Friday, 19 February 2010

The Hurt Locker

Hmm. It was good, but not nearly as good as I was expecting, given all the excellent reviews I'd read.

It was well made, it was well acted, but it didn't seem to offer anything particularly new in the way it was put together, and for me the occasional slow motion shot didn't help with the general tone of wobbly-gritty-news-o-vision. As if someone was determined to be harshly realistic but couldn't resist going just the slightest bit Vin Diesel on its ass.

I like that it otherwise portrayed modern warfare as an admirably unglamorous, boring, terrifying, meaningless, random mess, but I'm not convinced it did anything that Generation Kill didn't do way better.

Hmm. If I'd heard nothing about it I'd probably have been wowed, but given I'd heard so much, I was a little disappointed. Still good, though.

Labels: film and tv

Friday, 8 January 2010

Inglourious Basterds

The first scene was terrific.

Cristoph Waltz was mesmerising.

I usually like Brad Pitt but he was totally forgettable in this.

I'm not sure whether the scene with Mike Myers impersonating Austin Powers impersonating a British general was awful or brilliant, but I tend towards the latter.

Some scenes went on really, really, REALLY long while achieving virtually nothing.

There is a very fine line between hilarious yet shocking shoot-outs in which everyone kills each other (TM), and just removing all your half-decent characters much too early.

There were times when peculiar looming close-ups would appear for no apparent reason. I wasn't sure if he was riffing off something and I didn't know what it was, or if it was just a mess. It certainly seemed a mess. An uncomfortable pile-up of western, war-time melodrama, and modernist ultra-brutal war story.

The trademark Tarantino BIG TITLES, strange cutaways, voice-overed montages, and apparently incongruous sound effects and music did not in this case contribute to the feeling of a coherent and cohesive whole.

There were further glimpses of quality, usually involving Cristoph Waltz.

But mostly it was a self-indulgent shambles.

Labels: film and tv

Sunday, 3 January 2010

Moon/Star Trek

Saw a couple of last year's sci-fi features over the last week.

Moon is a thoughtful, low-budget, psychological science fiction piece that, in its depiction of one man losing his marbles in the loneliness of space, put me somewhat in mind of that old classic Silent Running. Sam Rockwell turns in not one but two excellent performances as the one-man crew (if you've seen it you'll know what I mean) of a power-harvesting operation on the moon, and Kevin Spacey backs up as the voice of his Hal-alike sinister robot buddy. He has but days left on his three-year contract when he starts to see things out there, and paranoia and head-fucks ensue. I'd say the outcome is actually a bit less interesting than I was hoping for, but it's still an intelligent and affecting old-school piece

A film that seemed to deliberately avoid being either intelligent or affecting is the recent "reboot" of Star Trek. I was a huge fan of Next Generation back in the 90s, watched the whole lot of about 160 episodes within a few weeks. Occasionally, and particularly during the Lwxana Troi episodes, me and my friends would shout, "bollocks!" at the tv, but generally I loved that show. I'm also an admirer of JJ Abrams' Lost and Cloverfield, he produces some clever, original, entertaining stuff. Plus I'd heard some very positive reports of this new take on the original Star Trek from people who really do know the difference, and so I was expecting big things.

I thought it was bad. Let me tell you why.

Star Trek always tried to be clever. It didn't always succeed, and at its worst it spouted a lot of boring, pretentious pseudo-scientific waffle, but it was always aspirational. It aimed to gel with science, to have internal consistency, and at times it reached real heights, tackled serious science-fictional, ethical, political issues in dramatic and entertaining ways. The reboot ... not so much.

Spoilers to follow.

Star Fleet Regulation 619 apparently means that any officer emotionally involved in the mission can be relieved of command. Ignoring the delightfully vague wording, how do you define emotional involvement? Once planets get all blown up and billions killed and the universe as we know it under threat surely we all get a tad emotional, no? And use of said regulation in the film? To allow utterly unqualified Kirk (whose father had been killed by the villain) to replace reasonably qualified Spock (because his mother had been killed by the villain). Wha?

A black hole is not in fact a hyper-dense collapsed star that exerts such powerful gravity that even light cannot escape from its event horizon. No. It iz kind of like a big magic mirror, like out of Zelda, which you can get dragged into and will probly go back in time though I'm not shure how far coz that's science, but you can get away from it by TOTALLY BLOWING UP YOUR OWN WARP CORE. KABLOOOOOOOOOOW!!!!!!! It is an explosion so ace it is BLUE!!!!!!

Star Fleet is very advanced. The bridge of its latest Flagship USS Enterprise looks like WAY cool with all kinds of transparent shit and ergonomic back-friendly chairs and glowy touch buttons like on an i-phone. But its engine room looks like a soviet-era russian slime factory with big turny-turny wheels and great huge twisty pipes full of bubbly blue water.

Space battles in star trek were once a question of careful decision making and pinpoint timing, all played out within the unimaginable inky vastness of actual space. "Aft torpedoes, fire!" and all that. Proceed at quarter impulse. We all remember the classic sequence of Kirk battling Khan in the nebula, right? It was all about cunning. All slow build-up, then sudden and deadly. Phasers were precise and surgical. But why have one phaser firing when you can have ten thousand? Surely that'll make the film ... 10,000 times better! With the reboot the Enterprise can blaze away like a crap seventies lightshow at an ancient Egyptian monument. Zanger zanger zanger go the pretty fairylights!

Worst of all was the villain, Nero, who seemed to suffer from every crap-villain cliche in the crap-villain rule book. I was talking about how much I enjoyed Avatar the other day (though I seem to have these two films entirely the wrong way round by most people's estimation), and observing that, despite it's plotting issues, the villains were pretty convincing. I understood what they were doing and why. When looked at from the villain's point of view, the film still made sense. Nero's motivations made no sense, his plan made no sense, his individual actions were all completely mad, and not in a Hannibal Lector way, just in a "I can't be arsed to work out a story that makes any sense" way. Why did his mining ship look like a thistle? Why was his mining ship so heavily armed it could annihilate a klingon armada (from the future, maybe, but could a modern supertanker defeat a fleet of World War II warships?) Why did he blame the entire federation for the destruction of Romulus? What was he doing in the 25 years between blowing up a federation ship and waiting for Spock to appear? Why did he not try to make contact with the Romulus of the past? Why all the tattoos? Why, why, why, would he maroon Spock on an ice planet to watch another planet explode when he could have kept him on his own bridge to do it, then killed him at his leisure? If you wanted to force someone to watch the destruction of earth, would you maroon them on Saturn? I am quite mad, insanely angry, and absurdly powerful, but only within certain spookily plot-helpful parameters!!! Raaaargh!!!! Even his demise was a rubbish psycho-cliche (No! I would rather die than accept help from you!) SHITTEST. VILLAIN. EVAH.

Now there were glimpses of quality through the haze. Some of the characters were very nicely played, Bones and Spock in particular (though Simon Pegg's comic relief Scotty was neither comic nor relieving for my money), some of the effects work was nice, and I liked how it was sometimes surprisingly ruthless. There were a good few laughs too, but for me it was like sticking nice bumpers, underlighting and a flash spoiler on an old banger that just don't go. It had the classic problem of trying to give every character their little moment regardless of whether it made a contribution to the whole. I was too distracted by reeling from one nonsensical clanger to another to ever get immersed in any of the character work or the action. There didn't seem to be a coherent film there at all, just a load of sequences all tossed together and shot with a really irritating star filter that put sparkly horizontal flares on everything.

I mean, I'm all for a focus on entertainment, especially when converting from small screen to big, after all Star Trek's most successful film outings have been the most action-oriented (Wrath of Khan and Undiscovered Country) and its diabolical worst the most self-consciously, pompously intellectual (I cannot speak the name of Star Trek V). And I concede that the franchise was badly in need of a reboot after the largely rubbish Voyager and Enterprise, but I don't see why we have to so conspicuously disconnect the grey matter. Maybe if I'd seen it on the big screen I'd have been wowed by the scale, like I was with Avatar. Maybe I've been harsh, but I was disappointed. It'd be a shame if the sf franchise that aspired to depth and intelligence ended up as dumb and shallow as this.

Say it with me, now. Bollocks!

EDIT: It has been drawn to my attention that Adam Roberts posted an eerily similar review more than six months ago with deeper insight and better gags. Curse these ivory tower sf-hating holloway-don academic english professor types!

Labels: film and tv

Thursday, 31 December 2009

Best Of...

Happy Birthday to Me. Happy Birthday to Me. Happy Birthday dear me-eeeee...

Yes indeed, another year of dry humour, wet nappies, sleepless nights, wonderful reviews, shitty reviews, and storming success drags to a close. So long 2009! Nice knowing you. A busy year, for me. I had a baby. I moved from London to Bath. I sold a flat and bought one. I even published another book! With all these good things to celebrate, one wonders why I still feel slightly anxious all the time. It's the modern condition, people!

An end, as well, to another year of blogging. Shall we look back to some of the highlights...?

Most Commented On Blog Post
Storming up the charts with 80 comments was my response to my favourite review of the year "People suck, war is bad, and the world is a bottomless shithole," which included, alongside the trademark apparently self-deprecating while actually being self-glorifying wit, some thoughtful introspection on the subject of ragged and unhappy endings. It even managed to beat last year's 60 comment winner. Proof positive, as if any were needed, that thought-provoking consideration of genre issues CAN be more interesting than being hit over the head with a piece of wood. A score for the intelligentsia. Runners up were an opportunity for you all to bitch about my US cover (always popular), with 55 comments, and my musings on my neighbour's teenage son never having heard of Dungeons & Dragons, with 42. Perhaps if I can think of more worthwhile and thoughtful posts to make I can break the 100 mark next year. No. I don't think so either...

Best Foreign Trip
I might have felt strangely sick the whole time I was there for no apparent reason, but Sweden/Norway your streets is clean, your trains is reasonable yet punctual, your people is friendly and above averagely good-looking, and your sf&f specialist bookstores is excellent. I also remain a committed fan of your modernist minimal design, unassuming royal families, and efficient education, health, and welfare systems.

Best Authorial Bitch-Fight involving me
Was definitely the no-holds-barred grudge match between me and Brent Weeks at the Borders Book Blog wich I totally won. Ask anyone. There's even some talk that we'll be taking this show on the road next year...

Best Authorial Love-In involving me
My thoughtful yet hilarious interview with Patrick Rothfuss on the occasion of his recent charity drive.

Best Authorial Blurb about my Works
Has to be the George RR Martin. I still feel deeply smug about that one.

Best "Best SF&F of 2009" list of 2009
Werthead demonstrates his impeccable good taste by selecting Best Served Cold as his best book of 2009, saying, "a tale of revenge, murder, assassination, war and generally pleasant stuff, with Abercrombie somehow outstripping the first trilogy in terms of mayhem." Graeme demonstrated an equal level of discernment - "It delivered on all fronts and just kept delivering." The redoubtable Dave Bradley, editor of SFX, has also declared Best Served Cold his best book of 2009 calling it a "brilliantly brutal tale of revenge". I note in passing he also had Dragon Age up there. Nice call, Dave. Rob Grant's taste at Sci-Fi London would have been as good if it weren't for that pesky Jesse Bullington and his bleak medieval european stylings...

Best Served Cold has popped up on a few other lists too. Fantasy Book Critic's, Joe Sherry's , even the editor's picks for sf&f at amazon.co.uk, where I stand proudly among such notables as Terry Pratchett, Jane Austen, and Stephanie Meyer. It's a varied crowd over there...

But lest we over-sugar the pudding, Best Served Cold also made Western author Iain Parnam's most disappointing books of 2009. He thought, "everyone is repellent, the story is dreary, nothing matters much, and the wit is missing." I shrug me a river. It's all subjective, people.

Books
I know what you're thinking - who the hell reads books any more? But this year I managed to get through a few, and some of them weren't even written by me. Non-fiction highlight would probably be CV Wedgewood's Thirty Years War. A classic of narrative history. Fiction highlight? Despite some tough competition from the likes of Fritz Leiber, Junot Diaz and Jeff Vandermeer, you'd have to walk a very long way through a post-apocaplyptic wasteland to beat Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Searingly stark and bleak, but somehow still life-affirming. Like a visit to Brooks Nightclub in Lancaster used to be.

Films
Well I must say my socks were quite blown off by Avatar, it may well have been the most jaw-dropping cinema experience for me since Fellowship of the Ring, way back in 1904 when I didn't have kids, but along somewhat more traditional lines District 9 and No Country for Old Men were certainly memorable too. Watchmen ... not so much.

TV
Battlestar Galactica ended more with a whimper than a bang, which left the final season of The Shield as my TV Highlight. That certainly ended with a bang. IN YOUR FACE. Michael Chiklis also stalks off with my coveted "Most Loathsome yet Strangely Sympathetic Bald Character" award. Mad Men continued to be great, second series of Dexter was good but, for my money, not as good as the last. Other things that have variously titillated, intrigued and amused included 30 Rock, True Blood, and, of course, Strictly Come Dancing. What am I going to DO with my Sunday mornings now it's over?

Games
Good year, good year. Despite tough competition from the old-school roleplaying of Dragon Age and the Medici-stabbing thrills of Assassin's Creed II, it has to be the smooth-as-velvet next-generation adventure charms of Uncharted II that gave my boat the most float this year. The importance of PC games seems to be very much dwindling for me, as console games gradually invade the rpg and srategy territory that was traditionally theirs. Medieval:Total War is possibly my favourite game of all time, so I found Empire to be a tad disappointing. I haven't played it a lot since I lack a PC powerful enough to run it well, but the AI seems kind of rubbish to me. It usually takes them a year or two to get those games properly balanced, though, so who knows. Perhaps a future classic...

And there we have it. Let rip the party poppers. Roll on 2010...

Labels: film and tv, games, interviews, reading, reviews

Sunday, 27 December 2009

Avatar

Holy smokes, I thought this was mind-blowing. Say what you like about James Cameron, the man hits what he aims at. With Avatar I think it's safe to say he was aiming at big, big, big screen sci-fi action spectacular, and for me he fairly hit the bullseye.

You could say that the big blue skinny native aliens ticked pretty much every cliche in the noble savage book, that the eco-message was on the ham-fisted side, that the dialogue was occasinally a bit silly, that the lead character wasn't particularly compelling, especially in human rather than alien guise, and that people occasionally did things that weren't terribly believable, but it would be a stingy viewer who didn't concede that most of that was utterly muscled aside by the stunning visuals, the incredible imagination, the sheer skill of the way it was put together. The alien world was like stepping into a fully realised Roger Dean painting, the human technology was just as believable, the action sequences really were amazing, and the story ... well, it was a bit familiar, but I'm all for old stories done in new ways, especially when the overall experience is as astonishing as this is. It ain't often I get to the end of a 2 hour 40 film wishing it was a bit longer...

It may partly be that it's the first time I've seen anything in 3d at the cinema, and it may well be that in 2d, on the small screen, it'll all look a bit lurid and pompous, but on the big screen, wow, utterly spectacular and involving.

Labels: film and tv

Wednesday, 28 October 2009

The Shield Season 7

Ouch.

I need to say that again. Ouch.

I loved the first couple of series of the Shield. It was tough, hard, morally ambiguous in a way I hadn't really seen in cop shows before. Had a killer twist in the very first episode. And featured a superb, eye-poppingly angry and dangerous central performance from Michael Chiklis as Vic Mackie. "Are you the good cop or the bad cop?" a suspect asks him. "I'm a different kind of cop," he replies, before beating a confession out of him with a telephone directory. This was my kind of show.

It's a bit of a shame in a way that it was rather eclipsed for me thereafter by the coming of The Wire, which was not only the best cop show I'd ever seen, but probably the best tv I've ever seen period. It also felt as if the Shield dropped off slightly in quality in its middle couple of series, though it was still capable of some great moments. But boy did they build back up to a hell of a finale with this final season, which has to be one of the toughest, most uncompromising and courageous endings to a tv series of which I'm aware.

After watching Vic and his crooked pals on the Strike Team beat, blackmail, lie and murder their way out of about six impossible situations in previous seasons, there's a horrible sense of inevitability about the final reckoning as the walls close in and they begin to turn on each other. Watching Vic and his one-time compadres squirming increasingly desperately for some way out as the wheels come off the wagon is almost unwatchably tense, and the tension builds, and builds, and builds to a series of gobsmacking moments in the final few episodes.

It's worth watching all seven series for one scene alone, in which Vic finally confesses to his butcher's bill of crimes. As he's trying to decide whether to do it they hold an ultra-tight close-up on his face for what feels like about 30 silent seconds, and all the anger, and bitterness, and swagger, and self-disgust that sums up the character is communicated without a word said. It's a brilliant piece of acting, but Chiklis is ably supported by some great work all round. It doesn't end quite the way you might have expected. But it's a perfect ending nonetheless, and one that leaves you feeling raw for days afterwards. Ouch.

Horribly brilliant.

Labels: film and tv

Monday, 28 September 2009

Battlestar Galactica - End Of

And beware of spoilers ahead.

Hmmm. Watched the final season (or half season) of the new BSG not long ago, a show that I loved the first couple of seasons of, but had mixed feelings about the third. So did they pull it all together in the final episodes? Well ... not really.

There was still much too much of the religious and cylon-related blather, joined now by much incomprehensible waffle regarding the cycle of human/cylon violence and the role of the key final five cylons in everything. And nothing. I guess they'd painted themselves into a corner where they had to try and make it all make sense and, well, they didn't really. Not for me, anyway. One can't escape the feeling that they picked as the final five - and especially the much-touted fifth - a rather random mixed bag of mostly second string characters, which didn't produce much of a "frak me! It was them all along?" reaction, at least from this viewer. More of a - "what, her? Oh."

The result was that the show then focused on these characters a lot more than it really should have, at the expense of the characters the show originally focused on and who were actually a lot better on the whole. Starbuck was sidelined. Admiral Adama did a lot of tortured gurning but not much glorious implacability. Apollo barely showed up in the last few episodes, and when he did his ludicrous hair was really stretching my suspension of disbelief. Baltar was literally treading water for two whole seasons so he could then show up for a much touted final moment that proved to be relatively insignificant. They laid some good action sequences on at the end, but for a show that weighed in heavily with the prophecy and portent the payoff was rather lame, and buried under an awful lot of philosophical mumbo jumbo, and made one think that they weren't really ever thinking much more than a season in advance, and just couldn't pull all the strands together when they needed to.

A lot of things were rushed, and a lot just didn't make much sense once you thought about them. Didn't really believe they'd give up all their technology to live as primitives. Oh, but building a log cabin's apparently alright. Why would Adama snr. abandon his son and friends for no apparent reason, rather than living just down the valley, or whatever? And, for that matter, would the hardboiled political and military pragmatists who'd led the fleet through its first couple of seasons really have gone on a suicidal rescue mission for the sake of one little girl? The subplot about galactica falling apart seemed pretty unnecesary really, but took up an inordinate amount of time with many, many similar shots of people welding.

At times, when it focused more on the human issues - the politics, and violence, and treachery, it was firing on something like all cylinders again, but unfortunately that only served to remind me how frakking great it was when the cylons were just the unknowable other, the enemy within and without against which the human response was measured and assessed, and every episode was full of launch tubes, sweat, doubt, fear, and the endless threat of nuclear annihilation. Bad hair was a constant throughout but, you know, it seemed to denote drama in the earlier episodes, and gritty reality. Here it just made me think of a disco...

Labels: film and tv

Wednesday, 9 September 2009

Watchmen

How can you take something so good,

Adapt it so faithfully,

And end up with something so dull?

4/10

Labels: film and tv

Monday, 7 September 2009

District 9

Wow, what a great film. Probably the best big-budget sf film I've seen since ... erm ... have there been any other good ones recently? Although the budget, at some $30 million, was pretty paltry by modern Hollywood standards, it certainly looks and feels big budget, which just goes to show, as if it needs doing yet again, that imagination is a lot more important than money. What a shame I have neither...

Aliens have arrived on earth, not in some glistening superstructure over Washington but in a mountain of floating junk over Johannesburg. They have neither attacked nor made dignified contact, but instead been interned in a giant slum (more than a little reminiscent of apartheid-era townships) where they have become addicted to cat food and are preyed upon by gangsters and profiteers while a sinister multi-national experiments on them in an attempt to unlock the secret of their technology. Pencil-pushing company man Wikus is given the task of evicting the "prawns" from the ghetto and moving them to a new one, but it isn't until he starts to mutate into one that he develops some understanding for their unfortunate position in human society...

A lot of its success for me is down to the structure and editing, which is frakking brilliant, seamlessly integrating faux-documentary interviews, pretend news footage and more traditional dramatic sequences into a smoothly flowing whole which grips right away and never lets go, managing to combine the immediacy and believability of documentary with the immersion of traditional drama. It has some great CGI on the aliens, and their weaponry in particular, a great central performance from Sharlto Copley as Wikus (most of his dialogue apparently improvised on location), and some great action sequences. It's funny, it's dark, it's clever, it's exciting, it's sometimes horrifying and occasionally even affecting, and above all it's very entertaining.

You could point to some weaknesses - a few details of the plot seemed a bit creaky, apart from Wikus the human characters were pretty one dimensional (voodoo-obsessed black gangsters, profit-obsessed white company men, "I just love killing prawns!" cackles the gung-ho paramilitary villain). The crazy action sequence towards the end was maybe a little drawn out with a few too many people exploded by alien weaponry (amazing the first time, less so the hundredth), and the second half is definitely a lot less inventive than the first (though it's still done very well). But the main criticism I've seen is that the film doesn't necessarily follow through on the allegorical aspects, and I think to concentrate on its supposed real-life message (or the failure of said) is somewhat to miss the point. Which for me is that this was just a superb action sci-fi film, gripping from the first frame to the last, and brilliantly clever and inventive, not so much in its politics and philosophy, as in its design, structure, editing and acting. To me it's a massive success not so much in the territory of Blade Runner as in the territory of Total Recall or Robocop. Quality, commercial, science fictional entertainment, but with some sharp thinking and a little social commentary behind the explosions.

9/10, and I'm not far from giving it the extra point, either...

Labels: film and tv

Friday, 17 April 2009

Appaloosa

Me thinks I haven't done much talking about films recently, so ... I watched Appaloosa last night. Ed Harris and Viggo Mortensen are steely-eyed lawmen in a tough western town. Renee Zellwegger comes between them. Jeremy Irons and Timothy Spall stretch their accents past the point of complete credibility in support. Good cast.

I love me a western. Really I do. Especially of the revisionist modern variety. The Outlaw Josey Wales may be my favourite film of all time. But honestly, I'm not sure I've seen one since Unforgiven that really needed making. 3.10 to Yuma was weak. Open Range was actually not bad, which is a surprise, since I'm not so great a Costner fan, but it was nothing amazing. Ride with the Devil, yes, but it's more civil war picture than classic hick-town six-shooter stuff. South of Heaven, West of Hell was baffling nonsense. Appaloosa, well, it was nicely acted, and nicely shot, and started reasonably but, well, overall...

I still haven't seen a western since Unforgiven that really needed making.

5/10

EDIT: Erik makes a good point about Deadwood, which is, of course, brilliant. I guess I was thinking of films rather than tv, he says, lamely. No doubt there will now be an avalanche of comments pointing out all the wonderful westerns made over the last fifteen years...

Labels: film and tv

Monday, 3 November 2008

The Wire Season 5

Well, those of you who haven't seen the Wire are probably bored of hearing people spout off about how it's the best thing on TV. But it really is the best thing on TV. I've already said so here.

Nothing touches it for realism, for characterisation across a simply immense cast, for depth of investigation. They never rest on their laurels either, always looking with each series at a new area of the system that makes Baltimore work (or more often, fail to). The first series looked at crime and police, the second added the docks and urban decay into the mix, the third correction and rehabilitation, the fourth politics and education. The fifth brings in the newspaper system, the news, the role of truth and lies in politics, and the way that people use stories for their own ends. It's incredible the way that within a few scenes in the first episode, they sketch out the staff and structure of the Baltimore Sun newspaper with the deftest of touches, and create enough to make a compelling show on its own while simultaneously advancing the plot and shining a light on all kinds of other areas of the city.

I wasn't completely convinced by this final series at the half-way mark, in fact after the seventh episode of ten I was concerned they might have lost their way - some elements of the plot seemed a little far-fetched, a couple of the characters they were focusing on had become a little irritating (McNulty in particular). Then the last three episodes were absolutely fantastic once again, and brought the whole thing together as they always seem to do. It's grim, it's hard, it's wonderfully pessimistic about the nature of power and the workings of politics, but at the same time it's not at all without messages of hope. No character in it is simple, no problem has simple answers, people who are utterly destructive in some circumstances can be heroes in others. There was a brilliant circularity to the whole story, as seen in five seasons, as characters come and go, but the roles they play in the great scheme of crime, policing, education and politics are eternal...

Recommended pretty much beyond anything else ever.

Labels: film and tv

Wednesday, 6 August 2008

No Country for Old Men

Hugely behind the times, of course, but I undertook to say something about this when I saw it, and it really is a very interesting film. I usually try to avoid spoilers, but in this case discussion of the unusual narrative structure will make that impossible. The film, as well as making me think on a more general level, also brought up some thoughts about the narrative structure and ending of my own series, and the risks you take when you set out to try and twist or defy conventions.

So, if you haven't seen No Country for Old Men AND read The First Law, my advice is to buy them both now, read/watch them, and return, but to read no further until you have...

It's a beautifully made film, for sure. Very lean, naturalistic, unembroidered, with little or no music, no big camera moves or self-conscious editing, nothing flashy to distract from the feeling of brutal realism. It actually seemed to me a very good filmic representation of Cormac McCarthy's stripped-back writing style, from what I've read of his (it's adapted from one of his novels). Dialogue is spare - people tend to spend more time doing than talking about it - but characters are still sketched with a deft hand, even incidental ones. Acting is equally understated and effective across the board, particularly oscar-winning Javier Bardem, who produces one of the all time great screen psycopaths, exuding relaxed menace as he calmly slaughters his way across Texas under some of the most terrifying hair ever captured on film. I should also mention, since I think it unlikely that Tommy Lee Jones will read this, a great performance from Garret Dillahunt as Deputy Wendell.

It's amazing how much tension is built up so quickly just by concentrating on the small things, the everyday, the routines. It reminded me at times of that prolonged final sequence in the Sopranos - everything observed with such drawn-out, close-up care that the most irrelevant details become imbued with a sense of menace. Indeed the sense of menace built up so high at times that I could hardly look. Rarely has a film been so unromanticised, so ruthlessly realistic. Violence was frequent, savage, sudden, sometimes random, often unpredictable, always extremely painful.

And the sense of realism went beyond the treatment of events and right to the narrative structure, which was every bit as ragged, strange, and unpredictable as real life. The (to that point) central character, the closest thing to a hero, who's been engaged in a bloody cat-and-mouse with the villain, ends up getting killed, off-screen, by some largely unimportant extras. There is no showdown, no denouement. I must confess it left me with mixed feelings. On the one hand I greatly admired the realism, the way in which they chose to strip the subject matter of any trace of glamour. On the other I couldn't avoid a nagging disappointment, and a loss of interest after that point. A perhaps unreasonable feeling that the film could have been so much more satisfying with a more traditional build-up, climax, and resolution.

Stripped of what had been the central spur of the film, it seemed to lose its way slightly. Tommy Lee Jones' sherrif was suddenly pushed to centre stage, having been more of a supporting player to that point. There were a couple of rather protracted scenes in which he searched for meaning in the meaningless events, perhaps mirroring the viewer's own rather desperate search in the same direction. But there were no answers, in the end. There was no resolution. Throughout, the killer acted with complete impunity, the police always three steps behind. The only thing that came close to stopping him a random car accident. I ended up intellectually impressed, impressed with the boldness of the filmmakers, certainly, but emotionally unsatisfied, maybe.

It's interesting, because this is exactly the sort of response I've seen some people have to the ending of Last Argument of Kings, although obviously I went nowhere near as far in terms of defying the expected narrative structure and would certainly lay no claims to doing it half as well as No Country for Old Men. But when people don't like the series it doesn't tend to be the bleakness they dislike, it's the raggedness, the lack of resolution, the sense that the characters haven't necessarily achieved anything. The sense of life meandering on. They feel a bargain's been struck that hasn't been honoured, maybe. I guess when you choose to defy conventions - even if you do it as well as No Country for Old Men - there will always be some readers, or viewers, who are disappointed not to have got what they were expecting...

Still, a grim and brilliant 9.

Labels: film and tv

Monday, 21 July 2008

TV Heaven - Firefly

Following my self-indulgent ramblings on Battlestar Galactica I was advised by various posters to give Firefly a go. I'd heard good things about it in the past, have always been a cautious admirer of Joss Whedon's approach to TV, and I'd watched the film adapted from the series, Serenity, and found it OK but been a bit nonplussed. Probably I'd been reluctant to watch the series just because I knew there was only the one, and somehow when you know there's a limited quantity of something it does spoil your enjoyment. And after all, if it got canned after a season it can't be that great, right? But I got round to it over the last few weeks and I must say, it really is very, very good indeed. Or might have become so, perhaps. What a shame there is no more.

It's sparky, it's funny, it's original, it's very well made and occasionally really quite clever, has a much darker edge than you expect when it needs one, and has some really great dialogue with a western twist. The surprising achievement for me is that it truly hits the ground running, even in this first season the characters - and the relationships between them - feel exceptionally well worked out and acted, like a cast that's been working together and getting familiar with their roles for years. The Captain is at the axle of the show, holding it all together, and a great character he is, barn-stormingly performed by Nathan Fillion, who totally nails the loveable rogue trying to live by a code in a world without one. He's one of the last nice guys left, but he ain't that nice, and I like that a lot. He'll shove a guy in an engine without blinking if it has to be done.

In fact all the characters have their surprises, their moments of unexpected compassion or unexpected effectiveness, their treacherous sides or their dark pasts. All of them can be heroes or, well, real shits on occasion. Stupid, treacherous thug Jayne with a wallful of guns behind a sheet in his bedroom is a particular delight. It can be light, but it never really feels soft-centred. Usually in these shows not every character fires on all cylinders. A good number, if not most, end up being rubbish, in fact, with episodes focusing on them a tiresome interruption. Yes, Counsellor Troi, I'm looking at you. In Firefly the central cast are all watchable, all have their roles to play. It's quite the achievement.

For me it's much the most consistent Whedon offering I've seen - Buffy and Angel could be great on occasion, but they could also be ... not great. Firefly feels much more polished, much more grown up, some episodes are better than others, of course, but there were no howlers. It has the tongue firmly in its cheek but never so hard that its cheek is ripped open and its face explodes. If you see what I mean. There are laughs at the expense of the genre itself, and genuinely funny ones at that, it don't take itself too seriously, but at the same time it doesn't take the piss out of itself or the viewers, there can still be emotional moments, affecting moments, even surprisingly deep and thoughtful moments. The balance between funny and serious, between light and heavy, is pretty much spot-on, in fact, for my taste, and it doesn't veer uncomfortably from one extreme to another as shows are sometimes prone to do, especially in a first season, being usually po-faced with occasional unconvincing humorous episodes based around a light relief character.

It's also an interesting approach to sci-fi tv in which the sci is dialled down to the absolutely strictest minimum, then wierdly fused with a whole load of western conventions. I mean, it's more western than sci-fi once you remove the surface dressing of, well, space ships and that. Shows like Star Trek, and most sci-fi tv since, seem to work with huge and, for me, rather misplaced earnestness to appropriate at least the trappings of science. Inverting the polarity. Quantum singularities. Phased tachyon pulses. When Data would spend whole episodes of Next Generation reciting this blather, the rest of the crew would nod sagely as though it all made perfect sense. Patrick Stewart, obviously, has the most majestic and convincing nod of any man alive, but still. "Ah, yes, invert the polarity of the phased tachyon pulse, I see what you mean, make it so." A sparkly red beam will turn blue, and the universe will be saved. One was invited to suppose that it all made rational sense, that this was indeed hard sf, in spite of appearances. Firefly surely is the polar opposite of hard sf, and makes no apologies. No real attempt is made to explain how the universe works (its one huge solar-system, but with loads of habitable planets?). Such questions are barely asked, let alone answered. The ship on which the series is set is decidedly lo-tech and knackered at that, with few if any problems solved through technical gizmo-ry. Most of the characters wouldn't know which end of a communicator to hold, let alone a tricorder. Problems are more likely solved with fast talk, lying, threats, or hitting someone in the face. People familiar with my own approach to worldbuilding will know that I'm a big fan of this type of thing. Characters, action, and plot are foregrounded, worldbuilding is barely touched on. Sweet for me.

I'm really at a loss as to why this series wasn't a crashing success. Perhaps it was too sci-fi for the mainstream audiences that maybe hooked on to Buffy, but too mainstream for the sci-fi audiences that love Star Trek. Perhaps it was too witty for those who wanted brutality and too brutal for those after the wit. Or perhaps it was just a ball-fumbling over support, marketing, timing and all those other issues.

Ultimately, the only significant criticism of the show I have is that it's all over far too soon. I was just really getting into it, and suddenly you're in the special features. I guess some shows start well and lose their way, so there are no guarantees that Firefly would have continued to improve and become something really great, but judging by its first series it was a very strong possibility. It felt that in the characters and settings they had some rich seams of great material they'd barely started to mine. It's a great shame that there isn't even a decent double-episode to end on, or anything. It just stops, leaving one pondering on what might have been, and on what to watch next.

Truly, life is not fair...

Labels: film and tv

Wednesday, 2 July 2008

Elizabeth - The Golden Age

Not good. Really, really not good.

I liked the first film, quite a lot.

I did not like this. At all. It had the feel of one of those tele-movie cash in sequels that have none of the original cast. Except with the original cast. It looked cheap, though it obviously wasn't. Locations that looked like sets, small and cramped, as if everything was done on a sound stage. The director seemed obsessed with tracking shots peeping around pillars, or focus pulls through filligree screens. Maybe they spent all the money on pillars and screens, and wanted to use them to best effect.

Plotting that was neither historically accurate nor telling a convincing story, darted around all over the place, never settling on one thing but at the same time constantly outstaying its welcome. Totally unconvincing behaviour from everyone concerned. During the thrilling battle with the Spanish Armada, I went away to check my email I was that irritated.

Dull, silly, pointless dialogue. An object lesson in how to make a great cast (and Clive Owen) look rubbish. I mean, you have to work real hard to make Geoffrey Rush look wooden. But they managed it.

The positives? Splendid costumes. Er...

It was not a golden age for me. No sir.

2/10

I feel nostalgic for I am Legend.

Labels: film and tv

Saturday, 31 May 2008

La Vie en Rose

I note that my posts have been getting longer and longer lately, therefore just a quicky. I saw La Vie en Rose the other day, French film about the life of singer Edith Piaf. My wife was going to watch it, I was going to work. I saw the first five minutes, hanging around at the back of the living room, ended up staying for the whole thing. Brilliant film.

The central performance from (rightly oscar winning, quite an achievement for a non-English film) Marion Cotillard is magnificent. In biopics the central actor will typically be convincing at a certain age, then look like a young bloke with naff prosthetics as the old person, or a middle aged actor very, very strongly lit as the young one. In this she is equally completely convincing as teenaged street-singer, as the performer at the height of her powers, and as the dying, illness racked old woman (though not actually that old). Gerard Depardieu is amazing as always, even in a minor role. That guy can do more with one look than most actors manage in a career.

The film is also a real triumph of editing. It darts back and forward from moments late in her life, to her childhood, to the middle and back, moving ever more quickly as it works up to the climax. This sort of technique can sometimes seem pretentious, pointless, adding nothing beyond what might have been there were the film told in chronological order. Here they use it brilliantly to make connections between the different parts of her life, and rather than repeating glimpses from earlier scenes as she remembers her past life - which would have been the obvious thing to do - they always show something new, adding deeper layers of meaning and understanding. Characters drift in and out without the plodding explanation you might expect in a Hollywood treatment of the subject matter. It isn't always clear exactly who they are, but it doesn't really matter. It makes the film amazingly compact for the ground it covers.

I've been raving about a lot of things lately. It's not like me. Usually I hate everything and I don't care who knows it. But there just doesn't seem much point writing posts in order to draw people's attention to the average, the mediocre, and indeed the downright bad. Unless it's my own work, of course. A-ha-ha-HAH.

Rating? A magisterial 9.

Labels: film and tv

Wednesday, 7 May 2008

Hi-Brow Heaven - The Histories

What the hell is WRONG with me? I hate EVERYTHING, and here I am being embarrassingly enthusiastic about four things in a row? What have I enjoyed lately, you ask? Why, only the RSC's production of Shakespeare's History Cycle at the Roundhouse in London, in chronological order (so Richard II, Henry IV parts 1&2, Henry V, Henry VI 1,2&3, and Richard III). Eight entirely uncut plays, and on two separate occasions three plays in one day.

Oh yeah. Let it never be said that I is not one cultured, hi-brow motherf*cker.

Three uncut plays in one day is a lot. Thirteen hours or more in the theatre and surrounds, maybe eight hours in the chair. If they hadn't been good it could've been pretty unpleasant. If they'd been bad it could've been hellish.

But, on the whole, they were amazing.

Stunning acting - I've rarely seen it look so natural, fluid and involving, possibly because these actors have been virtually living together for the past six years or so, and performing these plays to audiences for a good part of that time. It's a world away from a couple of actors drily spouting the lines at each other while others stand stiffly round and watch. The familiarity with the verse, the drama in the gestures and the glances, the small responses of onlookers, all make it very easy to understand.

Truly incredible staging, in the main - performed in the round, but with gangways at the front as well as the back so that there is an effortless flow to the movement of actors on and off stage. There's also a lot of rope-work - guys glide in from above, dangle from straps, burst up from below. The entire French court, harpsichord and all, at one point hang languidly suspended above the stage from trapezes. I make it sound gimmicky, but believe me it ain't, I've seen enough gimmicky Shakespeare (the tap-dancing production of Romeo and Juliet will stick particularly in my mind until my dying day, and not in a good way) and this was the opposite. There was always a point, a reference in the text, and in the main it was very stripped back, very simple - a huge amount was achieved with a bit of smoke and some clever lighting, some feathers drifting down from above or some other gentle touch. Never the slightest sense of being embarrassed by the text, of wanting to jazz it up for the modern audience.

Many breathtaking moments, particularly in the Henry VIs - Bedford opening up the stage to let the ghost of Henry V rise from its grave to lead the charge. Edward IV sweeping on, newly crowned, to talk of happy futures, blood leaking from his long white gown and leaving a slick across the floor. Jack Cade hanging upside down among his carnival of bloody followers to pass sentence on anyone who can write. The Henry VIs were particularly excellent - although they're usually thought of as minor works and not often performed - there was something about the scattergun, quickfire, ensemble nature of them that worked particularly well with the company and the fluid way it was staged.

If one was in a churlish frame of mind (which, of course, I usually am) one could point to a couple of weaknesses - I'm partial to a bit of David Warner (I mean, come on, he was Sark in Tron, Gul Madred in Star Trek NG, and - one of my favourite roles of all time - the voice of Jon Irenicus in Baldur's Gate II for chrissakes), but he's a subtle sort of actor, and I felt he was a bit miscast as Falstaff. Henry IV 2 lagged a bit in places, but then it's probably the poorest of the eight plays, a bit of a sequel for sequel's sake, perhaps, looking like a rerun of the greatest hits of Henry IV 1, but with less of the excitement and none of the novelty. Something I, as a fantasy author, can only whole-heartedly deplore.

The Richard III was slightly disappointing for me, as well. By no means bad, but they made an odd decision, after doing the other seven in largely medieval-cum-elizabethan style, to set that one firmly in modern, gangster-y dress, which suited the play well enough on its own but seemed to separate it from the rest of the cycle and render it more mundane, and on occasion maybe even just that little bit gimmicky. Jonathan Slinger had been brilliantly menacing as hunchbacked Gloucester in the Henry VIs, furious and charming by turns, but the Richard III seemed to be too much played for laughs, too rarely for real menace.

Details, though. On the whole it was a maginificent twenty or so hours of theatre, and definitely given an added depth by seeing the whole cycle more or less together in one piece, and with the same actors playing their characters throughout, resurfacing as ghosts, picking up echoes of old characters in new roles. No waiting a year between installments here. Ahem.

I could go on. But the chances are high that one or more of these apply to you:

a) don't give a toss about Shakespeare.

b) don't live in England, so have limited chance of seeing these productions.

c) since the run has nearly finished and the rest of it is sold out, can't see it now even if you wanted to.

d) you are totally bored, and wondering when I'll start bitching about my own reviews and cussing stuff off again. Soon, my friends, soon. No way can life stay THIS good for long.

Therefore I close.

Labels: film and tv

Sunday, 20 April 2008

TV Heaven - The Wire

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.

Labels: film and tv

Tuesday, 15 April 2008

TV Heaven - The Civil War

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.

Labels: film and tv

Wednesday, 9 April 2008

TV Heaven - Battlestar Galactica

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 (anything 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.

Labels: film and tv

Wednesday, 13 February 2008

Cloverfield

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

Labels: film and tv

Saturday, 22 December 2007

Days of Glory (Indigenes)

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

Labels: film and tv

Tuesday, 18 December 2007

American Gangster

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

Labels: film and tv

Friday, 7 December 2007

I am not Legend

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.

Labels: film and tv