season of speculation about being dropped by Fox, it looks like Terminator: The Needlessly Long Title Involving The Important-Sounding Word "Chronicles" is finally being cancelled. That, and Dollhouse, have suffered the fate of Friday Night Lights; running to overtake the expectation of imminent extinction. While FNL has, happily, been renewed for two more seasons, T:TSCC is not going to be so lucky. Perhaps Fox only really needed it to dilute the impact of the upcoming film in order to damage its box office chances, if their behaviour over Watchmen is anything to go by. Ironically, even though I was enthusiastic about T:TSCC when I saw the pilot, I only watched one more episode. Of course Torchwood, which I was comparing it to, got worse than even I could imagine, and yet I watched it all the way through to the hysterical end. What's up with that?

Surprisingly, Dollhouse might make it to a second season, which would probably be surrounded with even more chatter about cancellation. The only thing people have linked to Dollhouse more than those early, awful episodes is the expectation that it will not last. While once that was irksome, it's a testament to the quantum leap in quality from the sixth episode on that cancellation would now be a tragedy (in terms of TV show potential, not actual real tragedy). The last two weeks have provided more brain food than any other show on TV that isn't set on a mysterious island. As long as Dollhouse 2.0 is allowed to continue to explore the distortion of the moral norm caused by Dollhouse tech and not just have the ever-unappealing Dushku wandering around in bondage gear prior to some poorly edited fighting, a second season would be welcomed with fireworks and Bacchanalian parties (and, sadly, a flurry of woeful fanfic). If the show is not going to play to its intellectual strengths (yeah, I said it), why bother giving it another chance?

As I said earlier, we're inundated with shows, even more so now that In Treatment is back for two and a half hours a week, so maybe I should be glad Cupid is being axed. I never watched the original starring Jeremy "Mercury from The Metal Men" Piven, so I have very little awareness of what the show is like, but we're talking about a remake of a failed show, replacing the undeniably watchable Piven and the equally appealing Paula Marshall with Bobby Cannavale and Sarah Paulsen. I'm having trouble mustering enthusiasm for this, and now that it's been cancelled, that enthusiasm dims even more. If I do watch it, it'll be out of loyalty to the man who brought us Veronica Mars (though that wasn't enough to make me watch 90210).

Still, I can't imagine that it could be worse than Castle or The Unusuals. Despite the charmkrieg that is Nathan Fillion selling almost every shitty joke and laboured flirt-op (and proving he is indeed better, better than Neil, at so many things it's hard to conceal), everything else about it is to entertainment as formica is to wood. A lot of unimaginative shows feel like they are made by machines, but the machine that made this is constructed out of string and cardboard and powered by irradiated rats. Still, at least it's not The Unusuals. ABC's website made this sound like a drama featuring a bunch of unorthodox cops whose rarified skillsets allowed them to solve crimes no one else could. Canyon thought it was meant to be a straight-up comedy. That it satisfied neither of us is a sign something went haywire as soon as calloused fingers typed Fade In.

It's telling that, in the pilot, you see a clip of Bruce Weitz on TV in some kind of sitcom, as the show also felt a lot like Hill Street Blues, but this time with a team comprising nothing but the weirdos like Renko, Belker, and Buntz, but lacking the stable characters like Furillo, Coffey and Esterhaus. The first hour, directed with typical ineptitude by Stephen "The Reaping" Hopkins, was interminable, cutesy, unimaginative, uninvolving, edited into incoherence, cloying, drab, desperately quirky, and, most annoyingly, filled with terrific, wasted actors, like Jeremy Renner, Harold Perrineau and Terry Kinney. Such talented guys. Oh, and Adam Goldberg is in it too. Erm... ::tumbleweeds blow by::

So, if we lose that, no biggie. Better Off Ted, however, is just about the most lovable show on TV that isn't Reaper, and even if it's not as funny as 30 Rock, or as clever as The Office, it's still worth rooting for, especially as series creator Victor Fresco also gave us Andy Richter Controls The Universe, and I'd feel bad for the guy if he was responsible for two great sitcoms cut down in their prime. It has cemented our love of Portia DeRossi, who is just wonderful as the android-like Veronica Palmer, and has managed to satirise soulless corporate culture in such a non-abrasive manner that we almost love our monolithic overlords by the end of it. It's mild stuff, but compared to the laugh-void that is Parks and Recreation, it's Arrested Development meets Seinfeld. I've got my fingers crossed for it.

Sadly, I doubt anything can save my favourite new show, NBC's bonkers soap opera/religious fable/alternate-reality-curio Kings, which would be unmissable even if it was just 45 minutes of Ian "Swearengen" McShane walking around his "palace" muttering to himself, but manages to excel by featuring Ian "Swearengen" McShane walking around the city of Shiloh, capital city of the Kingdom of Gilboa, scheming against his foes (including Brian Bloody Cox!), railing against a preacher (played by Eamonn Bloody Walker!), and trying to predict what God wants of him in order to protect his eroding power base even when that makes him act against the interest of others. As with Dollhouse, no one expects it to make it to a second season, which is heartbreaking. In a season as dreary as this one (where the only other new shows worth following are the frustratingly erratic Fringe and the fluffy Mentalist) it's been a revelation. No matter how the other shows fare, knowing that the Sword of ~~Nielsen~~ Damocles hangs over such a promising head is enough to make me wonder why the hell I bother watching TV when ambition is so often rewarded with dismissal.

Self-indulgent whinge #268 over.

Thrown For A Loop By Satirical Genius

2009-04-15T01:25:00.003+01:00

There are a number of reasons why Armando Iannucci's feature debut, In The Loop, is automatically one of the best movies to be released this year, at least from this humble blogger's perspective, which is a relief after I went on about it in these two posts. However, there is one super-special personal reason, which I'll get to in a bit. First, a list of things to love about this magnificent movie...

1. It was free.

Yes, I got free tickets from a Sunday Times promotion, and got to see it at the lovely Ritzy in unlovely Brixton. The assembled upper-middle-class white people, perhaps fans of India Knight’s column, or that incredibly ugly typeset, seemed to thoroughly enjoy the movie, and we lower-middle-class white people did too. It was all very congenial, even with the C-word flying out of the screen with alarming regularity.

2. The easy transition to the big screen.

I'm sure the cinéma vérité style of The Thick Of It has its detractors, but whatever your feelings about it, it does make translating the show to a bigger screen fairly easy. No matter how modish the style has become, it's kinetic enough to keep the eye distracted from a film that is basically a bunch of people talking to each other a lot. The swift pace and aggressive performances keep the pace up for almost the entire movie.

Even so, Iannucci has fun with the contrasts between cramped and grey Britain, and the golden glows and grandeur of Washington. Even though the characters are stuck in depressing buildings, you still get the sense that Washington is a far more glamourous place than Whitehall. On top of that is one of the funniest visuals of the year; repeated shots of Malcolm Tucker scuttling around Washington, a sheaf of papers in his hand and mobile phone stuck to his ear as he bellows and shrieks torrents of foul abuse at everyone.

That said, would it pass the Billson test? It’s drab, frenetic, composed with what looks like slap-dash haste (though was probably worked out with great care), and certainly seems more interested in the spoken word than the visual aspect, but this is what the show is. Besides, even if it’s not The Fountain in terms of visual splendour, the script by Iannucci, Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Tony Roche and Ian Martin is a marvellously complex thing, easily as tight and satisfying as their script for the recent specials (finally available on DVD, staggering-genius fans!). What looks like an unconnected series of sweary set-pieces gels in the final act with great precision. Billson’s criticism of British screenwriters is as angry as her comments about directors, and just as accurate:

A lot of British film-makers assume that screenplay equals dialogue, and because the Brits still haven't caught on to William Goldman's maxim that "Screenplay is structure", we get endless exposition and a plodding procession of scenes unfurling like stage plays. Scene begins, there's some dialogue, scene ends, next scene begins, more dialogue and so on. Lawks-a-mercy, we might as well be watching a Restoration drama at the Old Vic.

In The Loop might feature more dialogue than a dozen movies put together, but at least there is plot there. I once attended a screenwriting discussion headed by a very nice lady from the BBC, who said that drama spec-scripts would usually only attract attention if the plotting was tight. With comedy, however, scripts could be poorly plotted but would be considered a success if they were at least funny, which most comedy scripts sent to the Beeb were not.

In The Loop is that wonderful rarity; a movie that has a funny line almost every thirty seconds, but also works like a narrative machine from beginning to end and, as a bonus, features some of the most fascinating and believable characters of recent times. I’m not saying Iannucci didn’t do a great job as director, because I think he did. What he should be most proud of, though, is that remarkable script. When the film finished I said to Canyon that it was this year’s In Bruges. I can think of no higher praise.

3. The peculiar anti-continuity continuity.

Though I thought it might be baffling to have Chris Addison return as a different character than he played in The Thick Of It, he is pretty much the same arrogant-yet-cowardly loser as before, just with a new name. At first this choice was mystifying, but as In The Loop deals with a different department within the government, new characters are necessary if we're not to waste half of the film explaining why these people have switched jobs, especially when it is going to be seen by many more people who saw the show (at least, I hope so). Having Addison play Toby and not Ollie is, thankfully, no big deal.

He's not the only one. Several cast-members appear as new characters who share similarities and narrative links with their previous incarnations, most notably Olivia Poulet as Toby's girlfriend (she played Ollie's Tory girlfriend in The Thick Of It), Lucinda Raikes as a reporter (though we don't find out if she's working for the Daily Mail as with the parent series), Alex McQueen as an ambassador with the same social ineptitude as his Thick Of It character Julius Nicholson. It's not all the same. James Smith gets a promotion, Joanna Scanlan (as seen below) gets a demotion, and Will Smith (no, not that one...) gets a tiny role that nicely pays off his parallel universe character arc from the recent specials.

Only two characters remain the same: Peter Capaldi as Tucker, and Paul Higgins as Jamie, who is only in the movie for a few minutes but tears his scenes apart with even more feral nastiness than in the original series. His arrival late in the movie was greeted with a murmur of upper middle-class approval from the Sunday Times readers in the audience. There was no response from the audience when a familiar voice announced the start of a conference about fifteen minutes into the film. I could very well be mistaken, but the voice (belonging to an unseen man) sounded a lot like a former Thick Of It cast-member who hasn’t been in the show since before the specials, for very well-publicised reasons. IMDb, not surprisingly, has nothing to say on the matter.

4. The amazing cast.

Having everyone come back for this movie, even in an altered state, is a pure joy. By now they know how to do this hectic, profane comedy in their sleep, and it's a relief to find that the two British additions to the cast, Gina McKee and Tom Hollander, are both wonderful. This is not exactly news, of course. McKee is so good that when it seems like she's dropped out of the movie about twenty minutes in I was gutted (she comes back later, thankfully). Hollander is remarkable as the hapless Simon Foster, his craven vacillating providing much of the comedy and plot movement. Even though I adore Malcolm Tucker, I had feared the movie would overuse him, thus denting his impact. Luckily the rest of the characters are inept and venal enough to become just as fascinating as him.

Some criticism (that I really don’t agree with) has been thrown at the movie for moving the action to America (more on the colossal shitbag who said that below). Expanding the scope of the Thickniverse was a clever move from a financial point of view (hello American viewers who will not know what hit them), as well as in terms of narrative and satirical possibility, but it also meant a new set of actors who have not worked under these conditions before. While the UK actors gambol over their lines with precision borne of years spent working on this show, James Gandolfini and his fellow Americans speak much slower. It takes a while to adjust to the change in pace in America, though this is not a criticism of them. Everyone excels, especially Mimi Kennedy as Assistant Secretary for Diplomacy Karen Clarke, Anna Chlumsky as naive intern Liza Weld, and the great David Rasche as the menacing Linton Barwick, who bangs heads with Malcolm Tucker a couple of times.

Gandolfini is also terrific, playing straight comedy in a way he’s not had a chance to do before. One of the highlights of the movie is the showdown with Malcolm, one of the few moments in the film where the humour pauses. I don’t remember specifics, but I do know I held my breath throughout.

5. Comedy heritage.

This superb cast, most of whom have worked with Iannucci before, either on The Thick Of It or earlier works, reminded me of the repertory of performers that would appear regularly in the films of Preston Sturges, whose hyper-modern comedies still feel fresh even today. While In The Loop has been compared to Yes, Minister (obviously) and old Ealing comedies (I'm not 100% sure about that, but I'll go along with it), I'd say Iannucci has been influenced as much by Sturges as anything else.

The frenetic pace, the irreverence, the seriousness of purpose (for example, Sullivan's Travels and Hail The Conquering Hero are pointed comments on social issues as much as they are kooky knockabout fun), and the beautifully wrought plot and characters, are all reminiscent of Sturges' films. Considering how that great director's work is not as well known in the UK as it should be (at least as far as I can see), it's strange to see someone dabble in the same waters.

6. There's a lot more where this came from.

Apparently a lot more footage was shot than was used. Though the final product is structured so well that a director's cut would probably not work anywhere near as well, we can hope for a lot of deleted scenes in the DVD. Until then, here are some scenes with Jamie being a total scumbag. Navigate within the window for more scenes (the first two are in the movie, but the movie discussion and confrontation with Gina McKee are not).

7. Topicality.

It’s obvious from a look at any synopsis that Iannucci and co. were inspired by the Dodgy Dossier that got us into the Iraq War, but I was unprepared for the level of extra detail he would add. With Tucker standing in for Alastair Campbell, Simon Foster is a movie version of Clare Short, vacillating over whether or not to resign in protest over the push to war. One of the funniest moments in the film comes when Foster convinces himself it would be braver to stay on than it would be to resign, but the depressing thing is that that’s almost a direct transcription of Short’s thinking, as explained far down in this fascinating article by Iannucci about the making of the film. This being a comedy, there is, sadly, no Robin Cook analogue.

The joke that got the biggest roar of approval, though, has to be what must have seemed, at the time, to be a throwaway joke about expenses. Even more surprising, after this week's controversy about Damian McBride and the smear-mail cregarding David Cameron , shouty spin-doctors seem even more topical. It goes to show how well the filmmakers understand the thinking of our leaders. Speaking of which...

8. Every time Malcolm Tucker swears, Alastair Campbell winces.

In polite conversation I make no secret of the fact that I think Alastair Campbell is primarily responsible for one of the darkest moments in recent British history, namely the campaign of dishonest bullying aimed at the BBC in order to dodge some awkward questions about the march to war, a series of events catalysed by the dodgy dossier used to such wonderful satirical effect by Iannucci and co. During that period, his embarrassingly brazen avoidance of responsibility, desperately squirming out of danger by setting the easily controlled British press after the BBC, was sickening to watch, especially when the press not only jumped into line like a brainwashed army, but would occasionally comment on how effectively they had been manipulated, as if to pay tribute to Campbell's Macchiavellian genius.

For fuck's sake, all he did was act like a kid trying to escape a bollocking for firing a spitball at teacher by pointing out that Jenkins has a nuddy mag in his desk and is far more deserving of the birch than he is, the difference here being that any Etonian headmaster would ignore such a desperate attempt at diversion and then wallop the living shit out of the kid, instead of letting him off and expelling poor Jenkins who was just holding that copy of Razzle for James "Portly" Fortesque, honest sir!

As if Campbell's despicable and immoral face-saving exercise wasn't bad enough - an exercise which, let's not forget, lead to the death of a renowned scientist and complicated all investigation into the march to war, dragging the conflict out at the cost of many more lives - the BBC has since kept bringing the sociopath back, over and over again, to host shows and participate in interviews and generally act like it's no hard feelings. Well fuck that, there are fucking diamond-hard feelings, and I'll bet there are plenty within the BBC too. His actions have damaged investigative journalism and engaged enquiry in England more than any logistical or financial shortfalls listed in Nick Davies' Flat Earth News, and it's doubtful we'll ever see a restoration of backbone in the fourth estate. Of course that could just be me letting pessimism overtake me, but that's an easy thing to do post-Hutton enquiry. The whole sorry experience damaged my perception of politics and journalism to such an extent that I cannot see my faith ever being restored, especially now Paul Foot has sadly left us.

Of course, it's blatantly obvious that Malcolm Tucker is based on Alastair Campbell. Only an idiot could deny it. An evil idiot at that. Yes, the man himself was invited to see it with "Zoot Suit" Kermode, and was bored by the film. I also like how he criticised Iannucci for not understanding how certain things worked in politics.

Of course, politicians and advisers have their own ambitions. But they have more than that. Some of the scenarios - like a secret meeting being overwhelmed by attendees because its existence has been announced on TV; or Tucker being able to keep out of the papers something a minister said on radio; or the minister being confined to the back row of a meeting while officials take centre stage - would have benefited from advice from someone who has been inside a government loop or two.

What advice? Like this? [From the Iannucci article I'd linked to above]

I'd established contact with a political blogger out in DC who fixed me up with US State Department staffers and Senate workers and Pentagon officials and even a CIA guy, who could brief me on the ins and outs of Washington life. At least two people told me that Condoleezza Rice was a bit rubbish. She got rather star-struck in Washington and never really stood up to Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. Both of the guys I met said: "And, as a result, people got killed." The CIA guy added: "And that's what really pisses me off!" and as he said it, for the first time in our meeting, he looked rather frightening. He had the look of a man who knows how to empty someone else's bowels out by simply touching a vein.

That sounds like he knew what he was doing, Mr. Campbell. Yes, his hilariously defensive comment piece was the thing that inspired me to write this post (well, that and the sheer awesomeness of the movie) but pretty much everything that I wanted to say about Campbell's snippy response to the movie is summed up in this comment piece by George Pitcher.

Within 24 hours, Campbell had demonstrated exactly why the yobbish In The Loop character, Malcolm Tucker, is so obviously based on him. Humourlessly beat up on a critical journo, then affect nonchalance at your own grim mirror-image the next day. The Guardian's Digested Read feature on Campbell's column today could read: "Honestly, I couldn't care less. Here's 800 words about how I couldn't care less."

Amateur psychologist as Campbell is, he must have turned his hobby on himself (which is after all his favourite subject) in today's column. Is it not the reaction of the bullying child in the playground that everyone eventually turns on, pointing and laughing at him, so he has to react with "Bor-ring! Can't you see I don't care?"

Brilliant. I also like Iannucci's response to the criticism:

We should have posters done. They would say: 'A disappointment, Alastair Campbell'.

Of course Campbell cares, though his faux-apathy might really have been triggered because Tucker is shown, at times, to lose track of the multiple deceptions he has created. I have a suspicion that the mad dashing, which often looks panicked, is as far from Campbell's image of himself as you can get. Nevertheless, don't forget that this is the man who raced across London and barged into a Four News broadcast to ladle further heaps of smelly lie-manure all over the acquiescent and terrified BBC. Of course, I'm making a huge assumption that Campbell is concerned with his image, but considering how vanilla his Wikipedia page is, I'm beginning to wonder if he has a hobby. Surely no one else is going to clean it up whenever it gets altered to discuss anything other than his unpleasant-sounding battle with depression, or his support for Leukaemia Research.

Or maybe the world has moved on now, and that page has remained untouched and information-free for years now. How soon we forget. At least we still have Tucker, and the thought of Campbell watching and trying to figure out how to spin the fact that he has been part of the creation of a monster, a hilarious character who nevertheless represents everything that is wrong with the world today, an amoral crocodile-man wrecking the lives of all around him just to accomplish whatever the goal is for that day. In The Loop is a magnificent achievement on a number of levels, but I take special pleasure in the mental image of that man, the one who installed Cynicism 2.0 in my soul, sitting in a screening room with a bequiffed William Friedkin fan, fidgeting in his seat as his personality is filleted with such precision. Thank you, Peter Capaldi, and thank you Iannucci and co. You completed me, somehow.

The Most Wonderful Newspaper Article Of Our Age

2009-04-13T09:30:00.005+01:00

In my line of work, I have to read a lot of newspaper articles. Seriously, a lot. Many of them are vicious and unpleasant right-wing shrieks of terror as the world slowly disassembles their medieval belief systems. The likes of Peter Hitchens, Amanda Platell, Charles Moore, Melanie Phillips, Richard Littlejohn, Kelvin McKenzie, Leo McKinstry, and many many more yank handfuls of hair from their scalps in an effort to out-selfish each other, demonising everything and everyone that would look vaguely out-of-place in a 1950s Somerset country house. Reading their nauseating bilewords smeared across the page like a mental skidmark has been one of the more upsetting things I have had to do in this life, and tends to make me forget that not all Fleet Street pundits are Mannequins of Lazy-Thinking Evil.

This week, thanks to a link from, of all people, The Internet Commenter Formerly Known As Moriarty, I have found my favourite piece of UK journalism of the decade. Anne Billson, novelist and Buffy fan, has said the unsayable about the British film industry; it is in a terminal state, and the causes have been there all along.

I agree with so much of what she wrote that I could just copy and paste the whole thing here and just finish off this post with multiple exclamation points of joy, especially with her catty single-sentence drubbing of Mike Leigh. I love it so much I'll pretend I don't mind that she didn't give some praise to John Boorman, who made one of the most visually innovative movies of all time (as well as three of the battiest and most lovable), though I suspect she's more concerned with the recent crop of British film directors. Of all the targets she hit, this in particular struck me as a salient point:

I once heard a British film director say in an interview that he wasn't interested in telling a story visually (why were you directing a bloody film then?), and it's clear he's not the only one. Historically, Britain has produced more world-class writers than painters, and words tend to be valued far above visual imagery, if only because reading and listening apparently require more effort than looking, and so are deemed to be worthier pursuits.

Later on Billson mentions the UK directors who emulate shots from American directors for no other reason than that they liked that shot, not because it is the right shot for the scene. It's funny that she mentions Atonement earlier in the piece. Though there were some shots there that were admirable, the big setpiece single take shot of the Dunkirk evacuation is one of the most overrated shots of the past few years. I take my hat off to Joe Wright for managing the logistical nightmare of it, but what was the point of it? On a narrative level it was meaningless, even though a lot of extraneous information was handed to us.

While I understand that Wright was making a visual reference to the Dunkirk passage in McEwan's novel, it still looked stupid, with the characters wandering around the beach in circles in order to show everything off while Dario Marianelli's music did a lot of the heavy lifting. Compare that to single takes like the nightclub scene in Goodfellas, or the opening long takes from The Player, or Snake Eyes, or The Bonfire of the Vanities. Story happens in those scenes. We discover things about the characters. In Atonement, we're just checking out a beach.

This is not to say there are no British directors who have an amazing eye. Sadly, they're often not lauded in the UK and their careers stall. My favourite British style-genius of the past decade, Lynne Ramsay, created two distinctive and brilliant films, almost got to adapt The Lovely Bones, and then disappeared to work on un-named projects. Garth Jennings has spent so long making Son of Rambow made and promoted that he doesn't even seem to have anything else in the pipeline. Michael Winterbottom once made movies I couldn't wait to see, though that has sadly changed over time. Peter Greenaway buggered off to the Netherlands a while back and his movies retreated to the kind of Matthew-Barney-esque obscurity they always should have had, that weird successful period back in the 80s notwithstanding. We're still waiting for the next movie by the wonderful Pawel Pawlikowski. Terence Malick is now more prolific than he is, shockingly enough.

Many other UK directors who understand what to do with a camera (to varying degrees) have hopped over to America as soon as they could; Paul Greengrass, Martin Campbell, Edgar Wright, Roger Michell, Mike Newell, Stephen Frears, Kevin MacDonald, Pete Travis, etc. etc. The other conspicuous style-addict in British cinema, who won an Best Director Oscar this year and whose name I'm sick of reading everywhere, is probably going to spend some time in Hollywood making worthy films for a while. In fact, the only British director who wants to keep filming in the UK is Neil Marshall, bless him. His next film, Centurion, already sounds unmissable.

Still, I'm surprised Billson doesn't mention the Scott Brothers, as they are surely two of the most influential directors of the past twenty years even if they have made movies that many people consider beneath contempt. Their style has been adapted and ripped-off more than almost any other filmmakers around; surely that's something the patriotic UK film buff can be pleased about. That said, I can understand why she doesn't mention other style-heavy filmmakers from the same background (i.e. advertising), such as Alan Parker and Adrian Lyne, who barely have a good film between them.

Sadly for the UK, Ridley and Tony Scott stayed away while their films became more interesting (Tony Scott had a run of fun action movies in the early 90s, and Ridley makes a lot of flat but ambitious films I feel compelled to see, such as Kingdom of Heaven and Black Hawk Down), and Alan Parker came back to run the UK Film Council. Disastrous. It would have been the worst of all worlds if Adrian Lyne had made anything in the last seven years. I will never forgive him for his disastrous adaptation of Lolita, which remains one of the five worst films of the decade. Yes, worse than Fatal Attraction, Nine and a Half Weeks, and Indecent Proposal glommed together into a big lump of misogynistic Silly Putty, and then bounced off our eyeballs for over two hours. The man is a menace to society.

Why am I dragging up all of this bile? Because last week I saw possibly my favourite British movie of the last ten years, and what's most horrible is that I don't think Billson would like it, primarily because it's not that visual. More on that tomorrow...

ETA: And by "tomorrow" I of course meant two days from now...

It's Trek Day!

2009-04-08T14:25:00.004+01:00

At the beginning of the year, in my Shades of Caruso Listmania quadrilogy of obsessive list-making, I gave Cloverfield the Best Marketing Award. Bad Robot and Paramount Pictures did a fantastic job of generating interest in their film, and by giving nerds at the Nerd Mecca of the Alamo Drafthouse a chance to see the first public screening of the new Star Trek film, complete with guest appearance by Leonard Nimoy, they've done it again by putting those relentlessly hatey buzz-killers on the back-foot, if only temporarily. Even with the release of a bunch of exciting trailers, old-skool Trek fans have been deeply upset about the franchise revamp, and this resistance has been the focus of much of the online coverage. With one fell swoop they put that on hold, and managed to generate far more enthusiasm about the movie than with the usual round of premieres and what-have-you.

They've also made me, and a lot of people, very very jealous. Just the act of scheduling a screening of Wrath of Khan, with Kurtzman, Orci, and Lindelof in attendance, and then bringing on Nimoy to announce a sccreening of the full movie, shows they care about the franchise and the reaction of the fans. How cool would it have been to be there? How playful an act? It's no secret to readers of this blog that I think Damon Lindelof is a great humanitarian, but knowing he was involved in a trick this cool makes him even more awesome.

Of course, when the movie comes out there will be even more back-and-forth about whether the film is any good, and if it is a big success (which seems guaranteed by now), there will become a bizarre schism between old and new fans that will generate so much online debate that it will make all who stand on the sidelines wish that we could tap the wasted energy pouring off outraged and entitled fanboys when they get pissy. Whatever. I just hope it's better than JJ Abrams' directorial debut Mission Impossible The Third, which was technically proficient and featured a McKee-tastic plot constructed with the best punch-card computations money could buy, and yet felt like the most expensive episode of Alias ever. As much as I enjoy Abrams' shows, they can often feel like lucite sculptures instead of flexible armatures. (This metaphor makes perfect sense to me. Sorry if it doesn't translate.)

The enthusiasm during that screening has proven to be infectious. As a result of the numerous online reviews, I am now totally psyched about the forthcoming release, even more so than I already was. My childhood love of Trek was obsessive, and even after I stopped watching the TNG spinoff series (due to being at university in a series of pokey rooms without TVs), that affection remained. One of my most cherished childood memories was of the day my mom came to my primary school to take me home because of an unnamed family tragedy.

But there was no tragedy! It was a cunning ruse to get me out of that hellhole and take me to the first screening of Star Trek: The Motion Picture at our local cinema. How cool is my mom? Of course, I was pretty unhappy about the pace of the movie (the image used above is the one of the most exciting scene in the film, which tells you all you need to know), but even so, I tripped out on Doug Trumbull's amazing effects, and at least wasn't traumatised like this poor viewer. I also still remember the first time I saw Wrath of Khan. Best major character death in nerdfilm history? Very possibly.

So, today has become Trek Day, thanks to multichannel TV. Search For Spock was on Sky Movies this morning, and even though it's not my favourite Trek movie, it was just the tonic. Though it's far too uneventful, especially coming after the rightfully beloved Khan, there are some wonderful moments (the death of Kirk's son, and the destruction of the Enterprise), some great FX work from ILM (especially the lovely matte paintings of Vulcan at the end), and some classic Shatner acting. Knowing that Trek is liable to be found everywhere on satellite TV, I went from there to Virgin, where they were showing the Voyager episode Warlord, which was notable for its creative use of nose/forehead prosthetics and some flirting with girl-on-girl lip-action (not consummated, those cowards).

Aired right after that was the second half of the final episode of Deep Space Nine. I had never seen past the end of the fifth season of DS9, so I was in two minds about watching it, but hell, this is Trek Day, so I left it on while I trawled Wikipedia and Memory Alpha for information about what the hell was going on. Gul Dukat looks like a Bajoran? Garak is in charge of the Cardassian Resistance? Ezri Dax is involved with Bashir? Hell, anyone at all is involved with Bashir? It was a lot to take in. And what the fuck? Sisko "dies"? Screw that. Nobody messes with Ben Sisko.

Still, it didn't seem as contentious an ending as that of Battlestar Galactica, even though comparing the two is unfair due to BSG's greater ambition. Plus, this is an unfair criticism, but DS9, for all its strengths, looks horribly dated compared to Ronald Moore's later series. Anyway, it was nice seeing it, but it pales into insignificance next to the original series. It's an amazing coincidence that Sci Fi (or should I say SyFy) was showing one of my "favourite" episodes from TOS: the Trek-Meets-Taming-Of-The-Shrew craziness that is Elaan of Troyius.

It's not particularly exciting, or thought-provoking, or performed well in any way, but my God it's spectacularly, almost wilfully wrongheaded. As an insight into Kirk's deeply worrying attitude to women, and his occasionally out-of-control machismo, not to mention how women were portrayed on US TV in the 60s, it is essential viewing.

Later on today Virgin is showing an episode of Enterprise, which I suppose I should watch in order to "catch 'em all" even though I have no enthusiasm for that show whatsoever. Of all of the various incarnations of Trek, that is the one with the most depressing Good Character / Gupta ratio. I'll get to that in a moment, but firstly, I have to unleash a howl of outrage from the depths of my nerdcore. There is no way - NO WAY! - that Captain Sam Beckett deserves high ratings like these compared to the feeble, barely above average scores given to Sisko in the card shown above.

Sisko would fuck you up six ways to Sunday! Archer was even crap at being captain of an intergalactic FAILcake. Anyway, that's not the main problem with Enterprise. All of the later shows had some excellent characters - Picard and Data, Quark and O'Brien, Tuvok and The Doctor (the last one being my favourite modern Trek character of them all) - and a few total Guptas - Riker and Troy, Kira and Bashir, Neelix and Tom Paris - but Enterprise had almost no characters I liked at all. Only Trip caught my imagination in any way; the rest might as well have not been created at all. I only remember the weapons officer being a hostile British jerk, and there was a sexy Vulcan in it. A sexy Vulcan? There's only one of those, thank you very much.

He's fighting to gain access to your lovebits, you know.

Virgin is now showing a Q episode of Voyager (Yay Q!!!), followed by some TNG, which means I'll have experienced all of the Old Trek (yes yes, I've not read any of the comics or books, or watched the animated series, but let's just move on). After that I might stick on Wrath of Khan, if I can make it to the end without sobbing bitter nerd tears all over the laptop. All of this has been made possible by the recent screening of the film, so thank you, Bad Robot, for totally distracting me from doing far more important things.

ETA: Nice! The TNG episode is Redemption, one of Ronald D. Moore's amazing Klingon episodes. He writes Klingons better than anyone. These were the highlights of the 1990s Trek renaissance, I reckon. Gowron is my bug-eyed hero, you know.

Hipster Douchebag Music Recommendation Of The Week Month Quarter: “Bear On The Beach” by A Camp

2009-04-06T11:45:00.004+01:00

When I wrote about the Cardigans last year, I remarked on how the band’s creative peak coincided with diminishing sales, and concluded that it was because their last two albums – while compelling, glorious and career-defining – were unable to find a commercial niche. And if a pop band like the Cardigans isn’t marketable – not thrilling or ringtone-friendly enough for the kids, not “authentic” or “classic” enough for £50 Man, and nowhere near hip enough for those influential, tastemaking hipster douchebags – there is surely little hope of commercial success for Nina Persson’s side project, A Camp.

A Camp’s self-titled 2001 debut is often described as “country” or “country-tinged”, and that’s not a genre that gets much exposure outside specialist US media. This description overstates the case somewhat, though, and the single “I Can Buy You” surely proves that “harmonica” and “country” are not necessarily synonymous.

This sprightly tale of a sugar mommy trying to hold on to a callow young lover is one thing country almost never is: it’s arch. The Cardigans are sometimes witty, sometimes knowing, sometimes playful, but their lyrics are usually heartfelt. A Camp has given Persson the opportunity to play around with characters, telling stories at one remove from the personal. In the album’s opener “Frequent Flyer”, she slyly claims “I’m a frequent flyer/A notorious liar” as if it were a disclaimer for all the porkies she is about to tell.

Despite being a little doomy in places (it was co-produced by Mark Linkous of doomy doomsters Sparklehorse), A Camp is not hugely different from a Cardigans record. The relentless chugging rhythms of “Hard As A Stone” are reminiscent of “My Favourite Game”, while the atmospheric ballads “Song For The Leftovers” and “Silent Night” wouldn’t sound out of place on Gran Turismo or Long Gone Before Daylight. For new album Colonia, Persson has recruited husband and former Shudder To Think guitarist Nathan Larson to accompany her, and the result is significantly less doomy. Although spotted with vague lyrical references to human beings behaving like dumb animals – ie killing each other, a lot – it has a sunny sheen that makes it irrepressibly uplifting.

The bleakness of the lead single’s lyrics, which suggest that although religion is often responsible for conflict love has been the cause of far more human pain, is offset by the crystalline chords and jaunty beats, not to mention Persson’s unmistakably pure vocals. (I like the video too, which rather than being a winking parody, a smartarse 2009 idea of what 1970s music TV was like, is done with clear-eyed earnestness, believably corny effects and an authentic lack of cuts.)

Elsewhere on Colonia the influence of 1960s girl-pop is obvious in the handclap-heavy “Here Are Many Wild Animals” and the simple, buoyant piano-chord progression of “I Signed The Line”. Although it’s no more a country record than A Camp is, the album occasionally puts me in mind of Dolly Parton (that poppiest of country artists) as well as folk singer Sandy Denny. “Golden Teeth And Silver Medals”, Persson’s duet with Nicolai Dunger, has echoes of “Silver Threads And Golden Needles” (a song recorded by both Parton and Denny) and “Islands In The Stream”:

Golden teeth and silver medals
Beauty mark and scars
That is what we got
Raindrops in a reservoir
And minutes in a jar
That is what we got

To my mind Colonia’s standout song is “Bear On The Beach”, whose sombre, wintry air recalls Angelo Badalamenti’s superlative Twin Peaks soundtrack. While a meditative Persson sings mournfully of Iris, someone who has evidently grown tired of the constant battle that is life, the twinkly toy piano contrasts with a creepily inexorable bassline, evoking a sort of uncertain serenity, a calm assailed by doubt and fear.

It seems someone thinks that the song’s ominous tone, imagery of islands and bears and oceans, and themes of isolation conjure up visions of a popular ABC time-travelly drama series that Shades Of Caruso may have mentioned once or twice.