Category Archive for ‘film and tv’ rss

TV Heaven – The Wire

April 20th, 2008 • 20 Comments

Finally, I complete my epic trilogy. Of short pieces of TV commentary. And how should one close but with – to my mind – the best thing on TV, The Wire. I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that HBO have changed the face of TV drama since the turn of the millenia. Let me count the ways. The Sopranos. Six Feet Under. Band of Brothers. Deadwood. Rome. Many more. But I don’t think they’ve done anything more consistent, more daring, more compelling and thought-provoking, than The Wire.

In theory it’s a show about policemen trying to catch drug-dealers on the mean streets of Baltimore. But it’s about an awful, awful lot more than that. Story arcs generally last at least a series, often much longer. Catch one episode, then another a few weeks later? Forget it. You’ve got to sit down and work through a series at a time. After four or five episodes you’ll probably feel confused, mildly repelled, vaguely intrigued, but slightly wondering what all the fuss is about. After ten episodes you’ll be utterly gripped. After a whole series you’ll sit amazed at how the whole thing comes together, and it will stick with you long after the end. For me, at least, the more you watch, the better it gets. And better, and better.

Each series tends to be a single, extended, fiendishly complex case, which gets at least partly wrapped up after 13 episodes, but they take the show in different directions each time. The first series sets the scene, and follows the effort of the police to take down the city’s biggest gang. The second shifts attention to Baltimore’s once-proud docks, finds time to investigate urban decay and the collapse of the American working class. The third examines the prison system, and the rehabilitation of criminals, at the same time broadens the scope into the upper echelons of Baltimore’s administration. The fourth changes up again and focuses on four young kids and their chances, looks at education, and through a race for the Mayor’s office the chances and disappointments of power. It’s a fiendishly complex show with a giant cast. I tend to watch each series on DVD as it comes out, usually within about four days, and I think that adds considerably to the experience. I don’t know if you’d be able to follow it so well spread out over 13 weeks. Certainly it would be pretty damn frustrating…

The police force are endemically lazy, almost uniformally incompetent, occasionally outright corrupt. The few good officers are always swimming against the current, usually getting ostracised to some bullshit duty as a result of being too effective and making trouble for everyone. The senior officers are obsessed with statistics and self-aggrandisement rather than meaningful results. The whole city operates on a system of favouritism and back-room dealing, where promotion is nothing to do with ability, and all about who’s “got suction”, meaning the right friends. For Chief of Homicide Rawls (one of my own favourite characters from a galaxy of brilliant ones), a big win isn’t solving a case, but managing to palm it off on another department.

Obviously, I’m neither a police nor a gangster, but there’s a feel of authenticity about near every element of this show. Real police work is shown to be more mindless drudgery than kicking down doors. Sitting for hours listening to wire-taps, following paper trails, squeezing informants, lying on roofs in the freezing cold taking photos. McNulty, probably the most central cop (though it’s always an ensemble piece), has drawn his gun once in four series, and even on that occasion never fired it, just ran around ineffectually in the dark looking scared. His partner then shot a bystander. It’s all about the confusion, the pointless complexity, the randomness, the waste and corruption. When criminals are caught it’s more often because of small accidents, treachery, or their own failings than some stroke of crime-fighting genius on the part of the police.

It’s a grim vision. Really, really grim. I very much doubt it’s done any favours to Baltimore’s tourism industry – the place looks like an endless, lawless slum of boarded-up houses, rusted playgrounds and collapsing tower blocks. The gangsters, who are followed just as closely and are just as sharply drawn as the police, usually end up dead or in jail for a very long time. The police usually end up busted, sacked, divorced, and/or constantly drunk. Those looking for happy endings or neat resolutions best run in the other direction. Unflinchingly harsh, determinedly unglamourous in its treatment of cops, criminals, drugs, violence, politics, urban decay and everything else. But at the same time it’s not unremittingly black by any means. There’s occasional nobility, honour, charity, often from the least expected quarters. Some folks try to do the right thing, in spite of the odds, sometimes with disastrous consequences. Things very rarely turn out exactly how you expect they will. Usually they turn out very badly.

Above all, though, the characters feel like real people to a degree that I don’t think I’ve ever felt with any other film or tv show I’ve seen. And the sweep of different types of people it encompasses is immense. From the young kids trying to find their way on the streets of Baltimore, to the gangsters who work the corners, to the police and their bosses, to the community leaders, to the politicos at the Mayor’s Office, it’s almost impossible to imagine that these people are actors. I can scarcely think of one weak link in the whole thing. You don’t think to yourself – great performance by Dominic West. You think to yourself – oh, there’s McNulty, I love that guy. It goes beyond great scripting and acting to a whole other plane. Much though I love, say, The Shield, it’s full of disposable, interchangable latino gangsters. In The Wire, despite there being probably hundreds of different runners, dealers, soldiers, gangsters, bosses across the four series, they all seem like real individuals, even ones who appear for moments.

In many ways, The Wire strikes me as the exact opposite of CSI Miami. Utterly real, convincing, courageous, subtle, with important points to make. It is the anti-CSI Miami. I quite like CSI, but I don’t much care for CSI Miami. I’ve never much cared for David Caruso, and I REALLY don’t care for him in that. He’s like a caricature, of a bad joke, of an idiot’s idea of what a really, really terrible over-actor is like. CSI Miami is supposedly the most successful TV Show in the world. The Wire most definitely isn’t. Now there’s a crime that needs investigating.

I could go on and on, but no-one’s paying me to, so I think I’d better close out and do some actual work. That or play Civilisation all day. You may have gathered that I think The Wire is rather good. That if you haven’t seen it, you should see the whole thing now.

NOW.

TV Heaven – The Civil War

April 15th, 2008 • 10 Comments

No, I refer not to some comic book plotline, or indeed to anything genre, but to Ken Burns’ 11 hour masterpiece of documentary film making, The Civil War. (Or The American Civil War, if you happen to be British). I’ll admit I’m not exactly capturing the Zeitgeist with this one – this series is nothing new. First shown back in 1990, I’d seen it all at least twice before, and just now rewatched it on DVD. But it’s just as good after three viewings and nearly twenty years as it was the first time round.

The American Civil War was in many ways the first truly modern war – vast numbers of men were conscripted and there were vast casualties (more Americans died in it than in all other American wars combined, if you can believe that). It was the first war in which civilians were targeted on a broad scale. It saw the first use of iron-clad warships, trench warfare that anticipated the First World War, vast prison camps and burned-out cityscapes that anticipated the Second. It was also the first war which was widely photographed, which is what makes this series possible at all. But at the same time the way in which the combatants thought, spoke and behaved seems a world away from us. It’s this collision between the old and the new that makes it such a fascinating subject, for me.

Now, I’ve worked as an editor on quite a lot of documentaries, so I appreciate just what a masterfully understated, unpretentious piece of work these films are. Visuals are almost exclusively photographs from the time, with some maps to illustrate the troop movements, some archive of veterans, and the odd bit of modern footage of the battlefields and locations. There’s no lame-ass stuff of civil war recreationists given a naff painterly effect to supposedly excite the jaded viewer. No attempt to jazz it up whatsoever. Why would you need to, when the photographs and the stories themselves are flipping amazing?

There’s an awful lot of ground to cover – political, social, industrial. The details of the warfare and of the key battles, the experience of soldiers and non-combatatants. A TV series, even one as long and thorough as this, can only ever be an introduction to such a vast subject. But this is a great, broad introduction, and the thing it achieves so brilliantly – which is so rare in films made from archive, especially stills – is a real sense of the personalities of some of the key players, and of the feel of the era, the importance of the events.

Sound-wise, it’s largely composed of writings from the time, voiced by quality actors (Morgan Freeman, Jason Robards, Jeremy Irons and Derek Jacobi among them). I don’t know if it’s something about the manner of expression of the era, or the events themselves that produced the drama, but the words are simply amazing. There’s the fabulous oratory of Lincoln, of abolitionists like Frederick Douglas, of poets like Walt Whitman. There’s the earthier wisdom of Generals like Grant, Sherman, Lee, Jackson. The magnificent pomposity of George McClellan. The reminiscences of diarists from privates on both sides to ladies of high society. Some moving, some terrifying, some simple. Stuff like:

“May 31st, 1864, Cold Harbour, Virginia. I was killed.”

It’s all held together by a superb voice-over, which manages to feel completely of a part with the rest. It’s also very uncluttered. Anyone who’s worked on voice-over driven documentaries will know that there’s always a push towards over-explaining, over-talking, filling every available second between interviews with blather. It’s actually the hardest thing to leave silent spaces, to let it breathe. It’s the pacing of these films that I particularly admire, because I realise the huge amount of work that’s required to reduce the words down to the most essential, poetic few. The huge amount of work needed to make it seem as if it was no work at all, in other words. The voice is never rushed, never confusing, the language simple and straightforward. There are long pauses with just music (of the time, of course) and subtle sound effects, we’re allowed to linger on the photographs of the people, to see their faces, to take it all in.

So powerful is the evocation of the period, in fact, that when the somewhat dated-looking sit-down interviews occasionally appear you’re kind of shocked to find the whole thing wasn’t filmed either in 1866 or yesterday. Chief among these interviews is the late, magnificent Shelby Foote, a man whose knowledge of the events is so thorough that he speaks with the emotion of an eye-witness, whose Narrative History of the Civil War is some of the most involving non-fiction I’ve ever read. Now, for reasons that I cannot begin to fathom, out of print. Bloody publishers.

Anyway, it may be somewhat off the beaten track for readers of edgy yet humorous fantasy fiction, but it’s a must see for anyone interested in the period, in war, life in general, or for my money, the art of documentary making. Inspirational stuff.

TV Heaven – Battlestar Galactica

April 9th, 2008 • 34 Comments

What with the tornado of excitement created by my own releases, reviews, signings, and convention attendances in March, and the tidal wave of resulting reviews, I realise I’ve utterly neglected my important duties as far as slagging off other people’s hard work goes. Time to put that right…

I haven’t spoken much about TV before, except perhaps indirectly, but apart from working in the business for some 10 years (though mostly in the areas of live music and documentary rather than drama), I’ve also been a keen watcher of the stuff most of my life (like most of us, I’m sure), and have observed some interesting and exciting shifts in the way it’s been approached over the last decade, especially US drama. I’ve watched with ever increasing delight the realism, depth, unpredictability, and outright darkness of shows like Six Feet Under, The Sopranos, 24 (before it became utterly ludicrous), The Shield, Nip/Tuck, Deadwood and so on, and I think a lot of this stuff has been an undoubted influence on the way I write, and the kind of stories I want to tell.

All in all, it may seem odd to say, but I take in a great deal more fiction via TV these days than I do via books, as most of my (lamentably limited) reading is non-fiction. TV seems to have gone from the medium of light, schmaltzy, disposable, poorly-made entertainment, with film as the cultured, clever cousin, to the medium in which all the clever stuff gets done first while film (at least the commercial end of it) is looking ever more cheesy and repetitive. The long format of TV series seems to allow the development of deep approaches and long arcs that you just can’t manage at the cinema, while the relatively lesser outlay seems to allow for a greater level of adventurousness. Massive generalisation, of course, and there’s still plenty of rubbish on the telly box (though don’t you dare tell me So You Think You Can Dance isn’t brilliant), but for the discerning watcher there’s more quality product out there these days than you can shake a fistful of confusing remote controls at.

The advent of DVD, and in particular for me Amazon’s system whereby they send you stuff through the post from a list, you send it back when you’re done and they send you more, has only made things better. Now you can get hold of a series and burn through the bastard in the comfort of your own living room in a few days, three or four episodes at a time. No more waiting for next week’s installment. Truly we live in a privileged age. Lately I’ve watched three different series, all excellent in their own way, my opinions on which I thought I’d share with the world. Or at least the people who read this blog…

First onto the chopping block, Season 3 of Battlestar Galactica (new version, obviously). I totally missed BSG when it first came out, so I’ll probably say a load of stuff that you’ve all been saying for months, if not years. Still, doing something everyone’s already done and calling it original is what I do for a living, so here goes … Haven’t seen Razor yet, by the way, so don’t spoil me in the comments.

The first two series, and parts of the second especially, are frakking brilliant. Shades of grey? Oh yes. Deep and interesting characters? Most definitely (self-destructive frak-up Starbuck and mean-ass one-eyed drunk Tigh are my personal favourites, though there’s much great acting going on all round). Technical quality? Oh yes again – very interestingly edited, in fact (editors never get the respect they deserve), and featuring some of the best space combat scenes I’ve seen in anything. Best of all, though, is the way that at its best BSG uses sci-fi to investigate some highly relevant questions about the real world that contemporary drama would probably balk at. How far should we compromise liberty in the pursuit of security? Does democracy work against extremism? Are terrorism or torture ever justified?

Season 3 hasn’t been quite as good as the other two, but better than I was expecting from what I’d been told. A few bad calls seem to have been made, though a lot of them I think are the result of the writers’ willingness to change things up radically and shift the focus, the courage of which I greatly respect and applaud. It’s what you have to do if you aren’t going to become a bad parody of yourself. Still, some characters don’t really work. Apollo in particular seems always to be led around by the vagaries of the plot rather than by any personality of his own, as a result of which he doesn’t really seem to have a consistent personality at all (Though I will admit that fat Apollo was a stroke of genius). Baltar seems to have gone from a fascinatingly conflicted and ambiguous character to a whinging ass. The Apollo/Starbuck forbidden love plot is weak as well, and constantly repeated to very little effect of any kind. Their eyes meet across a crowded room. They both look lean and tortured while hugging someone else. He even more chiselled than in previous series, she more tanned, having evidently spent some time on a sunbed (careful, that shit gives you cancer).

There seems to have been a general loss of focus and attention to detail round the middle of this series, which is exemplified for me (yes, yes, I am a borderline obsessive/compulsive) by the way in which the rank insignia on the various characters’ uniforms are constantly swizzling round and pointing off sideways so they don’t match any more. That happens literally in every other close-up. The hard won feeling of reality that the show was so good at generating previously is nearly frittered away by some poorly plotted episodes and a bit too much reliance on pseudo-religious mumbo-jumbo. The show is best when it engages with the real, and the prophecy stuff seems like movement in the opposite direction. One episode in particular involving some sort of radiation cloud just made no sense at all. They had to fly through it, but I’m sure in a wide shot later you could see it in the distance and there was no apparent reason why they couldn’t have just gone round the bastard.

Way the biggest mistake for me though, which started back in the second series, was the “deeper investigation” of the Cylons, which on New Caprica appeared to be lots of identical pretty people in coffee bars, and now in space seems to consist of Baltar in a bed with Lucy Lawless and a shed load of dissolves. Note to the gallery. Loads of dissolves don’t make an otherwise tedious and nonsensical sequence seem mysterious and alluring. In the first season the glimpses of Cylon environments seemed truly alien and strange – otherworldly mixtures of flesh and machine. Now the inside of a base-star is revealed to look something like a cross between a successful New York lawyer’s practice and a seventies disco. Folks in suits wander round the same stretches of bland corridor looking smug, and occasionally having unconvincing, bitchy conversations. The odd slime bath does not a tantalising alien civilisation make. Though you do gotta love Dean Stockwell.

The problem is that the show was much at its best when the Cylons were simply the unknown, implacable threat, the enemy within, a device for putting pressure on human civilisation and investigating the human reaction. Looking at them in detail makes the whole thing a) less frightening, b) less relevant to reality, and c) occasionally quite silly.

Anyway, despite a disappointing middle the season starts and ends as well as ever, and one can’t deny that sci-fi tv seems a way tougher, darker, edgier and consequently more interesting place as a result of this show. It’s often said that there’s nothing more dated than past visions of the future. I look back happily on Star Trek the Next Generation, though I was well aware even at the time that many of its episodes were poo (anythin
g involving Lwxana Troi springs to mind). I still think fondly of Picard, Data, prune juice and Cardassians. But it’s amazing how trite and disposable it all seems in the light of this dangerous new breed.

Gone are the glossy, sanitised environments of the Enterprise, in comes beaten-up, falling apart, low tech junk. Gone are the clean and shiny people too. The characters in BSG are tormented, damaged, generally drunk and strung out on drugs, often hate each other, often have sex with each other, sometimes hate and have sex with each other, and almost always have bad hair. Gone, most of all, is the noble mission to the stars. These are not people seeking out new life or new civilisations. These are people running for their lives, with hell at their backs and in their pasts, doing absolutely whatever is necessary to keep themselves alive. It’s a dystopian starship with a dystopian crew, making the best (and sometimes the worst) of a shitty, unfair universe. I particularly like the fact that they stand always ready to resort to nuclear weapons because, I mean, you would, wouldn’t you?

The future of futuristic telly has never looked so grim. And that makes me very frakking glad.

Cloverfield

February 13th, 2008 • 3 Comments

Late to the party, as always, I went to see Cloverfield tonight. I’ve seen it get some stick around the place, which quite surprises me as I really liked it, and felt it did exactly what it said on the tin and then some.

For those of you not in the know, and without giving too much away – an improbably beautiful cross section of Manhattan folk with complex interpersonal relationship problems are enjoying a fashionable loft party when the city is attacked by colossal monsters. Handheld camera chaos ensues complete with lots of shattering glass, rattling M16s, exploding power transformers, blood, screams, death, angst, and a real shit-load of dust. Everyone is very, very dusty. I even felt a bit dusty in the audience.

There are quite a few moments that stretch belief – where do all the soldiers come from and how did they get tanks into Manhattan so quickly? The motivations of the characters are, on the whole, not terribly convincing. (My god! A giant army of aliens is destroying the upper east side! Let’s run towards them!) They seem to get very badly injured then shortly afterwards run up 69 flights of steps without much trouble. The female characters stick to negligible party wear even when there are perfectly good work clothes available. But, for me, the film had just enough of its tongue in its cheek to more than get away with it. There are enough little gags to lighten the mood without damaging the suspense. It’s a slantwise look at the monster film, so it has to include all that stuff that a monster film should. Smashed up statue of liberty. Massive foot clomping down and crushing a tank. Skyscraper being demolished etc. And the fact is they do every one of these things very, very well. To bitch about realism seems to me to be kind of missing the point.

At the heart of the film is the notion that “it’s all been filmed on a home movie camera so it’s all handheld and wobbly and that.” This device ain’t especially convincing, if you really think about it – I mean, there are about 15 moments where no-one in their right, or even their wrong mind, would have held on to their bowels let alone a camera. But I think once the device is set up you kind of accept it – going back to grab the camera on occasion even becomes an in joke. And it’s strangely involving since it puts us in mind so thoroughly of the wobbly, filmed on the camera phone stuff we’re so used to seeing these days of 9/11, or 7/7, or the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. Then there’s some interesting commentary on the ubiquity of filming and photographing in our society, as ‘our’ cameraman competes with everyone else to get pictures of the chaos. The statue of liberty’s head crashes out of the sky and a few moments later the survivors are taking pictures of it on their mobiles.

And, bottom line, the way it’s all shot and edited is bloody effective. Effects and action all merge seemlessly – the grainy wobble-o-vision is forgiving to the monsters and the carnage and helps them look very real (if with slightly odd elbows). We can cut from one scene to another with a jerk and some static just like we get on You’ve Been Framed, which means the pace need never slow and the film need not outstay its welcome. And it doesn’t. It’s beautifully done, from a technical standpoint. You feel stuck right down there with the action, in amongst the nitty gritty, the little people, and the destruction looks truly massive and genuinely terrifying. My heart barely stopped going for 90 minutes, and that’s a hard trick to pull off.

Admittedly, I saw this in a good cinema with good sound. At home on your mom’s old black & white it might not work quite so well, but hey. To me, this film achieves exactly what it set out to achieve in spades. No pseudo-science bibble-babble, no striving for deeper issues, and above all mercifully free of the unforgiveable Hollywood soft-centredness that made I am Legend such a disappointment. Just edge of the seat action and really pretty people looking really scared. That’s always a winner, right?

8/10

Days of Glory (Indigenes)

December 22nd, 2007 • 5 Comments

I don’t mean for this to become some kind of film reviewing blog because, hey, let’s not forget this is supposed to be all about ME, but I saw Days of Glory last night, a French film about North African soldiers fighting for France in World War II, and it’s well worth talking about. Firstly, it’s a very good film with important points to make, and hence deserving of the searing blaze of publicity that exposure on this blog will undoubtedly produce (ha ha). Secondly, it serves as a rather neat counterpoint to both of the two films I’ve already discussed.

Where I am Legend managed to take an existing story that is brave, uncompromising, and thought-provoking, and turn it into something cowardly, pointless and utterly disposable, Days of Glory is – well – brave, uncompromising and thought-provoking. Really.

Where American Gangster is ponderous, bloated with unnecessary exposition, and pretends to have a point but doesn’t know what it is, Days of Glory is admirably lean and efficient, every scene contributing to the delivery of a heavyweight and heartfelt message. It delivers a knockout punch, alright, but it’s trimmed down, clever, and light on its feet. Kind of a Muhammad Ali to American Gangster’s Frank Bruno.

Days of Glory is the largely untold story of native-born North African Muslims who volunteered to fight with the Free French against the Germans in World War II. It’s focused on an Algerian peasant, an educated Morrocan corporal, an Arab who falls in love with a French girl, a couple of savage mountain men, and the French sergeant put in command of them.

In a world where films seem to be getting ever longer and more bloated, this is admirably streamlined and economical. The recruitment and training of the men, which in a Hollywood film might easily have taken an hour of navel-gazing screen-time, is done with six or seven sharp scenes. Ten or fifteen minutes in the main characters have all been sketched out and the background firmly established without the feeling that anything’s been rushed or overlooked. The whole thing clocks in at just under two hours and covers twice as much ground as American Gangster and I am Legend put together.

But it’s also a film that has something to say. It has a lot to say, in fact, about the period in which it’s set and about the modern world. About the exploitation of foreign soldiers by colonial powers (every bit as relevant to the British as the French). But also about racism in general, and about the relationship between the Western and the Muslim world. It’s also remarkable in that it apparently led to the end of the specific injustice of pensions not being paid to the Muslim soldiers who fought for France. A film that did some good? Can it be possible?

It’s interesting that for the English language distribution it’s been given the rather cheesy title “Days of Glory”, rather than the much more thoughtful and suitable “Indigenes” (the word the French officers would have used to describe their African soldiers, with its overtones of colonial contempt). Clearly they preferred to market it as a rousing war film than a film about racism, but the great triumph here is that it’s highly successful as both.

It’s all done without any tearful hand-wringing or breast-beating though, and I never really felt bludgeoned with THE POINT like I tend to be when Hollywood tries to make MEANINGFUL FILMS (witness the ham-fisted Blood Diamond earlier this year). The story remained always fixed on the characters, unpretentious and understated, with great acting and uncluttered film-making. There are no easy answers offered here, no simple people, and no pat resolutions. War is depicted as random, impersonal, extremely frightening, and very, very dangerous. The action scenes are hard-hitting (with the clear debt to Saving Private Ryan that I daresay everything WWII is going to have from here to eternity), and if perhaps not always exhaustively realistic, they certainly don’t lack for emotional content, which at the end of the day is the main thing.

It ain’t perfect, of course. There are a couple of moments that left me scratching my head thinking, would that have happened? The final mission didn’t seem to make a lot of sense, and it looked for a moment as if the film might wander off into rather standard heroic territory. But then it really, really didn’t. In fact I wonder if those cheeky film-makers might have held out the tantalising glimpse of a pat heroic ending just so the one they gave us was all the more stinging. I was left feeling like I’d learned something. I was left feeling as if my outlook on some things might be a bit different as a result of seeing this film. And that’s a rare and impressive achievement. Especially when you just watched I am Legend.

9/10

American Gangster

December 18th, 2007 • 3 Comments

Following the RUNAWAY SUCCESS of my post on cowardly Will Smith vehicle I am Legend (22 comments and counting, mark you) I have been prevailed upon (by me) to run my highly developed critical eye (yeah, right) over Ridley Scott’s American Gangster. I’m going to find this considerably more difficult to take the piss out of, however, and hence I imagine the laughs (and therefore the comments) will be less. But here goes, and beware of minor spoilers.

American Gangster is, in many ways, a film split in two. It’s split lengthways, in that the two main stars, Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe, play gangster and cop, and only for a very brief period at the end are they in the same scenes together. But it’s also split two thirds of the way in. The first hour and a half are devoted to the ruthless rise of Denzel Washington’s character to the biggest gangster in New York while Russell Crowe’s character does, well, some other stuff. The last hour or so there’s a sharp change of gear as the cop begins an investigation into the criminal.

Denzel Washington is a great actor, I reckon, though probably fitting into that category of actors that are basically more or less the same in every role, just a very good the same (no bad thing, Clint Eastwood and Al Pacino are not dissimilar in this regard). I’ve never seen Denzel be less than good, and often very good, and he’s good here as the ruthless man of violence on his way to the top of the ladder. But it’s a strangely flat, emotionless, absent performance. Probably that’s a pretty good representation of a complete psycopath, but it leaves the viewer (or at least this viewer) oddly uninvolved. I sat there on my sofa chomping through my Quality Street as he set people on fire and blew their brains out, neither much condemning the man nor much sympathising with him, just thinking that I like the pink Quality Streets most (the fudge ones). Don’t get me wrong, it was a good performance, but a long way from his best.

Then there’s Russell Crowe. What to say about Russell Crowe? When I first saw this guy in Romper Stomper, and then in one of my favourite films, LA Confidential, he blew my doors right off with some of the hardest-hitting angry acting you’ll ever see. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone do a man ready to explode with rage as well as he did in these two films. Since then, though, he seems intent on showing the many, many other sides to Russell Crowe, man of a hundred faces. Not that he’s bad at other stuff – he was great in The Insider (ace film) and good in Master and Commander (also a good film). I actually thought he was more than a bit hammy in Gladiator, but my wife and apparently every other female on the planet strongly disagrees. I ain’t seen him do much good lately, though. As a big enthusiast for westerns I was really looking forward to seeing him play an outlaw in 3.10 to Yuma (a disappointing film). “Now he’ll get out the bad!” I thought, but despite having all the cool lines he got totally acted out of the wild west by Christian Bale. Like a sulky singer who refuses to play his biggest hits on tour and will only do his experimental new material, he steadfastly refuses to get nasty on screen, instead (it would appear) preferring to vent his spleen on hotel clerks and so forth in real life. And I found him pretty bland in American Gangster. Not bad, but certainly forgettable. Like crabsticks. Disappointing (again) from a man I know can deliver so much more.

It wasn’t all his fault, to be fair. His sections of the film, at least in the earlier part, seemed a bit of an afterthought, rather ponderously and unnecesarily setting up his credentials as the one good cop in a world gone bad before actually getting him involved in some investigating. A sub-plot about his neglect of his wife and kid didn’t really seem to go anywhere in the end. It was all stuff I felt could have been implied just as well with a few well-placed lines of dialogue, as though they were casting about for things for him to do while Denzel built his criminal empire.

But there were some problems on Denzel’s side of the film as well, for me. It was all very serviceable, with some great evocation of sixties/seventies Harlem (not that I was there to check the validity, but it looked right to me) and some really fantastic music. But it was kinda drawn-out and slow moving, and the stone-faced gangster on his way to disaster reminded me way too much of a whole stack of other rise of a gangster films. He disposes of cocky competitors in merciless ways. He buys a club, and a piano, then his guys snort lines of coke off it. He lords it up by the boxing ring. He has naked women handling his drug factory, just like Wesley Snipes did way back when in New Jack City. His relationship with his trophy wife in particular seemed like a bit of a carbon copy of Pacino and Pfeiffer in Scarface. It’s all supposedly based on a true story, for sure, but there was plenty of room for interpretation that could have taken us into newer waters.

Now, having said all that, after about an hour and a half (over half way through, mark you) the film seemed suddenly to kick into a higher gear. Crowe begins an investigation into Washington and matters become much more focused and involving. There’s an excellent sequence of a police raid that was genuinely tense and scary. And, finally, there’s a great scene between the two leads that threatens to say something meaningful about society. It felt like a solid film by this point, but it all left me a bit frustrated, wondering whether the first hour and a half couldn’t have been drastically cut down or even excised completely. The French Connection doesn’t begin by showing you the early part of Popeye Doyle’s career in tedious detail. It effortlessly demonstrates what you need to know about his character through his actions and his dialogue, while getting on quick with the work in hand.

Overall, I was left wondering what new tricks this film really brought to a very well-trodden genre. Despite some passing attempts to show the hideous cost of Washington’s heroin empire, the film didn’t really seem to me to revel in the gangster cool any less than Scarface, or King of New York, or Deep Cover even, and it had nothing like the hard edge of earlier crime classics like The French Connection or, for that matter, The Godfather. Perhaps Washington’s oddly emotionless performance had something to do with it. It almost made it worse from this point of view that it was based on a true story, and offered the hint of having something important to say. There was almost a sense of “this is a clever and significant treatment of the subject matter, so it’s fine to enjoy watching Denzel Washington blow people’s brains out and think no more about it.” He’s made to look noble by comparison with other criminals because he has sound business practices, and with the bent cops who leech off him, and in the end he’s offered a rather unconvincingly upbeat redemption. I felt like the viewer was invited to feel pretty good about their gangster, despite the fact that, when the credits rolled and you thought about it, he was clearly a man about as evil as it’s possible to be, who’d directly committed at least three murders and profiteered from death and misery on a massive scale.

I’ve been harsh, perhaps, but it’s Ridley Scott, man, you should expect a lot. In summary, a rather ponderous rise of the gangster enlivened by a much punchier final act. Scarface, for all its over-the-top gaudy splatter, seemed to have more to say about the mentality, and the morality, of a drug-lord.

6/10

I am not Legend

December 7th, 2007 • 24 Comments

Once upon a time there was a book called I am Legend, written by Richard Matheson. It was rather a good book. In fact it’s safe to say that it’s a masterpiece of sci-fi and horror both. Robert Neville is the last man alive, everyone else having become a vampire. By day he hunts the undead through the shattered remains of the US, by night he barricades himself in his suburban home while the vampires gather on his front lawn, mocking him, and looking for a way in…

I am Legend was first printed in 1954, but it’s every bit as edgy and effective now, perhaps because its influence is still keenly felt in every zombie and vampire film made, more or less. Matheson practically invented the whole concept of ‘survival horror’ with this one slim volume. The book also features one of the best endings ever put to paper. With the final words, “I am legend”, the story is brought full circle and placed suddenly in an entirely different light. Beautifully dark and pessimistic on one hand, but so incredibly neat and effective that you’re still left with a sense of wonder rather than sadness. It’s a brilliant book, as short and breathtaking as a kick in the bollocks.

Right. You need to forget about all that.

Will Smith is the last man alive. By day he hunts deer through the artfully empty streets of Manhattan (complete with amazing product placement opportunities) for no apparent reason, by night he barricades himself in his swanky uptown townhouse, complete with basement lab sponsored by Apple Computers, and seeks for a cure to the virus that has killed more or less everyone else, and turned the rest into really pale and aggressive CGIs.

He eats stuff from cans. He shops for DVDs. He has flashbacks to his attempts to get his wife and child evacuated to safety as civilisation collapses. He knocks golfballs off of a downed Blackbird on a ruined aircraft carrier. He’s very watchable and appealing while doing it, just like he always is. There’s also a scene of him doing chin-ups stripped to the waist, which would be gratuitous except that the guy is just so damn buff.

It’s nicely made, though I’m not sure when people are going to realise that CGI STILL DOESN’T LOOK AS GOOD AS LIVE ACTION FOR 90% OF STUFF. It has the old wobble-o-vision which everyone seems to shoot in since the first series of 24 was so successful. Ruined New York is beautifully realised. There’s a couple of laughs. There’s a genuinely scary bit early on in the dark, where I was still thinking this film might be really good. Some lip service is payed to the idea of making it cold and hard-bitten, like a fat kid dipping his toe in the water of the pool, then squealing and running back to the changing room. There’s even one moment, late on, where Will Smith’s mysterious visitor looks in horror at a wall full of polaroids of the vampires he’s killed in his efforts to find a ‘cure’ and you think – hold on, we could be going somewhere dark and dangerous here – are they really going to do it? Are they going to give us what we want? What we need? What we deserve?

But the vampires don’t really gather outside the house, so you don’t have that truly terrifying sense of claustrophobia which is so powerful in the book. There’s not much investigation of the main character’s state of mind – he’s not so much the last human, dehumanised as he is a basically nice bloke who’s had a couple of bad days and tends to flair his nostrils a lot. Oh, and the ending’s an utter piece of gutless dog shit.

Imagine you’re telling a story with a brilliantly dark, unpredictable, and satisfying ending. Now remove that ending, and replace it with the most rubbish, cowardly and predictable one you can think of. Now make it a bit more rubbish. Now more cowardly. Now a lot more cowardly and predictable. Now make it twice as rubbish, and you might have an ending as rubbish, cowardly and predictable as this one is. The fact that they used the original title gave me hope that they’d use the original ending, but I should have known better – they do refer to that stroke-of-genius final line, but in a way that makes it utterly cheesy, meaningless, and naff. It’s like a kick in the bollocks, alright, but not in a good way.

I wonder if this is a classic case of the existing ending being vetoed by a bunch of faceless producers referring to focus group figures on clipboards, or perhaps a flip-chart with a Venn Diagram on it (three circles labeled rubbish, cowardly and predictable, with the area of maximum profit where they all overlap). “Sorry, Will, the Venn Diagram says we need to re-shoot.” I’d like to think so, because the ending’s not just cowardly and rubbish, it’s rushed, small-scale, and dumb. It’s not really foreshadowed by what went before, which it quite easily could have been. It feels tacked on, like the voice-over bit in the original cut of Blade Runner. It gives me hope, in fact, that one day the real ending will be unearthed in the personal effects of the director and put back over the travesty I just watched to make a decent film.

Thing is, I see in all this a bit of a sad metaphor for the state of Hollywood. US TV has never been so strong and effective as it is now, filled with brilliantly dark, unpredictable, pessimistic and realistic shows like the Sopranos, Deadwood, the Wire, and many more. Even within the SF sphere things seem to have got real dark and interesting over the last few years, with good stuff like Heroes and Battlestar Galactica (which I’ve just started watching and am quite enjoying, thanks for asking). I realise not all of these shows are box office gold, but in general things are very much heading in the right direction.

Big Studio films are by contrast, apparently, in a parlous state, having lost (on aggregate) billions of dollars this year. Rather than growing up and getting with the program the studios seem intent on simplifying, schmaltzifying, and dumbing everything down more than ever. Even when handed on a plate one of the greatest, darkest, most effective endings of all-time, they manage to make it (with no exaggeration whatsoever) into a COWARDLY PIECE OF SHIT. I guess the one advantage is that seeing the film in no way spoilers the book. You can go away and enjoy it just the same as you ever could. I strongly recommend that you do so.

Perhaps I’m being unfair. There’s plenty about this film that’s not awful. If you’d never read the book you might enjoy it, but just think it had a rather disappointing ending. I have read the book though, so to me …

It’s a DISGRACE.

3/10. I would give it 2, but Will Smith is just so damn buff.