Blowing My Thought Wad

Catch The Wrong One Out

2012-01-08T23:14:00.011Z

Having realized over the past decade that going to the cinema had become a less than pleasant experience, at the beginning of last year I’d decided to give it all a miss. It didn’t seem to be a big deal now that the DVD release is usually in the shops well before, say, a hardback book becomes available in paperback. If I can wait to read a book I can certainly wait to watch a film. Equally weary of the ramped—up propaganda that goes into selling every new release, it was refreshing to catch up with it long after the attendant hullabaloo had died down, so I could watch each movie on its own terms without it being made out to be such a big deal.

It all worked out rather well. Worse than being lumped in amongst an unruly bunch of patrons that have lost the ability to sit still and pay attention, or having to cope with a sound system designed to favour whopping great explosions and other such nonsense over important things like dialogue, was the feeling of wasting so much time trekking off to the nearest cinema to watch some mediocre piece of nonsense. At least at home, if the film proved to be not up to much I could get on with the crossword, waiting for it to pick up, or leave it running in the background while I got back to work. But as we moved into the latter half of 2011 two movies appeared that intrigued me so much that I couldn’t wait to see how they had turned out. One experience was better than the other, in the cinema itself and on the screen, although neither film ticked both boxes. But then you can’t have everything.

It was during the BBC’s Big Read, years ago now, when lists started doing the rounds of the 100 books everyone should read. I suppose because the public had initially been asked to nominate their favourites that the likes of The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy rubbed shoulders with Anna Karenina and Jude the Obscure lagged behind The Da Vinci Code as Tolkien and Jane Austen battled it out for the top spot. Whenever I’d tot up my score of titles I’d read down the years it would invariably come in between a quarter and one third of the total listed simply because not only had the Russian contingent always defeated me but it appeared that I’d made the appalling mistake of opting for Henry Fielding when I obviously should have gone for Thackeray while my A—level syllabus had chosen the wrong Thomas Hardy novel all along.

The same was true for John le Carré because I hadn’t actually starting reading his books until the late 1990s, beginning with The Tailor of Panama, which meant I’d breezed right past his celebrated Cold War—set oeuvre, ignoring it completely. It was probably because I had been hooked on Len Deighton instead. I’ve always had it in my head to get around to reading the earlier books when I had the chance, but it hasn’t happened yet. Of course when you haven’t read a book, the cop—out explanation was always to say that you’re waiting for the movie to come along. Or, when it comes to any number of the classics, the BBC adaptation. Over the years they have certainly served Dickens, Austen, the Brontes, Thackeray and George Eliot well, and in fact the same can be said for le Carré’s classic Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley’s People, which made up the first and third part of his celebrated Karla trilogy.

Over three decades since their initial transmission, both titles remain exceptional examples of television drama at its finest. So when Working Title announced that it was making a film of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy I couldn’t quite see the point. Of course there’s no reason for them not to finally turn the book into a movie. A good number of le Carré’s novels have already been adapted for the screen, starting with Martin Ritt’s film of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold in 1965. But with any book—to—film adaptation there’s always the issue of just how much of the source material will fit into the movie’s running time and, perhaps more importantly, what has to be omitted and how that will affect the tone of the finished piece. The worry with Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was that if it just came down to the spycatcher out to catch the spy, will little else, it would be no different from, say, a Mission: Impossible movie without all the flash bang, car chases and over the top stunts.

Still, I was further intrigued when it was announced that Tomas Alfredson had been brought on board to direct. Admittedly I still haven’t seen his well—received vampire movie Let The Right One In, but letting a foreign director bring an outsider’s perspective to a country and in particular its institutions can usually benefit an already intriguing story, as films like The Ipcress File and Point Blank have shown. Then a reasonably solid cast of character actors was signed up for the roles, and they’d even cajoled Kathy Burke out of retirement to play Connie Sachs, which suggested things were on the up. Finally, just prior to the film’s release came the series of ecstatic reviews that tumbled over each other to give it the full—on Jam Gush. So off I went, paid for the ticket and took my seat. Just over a couple of hours later, after the end credits had rolled, I headed home wondering if it had been worth all the effort to make, let alone go and watch.

Obviously having not read the book, all I could do was compare it to the BBC adaptation, which I’ll still find myself watching at least a couple of times a year when heavily—promoted new television drama turns out to be an utter disappointment. And when it comes to the two versions I think the comment Stephen Gallagher left a few posts back in relation to the original 219—minute cut of Heaven’s Gate and the bowdlerized studio version:

“...I’ve always thought [the full—length Heaven’s Gate] had a grandeur and a texture that the shortened cut lacked. Whatever it had going for it, those qualities largely vanished when just the story was pushed to the fore”

could just as easily be applied to comparing the seven—part BBC adaptation to Tomas Alfredson’s much shorter film. Maybe the glowing reviews held it in such high adoration because in the summer months, when the movies are usually filled with CGI—spectacle and all the other usual base nonsense, now retro—fitted for unwelcome 3—D, along came a movie appealing to a more adult sensibility. Unfortunately it was severely malnourished in terms of story and character. Even if an additional half hour (or more) had been added to the running time, which it certainly needed, the film would still only have been half the length of the seven—part BBC adaptation. And given some scenes that provided necessary narrative tissue had so few frames they were like strands of gossamer, quickly blown off screen, it showed.

There’s a scene midway through the television serial where Smiley and Peter Guillam stop for a meal during which Smiley recounts his sole encounter with the Russian master spy Karla. Sat down at the restaurant table, before he begins, Smiley stops the waiter from pouring their wine, instructing him to “let it breathe a little”. That I suppose is the real luxury of the television version. With a running time of five—and—one—quarter hours, it gives the labyrinthine story, punctuated by numerous flashbacks, the chance to breathe. Alfredson’s film, on the other hand, simply takes a series of big gulps. As a spy thriller the movie worked probably worked well enough for anyone with little or no knowledge of the source material, but with the much shorter running time short—changing every last character, there really wasn’t much meat left on the bone to make much of a feast for anyone who did.

It wasn’t a complete disaster. There were nice touches like Bill Haydon surreptitiously sliding his feet into his unlaced shoes at Smiley’s house, and the moment during the drunken revelry at the Circus Christmas party when, reminiscent of the submariners in Das Boot enthusiastically singing along to It’s a Long Way to Tipperary, the English spies break into a rousing rendition of the old Soviet national anthem. But aside from that there was little else going for it. The most egregious sin of all was just how much Percy Alleline, Bill Haydon, Roy Bland and Toby Esterhase – the quartet who make up the new regime once Control is ousted, one of which is suspected of selling the Circus out to the Russians – were relegated to the periphery to such a degree that their mere existence in the piece was virtually worthless. Their faces taped onto Control’s chess pieces may appear early on, but their designated codenames – “Tinker” Percy Alleline; “Tailor” Bill Haydon; “Soldier” Roy Bland; “Poorman” Toby Esterhase – were voiced so late in the day that they sounded like an afterthought rather than making up the actual title.

Back in 1979, watching the BBC adaptation, I had no idea which of the four men Smiley is sent to investigate was “Gerald”, the mole until the final denouement. They may not have appeared every step of the way but when they are on screen, especially in the flashbacks of Smiley’s initial enquiries into the Operation Testify debacle, they make their presence felt and leave a lasting impression. I’d say the opening scene of the BBC adaptation, lasting only a couple of minutes, tells you more about the pompous Alleline, devil—may—care Haydon, blustering, chain—smoking Bland, and finicky Esterhase that the film ever does.

Because they get so little screen time in Alfredson’s film, if the actual mole hadn’t appeared slightly less often than the other suspects, the writers could just as well have casually plucked one of them names out of a hat as they were gearing up for the last dozen pages and pinned the blame on them. Certainly when Guillam bursts into the safe house to discover who the traitor neither he nor Smiley seemed particularly bothered by the revelation. It was if everyone in the film had been dosed up on more than their fair share of horse tranquilers.

One of the things I liked best in the television version, which comes up in some of le Carré’s later books and usually gets a mention in the odd documentary on the author, is the correlation he makes between the working of the secret service and public school. On more than one occasion the controllers of both the Circus and Moscow Centre are referred to as “Head Boy”, and when Alleline takes over from Control, Haydon, Bland and Esterhase certainly act like prefects. So by design, once repatriated and let go by the Circus, Prideaux disappears to teach at a minor prep school in the Westcountry. Spotting Mendel loitering outside the school grounds while teaching his charges to drive in his old Alvis, he gathers the boys together, warning them to watch out for “ju—ju men wandering around” who had broken in to the “last place” he was at and cleared the place out. Setting up his own spy network, it’s the chubby young Roach, the outsider, who he relies on most. “Best watcher in the unit, ‘Jumbo’ Roach. As long as he keeps his specs clean,” Prideaux declares, and even the dimmest viewer, mystified by the serpentine plot should know of whom he is talking about.

I can’t recall if Smiley ever stopped to clean his glasses once during the movie. On television, one of the delights was watching him patiently listening to everyone tell their tales and questioning them with just a look. If the BBC came up with a special DVD that added extra footage of Alec Guinness simply watching, listening, and quietly processing the facts, I’d snap that up in a jiffy. In the film, there certainly wasn’t time for any of that, nor to make use proper use of Smiley, the great inquisitor and a solid operator in his professional life wrestling with an even greater deception on the domestic front. “Have you noticed Peter that when I really trouble one of our acquaintances with my questions, he’ll raise the matter of my failure as a husband to confound me,“ the cuckolded Smiley observes in the television adaptation, and throughout the seven episodes the most loaded remark was the oft repeated “Give my love to Ann!” An otherwise innocuous remark under different circumstances, but used to try and bring Smiley down a peg or two or throw him off the scent.

The film was bereft of those marvellously acidic mentions of Ann, and her appearance were only fleeting: briefly seen from behind during the Christmas party where at one point the camera lingers on her behind, groped as she’s in a clinch with her Circus lover which might be its most fatal flaw. If the television adaptation had pulled that trick she would have only been one step removed from joining the ranks of harridans like Captain Mainwaring’s wife or Maris Crane in Frasier. Whether it is taken from the book or not, Arthur Hopcraft’s script wisely introduces her in the final scene of the BBC adaptation, affording Siân Phillips to land the absolute killer blow with her piteous: “Poor George. Life’s such a puzzle to you, isn’t it?” All Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan’s screenplay gives us is Julio Iglesias’ rendition of La Mer. Merde, more like!

Stripped of so many of the relationships, both private and professional, past and present, that bound the narrative together on television, leaving just the spycatcher out to catch the spy, the film is like a once—healthy animal gutted and hung in a butcher’s shop leaving just the flesh on view. Obviously Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was going to be no different from the film version’s of Paul Abbott’s State of Play or Troy Kennedy Martin’s classic Edge of Darkness, with whole chunks of the story reduced or radically altered to squeeze it into a far reduced running time. Here the new angle was about Moscow Centre using the Circus to get its hands on US intelligence. But what made it so infuriating this time around was to hear fragments of le Carré’s familiar dialogue, displaced and isolated, as if the novel and BBC scripts had both been shredded and the film’s writers had half—heartedly scrambled to tape them back together before giving up and pissing off to the pub.

I suppose I could say more but it would mean giving the game away and revealing the identity of “Gerald”, which is a bit rotten. Although it’s a shame that whoever designed the film poster didn’t think along the same lines. What a muppet!

And if there was a quote that needed to go on the poster I can think of nothing better than the tweet from author Anthony Horowitz:

Tinker Tailor Soldier Why

One Of Those Days...

2011-12-23T23:36:00.005Z

While I was “away” there was a whole lot of work to do that had faltered somewhat, to the extent that there came a day where I actually sat down and wondered whether it was worth carrying on. But then so much research had already been done, together with what was already written, that it seemed silly not to keep going. And anyway, when progress was being made it was actually good fun especially when, based on my browsing and buying history, Amazon would recommend DVDs like the double-bill of Gorilla at Large & Mystery on Monster Island. I still can’t figure out what that’s about.

At the end of last week, having seen an unexpected curio at the BFI Southbank that turned out to be a real benefit, I received a phone call that confirmed we were on for “next Thursday”. At that point I had to ask, on for what? Then early yesterday afternoon I was bundled into a cab that sped off towards Holland Park. Inside the house, the housekeeper led us to the day room. I sat down on the sofa, admiring the sculptures of King Kong grappling with the Tyrannosaurus Rex, Sinbad sword fighting with the statue of Kali, checking out the row of awards that included a BAFTA mask and Academy Award statuette. We heard the voice first, coming down the stairs. Then into the room, leaning on his cane, walked Ray Harryhausen.

He settled into his chair, his daughter brought coffee and some of her excellent home—made mince pies and we chatted and I listened to his amazing stories. For a while, when it was the two of us, somehow we went well off topic. I think it was around the time he mentioned meeting Hal Roach. The subject of Laurel and Hardy came up and I remarked that my favourite scene of theirs was the pair trying to shift a piano: Not up the flights of steps in The Music Box, but across the rope bridge in Swiss Miss where they tangle with an escaped gorilla. He chuckled at the memory then after we threw out a few more titles and memories, I looked across and Mr Harryhausen was doing Stan Laurel’s thumb trick from The Bohemian Girl. And as I started to crack up he tipped his head back and roared with laughter.

'Saur Point

2011-12-22T23:42:00.000Z

When did dinosaurs stop being exciting? This was the query that started rattling around my head in the early hours, the week before last, during the tail end of an egregious bout of insomnia. I should add that it wasn’t just a purely random thought that had popped up while I paced around, fretting over whether the lack of sleep would leave me too insensible to get any decent work done during the few daylight hours we now have each day. Instead I’d been sat at the computer, whiling away the time watching The Land That Time Forgot – Animus Productions’ cheap and cheerful adaptation of the Edgar Rice Burroughs novel – in its entirety on YouTube.

It was a shame that I was catching it out of kilter because it would have made a perfectly good Sunday afternoon matinee. Co—written by Michael Moorcock, the film sticks reasonably close to the source material as the crew of a U—boat and the survivors of a recently torpedoed merchant ship – led by that big slab of heroic 1970s beefcake, Doug McClure – face the twin perils of aggressive, barely—evolved humans and carnivorous dinosaurs when, dangerously low on fuel and rations, they chance upon the lost sub—continent of Caprona. Watching it I wondered if the film would now only entertain young kiddies who haven’t seen better or people of a certain age who remember being enthralled by The Land That Time Forgot upon its release back in 1975.

Shown to a generation of slightly older children used to things being slick and shiny, would they complain about the back—projection, the scenes that looked like they had been shot in a local park, and – more importantly – the puppet dinosaurs? Would the gliding pterodactyls bring howls of protest, especially since the wires on the full–scale models and the harness on the actor that ends up in one of the creature’s mouth are clearly visible on screen. Or wouldn’t that matter to them? Would they just enjoy the film for what it was? All these years later The Land That Time Forgot is still great fun. After all, this is a film in which a Triceratops takes a round from the U–boat’s deck gun in the face. What’s not to like?

The next night, still awake, and knowing that watching movies wasn’t going to help, I decided to find a book to read that would help get me to sleep. Rooting around in a box in the bedroom cupboard, filled with the paperbacks there wasn’t room for in the bookcase shelves, I happened across Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park. I’d read it just the once when it was first published in 1991 and with dinosaurs still on my mind decided to give it another go. And it did the trick! A couple of chapters and I had nodded right off. Having hidden this book away for the better part of twenty years, I’d forgotten how absolutely rotten Crichton was at writing fiction. The characters are perfunctory at best and show no emotion throughout what is supposed to be quite an ordeal. Instead of conversations between individuals they just give lectures on their field of expertise.

Although one character on the page gets so scared they wet themselves, the rest blithely blather on with their oral dissertations on genetics or paleontology or chaos theory even in the face of what any normal person would consider the most appalling danger. It’s like Westworld only the visitors are the robots. If Crichton couldn’t write female characters – sidelining the paleobotanist through most of the book – he sure as shit couldn’t write credible children. The kids in the book were so clueless and irritating that every time they appeared I wished someone would hurl them into the gaping jaws of the nearest predatory beast. When the only ticking—clock drama was that the supply boat had to be stopped from docking at the mainland because, for the whole voyage, the crew were obviously too stupid to notice there were escaped dinosaurs on board, I wished I had some Burroughs in my hands. But that would have defeated the exercise and kept me awake. Instead, night after night, Crichton’s novel helped put me to sleep.

Although I honestly can’t remember what I thought of the book when it first came out, rereading it I’ve newfound respect for the screenwriter David Koepp. Credited with the scripts for the first Mission Impossible movie and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, I’ve never been a big fan of his work, but you have to hand it to him for having managed to fashion a half decent script for the film adaptation of Jurassic Park. I can remember the night I saw the movie in the West End. Everyone had to see the movie, simply because it had dinosaurs in it. But after seeing the dinosaurs there really wasn’t much else. For me the saving grace was the casting of the still much—missed Bob Peck as the game warden, Robert Muldoon, livening up every scene he was in. And I laughed heartily when the Velociraptor peered through the circular glass in the kitchen door, mirroring the scene where the no—nonsense Nurse Murch looks in on Gordo Cooper during one of the more bizarre tests at the Lovelace Clinic in The Right Stuff. Although nobody else in the audience seemed to get the joke.

For all the pixel power involved in rendering the computer—generated dinosaurs, the more satisfying scenes involved a hefty dose of animatronics from Stan Winston Studios. And even then, the best part of the set piece involving the Tyrannosaurus attacking the cars on the park tour was the ripples in the glass of water, foreshadowing the arrival of the weighty T—Rex. Although the fact that it would later tippy-toe into the visitor centre, much to everyone’s surprise, to chew up the raptors made nonsense of that earlier sequence. But by then I guess nobody cared. Dinosaurs were the new big thing. By the end of the decade, because there was an audience for it, we had the six—part quasi—natural history documentary Walking with Dinosaurs. That led to a whole number of Walking with... documentary series, which, all combined, covered life on Earth from the Early Precambrian period up to the Late Pleistocene.

Just as I mentioned in the previous post how the Mariner 4 flyby of Mars robbed the planet of its mystery once it began sending back images of the surface, the problem I found with this sort of “factual” programming was it made dinosaurs ordinary. Built in a computer, no doubt with any number of drab scientific advisors peering over the shoulders of the animators and digital artists explaining every last little boring detail, the creatures created for these series may have been anatomically correct and attributed the behavioural patterns best surmised by the experts in the field, but this surfeit of data reduced them to carnivores and herbivores of that era, no different than the beasts that roam the planet today. Where’s the fun in that?

A couple months back I had the pleasure of spending the afternoon with Julie Harris who had been the costume designer on the likes of A Hard Day’s Night and Help!, Carry on Cleo, the 1960’s spoof of Casino Royale, Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, Darling – for which she won the Academy Award – and The Land That Time Forgot. Utterly charming and still sharp as a tack, during our chat she mentioned that when it came to working on period dramas, although she would diligently research the clothing of the time, for the costume designs she would create a fashion for the era because historical accuracy would only go so far and audiences expect a lot more.

Though computer animators can now feel very proud for being able to create the perfect Tyrannosaurus, the end results still sadly lack the imagination of the dinosaurs that dazzled audiences in the original King Kong or The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, One Million Years B.C. or The Valley of Gwangi. There stop motion animators like Willis O’Brien and Ray Harryhausen – the absolute masters of their profession – not just brought those creatures to life but, more importantly, imbued them with some personality traits that went towards defining their character. And that’s what seems to have been lost amongst the vast numbers of pixels and hours of render—time, when animators only get their hands on a keyboard and Wacom tablet and not the dinosaur itself.

Even if the animation is done well it still requires lighting and shading to integrate it into the scenes and if one of those stages isn’t up to snuff the whole thing looks utterly phoney when it is composited into the live action footage. A couple of months ago I caught the first couple episodes of Terra Nova. Remember that dreadful BBC drama Outcasts? It’s like that, but worse. Because instead of useless colonists sent to a distant planet, the bozos in Terra Nova are sent back in time to the late Cretaceous period, which means dinosaurs. And not just any dinosaurs but badly animated and horrendously composited dinosaurs that looked utterly out of place in every scene they appeared in.

At the moment critics are falling over themselves to praise The Artist, Michel Hazanavicius’s silent film shot in black and white. Hopefully sometime soon stop motion animation will make a comeback. Because in recent years the only computer generated dinosaur I can think of that has come close to recapturing the true character of that wonderful earlier work is Rex, the over—excited plastic T—Rex with an inferiority complex from the three Toy Story films. Everything else I’ve seen of late just makes my heart sink as I yearn for those simpler, yet more exciting, days. And that’s not right.

Red Is Dead

2011-12-14T23:53:00.003Z

The story goes that back in the mid–1980s, at some point between the end of post—production and eventual theatrical release of Michael Mann’s adaptation of the Thomas Harris novel Red Dragon, producer Dino De Laurentiis decided to ditch the title and replace it with the uninspiring Manhunter in the grounds that the original shared a word with Year of the Dragon, one of his earlier movies that had come out the previous year and tanked at the box—office. Now, while it’s abundantly clear that there’s no exact science when it comes to a business where financial success depends wholly on the general public, who can be a fickle bunch of bastards at the best of times, surely basing that sort of decision—making on such superstitious tomfoolery can only best be described as pure idiocy.

I can understand Year of the Dragon being rejected by audiences and going straight into the crapper. I’d caught it when the film first opened here, going along because I’d found The Deer Hunter tedious, really loved the original 219—minute cut of Heaven’s Gate, and wondered what director Michael Cimino would do next. As it turned out, he’d made a crime drama, co—written by Oliver Stone during his cocaine years, featuring a self—righteous fascistic bully steamrollering his way through a retched miasma of overt racism, sexism and xenophobia. By the time I saw Michael Mann’s film, in which Brian Cox’s understated portrayal of Hannibal Lecter was far more chilling than Anthony Hopkins’ pantomime psycho turn, Year of the Dragon was just a distant ugly memory. With the original title would it have been more successful? Or would folk have pitched up at their local cinema expecting some Russian kung—fu flick?

Was De Laurentiis’ meddling down to his inability to recognize, let alone concede, that the previous content was at fault or his own personal messed—up Hollywood hoodoo to ward off failure? This was, after all, the showman who still ballyhooed the elaborate and expensive animatronics used in his remake of King Kong even though they’d had to resort to a man in a monkey suit during filming because the mechanics didn’t work. Though when he decided to ditch the “Red Dragon” title it’s a shame there hadn’t been somebody on hand to throw De Laurentiis into a quandary by reminding him that just a few years before John Milius had made an absolute killing with Red Dawn, in which Colorado high school students fought a guerrilla war against invading Soviet paratroopers. Torn between the one word brimming with success and the other tainted with the stain of wretched failure he probably would have had a seizure on the spot.

A quarter century on, it would be good to think this sort of corporate witchcraft had been laid to rest, but apparently old habits still die hard. Maybe it’s just another unexplained side effect of the Santa Ana winds, periodically turning the suits in the San Fernando Valley and over the hills in the Los Angeles basin into bigger arses than usual. Except this time its “Red” that’s leaving executives off—colour, or more precisely, the Red Planet. For Hollywood, Mars has always been troublesome. Although to begin with the fact that it was bad was good for the studios as invaders from Mars (and any other hostile planet for that matter) made for good metaphors of the pervading Communist threat in the great science fiction films of the 1950s, in much the same way that those pesky Martians, first landing on Horsell Common, in HG Wells’ The War of the Worlds were seen as an allegory of British Imperialism.

Much like the seemingly unstoppable three—legged fighting machines that emerged from the cylinders, laying waste to England before being routed by common bacteria, the end of the Cold War meant that Hollywood had no need to use the red planet as a threat to hang over us, and the collapse of the Berlin Wall was a cough in the face of forthcoming alien invaders. But anyway, by then science fiction had already been infantilized in distant galaxies. When the Martians tried their luck to take over our world again it was in Mars Attacks!, which, typical of a Tim Burton film, looked pretty in places, had a rambling plot that went nowhere, and failed to recoup its budget. While in the recent War of the Worlds – Spielberg’s definite article—less take on HG Wells – Martians weren’t even mentioned and the agonizing clarion call of the tripods, sounding before they unleashed their vaporizing heat–rays, was a welcome relief from the continual screaming and yelling from Dakota Fanning’s brattish character.

When Hollywood looked to Mars as the setting for dramas, the results were as successful as most NASA missions to the planet. Though Total Recall made money by taking Philip K Dick’s story We Can Remember It for You Wholesale and beefing it up with brutish, cartoon violence, John Carpenter’s Ghosts of Mars was a pallid retread of the director’s Assault on Precinct 13, while Doom – quite possibly the nadir of the video game–to–movie adaptations – was so sickeningly awful it shouldn’t ever be brought up in conversation again. Brian De Palma’s Mission to Mars aimed for some kind of 2001 profundity but missed the target. Nobbled by characters that had the bland stuff, shortly after their mission began I wished Joseph Cavor was in charge to liven things up. The only thing noteworthy about Red Planet was it was even more scientifically inaccurate than the old George Pal movies with those wonderful Chesley Bonstell matte paintings. When NASA – who opened their doors to the makers of Armageddon – refused to get involved, they pretty much declared it was a film to stay well downwind of.

So the only logical way forward would be to go back to the pre-Mariner 4 days when Mars still remained an enigma, allowing writers to conjure up tales set on a planet filled with mystique and exoticism. Back then we could have The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury’s utterly astonishing collection of linked short stories that begins with Rocket Summer, set in 1999, where the heat from the take–off of the first rocket to Mars has startling effects on the surrounding Ohio landscape, and carries on through the next quarter century and more to finish with The Million-Year Picnic – oddly enough one of the first of the stories to be published in the pulp magazines of the time – that brought the narrative to a remarkably poetic close. But The Martian Chronicles had already come to television in the form of a three part miniseries, broadcast thirty years after the book’s publication. Written by Richard Matheson, it tried its best but, like much all screen adaptations of Ray Bradbury’s work, it lost the beautiful lyricism of his prose in the translation from page to screen.

Before Bradbury there was Burroughs, the grandfather of Mars–based fiction, whose own series of Martian chronicles, set on the world the native multi–coloured oviparous races call Barsoom, feature John Carter, a one–time Confederate Captain in the American Civil War transported to Mars via astral projection, the Martian princess Dejah Thoris, and their eventual descendents. Though the English–born author Edwin Lester Arnold may have got there first with Lieutenant Gulliver Jones: His Vacation, published in 1905 and later known as Gulliver of Mars, it’s Burroughs the readers of fantasy fiction remember. A Chicago native and the son of a Major who fought in the American Civil War, Edgar Rice Burroughs served with the 7th Cavalry before being invalided out on medical grounds. Eventually working as a pencil sharpener salesman, he first started writing to see if he could come up with better stories than the ones appearing in the pulp magazines he was advertising his business in.

Yet if Burroughs is familiar to cinema audiences it’s as the creator of Tarzan instead. Although Tarzan of the Apes was published months after the first John Carter adventure appeared in the pulp fiction magazine All—Story – spread over six instalments under the title Under the Moons of Mars before eventually being published as A Princess of Mars – Hollywood obviously found it easier to bring his Lord of the Jungle to the screen than the many wonders of Barsoom, where studio—shot scenes could simply be intercut with stock footage of animals in the wild, omitting the need to venture out on location. Although of course any jungle adventures would still involve a far larger wardrobe budget than what would be required for Mars. While Tarzan went through numerous incarnations in film and on television, played by a succession of actors that included the great Johnny Weissmüller, Buster Crabbe, Lex Barker, Gordon Scott and Ron Ely, John Carter languished in print.

For a long time the closest John Carter came to the screen was in the early 1930s when Bob Clampett, the legendary Warner Bros. animator, drew up test scenes for an animated adventure. In the end all we got out of it was Marvin the Martian joining the Looney Tunes roster of characters. Twenty years later Ray Harryhausen’s interest in the property came to naught. In the 1970s, Amicus brought out adaptations of a trio of Burroughs’ novels, with At the Earth’s Core, the first book in the Pellucidar series, sandwiched between The Land That Time Forgot and The People That Time Forgot from Burroughs’ Caspak trilogy, but still there was no interest in Barsoom until a decade on when Walt Disney Pictures were looking to go ahead with a film written by Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, the screenwriting stalwarts who would later bring all four Pirates of the Caribbean films to the masses, then rewritten by Bob Gale. But again, the project fizzled out and it looked like we were only going to see Barsoom in pictures from fantasy artists like Frank Frazetta (up above) or, more recently, Frank Cho (below).

Luckily, come the turn of the century, interest in John Carter renewed. Maybe after the three stinky Star Wars prequels some studio executives decided to treat the audience to some spectacle that had a decent story for a change. Although for a while the film rights were in the hands of Paramount Pictures who were happy to put Robert Rodriguez, another purveyor of piss—poor movies, behind the camera with a script that began with Carter as the captain of an elite special forces unit, taking out unsavoury rebels in Central Africa before being transported to Barsoom from inside a cave adorned with red fire-gem crystals. After a switch in directors the studio lost interest, allowing Disney to regain the rights and finally go ahead with the project. Obviously this was a cause for celebration. Michael Chabon was brought in to work on the script. Andrew Stanton, director of Finding Nemo and Wall–E and one of the original members of the Pixar Brain Trust, was on board to direct. The film, based on the first novel would be released on the centenary of the publication of A Princess of Mars. At last everything was looking up!

If there was a downside it was that in the hundred years since the book saw print it, and the further novels in the series, had influenced or inspired countless science fiction or fantasy films, from the early film serials from Universal Pictures featuring Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, down the line to Star Wars and Avatar, where to say that Lucas and James Cameron were “influenced” by the Barsoom novels is actually an incredibly polite way of putting it. So there’s always the danger that some illiterate little twerp watching the movie will see a Thoat, one of the eight–legged Martian horses, and think the filmmakers have ripped off Avatar, not knowing that when Cameron wasn’t basing his designs on 1970s prog–rock album covers he was shamelessly plundering from Burroughs. Of course if that was the only downside, I guess it could be considered a win because what Stanton and everyone else involved didn’t know when they started production at the end of 2009 and how spectacularly Robert Zemekis would shaft them.

There was a time when Bob Zemekis made pretty decent movies. But then he became captivated by performance capture, which would have been no bad thing if only the end results hadn’t looked so bloody awful. Ranging from the odd to the downright disturbing, the characters in his first outing, The Polar Express, looked like something out of a kiddie’s worst nightmare with their lifeless eyes and strange facial movements. Carrying on the process through Beowulf and his take on Dickens’ A Christmas Carol there was little sign of improvement as the staff working at his company ImageMovers, by then acquired by Disney, seemed to be caught up in the details rather than understanding that the basic principle of animation was to bring something to life. They still hadn’t figured it out by the time Mars Needs Moms, based on the children’s book by the cartoonist Berkeley Breathed rolled around, which was a shame because Mars Needs Moms was pretty much the Beagle 2 of Mars movies.

Released earlier this year, it hit the ground with a dull thud and just lay there, making less than $7m on its opening weekend from a $150m budget. By the time Mars Needs Moms was sluiced out of cinemas and the air freshener was pumped in, the film had the distinction of already being the fifth biggest box–office flop in cinema history. There was even talk that its failure would bring the fad of showing every damned thing in 3D to an abrupt end, which might not have been a bad thing. What did happen though was that two months after Zemekis sent his torrent of shit flooding through uncanny valley, John Carter of Mars had suddenly become John Carter. How about that?! Of course Disney strenuously denied that the stinking great turd Zemekis had recently dropped had absolutely nothing to do with the suddenly truncated title but it still felt as if the spirit of Dino De Laurentiis was merrily roaming the corridors was Burbank.

When the first teaser trailer for John Carter came out in mid-July the most puzzling, and disappointing aspect was that it lacked any of the “wow factor” Burroughs fans expected. Frankly it was dull. With the London FX houses Double negative, Cinesite and nvisible knuckling down to get the film finished, luckily nobody blamed the omission of some expected eye—popping spectacular down to those scenes being incomplete. Nearly twenty—five years ago, when I was working on Who Framed Roger Rabbit departments were advised well in advance which scenes had to be fast—tracked for inclusion in the trailer, and that was long before kit like Pre—Viz made it easier to sort and select the requisite material. So the creeping suspicion that followed in the wake of this remarkably bland teaser was that it had been slapped together (perhaps having been taken apart beforehand) by a perturbed marketing department that suddenly had no confidence in knowing how to sell the movie.

For a while everyone laid low, hoping any controversy over the truncated title would die down, but then in the following months excuses for the title started coming out. Mark Strong, who plays Matai Shang, leader of the Holy Therns, took a stab at it back in the summer by explaining:

“The reason is that he has to earn that title. Again, it’s a franchise or a number of books; a series of books that people may or may not know, but if you call him John Carter of Mars, I think at the very beginning, all the work’s been done and what Andrew wants to do, I think, is introduce people to this first film, and by the end of it, he becomes John Carter of Mars, but not at the beginning. In the beginning he’s John Carter, but by the end of the first film, he’s John Carter of Mars; so he’s earned that title to take it off should it want to go to further storytelling.”

I suppose that’s one way of looking at it, especially with a franchise in mind, but then they could have made the point even clearer by checking back through the opening pages of A Princess of Mars and calling the film Captain Jack Carter of Virginia. That would hammer home the fact that he was an Earthman and everyone else wasn’t. Then finally the time came for Andrew Stanton, who obviously knew that he had a responsibility to the studio that had invested north of $250 million in his latest movie, to step up and just recently announce:

“Here’s the real truth of it. I’d already changed it from A Princess Of Mars to John Carter Of Mars. I don’t like to get fixated on it, but I changed Princess Of Mars because not a single boy would go. And then the other truth is, no girl would go to see John Carter Of Mars. So I said, “I don’t won’t to do anything out of fear, I hate doing things out of fear, but I can’t ignore that truth.

“All the time we were making this big character story which just so happens to be in this big, spectacular new environment. But it’s not about the spectacle, it’s about the investment. I thought, I’ve really worked hard to make all of this an origin story. It’s about a guy becoming John Carter. So I’m not misrepresenting what this movie is, it’s John Carter. ‘Mars’ is going to stick on any other film in the series. But by then, it won’t have a stigma to it.”

To begin with it sounds like the sort of mealy—mouthed misdirection that tumbles from the lips of some weaselly politico eager to hold on to his job, where starting off by saying, “Here’s the real truth,” immediately sends up warning signals because everyone has come to expect that whatever comes next is a whole world away from the real truth. Since his words came on the heels of the first proper trailer, released at the beginning of this month, it didn’t exactly chime with the new on—screen content that suddenly seems to be all about the spectacle. So it was disappointing that someone of Stanton’s standing was playing the game he was obliged to play. But I guess we should have known that someone who had enjoyed the years of freedom up in Emeryville wasn’t going to be completely held in check by the machinations of Hollywood. When he wrapped up his statement by acknowledging that ‘Mars’ did have a stigma attached to it, I wonder how well that went down in Burbank?

Or maybe Mars wasn’t as big an issue any more. Show the audience something big and shiny and they’ll soon forget what stunk up the place a day, a week, or a month ago. With the trailer the publicity department had got back on their feet by showing the goods but not naming any names. If you watch the teaser again, have a look and see what’s missing from the new trailer. Here’s a clue: Back in the summer Universal released a very expensive movie called Cowboys & Aliens. I didn’t see it. I don’t feel any real urgency to see it when it comes out on shiny disc in a week or so. But I do know it cost $163 million and only made just shy of $175 million worldwide, which in anyone’s book labels it a flop. Is it a coincidence that all the footage set in the Old West from the John Carter teaser hasn’t made it to the trailer?

So Mars is bad, a combination of the Old West and aliens are bad, and the first poster is just lousy. Difficult circumstances dictate that it’ll be an uphill struggle to give this film the recognition it deserves. It’s one of the few films that I’m actually looking forward to seeing next year. Hopefully Disney doesn’t bottle it, John Carter finds an audience and there are more films in the series to come. If they have some backbone and believe in the movie all the studio really has to worry about are the fans of medical dramas thinking it’s a film about that nice student doctor from e.r. But if it doesn’t work out I can always go back to Burroughs’ text. All I have to do is remember the words:

‘With my back against a golden throne, I fought once again for Dejah Thoris’

and I’m in another world...

For those who haven’t read the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, which I hope is just a simple oversight, Sterling Publishing in New York have begun reprinting the Barsoom and Tarzan series, with stories from the Pellucidar and Caspak series coming out next year. All titles can be obtained through Amazon and if you place your right order now they should arrive in time for Christmas. Having seen the double–issue Radio Times, there’s pretty much fuck all on as usual. Rather than getting stuck in the company of annoying relatives, find a comfy chair, grab a nearby box of chocolates, and get stuck in to some Burroughs. You’ll thank me later.

The Second Act In A Blogger's Life

2011-12-01T18:34:00.002Z

So, I’m back. Thank Stephen Gallagher, or blame Stephen Gallagher, which ever you see fit. I bumped into him the weekend before last and during the all too brief time we had to chat he urged me to resurrect this blog. Oddly enough, the following day a delightful and enchanting actress who I had been keeping entertained during her first time back in England since a shattering family bereavement, told me I was a wonderful teller of tales – and no, she hadn’t been drinking! Having already found myself toying with the idea of coming back for another go around. So those encounters were, I suppose, the final impetus I needed.

Truth be told, after the way things had turned out last year I really did need the time away to get things back in order. Taking these online ramblings out of the equation also allowed me to focus on the work currently at hand. As it happened, a short while after having the apartment to myself again, boxes were brought out of storage and transferred here so I could sort through an accumulation of annotated scripts, contracts, call sheets, newspaper and magazine clippings, photographs, and publicity material. We may not be fully up to speed because time management is proving to be an alien concept to the person I’m partnered with – which occasionally infuriates me because we should have gotten much further ahead by now – but we’ve certainly made progress.

Those concerns aside, through the changing seasons I’ve rooted through files in the British Library, scoured the British Library’s Newspaper Library, and got to talk to the director Robert Fuest, the writer Brian Clemens (either side of a new Blu-Ray commentary he was participating in), the remarkably forthright Academy Award–winning costumer designer Julie Harris, and John Humphreys, the designer/sculptor who created Max Headroom. Hopefully the momentum will build, but for the time being I’m managing to push the project forward, discovering numerous truths that will eventually dispel the long–held legends that have previously seen print.

With all that on my plate, returning to the blog may seem like an utterly insane thing to do because I doubt I’ll be able to post as regularly as before. But when there are days when I come back from Colindale Newspaper Library – thankfully only a short bus ride away – having spun through reels of microfilm or leafed through bound volumes of periodicals looking to find the information that will fill some of the numerous gaps in the narrative and returned home with little or nothing of value, it’s good to have something to write at the end of the day.

They may not run to the same length as previous entries – some of which clocked in at over 6,000 words – but rest assured that short doesn’t always mean sweet. Having been on my best behaviour and seen where that got me... Well, if you’ve been here before you’ll know just what to expect.

When All Is Said And Done

2011-05-09T10:01:00.002+01:00

So that’s that. “Say what you’re gonna say or prepare for eternal fucking silence,” declared Al Swearengen, and I think I’ve pretty much said all there is to say, at least for the time being. I’ve been posting for a couple months shy of five years now and that’s a decent enough run. Most times it has been fun, although there have been occasions where I’ve slipped up and written some quite thoughtless remarks, which I sincerely regret.

Unlike many ex–bloggers I’m not quitting simply to concentrate on facebook or twitter. Although I have a presence on the former I pretty much gave up on that over a month back and not before time. Anyone who knows me knows I’m not enamoured being amongst big crowds of people I don’t really know, trading idle remarks either in person or as part of a digital gathering, preferring instead to trade more substantial messages with actual friends online when there isn’t the opportunity to sit and have a conversation in person, in the same way that I now only comment – and will continue to comment on occasion – on particular blogs.

I suppose there are reasons for knocking it all on the head now but I can’t say that I particularly want to share them. So instead I guess I’ll end with a song. I was thinking of something from Elsie Carlisle or Jack Hylton and His Orchestra, but in the end I think this will suffice...

Making Dramas After A Crisis

2011-05-08T19:36:00.001+01:00

On the few occasions I’ve bothered turning on the television during the past week or so I’ve been constantly assailed by the trailer trumpeting the upcoming ORIGINAL BRITISH DRAMA on the BBC. It even appeared after an edition of the utterly brilliant Petworth House: The Big Spring Clean on BBC4, unless I had mistakenly flipped over once the credits were rolling and had mixed up whatever channel I was watching. Either way it seemed to be bloody everywhere.

By promoting the fact that this was BRITISH DRAMA, it may have been a riposte to the remarkably irritating Sky Atlantic trails featuring the remarkably irritating Dustin Hoffman. Trumpeting the new British Sky Broadcasting channel launched back in February after the company snapped up the exclusive TV broadcasting rights to the HBO archive, the spots heralded the arrival of the rather disappointing Boardwalk Empire, the rather disappointing Treme, and the thoroughly nasty swords and misogyny nonsense that is Game of Thrones.

Then again, this big push may be a consequence of the BBC Trust’s annual review from July of 2009, in which it told the BBC to basically get their act together and produce better drama. And, of course, a couple of days before that report was made public there was the email from the distinguished producer Tony Garnett in which he voiced his concerns over the Corporation for stifling creativity and it’s continuing failure to commission any quality drama. If the Trust had fired a warning shot across the bow of Television Centre, Garnett unleashed a long deserved salvo right into the empty heart of the BBC’s drama department. In a wishy–washy response Ben Stephenson, the Corporation’s drama commissioning controller, invited anyone who shared Garnett’s unease to pop round to his place for a coffee and a chat while he hid behind the testimonials of his best mates.

Whether the bins regularly put out on Wood Lane overflowed with empty Nescafe jars or someone from the top floor threatened to tear little Ben a new arsehole if he didn’t get his shit together, who knows. Either way, two years on, some of the dramas at least look intriguing. Of course any trailer, especially when it’s just clips put to music, is essentially a greatest bits package, held out to attract us like moths to a flame. I suppose some could quibble that since The Night Watch is an adaptation of Sarah Waters’ bestseller, and the six–part Case Histories is based on Kate Atkinson’s detective novels, they’re not exactly “original”, but at least it shows that someone, somewhere in Television Centre has decided to lay off having yet another go at an Austen or Bronte, so things are looking up.

That said audiences still had to endure the recent version of Women In Love, once again indubitably confirming that DH Lawrence is best confined to the classrooms so children can learn to loathe him at an early age, but at least it was quickly swept aside by The Crimson Petal and the White. Featuring great turns by Romola Garai and Gillian Anderson, a revelatory performance by Chris O’Dowd, and Mark Gattis on fire as his brother, it was like experiencing Michael Faber’s doorstop of a novel while in the throes of an all–consuming fever dream. It continued to prove that the BBC does the past better than the future, even if it involves marvellously unsavoury Victorian grime, insomuch that it made me completely forget that we had only recently been callously inflicted with the deplorable Outcasts.

As the trailer continues to play on the first of the offerings have already begun to appear. Doctor Who got off to a cracking start. If this weekend’s pirate episode wasn’t particularly up to snuff you have to feel sorry for writer Stephen Thompson whose episodes for both Doctor Who and last year’s Sherlock had the unenviable task of following immediately after a spectacular opening story from Steven Moffat. But as I said about the previous series, even if I’m not enamoured by the self–contained story within every episode there’s always something intriguing going on with the overall story arc. The woolly liberals over at The Guardian have already started a debate as to whether this new series is too scary for the kiddies. Granted most of the scenes in the abandoned orphanage were creepy, and the brief glimpse of The Silents suspended from the ceiling even made me recoil, but it looks like Moffat is out to introduce children to one of the scariest things they can experience in the whole wide world, which is heartbreak.

Over the May Day Bank Holiday Weekend, which began with a wedding I managed to avoid and ended with a well–deserved funeral, the BBC served up Exile. While it may have gotten some good write–ups I can’t say that I was overly impressed, and by the end it felt like I had missed an episode somewhere. Then on Thursday we got our first sight of The Shadow Line, which has nothing to do with the Joseph Conrad novella of the same name. Depending on which newspaper you peruse this is supposed to be either Britain’s answer to Forbrydelsen or The Wire. In interviews the writer–producer–director Hugo Blick has name–checked Edge of Darkness and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. After getting through the somewhat tortuous opening scene that seemed to drag on interminably, the stylization started to remind me more of The Avengers, celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. Unfortunately that wasn’t particularly a good thing.

Perhaps it didn’t help that the BBC had decided to schedule it on the exact same night as the imported conspiracy drama Rubicon, a clear descendant of the likes of Three Days of the Condor, The Parallax View and All The President’s Men, which placed intrigue ahead of smugness and wasn’t filled with characters who appeared to have accidentally stumbled out of a Pinter play. Even in the context of home grown drama, any new conspiracy drama will, whether unfairly or not, find itself compared to the all time television great, Troy Kennedy–Martin’s Edge of Darkness, which, a quarter century after its original transmission has still never been bettered.

While both Edge of Darkness and The Shadow Line began with policemen holding torches but whereas the former briefly introduces the freight train carrying the nuclear waste of IIF – a visual clue that will eventually lead to Northmoor – before effortlessly establishing the character of Bob Peck’s resolute Yorkshire detective Ronnie Craven, the latter spent far too long letting David Schofield’s police sergeant come across like one of the three witches at the beginning of Macbeth, muttering his oblique prophecy to his bored–looking protégé. Although I’ll no doubt see The Shadow Line through to the end, well before the end of the first episode I knew which of the two dramas I would much prefer to be watching.

As for the rest, both Luther and Torchwood are shows I couldn’t give a hoot about, so when they pitch up I neither know nor care. The Hour, following the lives and careers of a trio of television journalists working for a nascent topical news programme, looks intriguing even if some elements of the press are implying the 1950s setting suggests it was commissioned by the BBC to replace Mad Men, which has now been purloined by the evil Murdoch empire. Although the one I’m waiting for is Page Eight, David Hare’s contemporary spy thriller coming to BBC2 later in the year, which I doubt will disappoint.

Between now and then, who knows what else there will be. Next week BBC4 starts its Wonders of Iceland series and now that the channel has introduced us to the Swedish Wallander, the Danish Forbrydelsen and the French Engrenages, whose third series ended last night, there may even be some Icelandic crime drama heading this way if we’re very lucky. I guess we have to wait and see.

Even More Of What You Fancy

2011-04-26T06:13:00.001+01:00

Over the last five or sixth months either Film4, one of the ITV channels, or perhaps even a combination of the two, peppered their schedules with films like Avalanche Express, Bear Island, and The Cassandra Crossing. As films go they aren’t particularly remarkable and certainly won’t ever be inducted into some movie pantheon or other. Made by journeyman directors who weren’t out to make any kind of artistic statement, they had some big names in the cast and were pretty decent stripped down thrillers, which makes a change from a lot of the bloated nonsense we get nowadays.

Watching these films again reminded me of seeing them on their initial release, back at the tail–end of the 1970s when audiences didn’t give a damn about budgets or box–office takings and certainly weren’t subjected to all this current day hullabaloo and tiresome hype. Instead they simply pitched up at one of the local cinemas with precious little fanfare and proved to be just the sort of movies that helped while away a Saturday afternoon. Even if they would be amongst the many titles destined to fall between the cracks of memory, when it came to providing some decent entertainment for a couple of hours, those films did all right, then and now.

Being reacquainted with them for the first time in more than thirty years, it reminded me of the challenge set last year by Stephen Gallagher to list the films that I’ll happily watch from beginning to end any number of times. Back then I came up with 31 titles most, as I said, weren’t all award winners overflowing with artistic merit but were the movies that I enjoy watching again and again, whether late at night or on a rainy weekend afternoon, with or without a shallow tub of vanilla ice cream and a clear plastic container of warm orange squash to add to the viewing pleasure.

I knew there were always more. And since New Year another 30 titles that have seen me through the years proved to be indispensable during the particularly crippling bouts of insomnia or the many empty hours of a Sunday when there was nothing to catch up with on iPlayer. One film in particular (which is eighteenth on this new list if you’re interested) stayed in or close to the DVD player and I watched it three nights in a row as part of the triple bills when sleep steadfastly refused to beckon.

Once again the titles are in alphabetical order. For one movie, because I vastly prefer the director’s cut, I’ve listed it under that extended version’s title, which puts it at the end rather than near the beginning. This time around the images have simply been numbered so there’s no chance of reading the file names in the browser window, which means you either know them or you don’t. Or you could make an educated guess. Either way, they are:

The Boy Who Waited

2011-04-05T23:06:00.001+01:00

Back at the beginning of January, when I’d posted a few curt observations about the movies seen last year, I’d come to the conclusion that it was best to stick with what you know and have some of the old classics to fall back on when the current crop of rather abysmal films fail to impress. Until Forbrydelsen appeared on the screen (with the third series of the French crime drama Engrenages hot on its heels) I was beginning to think that I’d have to do something similar when it came to watching television this year.

It got off to a cracking start on New Year’s Day with the wonderful single drama Eric and Ernie, about Morecambe and Wise’s early years, originated by Victoria Wood, but was immediately followed by the detective drama Zen. I’m sure I’ve read one of Michael Dibdin’s novels featuring his Rome–based police detective sometime in the past, either picking it up on holiday or maybe taking it out of the library, and the plot of the first episode certainly felt vaguely familiar, but while it looked very nice with high production values the drama left me cold so that by the end it felt like absently flicking through a glossy magazine in a doctor’s waiting room.

I had the same feeling with Boardwalk Empire, even though a shitload of money had been thrown at it, not even getting all the way through the first episode, directed by Martin Scorsese. Maybe I’ll give it another go sometime in the future because it could just be that I’m all tuckered out when it comes to gangsters. Great as its final episode was, I felt The Sopranos went at least two seasons beyond its sell–by date. Probably when I come back to Terence Winter’s prohibition drama will be around the same time I give David Simon’s Treme a proper shot because at the moment I’m finding myself strangely ambivalent to that as well. Maybe it’s just a phase I’m going through, much as I love the great city of New Orleans.

By the time the abhorrently clownish Outcasts appeared I was already lining up the box sets of the BBC adaptations of John Le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley’s People, starring Alec Guinness as George Smiley; Troy Kennedy Martin’s Edge of Darkness and Reilly – Ace of Spies; a selection of Poliakoff and Potter, and a few choice cuts from Alan Bennett; Secret Army, Das Boot, Angels in America and An Ungentlemanly Act, thinking that if I wanted to catch some exceptional drama I’d have to look to the past and just stick to the current television schedules for Top Gear, University Challenge and a fine number of natural history and science documentaries. And pretty much the whole of BBC4.

How did Outcasts end, by the way? It doesn’t matter if you don’t know. I don’t really care. The last episode I caught, just to see if it had improved just a scintilla was the one before it was booted out of its weeknight primetime slot where it turned out the planet was riddled with radioactive hotspots within walking distance of the settlement, flawless cut diamonds were available if you knew where to look for them, and alien remains could lie partially buried on a beach and not be affected by tidal erosion. Still, it was nice to see Vincent padding about again, even if Rose and Bernard weren’t there to look after him, and to note that as well as Forthaven being a piss–poor, unimaginative version of New Caprica, Carpathia might actually be a piss–poor unimaginative version of Solaris.

As the characters appeared clueless at every turn it simply reinforced the fact that the writers simply didn’t have one fucking clue either it became apparent that if Outcasts had been taken just that little step further from being ludicrous and ill thought out to becoming absolute bonkers it might actually have been mildly amusing. And God knows we could have done with a decent comedy as the New Year began to stretch out in front of us. Instead we got the utterly dull and wretchedly unfunny Episodes. Coming from one of the creators of Friends and a writer from Mad About You I wouldn’t have expected much, but certainly something far better than this.

There’s certainly a lot of mileage to be had satirizing the foibles of Hollywoodland but to get anywhere near the target means following in the footsteps of Billy Wilder and making a solid play at biting the hand that feeds you rather than aimlessly stumbling around and giving it the odd nuzzle every now and again. Everyone who goes there has some strange tale to tell about their experience in that crazy town, so rather than put money into such tame nonsense wouldn’t it have been far more entertaining to make a documentary filled with the war stories of the Brit professionals who went abroad?

Episodes was pretty much dead for me from the outset simply because the creative couple at the heart of the show were so preposterously naïve it was it was amazing they had made it here let alone over there. Putting Tamsin Greig and Stephen Mangan together in something not very good made me hanker to go back and watch Green Wing in much the same way that if I wanted to see American actors play extreme versions of themselves, or simply act like complete arseholes, I’d spin up some episodes of The Larry Sanders Show or Curb Your Enthusiasm. I suppose when people talk about writing about what you know the edict should be amended to: write about what you know but for the love of God add some real zing to it otherwise it’s all just a waste of breath! And if the BBC wants to save money they should have simply repeated the first series of Rev starring Tom Hollander as the embattled inner city priest.

Then again, I suppose it’s still early days for 2011. Last year didn’t start out spectacularly well but things soon changed for the better once the sublime documentary and Around The World By Zepplin, chronicling Lady Grace Drummond–Hay’s journey aboard the Graf Zepplin as it circumnavigated the globe in August 1929, arrived on screen, accompanied by the BBC Natural History Unit’s simply astonishing Great Rift: Africa's Wild Heart. In the following months BBC4 came up with Andrew Graham–Dixon on European art history, the latest series of Timeshift, and Runnin’ Down a Dream, Peter Bogdanovich’s four–hour history of Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers.

Dan Snow’s outstanding Empire of the Seas: How the Navy Forged the Modern World, benefited from having a presenter who was an accomplished sailor and historian rather than having a familiar face parachuted in to flap their mouth simply to attract an audience. The same was true of the equally entertaining and informative three–part A History of Horror with Mark Gatiss, which pretty much rounded off the year with an exploration of the Universal horror films of the 1930s and 40s; the British horror movies of the 1950s onwards, dominated by Hammer Films; and the gorier American horror films of the 1970s.

A genuinely enthusiastic fan of the genre, Gatiss’ very personal journey branched off into Cold War–era science fiction, Roger Corman’s colourful adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe stories, the English “folk horror” sub–genre, and the legacy of those early slasher movies to give a remarkably detailed exploration of the history of horror films in such a relatively short space of time. Amongst the wealth of information on screen perhaps the most surprising revelation was Halloween director John Carpenter outrageously dismissing the celebrated swimming pool scene in Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People after declaring that producer Val Lewton was “overrated”, which might go some way to explain his rapidly declining career.

In terms of drama there were any number of really wonderful surprises. Lost ended brilliantly, which wasn’t really a surprise to many but I thought was worth mentioning again. As I’d said before, anyone who started watching it but gave up should seriously think about giving it another go, especially now there isn’t a week’s wait or more to catch the next episode. If you go for character–oriented drama you’ll be justly rewarded, especially after being affronted by so many ill–conceived and short–lived Lost–inspired series, cobbled together by people who simply ignored how the island drama had taken the time to first established characters and situations before drawing them into its intriguingly labyrinthine story.

Not so much a surprise but more a complete shock was that ITV actually came up with a really exceptional drama in Downton Abbey. A lot of industry types have said, over the past years, that British television drama should look to the best of the US drama for inspiration. Whereas many commentators suggested that Julian Fellowes’ period drama was simply an extension of his Academy Award–winning Gosford Park, I saw the roots of the period drama partially in The West Wing more than anything. Perverse as that may seem, certainly one of the opening shots of the first episode, when the camera prowls around the country house as the servants make ready for the new day, suggested Thomas Schlamme’s long tracking shot as Leo McGarry makes his way through the corridors of the White House in the pilot of Aaron Sorkin’s lauded political drama. And Downton Abbey’s title sequence was equal to the best of anything devised for an HBO drama, bringing to it a refinement and attention to detail reflected in the show as a whole.

At the same time audiences were served up this new historical drama, there was an old historical drama on offer as well with the Yesterday channel showing all 28 episodes of the BBC POW drama Colditz. This was a real godsend for me because it came from that distant era when the average household had two choices when it came to viewing a television programme: You either watched it on the day of transmission or you didn’t. Those were the only options available. Although I was very well aware of the show when it was first broadcast toward the end of 1972, and would soon possess an edition of Major Pat Reid’s book – although if memory serves it was The Latter Days at Colditz rather than The Colditz Story – as well as the eventual Escape from Colditz board game, I was at an age when the series’ time of transmission was considered by my parents to be well past my bedtime.

Having to content myself with watching the old 1955 film, The Colditz Story, directed by Guy Hamilton, which was probably shown one rainy weekend as part of BBC2’s afternoon matinees as a consolation, I only ever managed to see one episode of Colditz during its original run – the penultimate episode of the second series – simply because it was shown during my parents’ annual skiing holiday. Somehow I managed to convince my grandparents, who were looking after me for that week, that it was quite all right for me to stay up and watch it, even though by then the drama had moved from the mid–evening slot and was broadcast directly after the Nine O’Clock News.

Was the almost forty year wait worth it? Absolutely! And I suspect I appreciated it more watching now as an adult than if I had back then as a child because it wasn’t overdramatic or “sexed–up” as so much material can be nowadays, instead sticking to the facts. Of course I wouldn’t have expected anything less from producer Gerry Glaister who, in almost all his television endeavours, brought in technical advisors to bring a real sense of verisimilitude to the proceedings. For Colditz he naturally employed Pat Reid. Watching the two series back to back, there is a very subtle shift in tone between the pair, which could be due to the fact that by the time the events of the second year began Reid had, along with Major Ronald Littledale, Lieutenant–Commander William Stephens and Canadian Flight Lieutenant Howard Wardle, scored a “home run” and left Oflag IVC prison camp for Switzerland.

When I interviewed Gerry Glaister shortly before his death in 2005 he touched on Colditz even though we were primarily talking about Secret Army and he was still rightly very proud of the show, in particular episodes like the John Brason–scripted Tweedledum in which Michael Bryant’s Wing Commander Marsh feigns madness for months on end as a ploy to getting repatriated on medical grounds. As startling as the episode is, especially given the horrifying denouement, what had me seriously on the edge of my seat was the final scene of the first series’ penultimate episode when the quartet of prisoners, including Edward Hardwicke’s Captain Pat Grant as the fictionalised version of Reid, begin the escape attempt that would see them venture through the POW’s kitchens, across the outer courtyard to the cellars of the German Kommandantur and then out across the dry moat.

First they had to get out of the castle’s inner courtyard without being noticed by the guards on duty, and not only did their sheer ingenuity deserve a round of applause but the on–screen re–enactment, with only the sound of a German guard’s footsteps on the cobblestones adding to the tension, proved to be an incredibly nerve shredding piece of television. It’s a shame the producers of that godawful 2005 ITV miniseries, which was, staggeringly, written by Peter Morgan, hadn’t paid close attention and realized the wealth of material and succession of ingenious escape attempts meant that they didn’t need a load of made–up, melodramatic bollocks that included the most clichéd of love triangles.

Then there was Mark Gatiss again with his adaptation of HG Wells’ The First Men In the Moon. It may not have equalled the Charles H. Schneer–produced 1964 film featuring Lionel Jeffries’ “absolutely imperial” turn as Professor Joseph Cavor, but it was a worthy and enjoyable attempt. When it came to the moon–dwelling Selenites, the drama proved that computer–generated imagery, albeit produced on a BBC budget, still can’t hold a candle to Ray Harryhausen’s proven stop–motion animation. Of course Gatiss had also been responsible, in tandem with Steven Moffat, for Sherlock, the BBC’s update of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s legendary creation. Back in 2009 I’d stupidly wondered how the characters would work in contemporary times now that the police had much more advanced methods in detection. Suitably abashed, the answer was: simply brilliantly. And that’s all that needs to be said.

Thinking back to Episodes, it soon became clear that the sitcom was based on Moffat’s misadventures in LA, adapting his UK sitcom Coupling for the American market. A shame then that he hadn’t been hired to write a comic roman à clef, but then he had far bigger and better fish to fry. Mid–June of last year, giving the BAFTA Annual Television Lecture, Stephen Fry was quick to point out:

I am fully and furiously and timorously aware that over the course of the next forty minutes or so I might say a thousand harmless, possibly even true, things and yet make one hasty or ill–considered remark and it will dog me for weeks to come for I am to talk about television, and if there is one thing that the newspapers of this country like to pounce upon, it is any breath of criticism directed from an insider at broadcasting networks and their executives. It’s one of the media’s favourite indoor sports.

Though he got through the lecture unscathed, it was during the conversation with producer John Lloyd that followed where things came a little unstuck, declaring:

The only drama the BBC will boast about are Merlin and Doctor Who, which are fine but they're children's programmes. They're not for adults.

If he had said this a year earlier I would have wholeheartedly agreed with him. But something very strange happened around Easter of 2010. I watched the new series of Doctor Who. And I bloody loved it! This of course may come as a surprise – or even a complete shock – to anyone who has read my posts for any length of time. In fact just over a week after starting the blog, back in 2006, I was already writing about how I felt like Miles Bennell, frantically running from a blank–faced populace that had succumbed to the collective madness and unconditionally fallen under the spell of Doctor Who, while I couldn’t see why such a ratty piece of tat deserved so much hysterical jubilation and congratulatory circle-jerking.

I’d watched the show as a kiddie, from the end of Patrick Troughton’s run through to some time before Tom Baker decided to call it a day, because that’s what you did but didn’t see the need to go back to it, 30–odd years on, with the same fervour of my contemporaries the same way I didn’t feel any real need to revisit the Ladybird books I’d read so many years ago as a child. Out of curiosity I’d caught the first episode with Christopher Eccleston, was puzzled that the BBC had made a really inferior genre–swapped rip–off of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and was happy to leave it there. The only problem was the whole damned country seemed to have happily gulped down the Kool–Aid and just wouldn’t shut up about it.

My circle of drinking buddies were all lapping every episode up with gusto, as if it was the television equivalent of Linus’ comfort blanket, which made some evenings out decidedly tricky, but I could avoid them. What wasn’t as easy to avoid was the all–consuming promotion and Russell T Davies’ endless self–promotion that made it frankly unbearable. If the Fat Controller had simply stuck to the small market of genre magazines written by fans eager to toady to a programme made by fans he would stayed out of my line of sight. Unfortunately he managed to worm his way into what used to be called the quality press and wouldn’t stop banging on about how brilliant the show was and how brilliant he was. For all the money the BBC threw at the series in the beginning to ensure success, it’s a shame a few quid hadn’t been allocated to pay someone to stand behind RTD and whisper in his ear the warning that all glory is fleeting.

If I caught the odd episode it was only to revel in the sheer ridiculousness of the stories that would unfold, marvelling at the sheer lack of internal logic and trying to guess what the eventual deus ex machina would be, and knowing that when I’d bring these criticisms up to the drinking buddies their default response would be, “Well, it’s science fiction, it doesn’t have to make sense!”, which would usually infuriate me even more than the previous 40 minutes of daftness. If they countered by stating it was a children’s show I’d ask why they were watching it. If that was then revised to calling it a “family show” instead, I’d tell them the mix of adult drama with utter childishness didn’t gel. Topped up on a couple of pints, they’d take on board what I had to say and then ignore it.

The Fat Controller didn’t seem to be able to take on board any criticism and dismiss it as easily. Not having the article around anymore, I can’t remember who hadn’t been willing to deify him but in The Times’ cultural guide The Knowledge in October of 2006, he wrote:

...I’m not a hack, I’m not a new boy, I’m a very, very experienced and successful TV writer and there’s no way I could have got there without understanding character.

There’s no denying he could write wonderful little character moments, but constructing a coherent plot seemed to be beyond his grasp. Years later there was an edition of Have I Got News For You where Paul Merton observed that the real tragedy of Gordon Brown was that he always wanted to be Prime Minister yet when the opportunity arose he couldn’t do the job. When I heard that it seemed the perfect way to describe RTD’s tenure overseeing Doctor Who, because there were times when I wondered of he had been watching the same programme when I had when I was a kid. In that very same article, discussing his approach to Doctor Who, he explained:

I always wanted there to be some ordinariness in there; some mundanity with the extraordinary. These days there are 500 shows, good and bad, which have fleets of spaceships and monsters all creeping on what used to be Doctor Who’s preserve. So, in looking for scripts, you have to think, well, Battlestar Galactica’s got the big spaceships and Buffy’s got the fantasy and the vampires, what have we got that’s unique? And it’s the real world.

Really? I seem to recall a number of Gerry & Sylvia Anderson shows from my childhood that had spaceships, and monsters. Irwin Allen made a few as well. And I think there’s a little bit more to Battlestar Galactica than just big spaceships, the same way that Buffy the Vampire Slayer isn’t really just about vampires, but who needs really subtext and allegory when there’s a lot of whiz–bang and shiny–shiny to soften the brain and glaze the eyes. But what about that last line? I found the extended “real world” sequences that went beyond establishing the time and place incongruously intruded on the stories and ate up precious minutes that could have been better served on plot. Or, as English Dave commented when I first ran the quote: “I beg to differ with RTD here. What you have that is unique is Time Travel.”

From then it went from bad to worse. Over the odd pint I’d voice an increasing concern about the amount of direct references to other material in the episodes. Briefly paying homage to previous works or being influenced by them is one thing – and the great Canadian animator Richard Williams once mentioned to me when I spotted a brief sight gag from the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup in the workprint of The Thief and the Cobbler, that you should never copy anything unless you can vastly improve upon the original, which he did – but it was becoming clear that Doctor Who had incessant “magpie tendencies”. But rather than drawing inspiration from earlier sources it was directing lifting elements and dropping them into the episodes, unchanged, to fill the lack of hard-earned original thought in the stories.

It may not seem a particularly big deal to some but I remember an interview with Terry Gilliam, conducted not that long after the release of Brazil, where he was rather incensed that a UK–based agency had produced a commercial for a computer company (which might, or might not, have been Hewlett Packard) that unashamedly ripped off the scene where Robert De Niro’s Harry Tuttle disappears in a blizzard of newspaper to push this idea of PCs creating a paperless work environment. Although there were people who had already seen the film and knew the spot had nicked the idea from him, Gilliam’s beef was that there was still a potential audience out there who had seen the commercial first and, when they got to watching Brazil, would think he was the one who had lazily swiped the concept.

At least for Gilliam TV commercials are, on the whole, ephemeral, with only the most celebrated campaigns ever lingering in the memory. Watching the two–part series two finale of Doctor Who, I wondered how Philip Pullman will feel at some future book signing when some kid is going to hold up a copy of The Amber Spyglass and accuse him of ripping off these episodes, which they saw as a tot. I was utterly astonished how blatantly Davies stole from Pullman’s award-winning His Dark Materials trilogy. Did the Fat Controller care about stealing other people’s ideas? Did he fuck! In an interview in The Independent, in which such thefts were brought up – in particular the first episode of Torchwood stealing from The Silence of the Lambs and Men in Black (although the journalist forgot to mention the Somebody Else’s Problem Field from Douglas Adams’ Life, the Universe and Everything) – his defence was it was “simple storytelling”, explaining:

“It’s all there for the taking, I do it gladly. The ending of Doctor Who, where we had to separate the Doctor and Rose, that was unashamedly taken from the Phillip Pullman novels. They’re brilliant, and every child reads them. So that creates a resonance, when they’ve got a story in one part of their minds and they see Doctor Who and think, ‘Oh right! You can change stories!’ If you want to get pretentious about it, it’s exactly what Shakespeare did. As long as you put yourself into it I think it’s all there for the grabbing.”

Really?! In the end I suppose it’s all about conduct and how one deports themself, whether they want to be a person of principle, working hard to come up with something new, or not, lazily stealing ideas and imagery directly from other, more celebrated sources. After a while it turned out to be best not to bother watching any episode written by RTD, although that didn’t always guarantee success. While James Moran turned in a particularly good episode with The Fires of Pompeii, there was an especially idiotic story set in Depression–era New York where humans subjugated by Daleks were turned into pig–men for no apparent reason, before another sap, tossed into a metal pepper pot, emerged with monocular vision – which is always good for impairing hand-eye co-ordination, and causing loss of manipulation and balance – and his brain outside of the cranium just for good measure. So that’s evolution is it? Somehow I don’t think so.

Even though Doctor Who comes from a long line of science fiction programmes that only had a very tenuous grasp of any science at best, a little common sense in the story development stage might not have gone amiss, even if they can’t be bothered with the usual internal logic, simply because we expect more now than we did back then. This is why I could never understand by audiences were so wowed by the Fat Controller’s episode Midnight. Forget for a moment that the actual story itself was straight out of The Twilight Zone (or maybe The Outer Limits), the set–up simply didn’t make sense.

It was set on an oxygen–free planet made of diamonds “poisoned by the sun” where the “exotonic” light from the sun will “destroy any living thing in a split second”. Borrowing a line of dialogue from Armageddon, this appears to be, if I’m not mistaken, “the scariest environment imaginable”. Since the precious gems are worthless, and direct sunlight will vaporise you, it seems to be a place to avoid. Except in the Doctor Who universe where it becomes home to a holiday resort. So the first questions that come to mind are, how did it get Health & Safety certified? And who in their right fucking minds would go there?

Even if the owners did get customers for what looked like a reasonably upscale–looking resort, why, for excursions to see a “sapphire waterfall” at the less than appealing sounding Cliffs of Oblivion, is the caterpillar–tracked transport so utterly low–rent? If the windows have to be shielded – meaning there’s no view out – why are they travelling by land in the first place, especially when the round trip takes eight hours? I know, it’s science fiction so it doesn’t have to many any sense, but I’m sure if I’d seen a similar scenario as a kiddie I’d be raising my hand and calling it out as a steaming pile of bullshit.

In the end the only episodes worth watching were the ones scripted by Steven Moffat. I still haven’t seen his first episode, The Empty Child, simply because I’d caught the trailer, saw Billie Piper dressed as Jenny Sparks, the Spirit of the 20th century from Warren Ellis’ The Authority, and decided to give it a wide berth. Cajoled into checking out the second part of the story, I can’t say I was particularly impressed given that the plot hinged on the hoary old chestnut of aliens fixing injured humans without understanding their physiology and royally fucking it up. Still, The Girl in the Fireplace, his next offering, was certainly an improvement, but it was with the third series episode Blink, with the Weeping Angels, that he really nailed it and then came the two–parter that introduced the character who may, or may not, be this particular time traveller’s wife.

That was the story that really highlighted the differences between Moffat and the Fat Controller for me. Much like the differences between the Pixar and Dreamworks Animation films, Moffat created wholly organic family stories while Davies’ took childish elements, teen elements, and the odd adult piece, and loosely stitched them together with obvious pop cultural references. Whereas Davies’ incessant “magpie tendancies” lazily shored up his threadbare central narratives, Moffat took the existing genre tropes, doffed his cap to familiar conceits and spun them in a whole new direction.

So while Silence in the Library and Forest of the Dead had nods to both Kurd Lasswitz’s The Universal Library and Borges’ The Library of Babel, along with Audrey Niffenegger’s bestseller, they just provided a starting point rather than the means to an end, and, in River Song, he introduced a character infinitely more intriguing that RTD’s Captain Twat Scarlet. By the time the episodes were transmitted it had already been announced that the Fat Controller was stepping down and Moffat would be taking his place as head writer and EP, which had to be cause for much celebration, and fancy cakes. A fan of Doctor Who but evidently not a fanboy, Moffat didn’t come across as the sort of cock who would breezily compare Robert Holmes’ The Talons of Weng Chiang to the works of Dennis Potter, and his lack of appearance in the press – or at least the newspapers I read – suggested he was more interested in the work at hand than perpetual self–promotion.

Of course Moffat didn’t take over immediately, with the series pushed back a year while a smattering of decidedly un–special specials were irregularly crowbarred into the television schedules, including The Waters of Mars, which was so monumentally dire that it made Outcasts look sensible. Oddly enough, when it came to the Fat Controller and his boggle–eyed puppet making their exit it was quite a decent swan song, although it seems having an immortal ruminate over his mortality probably wasn’t what the expectant audience quite expected on Christmas Day. Still, the overriding sense of melancholia that permeated the narrative meant that the actors dialled down on the usual overacting, giving far more considered and affecting performances.

Really, it was about time, even if it was too little too late. Having previously seen David Tennant actually act in Peter Bowker’s Blackpool and John Simm give sterling performances in The Lakes and State Of Play, it had been quite depressing to witness their witless pantomime gurning over the past couple years. And I guess that was why I was looking forward to seeing what the new guy would do under Moffat’s tutelage, having only seen Matt Smith before in Moses Jones where he had a handful of scenes. Quite frankly he had me at: “Beans are evil. Bad, bad beans!”, and I knew I was on for the long haul once he hurled the plate of bread and butter into the garden, shouting, “And stay out!”

What I found most intriguing was how those die–hard fans amongst the drinking circle, who raved about the earlier, nonsensical series hadn’t been all that impressed with Tennent’s last bow, nor Moffat’s first year on the job for that matter. The latter opinions I found intriguing, though didn’t really spend enough time with them over the summer to get to the root of their dislike. I wasn’t enamoured by every episode but I did watch every episode. Because even if the self–contained story wasn’t up to much there was always something intriguing going on with the overall story arc, expertly woven into the plots in a way the previous year’s had consistently and spectacularly failed to achieve. So while, in the Vincent Van Gogh episode, I wasn’t exactly taken by the frankly bizarre ready–to–roast alien chicken used as a physical manifestation of manic depression (however brave it was to put an issue like mental illness in the show), the artist’s presence was necessary for the inclusion of Starry Night as part of the on–going narrative.

More importantly, Moffat made the companion integral to the story arc. Back when Sydney Newman first conceived of the series, the human companion acted as the eyes and ears of the audience at home, reflecting their fears and desires as the onscreen exploits unfolded. But as actors came and went, and incoming producers put their stamp own on the show, however different they tried to make the characters, I just remember the companions being there simply to be a plot contrivance, acting as the traditional damsel in distress, whether male or female. This time it was personal, which made Amy Pond far more relevant than say Billie Piper, starting off as some kind of Albert Square Buffy Summers before turning all doe–eyed, the pointless second girl, or Catherine Tate being her usual annoying, braying self.

When Rose was wheeled back in for the final, final time at the end of the fourth series, Moffat summed the character up best during an appearance at the 2008 San Diego Comic Con, observing: “You have to hand it to the Doctor for dumping a slightly needy girlfriend by palming her off on a copy of himself.” Introducing Amy’s fiancé and bringing him along for the ride, Moffat erased the tedious “real world” soap opera that had been gumming up the works and leavened the story with the relationship humour that had made Coupling a success. That meant the best laughs came at the expense of the characters rather than the inappropriate childish japery previously shoehorned into the stories.

Making it personal meant that Moffat could built up to a big event – the erasure of everything in the universe – but play it out on a small scale, which is what the old show used to be about, concentrating on the main characters rather than strain the budget with unconvincing shots of extras panicking in the streets and all the associated nonsense that came with them. Instead the money seemed to have been used wisely, certainly when it came to hiring far better directors and cinematographers who brought a much more filmic quality to the last series, especially when it came to the contrasting colour palettes Stephan Pehrsson employed on the final two episodes.

It was a shame that a few desks couldn’t have beeb reassigned in the BBC’s graphics departments as well. The Waters of Mars had featured an astonishingly bad cutaway to an onscreen news report that included the supplementary headline: THE WORLD GRIEVE FOR HEROS OF SPACE TRAVEL. In The Big Bang, the museum’s AV presentation of the Pandorica through the ages included an image of bombers in flight when it reached the time of the London Blitz. Instead of German Heinkel He-111s whoever had sourced the image had decided that a photo of American B-17 Flying Fortresses flying a daylight raid would do. Of course maybe it was another of the very sly nods to the alternate history that had taken place.

Either way, like the subtle Lost homage at the end of The Pandorica Opens it brought a smile to my face rather than raising my gorge, just as his eventual escape from that ultimate prison – while making absolutely no real sense at all – still made sense in terms of the mechanics of the storytelling. If the odd mistake creeps in at least Moffat seems confident enough to laugh at them without beating his chest and running to the nearest soapbox to rail against his critics, demonstrated earlier this year when someone passed on one of his tweets:

“Dad, the Treeborgs in Angels? Like Cyborgs but trees? Cyborg is Cyberorganism, Treeborg is tree–organism. That’s a TREE.” ”GO TO YOUR ROOM!”

Minor quibbles aside, amazingly Doctor Who is finally standing head and shoulders above other recent BBC dramas, especially on a night when they seem to have turned Carry on Cabby into a series. If there’s one thing Steven Moffat should be congratulated for is that in his first year on the job he seems to have subtly rewritten the timeline to omit all of Davis’ overblown melodramatics. Amazingly, I’m actually looking forward to the new series.

Killing Time

2011-03-20T12:10:00.008Z

This past month, aside from a brief detour trying (and eventually succeeding) to solve Brian Sibley’s wonderfully fiendish Beastly Books Quiz, the days have pretty much been divided up between working on the manuscript and catching up with the 20–part Danish crime drama Forbrydelsen, doled out on BBC4 every Saturday night in two–episode instalments. The first I can’t really talk about right now, the second, once I started watching, I can’t stop enthusing about.

Following the 20–day investigation into the grisly murder of 19–year old Nanna Birk Larsen, Forbrydelsen may contain faint echoes of Prime Suspect and State of Play, once the line of enquiry leads Sofie Gråbøl’s insular police detective Sarah Lund to the forthcoming local election intrigue at City Hall, but ably manages to surpass them both. Four years on from it’s original transmission in Denmark, the BBC managed to bag Forbrydelsen and broadcast it before the inevitable American remake arrives. Thankfully Sue Deeks, the head of acquisitions at the BBC who brought in the series after the success of the French crime thriller Engrenages and Sweden’s Wallander on BBC4, has publicly stated that they’re not going to bother with this English–language version. Having seen the promos for AMC’s The Killing I can understand why.

I can’t blame AMC’s previous output, what with Mad Men and the critically lauded conspiracy drama Rubicon, which should be heading our way sometime soon, under their belts. But transplanting Forbrydelsen from Copenhagen to Seattle – which means that it was no doubt shot in Vancouver – has resulted in a drama that, from the available clips, looks like it sticks not only to the storyline but a good number of the camera angles, yet manages to look... really ordinary by comparison. What helps make Forbrydelsen such a formidable piece of work is the Danish colour palate, the understated acting and the exceptional use of Scandinavian silences that convey far more than a spew of dialogue. There’s also something wonderfully pleasing about the level of concentration a subtitled, foreign–language drama requires, especially when, as Lund and her partner Jan Meyer chase down every available lead, alibis dissolve, motives are questioned, and just about everyone remains suspect throughout.

For this reason I didn’t watch the first episodes when they were broadcast on BBC4 simply because I had got into the habit of watching subtitled dramas – most recently during the run of Wallander – on iPlayer. You forget, watching a programme in your native tongue, how often you take your eyes off the screen, whether it’s due to reaching for a coffee mug or glass to take a drink, sparking up then stunning the cigarette out in an ashtray, or whatever other distractions are available. In a dialogue–heavy scene that doesn’t really matter because you can still hear what the characters are saying, but when it comes to subtitled dramas, especially thrillers where any offhand remark may prove vital clues, that’s a different matter altogether.

Sitting at the desk, watching episodes on the computer screen instead, meant I could focus on the drama, pausing if need be or scrolling back to watch a scene again if I’d forgot to pay close enough attention. With the BBC affording Forbrydelsen their series catch–up on iPlayer, meaning episodes were available for longer than the usual seven days, I waited a while and then dove in just before the initial episodes were about to disappear. This might have been a slight mistake because right from the start watching a couple of episodes a night wasn’t enough. And then of course once I had caught up it meant waiting each week for the next instalment, eager to discover what new twists and turns the story would go through, trying to figure out the guilty parties involved. By then I had dispensed with the computer and was sitting on the sofa, eyes glued to the television screen.

Over these many weeks, following Forbrydelsen has proved to be a bittersweet experience. Coupled with the investigation, the drama shows how the parents of the murdered girl deal with their grief. Watching those scenes, the strongest of which usually played out over a despairing silence, proved to be the most poignant fictional images on television that week. Afterwards I’d try to fathom how such an exceptionally complex and moving drama could have come out of Denmark of all places. I’ve always been a fan of Waking the Dead but the start of the ninth and final season came across as over–ripe histrionics. And what else has the BBC’s drama department served up over the past couple months while Forbrydelsen has been on: the abysmal absurdity of Outcasts, the continuation of tiresome crap like Holby City and Waterloo Road. Maybe the commissioning editors at White City should be beaten and dumped in a canal while Ms Deeks is put forward for a GBE, especially now the BBC has already bought the second series of Forbrydelsen, to be shown later in the year.

Next weekend the mystery finally comes to a close with the last two episodes. It’s a date I wish I had already noted in my diary because I’d recently agreed to help out a friend and will be out of town those days. So it will mean being careful of overhearing any conversation and rushing straight to the computer the moment I eventually get back home. And after that comes the withdrawal symptoms so hopefully the BBC will make good and broadcast the third season of Engrenages to help alleviate them while I wait for Lund to return to the screen.

Cast Away

2011-02-20T22:55:00.003Z

After all that malarkey last Friday week I figured it was best to put my feet up and have a relaxing couple of days, then just keep my head down and carry on with the minimum of distractions once Monday rolled around. Midweek I even made time to pick up some over–the–counter Diphemhydramine Hydrochloride to help counter the continued bout of insomnia that has taken root and made things interesting.

According to a label on the box I was made aware the sleeping tablets “may cause drowsiness”. Unfortunately, this turned out to be the result rather than a warning, leading to a pretty wretched night where I was still unable to sleep but too dozy to get anything productive done. Still, that didn’t stop me leaving the computer on, opening iPlayer and watching the next two episodes of Outcasts, which I had happily ignored during their initial transmission. This wasn’t because I felt I had been too harsh in my initial assessment and decided the drama deserved another chance, but simply that I was desperate to find something that would help me fall asleep.

I still didn’t find any of the characters engaging, which wasn’t much of a surprise, and couldn’t really give a damn about anyone or any thing. But it was worth watching such appalling nonsense, when there was nothing better to do, in light of reading Stephen Gallagher’s insightful evaluation of where the BBC’s attitude to recent science fiction drama has gone hopelessly wrong. Obviously a bit more thought in the preparation of Outcasts wouldn’t have gone amiss to bolster the inadequate scripts, but story aside, the inherent problem with each episode appears to be the lack of a decent budget, limiting the sets, locations and speaking parts, and too short a filming schedule.

I was having a chat with a pal last weekend, and the conversation eventually wound around to the sheer ludicrousness of Outcasts – and this was before it was revealed that one of the more idiotic characters had brought his music to the planet on vinyl of all things, and was acting as some sort of resident DJ. Regarding the lack of characters – or at least speaking roles – I mentioned to him that in the first episode, where the dull President and less than competent Head of Security seemed to be doing everything, it was akin to putting out yet another hospital drama but this time having the hospital administrator and a resident porter perform the surgeries.

On top of that was the general lack of cutaways or different set-ups in a particular scene to either include additional visual information to clue the audience in on the situation. Even though it wouldn’t solve the inherent problems, surely the insertion of a single shot of an armed member of the expeditionary force standing on a gantry atop the main gate, watching Jamie Bamber’s character enter the settlement, help to say a lot more about the living conditions of the colonists than the inconsistent blather than followed. At the very least, a few more set–ups would have helped create the requisite sense of urgency, rather than stick with the practice of plonking the camera down in one spot, have the actors say what they have to say, and end up with the all too familiar quite slow and occasionally tedious footage that blights far to many British dramas.

Even if a lack of both time and money helped account for Outcasts’ piss–poor presentation, rather than just laying the blame at bad writing, it’s too late now. I’ve seen far more than enough and as the ratings declined with each successive episode – starting out with 4.4 million viewers and ending this week’s fourth episode down to 2.2 million, where it was comprehensively trounced by both the final episode of Big Fat Gypsy Weddings on Channel Four and The 2011 Brit Awards, televised on ITV1 – apparently so has everyone else. So I suppose it came as no surprise that on Wednesday The Guardian reported that after next Monday’s fifth episode, Outcasts is being shunted to a late–night slot on Sunday evenings for the remainder of the eight–part run.

While it looks like Danny Cohen, BBC1’s new controller, don’t want the show stinking up the schedule on his watch, it’s typical that drama controller, Ben Stephenson, shrugs off making a bad call by declaring:

“BBC1 and BBC drama support creative risk. Sometimes this means that talented people make shows that don’t engage enough of the audience. I have so much respect for any writer who has the nerve and confidence to create their own original world and serve it up to an audience.”

Those are fine words indeed, but wouldn’t a well thought out, “original world” be far preferable to one slapped together by a bunch of jerry–builders? I suspect the simple–minded “loyal, core audience” little Ben goes on to talk about shouldn’t hold out for a second series, although it appears that Elisabeth Murdoch’s Shine Limited, which bought Kudos back in late 2006, is trying to interest daddy Rupert’s News Corp on staging a possible buyout. Smeared onto a Sky channel like some homemade dirty protest to the HBO back catalogue bulking out Sky Atlantic’s schedule, surely Outcasts would only prove that in terms of quality drama there are times when the US and UK really are oceans apart.

Heartache

2011-02-13T22:09:00.002Z

Perhaps the best thing I did on Friday was accidentally give my right kneecap a sharp whack against the column of storage boxes behind the desk because it took my mind off the ache behind my left shoulder blade that came from managing to snatch a few hours sleep on the sofa just before sunrise. That, in turn, had taken my mind off the nagging pain in my chest that I’d first become aware of in the early evening of the day before.

I’ve mentioned before that growing up in the Westcountry, particularly the years on the farms, we would only bother to seek any kind of medical attention if a limb had been torn off or a relatively vital organ coughed up. Anything less could either be patched up at home, treated with an asprin, or ignored and expected to be gone the next day, because running to the doctor with trivial ailments always seemed to be a waste of everyone’s time.

While there are the odd occasions when I find sitting for extended periods of time uncomfortable due to previously damaging my coccyx – although I’ve thankfully stopped suffering the incapacitating back pains that resulted from the same injury – and untreated ankle ligament damage put paid to any jogging, so far this kind of arrangement hasn’t turned out that badly. Of course if I had gotten the diagnosis and treatment for the kidney stone a lot sooner I would have saved myself the sort of pain that was so acute that I was physically tearing my hair out as I lay in bed, pleading for it to stop, but I guess you can’t get it right every time.

Compared to then this chest pain felt like a minor inconvenience. But having put up with it for around 24 hours, and after a bout of coughing had me doubled over, I figured it was best to call the local medical practice for advice before they closed for the weekend, especially since my GP now had me dropping by on a regular basis to check my blood pressure amongst other things. Part way through explaining the symptoms I was instructed to get up there as soon as I could. Once the on–call doctor pressed her stethoscope to first my chest then back, I realised I’d obviously resorted, unconsciously, to shallow breaths throughout the day – even when sparking up – and couldn’t take any of the deep breaths as instructed.

Optimistically, I’d left the flat with the computer, television and most of the lights on, expecting to be back in time for the second half of a repeat of The Crystal Maze on one of the more obscure digital channels. I’d also left my mobile phone by the computer keyboard, but I did have my Oyster card, so when she decided I needed to go to the hospital I asked which one so I’d know which bus to catch. Obviously there was more urgency required than leaving it in the hands of the 221 so while I waited in reception she made the call, even though there’s an ambulance station across the road that I could walk to, to grab a ride, and have a sneaky gasper on the way.

Before I could suggest the first part on that option a cute paramedic looking for someone with acute chest pains came barrelling into the practice, loaded down with her kit. Finding a free office, she sat me down and started laying out her instruments on the desk. Pulling up my tee-shirt, she eyed my chest and declared she’d have to shave it. With a flourish, she swept a disposable razor back and forth with the dexterity of Don Diego de la Vega, exposing the pink flesh covering my breastbone then began to attach the first of four Skintact pads that would encircle my heart. The remainder where pressed to my wrists and ankles, then I was wired up to her portable ECG machine.

It was only last month that I’d had my regular blood tests for cholesterol and diabetes and whatever else, and the results had been fine. The ECG results were inconclusive, even with one done for luck but my blood pressure was up and my temperature was at the low end of the high range. When the GP came in to study the read–outs an ambulance crew were hovering behind her so I was bustled off to their waiting ambulance. Heading to the hospital without the need for sirens, the driver was cut up by an articulated lorry on one of the main roundabouts. Meanwhile the paramedic sitting in the back with me finished filling out my details as I apologised for wasting their time if it turned out to be nothing.

Back in early 2009, when the pain from the then undiagnosed kidney stone became unbearable during the Spring Bank Holiday Monday, I’d phoned the A&E department to see if was worth coming in or whether, if they were overflowing of people blown up by barbecues, I should tough it out for another day. It was suggested I come the next day of I could wait. Never that keen on Friday nights out at the best of times, I was concerned I’d be processed through an A&E full of end of week revellers who had come a cropper from their revels. Instead I went straight through to admissions and was sent up to the Clinical Decision Unit, which was fortunate.

There I went through a repeat round of the same tests, the only difference being that I was surrounded by sick people in the CDU, and one of the blood samples was taken from my left index finger rather than my right. Then came another ECG, so it was good the Skintact pads had been left in place rather than ripped off and replaced. Then another attendant in a white smock, obviously looking for something to do, hooked me up to the blood pressure cuff again. After that someone more senior in a dark blue smock took me to a curtained–off cubicle and, while a person in the next bed along sounded like she was slowly being disembowelled, explained that they would have to wait until the X–ray to see whether I’d need to be kept in for the night or not.

Hopefully the answer would be not. But it took so long to get to the X–ray department, one floor down, that I wondered if it would still be night when the decision could be made. Because of course I couldn’t simply walk there myself and had to wait for a porter to sit me down and wheel me there in a wheelchair, and that took longer than any test. Perhaps it was a test to see whether I’d give up waiting, sign a release if necessary and head off home, whether my chest was about to explode or not.

After the X–ray I returned to the CDU ward and was left to wait for the results. When I’d first got there all the cubicles and most chairs had been taken. Pretty soon there was just me and an old man who looked like Dave Bowman before his final transformation into the Star Child. He lay on his bed, staring up as if he could see the black monolith floating above him, while I looked down at the floor, thinking that if that was me I’d want someone to drive a sharp blade between my ribs.

Eventually a doctor who looked younger than the youngest policeman came over and explained that they had checked both the ECG results and the X–ray and he couldn’t see anything serious. Had I lifted anything heavy? No. It might have been something that frivolous because they couldn’t see anything serious, so I was allowed to go. In fact he suggested that if I had a paracetamol at home I should pop one of those before bedtime.

Outside in the cold I sparked up and headed for the bus stop, luckily having enough on the Oyster to get me back home. Instead of paracetamol I managed to track down some codeine, which helped some, although the resulting fuzzy head meant that when I got to the front of the ATM queue here on the Broadway I pulled out the bunch of flat keys rather than my debit card. Before then I turned off the computer, television and the lights. So apparently my heart isn’t broken, which is news to me.

Castoffs

2011-02-08T23:55:00.004Z

Back in the summer of 2009, after Tony Garnett circulated an email accusing the BBC of stifling creativity, Ben Stephenson, Auntie’s drama commissioning controller, stuck his little head above the parapet and lobbed back a list of the various new dramas the Corporation would soon have on the screens to placate the critics and prove Garnett wrong. However tempting previews are you never can tell until you see the finished product. I have to admit to being suspicious of Steven Moffat and Mark Gattis’ update of Sherlock Holmes, which, when transmitted, turned out to be one of the best darned things on television. The same couldn’t be said for The Deep.

It was promoted as a drama set on board a submarine trapped beneath the Arctic ice floe, where a team of oceanographers, left with no power and limited oxygen, discover they are not alone. That suggested a whole lot of possibilities, none of them involving a bunch of idiots wasting their time bickering, which was pretty much what we got in the end. Instead of following in the footsteps of the likes of The Abyss and Ice Station Zebra with their claustrophobic angst, what surfaced was a bunch of nonsense that felt like it was influenced by the final couple seasons of Irwin Allen’s Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, which was not good.

Trying to think back to late last summer when it finally pitched up in the schedules, it’s difficult to come up with just one redeeming feature from all five episodes. Just as difficult is trying to think of the worst thing about the show because there’s so much to choose from. There was Minnie Driver, absolutely unconvincing as the captain of the submarine. She might have been the designer as well, in which case she needed to be punched hard in the face because this submersible, named Orpheus (oh, dear God!), made Skydiver seem utterly feasible. It had a moon pool for fucks sake! Then there was the oversized and utterly impractical bridge. And that was manned by, on the whole, a useless (but thankfully disposable) crew who looked like they should have been home revising for their A–levels rather than alternating between hissy fits and hysterics once they were submerged.

The bunch of imbeciles reminded me of the clowns running the Mars base in the Doctor Who episode The Waters of Mars who didn’t have a clue of what to do in a crisis. Oddly enough, one of the television channels was showing Mission to Mars on Sunday afternoon and I caught the last half of it. It’s not a brilliant film, but at least it showed that Brian de Palma might have finally gotten over his Hitchcock fixation. Because of a couple of unfortunate incidents, the crew of the second mission have to run through emergency protocols. They work against the clock, running through all kinds of procedures. Just because they know what to do in these situations it doesn’t mean that everything will go to plan. But what it shows is that the writers have done some proper research.

Yet when the BBC attempts to produce something that comes close to adult science fiction drama it’s happy to produce scripts that sets up a situation and then fritters it all away because the writer hasn’t either put in the research or given proper thought to both the environs and what the characters would actually do in those circumstances. So what it descends into is one faux drama after another. Think about that adaptation of The Day of the Triffids the Christmas before last where Bill Masen has to be rushed to a hospital because Triffoil, the company that farms the violent vegetation, apparently doesn’t bother to have any medical facilities on site. Obviously Masen needs to be in a London hospital so that he discovers the city deserted after the solar eruption, but the reason to get him there is thoughtless and unconvincing, which brings us to Outcasts.

A few clips had appeared in the montages squeezed in between the scheduled programmes to promote the new BBC dramas but they didn’t really show much, which was probably a good thing because are the weeks got closer to transmission the more the previews showed the less inspired Outcasts appeared. On the BBC TV blog, writer Ben Richards explained:

The inspiration behind Outcasts was the desire to tell a pioneer story, and the only place you can do that really now is in space. I wanted to explore second chances, most fundamentally whether humanity is genetically hardwired to make the same mistakes again and again.

That does sound like a pretty good idea to explore. And hopefully anyone interested in that sort of thing tuned in at 9:00pm this evening to watch the second episode of Battlestar Galactica on Sky Atlantic because it took the concept of humanity of making the same mistakes over again and created a work of real genius. As for Outcasts, I’m afraid the reviewer in The Times’ Playlist magazine from this week got it right when they wrote:

Not since Bonekickers has the BBC broadcast such an irredeemably awful series. Sometimes catastrophes on this scale can be enjoyed precisely because they are so dismal, but this one has a kind of grinding badness that defies enjoyment of any kind.

The first episode actually put me to sleep – which is not a good sign – so I had to catch it again on iPlayer. Unlike a new medical or crime drama, science fiction needs not just new characters and situations but a credible environment for the story to play out in. Outcasts told me very little and made me question a whole lot more, simply because nothing seemed to have been thought out. When it came to that early money shot of the Forthaven settlement, my initial question was, where’s the bloody river? Surely fresh water for drinking and to aid sanitation would be a priority to help keep the occupants healthy, along with nutrient–rich arable land. And a nearby forest would be good for lumber.

Finding out that the planet is only being explored by members of the expeditionary force – on foot, no less – it made me wonder why, with no ground transport, there was such a bloody big gate at the settlement. And since they obviously haven’t covered much ground shouldn’t there be some kind of fortification against either an unseen indigenous life form or a carnivorous animal species? And why wasn’t this sort of analysis conducted from orbit when they first arrived, because otherwise it just seems like they plonked themselves down at the first place they landed. And how come the newly arrived settlers in the second ship haven’t spent their five–year journey in some kind of suspended animation, thereby cutting down on the massive amount of supplies needed to sustain them for the trip? Instead they’ve been stuck inside, making babies, which eats into their limited resources even more.

Wouldn’t this have been figured into the back story for the show, especially when it apparently spent three whole years in development?! Because without any rational thought applied all we end up with is inconsequential action and a load of blather rather than proper drama for characters in such a situation. The programme makers obviously want to hold information back to add to the (tedious) mysteries revolving around the colonization, but some sensible details upfront wouldn’t have gone amiss to stop making it appear so bloody amateurish. Maybe they should have watched Battlestar Galactica first, which brought up the issues of how much food, water and fuel the fleet would need and then wove their procurement into the ongoing narrative. Firefly and especially Serenity would have also been worth looking at too.

In the case of the latter, within the first few scenes we get a flashback to River Tam at school where the teacher briefly explains the mass exodus from Earth. Once that’s set up, establishing the circumstances for the audience, we get on with the story. In Outcasts’ first episode, in a similar scene, which would have been the prime time to clue the viewers in, the teacher only tells her class that the key was finding a planet in the “Goldilocks Zone” – one that is “just right” to support human life. Yeah, we got that already. The earlier shots of clear blue skies and reasonably verdant countryside pretty much gave that away, you muppet!

It hadn’t surprised me that the teacher was rubbish because by that point it was already apparent that almost all the people sent out to the new planet seemed to be utterly useless at their jobs, especially members of the security detail who have handed in their guns following new regulations that everyone else blithely ignores. When we’re told that one of the achievements of Hoban, the militant member of the expeditionary force, is that he was the first person to set out and find water, you can only surmise that they’re even more moronic than the morons from the recent remake of Survivors.

In fact just before nodding off I wondered if this was a big joke and we’d eventually discover that all the colonists had arrived on Ship B of the Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet having previously been employed as insurance salesmen, hairdressers, telephone sanitizers and account executives. When I eventually saw the remainder of the episode I was rather disappointed that the ineffectual captain of the second ship wasn’t sitting in the bath saying how much he was looking forward to a nice gin and tonic. When I saw what I’d missed, all I discovered was that they’d killed off the only character with any depth, played by the only actor putting some effort into their role.

Still, I thought I’d give the second episode a go, not because there might be a modicum of improvement but because there might be an explanation as to why the transport’s lifeboats were called Sub–Shuttles. Instead we heard there had been an uprising in Shanghai, when I’m sure previously someone said the city had been previously nuked. Maybe a gigantic swarm of twelve–foot piranha bees got them. And then Outcasts’ version of the Others turned up. I think they were supposed to be clones but by that point I was trying to figure out 29 Across and frankly couldn’t care about what was dawdling along on the television screen.

With every bit of action undermined by the moronic dialogue, the attempts at drama were frankly underwhelming for the set up and came across as something that could just have easily been played out in a soap opera with characters arguing over their market stalls. By the time I have up, Outcasts just felt like a suit that had come from a tailor who hadn’t got the measurements right. Still, it was nice to see Auntie continue its recent tradition of producing a massive cauldron of shit whenever it attempts adult SF drama. All that should be said of Outcasts is “No, say we all!”

After The Flood, The Dud

2011-02-02T23:54:00.007Z

Nearing the end of January, the bout of insomnia that looked like it was going to see me through the whole of 2011 thankfully abated. I’d grabbed an appointment with my GP to see if I could score some barbiturates but she’d only sent me back home with a sympathetic smile and a leaflet on muscle relaxation and breathing exercises to help aid sleep. In the end it was probably exhaustion that proved to be the eventual cure, but that said I haven’t wholly managed to fall back into a pattern of a good night’s sleep every night.

Whereas before I would carry on writing at the computer, these odd few nights, while I may type in a few notes or continue with my research, I usually spend the time catching up with the television programmes I’ve missed during the past week. Last night, still up and pacing, unable to sleep, I settled down to give the documentary Dambusters Declassified another go. Stuck into BBC One’s schedule in the early hours of the morning, it had first been shown last year at the tail end of the celebrations commemorating the glorious Spitfire Summer of 1940.

Back then I’d tried watching it, first during its initial broadcast and then a couple of times while it languished on iPlayer, but each attempt came to naught. My main frustration had been that rather than being a fully factual piece, which shouldn’t be too much to ask for, Dambusters Declassified was another useless celebrity–centric documentary. Obviously this happens more and more now, and both the BBC and ITV decided their run of programmes paying tribute to the young pilots of the Battle of Britain required Ewan McGregor and David Jason fannying around in Spitfires rather than hearing from any surviving pilots of the day themselves. In this instance, the look back at Operation Chastise was hosted by a dour Martin Shaw, which made it even worse.

Purporting to take a fresh look at 617 Squadron’s attempt to breach the dams in the Rhur Valley using Barnes Wallis’ revolutionary bouncing bombs, Dambusters Declassified hadn’t helped itself from the outset by telling viewers that Michael Anderson’s classic film The Dam Busters, starring Richard Todd and Michael Redgrave, and made when much of the information regarding the development of the Upkeep was still classified, actually took dramatic license with the truth. Even before it got to Shaw, a pilot himself, navigating the flight path taken by the first wave of Avro Lancasters from their base at RAF Scampton, north of Lincoln, across the North Sea to the Netherlands and then on to Germany, that pretty much did it for me the first time around.

Why I carried on watching this time around I’m not sure. maybe it was because this time around the documentary was signed and, as Shaw went on and on about himself I was hoping that the signer would give up translating his worthless blather, curl her fingers into a loose fist and shake her hand from side to side as he prattled on. Back in May of last year, months before that first transmission of Dambusters Declassified, I’d written about interviewing members of the Directorate of Corporate Communication (RAF) and how they would go about assisting film and television projects if they thought the material was worthwhile. At the time they had been working with Tigress Productions to make the excellent two-part documentary The Dambusters, which took a number of NCO air–crew and officers and had them recreate the raid on a specially created flight simulator to show how bloody difficult it had been.

During that interview, Marcia Nash, who at the time oversaw the television side of the department, admitted they were wary of programmes about the exploits of 617, especially when some proposals had come in that suggested they were aiming to be uncomplimentary about the leader of the squadron. “Wing Commander Guy Gibson was a colourful character and had some flaws as everybody does. And in order to preserve his memory it wasn’t in our interest that they do a character assassination.” And surprise, surprise, one of the points raised by Shaw was that Gibson, rather than being like Richard Todd’s portrayal in the film, was a bit of a stuffed shirt who, after a brief failed marriage, sought solace in the arms of another woman. Would the DCC (RAF) have helped with Dambusters Declassified? I doubt it.

Hagiographies make me want to choke on my own vomit, but when it comes to someone like Guy Gibson, they deserve to be honoured with all “sins” pretty much forgiven. Here’s the thing to remember: When Gibson took off from RAF Scampton at 9:39pm on the night of 16 May, 1943, flying AJ–G “George” in the first wave of Lancaster bombers, he had already flown over 170 missions. After flying for over three hours at night, at a height of 100 feet, when he reached the Möhne dam Gibson made a dummy pass first, which enable the sentry gunners a chance to get ready for his attack run, before dropping to 60 feet so that Pilot Officer Frederick Spafford, his bomb aimer, could release the Upkeep. After the second Lancaster, AJ–M “Mother”, piloted by Flight Lieutenant John Hopgood took a hammering from the defences and ultimately went down in flames, Gibson flew in ahead of the third and fourth bombers in an attempt to draw the flak away, going so far as to turn on his navigation lights when it was the turn of Squadron Leader Henry “Dingy” Young flying AJ–A “Apple”.

Once the Möhne dam was destroyed, finished off by the Upkeep released from AJ–J “Johnny”, piloted by Flight Lieutenant David Maltby, rather than head back with the Lancasters that had released their bombs, Gibson headed further into Germany with Young to oversee the attack on the Eder dam, Though unguarded the terrain, with a difficult dogleg approach and a perilous exit due to high ground on the dry side of the dam, gave the pilots little more than a few seconds to line their aircraft up for the attack run. Gibson co–ordinated the attack and it was only after the Eder was successfully breached by AJ–N “Nut”, flown by Pilot Officer Leslie Knight, that he ordered what remained of the squadron home, landing AJ–G “George” back at Scampton just over six–and–a–half hours after taking off. In recognition of his valour and leadership, Gibson would be awarded the Victoria Cross by King George VI, “in recognition of most conspicuous bravery”. He was three months shy of his 24th birthday.

So when someone of that calibre is being criticized for his behaviour by a jumped up little actor, remembered by a generation for having the most awful bubble perm while he ran about firing a pretend Luger, my repeated response to the television was, “Fuck you, you cunty cunt!” at every claim made. Rude, I know, but right all the same. Having said that, by sitting through the whole programme I did learn that Flight Sergeant James Fraser, the bomb aimer of AJ-M “Mother”, who had managed to bail out after Flight Lieutenant Hopgood flew the crippled Lancaster to a height that his crew could safely parachute from, eventually broke during interrogation, revealing plans of the raid; that the Germans had discovered a virtually intact 9,250 pound Upkeep amongst the wreckage of one of the bombers shot down and went on to develop their own rocket-assisted version; that Churchill, expecting a retaliatory attack, had special defences set up around Derwent Reservoir in Derbyshire, which had been one of the practise grounds for the aircrews of 617 Squadron; and that bombing a dam is now illegal under the Geneva Convention because of the loss of life it can cause to the civilian population.

Unfortunately, rather than going into any real detail, this information was brought up and then quickly tossed aside so that time could be wasted as Shaw got into a twin–prop and showed that he could hardly navigate his way out of a paper bag. The programme makers had got special dispensation from the British and Dutch governments to fly at 100 feet over the countryside and coast just to show how bloody scary it is during the day time let alone at night. In fact Pilot Officer Geoffrey Rice, flying AJ–H “Harry” in the second wave of bombers, lost his Upkeep after clipping the North Sea and had to return to base. When Shaw and his pilot eventually got to the Möhne dam they flew over at regulation height, not even lining up on the towers because that would probably be frown upon, making the whole venture pretty pointless. I think Shaw then burbled on about war being bad and the bombers crews being very courageous but by then I was alternating between feeling the need to sleep and losing the will the live.

It all ended with Shaw flying in one of the two remaining Lancasters still in service, and taking part in last year’s Battle of Britain fly–past celebration, proving that in the end the whole show was just one big jolly for the actor, while the audience got the short shrift. If the programme makers wanted to do something different why didn’t they cover the further operations of 617 Squadron that gained them a reputation for accurate night–bombing, whether it was using the 12,000lb High–Capacity bombs on the Dortmund–Ems canal, the part the bombers played in Operation Taxable as part of D-Day, the three attacks on the Tirpitz, or their last operation, attacking the Eagle’s Nest at Berchtesgaden.

Eventually I went to bed wondering if we’ll see something like that in the future. Instead I suspect it’s more likely we’ll be watching Barney the Dinosaur present new evidence on the Big Bang. I haven’t seen next week’s listings yet. Maybe that’s what next Tuesday night has in store for me.

A Couple Of Swells

2011-01-27T19:21:00.003Z

After a night out on the tiles with the usual suspects where, quite amazingly, I was actually one of the last men standing while most everyone else had stumbled off home, I’ve spent most of the today trying to track down the names of the advertising agencies involved in a number of campaigns in the early 1970s, which has been a hoot and a half. Taking a breath before trying to get beyond the numerous dead ends that have halted me in my tracks these past hours, here are a couple of items to take note of...

Hopefully everyone regularly reads Roger Ebert’s Journal on the Chicago Sun–Times website. If not, it’s not too late to start. His most recent post – “Why 3D doesn't work and never will. Case closed.” – will interest anyone hacked off with this the current fad in filmmaking as it features a letter from Walter Murch, the award–winning film editor and sound designer, which effectively explains why this nonsense is just a colossal waste of time and money that can’t be sustained.

Having edited Captain EO, the 3D film directed by Francis Ford Coppola that was shown at Disney’s theme parks throughout the 1990s, Murch knows what he’s talking about, so it’s refreshing to hear an unbiased view of the technique’s limitations rather than the tedious grandstanding of certain loud-mouthed directors, coming on like carny hucksters, who wouldn’t need to wrap their product in such stupid irrelevancy if they had come up with something original and involving. As Murch writes:

3D films remind the audience that they are in a certain “perspective” relationship to the image. It is almost a Brechtian trick. Whereas if the film story has really gripped an audience they are “in” the picture in a kind of dreamlike “spaceless” space. So a good story will give you more dimensionality than you can ever cope with.

The full article can be found here.

2011 is, I’m sure everyone knows, marks the 50th Anniversary of The Avengers. Initially conceived as a vehicle for Ian Hendry, whose character enlists intelligence agent John Steed to track down his wife’s murderers, the drama evolved far beyond its original concept following Hendry’s departure. The longest running secret agent adventure series of the 1960s, as Steed moved centre stage and, reinvented as a debonair gentleman, worked with a succession of liberated female partners, from night-club singer Venus Smith and leather-clad, martial arts expert Cathy Gale, to catsuit-clad Emma Peel and trainee-agent Tara King.

Over the years, as the production advanced from shooting live or on videotape in the studio, then from black and white film to colour on location, the series shifted from tough crime thriller towards outright parody. Replacing the real world with an idealised fantasy Albion, Steed and his partners investigated absurdist conspiracies hatched by successive diabolical masterminds in the most innocent and idyllic rural settings. And by remaining quintessentially English, The Avengers became one of Britain’s most successful shows internationally.

Last year the BFI Southbank ran the Brian Clemens: Auteur of The Avengers season and throughout 2010 Optimum Releasing brought out all the surviving, digitally restored episodes on DVD with a fair selection of extras included in each box set. This coming June, the Dept. of Media are holding The Avengers: A 50th Anniversary Celebration of the Classic Television Series at the University of Chichester. The weekend event will include one–to–one and group interviews; screenings with “live” commentaries; panels discussions; a Hellfire Club party; signings and much more.

As well as a special video message from Patrick Macnee and newly filmed interview with composer Laurie Johnson, guests will include producers Brian Clemens and Leonard White; writers Roger Marshall, Martin Woodhouse, Richard Harris, Jeremy Burnham and Robert Banks Stewart; directors Ray Austin, Jonathan Alwyn, Gerry O’Hara, Don Leaver, John Hough and Robert Fuest; actors Jon Rollason, John Carson, Peter J Elliott and Anneke Wills, and of course Julie Stevens, Honor Blackman and Linda Thorson.

Further information can be found at the event’s website.

Born At The Wrong Time

2011-01-25T23:29:00.005Z

I may not have been as bowled over by Inception as most everyone else but I was still happy to applaud Warner Bros for putting money into something that was certainly different and a bit more intelligent than the usual pap spewed onto cinema screens. And since it was well–received by both the public and critics – when so many movies are lucky to get even the slightest approval from either – made a good bit of money, and is finding its way into annual award categories, you’d think that those studio executives with the wherewithal to green light projects would have figured out that making films that are new and different could be the way to go.

If they did mull it over during an odd moment between the usual hours of self–loathing the idea obviously didn’t stick, because the boobs at the studio have kicked off this new year by announcing a remake of A Star is Born, directed by Clint Eastwood and starring some singer called Beyoncé. At this point WTF? was reconfigured from “What The Fuck?” to “Why The Fuck?” I mean, really, why? It was only a few months back, appearing on BBC2’s The Culture Show to celebrating the 50th anniversary of Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, that Martin Scorsese related the tale of seeing the film in a screening room on the Warner’s lot in the company of the Vice-President of the studio who was thinking of remarking it. After the credits rolled and the lights came up the VP, who like Scorsese was watching it for the first time, declared, “Can’t top that!” and dropped the idea.

Since this is further proof that the studio executives back in the mid–1970s had brains, while the current crop appear to have shit for brains, maybe they should take an afternoon off and head to that same screening room to watch a print of George Cukor’s 1954 classic starring Judy Garland and James Mason called up from the vaults. That way it should soon become clear that they shouldn’t waste the studio’s time and money and actually make something new instead. After all, we already had a remake of A Star is Born in 1976 (which might discount the theory that every studio head had their head screwed on back then), this time shifting the story from the film industry to the music business and featuring Barbra Streisand as the young singer whose career is on the ascendancy, falling for Kris Kristofferson’s long established, self–destructive, star who is in decline.

Questioning the reasoning behind this prospective new version isn’t simply about having an axe to grind with remakes. After all, Cukor’s version was in fact a remake of a 1937 film, produced by David O. Selznick and starring Janet Gaynor as Esther Blodgett/Vicki Lester and Fredric March as the older, alcoholic, Norman Maine. And just to queer matters further, the William A. Wellman–directed original was so similar is terms of plot to the earlier What Price Hollywood? – also directed by Cukor and co–produced by Selznick – that RKO even contemplated filing a suit for plagiarism against Selznick International Pictures when this new film was released.

Almost a year ago, Brian Sibley kicked off an intriguing discussion regarding which film incarnation of various literary characters people preferred as every generation gets their own particular take on the famous creations of Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen and Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson and Lewis Carroll. There was also Alexandre Dumas’ Musketeers to consider and even Conan Doyle’s legendary detective, especially since we had just had Guy Ritchie’s latest cinematic version of Holmes and Watson, with Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss’ extraordinary contemporary take still waiting in the wings. Even if we don’t always accept the new versions, staying rooted to our favourites, there’s always something intriguing as to how the latest interpretation will play out.

Remakes, though, are a different matter, especially when they miss the point of the original. The remake of The Italian Job might have kept the minis racing off with the gold, but without the wit and sheer anarchy of Troy Kennedy Martin’s original that threw an almighty “Fuck you!” to the European Economic Community, which Great Britain was soon to join, the film was a run–of–the–mill caper movie filled with bland characters. But then the most revered film adaptation of The Maltese Falcon, starring Humphrey Bogart as private eye Sam Spade and written and directed by the great John Huston, was the third take on Dashiell Hammett’s novel. Howard Hawks’ His Girl Friday was the second film based on Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s Broadway comedy The Front Page and has never been bettered, not even by Billy Wilder with his 1974 version.

After blotting their copybook with a wholly unnecessary remake of Alexander Mackendrick’s Ealing Studios classic, The Ladykillers, the Coen brothers have currently found critical acclaim with their new version of True Grit. The rationale behind the project was not to remake the film but to produce a more faithful adaptation of Charles Portis’ novel, focusing more on young Mattie Ross seeking revenge for the death of her father. So maybe the unwritten rule studios should adhere to is to only remake a film if they and everyone involved has a valid reason for doing it and can actually improve on the previous version. Now that would be something original!

More Rewards For Less

2011-01-18T23:57:00.004Z

An ongoing bout of crippling insomnia, now in its third week, along with other major distractions have meant that I’ve missed commenting on a fair few things of late. None of them have really been that important, although I may try and shoehorn one or two in sometime in the near future. I was scribbling something new while I took a break for lunch but that got pushed aside, later, when I belatedly discovered that today the nominations for the 2011 BAFTA Film Awards were announced.

With the odd exception, most years the films nominated are the smaller artistic endeavours, usually ignored by the mass audiences who have spent the previous twelve months gorging on popcorn junk. This means that filmmakers and distributors, though pleased with the recognition, however belated, can immediately slap their nomination totals onto posters or DVD covers (if they’ve already come and gone from the cinemas) in the hope that this sudden attention might help toward clawing back their production and advertising costs, and maybe even have enough to splash out on a fish supper if they eventually nab one of the shiny prizes.

This year the only super–duper big–budget movie in the major categories is Christopher Nolan’s Inception – one of only five of the movies given a nod across the board that I’ve seen so far – which only goes to show that the BAFTAs, like the Academy Awards, have a completely different motivation when it comes to handing out gongs to the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s Golden Balls, where their modus operandi was expertly deconstructed in the opening monologue of Sunday’s ceremony.

The difference with the BAFTA list this year is that remarkably, and thankfully, the “smaller” pictures actually have made money. And I find that really gratifying. At last year’s Oscar ceremony The Hurt Locker may have made Kathryn Bigelow the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Director but the film itself had the distinction of being the lowest–grossing movie to in Best Picture. Five of the film’s six awards exactly duplicated the BAFTA categories it won so there’s more than a good possibility that the five BAFTA nominations will appear next month when the Oscar nominees are announced.

Lined up for BAFTA Best Film line up are Black Swan, Inception, The King’s Speech, The Social Network, and True Grit, and all five of them have been raking it in since their theatrical releases in the US and, for all but two films, around the world, far surpassing their production budget. Black Swan isn’t my kind of movie. I liked Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain but from the trailers for his new film it looks like a Dario Argento remake of The Red Shoes. And if I’m going to see a ballet movie I’ll simply stick with The Red Shoes, thank you. Still, over $75m domestic on a $13m production budget isn’t too shoddy. Meanwhile The King’s Speech, which opened here last Friday, has already accrued a worldwide take of nearly $80m on a $15m budget.

Even the bigger films, The Social Network and True Grit, had relatively small production budgets of $40m and $38m respectively. David Fincher’s facebook film has returned nearly $203m worldwide, while the Coen brothers’ take on Charles Portis’ tale of retribution has roped in over $128m in the US while waiting for worldwide distribution. So that leaves Inception, exceeding them all with a worldwide box office of $823.5m, but from a hefty budget of $160. So even including the additional revenue from eventual TV sales and DVD, then offsetting that against money spent on the ad buys, the film that made the most might not have the best investment to return ratio.

And that should get champagne corks popping. Because it’s about time the big Hollywood studios started making these smaller, better movies. It has to be the inflated above the line salaries that really fuck the budgets, otherwise how can you explain nonsense like Little Fockers costing $100m, or The Dilemma, the rather unsavoury looking Ron Howard–directed comedy starring Vince Vaughn and Kevin James, needing $70m to gasp from script to screen. Still, Universal won’t get as badly screwed as Sony who stumped up the $120m for James L. Brooks’ How Do You Know, which has only yielded a piddling $30m–odd after five whole weeks in American cinemas.

Even of we can’t get the staffers to look interested or the majority of patrons to stop tinkering with their mobiles, shut the fuck up and generally behave, no weak–ass star vehicles for Ben Stiller, Jack Black, Seth Rogen and Vince Vaughn (and... the list goes on), no less–than–spectacular, empty special effects spectaculars, along with anything else that wastes utterly obscene amounts of money for very little reason at all, might make the cinema a far better place to visit in the future. After all, what’s the point of creating something that both the backers and viewers think is a complete waste of money, or is that the new definition of art these days?

This Friday I have a midday lunch in town followed by an early evening drink. I’m really hoping the former runs long and the latter starts earlier because yesterday I found myself absently scribbling down the afternoon screening times for The King’s Speech. And after being something of an exceptional jerk last month, I’d like to keep my no cinema outings in 2011 promise. At least for a little while longer.

The Sharpest Cuts

2011-01-08T22:53:00.002Z

With last month’s severe wintry weather conditions pushing the usual festive madness to even more extremes, and making any kind of external activity either a little adventurous or downright treacherous, it seemed like the ideal opportunity to sit back, put my feet up, and catch up with some of the movies that I’d missed during the year. All too often I seem to bemoan how few times I get to the cinema nowadays. Though not a resolution, every January I tell myself to make more of an effort and I suppose 2010 was no different.

It all started out rather well with a double bill of Sherlock Holmes and Up in the Air, and I suppose that back then I felt, however briefly, that this year was going to be better than the last. But not long after that it all went rapidly downhill with trips to see Avatar, Shutter Island and Clash of the Titans. Though Disney’s The Princess and the Frog lacked some of the magic of the company’s great animations I had grown up with it wasn’t that bad, although the evening was soured by getting the screening times wrong and, missing out on Hayao Miyazaki’s Ponyo, I made the incredibly ill–judged decision of going to see the wholly unnecessary film version of Edge of Darkness immediately afterwards.

Obviously I have to shoulder some of the blame for making a lot of really bad choices (although the studios too deserve a good shellacking for making bad movies), but by the time I got around to seeing Robin Hood in May I was pretty much done. In that instance it wasn’t the movie, which I loved, thereby putting me in the minority, apparently, but the whole cinema–going experience. Everyone probably has some gripe about trying to watch a movie in an auditorium with uncomfortable seats, sticky floors from spilt soda, poor projection and audio set–ups that really sticks it to the dialogue. Then there are the fellow members of the audience who appear to have left any good manners at home. But when the venue’s staff couldn’t give a shit, close the box–office and make you queue for a ticket at the concession stands behind social Neanderthals who can’t decide which flavour ice cream they want, causing you to almost miss the start of the film, that’s more than enough for me. And this whole enforced 3D experience can fuck right off.

So I fell back on the tried and true stratagem of waiting to see the film on DVD instead. At least then if there’s some arsehole talking back to the screen then it’s obviously me and I’m okay with that. Over the last couple months I eventually got around to seeing the likes of Iron Man 2 and Chris Morris’ Four Lions which were entertaining enough and far better received from the comfort of the sofa than if I had queued to see them at a multiplex. But in the end I knew I’d have to wait until the festive season for any of the bigger, dumber summer movies to be spun out on shiny disc, just in time to be plucked from the shelves and wrapped in shiny wrapping paper because I suppose nothing says Christmas more than a copy of the latest instalment in the tween–moistening Twilight saga.

For some explicable reason I started off with The A–Team. I’m sure there’s a perfectly valid reason for that kind of behaviour, although at this exact moment it escapes me. Even if I had continued going to the pictures I would have given this one a pass. Because as much as I love a caper movie, ones that are devoid of wit and intelligence, instead burying their shortcomings under an avalanche of mindless cartoon violence and sheer stupidity are given a wide berth. Maybe I stuck it first on the list because I figured the titles that followed couldn’t be any worse, which turned out to be not always the case.

I’d never been a fan of the television series and don’t think I’ve ever sat through a whole episode, instead preferring to associate the recently departed Stephen J Cannell with The Rockford Files. Though I’d enjoyed director Joe Carnahan’s Narc I absolutely loathed the crass absurdity of his follow–up, Smokin’ Aces. Though it was obvious this film was going to be closer in temperament to that film, because The A–Team, as a known quantity, had potential franchise written all over it, and had been dragging its arse through a decade–and–a–half of development, I suppose I was intrigued to see the result of all that time and money. It wasn’t good. I’ve seen shell games played out with more panache by the late–night street hustlers on Bourbon Street and the only real intrigue was how the quartet of characters had stayed together so long without killing each other.

The few feeble attempts at humour paled in comparison to the initial guffaw that came even before the film had begun, when CELEBRATING 75 YEARS appeared above Rocky Longo’s familiar 20th Century Fox logo. With The A–Team? Really? It must take a certain warped pride to follow such a proclamation with a $110 million stream of effluvium smeared onto two hours worth of celluloid. Maybe an apology might have been the better option. But then, when you’re a subsidiary of Mephistopheles Murdoch’s News Corp., commerce trounces artistry at every turn, as is evident by the less than stellar tribute video the studio released earlier in the year.

That’s the best they could come up with? Really? Seventy-five years of movie making and they opt for the likes of I, Robot, Mr and Mrs Smith, Australia, X-Men Origins: Wolverine and Mrs Doubtfire? Watching it again, I still couldn’t decide whether it was hastily cobbled together by an editor eager to leave for a planned weekend in Big Bear or some unpaid intern who had just ordered a pizza and had to be down at the main gate to pick it up. If they had stayed true to celebrating the studios long, and sometimes distinguished, output rather than turn it into a rather tawdry excuse to hawk some titles that perhaps aren’t pulling their weight in the current home entertainment market, what films should have been highlighted?

When it comes to 20th Century Fox, the only title that immediately springs to mind is Star Wars and that’s chiefly because since John Williams composed its main theme as an extension of Alfred Newman’s celebrated fanfare the two have become virtually engrained, and of course they used copious clips from that one, so that wasn’t any help. Trying to think of others just off the top of my head has left me drawing a blank. Why is that?

Back when I was a kid, watching all those great film seasons scheduled on the BBC it didn’t take long for me to associate Universal Pictures with the classic 1930s and 40s horror films and Warner Bros with gangster movies, Errol Flynn swashbucklers and Bogart in a trench coat. Paramount had the Bob Hope & Bing Crosby Road movies as well as a generous selection of Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder–directed films while Columbia Pictures swung between screwball comedies and David Lean’s wartime epics. United Artists regularly served up further helpings of The Pink Panther and James Bond, RKO delivered Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals and Val Lewton's low–budget horror, along with a fair spread of film noir. That left MGM with more lavish musicals, The Thin Man series, and Johnny Weissmuller as Tarzan the Ape Man. But Fox? If the studio had a readily identifiable genre associated with its output it failed with burrow into my subconscious.

That said, even the most rudimentary search reveals the diversity and quality of the studio’s more distinguished output. For instance there’s FW Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, which won the award for Unique and Artistic Production at the very first Academy Awards ceremony in 1928, and the film version of Noel Coward’s Cavalcade, winner of the Best Picture Oscar five years later. Other Academy Award–winning productions like John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley and The Grapes Of Wrath, The Hustler, Planet of the Apes and M*A*S*H, joined Sunrise by being selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”, along with Miracle on 34th Street, My Darling Clementine and The Day the Earth Stood Still.

Even though they didn’t make the Library of Congress’ list there’s also An Affair to Remember, the musicals Hello Dolly!, South Pacific and The King and I, the first pairing of Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce in The Hound of the Baskervilles, and Tony Curtis in The Boston Strangler. More recent titles include Alien, Broadcast News and Lawrence Kasdan’s Grand Canyon, which chronicled the interactions of a group of disparate characters in Los Angeles well over a decade before Paul Haggis covered pretty much the same ground with Crash, crucially replacing Kasdan’s wit and gentle humour with the sort of po-faced sermonising that sent the movie disappearing up it’s own fundament long before the credits rolled.

Rather than simply falling back on the sort of utter guff directed by Roland Emmerich or starring Will Smith (or worse, directed by Roland Emmerich and starring Will Smith) shouldn’t clips from even a handful of these films have found their way into a proper tribute, or do they no longer serve a purpose? Anyone old enough to have seen any of the titles would be reminded just how godawful most new releases are, while the mouth–breathers who make up today’s main cinema–going demographic, and resolutely ignore anything made before they were born, would no doubt respond to their appearance with a querying “Huh?!”

Though suspecting some entertainment might have been eked out of giving The A–Team another spin, this time listening to the audio commentary to see whether Carnahan would make a stab at justifying the film’s worthless existence, it didn’t seem worth wasting any more precious time on. So I wasted more precious time on something else instead. As well as an aversion to daft television series, I spent the 1980s and 90s trying to steer well clear of the crass action movies featuring moronic, monosyllabic, muscle–bound lunkheads, although the memory of being taken to see Cobra still gives me chills. The upshot of this was that any novelty value The Expendables was supposed to have was totally lost on me.

With its bland production values, if this was meant to be a throwback to the movies that helped make stars of the veteran actors, well before most of them ended up looking like whole sides of beef thrown from the back of a refrigerated truck and run over by all the traffic behind it, shouldn’t it have also embraced the filmmaking practices of those times before CGI crippled invention and the violent videogame aesthetic pushed acts of brutality to extremes? There was a real ingenuity to, say, Dick Smith’s makeup effects for The Godfather, making a scene like Sonny Corleone’s almost balletic death throes during the tollbooth ambush utterly unforgettable. In The Expendables the truly expendable minions were instantly turned into a pixel purée by rounds that were almost artillery shells, with a repetition that negated the initial shock value and frittered away any dramatic currency. Still, I suppose I should be thankful they hadn’t bothered to cast Jean–Claude Van Spam.

In the lackluster hinterland between Christmas and the New Year I tried to fill two hours of the yawning void with Scott Pilgrim vs The World. Obviously that too was a big mistake. Unaware of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s series of graphic novels, which is something I can happily live with, but all too aware of Michael Cera cornering the market when it comes to playing slackers, which is something I can happily live without, all I can remember of the wretched experience is that the film seriously needed a course of methylphenidate to make it even remotely bearable and, like Kick Ass before it, made me realize “I’m getting too old for this shit”, (a phrase I’ve never used before and hope to never use again).

Before that, however, came How To Train Your Dragon. I can’t say I was expecting much. Over the years I’ve found myself in a love–hate relationship with Pixar and Dreamworks’ computer–generated animated features insomuch that I love the former and hate the latter. After the unappealing Antz the studio had a well–deserved hit with Shrek, delighting in filling the frame with such barely contained vitriol for The Walt Disney Company that the film appeared to be influenced more by Kim Masters’ scathing The Keys to the Kingdom than William Steig’s original fairy tale. But once the studio got that off its chest successive features lazily fell back on celebrity stunt voice casting, painfully obvious gags that wouldn’t have made it into an episode of The Flintstones let alone The Simpsons, and an over–reliance on contemporary pop culture references that were dated before each film finished production.

Now that computer animation has reached the point where, given enough time and money, any damn thing you please can be rendered in all its gigabyte glory, without a good story and well–developed characters to bind everything together what appears on screen becomes nothing more than very expensive moving wallpaper. For the discerning viewer, Dreamworks have never hit the heights achieved by Pixar because they blithely ignored investing both story and characters with a real emotional heart. Based on Cressida Cowell’s series of children’s books featuring Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III, aka “the Dragon Whisperer”, How To Train Your Dragon mercifully dialled down on the usual shtick but just couldn’t let go of the snarky teen dialogue that kept me at arm's–length.

In the plus side it was a vast improvement on Monsters vs. Aliens, which I tried watching on a few occasions over the summer, usually giving up somewhere around the twenty–minute mark. In terms of content, How To Train Your Dragon felt like the closest Dreamworks have come to producing a more traditional Disney animation, although I’m not sure whether that was because it amplified the moral of the story more than usual or came down to the fact that visually Toothless, the injured Night Fury dragon befriended by Hiccup, constantly reminding me of a less maniacal version of Experiment 626 from Lilo & Stitch, also co–directed by Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois before the studio showed them the door.

With those films out the way, all that was left were the two big hitters from the summer to catch up on: Toy Story 3 and Inception. There’s a lot to be said about film trilogies and belated sequels, most of it not good. Apart from a very few rare exceptions, they’re another bad example of commerce striding in bold as brass and punching artistry square in the face. They may be a easy way to bring in some extra cash but a really botched follow–up can tarnish the original, violently raping it’s initial inventiveness, with The Matrix, Pirates of the Caribbean and The Mummy trilogies being prime examples. And did we really need Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull? Or the soulless Star Wars prequels? Or... well, fill in any number of blanks yourself.

At least Pixar have enough of a reputation for audiences to know they’re not out to be fleeced by carpetbagging hacks, and though this third film may not have seemed necessary after so many years, it brought closure to the tale of Andy’s toys with marvellously astute creativity and taut storytelling. If the studio had released Toy Story 3 a couple of years back it would have really bowled me over, but coming in the wake of Wall–E and Up it felt like two steps back. Whereas both those films have instances in their begins, middles and ends that can still reduce me to a blubbering wreck, in Toy Story 3 there was only one point – when the toys all join hands, finally accepting the especially unpleasant fate they expect to befall them – that there was a slight tightness in the throat and a moistening of the eyes, but it didn’t go beyond that.

If the big emotional payoff didn’t pack the same punch as those previous releases I can only put that down to personal circumstances. As a wee lad I didn’t have a lot of toys to play with, which I should say was through choice rather than some kind of Dickensian deprivation, preferring to build model kits, play board games and, more importantly, read and draw insatiably. Moving at regular occasions during my childhood as my folks changed businesses, meaning new houses and new schools, any totems of those salad days started to get left by the wayside early on. The succession of new environments meant that contemporaries came and went with an almost alarming rapidity, regrettably inuring me to people leaving in my later years, which figures in the subtext of those final scenes.

Since they didn’t get to me the same way a worn–out robot yearning to hold hands or an old man carrying the weight of his life on his back did, it may mean I need to watch Toy Story 3 a few more times for it to sink in. Before then came the new film from Christopher Nolan. I don’t think I need to go on and on about how much I loathed The Dark Knight, which went on and on far too long, repeatedly bludgeoning home the moral dilemmas that I got the first time, thankyouverymuch! While The Prestige was far better, going to see the film having been informed in advance there was a big twist, though not knowing what it was, meant that from the get–go I was trying to work out the angle rather than sitting back and enjoying the story.

A summer movie that requires audiences to actually think for a change is certainly going to get press attention, especially when people’s brains have been deadened by far too many seasons of mindless blockbuster escapades. The problem with the one or two films that, if we’re lucky, annually stand head and shoulders above the rest, is divorcing them from the attendant hype to avoid disappointment. Even though it wasn’t my thing, probably the reason I wasn’t swayed into buying any of the original line of Star Wars toys, helping George Lucas make his millions, was that after seeing the movie, that first time as a pre–teen, I walked out of the cinema feeling that it hadn’t lived up to expectations.

However long you wait for hype to wash away there’ll always be a residue of anticipation that lingers like a faded stain, but I tried to come to Inception with clean hands and a memory flushed from comments that it had thematic comparisons with The Matrix and Avatar, with characters finding themselves wired up to live another life, or was too damned complicated to understand on the first viewing. As it turned out Inception didn’t appear to be as labyrinthine as I expected. Calling Ellen Page’s newly hired dream architect Ariadne was the one instance where it made me wince for trying to be too clever for it’s own good and discovering Leonardo DiCaprio was being vexed by a dead wife brought up the horrible aftertaste of Shutter Island, but it was all good.

Except, in the end, however clever the concept, particularly the idea that within each successive dream–within–a–dream exponentially affords more time in an increasingly unstable environment, after so much set up the resolutions didn’t feel that satisfying. Obviously the massive budget required a mass appeal blockbuster but as the credits rolled I was left wondering whether the idea might have had far more substance either in prose or as a television serial. Instead of any comparison to other movies, Inception reminded me most of Channel 4’s Grand Designs and an episode that showcases a rather unique and remarkably well–constructed property that upon completion turns out to be something I could admire but not particularly want to live in.

So that was it: a half dozen films to round off the year. I guess in total I didn’t see much more than two–dozen new releases either in the increasingly unfriendly environs of the local multiplex or from the comfort of my home sofa. Thankfully times have changed so that if you fail to catch a movie during its theatrical release it means waiting a couple of years before it ends up on television, unless it comes back around as part of a double bill. Just before I settled down to start watching this final round up, Filmography 2010 appeared on YouTube to helpfully show me how many titles I had missed, and how much catching up I had to do if I wanted to put in the effort. (Although to be fair it does include a number of features yet to be released over here).

Apart from being a handy guide to what came out last year, hopefully the piece has been watched by the folk who keep posting their supposedly jokey mashups on YouTube so that they finally learn there is actually a real art to editing. Of course juxtaposition can be funny, but it’s even funnier if you cut it just right. While the difference between a good filmmaker and a bad filmmaker is huge, the difference between a good editor and a bad editor is a yawning chasm that can kill the end result stone dead.

Although the reel reminds me to look out for The Social Network, which I assume will be coming to disc sometime around Easter, around the 3:20 mark there’s a clip from what was probably one of my favourite new releases of 2010, Roman Polanski’s adaptation of Robert Harris’ The Ghost. It was the film I should have seen instead of wasting time watching Clash of the Titans (where no titans actually clashed), so I had to wait for the DVD. And it was well worth the wait. A cracking Hitchcockian thriller from start to finish, it benefited greatly from taking the ending of the book, which worked brilliantly in print, and replacing it with an utterly superb visual resolution.

Of course in the end it comes down to sitting back and watching something I’m going to enjoy. Tagged back in the summer by Stephen Gallagher to list the films that I’ll watch any number of times and finally responding at the beginning of September, not long afterwards Fred Zinnemann’s The Day of the Jackal started popping up at regular intervals on ITV4’s schedule and every time, no matter how late it started, I’d find myself watching it. So maybe the answer is to stick with what you know or have something to go back to when contemporary movies fail.

This year I suppose there’s no point resolving to make a better effort, again. 2011 may be starting out with the usual BAFTA–bait like The King’s Speech and the Coen Brothers’ True Grit but down the line there’s a wholly unnecessary, third Transformers movie, even more unnecessary Pirates of the Caribbean nonsense, and another go at Conan the Barbarian, in 3D, which makes me bilious just contemplating it. So I’m beginning to think that if I ever make it to the cinema in the next twelve months it might be an idea to simply stick to foreign language films.

A year or more since I bought The Lives of Others and Philippe Claudel’s I’ve Loved You So Long, the DVDs remained unwatched on the shelves. It’s not that I don’t want to see either of them, it’s just that a subtitled film requires more attention. Watching at home, where sometimes I’ll watch a film from my desk, there are more reasons to momentarily takes your eyes off the screen and accidentally miss vital plot points. As much as I tried to make an effort watching The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo on DVD there were a good number of instances when I was reaching for the remote to replay a scene or two. I suppose I’ll have to wait and see.

So, in brief, my favourite new releases of the year turned out to be Sherlock Holmes, Robin Hood and The Ghost. But the best experience I had in a cinema in 2010 turned out to be this.

A Flying Visitor

2010-12-25T06:41:00.000Z

It’s that time again! Whether you’re treating today as a traditional Christian celebration, a winter festival or simply a good weekend, spending it with family, friends or on your own, I hope you all have a happy and enjoyable Christmas. Stay warm, be safe, and have a whole lot of fun.

A Pretty Alpine Rose

2010-11-24T23:54:00.000Z

A fair few years back I had the very good fortune to interview the utterly delightful Ingrid Pitt. Dubbed the “Queen of Horror” thanks to her starring roles in Hammer’s The Vampire Lovers and Countess Dracula, and Amicus Production’s portmanteau movie The House That Dripped Blood, she was born Ingoushka Petrov in Poland, the daughter of a Polish–Jewish mother and Prussian father.

At the age of five she was shipped off to Stutthof concentration camp, east of Gdańsk, with her mother, while her father, a scientist who refused to assist in the development of the V2 rockets, was interned at Theresienstadt concentration camp in Czechoslovakia. Escaping during the evacuation of Stutthof due the Red Army’s advance, the pair were taken in by local partisans. After the war’s end her mother was treated for typhus and she was hospitalized with tuberculosis. Once recovered, they scoured the displaced persons’ camps, walking from Warsaw to Berlin where the family was reunited when they eventually discovered her father living in a cellar.

Enrolled at medical school because most of her ancestors had been doctors, Ingrid wanted to be an actress. Although living in West Berlin she was accepted into The Berliner Ensemble run by Helene Weigel, the widow of Bertolt Brecht, located in the East. Outspoken of the Communist regime when the compulsory political schooling ate into her rehearsal time, she was tipped off that the Volkspolizei, who had previously cautioned her, were coming to the theatre to arrest her. As officers marched into the auditorium she bolted for the stage door and, once outside, threw herself into the Spree. Luckily an American patrol on the western bank heard the gunshots and she was pulled from the water by Laud Pitt a marine lieutenant who immediately took her to a nearby whorehouse where she was given brandy and a hot bath.

Married to her saviour, she eventually relocated the America, spending time on the Navajo Reservation at Window Rock, Arizona. With the marriage failing, when the American theatre company she joined went bankrupt she drove to the airport, sold the car and booked herself on the first flight to Europe, pitching up in Spain. Photographed at a bullfight, the picture caught the attention of a well–known filmmaker, learning her lines phonetically for the ensuing screen test. By the time Ingrid established herself as a member of the Teatro Nacional de Espana she was cast as an extra in David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago, which helped kick start her film career.

Although we would discuss her famous roles, including a part in Robert Hardy’s celebrated The Wicker Man, I had to begin with Where Eagles Dare. Before we moved on she drew my attention to the final scene of the movie where the quartet of agents finally relax in the passenger compartment of the Junkers Ju 52, with Richard Burton and Mary Ure – who had since passed away – sitting together on one side of the aircraft, while she and Clint Eastwood, both very much alive, sat on the other. Alas, as of Tuesday afternoon, Eastwood sits in the “Iron Annie” alone.

Discovered In Congress

2010-10-25T23:30:00.002+01:00

With the nights drawing in and the downturn in the weather calling for cocoa rather than cocktails, it’s that time of year for the annual Missing, Believed Wiped event at the BFI Southbank. Since its inception close to twenty years ago, the initiative has continued to track down and restore numerous television programmes wiped by the UK broadcasters in their effort to save on the high cost of videotape during the 1950s and 60s. The 2008 event saw the BFI unveil the first fruits of their acquisition of titles from the collection of the late Bob Monkhouse. Two years on the rarities recovered come courtesy of the Library of Congress’ holdings of over 100 hours of classic British television.

The first of the event’s two sessions begins with a presentation about the discoveries in the Library of Congress – described as arguably the most important find of the decade – illustrated with clips from some of the most important titles found. After that Session 01: Music & Miscellany features an episode of The Lulu Show from 1969 featuring guest singers Gene Pitney and Terry Reid who had been offered lead vocalist in The Yardbirds by Jimmy Page, replacing Keith Relf, but turned it down because he was already committed to supporting the Rolling Stones on their 1969 US Tour, suggesting Robert Plant to take his place. It continues with an extract from the Southern TV show, Day by Day, featuring Manfred Mann at the Concorde Club, the BBC documentary Bath: The Queen of the West from 1952 and, more importantly, Terry, an edition of the 1969 drama-for-schools series Scene, written by the recently departed television playwright Alan Plater and starring Bill Owen and Dennis Waterman.

After the interval Session 2: Comedy begins with one of the three editions of the hour-long Secombe Here! from 1955 in which fellow Goons Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers join Harry Secombe in his live National Radio Show from Earl's Court, an episode of the BBC’s The Frankie Howerd Show, first broadcast in January 1965, written by the celebrated partnership of Ray Galton and Alan Simpson and featuring Yootha Joyce along with Julian Orchard and Hugh Paddick, before rounding off with a complete episode from ITV’s sketch comedy At Last the 1948 Show. Made by David Frost’s Paradine Productions and starring Tim Brooke-Taylor, Marty Feldman, John Cleese, Graham Chapman, and “the lovely” Aimi MacDonald, this sixth episode from the second series features the famous Four Yorkshiremen sketch that would later be performed by members of Monty Python during their live stage shows before being resurrected for Amnesty International’s The Secret Policeman’s Ball.

Both Missing Believed Wiped programmes take place at the BFI Southbank’s NFT 1 on Sunday 07 November with Session 1: Music & Miscellany kicking off the proceedings at 3:50pm in NFT1, followed by Session 02: Comedy at 6:20pm. Joint tickets for both the Missing Believed Wiped sessions cost £12.90/£9.65 concs, with BFI Members receiving a £1.40 discount. This offer is unavailable online, so call the BFI Southbank Box Office on 020 7928 3232 (open 11:30 - 20:30 daily) to book. I’ll be there with the Luminous Beauty so if you’re coming along we’ll probably be in the bar beforehand with the usual reprobates.

The ABC Of Books For Good Dogs

2010-09-30T22:18:00.006+01:00

Following an open invitation from Brian Sibley to have a go, here’s the latest literary meme to do the rounds. It comes at just the right time because of late I’ve found myself starting a number of posts that I simply can’t be bothered to finish, deciding that I’d easily prefer to spend my free time in the company of the truly Luminous Beauty rather than witter on here about something inconsequential, so a little brain teaser is just the ticket.

So here are THE RULES (for there must always be RULES) as laid down:

01. Go through the alphabet, and for each letter, think of a book you’ve read that starts with that letter (A, An, and The do not count).

02. You must write down the FIRST book you think of for any given letter. This may make for some odd choices, but them’s the breaks.

03. You must have actually READ the book. (I thought of lots that started with some letters, but I hadn't read them).

04. If you think of a more impressive-sounding book for a particular letter, but you’ve already written your first thought down, you CANNOT change to the more impressive-sounding book. As an example, you have to leave Fifty Famous Fairy Tales (the Whitman Publishing pink and white one) on the list, even if you come up with fifty more impressive books afterwards.

05. If you can think of a book for X, you win... my lasting admiration (I can't afford real prizes!)

06. You can then tag as many people as you like. The more the merrier.

That said, my ABC of books is:

A is for American Tabloid by James Ellroy

B is for The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney

C is for Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

D is for Darkness, Take My Hand by Dennis Lehane

E is for Enigma by Robert Harris

F is for Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler

G is for God is a Bullet by Boston Teran

H is for How to be Topp by Geoffrey Willans

I is for The Iron Man by Ted Hughes

J is for The Juvies by Harlan Ellison

K is for The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana translated by Sir Richard Burton & F.F. Arbuthnot

L is for Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez

M is for Mefisto in Onyx by Harlan Ellison

N is for Native Tongue by Carl Hiaasen

O is for One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

P is for A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving

Q is for Queen of the Dawn by H. Rider Haggard

R is for The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe

S is for The Silver Locusts by Ray Bradbury

T is for The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas

U is for The Urth of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe

V is for The Visitor by Lee Child

W is for We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

X is for ...nope, I can't think of one either

Y is for You Only Live Twice by Ian Fleming

Z is for ...stumped! When I think of one I’ll let you know

When it comes to the tagging I’m going to plump for Stephen Gallagher, Mister Mark – who has defected to facebook and twitter and left his blog wanting – and, if she feels like it, The Woo. Naturally anyone else who feels like taking a shot at it is free to have a go.

What It Says On The Tin

2010-09-09T23:19:00.000+01:00

I finally caught up with the last couple episodes of BBC One’s The Deep before they disappeared from iPlayer and was planning to comment on the drama, but every time I thought about those five hours of my life I’d wasted my gorge would rise and I’d be screaming out for a brain bleach. So in the interim here’s something that dropped into my inbox a while back.

Though email is an absolute boon, like everything there is always a downside. At one extreme you can have your account hacked – and by the way, anyone who got an email from me entitled Making her climax is finally so easy, let’s just say it didn’t come from me – or just as galling are those bloody circulars filled with “funny” photographs, shaggy dog stories or lame jokes that used to take ages to download before the arrival of broadband but are still a complete waste of time. One of my cousins makes a habit of sending out multiple emails with this kind of nonsense every other Friday and most times I’ll give each one a cursor glance before junking them.

Amazingly one of his last electronic missives actually involved something interesting. Though this may not be the best time of year to make light of airliners, here is the new livery for Kulula Air, a low–fare South African airline that operates out of Johannesburg. [click on each image to enlarge]

The airline’s attendants make an effort to add levity to their safety lecture and in–flight announcements. Here are some examples that have been reported in the past:

“Welcome aboard Kulula 271 to Port Elizabeth. To operate your seat belt, insert the metal tab into the buckle, and pull tight. It works just like every other seat belt; and, if you don’t know how to operate one, you probably shouldn’t be out in public unsupervised.”

“Kulula Airlines is pleased to announce that we have some of the best flight attendants in the industry. Unfortunately, none of them are on this flight!”

“Weather at our destination is 50 degrees with some broken clouds, but we’ll try to have them fixed before we arrive. Thank you, and remember, nobody loves you, or your money, more than Kulula Airlines.”

“In the event of a sudden loss of cabin pressure, masks will descend from the ceiling. Stop screaming, grab the mask, and pull it over your face. If you have a small child travelling with you, secure your mask before assisting with theirs. If you are travelling with more than one small child, pick your favourite.”

“Your seat cushions can be used for flotation; and in the event of an emergency water landing, please paddle to shore and take them with our compliments.”

“Thank you for flying Kulula. We hope you enjoyed giving us the business as much as we enjoyed taking you for a ride.”

“As you exit the plane, make sure to gather all of your belongings. Anything left behind will be distributed evenly among the flight attendants. Please do not leave children or spouses.”

“We’d like to thank you folks for flying with us today. And, the next time you get the insane urge to go blasting through the skies in a pressurized metal tube, we hope you’ll think of Kulula Airways.”

More Of What You Fancy

2010-09-01T23:45:00.001+01:00

Tagged a month ago by Stephen Gallagher, who provided his own list here, the object of this particular exercise is to list the films that I’ll watch any number of times. In a way it was lucky I’ve had the time to mull over this particular challenge.

This isn’t a list of the films I consider to be the greatest ever made, especially since I could probably reel off a number of celebrated movies that I wasn’t keen on seeing all the way through the first time and would be happy to never see again. So while some of the titles may not be award winners, overflowing with artistic merit, I do know that if I was at a loose end or bored one rainy weekend afternoon or late evening, any one of these movies could be loaded into the DVD player and I’d be more than happy to watch them from beginning to end, and that’s what counts.

I’m sure there are many more titles I could have included, but given their lack of availability on shiny disc or their absence from television schedules they don’t make the list. Trying to narrow it down to an even dozen to begin with, then two dozen when that didn’t exactly work out, by the time I stopped there were 30 titles (or rather 31 for anyone who knows the movies), which means there are enough to happily keep me going for a month. In alphabetical order, they are:

These are the rules of the meme:

01. Provide a non-exhaustive list of films you’ll happily watch again and again.
02. There is no rule 02. (cute)
03. Reprint the rules.
04. Tag three others and ask them to do the same.

So the three lucky people charged with carrying this forward are Brian Sibley, David Weeks and Will Dixon. Enjoy!

Space To Breathe

2010-08-31T20:41:00.010+01:00

July and then August proved to be an especially interesting time for me, although little of what happened is going to be recounted here. Being me, I had to thoughtlessly stumble into a few potholes of my own devising in my own Yellow Brick Road but thankfully managed to negotiate my way out of them without too much harm being done.

Between spending the evening with the Luminous Beauty at a showcase event at McQueen, which served up rather incredible champagne cocktails flavoured with Rhubarb Bitters before providing some eye–catching burlesque entertainment, and the pair of us joining old friends to watch Mister Mark perform with Twelfth Night for the last time in the UK ahead of their final gig at the Night Of The Prog Festival V, held at the World Heritage Loreley amphitheatre near Koblenz in the Rhineland, this weekend, things went a little awry. In the end I was given a good talking to by friends and professionals who told me to be less gruff and jaundiced and concentrate on the really important things in life, though what they said wouldn’t have been worth a damn if my gorgeous Luminous Beauty hadn’t forgiven me for fucking up so badly.

If that wasn’t enough to curtail the blogging, which had dropped off this year, numerous computer problems during the summer months exacerbated the lack of posts, whether it was my internet provider taking unexpected vows of silence at the most inopportune moments or the monitor inconveniently bursting a pixel that bled an irreversible inky blackness across the screen. While a few things I was going to mention in passing can wait, posts recounting the Chimera screening and Brian Clemens in Conversation, both at the BFI in July were only recently finished and are posted with the dates they were started and initially saved.

For all the inconveniences, days without immediate internet access were never that bad, although one outage meant that I had to text poetry written for the Luminous Beauty and leave one particularly involved composition as a voicemail. Though I missed catching up on numerous blogs, the one website I pined for the most was the HubbleSite and the latest releases from its newscenter. With the connection playing silly buggers, it took a good while before I could get to see their recent updates.

First up was the collision of the Antennae galaxies, around 62 million light-years from Earth, in a composite image from material provided by the Chandra X-ray Observatory, Spitzer Space Telescope and Hubble. Having begun more than 100 million years ago and still ongoing, the continued impact of the two galaxies triggered the formation of millions of stars in clouds of dust and gas, where even the most massive of the younger stars have already raced through their evolution and exploded as supernovae.

More recently the site posted a natural–colour, long exposure image of NGC 4911, a spiral galaxy 320 million light-years away in the northern constellation Coma Berenices. Located deep within the Coma Cluster, a home to almost 1,000 galaxies, the outer spiral arms of NGC 4911 are constantly being distorted by the gravitational pull of its neighbours, which undergo frequent interactions and collisions from being so densely packed together. Faced with that it made the grievances seem so utterly small and insignificant.

Building The Perfect Beast

2010-07-11T19:28:00.009+01:00

Monday night I was back beside the Thames, this time at the BFI Southbank for a screening of the television drama Chimera. Programmed as part of July’s Film Science: Future Human season, it was followed by a Q&A session with the writer Stephen Gallagher and director Lawrence Gordon Clark, conducted by the great television archivist Dick Fiddy.

Not only did the event coincide with the release of the uncut four–part serial on DVD from Revelation Films, but as he took to the stage to introduce his work, Stephen Gallagher – who has already written about the event on his blog – noted that he had done something similar 19 years ago in NFT1, except what had then a preview was now considered archive television almost two decades on. Because the 1990s was a decade of working long hours at various animation studios for me, especially during the first few years, I made up the part of the NFT3 audience that was seeing Chimera for the very first time.

Relocating The Island of Doctor Moreau to an isolated fertility clinic in the Yorkshire Moors that acts not just as a front but an integral part in the process of creating the hybrid creatures, Chimera took the staples of genre fiction and confounded my expectations at every turn. When it comes to watching older material for the very first time, long after its initial air date, there’s a tendency to be a bit more forgiving because the shooting style will not doubt be outdated and the production values very different from what they are today. It soon became obvious that Chimera didn’t need such latitude or patronising.

In fact, if it wasn’t for the 4:3 aspect ratio that would probably befuddle younger audiences today, Chimera could have quite easily been dropped into the current TV schedules and found a very welcome audience, especially one looking to get their teeth into a rather meaty conspiracy thriller, this time involving government–sanctioned genetic engineering that goes beyond their control. After a decade of too many lousy dramas dropped into the ITV schedules, smothering the occasional gems, watching Chimera was a bittersweet experience. During the interval I found myself pacing around outside, dragging furiously on a gasper wondering what the hell went wrong with the channel, before happily going back in for more.

Interviewed onstage at the BFI a couple of years back along with Ian La Frenais, Dick Clement decided that having worked across different genres over a forty–odd year career, the work could be divided into two categories: stories set before the advent of mobile phones, and stories set after the advent of mobile phones. Chimera was a reminder of how far more inventive and intriguing dramas were before the availability of the internet, when characters running down a lead actually had to do some actual legwork rather than simply sit themselves down at a computer and scrounge all the information they need.

And when it comes to the characters, I’m now beginning to think every drama needs a prissy Whitehall wonk instructing a signer for the deaf to interrogate a laboratory monkey. With all the main characters well defined with enough quirks and foibles to introduce enough humour to balance out the drama, it was intriguing to see how morally bankrupt a large proportion of them once as the story developed, especially the scientist who condemned the experiments up until the point she discovered it actually worked. Though Chimera had been likened to Frankenstein, Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass, and the writings of HG Wells, I’d simply put it in the same category as Edge of Darkness.

During the Q&A that followed, Stephen Gallagher reminded us that up until Chimera, the only television credits he had under his belt were two Doctor Who stories and an episode of Rockliffe’s Folly. After having that freedom to adapt his own work he admitted there was no way he could settle down to write for the familiar hospital dramas, instead carving out a niche in genre television that ultimately led to writing for American network dramas.

After the event I got to finally meet him after regularly exchanging blog comments, and hear about the pilots he’s readying to pitch for the new season, which sound both intriguing and entertaining. If there’s a moral to the story for new writers wanting to get into the industry, it’s write the stories you want to write rather than settle for a credit on Holby City. And if you haven’t seen it, grab a copy of Chimera the first chance you get.

Living The Dream

2010-07-03T23:09:00.007+01:00

A couple of Fridays back the Luminous Beauty and I headed to the Southbank Centre for a screening of the documentary Dreams With Sharp Teeth, shown as part of the 2010 Meltdown festival. It may have seemed an incongruous inclusion to the programme of concerts and musical events but then Richard Thompson, the founder member of Fairport Convention and this summer’s festival curator, had composed the music for Erik Nelson’s profile of acclaimed writer Harlan Ellison, so that was all right.

We had invited the ever delightful Brian Sibley and David Weeks to join us, which turned out to be a very good thing because they were not only excellent company, especially when it came to looking after the Luminous Beauty while I waited to be served at the bar, but knew where we were supposed to be going. A regular at the BFI Southbank, and occasional visitor to the National Theatre and Hayward Gallery, I’d rarely visited the Royal Festival Hall or Queen Elizabeth Hall, and the staff there had so far been positively unhelpful.

Getting tickets the week before, the staffer at the Royal Festival Hall’s box office had looked decidedly put out when he discovered it was a free event, which meant that I wouldn’t be handing over any money. Arriving early on the night for a drink and a smoke out on the terrace, I’d asked the initial barmaid that served me where the Purcell Room was and she directed me upstairs when it turned out to be next door. Luckily Brian had given talks there in the past and showed us the way otherwise the pair of us would have been wandering about, hopelessly lost.

Almost the whole of the central section of the auditorium had already been taken, leaving us pretty much at the back row, but when we eventually sat down the four of us found we had an uninterrupted view of the back of the heads of the folk right up front. Maybe it was the arrival of the unexpected inclement weather that evening, or the fact that the England team were aimlessly kicking a ball about in Cape Town, but all the ninny lobcocks who had booked those seats failed to make an appearance, which was a shame because they really missed something special.

Erik Nelson had flown over specially to introduce his work, which, over the course of ninety–odd minutes perfectly captured the vitality and enthusiasm of his subject. An almost relentless barrage of bon mots, creative expletives, and testimonials from his contemporaries, the material had us all either howling with laughter or stunned into silence, particularly when, in an astonishingly affecting sequence, HE got to view and commentate on home movie footage of a family trip to Niagara Falls when he was a boy.

Meanwhile excerpts of readings from a number of his short stories also help dispel the misconception that HE is simply a science fiction writer. When I first came across his work back in my early teens, the UK paperbacks had erroneous cover illustrations, usually featuring nondescript spaceships, that didn’t correlate to any of the short stories included therein. When I first met him a decade or so on and we talked about his writing he explained:

[T]he great triad of writers who I worshipped were Poe, Kafka and Borges. It is in fact Borges who first taught me where my literary family resided. Until that time they had been calling me a science fiction writer, a fantasy writer, and I never wore the mantle comfortably and real science fiction writers were very uncomfortable with me... very uncomfortable. And I despised having those kinds of covers put on my books because I knew very well I wasn’t writing science fiction and I didn’t like flying under false colours and I also didn’t like encountering an audience that thought that was what I was writing.

When I first discovered Borges it was in The Library of Babel. It’s the story about where all the unwritten books are. It’s a great and classic story and I think it’s in the book Labyrinths. I read that story and I said “This is what’s... But this is what I’m doing?!” This is the resonance. I suddenly heard that one note, that one collusive note that exists in the universe: pure, clear, absolutely unsullied. And went from Borges to Luisa Valenzuela, who I met subsequently and just desperately fell in love with – a wonderful writer and a wonderful woman personally and she and I still communicate – Garcia Marques and Jorge Armado and Julio Cortázar. And I read these people and wept, wept like a child because at last, at last, I had come home.

My family was not Henry James. My family was not Jane Austen. My family were the writers of the Latin-American boom of the late-forties, early fifties. Ever since then I have written with more assurance and less self-conciousness the kinds of things I want to write. Like this story just this last year, 1993, I finally got into The Best American Short Stories. It’s a great honour, a great honour. In the whole field of fantasy there have only been five writers in all the years of The Best American Short Stories. There are only five writers who have made it into that collection and I am the most recent. And I did it with a story that is pure magic realism. Its pure Borgesian writing: The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore.

Once the credits rolled every stayed in their seats as, for an extra bonus, Mr Nelson took to the stage along with the writer James Moran and, through the wonders of modern telecommunications, briefly interviewed HE from his home in Sherman Oaks. Even more astonishing for anyone who has either seen him speak on the lecture circuit or spent any time in his company, HE kept his answers remarkably short and sweet.

Though the documentary may not have played to a packed house it satisfied a small, dedicated audience who were more than happy to be there, and was the perfect primer for people who are only aware of “the dark prince of American letters” from his various credits on television shows like Star Trek and The Man from UNCLE. At least for those who couldn’t be bothered to come along to the Purcell Room Dreams with Sharp Teeth is available on Region 1 DVD. If HE had appeared in person I’d like to think it would have been a sold out event, but with today’s fickle audiences who can tell.

This month at the BFI Southbank, the Film Science: Future Human season includes a screening of four-part drama serial Chimera, followed by a Q&A with writer Stephen Gallagher and director Lawrence Gordon Clark on Monday, 5th July, starting at 6:00pm. Later on the Brian Clemens: Auteur of The Avengers season features two live events: Brian Clemens on The Avengers on Thursday 22nd July at 6:20pm), which is preceded by a screening of The Avengers episode A Touch of Brimstone, and then Brian Clemens in Conversation a week later on Wednesday 28th July at 6:30, where he discusses the rest of his film and television career. Amazingly there are still tickets available for all three.

Granted neither writer will be able to help people wanting to break into the industry by giving them tips on how to get a commission for the typical load of toss like Doctors or Holby City, but given that they both worked in genres that don’t seem to exist in television any more, what they’ll have to say should be nothing less than fascinating.

"Crom!"

2010-06-28T23:56:00.003+01:00

I’ve been trying to scribble down a few observations before the month is out, evidently without much success. In the end I really wasn’t that bothered that Spartacus: Sausage and Smash had too much testosterone for my liking or Warehouse 13 worked as enjoyable fluff until, in a recent episode, the characters had to get from A to B in a set time and rather than decide on the optimum route while on the move, they stood around arguing over the best way to go while the clock ticked down.

And anyway, there are better things to do than agonize over decidedly average television shows, like continue the ongoing adventures with the Luminous Beauty, which saw us accidentally locked in Regent’s Park after dark, early last week. With the wonderful interweb playing silly beggars over the past few days, it turned out I didn’t have to bother cooking up something to post because my service provider couldn’t give a damn. But since today is the fourth anniversary of Blowing My Thought Wad, I figured I ought to make an effort to celebrate the blog birthday. So for a laugh, here’s Conan the Barbarian: The Musical.

Truth And Reconciliation

2010-06-09T23:58:00.008+01:00

For some inexplicable reason I found myself watching the final episode of FlashForward on Monday evening, a full week after it was initially broadcast. I’d given up watching the show long ago having stuck with it for the first half dozen episodes before deciding there was no point carrying on. The central conceit may have been interesting but it quickly got stuck in a rut and with no characters to care a damn about it was pretty easy to give it up.

Catching the finale might have seemed a redundant exercise because although I could remember some of the central characters I didn’t have much of a clue what was going on anymore. I’d been happy to avoid it altogether but Five kept dropping the damn show into the schedules of their trio of channels and I thought it might be worth wasting of hour of my precious time in came something quite miraculous happened. Although a few minutes in I found myself absently tidying the desk and then once I discovered a crossword, untouched from last week, I didn’t pay much attention until the final act when the show managed to end with both a bang and a whimper.

On the whole I don’t think I really missed all that much. Given that the series was cancelled after the season had finished filming there wasn’t going to be any real resolution. But in the end there was nothing surprising about the last episode of FlashForward, other than the reappearance of the kangaroo. Whatever complications arose in the narrative, they just seemed so predictable, so generic. It just fitted in with all the thousands of hours of rather unremarkable television drama that I’ve seen before, and will probably see since. It might have started off with a grand plan but ultimately FlashForward did nothing to raise the bar. Whereas, the previous week, there was the finale of Lost.

Pretty much everyone I know that watched Lost when it first appeared six years back gave up during the third season. To be honest, I couldn’t blame them. Around that time there was a point where the show did start to tread water as well as make the mistake of introducing a couple of inconsequential characters that nobody gave a damn about. In a way it was bound to happen. With any successful American television drama the network wants to keep it on air for as long as possible so the show’s producers don’t always know how long they’ve got to tell the story. In a way it’s as if Dickens, writing Oliver Twist in serialized instalments for Bentley's Miscellany, was being instructed as to how long the story should run by the magazine’s publishers rather than making the decision himself.

That’s fine and dandy for showrunners happy to bank a cheque every week, but not a particularly ideal situation for the writer/producers who actually want to tell their story. Perhaps fearing that by padding out the narrative for too long audiences would significantly drop off, leading to an untimely cancellation, Lost producers Damon Lindelof and Carleton Cuse took the inspired step of going to the network to secure an end date. I suspect I would have carried on watching the show regardless simply because of the presence of Terry O’Quinn who is an actor I’ll watch no matter the quality of the material, but once Lindelof and Cuse had a fixed timetable it was like they had filled the tank with rocket fuel as the show seriously took off.

I’d like to think that everyone who stayed with the show throughout the whole six–year run was rewarded by the finale. Though it worked for me, there had been rumblings leading up to the final broadcast that everything wasn’t well amongst the fan base, and after it aired it has been intriguing – and somewhat puzzling – to read the many reactions to the story’s resolution. It was just over a year ago that the stunningly perfect finale of Battlestar Galactica, which also had an additional half–hour added to its running time, incurred the wrath of fans wanting to know why there were so many questions were left unanswered, particularly those involving the character of Kara Thrace, who never wanted to be forgotten.

With Lost, viewers seemed to get rankled that so many things about the island went unexplained, whether it was who built the statue, who was the Gaia figure and what was her story, or why were women on the island unable to give birth? Some sites people up with whole laundry lists or rather inconsequential queries and when they included the relevance of things like Jack Shephard’s tats, you really wanted them to follow Bill Hicks’ advice to people in advertising and just kill themselves. Because in the end, Lost, like Battlestar Galactica before it, was all about the journeys the characters take rather than the minutiae of the situation they found themselves in.

Caring about the characters more than the plot mechanics, what made the finale for me was the look of absolute joy on Hurley’s face when the motel room door opens; Eloise Hawking, who has a clear understanding of what is going on, worrying that her son would be taken away now that she has become the mother she never was; Kate saving a bullet; Hurley and Benjamin Linus, before and after; Locke’s final conversation with Linus; the encounter at the hospital vending machine that replayed the exact conversation at the Swan site from the season opener, with a few lines of dialogue removed. Giving a completely different emphasis and meaning to their words in the latter of the two, that scene alone was perhaps the best illustration of Lindelof and Cuse’s magnificently handled long con.

Last year, when the Battlestar Galactica gripes became public I wondered about the nationality of a lot of the finale’s naysayers, expecting most of them to be American because their comments showed just how bloody thick they were by missing the point of the show completely. With it happening to Lost, this time it wasn’t their country of origin I was intrigued to discover but their age. There’s a time early in everyone’s life when they’re more interested in the story rather than the characters. Everyone eventually grows out of it unless they are either dead inside or a hard–core science fiction fan. Reading some of the frankly inane criticism I wondered if it had come from emotionally–stunted youngsters who would be better served watching the big, dumb summer blockbusters at their local cinema.

On the outside Lost might have looked like a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma, but ultimately it was a tale of faith and spirituality, of friendships forged by disparate people who have to depend on one another if they are to live together rather than die alone, and ultimately getting closure. If all viewers wanted from the show was to find out what was in the box then they would, no doubt, have come away disappointed, especially when, during the last twenty minutes, it was revealed that there wasn’t anything there. But if they were happy to interpret it for themselves rather than have a bunch of straightforward answers served up on a plate, then the finale – along with all the episodes that preceded it – was an absolute triumph.

That said there were still folk who, despite not caring about the statue builders or any of the other inconsequential mysteries, absolutely failed to grasp what the show was about by getting it in their heads that the characters had all died from the initial air crash or some such nonsense. Perhaps the most astonishingly diametrically opposed views came from the same publication where Mary McNamara, the television critic of The Los Angeles Times, got it so hopelessly wrong that the humane thing to do would be to drive her out of LA and dump her in the desert, somewhere off the I-40 between Barstow and Needles, while Todd VanDerWerff, writing for the same paper, absolutely nailed it. (And if you haven’t watched the show and are planning to, it goes without saying that you shouldn’t go anywhere near either of the links just yet).

If it has taken me a long time to get around to writing this it’s because apart from catching the finale a few more times – and every time ending up a disgusting tear–stained wreck – I wanted to shuffle back through the episodes and watch the whole of the sixth series to see that it stands up. It does. With so many distractions during the weeks between each episode’s initial broadcast, it just hammers home that the best way to see long ongoing dramas is with a DVD box set, especially when there are so many little incidental details you’re liable to forget along the way, watching them so far apart.

For the people who didn’t like it the first time around, giving it a second chance on shiny disc might make for a far richer and rewarding experience. And who knows, somewhere down the line the youngsters who don’t get it yet might eventually realize that what we’re given is actually all we really want in The End.

In The Hood

2010-05-30T22:38:00.007+01:00

Just a solitary post in over one month is, quite frankly, a poor showing, I know. I could blame the researching and writing I’m still happily ploughing through or the wild adventures with the Luminous Beauty for eating up all my time, but there have been stray pockets here and there where it would have been easy to cobble together something. The only problem is that since I’m enjoying both of the above so much I can’t find anything in life to really growl about.

At any other time just the sight of those godawful 2012 Olympic mascots would have had me blowing a plug, but I figured that since so much money had already been spunked on the utterly horrendous logo that it seemed only fitting that a whole lot more was further flushed away on this pair of animated idiots. As for the poor bozos playing dress–up in the life–sized suits, you can only hope that they’re getting their Equity card or some such handsome reward for fannying about in the costumes in public.

Then recently I saw a post from the little twerp in Los Angeles trying to make it as a screenwriter who couldn’t make head nor tail of The Eagle Has Landed. This time she was asking folk what their favourite movie car chases were. When someone mentioned the famous chase between the car and elevated train through Brooklyn in Billy Friedkin’s The French Connection, her response was, “Does French Connection have a car chase?” What can you really say to that, other than suggest she gives up the writing and gets a job working the checkout at her local Ralphs.

So if I haven’t got any major gripes and I’m now finding it easy to ignore the sheer stupidity of youngsters when there’s opportunities to make merry, what the hell am I doing here? There are still things that rankle and are worth making a fuss about, although some are so damned horrific it’s difficult to even talk about. A few months back, attempting to get back into the habit of making regular trips to the cinema I set out to see a double bill of The Princess and the Frog and Ponyo. If I had seen both I’m sure it would have been a great evening, except I got the times mixed up. So excited to catch the new traditionally drawn Disney picture, I saw it first rather than second, and when I got back to the box office after sneaking out for a welcome gasper I discovered the new Miyazaki film shared a screen with some other movie and was being shown any more that day.

Perhaps it would have been best to shrug it off and head back home, but since I was there I figured I could find something else to watch. I knew it was a big mistake going in but I plumped for the film version of Edge of Darkness simply because I was intrigued by how badly they would screw it up. I know I could have waited until now, when it’s coming out on shiny disc, but I figured it was better, and less expensive, to just make a scene in the auditorium if I started screaming uncontrollably rather than put a foot through the television and throw the DVD player out the window at home. In fact when it became apparent that the political machinations were simply being replaced by repeated mentions to the Massachusetts gun laws I probably would have torched the whole apartment.

Instead on burning myself alive I sat through pretty much the whole thing slack–jawed and incapable of making any sound amazed by how they had taken that spectacular BBC serial and turned it into the noxious, easily forgettable, ill–conceived pile of dog toffee. If there was any doubt about how great an actor the late and much lamented Bob Peck was, all you have to do is compare his marvellously nuanced performance as Ronnie Craven in the original to Mel Gibson’s bug-eyed and empty turn in the film version. Finally stumbling out of the cinema and tottering home, I’d meant to post about how utterly wretched and traumatizing the experience was but whenever I sat down to write my mind just blotted it out and I’d draw a complete blank every time.

Although that was months ago, a couple weeks back I’d been trying to fit another double bill into my schedule, this time Iron Man 2 and Robin Hood. Obviously not paying attention, I’d forgotten that the summer movies are arriving sooner and sooner. Give it a couple more years and no doubt they’ll be tripping over each other to reach the screens just as soon as we’ve recovered from the New Year celebrations. And now that the films big holiday movies are starting to come out thick and fast there’s only a small window of opportunity to catch them on the bigger screens of the average plastic multiplex.

At one point, just for a few brief days, it looked like everything was going to work out, except that I couldn’t find a way to watch both movies. Even though the pair were playing on two screens apiece, wanting to see them on the larger screens rather than in one of the pokier little theaters – which would be not much bigger than watching them at home – with their running times constantly overlapping I couldn’t work out to way to see them without there being quite a long time lag between the screenings. In the end I was just too late and the arrival of Prince of Persia put paid to any plans I had. Having to ditch Iron Man 2 and await its arrival on shiny disc, I went to see Robin Hood.

On numerous occasions in the past I’ve stated that for me Robin Hood starts with Errol Flynn in The Adventures of Robin Hood, ends with Dick Lester’s elegiac Robin and Marian, with just enough space between them to squeeze in the Disney version. I was too young to have watched Richard Greene in ITC’s The Adventures of Robin Hood, written by many of the fellow travellers who came to these shores to escape the hectoring of the HUAC, and couldn’t really be having with Robin of Sherwood, Richard Carpenter’s 1980’s take on the legend that leant heavily on the Green Man mythos, or the BBC’s recent sullen hoodie version. Unluckily I was in the generation who got Rocket Robin Hood as a kiddie, so any take on the legend on television pretty much put me off.

Except from now on I’ll have to revise that opening statement to include this new Ridley Scott version because, quite frankly, I bloody loved it. I suppose that puts me in the minority. After some initial good reviews everyone then seemed to start in on Russell Crowe’s wavering English accent. Even though I had already listened to his confrontational interview with Mark Lawson on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row by the time I was settled in with my bucket of popcorn and cup of fizzy pop, I can’t say that I really noticed or even cared.

For all its perceived faults – and to be honest I wasn’t too keen on the yellow subtitling – the script, rewritten by Brian Helgeland during the course of development, was a whole lot better than the original, written by Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Voris. As I mentioned back in January, their script Nottingham started a bidding war between the studios and was initially described as a revisionist take on the legend with the newly appointed Sheriff of Nottingham the benevolent character and Robin of Loxley the real outlaw. Except after reading it back then, and discovering that Loxley appeared in only a handful of brief scenes at most, ultimately it seemed utterly pointless.

Much in the same way that Christopher Nolan delved into the origins of Bob Kane’s Batman years after the quartet of awfully overblown pantomimes directed by Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher, this version of the Sherwood Forest legend could have easily been dubbed Robin Begins. There’s always a danger when Hollywood messes with our folklore – when Touchstone Pictures removed the lyricism of Sir Thomas Mallory’s Le Morte d’Arthur from the 2004 King Arthur the results were woeful and dull – but I thought that replacing the familiar romanticism of men in tights with a more grounded reality actually worked in this instance, especially with the suggestion that the northern barons were responsible for the origins of the Charter of the Forest. And it just looked sumptuous.

If I had any problem with the experience it was with the damn multiplex. It probably didn’t help that I unwittingly chose to see the film at a time when a massive shipment of popcorn had just arrived. So that meant the box office was closed up so two young staffers could lark about as they put the huge popcorn bags, which looked about the size of a flattened hay bale, in storage. To get a ticket I had to queue at the Ben & Jerry’s counter, which wouldn’t have been a problem if the lone kid didn’t have to deal with an elderly European couple, for whom English probably wasn’t even their third language, as they kept changing their minds over which goddamn flavour to go with. With the minutes ticking away I asked them if they could just make their minds up. The people queued between them and me heartily agreed, but then they weren’t the ones who got the stink eye.

Worse, in these plastic palaces the projectionists never seem to take any due care and attention with the prints. When I saw Robin Hood the film was only a week old, if that, yet from start to finish the print had been badly scratched leaving short horizontal marks that started at the top of the left hand side of the frame, bounced their way down to the bottom of the screen over the course of a quarter of a minute and then jumped back to the top to start out all over again.

Obviously something in the projector had nicked the emulsion from the get go and was simply made worse with each screening. No wonder dear old Stanley K used to send his assistants out to cinemas to check that the prints were looked after and the films were shown in the correct aspect ratio. Although a distraction on occasion, it was still better than having to watch the film in 3D.

Formation Flying

2010-05-09T22:33:00.004+01:00

According to a report from the marketing body Thinkbox UK viewers currently watch an average of four hours (and 18 minutes) television a day. If that’s the case then there’s some couch potato out there with their eyes glued to the goggle–box making up the time for me because over the last fortnight or so I doubt I watched that many hours each week, let alone per day.

Last Friday, deciding to knock off relatively early, I dug the listings magazine out from under the clutter on the desk to find it still open on Monday’s schedule. I think I’d only turned the set on for Thursday’s Have I Got News For You only to find three complete plums flapping their mouths at the camera, so that went off pretty darn quick. Although to be fair I hadn’t been stuck in every evening, deciding what not to watch as I cracked on with the work.

Midweek I’d scooted out in the afternoon to join an actress friend celebrate her agent’s birthday, then hooked up with the Luminous Beauty for a drink in Covent Garden’s piazza before we headed off to the Cartoon Museum for Collaborative Visions, Brian Sibley’s excellent, authoritative and entertaining talk on Ronald Searle’s career as an illustrator, as part of the museum’s season celebrating Searle’s 90th birthday. From there it was on to meet friends for dinner at the Italian restaurant within St Pancras International. Then during the long May Day weekend a 31–hour power cut had left me rotating between cleaning, exercising and reading before everything was eventually sorted out.

This week I hadn’t even bothered with perusing any TV listings in advance, simply watching NCIS on Wednesday, Lost on Friday and, sandwiched between the two, Wallander to blot out all the flapdoodle surrounding X Marks The Box Day. When I did flick over to the BBC’s reportage, Andrew Neil was asking Bruce Forsythe for his insight on the election at some Thames–side bash, which had me comment to an equally incredulous friend of facebook that they should have spiked the partygoers’ drinks with the rage virus and had them paint every inch of that boat with Neil's and Brucie's blood.

There had been the odd evening when I’m absently flip through the channels, alighting on various programmes here and there to catch up on shows I didn’t have the slightest interest in. That past Friday, if I remember rightly, I did alight on the usually torpid BBC3 to catch the odd few minutes of an old edition of Top Gear, where the Hampster, behind the wheel of a Bugatti Veyron, faced off against an RAF Typhoon jet fighter in a drag race. Watching that particular challenge reminded me that it was a shame they hadn’t reformatted the show sooner, turning it from the initial, rather dry, consumer programme to three overgrown boys dicking around in expensive cars and all the stuff and nonsense that came with it.

Back in the Spring of 2003 I’d been sent along to interview the Wing Commander in charge of the Directorate of Corporate Communication (RAF). Calling to arrange a time to meet up, unfortunately I’d caught him at a bad time. “I’m a bit busy with the war!” he explained, which initially threw me, having spent the day at the Imperial War Museum’s Archive before heading off to the rather unimpressive wrap party of the last major animated series I had worked on. My first thought was, what’s he talking about the war’s been over for ages? But once the penny finally dropped he suggested I call back the following Thursday when things would be a little quieter. On the Wednesday, while working from home, I watched as tanks entered Baghdad and marines from the “Thundering Third” helped topple the statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square.

At the time the DCC (RAF) was housed in the old Grand Metropole Hotel on Northumberland Avenue. Requisitioned by the government in the lead–up to the Second World War, the building had been the home of MI9 and the SOE before they moved out to Wilton Park and since the early 1950s it had been wholly taken over by the Air Ministry. Formed three years previously from RAF PR, the role of the DCC (RAF) was to provide all manner of assistance to television and film companies, producing everything from short news broadcasts through to light entertainment, documentaries and dramas.

Although they continued to provide assistance to Eon Productions’ series of James Bond films, recently granting them access to RAF Odiham in Hampshire where a hanger stood in for the US Army base south of Korea’s DMZ in Die Another Day, and supplied Chinook helicopters and safety advisers for the scenes in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider shot on Salisbury Plain, the department didn’t simply acquiesce to every request that landed on their desks. Looking to raise the profile of the third branch of the armed services, the DCC (RAF) have to carefully assess each project in turn and decide whether it is a good thing for them to do. Even if an idea passes muster with the department, the chances of it making it to the television screen are still slim.

At the time the main body of work presented to the DCC (RAF) were documentaries coming from independent production companies rather than the major broadcasters themselves. During the initial stages the department would work on spec to help flesh out the idea, providing the necessary background to help try and get the programme commissioned. If it reached the next stage and development money was forthcoming they would do a lot more research and come up with a solid plan. If the project passes all the hurdles and gets the full funding, then the DCC (RAF) becomes intimately involved and adds a lot of value to the production.

The ideal subject for the department is one that mixes the old with the new. A purely historical documentary relying more on archive footage needs little assistance from the DCC (RAF). “There are always benefits to doing historical perspectives,” the WC explained, “but obviously when we look at it in terms of what’s in it for us, we want to get the modern Air Force in there as well.” A case in point was the 2003 documentary The Dambusters made by Tigress Productions for Channel 4 and The Discovery Channel to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of Operation Chastise, carried out by bombers of 617 Squadron led by Wing Commander Guy Gibson.

A number of documentaries had already been made about their raid on the Ruhr Valley in Germany’s industrial heartland dams raids so the project was never going to be a simple historical account. Although telling the story through the eyes of three surviving crew–members of one of the Lancaster bombers would provide a centre piece, not least because they successfully breached the Eder Dam, the initial idea was to try to recreate the raid to show how difficult the job their squadron had to perform was.

Still considered one of the most technically difficult pieces of flying ever attempted, the Lancaster crews had to navigate their way to the targets for almost seven hours, at night, flying at an altitude of only 100 feet. “From our point of view we were not interested in the strategic moral elements of the story,” explained the programme’s producer. “I only wanted to know one thing: what was it like to be there?” Throughout the filming, the DCC (RAF) proved to be incredibly helpful to the production team, opening many closed doors and dealing with unexpected issues.

When a physical reconstruction proved unfeasible, the DCC (RAF) suggested the production company meet with flying instructors at RAF Cranwell in Lincolnshire to use a specially created flight simulator. Because the RAF couldn’t afford to take anyone out of training or operations, the programme-makers were offered a selection of holding officers who were between courses, choosing a mixture of non-commissioned officer air-crew and officers that reflected not only the situation sixty years ago but also the modern air force of today.

While documentaries continued to raise the RAF’s profile by focusing on past and present achievements, the DCC (RAF) were still eager to see the service portrayed more in television drama. At one point Kudos Productions were looking to insert footage of RAF fighters in a second series episode of Spooks where a microlite flying toward Chequers sparks fears of a terrorist attack, though ultimately they relied on existing stock footage instead. Where the department did score a minor victory was with the BBC’s Red Cap, starring Tamzin Outhwaite as a member of the army’s Special Investigation Branch. Although the drama involved no flying sequences whatsoever, the department took the programme–makers to a training area and put four Harriers in the air for inclusion in the opening title sequence.

“No doubt the army were extremely upset about that,” the WC gleefully explained. Once the new Top Gear got going and began to involve the armed services, the rivalry between them certainly came to the fore. It began late in 2003, at the beginning of the show’s third series, when the original black–suited Stig in a Jaguar XJS attempted to reach 100mph on the 200 metre–long runway of HMS Invincible, ultimately driving off the deck and sinking into the water below. Two episodes later the new white Stig, driving a Saab 9–5 competed against a naval Sea Harrier to see which could post the fasted lap time.

A year after I had spent the morning in Northumberland Avenue, the new series began with Clarkson driving the super–lightweight Lotus Exige while a WAH–64D Apache attack helicopter tried to get a missile lock on him. In recent years the show has upped the ante with the armed forces involvement, having Clarkson take part in one of the Royal Marines’ beach–landing exercises on Instow Sands while road testing the Ford Fiesta, and later playing British Bulldogs against the army’s latest military hardware on their Dorset testing grounds.

Back in the DCC (RAF) offices the Wing Commander had explained that when it came to reviewing requests they had to ask themselves, what’s in it for the RAF? Is it going to be interesting and exciting? What are the resource implications? After an initial assessment, around seventy–five per cent of the submissions go straight in the bin, especially with the ideas that ranged from the really daft to the totally barking. Probably the most ridiculous request had come from the team behind LWT’s Saturday challenge game show Don’t Try This At Home, hosted by Davina McCall, who asked “Can we land a Harrier on the Millenium Dome?” His curt response was, “Yes, but only once.”

Twenty Twenty-Ten Vision

2010-04-24T19:03:00.006+01:00

Twenty years ago today, as part of the thirty–fifth mission in the Space Shuttle program, the crew of Discovery deployed the Hubble Space Telescope in a 380 statute mile orbit. Because nothing succeeds as planned, once operational, the initial images revealed that the telescope had a serious flaw with its optical system due to the primary mirror having been ground incorrectly. Too flat around the edge by 2.2 microns, the flaw created a severe spherical aberration.

Although the HST could still carry out its observations, it wasn’t until December 7th, 1993, during their almost seven–hour fourth spacewalk to upgrade the telescope that the mission specialists of the shuttle Endeavor installed COSTAR, the Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement system, to correct the bleary-eyed primary mirror. Since then the images regularly sent back have been utterly astonishing.

To celebrate Hubble’s twentieth anniversary, NASA, ESA and the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore have released a new photograph detailing a portion of the Carina Nebula. Even more astonishing than the classic “Pillars of Creation” image from fifteen years ago that revealed stars forming in the Eagle Nebula, this latest image shows towers of cool hydrogen laced with dust, three light–years–tall, rising from the wall of the nebula. Eaten away by the brilliant light from nearby stars, the pillar of gas and dust is also being pushed apart from within as infant stars buried deep inside fire off the jets of gas streaming from the towering peaks.

For more information visit the Hubble site. In the meantime, Happy Anniversary Hubble, you magnificent bastard!

The Idiots Have Landed

2010-04-23T23:49:00.008+01:00

I should have suspected that Clash of the Titans was going to be an absolute fetid pile of dog toffee the moment it kicked off with a dreadfully lumpen prologue. Explaining in far too much detail who the key Gods were, and preparing the way for the eventual coming of the Kraken, it laid all the cards out on the table in such a crass way that I wondered if, before donning the useless 3D glasses, I was meant to have driven a stiletto through my frontal lobe.

Of course that might be an unfair assertion because I had a Latin master at prep school who would ease us into the week by setting aside the declensions and their cases and instead spending the Monday morning lesson teaching us about Roman History. So from an early age I knew about the Gods and their mythology, and subsequently their Greek counterparts. Soon after an introduction to the Norse myths came simply from reading issues of Marvel Comics’ The Mighty Thor. Whether most kids get that kind of introduction today is another matter. With so many distractions and the little feckers running riot most teachers have enough trouble trying to instil the three Rs without complicating the basic curriculum.

So there’s nothing wrong with a brief introduction per se. Disney’s Hercules – which covered some of the same territory and had an infinitely better Hades, voiced by James Woods, as opposed to Ralph Fiennes taking a big cheque to wear a bad wig – set the stage with The Muses introducing the characters in their song and dance number. But at least that opening was there from the get go. I neither know nor care if Clash of the Titans had a troubled production but on screen, as it stumbled through a seriously fractured narrative, the prologue seemed like the product of a radical re–edit, similar to The Golden Compass, whose introduction spelt out so much about the parallel universes connected by dust, the witches, Gyptians, alethiometer and the Magisterium that it seemed pointless to carry on.

Since a mainstream film’s structure has long been in the hands of the twerpy young Angelenos that make up preview audiences as much as the filmmakers, I wonder if detailed prologues are going to become a regular fixture for future releases. I mention this because last week I was staggered to read a blog post from a resident of LA who had watched The Eagle Has Landed and hadn’t been able to make sense of it. Released here and in the US in 1977, John Sturges’ adaptation of Jack Higgin’s novel featured German paratroopers being dropped into Norfolk with orders to kidnap Winston Churchill and deliver him to Berlin. It’s basically Ealing Studios’ Went the Day Well? – itself based on Graham Greene’s short story, The Lieutenant Died Last – but with a more clearly defined objective.

This girl’s issues with the film were actually twofold. The casting of American, British and European actors as German characters threw her to begin with, especially since Robert Duvall (wearing what she described as a “stereotypical German uniform”) spoke with a very clear German accent while “another guy” dressed in an unfamiliar uniform, which she believed was a German naval uniform, spoke with “a very distinct British accent”. So when they discussed kidnapping Churchill her confusion of the differing accents led her to think the British guy was a spy. It got even more confusing when Michael Caine eventually appeared on screen, speaking in “some kind of hybrid accent and wearing a completely different unfamiliar uniform”, and “saving Jews from concentration camps”. To confound her even more, “[t]hen Donald Sutherland shows up and speaks with an Irish accent. But he’s actually playing an Irishman.”

Given that The Eagle Has Landed is regarding as a classic Boy’s Own wartime adventure yarn, and not exactly particularly taxing on the brain, my initial response was to simply laugh like a drain at the sheer depth of stupidity on display and forget it as best I could. But one thing that still rankled was her mistakenly labelling all the German characters as “Nazis”, so after digging out the DVD, which had come free with one of the nationals some time back, and watching it again to refresh my memory, I tried my best to put her right.

The way I saw it, the ignorance of youth was to blame for her confusion rather than the production, especially when it came to not knowing that not everyone in Germany during the Second World War, either in the services or simply civilians, was a member of National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or that in the armed services there was a difference between the regular Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS – with the former not always seeing eye–to–eye with the latter. Many of the war movies made during the 1960s and 70s, such as The Guns of Navarone, would show tensions between the high-ranking regular army officers and the token member of the SS, and The Eagle Has Landed was no different, actually using that divide as a plot point.

Still she did recognize the regular officer’s uniform Duvall’s Oberst Radl and the other guy – who was in fact Sir Anthony Quayle – was indeed wearing a naval uniform. Though how he was dressed might not have been as familiar, the fact that he was continually addressed as “Herr admiral” might have been a bit of a give away. In the same vein, Michael Caine’s Kurt Steiner and his men were established as decorated paratroops before they make an appearance and travelling through Poland, obviously on the way back from Russia, were outfitted in reversible winter uniforms. Even if each of the main characters was wearing something entirely different, all were decorated with the Iron Cross or Knight’s Cross and there were enough insignias on display to make the point that they were all German.

As for the accents, it always seems to be an unwritten rule in these films of such daring–do that English actors would usually just add a slight Germanic lilt to their voice if they were playing one of the beastly Hun. It didn’t always work, and in The Eagle Has Landed Michael Caine’s mangled pronunciation of Berchtesgaden is always good for a giggle, but that’s the way it goes. Since it was also commonplace to have at least one or two American stars to help sell it to American audiences, those actors tended to elicit a much stronger affectation to disguise their own native accent. One thing Robert Duvall’s accent has going for it is that it doesn’t have anything like the formal, and occasionally distracting, pronunciation used in his portrayal of Dr Watson in the Nicholas Meyer–scripted The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, made in the same year.

And as for a Canadian playing an Irishman with an Irish accent, there’s little else to be said about that. But I did wonder if she had the same problems watching the more recent Valkyrie, which had any number of Brits playing German officers and Tom Cruise starting out in the light–sand coloured uniform of the Afrika Korps. Leaving the BFI Southbank last Friday, I mentioned this to a couple of the people in attendance as we stopped for a quick drink before I headed on toward Piccadilly to meet up with the Persian Princess who had been attending an event at BAFTA, and their immediate response once they finished laughing was, this poor girl better not see Where Eagles Dare then. That would put her in a whole world of brain hurt.

So I sent a response, which duly appeared in the comments followed by her reply that it was “all well and good but [filmmakers] cannot possibly expect [their] audience to know that much about any era if [they] want them to enjoy a film. I shouldn't have to study before I go see a movie.” One of her other grievances had been that “the beginning of the film was so talky. They keep naming characters who aren’t in the scene so when we finally meet those characters I’m not sure – is this the guy they were talking about? Is he German too?”

Aside from Churchill, I thought the only character who is really talked up ahead of their entrance in The Eagle Has Landed is Caine’s Oberst Kurt Steiner. But watching the opening ten or fifteen minutes of the film again Radl and his aide and Quayle’s Admiral Canaris, name–check Hitler; Himmler (who makes a brief appearance onscreen, played with a weasel–like intensity by Donald Pleasence); Goebbels; Mussolini; Göring and Karl Jung (and it would be doubtful we would see him taking up arms). I know it’s sixty–five years now since the end of the Second World War, but aren’t those names, and most of their faces, still familiar?

How soon will it be before producers and directors making any kind of period film have to bolt on an explanatory prologue because a clueless younger audience simply can’t get the gist of what’s going on? If this girl doesn’t know, then she doesn’t know and it’s not her fault. Although the most alarming aspect about her having difficulty in following this particular plot is that while trying to make it as a screenwriter she has a day job as a teacher. So if we have to suffer the ongoing infantilization of cinema, maybe the first thing to do is blame it all on the schools.

Restraining Order

2010-04-19T23:57:00.005+01:00

Of all the movies being released this year, one of the few I was really looking forward to seeing was the remake of Clash of the Titans. I’d grown up being solidly entertained by Ray Harryhausen’s astonishing stop–motion animation, and to this day still find myself entertained by the likes of Jason and the Argonauts and the trio of Sinbad movies, but there was always something about the 1981 original, sadly his last film as special visual effects creator, that made me not bother to revisit it after the initial theatrical release.

It certainly wasn’t the animation that was at fault, rather the pratfalls and whistling of that mechanical owl, Bubo, had bugged me all the way through. Blue screen rather than back projection was employed, showing the joins that the new technology brought with it, and the lighting of the scenes that would have the animated creatures inserted into them later on in post–production made the live action look soft and far beyond a second generation copy. Maybe it was simply an age thing as, being in my mid–teens at the time it arrived in cinemas, I was far more critical in my younger days. Although watching it again just recently I was far more forgiving of most of those early criticisms, except of course for the damned owl.

The remake appealed because, since we seem to be in an age where every big movie is almost required to ram computer generated imagery down our throats, classic mythological creatures would be a darn sight better than what usually gets served up. In the different drafts of the script that have been floating around over the last year or so, Tiamat’s appearance in the Great Hall of the Basilica of Joppa is decribed:

Tiamat, Queen of the Deep, floats forward, parting a sea of cowering celebrants. The folds of her liquid cloak billow to the sound of SURGING TIDES. All eyes follow her. Perseus sees his first Olympian.

[...]

Tiamat tears off her cloak, which scatters to a fine mist. THE GODDESS STANDS NAKED. The skin of her luscious body glaws with the frigid bioluminescence of a deep sea creature. Swirling fins in lieu of hair. Sublime and terrifying.

[...]

Clouds of blank sea–ink swirl and swallow Tiamat, then implode. Tiamat is gone.

And that was before it even got to the Stygian Witches, Medusa, and the Kraken. If animators with only a fraction of Harryhausen’s talent could be employed to create the roster of characters, the end result might have been well worth watching compared to brainless robots bashing the cogs off each other, buildings coming down around the insignificant lead actors, and the load of old bollocks that took place on Pandora. When the teaser was released it actually looked quite promising. But then the second, longer trailer arrived, which started to sow doubts, until finally the damning reviews came, including ones from people whose opinions I respected.

I was happy to write it off like many other movies I was initially eager to see but soon gave up on, but come Friday I found I had some hours spare during the day. A meeting at the BFI Southbank to discuss the feasibility of a future project, originally scheduled for mid–afternoon, had been pushed back to almost the end of the working day. Though the switch had come well in advance, rather than at the last minute, I’d done everything I needed to do and still headed off into town earlier, stopping at the local multiplex on the way in. If I had any sense I would have stumped up to see The Ghost instead.

You can pray that what appears on the page will find its way to the screen, but on this occasion the Gods certainly weren’t listening. The shooting script had changed dramatically, with the final draft obviously written by someone who mainly worked in crayon. And who the hell decided to cast a right plum who had even less charisma than the already charisma–free Harry Hamlin in the role of Perseus? Then there was the treatment of the Gods. Still, at least there were Gods involved, unlike Troy, which eradicated all reference to the deities in Wolfgang Petersen’s worthless adaptation of Homer’s Iliad.

Whereas in the earlier Charles H. Schneer/Ray Harryhausen productions had the occupants of Mount Olympus milling around when they weren’t meddling with the fates of men, here the Gods were placed on weird podiums like they were contestants on some bland game show. Having previously portrayed Sir Gawain in John Boorman’s Excalibur, and from the look of it still wearing more or less the same suit of armour, Liam Neeson appeared to be more perturbed that, while he had moved up in the ranks and taken charge, some bastard had snuck in and stolen his Round Table.

I suppose these grievances could have been put aside if the creature effects had been half decent. Amongst the two hours of frenetic nonsense there were a couple of decent scenes – one near the beginning where the harpies coalesce into Hades, and then later there were a few nice moments with Medusa slithering effortlessly through the ruins of her lair – but everything else simply paled by comparison to the original. The scorpions formed from the spilt blood of Calibos may have been far bigger than before but they certainly weren’t better, and though the original Kraken may have looked like a cross between a steroid Creature from the Black Lagoon and the Ymir from 20 Million Miles to Earth, it still had more personality than the indistinct collection of tentacles and teeth that rose up in the new version.

Trying to make sense of what I had seen – and days later still wondering what the hell happened to Liam Cunningham’s character – I can’t understand how such an epic story turned into an epic fail. How could they get it so horribly wrong? There were certainly issues with the narrative – and especially how the story was set up, which is perhaps best left for another time – but surely the real problem with Clash of the Titans was down to the ham–handed direction that wildly swung between lacklustre and frenetic, and the equally schizophrenic quality of the effects work.

If Clash of the Titans initially appealed to me it was because with only the one Medusa, one Pegasus, one Kraken, along with the trio of scorpions, the film wasn’t going to be awash with thousands of computer–generated individuals zipping around the frame simply to make up for the lack of character and plot. Of course this also meant that one failing of Clash of the Titans was that there was only the one Medusa, one Pegasus, one Kraken, along with the trio of scorpions. With those creatures the sole focus of their particular scenes the animation had to be top notch, and for the last two creations it sorely wasn’t.

Back when I was young and (even more) foolish, I’d line–tested some animation for Dick Williams. Stepping back and watching the results, I’d made some comment about the character zipping across the screen looking just great. Dick had put me straight by explaining that a fast–moving character was easy. The hard work when into one that was moving at a slow and serene pace. While some of that was evident with Medusa, the damn scorpions looked like the animators who had been manipulated in the computer never once bothered to study the actual arachnids’ motion beforehand.

Whether this below par animation had something to do with it or not, the whole muddled scorpion sequence that failed to establish where anyone was at any given time looked like it had been sliced together by a four–year–old with advanced ADHD. In fact the direction overall was generally awful, and the distinct lack of film grammar only made any kind of sense when I later discovered that the maroon in charge behind the camera had previously inflicted upon the world The Incredible Hulk – a retched load of nonsense whose only saving grace was that it was slightly less retched than Ang Lee’s earlier Hulk.

With more and more technology available, it’s become more and more apparent that there are film directors out there who shouldn’t be allowed to get their grubby little mitts until they can prove their worth by making movies that don’t rely of spunking bone–headed CGI nonsense all over the screen. Luckily there are some directors who use limited amounts of computer imagery in the service of the story without making a song and dance about it, but as for the rest, they should be rounded up and herded into an empty underground bunker with the words SHOW RESTRAINT painted on every wall. Only when it sinks in and they finally get it will they be allowed out to go about their business.

Back in the 1980s I was really taken by Tim Burton’s early films like Pee–Wee’s Big Adventure and Beetlejuice. In fact I saw the Pee–Wee Herman movie twice in previews before it went on general release, and now that I think about it the second time around was my very first date with The One That Got Away. Once his talent was embraced by the major studios and given bigger films with bigger budgets it all went to hell. It was easy to see coming. Having started out as a junior animator at Disney, it was evident Burton was far more interested in kooky characters and quirky production design rather than niggling things like a serviceable plot. While the outrageous stop–frame animation of those earlier projects had a certain charm to them, once he bought into the computer technology employed in the making of Mars Attacks! there was no holding him back.

The same can be said for James Cameron. Smug beyond belief about all the new technology he has had a hand in directing, it still can’t disguise the fact that his best film is still Aliens. Avatar may have won the Academy Award for Best Achievement in Visual Effects – and, bizarrely, Best Achievement in Cinematography, which had to be the most public pity fuck in human history – but Ripley in the powerloader suit, angrily trading blows with the Queen Alien, was far better than the climactic standoff between Quaritch in his ridiculous ampsuit and the Giacometti smurf.

That’s not to say the props should henceforth come out of the Blue Peter studio, having been cobbled together from empty washing–up liquid bottles, the cardboard tubes from toilet rolls and a couple of coat–hangers, all held together with sticky tape and string. But less money and practical effects require filmmakers to be more creative rather than simply kicking back and let the pixels take the strain. Pissing around with motion–capture animation may have been all fun and games to Robert Zemeckis but when his films, with their freakish character designs, didn’t bring home the bacon Disney pulled the plug on ImageMovers Digital, with its eventual closure putting 450 people out on the street.

Maybe a tighter lease and a couple of zeros knocked off the end of the studio cheque will make a number of once decent directors stop acting like kids that have run riot in a sweet shop, scarfing down everything they could get their hands on and having a massive sugar rush that sends them batshit crazy, and get their act together. Although if the scenario took place I wouldn’t doubt Burton, Cameron and Roland Emmerich – whose films are about as entertaining as being cracked in the face with a breeze–block – would end up starving to death in that bunker while everyone else learns a valuable lesson.

And when that’s sorted out we can turn our attention to this bullshit retro–3D process. Gussied up after the fact like an ingénue thrusting her new implants in our faces to get herself noticed, instead of 3D it should be labelled 33DD, with the audience appearing as the biggest tits of all for paying the extra to get an eyeful of the unnecessary enhancement. Before leaving home I’d been rooting around at home for a clip–on bunny tail – which is a whole other story in itself – and found a number of the eye masks Virgin Atlantic give out to passengers who want to sleep through the long–haul flight. Frankly I wish I had taken one of those along with me on Friday afternoon instead.

Short And Sweet

2010-04-09T11:23:00.004+01:00

Just as my abject fury over intrusive computer generated imagery bollixing up mainstream modern cinema is reaching critical mass, along comes Patrick Jean’s short Pixels to take it down below the red line. Obviously it won’t last, but for the moment, enjoy.

Back From The Brink

2010-04-05T23:51:00.006+01:00

Up until Thursday it felt like the joke was on me. There have been brief bouts of insomnia to contend with in the past but nothing this sustained. Though I never quite reached the point of making homemade soap with an imaginary friend, by the beginning of this last week I felt like I had accidentally ingested a horse tranquillizer by mistake.

Hoping against hope that the switch to British Summer Time would help me snap out of it, there was no such luck and I’d still be up to watch the black of night fade to an indigo blush. If I was lucky I’d get a few, almost uninterrupted hours sleep during the night, but those instances became increasingly rare. Instead I’d manage a brief catnap either late morning or early afternoon and spend the rest of the time in a wearisome daze. As debilitating as that was, at least it was fortunate I currently had the recently delivered containers of material to sort through.

While it’s more convenient nowadays to obtain information from the internet – although it then takes time to cross–check facts from a number of independent and accredited sources to guarantee it’s validity – there’s nothing better than poring over actual documents and clippings, carefully sifting through them all to find out which are useful and which are not. One of the best discoveries, although peripheral to what I’m working on, was a bound cardboard folder entitled ORIENT LINE RECORDS OF A VOYAGE. Held inside its canvas pocket were various articles pertaining to a Mediterranean cruise, from 23rd May to 9th June, 1930, onboard the SS Orion.

The contents included the PASSENGER LIST and GENERAL INFORMATION FOR PASSENGERS with its powder blue cover, the dinner menu for 3rd June and the luncheon menu from five days later, and the programme for CINEMA IN THE BALLROOM AT 9.15PM (for passengers from First Service only). There was also the printed LIST OF PRIZEWINNERS from the numerous sports and entertainment events that took place over the course of the cruise, including Chalking the Pig’s Eye, Bird Guessing Competition, Tipping the Life–Buoy and the Cigarette Race.

Obviously these various cards and booklets could have been scanned and uploaded as pdf files to be read just as easily. But almost eighty years old now and somewhat mottled with age and worn around the edges, it was just fascinating to careful lay them out on the desk for careful examination. Also given to each of the passengers was THE LANDSMAN’S LEXICON, a 32-page booklet intended to “help to add to the pleasure of a voyage by Orient Line”. Along with sections on Ships of the Past and Navigation, the latter half of the booklet was taken up with a Nautical Glossary.

On the last page was a list of “old seafaring expressions [that] still lurk unrecognized in our language”. Included there, which I didn’t know the origin of, were:

The “devil to pay”

To paint or tar the “devil”, an inaccessible plank on the ship’s side; cf. “between the devil and the deep blue sea.”

“Nippers”

Very smart boys who were employed in “nipping” the cable to another rope connected to the capstan when the anchor was being weighed.

“Aloof”

Upwind, and therefore difficult for a sailing ship to approach.

I’m sure it would have been more intriguing if I hadn’t been so zoned out going through it all. Maybe I’ll go back to it sometime next week. I wondered how long this mental state was going to go on. Come April Fool’s Day I was scheduled to meet up again with our delectable Persian Princess and was hoping I’d be able to string a sentence together at the very least. I also had to make the effort of suggesting where we could meet up and then where to go rather than leave it all to her, otherwise it would look like I couldn’t be bothered.

So that meant trying to remember which pubs I used to frequent back in the days when I was a young scamp. Giving it a couple of minutes thought I was floundering badly and had to turn to the Good Pub Guide’s website. Picking a central region of town and then scanning through the customer comments of the higher–rated establishments listed, there appeared to be a clear division between the sexes and what they were looking for on their night out. The women who responded would paint a wonderful picture, praising the pub’s atmosphere, the pleasant demeanour of the staff and the fact that their drinks hadn’t been spiked with whatever date–rape drug was circulating. Everything would appear perfect until, with a final brush stroke, they would daub, “But the toilets are an absolute disgrace!”

The men, however, didn’t seem to give a fig if the Gents smelt like a mackerel fisherman’s gusset on a hot summer afternoon at sea. Most were simply aggrieved that there hadn’t been a pint of Garibaldi’s Peculiar Winkle available at the pumps. Instead they had to settle on supping from a glass of Old Barnaby’s Hairless Muskrat and grumble about how it reminded them of the time their ailing donkey was given a Worcestershire sauce enema, and frankly that won’t do at all. In those instances, finding sick on the stairs seemed to be something of a bonus. Neither helped.

So we chose a central location with a number of decent pubs in mind. Of course with the Easter Weekend bearing down on us the working week had come to an early end so most were packed full to the gunwhales, with SRO if you were very lucky. At least my suggestions were. The Persian Princess knew where she was going and soon we were settled in a relatively quiet banquette. Meeting up with the usual crowd on those few occasions, a couple of the characters refuse to sit. It may be that they imbibe so much they fret whether they’ll ever get up again. In those situations it’s easy to step outside for a quick gasper, whereas in this instance the rulings of the Health Nazis put us in a bind.

To spark up we had to move on, puffing away on the trek between watering holes. There was every danger that would leave as two sotted ruins come the end of the night. Luckily we ended up on a balcony overlooking Covent Garden’s Piazza, in a pub that, since my first days at The Esteemed School of Art, I had always thought of as being jammed with obnoxious, braying poltroons. But obviously they had moved on, so we stayed. After skipping off again for something to eat, we ended up alternating between Underground platforms, heading in different directions and seeing whose train would come first.

After all this, once again getting the last bus north from Marylebone, I fell into bed and slept for a good seven hours. Waking up on Good Friday I figured this might just be a fluke, but then the next night and the next night and last night I’d retire for a decent sleep. I figured my head was already getting back onto its natural plane after watching the first couple of minutes of the final series of Ashes to Ashes and yelling, “Utter bullshit!” at the television. Since then, taking it relatively easy over the holiday weekend, I got to catch up on the second series of Simon Russell Beale’s Sacred Music and watch the new episodes of Wallander now that I was able to pay attention to the subtitles.

Other than that it was a case of looking back over the last few weeks and see what I’d missed. With all the continuing ails in the world, one of the biggest brouhahas seems to have been the BBC’s decision to appoint Claudia Winkleman as the new host of the Film programme. Criticizing her for not having the proper critical credentials and being too lightweight doesn’t seem to hold water because, quite frankly, that never stopped the outgoing incumbent. Frankly I would have been happy with a sock puppet or even one of the firemen from Trumpton if it meant getting that witless ass–clown off the television screens.

I’m not saying that she’s the very best choice. At a push my vote would be to rehire Barry Norman, and that’s not simply biased toward the fact that I’m still in possession of my Film 80 tee shirt, even though it’s now a few sizes too small. The news of having young Winkleman in the chair didn’t seem to be that big an affront to so many sensibilities once the BBC quickly pointed out the show’s format was going to change, bringing in industry experts and studio guests. Hopefully they will include appearances from the reviewers everyone expected to get her job in the first place, leading to a discussion of a new release’s merits to give a more reasoned judgement, rather than relying on just the opinion of a sole presenter.

Still, with newspaper and magazine reviews, along with trailers and any number of film clips readily available on the internet, what is the value of a television programme based around film reviews (and the odd location report or painfully short feature)? To keep the Film programme relevant they’ll have to do more than simply replace the presenter. But at least getting rid of a prancing popinjay who goes easy on his industry “mates” is a start.

On Days Like These

2010-03-25T23:58:00.002Z

I never thought I’d ever say that insomnia has an up side to it. Awake well beyond the early hours of Monday morning, I started poking around on the computer and discovered the drama section of 4oD on YouTube. I’m sure everyone knows about this but I obviously wasn’t paying attention in assembly when the announcement was made.

Since that first night I’ve worked my way through the Channel 4’s marvellously bonkers adaptation of A Dance to the Music of Time from 1997 than gallops through Anthony Powell’s twelve–volume cycle of novels in just under seven hours. Next up will be the channel’s version of Mary Wesley’s The Camomile Lawn, which I haven’t seen since it was first broadcast. Then there’s The Gravy Train, the original Traffik, GBH, the marvellous Porterhouse Blue and even the whole run of both Hill Street Blues and St. Elsewhere. Best of all Dennis Potter’s final pair of dramas, Karaoke and Cold Lazarus, are also available, which is an absolute godsend.

Hopefully I’ll get to watch them at a more sociable hour, although when that will be is anyone’s guess. This afternoon six large containers filled with a mixture of documents, contracts, correspondence, annotated scripts, various clippings and all manner of publicity photographs, finally arrived, which have to be sorted through and catalogued. For the current project it’s like having the contents of Aladdin’s cave delivered to my door. Since I haven’t even bothered to break for an evening meal, stopping to try and get some sleep is highly unlikely even though after last night’s shenanigans I should be thoroughly worn out.

The time had come to celebrate our good pal H’s birthday. It was a much earlier start than usual and he had started even earlier, having a long lunch with a number of his actress friends. Although none of them carried on to the next stage of the celebration we were joined by the actor George Innes. By chance BBC2 had shown Stephen Frear’s Gumshoe over the weekend in which he appeared along with Albert Finney and Fulton Mackay. Although he continues to act on the screen and stage, in the last decade appearing in Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World and Stardust, for men of a certain age he will forever be Bill Bailey, Charlie Croker’s Number Two in The Italian Job.

Although Michael Caine delivers the famous and favourite one liner, “You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!”, once the gold is loaded into the three Minis and sent on their way, Innes gets to tell the rest of the crew, dressed up as football fans and sitting in the dormobile as they wait to make their escape from the traffic–jammed Turin, “Well, look happy you stupid bastards. We won, didn’t we?” Yet strangely enough, over a drink I found myself asking him about his time spent in America, guest–starring in episodes of Hill Street Blues, Magnum P.I. and Newhart.

Usually the first to leave on these nights, this time I was there right to the end. Instead of having to help someone I barely knew who was too drunk to get home on her own, this time I was in the company of our beautiful Persian Princess, who was just a touch squiffy and not wanting the night to end just yet. So instead of heading home at a time when we were just about sure our respective train lines were still running, she announced we should grab a quick bite.

Hand in hand, off we skipped looking for something to eat, eventually resulting in me just managing to get the last bus north from Marylebone and her having what sounded like the most horrendous journey east, taking in just about every means of transport available. Still, you obviously can’t have everything. I mean I’m still waiting for the birthday drink she promised me.

Shut Down

2010-03-20T22:15:00.005Z

After a few particularly trying weeks, during which time I repeatedly felt like pushing the keyboard aside so I’d have the room to bang my head upon the desk, I ended up spending the last couple of days researching Italian horror films of the 1970s and 80s. As a genre I had no previous knowledge of or real interest in, the most I could glean was that this particular branch of the industry is run by a bunch of phenomenal crooks that even puts Hollywood players to shame.

By early yesterday afternoon I figured that if I stayed in front the computer much longer I was liable to go insane so, in keeping with my half–arsed resolution to see more movies upon their initial release rather than waiting the four months or so until they pitched up on shiny disc, I pushed off to the cinema. Frankly, it was a mistake. I should have gone for a walk through the nearby park and up around the hill to help clear my head, then picked up some takeout on the way back and settled down to something a bit daft but nevertheless entertaining like Rocketeer or The Poseidon Adventure.

Being Friday I was looking actually forward to QI but upon checking the television listings I discovered that the regular BBC schedule had been ripped up in favour of the godawful Sport Relief. I have nothing against giving money to charity but these telethons are like watching a cute puppy roll over and then slowly be sick for hours on end. After a couple of minutes of watching the typical parade of clueless gurning media whores fumble about on live television any sane viewer would no doubt happily pledge all their worldly possessions just to make it all go away. So a trip to the pictures seemed by far the best alternative.

When I eventually got there I plumped for Shutter Island. It wasn’t my first choice but the journey to the multiplex took longer than expected, meaning that I’d already missed the first twenty minutes of Green Zone by the time I got to the box office window. The only other alternative was to catch The Bounty Hunter and I couldn’t really see that happening. Although I’m a big fan of Dennis Lehane’s quintet of Kenzie and Gennaro novels and Mystic River, I was disappointed with Shutter Island when I first read it in hardback. I could see where Lehane was going when he said it was, “an homage to gothic, but also an homage to B movies and pulp,” but I still felt short–changed by an ending that probably would have worked better in a short story or a novella than a 325–page novel.

Still, it seemed a worthwhile idea to see what Hollywood would make of it. After all, Lehane had been reasonably served well with Clint Eastwood’s adaptation of Mystic River and Ben Affleck’s take on Gone Baby Gone, although the latter suffered somewhat by giving exceedingly short shrift to the character Angie Gennaro. Not only that, The Culture Show had recently broadcast an interesting interview with Martin Scorsese, conducted by the art critic Andrew Graham–Dixon, in which the director talked about what he had set out to achieve. Except somehow those good intentions didn’t seem to have translated onto the screen.

Scorsese may have picked up on Lehane’s homage to B movies but with the large budget and much longer running time Shutter Island felt like someone had taken an old jukebox classic and tried to turn it into an opera. Literally introducing a “locked room mystery” but quickly expanding it into a locked island mystery, it lacked the true psychological suspense by spending fat too much time lingering over long, static conversations. Throwing out multiple theories about what was actually going on at the isolated, inhospitable Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane might have worked on the page, but onscreen it felt like the narrative was going around in circles without going anywhere.

It didn’t help that the obtrusive pieces of previously recorded, “modern classical music”, most of which sounded like a punch up in an over zealous percussion section, intruded on a number of these discussions between investigators, patients and staff, rendering their suppositions almost unintelligible on all counts. And what was with the flashbacks? Having read Lehane’s novel a second time sometime during the summer of last year, I knew they were there by couldn’t remember so much emphasis being put on the liberation of Konzentrationslager Dachau. Although Dachau had Arbeit macht frei worked into its wrought-iron gates, the entrance to the camp shown in the film, with the motto inscribed over the gate, resembled Auschwitz.

Too obvious to be a simple error made by Dante Ferretti, Scorsese’s regular production designer, it made me wonder if this had been specifically introduced into the script. Because Ashecliffe was meant to be the first of its kind in the treatment of the criminally insane and Dachau was the Nazi’s first concentration camp, I wondered if the surprising prominence of the phrase was meant to be a visual clue. If so it was particularly heavy–handed, but then of course I entered the cinema already knowing the plot turns in advance.

Of course it may be that more was expected from Martin Scorsese, and to be honest this is the first film of his I’ve seen on its theatrical release since I gave up an afternoon poolside to watch Bringing Out The Dead at the small cinema on the eastern end of Key West. Sitting watching Shutter Island I wondered what the end result would have been like if Wolfgang Petersen, who had originally optioned the novel, had been behind the camera. Either way the film would perhaps have benefited without Leonardo DiCaprio playing the harried lead. Even in his mid–thirties he still looks like an upper sixth former fretting over his upcoming A–level exams.

Although Mark Ruffalo didn’t get the amount of screen time he deserved, whenever he appeared his demeanour made me think that perhaps he should have been cast as Jim Rockford in David Shore’s remake of The Rockford Files instead of Dermot Mulroney. If that was going through my head while I sat in the auditorium it obviously shows that I wasn’t really connecting with the film. Maybe to truly go back to the pulp roots of the B movies it would have been better if Shutter Island had been more black and white on all counts.

Blue Sunday

2010-03-03T23:56:00.003Z

I suppose every once in a while it’s a good idea to do something completely out of character just to keep things lively. A few weeks back, on my way out of the BFI Southbank, I turned back to the usual crowd who were still hugging the bar and suggested that with my birthday coming up we should get together for a drink that weekend. While not unusual per se, making an event out of the occasion isn’t something I usually do.

I remember having a big birthday day when I was maybe six or seven, before we moved out into the countryside, and then a joint birthday party with a couple of fellow students during my first year at The Esteemed School of Art, but after that nothing special or than maybe a quick drink with a few people. Even my fortieth just came down to lunch and a quick pint in the afternoon with a couple of friends. Maybe my reasoning is that it would be rude to gather everyone together and then be the first to leave, which is usually the case whenever I’m out meeting up with people.

It may be that I’ve always preferred to be part of a small gathering where you can actually converse rather than having to stand amongst a whole lot of people, letting a cold bottle of beer grow warm in my hand while listening to idle chitchat. A few exceptions can always be made when the circumstances are right, but otherwise I think my aversion to seeing people en masse comes from being forced into joining in the Friday night ritual at The Esteemed School of Art where everyone decamped to the nearby pub and regurgitate everything that had happened that week. Even worse was at the animation studios, having to end a long, tiring week amidst animators bitching about who, amongst their brethren, had got a directing gig they obviously didn’t deserve. Both got old real quick so it was no wonder that I’d scurry off to see a movie instead.

So while the idea of putting something together this year might have sounded good at that exact moment, it was stillborn thereafter. Any thoughts of meeting again for more drinks dried up the moment I stepped outside onto the South Bank to help prop up an ex–girlfriend of one of the crowd. Toward the end of the screening she had bounded from her seat like a filly out of the gate, disappeared for goodness knows how long and eventually reappeared, now stumbling around like a new–born calf, long after we had retired to the Riverfront bar. It turned out that whatever drinks she had downed formed a unique cocktail that incurred such a violent expulsion in the Ladies Room that panic–stricken BFI staffers had apparently coned off the area and called in a rapid–response hazmat team.

Now she desperately needed to get home and because her old partner still wanted to carry on propping up the bar instead I offered to help her out, not realizing that the gauge might have read empty but there was still a little left in the tank. Getting the Underground didn’t seem the ideal choice of transport so we headed over the bridge, looking like we were enacting Napolean’s retreat from Moscow with me wondering if it would be indelicate to simply throw her over my shoulder to help make headway. When we eventually reached the Strand the traffic was so snarled up that we got the tube, not realizing the rocking and rattling of the train wasn’t exactly ideal for her delicate situation. It didn’t help that she had long fine hair that wasn’t tied back.

Throughout our trek all the people we came into close contact with directed their withering looks not to the young lass bent double with strained stomach muscles and sick in her hair but to the middle–aged man who had diluted his one pint of lager that evening with lemonade, suggesting their primary thought was: What sort of person gets a woman in this state? I wanted to explain, “I only met her four hours ago, this is nothing to do with me!” but I figured that I had to show that gallantry still had a faint pulse. When we eventually parted at Baker Street, where she decided she could continue the few stops west unaided and I could continue north, once I was settled and poring over the crossword, I decided that was probably enough fun and games for a while.

At least that was the excuse I was going with. Luckily nobody picked me up on it, which probably showed how much they cared (or even remembered that night), and I was happy to let it slide. When a dear friend emailed Friday evening to see what I was doing on my “big special day” and remind me that we still hadn’t managed to get together since Christmas, rather than take the initiative and invite her out I replied that I just wanted to see this month out with a day of Powell & Pressburger and pizza. So after nipping out early Saturday morning for croissants and fresh lemon juice from the nearby M&S food hall I kicked off with ‘I Know Where I’m Going!’ and A Canterbury Tale, then A Matter of Life and Death and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. The Red Shoes got bumped because of past history. I gave the pizza a miss too.

Waking up on Sunday morning I decided that I should at least try and do something special during what remained of the weekend. Except I couldn’t think of anything to fit the bill, so I went to see Avatar instead. Nearly three months on from it’s release, what more is there to add. It’s a lot of blue. It’s better than Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. It didn’t do anything for me at all. I do wish that I had seen it earlier, when there was a choice of versions to watch. Now it was just the 3D version available, making Avatar my introduction to the format. I don’t mean to be a tricky customer but I don’t do glasses. As a kiddie I took a spill and had the bridge of my nose mashed into the tarmac so glasses never sit right on my face. Even during summer I just squint my way through the bright sunlit days.

So the 3D didn’t do much for me than provide a mild irritant. When I wasn’t fiddling with the specs a couple of the camera moves reminded me of being on the Star Tours and Back to the Future rides, lurching forward in my seat as a reaction to what was being projected in front of me. Ultimately the depth of field just exacerbated the lack of depth to the narrative and after a while I found myself playing guess the camera move, trying to figure out where it would go next to put the action right in my face. As obvious as the story was, there were still one or two small surprises, but they only came about because I’d never managed to get all the way through Cameron’s ‘scriptment’, which has been floating around for goodness knows how long, or the actual script, which surfaced toward the end of last year.

Neither had been much of a page–turner simply because tedious detail suffocated the life out of the story, and with both I skimming through them before simply giving up even though the end was in sight. Although Avatar has been accused of stealing from Dances With Wolves, Delgo, Battle for Terra, FernGully: The Last Rainforest, Poul Anderson’s short story Call Me Joe and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom cycle, sitting there in the cinema I was reminded more of Larry Niven’s Ringworld. Having read it was seems like a lifetime ago, so any recollection may be fuzzy at best, my abiding memory of the book is that Niven took so long setting up this artificial world, much like a thin sliver of a Dyson sphere, that when the characters finally get there nothing much really happens.

Of course I may be wrong. But with Avatar it seemed like so much effort put in for so little return other than shouting to the world, look how big and clever we are. Unfortunately I didn’t succumb to such shallow charm. Whereas by the end of The Hurt Locker my nerves felt utterly shredded and I was eager to scramble out of the cinema and spark up, as Avatar finally came to a close I was squirming in my seat feeling like my bladder was about to explode. I was trying to decide whether I should have gone earlier or not gone at all.

Between a Slave To Dreams And a Servant Of Regrets

2010-02-27T11:43:00.004Z

Apparently from today I've reached the age where I have all my five senses in the keeping of my wits.

I’m not actually sure I got that memo, but I’m happy to play along.

Risk And Reward

2010-02-26T21:01:00.002Z

One thing I realize I didn’t mention in the previous post regarding my aversion to the American television schedule was the late night programming. The first time I stayed in New York for an extended period I was introduced to The Tonight Show and although Johnny Carson was by then a national institution, frankly I didn’t exactly see the appeal.

A few years later, after Carson’s retirement, I got into watching Letterman simply because Jay Leno was as entertaining as staring at a baked potato in a microwave oven that wasn’t working but even then I could only take all the shtick and banter with the band and the guests coming on to shill their latest book or film or TV show in small doses. It was bad enough seeing that abroad, where the best way to avoid it was stay in the bar, but worse was finding those same routines infect British chat shows where the guests became an instrument for the self–aggrandizing hosts to make it all about them.

I suppose this aversion was because I had grown up watching proper interviews where the host was actually interested in what the guest had to say and the guest was happy to engage in a dialogue with them. At that early age, the king of the UK chat show was Michael Parkinson whose shows always featured an occasional eclectic mixture of interesting personalities who didn’t see their appearance as simply another pit stop on a tiring promotional tour. When Parkinson went off the air in 1982 the competition dotted around the schedules was more about entertainment than simply listening to what people had to say, turning the spoken word into background muzak.

It wasn’t until the end of the decade that the BBC tried to redress the balance by resurrecting Face to Face. I hadn’t been around when the series first debuted, hosted by the former politician John Freeman who rarely appeared on screen as the camera concentrated on the interviewee rather than cutting back and forth between the pair. With Jeremy Isaacs taking over as inquisitor the series may not have had the impact of the original but still managed to produce some astonishing interviews, most particularly the moving edition with Paul Eddington broadcast a month before his untimely death in late 1995 from non–Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

All these years later I can still remember the actor, after discussing his life and career, from his Quaker roots to his celebrated sitcom roles as Jerry Leadbetter and Jim Hacker, consider his legacy and admit that for an epitaph he had decided upon: “He did very little harm,” which is not always an easy thing to achieve in this life. In a way it was a reminder of Melvyn Bragg’s affecting interview with Dennis Potter shown on Channel 4 the previous year. Defiantly chain–smoking and breaking off to swig liquid morphine to ease the pain from the pancreatic and liver cancer (which he gleefully announced he had named in honour of Rupert Murdoch), the playwright used this one last time in front of the cameras to show what a master of the medium he was.

Knowing his days were clearly numbered, Potter revelled in the things that made life worth living: the “blossomest blossom” he could see from his office window and the cigarettes that still remained “lovely tubes of delight”. When it was decided that life was too short even to shoot Murdoch if he could when there was work still to do, Potter gently pressured the BBC and Channel 4 to produce Karaoke and Cold Lazarus, his final pair of interconnecting plays, which he hoped would be a fitting memorial to his life’s work in the arts. Anyone who watched the programme would agree it stood head and shoulders about the inane chit–chat and worthless trivialities that polluted the current talk show format.

This past decade, carrying on from Face to Face we’d had the irregular series of Mark Lawson Talks To interviews on BBC4, continuing to fight a corner for intelligent and revealing conversation. Having just two people in chairs with cameras pointed at them, actually talking about something relevant continues to show what a difference it makes without having an audience of gurgling chuckleheads that both host and guest feel they have to play to and keep entertained in case those boobs start having a temper tantrum because nobody is paying them the slightest attention.

If anyone thinks having a live audience is a good thing, this past Tuesday showed that kind of reasoning needs to be adjusted with a few sharp whacks of a croquet mallet. For anyone here who wasn’t listening to Brian Sibley and Lord Puttnam discuss the current state of the movie business on Radio 2 in their decade–on sequel to David Puttnam’s Century of Cinema, on BBC4 Mark Lawson was sitting down with actor Brian Cox for an incredibly revealing talk that capped an evening of programming that included the documentary Brian Cox’s Jute Journey and the political drama On Expenses, which featured Cox as Michael Martin, the Speaker of the House of Commons forced to resign over the MP’s expenses scandal.

Meanwhile, across the water on CBS’s The Late Late Show Craig Ferguson, who is rapidly turning out to be the most interesting of the late night chat show hosts by not pandering to the absolute dregs of the lowest common denominators, tried an intriguing experiment. Maybe his competitors should give it a go once in a while if the results are going to be this damn good...

Lost Interest

2010-02-22T18:05:00.005Z

I’d always find it amusing when, during a frank exchange about whether American television drama is better than the English product, the witless maroon desperately trying to convince me that Casualty is better than ER or Doctor Who knocks spots off Battlestar Galactica eventually resorts to blurting out: “Well, if you like American television so much, why don’t you bloody well live there!” At that point any kind of ongoing argument is over.

Once that specific retort rears its ugly head, making me out to be a traitor to the mother country, there’s simply no reason to continue. But the fact is that my reply to their outburst wouldn’t have done either of us any favours or helped the discussion one jot. If we carried on I’d eventually have to admit that while I heartily champion many of their dramas and comedies I simply can’t stand American television, or rather the American television schedule.

Back when I was out there for extended periods – whether it was time spent in New York or Burbank, or even the weeks in the rented house in Key West while the ex–girlfriend and soon to be ex– earned their scuba diving certificates – there was never one whole evening spent indoors vegging out in front of the television simply because it would drive me up the wall. Usually the set would be switched on for Jeopardy or a Seinfeld rerun (if there was one going) to play in the background while we prepared to head out to dinner or a movie or simply to hit the bars.

One night I even sat in a theatre, slack jawed, as a Manhattan–based amateur dramatics society utterly massacred Gilbert and Sullivan, and then had to go out to dinner with the jubilant players after their curtain call, as an alternative to staying in and watching the box. The simple reason was that, before the influx of reality shows that are blotted about like a virulent fungal infection, the network primetime schedules were just a massive stodge of dramas and sitcoms. If there was the odd new episode I would make a point of catching, I’d rarely want to sit through another drama or another comedy immediately afterwards.

So what it came down to was the utter lack of variety in the schedules. There were no quizzes or panel shows to help mix things up and, more importantly, no decent documentaries. Flicking through the many channels, whenever I alighted upon something that might have fitted the bill, it was either sensationalist nonsense or seemed to be specifically infantilized for the particularly hard of thinking. Obviously you can’t please all the people all the time, but in the end I’d always be happy to pack up and catch the flight home just to watch some factual programming that didn’t treat me like I was a complete imbecile.

Once the television channels got their breath back after the usual nonsense of Christmas and New Year, which this time around required David Tennant to appear in just about every damn programme going, some particularly fine documentary series started to arrive, but what about the drama? Two decades on from the 1990 Broadcasting Act, every year seems like another sharp kick in the balls for anyone wanting more than just seeing hour upon hour of ordinary folk recounting their woes over a pint or being cheered with a nice cup of tea, or another familiar round of carriages and corsets and uniquely English whodunnits.

In my argument that US television drama generally bettered its UK counterparts, what I’ll always try and get across to those raving spittle–flecked loons unwilling to consider my point of view was the more inventive and original nature of the American material, whether in story or setting. Whenever a British series tries something different the idea somehow never seems to be entirely thought through, like Survivors, which was populated by too many characters that didn’t appear to have the smarts to get through a normal day let alone cope in the wake of a devastating pandemic.

One of the many problems I had with the recent remake of The Day of the Triffids was having the characters being written as a bunch of dunderheads unable to cope with the situation and eking cheap drama out of their rudimentary mistakes. Years ago I took some screenwriting classes scheduled for one evening a week just to get away from being in the studio all hours. For the penultimate class our tutor asked everyone to bring in favourite film sequences that were devoid of dialogue. I took along Michael Mann’s Thief, cued up to the Los Angeles diamond heist that James Caan’s Frank agrees to do for the Chicago crime boss Leo.

It’s difficult to watch clips out of context at the best of times but once the job was done and Frank pulled up a chair and lit a welcome cigarette, when the tutor asked the rest of the class what they thought, almost all of them hated it. Asked why, nearly all the responses boiled down to the fact that because Frank and his crew were experts the robbery went to plan. When they lit the thermal lance to burn through the vault door nobody accidentally caught on fire, nor did and the police get wind of the heist and come bursting in before they had the gems. I tried to explain that because they had such a particular skill set their problems would appear on a different level from amateur crooks but they weren’t having it.

I think my problem with most new original British dramas is they lack cleverness, or at least the kind of cleverness that I look for. Are people scared by intelligence? Or don’t they like to be made to think, instead wanting any old nonsense that they can stare glassy–eyed at as their day winds down? When that’s what they’re given, because the numbers say it’s what they want, television drama over here isn’t going to get better but worse. Aside from documentaries and news, I currently watch the BBC channels just for the Monday night double bill of University Challenge and Only Connect and the XL version of QI. Everything else is just the wrong kind of mulch and ITV1 and Channel 4 don’t even figure on my radar anymore.

Still, that doesn’t mean I blindly gorge on imported shows to make up the shortfall. As new seasons arrived in the New Year, I was surprised by how many dramas I’ve given up on and stopped watching. Some I’ve grown tired of over the past few years, either because they’ve become too predictable or simply gone off the boil, so that struck House, Heroes and 24 off the list. Others, like Fringe, Big Love and True Blood, I just didn’t take to. Joining them now is Leverage. It recently arrived on Bravo with a great pilot but two or three episodes in turned out to be not that much better than Hustle, which had a reasonably decent first year based on the novelty factor and then snuffed that out by coming back, again and again, with just the same old, same old.

So that just leaves me with only a handful of dramas worth watching, and the one thing almost all the shows share, apart from the smart writing and fine performances, is a subject matter we don’t ordinarily see over here in the UK. Watching the new third season of Mad Men on BBC4 it had me wondering why there hasn’t been a British drama set in an advertising agency other than Les Blair’s Honest, Decent & True, broadcast in the Screen Two strand almost a quarter of a century ago. Obviously there’s more to Matthew Weiner’s drama, with Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce the backdrop for characters creating a new image and identity for themselves, turning their lives into an ongoing campaign, but that kind of work arena is particularly fertile ground.

Having worked at a design and advertising consultancy during the fag end of the 1980s before (quite literally) taking flight – and followed that with the years working on commercials – I’ve met my fair share of “creatives”, account managers and producers, along with clients so utterly witless they deserved to be fleeced for every penny on campaigns that weren’t as significant as everyone made out. Though most were best categorized as pond scum there were still enough intriguing characters with a handle on what they were doing to make it interesting. They may have been more brash and self–important than most ordinary folk but that kind of behaviour isn’t exactly exclusive to their line of business.

Yet when it comes to a homegrown attempt at using an advertising agency milieu we get the BBC Two sitcom The Persuasionists. On the evidence of the ten minutes I sat, stony–faced through, this garbage was not only devoid of comedy but a basic grasp of advertising, resorting to every stale cliché in the book. No wonder it got kicked from its original time slot and bounced around the schedules as the remaining episodes were burnt off. Compared to Channel 4’s superior Free Agents from last year, where a talent agency setting allowed supporting characters to be spectacularly reprehensible in an environment that tolerates such behaviour, while the leads dealt with more familiar trials, The Persuasionists looked even more pathetically obvious and slovenly thought out.

If intelligence is frowned upon it also seems that ordinariness is valued over invention in ongoing drama. When did adult UK drama step away from creativity? By that I don’t mean blowing the lid off the dressing–up box or splashing out on extravagant sets. Some time back I chanced upon an episode of Waterloo Road, an incredibly pointless Grange Hill–for–grownups as far as I could tell. It reminded me how much fun Channel 4’s anarchic Teachers had been, at least until the more interesting actors jumped ship and the fizz quickly fizzled out. Although in retrospect the increasingly bad behaviour of the staff at Summerdown Comprehensive turned out to be rather tame in comparison to Bryan Cranston’s Walter White in Breaking Bad.

Sure, the mid–life crisis scab has occasionally been picked at over here but it usually resorts to the predictable, involving wives being trading in for younger models, flash cars, and men acting like complete cocks. Nothing has approached the wonderful extreme of Vince Gilligan’s drama in which a middle–aged Albuquerque high school teacher, diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, teams up with one his none too bright ex–pupils to cook up and sell crystal meth to provide for the pregnant wife and child he’ll leave behind. While it would be wrong to say that hilarity always ensues, at the very least Breaking Bad is a good learning experience, especially if you want to know the best way to dissolve a body in restrictive surroundings.

Having the show’s second year stripped into FiveUSA’s Christmas schedule was an unusual and sometimes somewhat inconvenient festive treat, but once the thirteen–episode season was hastily gobbled up it left a void that has only recently been filled with Sons of Anarchy. There have been many adaptations of Shakespeare in the past – some years ago the BBC updated a quartet of plays in Shakespeare Retold, an idea which seemed like an afterthought to the contemporary versions of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales – but Kurt Sutter’s loose take on Hamlet steamrollers over the lot of them by shifting the setting from Elsinore to the small Californian town of Charming and turning the characters into the local chapter of the Sons of Anarchy motorcycle gang, running guns and keeping unwelcome drug dealers off the streets.

Could we make something like either of those two shows over here? Probably not, simply because the tiny–minded middle Englanders who cuddle up to the comfortable, inoffensive stories that hark back to the golden days of Albion would no doubt become apoplectic if some comparable subject matter appeared on screen. But I think the other contributory factory is the scale of landscape where “bad guys” – for the most part the more interesting characters – can go about their business. With everyone virtually looking over each other’s shoulders and the net curtains twitching, this kind of extreme behaviour would make for a lively episode of Midsomer Murders but by the end any survivors would be in shackles and the status quo would be redressed.

Obvious the subject matter tends toward particularly brutal situations. Five episodes in Sons of Anarchy has seen a Korean Elvis impersonator taking a severe beating, a rapist having his balls posted to the victim’s father, and an ex–gang member having his SOA tattoo forcibly removed with an acetylene torch. For all the savage violence, it’s saved from being simply gratuitous by good storytelling and well–judged comic relief to counterpoint the sturm und drang that doesn’t tip over into clumsy broad comedy, best exemplified by rookie gang member Juice who has so far woken up in only a giant nappy with the sign ‘slightly retarded child, please adopt me’ stuck to his chest after accidentally doped himself up, and then spiked a piece of meat meant to knock out a rabid guard dog with meth.

Joining the watch list, provisionally, is Caprica. I’ve never been an especially big fan of sequels and prequels less so because the former are usually unnecessary and the latter even more unnecessary. Hampered by continuity and lacking in real suspense, most simply exist as callous money–spinners to extend a story that has reached its natural conclusion. But with the clock running down on Dollhouse and Eleventh Hour over here we really need some more intelligent science fiction to step into their place. Otherwise what’s the alternative? Stargate Universe? The only fun I got out of that was discovering Joseph Mallozzi, one of the show’s writers and consulting producers was actively soliciting input for the next season from the fans. What a complete maroon!

At least Caprica has an intriguing premise to work with, stirring up a mix of hedonism, technology and hubris that we know is going to end badly for everyone involved. Dealing with those issues means it’s far removed from the silly alien guff that turns science fiction into the sort of twisted masquerade ball that should only intrigue children still learning to crawl. With only the Adama family a direct link to the characters in Battlestar Galactica it removes itself far enough from the original series. As long as it doesn’t stray too far into the twatty teen preserve favoured by the likes of Smallville it might be interesting to see life in the Colonies before the fall. Although the moment a young Laura Roslin appears in William Adams’ classroom I’ll be lunging for the remote.

After that, all that’s left is Lost. A few days after the final season kicked off I was out with the usual crowd, meeting up at the BFI Southbank. Retiring to The Riverfront bar I gauged their opinion on the two–part opener only to find none of them had actually caught it. In fact amongst those who once watched it, almost all had given up years ago. The relatively lacklustre third year when the narrative seemed to be stretching itself out had been the tipping point, in fact it seemed to be the time when most people bailed on the show. I suspect if it had carried on that way I might have thrown in the towel as well but then producers Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof went to the network and asked to set an end date for the show.

That was probably the smartest thing the pair ever did. After all, American television is not exactly an environment conducive to drama that strives to have a specific beginning, middle and end. If the show is a hit the network is going to want to keep it on the air for as long as possible. That’s fine for something specifically character–driven or one that has season–long story arcs, but a drama that specifically knows where it’s going usually finds itself having to pad out the mid–section. When that goes into effect there’s the danger audiences will turn off because it’s started going nowhere fast meaning that in all likelihood the show will be cancelled before the planned resolution, which means that in the end nobody benefits.

So when Lost was perceived to be treading water and the numbers went down the pair brokered a deal for two more seasons worth of episodes spread over three years that piqued my interest. Once that was in place, Lost was off to the races. I’d always been amused by folk whose excuse for bailing on this or any other show was because the believed the writers were “just making it up as they go along!” With everything else going on in life, trying to remember how a drama began when you’re three years down the line is tricky at the best of times. When FlashForward came out and fucked it up so badly, I went back and watched the first few episodes and it’s pretty much all there in embryonic form waiting to be realized.

What I was most surprised by was how the flashbacks, which the audience was lulled into thinking were simply a device to help establish the characters and their connections as well as provide an alternative to everyone standing around amongst jungle vegetation, prepared viewers for the far–reaching time shifts that occurred throughout the previous year and the current “flashsideways” or whatever it is the alternate reality sequences are being classified as. Adding this new dimension to what is already a particularly mind–bending narrative, it’s obvious that with only a dozen episodes left Lost isn’t going to ease up and coast toward the finish line.

Perverse as it may sound, I hope we don’t get answers to absolutely everything. When this Chinese puzzle box is finally unlocked I want a satisfactory resolution for the characters rather than a checklist of all the incidentals. But then what do I know; I was happy there was no explanation regarding Starbuck in the finale of Battlestar Galactica.