Category Archive for ‘film and tv’

It’s pretty amazing, the way that TV has come to entirely replace film as my visual medium of interest.  It seems strange to imagine a time when TV was for soaps and gameshows, and the cinema was where you went for quality drama. There are still a few films that spark my interest, but generally they seem so conservative, repetitive, so dominated by franchises and the obvious.  The interesting stuff is happening on the small screen.  A little roundup of recent viewing, therefore:

Game of Thrones, season 2.  Yes, yes, I know you’re all watching season 3, you bastards, but I watch the box sets, so I’m way behind, and I just got through season 2. It’s hard for me to step back from this, in a sense, partly because it’s an adaptation of some material I’ve loved for a long time, partly because it’s a very big deal within my profession.  The impression I’m getting is that it’s becoming more and more successful, being talked about more and more widely – perhaps still with a slight sense of, ‘yes I’m watching this fantasy thing which surprises me as much as you but it’s actually quite good,’ but talked about even so – which can only be a good thing for the whole arena of gritty fantasy. Overall I continue to be very impressed, I must say.  I think it hits far, far more than it misses, is hugely professional and well realised, with great costume and design and just a very effective adaptation of challenging material – they’ve made a great TV series out of it.  A slightly uneven start to this season though, I felt.  In general they’re very good at juggling a lot of balls (hur hur), but the addition of new characters, and the steady spreading out of many of those they’ve got, makes things a little hard to follow initially – my main problem with the books, in so far as I have one.  Massive amount of sex early on, as well, which got more than a bit eye-rolley for me, but that settled down later.  I think I’d probably say the greatest strength is the casting – so many characters and the great majority of the actors are very good.  It almost seems unfair to pick anyone out but I think Iain Glen and Charles Dance were brilliant with characters who weren’t particularly memorable in the books.

Boardwalk Empire, season 2: Hmm, yeah, a powerful evocation of the period and all, and nicely made, and nicely acted, and some memorable moments but, I dunno, perhaps this will come as a little rich from me, but the bleakness, the lack of anyone to root for, the frequent really horrible violence, it got a bit wearing.  Everyone’s such a humourless bastard, I’m not really sure what the point of it all is.  There’s a sense of an exercise in futility.  Mad men is shiny and hard, full of meaningful lines in an ocean of silence and packed with period detail in a similar way, but Mad Men manages to produce really touching moments, and believable personalities, and offhand profundities that, for me, Boardwalk Empire doesn’t get anywhere near.

Friday Night Lights, seasons 1 and 2: A series about a high school football team in small-town Texas doesn’t sound like a winner, but this is absolutely brilliant.  So much of the relatively recent crop of great telly, from the Sopranos, through the Shield, the Wire, Deadwood, Battlestar Galactica, Mad Men, etc. has been bleak, cyncial, and highly violent with the aforementioned Boardwalk Empire being a good example.  They’re all fantastic series, but a little variety in the diet has to be a good thing, and Friday Night Lights is the exact opposite – everyday, small-scale, moving, involving, funny, tender (I’m tearing up right now), with great characters and performances.  If you described some of the plotlines it’d sound cheesy as all hell, but it totally transcends its ingredients through quality of script and ensemble playing.  Pretty much everyone in it is a fully realised character, with no villains to speak of, just folks motivated by their everyday hopes and petty disappointments, trying to do the best they can as they see it.  I love these people.  I’m tearing up again.  I wish I was one of them.  Never been much good at sports, though.  And 38 may be a little late for a High School running back.  Coaching staff, maybe…?

Try to avoid spoilers in the comments, if you please! 

God bless LoveFilm instant.  As someone who vaguely remembers the appearance of home VHS recorders, the fact that I can now through the medium of my playstation get thousands of hours of quality (and not so quality) recent TV at the touch of the button for nothing (well, the price of a membership, but we were paying for regular DVDs anyway) is actually pretty striking.  While browsing the content available I noticed Sons of Anarchy.  I’d watched the first season a while back and been a little underwhelmed by the whole thing, and my wife was not at all interested in continuing.  But, you know, since there are three seasons there at my fingertips for nothing…

And on balance I’m very pleased I watched it.  The second season is a more focused and consistent affair than the first, with the arrival of plotting neo-nazis in Charming.  The third season is sadly a bit rubbish, with a visit to a somewhat silly version of Ireland and investigation of the club’s IRA connections which allows for some of the most risible Irish accents I think I’ve ever heard on television, and I’ve heard some bad ones.  The fourth season, though, with the club fracturing under the weight of its secrets and the bikers totally out of their depth when dealing with everyone’s go-to South American drug lord Danny Trejo, is dynamite.

Though on balance a fair bit better than Spartacus, it strikes me as not entirely dissimilar in that there’s a lot to admire and some really powerful scenes, but also a fair bit to cringe at, including a good deal of lad’s mag style lowest common denominator splattered about.  I mean, biker gangs are probably pretty macho outfits but I’m not sure the show doesn’t revel in that more than it investigates it.  Katey Sagal is great as Gemma, the machiavellian matriarch of the club, but otherwise the female pickings are pretty slim.  Believability in general is a bit of an issue – there’s a rather unconvincing wild west flavour to crime and law enforcement and I’m not sure all the plot movements make actual logical sense, but I think the technicalities of plot and action are actually a lot less important in Sons of Anarchy than the interplay between the characters and the spiralling webs of cross and double-cross, and there’s always a pace and drive and feeling of impending doom that at its best is highly effective.

I remain just a little unconvinced by Charlie Hunnam in the central role – I don’t think he’s a bad actor, he’s watchable, he’s likable, but I’m just not sure I buy him as a man capable of extremes of violence.  I don’t have that issue with Ron Perlman, however, who’s excellent as ever, and the rest of the central cast are all solid, with large chunks of the supporting players drawn from two of my favourite shows – Deadwood and the Shield (one of the characters is watching the Shield in jail at one point, in fact).  Indeed Kurt Sutter, who created Sons of Anarchy (and turns in a memorable performance as jail-bound disaster Otto), was also closely involved with the Shield.  And is married to Katey Sagal.  Six degrees, and all that…

So second season good, third a little cringey though not without its moments, but things really came together for me in the fourth season as long simmering secrets come to the boil, external pressures build, and it all spills over in a series of really shocking scenes.  Tense, powerful stuff that reminded me a lot of that spectacular last season of the Shield, in which the nested dangers pile up, and up, and up, and leave you wondering how the hell the characters can possibly get out of this.  Answer – a good few of them can’t.  It’s ripping stuff, that last season, and makes me very optimistic for the next….

Hrrrm.  Drums fingers on desk.  What to say about Spartacus: Vengeance?  I think on balance it was about as good as the previous prequel series, Gods of the Arena, but not as good as the first series, Blood and Sand.  I’d like to say that makes it watchable hokum, but I think that’s simultaneously unfair and over-generous.  Because there are some really good things about Spartacus, honest.  But there are also some laughably poor things, for real.

I’m a bad news first kind of guy, so let’s begin on the poor side of the scales.  The first two series were focused around the Ludus in which Spartacus and the other gladiators were trained, their loves, rivalries, and the machinations of their master and mistress, with occasional trips to the arena for ultra-lurid highly stylised and weirdly edited savage bloodshed.  In Spartacus: Vengeance the slaves have escaped into the Italian hinterland, but the budget only stretches so far and the locations are limited and often a bit rubbish.  Woods, mostly.  And recycled locations from last series.  There was always a lot of sweaty sex, but within the feverish confines of the ludus, everyone facing death on the morrow, that made a kind of sense.  Here it seems even more gratuitous and often more than a bit eye-rolley.  Plotwise there’s a lot of not particularly convincing treading of water in order to get everyone into position to participate in a massive bloodbath at the end of the series.

Then there’s the acting.  In the main, the escaped slaves are really … let’s say not great.  Andy Whitfield, who played Spartacus in Blood and Sand with a good deal of charisma, sadly died after season 1, and I’m not a huge fan of his replacement, nor of the rather repetitive rousing speeches about freedom and togetherness the writers have inflicted upon him.  And therefore us.  Many of the other slaves have clearly been selected to look A1 in a loincloth, but some ability to speak is also desirable.  And the script really isn’t helping that much.  There’s this truly odd habit the writers have of dropping most of the pronouns, so instead of saying, ‘Get your mind on the task!’ they’ll say, ‘Get mind on task!’  Perhaps it’s meant to simulate the cadence of latin, or something, but, er, it doesn’t.  In the first couple of seasons John Hannah could make it sound good.  The better actors here get away with it.  The worse ones, and there are quite a lot of worse ones, sound risible.

But now to the upside.  The villains are way, way better than the heroes.  Last two seasons it was John Hannah who stole the show as the owner of the ludus.  This time around it’s Craig Parker (who I last saw as Haldor in Lord of the Rings), as glassy-eyed psychopath Praetor Glaber.  Generally the backbiting of the Romans is a whole lot more entertaining than the lumpen feuding of the slaves, and you keep on wishing they’d get on with crucifying Spartacus so we could have a show about roman politics.  Like Rome was.  In spite of the occasional sparsity of location, the look of the series is actually really good.  There are a lot of interesting visual ideas in there, a lot of strange and surprising editing, and a distinctive grade to the whole thing (that’s the tone and colour palette, in case you was wondering).  It doesn’t always work but it hits more than it misses, I think.

And finally, well, you could call it silly splatter or ridiculous schlock, but there’s a balls-to-the-wall, no-holds-barred, lurid, feverish intensity about parts of the show that you’re just not going to see anywhere else.  One scene stands out in particular (and SPOILERS for anyone who hasn’t seen it), in which Glaber’s lover tries to murder him while he’s buck naked getting ready for his bath, but she is instead murdered by Glaber’s wife before she can wield the knife, showering him with slow-motion arterial spurt.  They then have sex covered in blood while the body floats about in the bloody bath water.  In BLOOD.  I gave this kind of incredulous titter afterwards.  Then I had to watch it again just to make sure I hadn’t imagined it.  Did that scene need to be made?  No.  No, it didn’t.  But I’m kind of glad it was, and I’m not even sure why.  Therein lies a metaphor for Spartacus in general, perhaps.

Still, it concerns me that they have an unfortunate habit of killing off their best characters at the end of every season.  A certain ruthlessness with your cast is much to be admired but you’ve got to have someone left to root for.  The end of this one was a proper slaughter in which for my money the four best characters went out in a blaze of splatter.  Good episode but, man, I worry about the next season…

Been a long time since I’ve been in a completely full cinema.  Even longer since the audience gave a round of applause at the end (including me).  Even longer than that since I saw Russel Crowe give such a storming performance, nor was he by any means alone in that, plus tight, uncomplicated directing and editing with the guts to hold on the big tear-streaked close-ups so the actors could nail the songs directly to your aching soul.  Big themes, big emotions, big set pieces, great big faces delivering huge songs.

Brilliant stuff.

Quite simply superb.  I had no idea how – being honest I never thought that – they could top the thrills of Tinker Bell and the Great Fairy Rescue, but somehow they did it.

And yes, on the face of it, it’s a simple story of a young fairy finding the fairy sister she never knew she had, having various snow-related adventures together in the company of cuddly animals, and eventually saving the fairy dust tree from destruction by a cold snap, but peel away the layers and you find a razor-edged investigation of loss, rebellion, friendship, forbidden love, and how snow is actually delivered in hand-woven baskets by owls.  Labour intensive, but beautiful.

I guess if I had one small criticism it would be of the ending, in which SPOILER Tinker Bell’s broken wing was mended with a device that felt a little deus ex machina to this viewer, adding a slightly saccharine false note to what had, up to that point, been a near perfect balance between a superficial shininess and a deep undercurrent of loss and pain.  Damn those studio executives and their fumbling populist fingers!  Still, overall, magnificent.  The characters may be fairies, but it’s all about what it means to be human.

Hrrrm.

Hmmm.

Ho Hum.

Very mixed on this.  I loved Peter Jackson’s adaptations of the Lord of the Rings, especially the first film, but I was rather worried when I heard he was making The Hobbit into three big films.  How can he be doing that with such a slight book?  I thought.  Won’t it turn out a bit . . . bloated?

And, yes, it did.

To be fair, for a three hour film it never really got boring, I wasn’t squirming in my seat or anything, but, man, it really did feel padded out beyond recognition, with barely a sequence or conversation left intact and offhand allusions in the book converted into weighty additions.  An interminable pre-title with the elder Bilbo, a ponderous exchange between Gandalf, Saruman and Galadriel, an utterly unnecessary aside with Radagast.  I felt like I must be watching the extended edition, where every scene goes on just that bit longer than it needs to.  Sometimes a lot longer.  Sometimes even longer than that.  I thought they cut and sculpted the Lord of the Rings books very well for the original films but, you know, it’s one thing – surely a tricky, skilled and difficult thing but one thing all the same – to cut down a wealth of source material and maintain the feel.  It’s entirely another to add great wodges of your own stuff to quite slight material.  The dialogue in those new sections clunked, the voice-over creaked, and for me it ended up just not feeling very much like the Hobbit at all.

What it did feel like was a less original and interesting prequel film to the Lord of the Rings series.  There was a whole lot of rather self-important repetition of things from the trilogy – the same sort of sweeping angles over a similar fellowship threading up a snowy ridge with the same sort of music playing, Gandalf giving Bilbo the same sort of dewy eyed bitter-sweet smile he gave Frodo in the same sort of situation, spindly collapsing bridges beneath the Misty Mountains were a lot like the ones in Moria, Gandalf sent a moth for help from his burning pine just like he did when he was trapped on Orthanc.  I could go on.  There was a sense of having seen it done before with a bit more conviction, and everywhere there seemed to be a ponderous weight of linking everything back to the Lord of the Rings that wasn’t really necessary.  Plus a strange desire to turn Thorin into a kind of cut-height Aragorn, all handsome, windswept and heroic that I found slightly . . . odd.

Perhaps it was just me, or the years have rolled by and what once looked good does no longer, but the film also felt a bit less artful in its visuals than the Lord of the Rings were.  Too much reliance on heavy CGI this time around, with a couple of the villains not looking all that convincing for my money.  In Fellowship of the Ring the Uruk Hai were very well made up and armoured real guys, and that gave the fight scenes a weight and punch and reality that was very much lacking here.  The action was a bit cartoonish, a bit uninvolving.  There was a cheesier sense to the whole thing.

Now, lest I am accused of giving this a panning let me say there was a lot to admire.  Martin Freeman made a very good Bilbo, I thought.  Gollum was brilliant and the scene of their Riddles in the Dark definitely the highlight.  Overall it kicked along after a languorous beginning, had some strong set pieces and a lot of the virtues of scale, look and stunning design that made the Lord of the Rings films such a success.  It was a decent way to spend an evening.  Certainly I’ll be watching the next instalment.

But, for me, it felt far more like the prequel the Lord of the Rings didn’t particularly need than The Hobbit.

Well, not that recent.  Recently watched by me, but I’m usually at least a season behind on everything.  Such is life in this era of cable, streaming, and Sky Atlantic, but ample evidence recently that the revolution in televised drama continues to be fit and healthy, and that the exciting, surprising, progressive stuff is mostly happening on the small screen rather than the big, these days.

Mad Men Season 5 – I thought Mad Men might be losing it’s mojo last season, but it seems to have come back stronger than ever with this one.  Great characters, great offhand profundities, some brilliant stuff on the nature of capitalism and consumerism and the emptiness of modern life.  Harsh but beautiful.

In Treatment Season 2 – I found the first series interesting but patchy, this one a lot better.  Gabriel Byrne and cohorts put on an acting masterclass as therapist Paul and his patients face life, death, the hell that is other people, and the even worse hell that is no other people.  Bleak but riveting, and impressive how they can squeeze the same drama from an offhand comment that other shows can’t achieve with atomic explosions.

Homeland Season 2 – Like its predecessor 24, Homeland is really good as long as you can basically accept that, seen from a distance, none of it makes the slightest bit of sense.  Excellent pair of performances from Claire Daines and Mandy Patinkin (can it really be Inigo Montoya?).  Damien Lewis is a great actor, I think, but his character in Homeland is so riven by inconsistencies I just don’t believe in him as a human being at all, and the many asides with his family just aren’t that interesting.  Still, just when you’re getting bored they throw some crazy plot twist at you and suddenly you’re interested again despite yourself.

Dexter Season 5 – Michael C Hall remains eminently watchable, and there are still a few great characters on the periphery, but Dexter’s falling well short of the heights of its first couple of seasons for me.  A lot of forgettable sub-plots going on.  John Lithgow kept the last season watchable but there’s a lack of any really strong central villain this time around and nothing much new to say.  They need to up their game.

Breaking Bad Season 3 – Magnificently bleak, unpleasant, ambiguous, surprising and occasionally hilarious stuff from Bryan Cranston et al.  The lies pile up and so do the bodies, and things go from bad, to worse, to much worse, and you sense they’re going to get a whole lot worse than that…

If you plan to comment, don’t spoil me on anything, people!

Mixed feelings about this one.  On the one hand there were some good moments and some great set pieces – the final half-hour long battle was pretty spectacular and must have been still more so in the cinema.  On the other, I think one’s first feeling on looking at the poster is – wow, there sure is a lot going on in that film, might it all become a muddle?  And, yeah, it did.  Great cooking doesn’t necessarily involve every spice in the rack.

The central players were all decent enough, it’s just that there were too many vying for attention.  Having had so many of their back stories set up in other Marvel films over the past few years certainly helped and leant a bit of depth, but there wasn’t much room for development within this film.  One member we hadn’t seen before (I don’t think, anyway), was the only female member of the crew, Black Widow.  I thought Scarlett Johansen was a bit of an odd casting choice there, not that I dislike her as an actor but they could have done with someone with, I don’t know, a bit more edge.  She rather lacked oomph as a character too.  No doubt she kicked a bit of ass, but amongst a bunch of mega powered men calling down the lightning, zooming about jet-powered and demolishing buildings, Black Widow’s significant contributions all seemed to consist of tricking men using her sexy/vulnerable feminine wiles.

There was a bit of a frustrating lack of consistency in places.  I know I keep banging this drum and it matters less in some contexts than others, but even so, it always seems to me that it’s as easy to have things make sense in a script as to have them not make sense, and far preferable.  The Hulk, for example.  One moment he was an uncontrollable menace, deadly to friend and foe alike.  The next he was quite capable of co-operating with others, taking instruction and, indeed, grinning at his cohorts like everyone’s loveable green best mate.

There was a slightly odd imbalance too in that, typically in these superhero movies, the hero faces a more powerful villain with greater resources and must use grit and ingenuity or the power of love or whatever to prevail against the odds, whereas here you had five or six really highly powered superheroes, backed up by the bottomless resources of the world’s combined governments facing, well, Loki on his own, really.  You couldn’t help feeling a bit sorry for Loki.  Rooting for the underdog.  He it was who had to come up with all the clever schemes, take the chances and stay on the offensive while the Avengers squabbled, dithered, and squandered their home advantage.  Loki was – I dunno – sort of the hero of the film, wasn’t he?  He certainly had more good lines than anyone else.  The result was that the plot sputtered along for most of the considerable length, lots of time spent with the heroes rather bittily reacting to minor crises of their own making.

Hey, given the amount to juggle, it could have been a lot worse.  It had it’s moments, and I’d probably watch another one.  I remain to be convinced that our Superheroes aren’t better served up individually, though…

EDIT: I haven’t expressed my thoughts about Black Widow very well.  There are some further ruminations on the representation of women in the film (or lack thereof) lower down the comments.

Now this is more like it.  Got to say I thoroughly enjoyed this lean, brutal, stylish adaptation of 2000AD’s best known character, the perfect antidote to the bloated running times and overwrought self-importance that seems to have infected action films of late.  Minimal messing around, a growly voice-over, and we’re straight into a stripped-down plot of one-man justice system Dredd and rookie Anderson fighting for their lives in a sealed off mega-building against loopy drug dealer Ma-Ma and her army of gun-happy crazies.  They went for a more modern-day feel than the comic or the ropey Stallone version, but I think that worked pretty well and probably helped a bit with budget conservation (a mere bagatelle at $45 million, I understand).  The 3d was good at times but I don’t think added a huge amount.  I remain to be convinced of the usefulness of the technology, really, given its drawbacks.  Nice score and sound design, though, especially around the sequences of sparkly slowed down time which accompanied the taking of drugs and were used to great and stylish effect.

Acting was pretty solid, especially Lena Heady as the firmly unglamorous Ma-Ma, a far cry from Cersei in Game of Thrones.  Karl Urban provided the Dredd frown and the Dredd growl  - all very Clint Eastwood but then Dredd is very Clint Eastwood, and I think you’d have to say that in general the adaptation was pretty faithful to the feel of the source material – I spotted a couple of nice nods, Chopper Graffiti and Fatties and so forth.  They didn’t really make any efforts to lift the lid and mine the hidden depths of Dredd’s character and motivations, they didn’t try to file off his brutal edges and sentimentalise him, and the film was a lot, lot better for it.  Action was sharp, ruthless and very genuinely 18 certificate luridly nasty, the judges even more remorseless than the perps, if anything, which I rather appreciated after some of the more sanitised and sentimental approaches I’ve seen taken recently.  If you’re going to show people being shot in the head, I’ve always felt you should take an honest look at the consequences rather than showing the victim bloodlessly toppling over, as in Total Recall.

Overall an uncompromising, uncluttered, unpretentious action film that stayed true to its roots and far from outstayed its welcome.  I very much hope Dredd rides again in this current incarnation…