Category Archive for ‘film and tv’

Yeah, not great, really.

On the upside, the design was generally good, sets and costume and styling pretty convincing, it didn’t look like cheap crap as fantasy films can (and often) do, and aside from some of the villains’ spiky costuming it was nicely free of the ubiquitous influence of Lord of the Rings.  Not that there’s anything wrong with Lord of the Rings, on the contrary, but it’s nice to see some alternative visions of fantasy.  Early sections with Ron Perlman weren’t bad (you can take Ron to the bank, even when he’s wearing what appears to be a fur tent and has borrowed bigfoot’s hairstyle), Jason Momoa was at least watchable as Conan, there were a couple of vaguely amusing moments, and some of the action scenes were, well, okay.  Aside from that, though, it was mostly an incoherent, charmless mess.

Despite its many faults, I remain deeply fond of the 1982 John Milius version.  Maybe it’s all a function of the age at which I watched it, but to me it had some great evocative moments and at times a really powerful sense of place.  Not to mention that stupendous Basil Poledouris score.  You also had James Earl Jones as Thulsa Doom, who with his liquid eyes, voice that could make the most dime-store of philosophy sound profound, and anarchist free-love doctrine seemed to be a guy you could imagine the oppressed of fantasy land getting behind.  For a villain in 2011 you have Stephen Lang giving it the massive ham, all poppy-eyed snarling and cut-price ultra-evil fascist blather.  At one point he talks about drowning the world in a sea of blood, or some such, and you think, ‘who signs up as henchman to a guy like this?’  Yeah, my boss is a slavering nutbag hell-bent on the annihilation of the universe, but the uniform is cool and the benefits excellent and, you know, who really likes their boss anyway?  Perhaps that’s why, while for much of the film he is surrounded by an army of goons inexplicably dragging an enormous war-boat across land, at other times he seems strangely unattended.

I like Jason Momoa, in general.  He really stood out in Stargate Atlantis.  If not exactly an actor, he certainly got the charisma.  Which makes him not unlike Schwarzenegger, in a way.  But he doesn’t have much to work with here.  He spends most of his time frowning real hard at people.  Arnie I daresay got no closer to Howard’s Conan, but at least he brought a kind of lunk-headed likability to the role.  Momoa’s Conan verges on being, well, a twat.

Most of all, the 1982 version seemed to create a cohesive world – by no means a masterpiece of worldbuilding like we see in Lord of the Rings but some really memorable and atmospheric moments with a feel of history.  Maybe a lot of it was in the music, and for sure there was a smorgasbord of cultures all bunged in together, but the Giant’s Tomb?  The battle among the stones?  That was good stuff.  The worldbuilding in the 2011 version is a shambles.  From the maguffin-heavy expository opening it lurches like a perp on angel dust from one location to another, linked, it would appear, by neither history, geography, politics, or plot.  And sticking a big wide with the name of the location up when you get there only serves to underline how little thought had gone in to the connections between them.  The ending is particularly nonsensical.  What was the big maguffin for anyway?  It’s like Sauron reclaimed the ring . . . then fell off a bridge, the end.

So I’d have to say the 2011 version is crushed mercilessly beneath Schwarzenegger’s muscular heel while James Earl Jones says something that sounds deep in the background.  Until you think about it.

But is the 2011 Conan the Barbarian worse than Conan the Destroyer?

Ha, ha, of course not.  Now you’re just being silly.

It seems that Denmark is not only the home of bacon, Hamlet, and extremely high quality modernist furniture, the Danes can also craft a pretty damn good piece of crime-based TV.  The Killing is a 20 part series about a murder that sits somewhere between that tradition of sparse Scandinavian psychological thrillers and The Wire.

Comparisons to The Wire abound, in fact, not least on the cover of the boxed set, and it’s a comparison that is apt in many ways and not so much in others.  Both series try and take a broader view of society than you’d get in your common or garden cop show, with the Killing focusing on the family of the victim, the police investigation, and the effect on an ongoing political campaign.  Both series aim at a realistic and cynical look at society and police work.  The Killing less than The Wire, perhaps, but with its suspect politicos, dodgy hair and crap knitwear it’s still admirably unglamorous.  Both series have an impressive knack for presenting a variety of complex, multifaceted and convincing characters from all walks of life, a happy meshing of script and acting with a trick for expressing relationships through manner and movement without anything even needing to be said.  The developing relationship between obsessive chief investigator Lund and her hammer-headed partner/replacement Meyer, largely communicated in occasional glances and the way they stomp around after each other, is a particular delight.  The most minor characters here exude personality, which is particularly impressive given I have to watch in subtitles.

The Killing is excellent for twists and misdirection.  Some revelation will have you suspecting one character before a sideways glance or throwaway line will suddenly have you looking elsewhere.  The touch is deft, but some of the secrets people choose to keep from the police therefore allowing themselves to continue as suspects – in a brutal murder, after all – sometimes stretch credibility.  And despite its occasional forays into the nature of people and politics, the Killing remains essentially a whodunnit.  A clever one, no doubt, but where the Wire transcends its genre – the question there is never who did the crime, but why – The Killing remains bound by it, and the plot twists and turns so much that by the end you cannot but have suspected pretty much everyone with a credit.  As a result the resolution is maybe a tad anticlimactic.

So The Killing isn’t quite the masterpiece the Wire was but, hey, what is?  It’s still excellent telly.

A few other pieces of televisual entertainment I’ve consumed over the last few months:

The Shadow Line.  In the onslaught of quality US Drama it’s been quite a while since I watched any hailing from these shores, but I thought The Shadow Line was a really decent effort.  A tough, bleak, labyrinthine thriller that wisely avoided the hyper-real approach cornered by American heavyweights like The Wire, The Shield, and Southland and went for something much more psychological, theatrical, even at times slightly surreal.  Some really great performances and writing, some stark and stylised photography, some neat twists, and an unflinching lack of sentiment.   Good music too.  All in all it put me slightly in mind of that 80s masterpiece of paranoid thrillers, Edge of Darkness, and that’s got to be a good thing.

Breaking Bad, Season 2.  An arresting portrait of a harassed but basically decent guy’s descent into, well, evil, basically.  The violence is unsettling, the treachery and manipulation scarcely less so, the humour ultra-black, the portrait of modern society way more banal but every bit as damning as The Wire.  Stone me, it can be grim watching, though, and one really does have trouble finding anyone particularly sympathetic to cling to.  The chances are high when you do start feeling sympathy for someone, they’re about to do something unforgivable.

Damages, Season 3. Still watchable, and Glenn Close is still great as ultra-ruthless lawyer Patty Hewes, but overall Damages seems to have got less good with each season.  Admittedly, season 1 really was good, but this time around the central case was a lot less compelling, the cast was a lot less strong, the basic approach of flashbacks within a framing story seemed a bit tired, and although they still have a knack for misdirection and surprise, overall it seemed to lack edge, and WAY too much time was spent on loose ends left dangling from previous seasons, unconvincingly resolved.  I’ll probably give the next one a go, but they need to get their mojo back.

The Good Wife, Season 2.  In some ways this legal drama, pitched into the gulf between Damages and Ali McBeal, is very straight-ahead, commercial stuff, but sometimes it can show a nice, morally ambiguous edge.  Julianna Margulies convinces as the moral centre but you’re never quite sure who else you can trust.  Politics, law, and even private life are dirty games, cases are rarely right or wrong, good(ish) people are called on to do sleazy things and rarely say no.  There are some weak performances but mostly strong, occasionally a little twee but it shows its teeth often enough to keep you guessing.  I enjoyed it.  A good indication of how far the middle ground of TV has come on over the last few years…

Alright, so it’s called Spartacus: Blood and Sand, really  but I feel Gore and Bums would have been a more accurate subtitle for this ultra-lurid, feverish re-imagining of the gladiatorial legend.  To get the negatives out of the way, for they are many, and could easily destroy your enjoyment, the sex and violence levels are ridiculous, the acting can veer towards the wooden, the dialogue is occasionally risible in its scattergun fusing of olde constructions and latin terms with anachronisms like, ‘we’ll handle it,’ and ‘okay’, the smorgasbord of accents ranges from antipodean to scottish to american – and is it my imagination or does Crixus the Gaul occasionally go a bit cockney?  On the upside?  It’s frakking ACE.  The absurd splatter and macho posturing, the deadly sexual politics and twisting plot, the breakneck pace, the savage ruthlessness with characters, the occasional interesting musing on the nature of slavery.  Plus you have some neat film making, editing especially, not to mention Lucy Lawless and John Hannah are excellent as Spartacus’ treacherous, social-climbing owners.  I mean, yes, you could say its portrayal of the Roman Republic is not entirely historically accurate, and the action occasionally deviates from the realistic.  But it’s better seen as fantasy with a Roman vibe.  Like those sugar foam prawns you get in pick ‘n mix.  They look a bit like prawns, but only an idiot would complain that they don’t really taste like seafood…

It’s strange, because I saw the first episode of one of Starz’ other offerings, Camelot, the other night.  And though you could make a lot of the very same criticisms about that show, Spartacus is triumphant regardless while Camelot, I thought, sucked.  HARD.  Go figure.

In short it’s a TV series about a biker gang starring the ever-dependable Ron Perlman among others, the first season of which I just finished watching after it was recommended to me by a few folks.  It certainly had its moments, and its interesting characters and scenarios, and at times tantalisingly dangled the possibility of something very interesting, but it never really reached a critical mass of quality for me, and every good episode seemed to be followed by a ropey one, every inventive scene counterbalanced by something that would have me scratching my head.  Despite lashings of grittiness and fumblings towards moral ambiguity the whole thing often seemed fearsomely unrealistic both at the micro level of the behaviour of certain characters (especially most of the women and the central character Jacks, who seemed much more vehicle for plot than personality in his own right) and the more macro level of a massive biker gang infesting a small town and causing intermittent total mayhem throughout the surrounding states without much really happening as a result.  It all put me somewhat in mind of the TV era of the A-Team.  It’s assumed you’re watching a kind of parallel universe in which this sort of thing might happen.  Despite a strong end of season I’m not sure I’ll be coming back for seconds on this one…

I know I’m well behind the curve on this one, but I just got through watching the last season of Lost, and all I can say is, Hmmmm.

I’ve really enjoyed and admired this show at times.  I liked their ruthlessness with cast and audience.  I liked their willingness to take crazy turns,throw in new characters and keep you guessing.  It was always very slickly made and put together (although the same-old island locations did start to pall after a while), and offered some really creepy, cold skin moments.  I very much liked the structure of the show, in which the “now” action on the island is interspersed with snippets of the past (or future) of given characters, allowing the people and events to suddenly be shown in totally new lights.  I liked some of the acting (though in general the prettier the actor, the worse the performance).  I even quite admired the way that, just as they seemed to be on the verge of giving you some answers, they’d totally shift the questions, because they always did it with a kind of total belief that kept you, if not believing, then at least watching.  It’s about a plane crash, no, about some numbers, no, a hatch, no, a button, no, it’s about the dharma initiative, no, time travel, no, some climactic inscrutable war of good against, no, an invisible guy in a hut, no, it’s actually not about that at all.  We don’t know what it’s about.

I guess, given the way that it twisted and turned, that it misdirected, fast-talked and routinely bamboozled its audience to the point of frustration, the ending was never really going to suddenly answer all those questions, now, was it?  But I was hoping for something that at least intrigued, that gave me a sense of what the fuck? in a good way, because if Lost did anything well, it was what the fuck? in a good way.  What we got was a lot of lumpily spooned-up mumbo-jumbo, so incomprehensible that it had to be explained to us via the medium of Jack’s dead dad and still didn’t make any sense.  It was what the fuck, yes.  But not in a good way at all.  And schmaltzy too!  Feelgood folks chuckling away to each other, all paired off and enjoying a big hug.  You guys!  What about that crazy island, huh?  Good times!  I dunno, it felt like a real betrayal of the ruthless edge the show delighted in wielding at its best. 

I expected to be disappointed, in the end.  I’m not sure I expected to be that disappointed.

Yeah, yeah, good fun all round.  Hopeless nerd Scott Pilgrim falls for the cool new girl in town, only to discover he must battle her seven evil exes in order to win her heart, the whole a kind of kung-fu comic book manga video game beat ’em up pastiche.  Kind of Tekken vs Ninja Scroll vs Juno.  Very neatly done, cleverly put together, nicely acted.  Likable, touching, funny, at times very funny, perhaps particularly for those of us who’ve spent more than a minute or two in an arcade in our lives.  The first half really was excellent, with a deft touch on the characterisation, but they couldn’t quite sustain it.  Perhaps it’s a strange criticism to make of a film that revelled in its own silliness right from the outset, but it got a bit silly towards the end.  Or perhaps it stayed equally silly and got less funny.  Or perhaps the silliness started to pall somewhat.  Or perhaps it lost its way narratively a little, or didn’t know where exactly it wanted to go, and started to replace the inventiveness, the light touch, and the emotion with a little too much schlocky kung fu special-effect-i-fication.  If the first of your battles is crazily outrageous and over the top, you do give yourself that old anime problem of where to go once you’ve already dialled it to 11.  You either have to dial back, or stick on 11 knowing that you’ll get diminishing returns.  After a while, 11 starts to seem like 6 or 7.

But yeah.  Good fun, no doubt.

Man, it’s a long time since I talked about a film.  You know why?  It’s a long time since I managed to get to the cinema.  Kids and books and building projects and all that other, you know, LIFE, can do that to you.  So imagine my delight when I chiselled free an afternoon to go and watch Inception.  The reviews had led me to expect Matrix meets Memento, trippy crazy action with mind-bending twisty plotting.  I could not WAIT.

Now imagine my disappointment when I left the cinema.  Inception ain’t a bad film, really, but it seemed to me a rather mediocre one.

Fundamentally, Inception is a con film.  A con film that takes place in people’s dreams rather than in faked realities, but a con film nonetheless.  Now usually, in such a story (I guess the Sting would be the classic example), there’s a superficial con being played on the target, but there are also tricks and cons being practiced among the con men themselves, which are gradually revealed.  In the best ones, there’s usually a final trick being perpetrated on the audience as well, and we all slap our thighs as the credits roll at the ingenuity of the way it’s all been put together.  There’s at least one good twist, in other words.

Now I’d been told Inception was ingenious, so I kept waiting for the twist.  For one of the team to pull their masterful triple-cross, for their mysterious employer to reveal his sinister hand, for the target of the sting to turn the tables and show the elaborate deception.  It never happened.  Elaborate, undoubtedly, but deception there was none.  No one really, at any point, did anything unexpected.  It did exactly what it said on the tin, even if the tin had a very long, confusing label.  It made me think of a bad orator using lots of complicated language to disguise the fact he’s got nothing much to say.  A bad comic trying to make up for having no punchline by making his joke really long and complicated.  REALLY long and complicated.  But when it comes to the long con in nested realities I can think of holodeck-based episodes of Star Trek that did more surprising things, and that investigated the whole concept of false reality and are we-aren’t we dreaming more effectively and elegantly.

The lack of any real guile in the plot might not have been so bad, if the film hadn’t disappointed in other ways.  There was much heavy-handed exposition, but key concepts were left largely unexplained or came suddenly out of nowhere, and others seemed inconsistent or were ignored whenever it suited.  The rules on which the whole thing functioned just didn’t feel concrete.  There was one good action sequence in zero gravity (though by no means for me the kind of game changer that the Matrix featured when it first appeared), but mostly the action was really very poor.  Loads of automatic gunfire endlessly ping-panging from car doors and that.  About as adrenaline pumping and dangerous as Roger Moore era James Bond.  There was no real enemy to fight, even, no mastermind to outwit, just anonymous baddies drawn from the target’s subconscious.  OK, maybe it’s all supposed to be a dream but – why such a naff one?  On the trippy reality-bending it really fell flat for me as well, in the end.  In preparation they were folding space and stepping through mirrors and all, and we were promised as they passed from one dream to another things would become “unstable”, collapse, go wild.  I was ready for MC Escher on acid and I got, erm, a rainy city, a fancy hotel, and a concrete fort in a blizzard.

I’m being harsh, I know.  Inception ain’t a bad film, really.  It was interesting, diverting, had some good performances (as well as a lot of forgettable ones), some great visuals, and the end packed a surprising emotional punch.  But it was too little too late.  I’d been promised clever, and maybe it all went over my head, but my mind came out of it decidedly unbent.  Everyone else seems to love it.  Perhaps a team of slick-back conmen had broken into my mind the previous night and predictably implanted the idea that the film just wasn’t all that good…