Before My Eyes

The Passion of the Mayan

2007-01-14T16:54:00.000Z

A review of Apocalypto. Tricky, given Gibson's recent track-record.

Trickier, because it's really not a very good movie, and I hate to kick an anti-Semite when he's down. But not very much.

The good stuff first, though. Mel Gibson has strengths as a filmmaker, and it would be churlish to ignore them. He's especially good, for example, at evoking a time. Much has been made of his various historical inaccuracies and anachronisms (personal favourites include Jesus in Passion of the Christ stating that a new style of table, or maybe chair, would 'catch on', and a bizarre bit of Mayan dialogue here stating "I'm walking here!"), but his times and places always FEEL solid.

So, we have a wonderful evocation of an ancient culture. The first tribe we encounter are given the same treatment that Costner figured out for Dance With Wolves - make 'em just ordinary folks. They laugh, they joke, they have ghastly mother-in-laws. It's not an original approach, but it does make life easier on a director who wants you to feel for the characters without, y'know, having to teach you a load of stuff.

But this virtue is also a curse. Because Gibson has no real interest in sharing the nuances of the culture he's portraying. The 'good' Mayans are just like us, only they're not so fussed about covering their buttocks; the 'bad' Mayans capture slaves, paint them, and then make sacrifices up on a big building.

It has something to do with pleasing a god or gods, apparently. About preventing disease and crop failure and...well, who knows what else. Ingrowning toenails, maybe.

Oh, you can boast about how all your dialogue is in the original language, but this has all the accuracy of a Star Wars stormtrooper.

Still, let's stick to the positive for a moment longer. Apocalypto, regardless of the marketing, is a chase movie first - a basic genre that this film chooses not to embroider with additional levels or subplots. And in that, it is partially effective. The first tedious hour of the film spends too, too long setting up characters just to kill them off, then drags out a journey from village to city until you really start to wonder if it's worth walking out.

But, just as you've got your bags together, our hero - Jaguar Paw - escapes the clutches of the bad Mayans and races home.

As he fights to evade his chasers to get back to his pregnant wife and child (currently trapped down a hole and starving), fending off jungle terrors such as a pissed-off Jaguar and swamp mud, there's tension aplenty. Jaguar Paw becomes a primitive McGuyver, taking out bad guys with poison darts adapted from thorns and a captured frog. As Predator-esque chase, it works just fine.

This is helped enormously by Gibson's devotion to realistic, gut-churning violence. Not for him the nice wounds of modern action cinema - 12A rated, suitable for older children - this stuff is a hard 18 and it bloody hurts. It's a rare thing these days, with most studios worried about high certification stamping on their profits, and great to see. Kinda.

The performances is are fine, if not especially textured. Heroes, villains, scared kids, wives with inner-strength, blah, blah, blah.

And that's about it for the good stuff. So, what's wrong here?

Well, taking the latter half on its merits - a simple chase movie needs to make enough sense that the audience don't question until they leave the room. Here, Apocalypto already starts to fail. A gang of kids are left alive when the bad guys kill or kidnap the village population (this never happened, by the way; they didn't steal random innocent people to sacrifice). These kids are deliberately left, and watch their families get taken away.

And not once does our hero shout back to them "I left my wife and child in a hole behind my house - make sure you chuck her a rope." Nor do the kids, apparently, return home and notice her screaming. Then, later, as the rain comes down, her hole starts to fill with water.

Two things here. How much rain does it take for a rocky mud-hole to fill up over six feet? Quite a lot.

And doesn't the human body tend to, y'know, float?

As our wife character starts to drown, apparently taking her son with her (oh, and the unborn baby, which GETS born with a laughable pop during this scene), we sit in the cheap seats, popcorn in hand, and shout "SWIM!!!!"

Other times, smart action movie ideas are ignored to drag things out. Jaguar Paw, looking like death, arrives at a mass grave site, bad guys right behind him. And no, apparently he hasn't seen the same movies we have, because he never considers lying down and playing dead. (And, given that there's no evidence of these mass graves in the first place, you'd think Gibson'd do SOMETHING with them.)

What else? Ghastly contrivance means that out hero is saved from sacrifice by a handy eclipse. Seriously. There's always a moon around when you want one.

And what do our sun-worshiping (I assume) baddies do? They rejoice - the gods are pleased, the killing can end. So, just take these saved sacrifices out the back and kill them, would ya?

Huh?!

Now, this might be some kind of commentary on the mixed natures and hypocrisies of politics and religion - potential sacrifices become collateral damage - only, if it is, nobody seems keen on saying so.

What it ACTUALLY is, it turns out, is an excuse to set our hero on the run. Because when they DO take him and his chums out back, it becomes The Ancient Running Man, with men let loose in pairs to be shot down for the amusement of the bad guys.

I'm not kidding.

Nor am I joking when I say that the latter half of the film is foretold by a diseased infant.

Yep, a sick, smallpoxed kid in a wiped-out settlement provides a prophesy to our captives and their captors - all vague stuff about serpents and rising from the earth. And whaddya know, it happens!

Except...hang on. The whole film is built on an opening quote (see later) suggesting that the Mayan religion is a corrupted, nonsensical, bloodthirsty crock. There's nothing mystical, it says - WE know what an eclipse really is, they don't. They choose to see magic in what is, in fact, wholly explicable. Their actions for their religion is what makes them doomed already.

So how is this kid able to tell the future? If not something from the local faith? Well - I'll come back to that in a while.

But even sidestepping the how, the method is lousy. Who makes prophesy about the ENTIRE FUTURE OF A CIVILIZATION to a small team of passing killers and their prey? The message never gets back to the chiefs and priests, word never spreads to the populous. In fact, when the few guys who heard the kid speak finally figure out it's a real, genuine prophesy (by encountering said serpent and the rest), their time's almost up. They die minutes or hours later.

It's like Nostradamus predicting huge, vital things...and then only telling his mate Geoff in the hours before Geoff blunders off a cliff. Where's the virtue in a genuine, accurate prophesy that nobody hears about?

So, moving on - that first half of the film. You all saw Passion of the Christ, right? No? Oh, well then permit me a moment of tangential ranting.

Passion isn't a film I have a lot of time for. Not because I lack faith - I do, but that didn't prevent me loving Scorsese's magnificent Last Temptation of Christ - but because I resent the hell out of bad cinema. For its lengthy running time, what you see mostly is this: Christ hurts, Christ walks, Christ falls. Repeat and repeat and repeat.

Now, before we get into a big thing here, I totally accept that this is probably the way it would have gone down. Ignoring the film's appallingly prevalent anti-Semitism, the actual torture-and-pain progression is horribly realistic. That's fine. You do feel it.

What you never got, not from the movie, is WHY.

Again, it's not my personal religious myth of choice, and there's a whole congregation of people who paid to see this mess of a film who know exactly why the poor chap is going through it. But where Last Temptation brilliantly conveyed the weight placed on a divine being in a human body - showing, in the end, just how important his execution must be - Gibson's movie just lets it happen. It's visceral, but it isn't understandable.

Nor, for that matter, is it triumphant. We watch this guy go through the ringer, and when death finally - after too, too long - takes him, it should be a kind of triumph. He dies for our sins, he saves mankind, right? Shouldn't that have at least the sense of power that James Bond gives us when he stops a bomb going off?

One last time - not my faith. But in this case my problems are in the lousy filmmaking, not the mythology. If what he does is important, prove it. Show it to me on-screen. Show me it matters.

And that's also where Apocalypto fails. Crikey, this bound journey from village to city (once again headed for public execution; it happened in Braveheart, too, public murder fans) takes a long time. Eons, it feels like. And, once again, we watch it all thinking 'Well, it's all very nasty - but what exactly is the point?'

A series of events is not a narrative. Pain doesn't automatically convey meaning.

The worst part of all this is the arrogance of the director. The film begins with a quote: "A great civilisation is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within". Suggesting a film that will comment significantly on that civilisation's downfall.

Nope. Wrong.

With all the bloodshed and murder, all the eclipse-driven decisions and body-painting, Gibson manages to say 'The Mayans were too sick to survive'. And just leaves it at that.

Because, while some reviewers have seen the arrival of the Christians at the end as negative, I think you'd be hard-pressed to take that away from the film's message. That's something we know for ourselves - the Christians turned up, and pretty soon disease and violent, sweeping murder was wiping out the indigenous population - but the film carries no such suggestion.

In fact, their arrival - little more than a few shots of ships at the climax - is viewed dispassionately. And, had the opening quotation not been included, that would have been the end of it. WITH that quote, though, it carries one ugly implication: 'What you have just seen is a society tearing itself apart from within. If it weren't already doing that, the Christians wouldn't be here.'

Carry that through, and you have 'Well, it was really their own fault'.

Already we're shown that the people are stricken with disease, which makes THAT not the fault of the arriving invaders. Now we're saying that their bizarre rituals and mythology (much of which, as I say, Gibson has made up for the movie) are the true cause of their downfall. They were already tearing themselves down. The Christians just...what? Watched?

So how was that kid able to tell the future? Whose words came from her mouth?

Couldn't have been the voice of God, could it?

And there it is. The objectional politics of Passion return and you really, really are watching a film by Mel 'Sugartits' Gibson. The Christian right are right, everyone else is wrong, and it's the cleansing fire of God that arrived on your shores that day.

That the film is badly paced, arrogant, and has pretences to both 'fact' and 'depth' is undeniable, and extremely irritating.

That it once again carries an under-message of such an objectionable nature - well, that's deplorable.

Save your money. Avoid this average film with its bitter aftertaste. And don't put any more money in Mel Gibson's pocket.

Never Diet Again

2006-12-15T09:48:00.000Z

If you don't know Rob Grant, he's the co-creator of a certain SF comedy series, and the author of Colony (not-bad, not-awesome SF comic novel) and Incompetence (very decent SF comic novel).

If you DO know Rob Grant - think again. You really, really don't.

The novel is Fat. It's out just after Christmas. And it's incredible.

Three parallel stories are told - heavily overweight Grenville Roberts struggles to control his temper and risks his career, teenager Hayleigh is avoiding food wherever possible, and PR man Jeremy is in charge of marketing the government's new fat camp scheme.

The brisk, gentle storyline isn't the real meat of the piece, though. Each one gives Grant a chance to provide perspective on what has become a national obsession.

And what perspective it is. Fat is almost allergic to quick-definition labels. No fat, no thin, no tall, no short. Our teenager's precise age is left vague, and we NEVER see the word 'anorexia'. Grenville's job is unremarked-upon until it's needed. And Jeremy...well, when he calls himself a conceptuologist you know Grant's having some fun. (And maybe it's just me, but I took it as a tiny dig at Dan 'he's a symbologist' Brown.)

No labels. People are who they are and what they think far more than what they DO. Yet the book is fascinated by action and reaction, by what its people ARE doing.

There are many, many razor-sharp sequences as Hayleigh struggles to hide from every mirror in the house, to make and pretend to eat an entire cooked breakfast. (This continues throughout the story, and climaxes in a hospital bathroom with a heartbreakingly matter-of-fact descent in desperation.) Being inside the girl's head so credibly makes these escalations of events painfully compelling...and the relief when Gren throws an equally-escalating fit of pique acts as a counterpoint, a vent for tension.

And it is this this way that Grant not only improves on his previous books, he blows them off the map with a tactical nuke.

Where logical escalation became, in the end, a frustration in Colony (the main character, a head in a jar, was incorrectly hooked up to his new body - arms move when he wants to walk. Funny for two chapters, irritating after twelve) and Incompetence (a society of people who can't do their job is frequently hilarious; but character frustration shouldn't always lead to reader frustration), here Grant finds a way to frame that frustration so the reader is aware of it, rather than suffering with it.

The three strands of Fat balance the whole tricky business. Grenville's story is visceral, physical. It makes you aware of the body - the LARGE body - and it's functions and actions. Hayleigh's is emotional, irrational. (Yet played clinical and rational - her need to avoid food, to fake not only meals but also her long-lost periods, seems so horribly SENSIBLE.) She lives in her head. But the intellectual side, the sense and the facts, come from Jeremy's side...or, rather, the side of the remarkable woman he runs into.

Coupled with a 'what next?' chapter style - where you have to read on, but never in a cheap cliffhanger-y way - it's a remarkable cycle. You get a belly laugh, a heart flutter, then some food for thought. And round and round it goes, like some perfectly-timed waltz with rarely a step put wrong.

The clarity of formatting includes the book's three sections - a single day for parts one and three, a specific period for part two, all preceded with a menu of what will be eaten in the coming chapters.

There's the occasional, very rare, over-egging of the pudding. (Food metaphors impossible to avoid, I'm afraid.) Chapters taken from fictional recipe and anger-management books are a spoof to far, but it's hard to get too picky with such well-handled material. Grant has done his research (even if he can't remember that it was Ben Stiller, not Owen Wilson, who had the "Do it" catchphrase in Starsky and Hutch).

Like Ben Elton with subtlety, or Michael Crichton with a conscience, Fat is filled with facts. Unlike those writers, you rarely feel bludgeoned by them. In fact, by having the terrifying - for all the right reasons - information tumble from the mouth of a woman who just can't shut up, Grant finds an excuse to rant. That her audience of one is a guy more interested in getting her naked strips away the pretension. How can it be 'just' the author's manifesto when the only other character in the room is waiting for her to shut up?

Deeply cynical about the accepted facts, Fat is going to change the way you look at diet culture, about so much that you THINK you know. Salt is bad for you, fatty foods are destructive. Sure about that?

I'm not. Not any more.

Still, Fat isn't a lecture. It's three running anecdotes with a wonderful line in laugh-out-loud humour, plus some classy emotional weight that, hitherto, one might not have expected of the author.

If there's any justice, this is going to be THE novel of 2007. Fat should be on everybody's lips (*sigh*). Buy it for yourself. Buy it for friends. It's a wake-up call for the Weight Watchers generation.

Mister Bond, We Weren't Expecting You

2006-11-16T10:10:00.000Z

You're going to have to give me a little leeway on this one. Casino Royale is the 21st Bond film, the first to star Daniel Craig as 007, and a movie I was bound to like. So, review or not, there WILL be gushing.

Still, I do still have a little perspective. I was the Bond fan who walked out of Die Another Day going "Erm, what the hell happened?" It's become known as 'that one with the invisible car', somewhat unfairly - it should be called 'the one with the director who doesn't understand action'.

(Die Another Day had some great ideas - Bond captured, tortured and traded, for example - but you can't get behind a film with CGI that bad, or that cuts away from a supposedly life-or-death car chase to watch the villain pack up his gear.)

For all the talk of reinvention, Casino Royale is smart enough not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The producers know their iconography, and are clearly aware that those touches are the difference between a Bond film and a generic action thriller. (Or, even, the unofficial 007 picture Never Say Never Again; Connery or not, without the music, catchphrases, titles and style it just ain't a Bond flick.)

They've also wisely ignored calls for a 'auteur' Bond film. These are producer films, not showcases for directors. All the talk about a Tarantino Bond was unfounded, but can you imagine anything more ghastly?

So when Martin Campbell was called back for Casino Royale - having previously helmed GoldenEye - it was always going to be his film second, the producers' first.

It's great to have this director back, though. He has a crisp, clean style that really works for Bond. As with GoldenEye, both the photography (by his long-term collaborator Phil Meheux) and and the editing style really add a snap to proceedings. But where, in GoldenEye, he was working with a 'greatest hits' script package, here he's been handed something far more complex...and he rises to its every challenge.

Because while GoldenEye's attempts to plumb 007's depths were kind of embarrassing - cod-psychology dialogue mixed with Brosnan's inability to get beyond TV-movie substance - here they're...well, if not revelatory, then certainly affecting and compelling.

Dialogue and depth can most likely be attributed to Oscar-winning writer Paul Haggis (Crash, Million Dollar Baby), who polished up an original screenplay by Purvis & Wade, veteran of Brosnan Bonds as well as powerful true-story brit-flick Let Him Have It. There's a palpable crackle to every exchange.

Characterisation is precise to a pin-point. Vesper Lynd has a history and a take on the world that's all her own. She's also achingly real, which means that she reacts pretty badly to the life of casual death she's stumbled into - never has it been more clear that Bond is borderline psychotic.

The villain has been misunderstood in some quarters, described as weak or insubstantial. But that is, surely, the point. Le Chiffre is a numerically-gifted banker, but it's always someone else's money. He's a pawn in a much bigger game, as per the novel. The high-stakes poker game around which the film centres is the final act of a desperate man - he's lost £120 million that wasn't his, and he needs it back before they kill him.

Mads Mikkelsen plays Le Chiffre as a sadist, a psychotic mirror of Bond (who could, in this incarnation, could be seen as a masochist). A small bundle of foibles - asthma inhaler always on-hand, and a malformed eye that weeps blood - back him up as basically weak, but driven to the edge. Yes, that's right, he's MOTIVATED.

M, also, returns to the original Fleming - only nobody seems to have noticed. Judy Dench may be back, but this is NOT the same incarnation of the character. She's exasperated, angry, and given to bouts of brilliant swearing. Female or not, this is M as the books describe, and the frisson with 007 is palpable.

On to the second teir. We have Villiers - M's chief of staff, and another novel regular, who rarely turned up in the film series - who Tobias Menzies makes likeable, if forever slightly startled. Rene Mathis, played by the terrific character actor Giancarlo Giannini, all understated French confidence and capability, dispatching with problematic people (alive and dead) remotely, just watching as they are dealt with while he carries on with his breakfast.

And just when you think it can't get any better, Felix Leiter makes his presence known.

While this Felix has yet to, ahem, bond with Bond, Jeffrey Wright makes it very clear where this relationship will be going. He's sharp, witty, and very likable, and his limited screen time just makes his likely return in the next film all the more desirable. Spot on.

And Bond himself? Wow.

I'm always loathe to compare Bond actors. Is Roger Moore's version - a guy who'd rather humiliate an assassin than shoot him - really the same as Connery's? And does it matter? I have huge affection for every incarnation.

But, okay, the script is as Fleming as can be, and that means Daniel Craig gets to nail the character in a way nobody's had to the chance to before. Which, along with a pitch-perfect performance, makes him the best screen Bond ever. Yes, EVERY actor has been 'the best since Connery' - Lazenby was by default, Moore then became so, Dalton then beat those two, and Brosnan came along and did it better than any of them (all debatable, obviously, but you see what I mean) - but Daniel Craig...sod the hair colour, he IS James Bond. And he's better at it than Connery.

Don't bother getting into a continuity tizz, by the way. There's been years of nonsensical debate among fans that the universe changed with each actor, or that Bond is a code name for several agents, or that Dalton's Bond was written over by the Cold War flashback at the start of GoldenEye. NO version makes full sense. If they're all the same guy, Bond would be at least 70 years old by the time of Die Another Day.

The way to look at the first 20 films is as stand-alone adventures with SOME shared history. But each film is of its time, and continuity can (and should) been seen as breakable.

So - this isn't a prequel. A lot of reviewers have this wrong, but then even the cast and crew seem unsure how it works. It's not 'Bond 0', not the film before 1962's Dr No. For the sake of tidiness, it's a reboot. But then, so were most of the other films. (Remember On Her Majesty's Secret Service? Bond goes undercover at Blofeld's HQ. Which is odd, seeing as they met in the last movie...)

But neither is really appropriate. What we actually have here is the start of a series that was never, really, a series before. Casino Royale is a film that leaves a few key questions behind to be picked up in a sequel. Yes, a sequel. Not just 'the next film', but a film whose narrative locks directly into the previously part. In that respect, you can call Casino Royale incomplete if you like. I don't mind.

I've heard the director call it part one of a two-parter. With Craig signed for three films, I hope it's a trilogy. Sure, he may do more films after that, but I say go with what you can be sure of. A trilogy has a definite shape to it, and it means risks can be taken with running story threads. A two-parter just means Craig's third film won't be directly connected to the first two. (Of course, what happens POST-Craig is anyone's guess. We can't do the origin story every time.)

Ah, but who to direct? Aiming for a 2008 release (guys, PLEASE don't rush the screenplay!), director Campbell has stepped away, and - producer-led series or not - we need someone who can match part one's style. But not a director so huge that it becomes THEIR film.

In years past I've talked up American F. Gary Gray. He's the guy behind the Italian Job remake - a film that balanced real-stunt spectacle with some fun humour and well-drawn characterisation. And if this were a Brosnan Bond, I'd still suggest him.

Only we need someone now with a slightly darker sensibility. And you know who I crave? Doug Liman.

The Bourne Identity was his. And if this new Bond has a touchstone, it's that film. Not the sequel - which I enjoyed immensely, but it went WAY too far with the documentary style and lost the cleanness of the original - but Liman's original (which he followed, oddly, with the 'Two Bonds at Home' comic action allegory Mr and Mrs Smith) shows you that he'd be the guy for the job.

Beyond that? Okay, I'd like Michael Caton-Jones on the list. He knows thriller (Basic Instinct 2 is nowhere near as bad as you think it is), he knows sexy, he knows British sensibility, and he can handle emotion and action (Rob Roy's is remarkable, and the look of The Jackal is smooth). Sure, the back catalogue isn't outstanding...but I'll say it again, these are producer movies.

Seriously, you need a gun for hire who's going to make the best of Eon Productions' concepts. THEY'LL nail the script, you just have to stick to it. Campbell did No Escape, for God's sake.

With that in mind, the rest of my hastily-constructed shortlist includes Jonathan Mostow (Breakdown, U-571, Terminator 3) for his gritty, solid style, and John Moore (Flight of the Phoenix, Behind Enemy Lines), assuming he can be made to hold off on the CGI.

These are hired guns. But I think they're realistic choices, and directors who would be able to maintain the work begun in Casino Royale.

That's big-picture, franchise stuff, though. I haven't exactly run through the film itself, have I? So here, for the patient and virtuous, is the quickie 'regular' review:

The opening scenes show Bond's first two kills, intercutting between a trashed bathroom and an under-lit office. The first kill (which, with the cutting, we actually see second - radical style for a Bond movie, as it goes) is brutal, violent, hand-to-hand. It's shot with a grain that the cooler office scenes don't have. And with one being dark and the other being neon-lit, it's absolutely designed for black and white. Nobody's getting lost - it's visual storytelling at its best, at its most simple.

By the second kill, James is already an icy killer. And already we're asking - is this right? Is what he does the only way? And how can he feel so little about it? There's something wrong with this guy.

Themes the movie will make good on. Oh yes.

We conclude with the gunbarrel shot - at the end of the sequence, rather than the traditional start - actually as part of the film proper. (Which makes you wonder if they picked the bathroom setting just to give Bond the traditional white background...) The blood runs down, giving our first piece of colour...and the song kicks in.

I won't hear a word against Chris Cornell's song, by the way. It's a ballsy, heaving, masculine track, with lyrics that nail the tone of the film. ("Arm yourself because no-one else here will save you...")

It also provides the backbone for the film's score by David Arnold. A powerhouse of excitement, tension and timing, and steadfastly only offering up fragments of the James Bond theme when 007 has earned them. After over-using those iconic notes (albeit to great effect) in the last three films, it's a great move, further cementing Casino Royale's new style, while still anchoring us to the history.

The titles are a work of art, by the way. Daniel Kleinman goes up and down in my estimation with each film - GoldenEye's are spot-on, and full of intelligent metaphor, while Tomorrow Never Dies' are pretty weak - but this newly-styled look, all playing card motifs and Bond silhouettes with not a floating naked woman in sight, works a treat.

Then we start running. Literally. Bond is on-mission and almost immediately forced to chase a bomb-maker and, apparently, part-time free-runner. It's an amazing sequence, marred only once by Brosnan-like excess when 007 gets behind the wheel of a digger. Otherwise, it's a perfect example of human-action filmmaking; Bond's unrefined physical style versus his slippery free-running opponent.

Here the style is cemented. To kill is a struggle. To fight causes pain. You will scrabble to survive, you will get hurt. And as things conclude in an embassy building, it becomes clear that 'victory' and 'defeat' are concepts too simple to live here.

An icy chat with M later, and Bond is off to the Bahamas. He wins an Aston Martin, does some real, proper detective work, seduces his quarry's wife (though NOT to conclusion)...then gets caught up in a race against time to prevent an airport bombing.

I know, it aches with contemporary relevance, doesn't it? And yet, just as Fleming's book held the mood of a post-WWII world, so this film has no choice but to land post-9/11. It's done with intelligence and power, though. So while the sequence again goes a step too far with the property destruction (and apparently yet more destruction was cut), there's tension and invention throughout.

That's movie one, then. The one where 007 kicks ass and forgets to take names.

Movie two is the one where Bond knows everyone's name...and gets HIS arse royally kicked.

Because the film is weirdly built up of two separate three-act stories. The first, described above, is all satisfying wham-bam. It DOES have substance, but is really a prelude to the the good stuff that's on its way.

I won't ruin this latter film, too much, though. It kicks off with some great chemistry between Bond and Eva Green's Vesper, then gets down to the business of playing poker.

Don't listen to anyone who tells you that the poker scenes are too long. That's only true if you're not invested. Let yourself be taken into the world - a world where both hero and villain HAVE to win - and the timing is impeccable. I don't play, or even understand, poker and even I followed every step of the game. There's some exposition, but it actually explains the wrong things; the camera and editing does the real work...and it's nail-biting.

Between games, Bond and Le Chiffre both fend off attacks (watch for a brutal fight on a staircase - wow), and at one point James looks certain to die...not from a bullet, but from something far more pedestrian. And thus more humanising. (And back to Fleming again.)

While the much-vaunted car stunt is amazing, the chase before it is over way too soon. Still, it does cause genuine gasps...as does 'that' torture scene.

This Bond bleeds, sweats, cries and even vomits. He's not always right, and he doesn't always get the bad guy. But never is he better than when he's stripped of everything. Clothes, weapons, allies...all gone. And as Le Chiffre beats him from below, THAT'S when he becomes tougher than ever. With words, with performance, Bond fights back. His ego becomes a survival tool. And in those moments, we were never more proud of him.

He's also bloody funny. How can a film be so brutal, then wryly humourous, then so pulse-pounding? And then make you cry? Christ, this is top-notch stuff.

The only problem is, as I said before, the two-film structure. Because the second film is, at this point, only at the end of act two, we have a LONG way to go to get to our conclusion.

It would be more of a problem if this final section were bad. But the quality stays high, and it drags you over a couple of bumps - relocating to Venice - before concluding in a pumping climax. One that probably goes to far, given that we really just need to focus on emotion at this point, but still has some great action to offer.

And then the coda. And it's in the film's final shots that we are told, definitively, everything we came to find out. Yes, this IS Bond as never before...and at the same time, don't worry, feel safe, because Bond is Bond and he'll always be the same.

Think that's a contradiction? Not when you see it it isn't. The best is saved for last - these films have ended sadly (OHMSS, with the death of Bond's bride), and happily (all the others). But they've never ended with triumph like this. It may be hollow triumph, but it's all we have.

And Bond is all we have.

You won't agree with his methods. You may not even like him. He's a dangerous, amoral, borderline psychotic with a possible drink problem. You don't want to know him.

But you'd rather have him on your side.

Nothing Up Their Sleeves

2006-11-11T01:19:00.000Z

So - a question. Is a movie with a major twist in its tail a failure if you see that twist coming?

Usually, probably.

With Christopher Nolan's The Prestige...well, that's the trick, isn't it.

Christian Bale (cockney chancer) and Hugo Jackman (all-American showman) face off as rival magicians in Victorian London. And it's magnificently painful to watch.

As one punishes the other back and forth - initially over the death of Jackman's wife, but later over pride, obsession and downright bad habit - we watch. And hurt. Blood flows quickly and sharply. Limbs break, appendages are sliced off - and, usually, there's a full-house audience to see it happen.

It's about obsession, then. And deception, naturally enough. It's also about love. Male-female (three female leads - two glamorous assistants and a viewer) and familial (father-daughter, father-figure-to-son).

The layered storytelling might lead you to doubt some of this. Nolan directs with the same flash-back-forward-and-sideways style that served him so well in Memento, Insomnia and even Batman Begins - so much so that some viewers will think that THIS is the trick.

But, actually, the framing devices (TWO journals, a pair of teasers up-front, and ruthless intercutting throughout) are just that. Nolan cuts, as Walter Murch always taught us - with the EMOTION.

His photography is always crisp, but it's not where the meat of the storytelling happens. Nolan uses the edit like Ridley Scott or Brian DePalma uses the camera. THAT'S where his particular brand of magic happens.

Events, feelings, moments are effortlessly joined. And somehow you never lose track of where or WHEN you are. Filming the whole thing with little interest in 'ooh, another period detail!', there's a vibrant energy to the look that put me in mind of Michael Winterbottom's Jude. It's modern-day storytelling...it just happens to be a hundred years ago.

The performances are joyous (yes, even the bizarre combination of David Bowie and Andy 'Gollum' Serkis). Sympathies bounce between out two male leads and they each out-anguish and out-obsess one-another. Meanwhile we ALWAYS feel for the real victims - the loved ones.

Scarlett Johansson seems to be getting some knocks, but I found her coping well with an English accent while forever seeming TOO luscious to deserve these men (and too marginalised by them both). That her role is not more tragic is down to the script's own agenda, not any particular failing on her part.

(And yes, I know - this is my second positive Scarlett write-up after The Black Dahlia. I'm far from being her biggest fan, but twice on the run I just happen to have found her ideally suited to the film she's in. Sue me.)

But we have two other female leads that NOBODY is talking about, but who arguable carry far more weight and significance.

Piper Perabo, the wife Jackman (and the audience) loses, manages to be so much more than character motivation. You love her as he does, or at least like her a lot, and you miss her when she goes. Rebecca Hall, meanwhile, becomes the wife to Bale's struggling innovator - and, again, does way more with the 'you're losing your family to your obsession' role than anyone could have expected.

These fantastic, amazing women surround them (not to mention Caine's doting mentor). That they can't see past their rivalry...well, that's what makes this whole thing a tragedy.

Still, let's not dump a genre label on it - it's also a gothic horror tale, a period drama, and (kinda) a science fiction story. It is just...The Prestige.

And yes, I'm afraid you WILL spot the twist. Moreover, you'll spot it at the one-hour mark. And just when you expect it to be revealed, the film just carries on.

It's the first time Nolan has missed his mark. Usually he's the first to be a step ahead. And if this were a lesser movie, the whole thing would end right then and there.

Thankfully there are other surprises in store, other pennies to drop, and further depths to plumb. Every one worth the ticket price.

So, while you may feel like you just saw the magician with a dove up his sleeve, you can still enjoy the rest of the show. You can even admire the dove trick when it finally happens.

And applaud.

Entering Lives and Breaking Hearts

2006-11-11T00:43:00.000Z

Anthony Minghella returns to London and a smaller character story after a triumphant few years with thunderous (yet still intimate) period near-epics like Cold Mountain, The English Patient and The Talented Mr Ripley.

Breaking and Entering has Jude Law looking, frankly, as fallen and damaged as he ever has. Is he really a heart-throb? Seriously? Okay...but to me he's all inconsistent stubble, strange bone-structure, bulging eyes and receding hairline.

And I mean that in a good way.

Whatever else he is in this movie, he's fully-rounded as a character. Except that the character has an emptiness, a missing part to his life. But you get what I mean. He's not pretty, or especially sexy. But he's human as hell.

Martin Freeman is his best mate. A career path Freeman is undoubtedly going to get landed with after Hitchhikers' Guide failed to take off while The office really did. (He is, for the record, delicious. His comedy is tragic, his tragedy comic. There's a lightness and reality to everything he does.)

So, Law is married to Robin Wright Penn, playing daddy to her mildly autistic teenage daughter. (The kid's great, touchingly layered and far from cliched. Wright Penn does way more with her role, too, than simply be 'the wife'.) Then his workplace, his business, is robbed. Twice.

Law chases the kid responsible back to the home he shares with his mother...and goes about meeting her. Then falling for her.

It's Juliette Binoche. How could he not?

There follows some who-will-cross-who plotting, a little bit of forward movement, but really just enough to keep us going. Because what we really have here is a poem on modern city life.

Breaking and Entering is a film that makes your heart just ACHE. Because everything just seems so...hard. While at the same time we seem to tread water, we also seem beset with problems that constantly sabotage our chances to be happy.

I will happily concede to weeping repeatedly. But the kicker is this - I don't entirely know WHY.

In that regard, among others this feels like a cousin to Paul Haggis' Oscar-winner Crash. Again, crime and coincidence tying together lives of ill-ease, and the film asks questions without being able to throw up many answers.

Minghella beautifully balances the cinematic and the regular. This isn't rom-com chocolate-box London, but it DOES find the cinematic within the real - the thief is a street-runner, flipping his way around the city's rooftops. But it's something his mum thinks is cool.

And it's this real-world feel that stops the film from caving in. Every time you see something you KNOW will cause trouble (because you've seen it in a movie), it doesn't, quite. But the stuff you thought would be fine? THAT'S where you need to watch out.

There are great moments of humour, too. As Law begins hanging out in his car, waiting for his offices to be robbed again, he strikes up a bizarre friendship with a local prostitute. She brings him Starbucks, he lets he keep warm.

And yet it's all founded on credibility; and, maybe more importantly, on tonal resonance. Because relationships ARE co-dependant, even the hooker in the passenger seat is showing you a perspective on your life.

Once or twice the subtlety wanders away - usually when Law is given a quick monologue about his character's nature when those thoughts would be better off coming from another character's mouth - but this is just nigglesome.

The performances are great, the writing always good and often excellent (yet it rarely draws attention to itself), the direction near-faultless.

There's no question that this is not feel-good territory (though the film does tie things up more neatly than it probably should). But it is a dim light on a dark corner.

You'll relate. You'll cry. And you'll leave wanting to do...just a little bit better at the whole 'life' thing tomorrow.

You Say Dah-lia, I Say Day-Lia

2006-09-30T15:49:00.000+01:00

Brian DePalma has returned to the mainstream (ish) with The Black Dahlia. Welcome back, Bri.

Now, I'm a bit of a DePalma fan, but I'm massively aware that, like Cronenberg, you have to acquire the taste. If you don't, it's only the mainstream fair that gets your attention. For Cronenberg, those films were The Fly and Scanners. For DePalma, they were Carrie, The Untouchables and Mission: Impossible.

If these are the films you know their makers for, it goes without saying that I think you're missing out of some fascinating cinema. But that's a rant for another day.

The Black Dahlia is DePalma doing one of those accessible movies he does from time to time to fund a career of interesting misses (the saucy Femme Fatale, the joyfully bonkers Raising Cain). I love that he does them, not just for the fare they lead to, but also for what they are. And yes, cards on table, I loved Black Dahlia.

Still, there are some preconceptions to tidy up first.

Yes, it may be easy to compare this film to LA Confidential - same source novelist, same noir-ish Hollywood setting - but it's closest recent relatives are more unusual.

Far From Heaven and Down With Love.

Both films were slavish recreations of a particular style. Great, entertaining films that totally - and without irony (or, at least, any that wasn't there already) - embraced a long gone style.

Modern film noir is best known, I guess, through films like Chinatown and Body Heat. (I'm ignoring the sex-thriller mutation that followed with things like Basic Instinct.) But modern noir always seemed to want to be credible. It wanted to take place in the real world, more or less. And for me, that made the genre less interesting.

Away from Double Indemnity and The Maltese Falcon, those 40s flicks with their voiceover heroes, flashbacks and pervading, unspoken sexuality, we eventually lost some of the richness of style. LA Confidential is a great, great movie - but it's almost a period drama, a procedural, rather than a noir.

The Black Dahlia has no such trouble.

DePalma grabs hold of the noir style with both hands - to embrace it, rather than to shake it up. The voiceover is utterly hardboiled, the flashbacks razor-sharp. Every character is in 'a film about a murder', they're not living it for real, they're in the movie. But again I say this is not intended ironically. It's just that, maybe, the style gets across the senses the way 'reality' and 'facts' never could.

(It's worth noting now that I have no opinion about the 'true story' the book and film is loosely based on. It's a work of fiction for me, and was watched as such.)

Aside from the more modern flavours of bloody violence, F and C words and nudity (more on these in a moment), this is a period movie as if it were made at the time. Dahlia's cast have been perfectly selected for a vibe that just screams 40s Hollywood. Hartnett is splendid -

Hang on. Let me type that again.

Yes, Josh Hartnett is GOOD in a film. With much of the smugness knocked out of him, he's a terrific leading man for the genre. It's unbelievable. But when his character puts his hat on for some post-coital, in-bed conversation, you realise how right he is. I may never think it again, but on this one day...he's ideal.

(The hat, by the way, is a symbolic gesture, too. After sex, he's back to work, questioning a suspect he just happens to be sleeping with.)

Scarlett Johansson, of course, always looked like she'd been cut out of 40s celluloid anyway. Nobody else so immediately carries with them the white-blonde hair, the pout, the curves, and that ice-cold-but-scalding-beneath attitude.

The same is true of Aaron Eckhart, who again feels like he's been beamed here from a Big Sleep casting session. His biggest flaw is limited screen time - as the character whose mind is torn apart by the Dahlia killing, we needed to see a little more of him, and it definitely feels like a scene or two got snipped. That aside - powerful.

Only Hilary Swank separates herself from this crowd. Unlike the others, she has to pull on her character like an outfit. She wears it well, but there's always a tickle that she's 'acting in the style of' rather than finding herself intrinsically part of the genre by nature. It's still a fine performance, but - not unlike Ewan McGregor in the aforementioned Down With Love - it comes from a gifted actor, rather than 'a star', and you can feel her trying.

Still, DePalma's the real star. The film is filled with his style, and yet not overwhelmed by it, as is so often his greatest flaw. As with the Untouchables or Carlito's Way, the director figures out when to tone down the flourishes and let the screenplay talk.

Than again, he also knows when to turn his own volume back up. Who better to employ film-within-film voyerism? (And how wonderfully creepy that the director himself plays the voice of the director heard in our dead girl's screentests!)

Anyone who's seen Hostel will know all about the limits of cinematic gore, or lack thereof. But showing a thing isn't, on its own, enough. Hostel's violence caused little reaction from me, save the odd shrug. "Prosthetic," I yelled. "Editing trick!" Because it may all be well-executed, but the technique itself...dull.

DePalma's camera, meanwhile, is never dull. His photography, editing and movement can have a visceral effect on the viewer, and here you WILL find yourself flinching, even turning away from the screen. Not because it's more gratuitous than Hostel, but because it's better made.

So there's tension and pain and voyerism and style. What of the director's usual bugbear - the coldness of his characterisation? Critics often, and usually with good reason, call him a technical filmmaker. Someone interested in technique and never emotion. And in the films where he's written the scripts himself, that certainly feels true.

(Ironic really, as his self-penned films really ARE the most personal. Taking autobiographical elements - photographing his mother having an affair - and scripting them to then be filmed.)

But with Josh Friedman's screenplay, we hover instead between style and substance. But, I say again, this is a movie about a case, it's not the case itself being filmed. Noir isn't first and foremost a character study. But it IS a study of characters.

Contradictory? I don't think so.

This isn't a genre that tries to get into the mind of someone you've never met, some new and layered character. Instead, it shows you a collection of people who represent aspects of our natures. It gives you men repressing their sexual desire. Women teasing it out - effortlessly, because in the end we're all just barking dogs on a leash, and ridiculously open to manipulation.

There are the rich and crazy people, and lives of secrets, rebellious daughters and tempting wives. There's masculine aggression - oh boy is there masculine aggression - and feminine sensuality. (This is, for the record, not a sexually explicit film. But it is the sexiest thing I've seen in the cinema for a while. The smallest gestures - hands and eyes - speak huge, horn-inducing volumes. Ladies, gents, take a partner. You will be steamed up by the time the credits roll...though you won't necessarily feel good about it.)

In the end, then, it's like the horror genre. It's about pulling bigger, grander truths, rather than filming the 'real'. And in this film we get a deliberate, willful, almost child-like insistence that the film WILL be made this way. To hell with 60 years of genre development.

So, while it will remain unappreciated by some audiences, and certainly by Oscar, this is, no question, cinema of WORTH.

Whether it's too your taste is something else...

Certainly you'll want to concentrate. Minor characters, quickly-mentioned names, all will come into play for the final revelations. Pay attention. I left wanting to see the film again right away. Just make sure that it's for the right reasons. Word is the screenplay was compressed significantly from the version David Fincher had, at one time, intended to shoot. Between that and the sense of scenes being removed or shortened, the pace is brisk (though not hurried), and a few more minutes would not have hurt.

Still, I had to see LA confidential twice, too - to make all the connections. So maybe I'm just too dim for noir. Hell, even Chandler himself never worked out who killed the chauffeur in The Big Sleep.

Me, I like the gangster movie. James Cagney, The Public Enemy. A genre that, actually, has undergone far less reinvention since it's arrival in the 30s. The Godfather maybe tried to legitimise the character side, but with Scorsese's Goodfellas and DePalma's own Scarface 'remake', it was still the same kind of movie - attractive and frightening, violent, blackly funny, and forever based around a big central performance.

In the gangster film, being alone is dangerous. And everyone lusts for MORE - more money, more power, more stuff. Thing is, the more you have the more alone you become. It's an inevitable, fatal cycle. I love it.

Gangster films - they still make 'em like that. Old-style noir doesn't really happen so much. So take the chance and see The Black Dahlia. You might not get along with it - it's certainly polarising audiences - but it's still easy to be impressed by the achievement.

Ricky Is Funnier Than You - FACT

2006-09-22T12:37:00.000+01:00

Are you black? Are you British? Then Ricky Gervais is funnier than you.

Sorry about that.

The second series of Extras kicked off with mostly repeats of - okay, quite funny - jokes from the first series. "Oh, the famous - they can be quite conceited! And insecure! They're just how we think they are when we read Heat! How hilarious!" Followed by the old, standard, "He didn't really just say that, did he?" thing.

Most of which is apparently not offensive so long as Gervais - who wrote the lines in the first place - looks shocked.

Now, hey, lazy writing and weak satire are fine. I'm not offended (much) by either. But when, towards the end of the first episode, Gervais' "character" Andy was asked to think of funny, black, British comedians...well, something else loomed large.

So, he couldn't think of a single one. Apparently Gervais - who (FACT) is funny - is, by extension, better than an entire segment of the UK population. Lovely.

Then his character looks at the Lenny Henry picture on the wall. And refuses to take the example. Hilarity ensues.

Because Gervais - being (FACT) funny - is able to stomp all over that career straight away. Forget how bloody hilarious he used to be, how charismatic he still is. I'm no big Henry fan, but come the hell on.

Oh, and if you like 'regular' sitcoms, you're a moron. A TV drone. Ever found a catchphrase funny? Ditto. Formular comedy? Well, I'll get on to that...

Episode two was marred not by some serious imbalance of tone, but rather by simply by not being very funny.

Gervais is now playing a version of himself so closely that entire scenes go past without a line of dialogue that feels like 'Andy'. The scripts are marginalising his female co-star (who's still actually funny, playing a full-fledged 'character'...even if she is, by default, also playing 'dim woman') in favour of a storyline about how Andy's sitcom has been ruined by the BBC.

An odd one this, because not only did it not happen to The Office, despite the implications that it could have (how?), it's generally hard to take no blame for a comedy series that's not funny when you're the writer and star.

Worst of all, everything being lampooned - on-the-nose punchlines and formular - are every bit a present in Extras as they are in his com-within-a-com. Every week we visit the agent, the agent's crap, Barry from Eastenders turns up...it's actually decent stuff, this, but don't pretend it's any different from Basil hitting Manuel every week.

Take this line, about Andy's recent TV success: "Oh, and Sky called." "Yeah?" "Yeah, they said they can put up your dish next Thursday."

It's a fine enough joke. But it IS a joke. It's a sit-com gag. It plays exactly the same way in My Family. Deal with it.

Ignoring, then, that we have a ego in place of a character at this point. That we've just had an entire episode that ground along painfully (oh, the agony of the 'giving money to the homeless guy' scene. On and on it went, not funny, just exhausting) using the same old schtick. The most aggravating thing is how...this 'better than you' attitude is really making the show unpleasant to watch.

'Andy' looks at the sitcom-loving studio audience with contempt. Why? Because they love TV comedy? Bastards. Who does he think his audience is? Just because they're not in the room when he films, doesn't change anything.

It's an ego in overdrive. A deluded opinion that 'realism' is a finite, definitive thing. The thing that sets his shows apart from those of mere mortals. It's not.

Anything 'realistic' is just dressed up in a style, same as any other. And that style dates like the others. Brando in Streetcar? Stylised as hell to watch now, but back then it was seen as the pinnacle of naturalism. Not that it matters, if the thing's GOOD.

Extras in 20 years' time? One good series, followed by sluggish, indulgent content and ego that pronounced itself better than anyone else...WITHIN the dialogue of the show.

I'm constantly short of time at the moment, so with that off my chest I have to fly. But if you want something funny, wait until Extras has finished and watch Mitchell and Webb - which actually IS.

I'm Not a Zombie, Honest!

2006-09-09T19:02:00.000+01:00

Hey, I'm back! Did ya miss me?

Oh you're just saying that...

So, I've just been to see Right At Your Door. I was really looking forward to this - from the promotion it came across as a tough little indie picture with something to say about the current state of panic.

(You know how we look back at the nuclear panics of the 80s and 60s now? Retrospectively aware that the paranoias were overwrought, and the safety measures pointless? How come nobody has this in mind during the current alleged 'terror wave'? When did we stop being able to tell the difference between 'more terrorists' and 'more headlines about terrorists'?)

As you may know, I'm sucker for the little independent film that could. Hard Candy was my last such joy, and Right At Your Door has a similar set of criteria - two leads, one male, one female, a low budget, L.A. setting, tense atmosphere...

...only, as it turns out, Door is actually pretty wooden. Solid, unremarkable, and ultimately not very interesting.

Laboured metaphor aside, it's with some disappointment that I say this, because it was film I fully expected to like.

As dirty bombs explode in downtown Los Angeles, a husband can't contact his wife. The authorities insist that houses be locked down and sealed up to protect inhabitants from infection, but when his wife comes home, our man has to make the tough decision to leave her locked outside rather than risk the lives of himself and next-door's caretaker.

Now, two things to ignore. The 'What would you do?' premise is the first. What you would do is panic, not be very good at sealing the house up, and ultimately let the person you love back in so at least you can be together in your final hours. Or, if there's a cure, you'll both get it. Who wants to be the only survivor?

Secondly, ignore the blurb about a twist ending. It isn't. It's not even close. It's seeded early and often. Worse than that, it's EXACTLY the kind of twist you've come to expect from downbeat, 'what if?' cinema.

See, when the wife comes home and screams to be let in, you've already seen it in another genre - the zombie movie. 'Let me in, it's just a scratch!'

Now, in those circumstances, everyone in the audience yells 'Shoot her through the head!' Because to get sentimental in a horror film is to invite death.

Oh, but Door is SERIOUS film. Not some silly genre picture. It wants to know what you;d do FOR REAL, if it weren't some silly film.

Only, to be a SERIOUS film, you can't pull a cheap, predictable movie twist. You either embrace genre or avoid it, but you can't do both. If we're asked to see his decision as the right one early on, you can't tell us later that he deserves to be punished by the movie gods in an way that sucks all credibility from the film.

All this is a shame, because TV familiar faces Mary McCormack (The West Wing's Kate, oddly getting top billing) and Rory Cochrane (CSI: Miami's Speedle) put heart and soul into their performances. Through the film's brisk runtime they run through the worst emotions with credibility and accessibility.

Meanwhile writer-director Chris Gorak undoes his noble intentions with a far-too-weak narrative and under-developed characters and relationships. There's about enough story (and, yes, lame predictable twist) to fuel a 45-minute episode of The Outer Limits, but no way a feature.

That's okay, you think, with only two acts to the story at least there's time for two good actors to let us tear into the hearts of their characters.

Eh - not so much.

While studiously avoiding lame exposition - it's an hour before we learn that Cochrane's character is an out-of-work musician, and I don't think we ever find out what McCormack does - he forgets that, to care deeply about people, we have to know them. They have to be more than a cipher for 'If I was him'.

And maybe that's it. Maybe keeping their lives unspecific was meant to make it easier for viewers to lay their own natures over the top. If so, it doesn't work. What it does instead is keep motivations vague - ironic, really, because we might have been better with a film that asks 'What would HE do?'

So as we watch two miserable souls fall apart, uncertain about what, exactly, is being lost (there's a little talk that the husband no longer speaks to his family, while McCormack does take a call or two from her mother - but again it's lip-service to emotions that could have run much deeper).

It's a post 9/11 movie. Of course it is. And I don't think that's anything to be ashamed of - how can you identify with art if it doesn't reflect your reality?

What SHOULD be shaming is the script. For all the gritty, ugly, yet oddly-compelling visuals (Gorak was formerly an art director, and Fight Club sits high on his CV), it's the writer half of the writer-director who needed a bit of a talking to.

Deliberately underplaying character to avoid melodrama is noble, but you need something in its place. More of the same tone - unrelenting bleakness and panic - isn't enough, no matter how well-executed your low-budget visuals. The script is the cheapest way to improve your film, and a dirty cop-out of a finale like this shouldn't have made it beyond the first draft.

So, well-intentioned, and certainly a sign of a talent to come. But, like so many directors, he'll need a solid screenwriter on hand to make 'interesting' into 'excellent'.

Lady In A Big Shirt

2006-08-15T11:09:00.000+01:00

Let's be honest, you either like the films of M. Night Shyamalan or you don't.

Okay, maybe The Sixth Sense is an exception. But, basically, you're either the kind of person who took to Unbreakable, Signs and The Village, or you ain't. Either of these is fine by me - I'm a movie fan who genuinely never took to Coen Brothers movies, after all. (Hey, I KNOW they're good films, but, Fargo aside, I just don't gel with them.)

What his critics say about him is basically right. He's short on new tricks, he's massively formal in his style, and his characters are 'characters' rather than 'people'. Oh, and his ego may be becoming larger than his talent - though in that regard he'll always tail behind all-ego-minimal-ability Cabin Fever director Eli Roth, who seems to have got into movies in order to 'score chicks'.

So, anyway - Lady in the Water.

I should preface this waffle with two caveats. Firstly, I genuinely believe there is nothing more adorable and attractive on this Earth than a woman dressed in just a man's shirt. It's sexy, for sure, but more than anything it just makes me want to curl up and cuddle. And Bryce Dallas Howard spends the entire movie dressed this way.

Secondly, I like Night's movies. He's not the revolutionary genius he thinks he is - I remember one interview where he claimed that only he and Spielberg had the secret to making great, popular films, something Lady's box office seems to disprove - but he IS a talent to be acknowledged.

Lady has a great deal going for it. Paul Giamatti for one thing, who's wonderful as the building caretaker trying to escape his old, painful life. The photography's gorgeous, too. Not chocolate-box, but unusual; no apartment building ever felt more familiar and yet alien.

The story is hard to convey, because it's a story about storytelling. A water nymph arrives to inspire a writer to a great work just with her presence. That Night PLAYS this writer is disgustingly self-aggrandising; "What me? Change the world with my words? Well, gee..." It's a stupid mistake, because he's actually fine in the part. His acting isn't great, but it's not noticeably bad, either. But why THAT part?!

Still, the writer DOES have an interesting arc. Lady in the Water makes the reasonable point that hugely influential, world-changing writers tend to be recognised after they die; and sometimes they're killed for their views. If you knew your book would improve the world, but that you'd be killed for it, would you still write the book?

Me, I'd use a pseudonym. But that's not part of the guy's poetry. It's not a cynical film.

What I would have loved to see is Night in the role of the critic. Yep, that's right, one of Lady's characters is a movie critic. You can tell he is, because he's miserable and judgmental and complains about things being derivative and unoriginal. Because critics are always negative and uncreative, and writers are always life-embracing and inspirational. Always. Obviously.

I'm a writer AND a critic, and I feel I'm being misrepresented twice.

So, with her writer duly inspired (seeing each other was, apparently, enough; reducing the concept of a 'muse' to something pretty bland), our nymph has to get home.

There then follows a series of discoveries about fairytale rules. The legend goes that our nymph - called a Narf, apparently, and this particular shirt-wearing lady is named Story (for crying out loud...) - will be carried away by an eagle. She would, too, if it weren't for the dog-like Scrunts trying to kill her. But they can be held back by...

...and so it goes on.

At this point the film is more like Signs than any other Night movie. It presents a series of oddities and threads and waits to tie them all together. But where Signs' wrap-up didn't really work, this one does, if only by virtue of continually reminding you that THIS IS A STORY. Unlike 'life', it has to follow the rules of narrative cinema.

Which means that our hero eventually goes to the critic to ask what happens next.

Now, brilliantly, the critic tells him. He doesn't know why he's being asked, it's all done in the hypothetical, but later - when he turns out to be wrong - one character gets to say "What kind of man would presume to know what is in another's heart?" That dang rat-bastard critic, that's who.

Which is all Night's way of digging at people who write bad reviews, presumably. Because they're uppity, talking about storytelling when they clearly know nothing about it. Ugh.

What's massively wrong with this picture is that a) the critic was asked about a hypothetical movie storyline, he didn't know some idiot was going to follow his advice because lives depended on it, and b) he's being written by Night. So how could he give the right answer? ("Oh, I'm in a Night movie? Well, he hates critics, so assume whatever I say will be wrong...")

Actually, any critic in the audience would have given a more extended answer than the one in the film, one that included the following: "Well, we're still in the middle act, so there has to be some misdirection. So the solution we seem to have found nice an early will have to turn out to be wrong, but that the REAL solution will still have been seeded early in the plot exactly like I told you."

It's anger-inducing, because the critical vendetta really gets in the way of what, otherwise, could have been a great film. It really could. Away from those moments we have neat narrative tricks, smartly used effects, the odd good scare, some genuinely affecting tear-jerks, and some quirky characterisation. Plus a running thread about the importance - the need - for belief in stories.

I LOVE that nobody in the building questions the weirdness of what's going on; they want it to be true, so let it be. Wouldn't we all like to shake off our cynicism? The sharpness of it, the cruelty, is horrible. But we have to have it to keep living - otherwise we'd all have been conned, ripped-off, cheated or killed by now. It's a survival instinct we wish we didn't need - and that's a great thing to make a movie about.

Disney kicked Night out based on this film. Too self-indulgent and weird, they said. Well, weird is fine, but the other thing is spot-on. This cried out for a script editor, or an executive, with power enough to make the egotist reconsider. "Night, you've got two-thirds of a great movie here. It treats fairy stories with the same reverence and importance as Unbreakable treated comics. The terminology gets a bit daft and over-complicated, but we can fix that. So, what say we give you the greenlight based on one change - dump the critic."

So, yeah, see it if you like his stuff. You'll be frustrated by some of its tricks, delighted by others, and irritated by the ego and the bare-faced, one-dimensional temper-tantrum that is the 'critics are bad' theme...but, with that ignored, it's actually an interesting piece of cinema.

Plus - lady in a bloke's shirt. I'm just sayin' - in any context, Best Thing In The World Ever.

Life In The Not-Sure-Which Lane

2006-08-14T11:23:00.000+01:00

Pixar-Disney's Cars is out now, and it's a joy. An absolute delight. Only, it's kind of a disappointment as well. Here are some of the reasons why.

When we think of Pixar, we think of Toy Story, Toy Story 2 and The Incredibles. Which is like thinking of Francis Ford Coppola and immediately going to Godfather, Godfather 2 and Apocalypse Now. Yes, he made them, and they're his best movies...but they're also three of the best films ever made by ANYONE. To expect his career to continually provide that standard is ridiculous.

Pixar have made, bar none, some of the best animated films ever. With those named examples, in fact, you can even afford to lose the 'animated' caveat. But seriously - how many genuine masterpieces does anyone have in them? Get past the top five Da Vincis or Van Goghs and you're into the 'brilliant but less iconic' stuff. It has to be that way.

Pixar's second tier is led by Finding Nemo - brilliant, beautiful, witty, but wearing thin on the buddy concept - followed by Monsters Inc and A Bug's Life.

Cars can certainly sit comfortably alongside those last two. All top-class affairs with spot-on voice talent, nifty direction, great gags, strong characters...they just ain't Toy Story. But in a world of Over The Hedges and Madagascars, they don't have to be. Even lesser Pixar kicks the pretenders to the curb. Only Dreamworks' Shrek movies come close.

It should, I suppose, be pleasing to Pixar that their greatest competition is themselves. But in the meantime critics are dwelling on a perceived 'mediocrity' that just ain't there.

A few upsides, then, before I get hypocritical and tap Cars's flaws. The voice cast is spot on, the characterisation strong, the visuals astounding. The world is smartly thought out, with its own anthropomorphic logics, just as Bug's Life or Nemo had theirs.

Unlike previous films, though, Cars has NO humans. These aren't cars living in our world - like the toys that only come alive when you don't look, or the fish threatened by our nets - they live on a totally auto'd version of Earth. No animals, no people.

This is a strange and illogical existence, riddled with paradox. Despite feeling uncomfortable about the film's constant 'burning' of fossil fuels, you have to reason that they're not using petroleum, because where could it have come from without organic life? And who drilled for it? Hell, who built the cars in the first place?

I know, I think too much. But, in a more mature movie, questions like these ARE begged. (Still, it does lead to a GREAT end credits sequence where the cars go to the drive-in and watch 'Toy Car Story' and 'Monster Trucks Inc.')

More mature? Oh yes. The humour is often lower-key than usual, and this may be what's off-balanced audiences expecting a kid-friendly flick with a few cunning gags for the adults.

This is an adult animated movie, with a few slapstick gags for the kids.

I'm serious. What sproglet is going to follow the satire of big-money motor-sport, the significance of symbolic nightmares, the implications of a bottom-of-the-back tattoo?

After the maturity of The Incredibles - which itself went for wit over wacky and didn't panic if there wasn't a gag every two seconds - this is another step forward for Pixar. A smaller step, to be sure, but a suggestion that animated objects aren't just for the kids.

What's next? Grown-up talking animals? I can dream... (Come on, Bugs Bunny's always been better the older you get.)

Still, with a mature film comes mature themes. The message of Cars is confused. It wants to say that you don't have to rush, and that winning isn't everything. You can afford to slow down. But then, it's a film about a race car, and there's a climactic race to enter for the finale. Hmm. This final sequence - which, by the way, really cooks - contradicts the previous message entirely. The audience whoops as the film gets out of the slow lane and puts its foot back on the gas.

Mixed messages aside, it's also scuppered slightly by the hero. He's arrogant, inconsiderate and, because of that, lonely. And while he DOES learn his lesson, for a long time he's kinda short on redeeming features. Having accidentally trashed half the town, Lightning McQueen's response is "Oops. So, when can I get outta here?" Where's the apology?

It's a bold move to put an unlikable character front and centre, and Owen Wilson's charms do soften the blow. But again I say - lovely, likeable heroes are the safe choice of more childish films. A more adult outlook makes for bolder choices. Anyone accusing Pixar of playing it safe this time around should bear this in mind.

More good stuff, then...

See it for the amazing action. For the Cars universe version of insects - oh, and cows. You'll LOVE the cows. That gag is SO good it's worth doing five times, and it's funny EVERY SINGLE TIME. See it for the raging climax which, as a three-car race, totally avoids all those binary result problems I like to bang on about.

Cry, whoop, cheer. Laugh (slowly, but building exponentially). And fall totally in love with the latest in a long line of lovable comedy sidekicks - Mater the tow-truck. He'll be your new best friend:

"You know, I once knew this girl Doreen. Good-looking girl. Looked just like a Jaguar, only she was a truck. You know, I used to crash into her just so I could speak to her. "

Hello, You Must Be Going

2006-08-11T14:03:00.000+01:00

So - four housemates have been returned to Big Brother's 'House Next Door'.

Yes, I watch it, I like it, I'm blogging about it. Bugger off.

The public outcry is typically nuts. People who voted demanding refunds, claiming they were misled. Um - you know it's a TV show, right? It's hilarious that Big Brother, which is famous for changing the rules on its participants, has finally pulled a switcheroo on the viewers.

The thing is, TV viewers don't really know what's good for them. Year after year the loud and annoying are dumped in favour of the dull and innocuous. Which is fine - hey, it rewards not-being-irritating, a rare virtue that SHOULD be rewarded - but it leaves the show with all the flavour of tap water.

There are typically three kind of BB vote results:

"Yes!!" - When someone genuinely ghastly gets the boot, usually due to people who rarely vote taking the time to ensure their downfall. Cezar and Grace both got votes from me this year, when usually I only vote in the final. But I wanted to be REALLY sure they were off my TV screen.

"No!!" - When nice people get chucked. It's like splitting up with someone you actually like, but are never going to love. Sorry Sam, you were jolly sweet. This also applies to the eviction of people who were irritating, but provided good entertainment value. That's Nikki.

"Meh..." - When the person getting the boot will barely be remembered a week later. Bonnie, Michael...who were they again?

Look, angry people of Britain, you placed a text or phone vote and it cost you, what, 25p? If you're especially dumb, you voted dozens of times every week, in which case before getting your money back you should get some kind of psychological evaluation, making sure you're actually mentally fit to have money and, y'know, be around other people.

You voted to evict, right? To evict. Not to have the person executed, not even to remove them from the public eye permanently (if only); just to have them taken out of the house.

Also - IT'S A TV SHOW!

Does it actually matter who wins this thing? They all make way more than the prize money in their first few months out of the house. After that, the smart ones save up for the day when they can't get so much as a job in Tescos. The stupid ones try to release novelty singles and wind up drinking lighter fluid on the street.

It's not a president you're electing. And if it was...maybe we should get Endemol's producers to run our political system. You know that horrible moment where you realise you've voted into power a total gimp? Here's a second chance - try again, get it right this time.

Okay, okay - fascist dictatorship. It can't really happen. But this, I'll say again, IS A TV SHOW! It's powered by money and ratings, and the sad truth is that the people behind the scenes, pulling the strings, know what makes good telly better than you do.

Frankly, you haven't got a bloody clue.

You reward volume and violence, provided its directed where you want it. You have a ten-second memory for people's actions - falling off a chair in week 8 doesn't suddenly make being a consistently selfish gonad 'okay'. You reward stupidity.

Still, if Endemol needed any further proof that you don't know what you're doing, just look at who you've voted back in.

Nikki. Well, Nikki was a no-brainer. But you do know she's not been living in a box for the last few weeks, right? She's seen the videos, she's done the magazines and the TV shows. She thinks her histrionics are brilliant now so she's putting them on. Sure, it was always a bit of an act - but it's on a whole new level now. She's doing an impersonation of herself!

Oh, and she's STILL too dense to know what's going on...

Lea. Actually, yeah, okay, she looks like a Barbie that's been left too close to a hot stove, and she has some stalky tendencies. But she's motherly, she's caring, and she talks a string of utter filth. That's fine.

Mikey. Never was a man more confrontational in his requests that people stop being confrontational. Again, thick as custard, arrogant as hell, and the kind of guy who uses the word 'gash' in conversation referring to...exactly what you hope it doesn't. He's also a fawning lapdog to...

Grace.

Look, okay, I get it. We wanted some fire and personality back. But you voted her back in! You idiots!

Never was there such a respository of bile. Never has a face so obviously conveyed contempt - despite this woman being in a position to look down on nobody. This vile, hateful, sadist, this control freak, this spoilt brat. A person who thinks the best way to raise your self-esteem is to shove everyone else's over. Vindictive, manipulative...and, again, too stupid to breathe in and out.

Grace, darling, you nominated every week. Took pleasure in it, in fact. Had you been asked to vote for EVERY person in the house, and give valid reasons, they couldn't have kept you out of that diary room.

So how come one woman voting for you - citing only reasons that you 'hadn't really bonded' - warranted such a reaction? Suzie, bland as she was, had no idea she was the only person nominating; you did, and you made every effort to suck up in the preceding days.

Oh, right, sorry, yes - that's it. It's not the voting, it's that your efforts to fake being nice didn't work.

A small tip, then: Fake always feels fake. And some of us don't have to labour constantly to BE nice. For some people, it's where they go first. Hate's a last resort, not a preferred destination.

We, the voters, have rewarded this pig of a human being with more fame. She's back in...for now. And, like Nikki, she's taken this as a licence to bitch.

She's back, I guess, because we want some fireworks. But what possible pleasure is there, at this stage, of watching Nikki and Mikey gather around Grace's hateful fire, being mean for the sake of it? I've no interest in seeing them come face to face with Aisleyne - self-absorbed loudmouths fronting up. Ashlyene too daft to argue intelligently, Grace to busy being mean to bother understanding people. Who needs it?

Oh, and don't give me that "She's only 20" thing. Cobblers. I wasn't cruel like that at 20, and anyone who is has CHOSEN to be. Being voted out, and getting that huge panto reaction, is the least Grace deserves. Does voting her back in make her learn a lesson, or undermine the one thing that eviction might have taught her?

I've no problem with the game being played on us as strongly as it is on the entrants. We're all complicit in the same cruelties, and we deserve to have our choices questioned and undermined.

What we don't deserve is any more screen time for a woman who thinks kindness and understanding are abstract concepts reserved for the movies, who believes that being thin entitles her to a living, and who's incapable of seeing life from another's perspective.

Evict her. Again. Please.

The Last and The Spurious

2006-07-31T19:56:00.000+01:00

WARNING: THIS CAR-MOVIE REVIEW INCLUDES SPOLIERS. (Ba-dum - tch!)

So it's taken oodles at the box office, but was The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (known to me and a friend as '3 Fast 3 Furious') any good?

Hmm. Huh. Well...not exactly.

Thing is, sequel success tend to be an indicator of popularity, not intrinsic quality. Popularity of what?

Well, the previous movie, actually.

It used to be said that a sequel stood every chance of making 40% of the previous film's income. They get greenlit on the numbers. Do it right, maybe you make more. And in these days of franchises, believe it or not, more are getting it right than you'd think.

Bringing back cast, writers, directors, producers - this is the way to do it. Sometimes. Dead Man's Chest is a good example. But I love what the Blade series did - same writer every time, but a new director. You want someone with an eye on the saga.

Unless you're a silly car-porn film franchise like Fast/Furious. In which case you need whoever's available.

I'm going to talk about all three films, in reverse order. Because I'm quite perverse.

TOKYO DRIFT

Things they didn't learn from the previous films: Colour-coding cars helps audiences keep track of who's where. Heroes should be vaguely capable, and certainly not moronic. Have more than two cars per race.

So, Lucas Black. When he was a kid, he was incredible in a series called American Gothic as a creepy but basically innocent kid. Grown up, I suspect he's capable of good things. Just, y'know, not here - where he's asked to play a kid who gets into trouble for no discernably good reason whatsoever. And he isn't even GOOD at trouble!

He takes on races to win access to the knickers of a cheerleader. Only he can't drive very well. He demolishes property, shows zero control, and...well, he's crap. The guy he races against should probably have been the lead.

He's pushed from mummy's bosom to daddy's out in Tokyo, where we discover that English speaking kids are nice, Oriental ones are nasty, and black kids are sidekicks designed to provide wisecracks. Yeesh.

Now, there's a theory that the director - a Taiwanese chap named Justin Lin - is an outsider himself, arriving in the US and trying to make a name. That might almost make sense. But not quite.

So, what's up with the movie?

One-on-ones, mostly. Races between two cars, two drivers, are incredibly hard to make interesting because it's such a...binary state. Either one wins, or the other does. This is why straight boxing films are such a pain - you win or you lose. And given that we want to feel uplifted, the hero's not gonna lose at the end, surely?

(Rocky, the first one, tried to get around this. At a point slightly too late in the film to be anything OTHER than set-up, Rocky insists that he doesn't care if he wins, if only he can last that distance. That would be victory enough. Guess what happened next...)

Confrontation in fiction is like good conversation - it really fires up when there are more than two people involved.

But Tokyo Drift has other issues. The conflict in the film, the thing the climax hinges upon, is money the 'bad guy' (who's never very bad, actually) was ENTITLED to. Oh, and maybe a girl - the hero never snogs her, or has much conversation with her, but she's in the mix. Presumably he fancies her because she's the only non-Asian female in his class. To repeat: yeesh.

I briefly heard this film called 'darker' than before. That's not quite true. It's not darker, it's more pedestrian. The crashes are more realistic - more Cronenberg than Michael Bay. This does NOT fit a franchise that slides day-glo cars under trucks. A franchise like this, which carries a 'don't try this at home' warning at the end of each installment, should be flipping the vehicles 12 times over, killing only nameless extras. No moment is less appropriate than when we see a friend of the hero smash his car and blow up.

Painful scene. But dude, you're in SO the wrong film.

What else? It forgets to be a cop movie. Films one and two were, in their Miami Vice-lite way, about undercover investigations. This one's about a clearly bi-polar kid who couldn't drive cattle. It's robbed of half its genre - which takes away that Bad Boys/Beverly Hills Cop vibe and leaves you with...binary action scenes.

Oh, and the final race takes place in the dark, and fails to realise how important it is to colour-code cars so audiences can keep track.

Now, to be fair, the location is well-used (a shot of cars gliding through a dense crowd will leave you gasping); you get a real feel for the city. And the notion - tight-corner racing - is cleverly tied in to the setting. But what's next? Fast and Furious: Alaskan Snow-Chains?

For all this, though, it's the lack of memorable icons that infuriates most. Not one character you'd recognise again. Not one scene you can recall. Barely one moment you'll talk about in the pub.

Still - millions grossed. Another will follow.

And back in time we go...

2 FAST 2 FURIOUS

Ignoring the too-cool title based on a music track in the first film, what surprised me was this: it's not rubbish. Oh, it's trashy cinema. But I happen to like a bit of trash now and again. What it does, actually, it does not-badly-at-all.

It remembers to colour-code its cars for one thing!

It also manages to throw variants into the races, keeping things more than binary. There's a tag-team thing where two cars race, then pass the baton to two others. There's a four-way. And the finale of the film hinges on chases and getaways - not 'am I quicker than him?' It leaves room for complexity. A little.

It also makes sure to have, oh yes, memorable things. There's a magical, if slightly shop-worn, trick when the police find themselves chasing 50 cars at once. There's petrol sprayed on a windshield and set fire to. Taser guns that disable cars. There's an (okay, okay) wisecracking black sidekick - but he's got a vaguely interesting grudge history, a lovely habit of eating ALL THE TIME (see also Brad Pitt in Ocean's 11), and model/singer/actor Tyrese is, get this, actually charismatic to watch.

Unlike Paul Walker, who's at least as blond and plank-like as he was the first time around - maybe even blonder and with an extra coat of varnish.

Still, we have a villain who is what they claim him to be. We know he's bad, because he tortures a cop by putting a rat on his belly inside an upturned metal bucket, then torches the bucket so the rat will dig downwards. Ian Fleming would have loved him.

The photography's good, too. John Singleton - who seems cursed by critics who think a black guy should be making black movies (therefore, presumably, keeping him away from dem white folks' films). Tough. He's a decent director of 'issues'. But, given the chance, he can get your pulse racing, too.

(I have a theory that an executive put a call out for anyone good with 'race stuff' - Singleton getting a call was the misunderstanding of an office junior.)

He fills the frame with colour and movement. Turns the camera upside-down, but keeps it tight in the edit so it works. Michael Bay wishes his camera were this inventive.

He casts smartly, too. Most characters won't stick beyond the running time, but when they pop up a second or third time, you know who they are.

Oh, and instead of the cocky little git of film three, our guys this time aren't at all sure. (Ironic, really - they're clearly better than him.) In the face of the race, cocky becomes anxious. The other car IS faster. Ulp. Basic drama.

Not art, then. But not arse, either.

THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS

Film one. And yeah, okay, you get why they wanted to carry on.

The first film remembers to do things right - start with INCIDENT (a daring hi-jack), find a style (there are some gorgeous time-lapse shots of LA, lovely focus-pulling between cars, and you actually see our stars and their explosions in the same frame at the same time), and tense up the undercover stuff.

It creates icons quickly, too. "A ten-second car". NoS injection systems. "Life a quarter-mile at a time". Spraying checkpoints across the street. The girls and the gears. Hell, I have no interest in cars, but for two hours, it's groovy.

It's a hell of a lot more ethnically balanced, as well, with gags about Latino names ("Even I can't pronounce it" says Hector of his surname) balanced with bitches right back (Brian O'Conner's name "Sounds like a serial killer").

The story pounds along, too. On the night our hero and his prey meet, they take part in an illegal street race, get caught, escape and flee, get attacked by Chinese gangsters then go back to his place for a beer and a crack at his sister.

There are some 'relationships' on show, too. Brian's boss is also his dad (likely expected to return in film two but didn't - there's a character who acts just like him, though), one of Vin Deisel's gang has ADD and a bright future in design, only he's in with the wrong crowd. Vin himself has a 'proper (movie) past'.

Oh, and okay, let's give Vin his due. He's failed to find decent films since, but for a moment here it seemed like we had something hot on the screen. Raw, masculine, not short on charisma...in an era where audiences (including myself) prefer their men a little more complex and capable of emotion, Vin was kinda refreshing.

There's a mis-lead in the bad guys, some judgment calls, tough decisions...okay, it's basic, but it's something the sequels don't do at all. But both this film and the sequel put more on the line than straight victory, than first past the post.

There's only one real car wreck, and it takes place during a smashingly tense set-piece as three cars try to take down a truck and fail, painfully. One on one races - those binary bastards - are treated as perfunctory. One overtake, big deal.

It also plays smart with the obvious stuff. Vin finds out his new best mate is a cop...they look at each other, never speaking. Again, it's basic, but it shows a confidence.

People saw the second movie because they liked the first. They saw the third because they liked the second. I doubt many liked the third - though Empire seems to have gone out of its mind giving Tokyo Drift three stars having given the second film only two - so who knows whether they'll bother with the fourth.

Maybe - if Vin's in it. He has a cameo at the end of Tokyo Drift, after all (which probably cost half the budget, and actually has more verve than any other dialogue scene in the picture).

Maybe - if they bring Tyrese back. He and Vin work in my head as an on-screen pairing.

Maybe - if they ditch the binary race results.

Vrrrroooooommmmm!

Desperately Seeking Something

2006-07-24T09:39:00.000+01:00

Ever since adding the webstats info to Before My Eyes, I've been able to see who's referring to me (thanks China Blue!).

And, okay, hardly anybody is visiting. And those that are, ain't staying long.

So while I spend a little time contemplating the point of all this nonsense, trying to figure out how to reach my target audience of media nerds, I wanted to share with you a few of the Goggle searches that have led to this under-updated corner of cyberspace.

When people pop over from a Google link, the system takes note of what was searched for. Some of these make me proud:

"Russell T Davies" Bleasdale GBH
GBH with Michael Palin, Robert Lindsay
gbh lindsay palin convention

Excellent. Want to read about one of TV's best ever drama? Come to Behind Closed Eyes for review and opinion. Splendid. There was also one where 'Bleasdale' was spelt with an extra E in the middle - which got here thanks to my own typo (now corrected) in the middle of this item.

The Dead Man's Chest piece also did okay...so long as you knew the name of the wacky pirate with one eye played by that bloke from 'The Office', or have no idea how to use apostrophes:

ragetti eye
ragetti temptation quotes
real live kracken's
ted elliott pirates interview waffle

I especially like the 'waffle' there. Going out on a limb, chances are they weren't expecting Ted Elliot, co-writer of the Pirates films, to be discussing waffles. So they were searching, I guess, for him waffling on about the movie. Which is an unlikely, but charmingly literal, way to Google.

Meanwhile, there have been quite a few of these:

emma caulfield fhm

Presumably a disappointment when they find that this is actually something of a piss-take.

On the other hand, I love that someone searched for this:

"i miss you,and the way we used to be"

One of my more self-indulgent posts, there. Nice that somebody found it.

Specific blog searchers, meanwhile, have been decidedly on-topic:

superman returns box office
"doctor who" doomsday

Good for them. And I choose to think that the Googlers who went for variants of "hard candy 2" trailer were a) appreciating the irony of this piece when it came to unnecessary sequels, and b) not ACTUALLY looking for a sequel to Digital Playground's hardcore porn film Hard Candy. (A Robby D video, currently one of the most over-productive and generally mediocre rude film directors currently working.)

Still, my inner demons suggests that my optimism misplaced. Partly because it's the internet, and you just expect a bit of sleaze. Partly because this site isn't exactly afraid to talk naughtiness on DVD, and like attracts like.

And partly because, on a separate occasion, one Google search led to my site with these words:

young 13 year old hotties

Gulp, frankly. Dude, whoever you are, go away.

I console myself with the fact that I came up 19th in the search. (Which begs the question - why'd he come here, surely one of the first 18 options provided the sicko with what he wanted?) I hate to be judgmental, but there aren't a lot of ways that search can be misinterpreted, are there?

Look, hey, I can Google porn for my country. And we all have our own proclivities. But seriously, dude, go away, don't come back. Get help.

The rest of you - any advice on getting myself noticed would be appreciated. I'm willing to do anything short of removing clothing in public or eating broccoli.

----------

Additional: Yes, I am very much aware of the irony that, with that hotties line included in a post, I've just set myself up for MORE visits from Googling paedos. Like I said, I need the ratings.

Clock Up A Point For Creationism

2006-07-23T21:03:00.000+01:00

What terrible thing did those poor dinosaurs do to their agents to deserve ITV's new series, Prehistoric Park?

Nigel Marven, as far as I can tell, usually spends his time with real animals. (One of the 'If I poke it with a stick, maybe it'll get angry' school, presumably.) Now he's 'presenting' a 'time-travel' 'documentary'.

Note the sarcastic quotes there.

The premise is this: Nige is catching dinosaurs from the past and transporting them to a private enclosure to become a public attraction. Jurassic Park, then, without the cloning.

Problem number one - how are ITV getting away with this title and premise? Shouldn't Michael Crichton be suing already? Christ, they even showed Jurassic Park directly before the first episode! Which implies some kind of approval that surely isn't there.

Problem number two - if ITV told people they were planning a series where animals from around the world were being hunted down and captured, wouldn't there be uproar? Why is it morally acceptable when the beasts are CGI?

Problem number three - given that the beasts ARE computer generated, playing the whole thing as 'genuine' just makes everyone look a bit silly. Nige shows us maps of his park, they build big pens (out of, erm, wooden poles), and we watch thinking "Hmm, they'll slip right through the bars, won't they? What with being TWO DIMENSIONAL!"

Problem number four - acting. Presenters have trouble doing it. Nigel couldn't pretend he was under attack from a T-rex if his khakis depended on it. I'm all for verisimilitude (it worked amazingly well in the BBC mock-doc Ghostwatch, more or less) but maybe an ACTOR might have been an idea...?

Problem number five - time travel. Hi, welcome to the science fiction genre. A genre that's been alive and well for a few centuries now. One which, apparently, has passed the makers by.

Let's ignore the really geeky stuff - say, the fact that you can't just go back in time and change the past without seriously jeopardising the whole of history, or that fact that moving in time doesn't suddenly enable you to move location as well (Nige should pop-up in the middle of space, the point where his park hung 65 million years ago. And don't I just wish that had happened) - and concentrate on two factors.

Firstly, if a documentary really did use time-travel, the audience might be more interested in learning how that worked, rather than seeing some bloke building fences. Secondly, that, with the whole of time available, maybe this whole 'last minute dash to beat the apocalypse' was unnecessary. Why go back to a day before the end of the era, the day before the comet crashed down? Go back another fortnight and save yourself some tension.

Problem number six - speaking of verisimilitude, who's filming this series? For every segment showing tents for camera crews and the like (why stay overnight? They have a time machine! Go home to your beds and come back in the morning!), there's a segment clearly filmed by the world's most suicidal cameraman - strapped to the back of a Triceratops, on the ground between fighting dinos. You're either a documentary or a drama - make up your mind!

Problem number seven - education. Provide some. The best this series can muster is anecdotal discussion of Rex tipping over if it leans forward. Other than that, it's all 'height this' and 'weight that'. I can get that from Wikipedia before the first commercial break!

Ripping off the BBC seems to be ITV's new big plan. Spend less on drama, sod all on comedy, and plough it into big shows that nick the best notions from other channels.

Get the Walking With Dinosaurs DVD. It's a lot better, the improvements of CGI aside. At least, it's actively less offensive.

Word has it that ITV have plans for an action/SF series based on time portals. In this show, dinosaurs will be popping up and it's the job of our heroes to stop them. Or something. My fond hope is that this series was intended as a series of FX and photography tests for that show.

Because they're the only areas in which Prehistoric Park is anything other than abysmal.

Just Super Enough

2006-07-17T15:16:00.000+01:00

Leaving the cinema after Superman Returns I was hit with various conflicting responses. They included, in no particular order:

- Loved Kevin Spacey

- Why does Lex Luthor hire such utter goons?

- Brandon Routh (Supes) is incredibly likeable

- Christ, Superman is just the blandest hero in comics

- Kate Bosworth (Lois) looks terrific, but...

- She's too young to be Lois. And nowhere near tough enough.

- When a villain literally changes the map, it's really disturbing to look at

- How come nobody really misses Clark during his Superman-sized time away?

- Actually, they don't notice he never does any reporting, either.

- And why write your hero and villain only meeting once?

And so on. It's no mean feat for the kind of super-strong guy I'd usually hate/resent/wish I was that I actually really took to Routh in the part. It's a shame they've mangled him to be half-hero, half-stalker for the new movie. He only gets one set of emotions to play - those of being super-miffed.

Bosworth is far more hugable than Margot Kidder, but she's far less acerbic. I always liked the interpretation of Lois as overly-tenacious, to the point of danger - something Teri Hatcher would also mange pretty well in the TV series. That's given lip-service here, but you never FEEL it.

Spacey, meanwhile, lights up the screen. Funny, a little scary, he sees himself as noble David to Superman's Goliath. (Huzzah for a villain with motivation!)

Spacey scenes tend to be filmed a little more in wide shots, and group framings. Letting Kev, Parker Posey and others play a little, find their own rhythm. It works a treat - and it's a hangover from the style of Richard Donner's scenes from films one and two - but highlights the fact that this ISN'T happening among the good guys.

Whether inside the Daily Planet building as Clark, or on top of it as Superman, none of the other players are afforded this chance to act. It's all done in the cut, the score, close-ups and specific gestures.

Not to lob any aspersions, but this is, traditionally, how a director will cope with actors who aren't living up to the promise.

Which I'm not suggesting must be the case here. Usually, even when you cut around outlines this heavily, the real shape still shows. (George Lazenby as 007 is a prime example.) These two are endearing leads. Chemistry? Who knows. Too often it's played in individual close-ups; they could be playing their lines to a roll of gaffer tape.

Watching Christopher Reeve (yes, I did it, I made the comparison, I didn't intend to, but here it is anyway) bumble around the Daily Planet was like a silent movie. Postitively Buster Keaton-esque. Our new Clark plays his clumsiness in CU of suitcases, CU of table being bumped, CU of person going 'ow'. Is Routh any good at comedy? I dunno. His editor seems to do okay, though.

Still, after a nostalgic but slow start, the movie has a decent lick to it. It doesn't feel over-long during the body of the film - only at the end, when a coda becomes a fourth act, does Superman Returns outstay its welcome. Action is solidly staged (though never with the 'gasp' factor of the great action movies; Singer's never really nailed his action scenes for me), FX generally excellent. Blah blah.

Oh, the film is shot on the Genesis digital camera. Mistake. Night scenes are shot through with grain. Elsewhere, Singer's photography goes again for dark, muted colours - an odd thing to do when your hero wear nothing but primary colours. (Suit looks great, by the way. Dark, but nifty...y'know, for tights and a cape.)

Still, all this whining is missing a lot of decent stuff. Lex's plan has huge scope, but still fits with his continued craving for land and property. Jimmy Oslen (who has way too much screen time at the start) is another likeable guy in a film full of likeable guys. And there's no denying the emotion brought up by using old motifs, familiar designs and the classic Superman theme.

Great nods to the history abound, too. My favourite? Perry White has pictures of Superman taken on a kid's cameraphone. He describes them as iconic. One is the classic 'carrying damsel' stuff - cover of any number of comics - the other shows Supes holding a car over his head, putting it down front-end first.

That, my friends and web neighbours, is the Action Comics cover pose for Superman's first ever appearance.

Very cool.

In my Pirates 2 write-up I praised the details in the film. How much stuff was in there to reward a second viewing, a DVD purchase. Some stuff was better than the stuff you were focused on the first time.

Superman Returns has the opposite effect. Everything you're meant to see, feel, notice is front and centre.

You can claim that this shows a director with focus and I'd happily agree.

Or you could say that the film is a little one-note and shallow. And I'd accept that, too.

We have the usual Christ subtext, of course (heavily hit when, towards the end, Supes falls to his 'death' in a crucifixion pose, only to rise again three days later*), constant waffle about Earth needing/not needing a savior. Oh, and some strictly textual stuff about how people move on when you go away. But that's kinda it.

No, the problem with repeated viewings is just how many holes open up in the story.

Clark returns, Superman returns. They left at the same time, reappear within hours of each other, then Clark vanishes while Supes is in a coma. Nobody notices. Even though the Planet covers Superman stories constantly.

Superman is stabbed with a Kryptonite shiv. (Great stuff, this by the way. Making you wonder why Supes and Luthor weren't handed a great deal more shared screen time.) He's on a part-Kryptonite island and is rendered essentially mortal by it.

Later, he is able to LIFT the island that renders him mortal.

Look, it either drains him or it doesn't. You can't change that to suit the story. Also, it's made even MORE unlikely when you find that he STILL had a fragment of the broken-off shiv in him at this point.

I get the feeling that next time I'm going to wonder just why Clark gets his job back. He never does any work. I'm going to wonder why Lois is hogging a TV interview when she's a print journalist. I'm going to wonder why Lex and Supes didn't get a proper series of face-offs. Why they dragged that conclusion on so long. I'm going to wonder whether all this skulking around Lois is really fair; it feels more like another example of Superdickery.

Sorry, sorry, ranting away without saying that yes, it's a decent movie. It's fun, sad, exciting, funny. It's also going to come and go in a blink. And, sadly, it seems that the box-office has spoken - no sequel is looking likely.

I really, REALLY would like there to be one.

*N.B. Might not have been three days. Felt like it, though.

Rose Makes Me Thorny

2006-07-14T12:50:00.000+01:00

Doctor Who concludes, then, with a two-parter that makes me want to swallow my previous rantings. Bastards.

ARMY OF GHOSTS & DOOMSDAY

I hated the Cybermen two-parter in the middle of this series, I make no bones about it. So the idea that the series finale would follow on from it filled me with dread. This was supposed to be a blub-worthy farewell to Rose Tyler - how could they manage that with another load of cyber-nonsense going on?

The answer, annoyingly, is 'incredibly well'.

Once again, as with last year's two-part finale, we were given a lo-o-o-o-ong build up. We knew the cybermen were coming, even as everyone whittered on about ghosts. Shrug. And all this build up, despite a manipulative-but-effective teaser sequence, might have been infuriating, had it not been carried out with such wit and enthusiasm.

Listing the lovable: The Eastenders spoof, The Doctor's delight at being a prisoner of Torchwood, Rose and The Doctor singing Ghostbusters, Jackie's peculiar promotion to 'companion'...and those 3D glasses.

The glasses rate a special mention because, as it turned out, they mattered to the story. Now here's a writer who knows what he's doing - hiding important plot information in plain site, dismissed as amusing-but-standard Doctor wackiness. Brilliant.

All good entertainment it was. Awesome and mind-blowing? Not until the last few seconds.

Because somehow a production usually unable to prevent leaks of all sizes managed to plug the holes. A vague tabloid mumble about 'Daleks V Cybermen' was dismissed in the early days as more journo daydreaming. (Right alongside Rachel Stevens becoming a companion.) Turned out, it was true. And we didn't see it coming.

(That said, the tease as to the creators of the sphere WAS enough to have me yelling 'Daleks!' at the screen in the minute or so before it opened. I relish that moment, as it reduced me to the age of about 7. Suddenly I was an excited kid watching Doctor Who, and for that feeling to be recaptured at 30...well, thanks guys, it's appreciated.)

So, not-bad, won over by execution and cliffhanger, despite being light on story...and the fact that Tochwood's main staff seem to work in a cupboard.

But part two? Oh boy...

Witness me dancing around a room as battles are fought, jokes are hammered home and daleks have banter - BANTER! - with cybermen. Witness my jaw drop as we realise that the Genesis Ark is a prison for an entire dalek race, now sprung open on an unsuspecting populous. Witness me blubbing like a child when Rose and The Doctor say goodbye.

How is all this possible? The cybermen were crap last time, how are they now so imposing? How did the lazily resurrected emotions of Rose's family become this graceful, powerful elephant in my living room?

Jackie gets her husband back, Rose gets her dad. They all stay together, in another reality, with Mickey. And the lot of them are transformed, better people for knowing The Doctor. Who himself is now left, alone, once again.

Christ, that's smart stuff.

I've heard fans bemoan the convenience of the climax, but I'm not listening. The Doctor's plan was seeded early with the specs - he had plans early on. Moreover, I'll take every one of Davies' 'silly' climaxes - viral cures in showers, diamonds and telescopes - over Trek's gobbledygook every time. Davies writes conclusions that work emotionally, viscerally. I could care less about them being TECHNICALLY correct.

Seriously, who's bothered by '"Captain, we can do it! We just need to reroute the binary relays to hexigladical output and flouridate the mattermixmaster and we can do it!"? Not me.

Yes, there were flaws, there always are. There's no way Pete's rescue should have worked, and there's no good reason to see so little of the war being fought outside. (I'd assumed budgetary reasons, but the commentary track informs us that the director had shot loads more and they cut it out.)

But I'll pay those prices. To see Tennant - much maligned this series for gurning (which I love, Dave; keep it up!) - cry his single tear, I'll pay all that and more.

Oh, and another well-hidden cliffhanger, too. This one funny rather than shocking. That'll do nicely. Christmas special and third series please, quick as you like.

Which brings us to The Future Of Who. That future is Freema Agyeman.

Wrongly named as 'the first black companion', as if Mickey Smith hadn't spent two series growing impressively right before us (and traveling in the TARDIS, pedants), the character of Martha is bound to be another of Davies' interesting, down-to-Earth females. Which is fine.

Only...gah, I just can't shake my concerns about the actress. Because she was pretty lousy in Army of Ghosts.

But hey, Piper was hardly Brando in her pop videos, right? And 'flirty office worker who gets killed' ain't a great part. Frankly, everyone in Torchwood needed a performance enhancing drug - something wasn't gelling in those office scenes, and almost every performance was off.

So I shan't worry too much about Ms Agyeman. These guys know casting. I have faith.

It's an exciting time for Brit sci-fi. Because we finally have some again.

Avast Behind!

2006-07-09T23:12:00.000+01:00

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. Beware ye who read on - here there be spoilers.

"Jack's back" the campaign touted, and with good reason. Depp's Jack Sparrow was a major reason the pirate movie finally shed decades of bad reputation (Cutthroat Island literally sank its parent company) and sailed off with millions of the public's booty.

But there were other reasons, too, and they're more or less all here, too. Top of the list are writers Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio. These guys are MASSIVELY important to the Pirates saga, and to modern Hollywood movies. Their peculiar mix of honest character, fast-moving story and knowing irony has informed some of the best recent blockbusters.

Top of the list - Shrek. Oddly, this saga's closest relative in some ways. The POTC films are 'Pirate movies' in the same way the Shrek films are 'fairy stories'. They have all the elements - even cliches - of the genre, but are perpetually subversive and knowing. (Playing a pirate as a rock-star is absolutely akin to Shrek playing a Lord/ruler as a dictatorial movie studio head.)

They did similar, but more subtle, work on the first Banderas Zorro flick, Small Soldiers and, far more so, Disney's Aladdin. These guys rock my kasbah.

Also pretty explosive is Jerry 'blow it up!' Bruckheimer, on board as producer to make sure there's no shortage of set-pieces. But there's another side to Bruckheimer that people rarely appreciate - character. All his wham-bam flicks - Crimson Tide, Bad Boys, Beverly Hills Cop, The Rock, Armageddon, Con Air, Top Gun - are really tuned in to what motivates people.

Yes, they're big. Yes they're overcooked (in the most entertaining way). But he knows how to marry movie stars to characters with clear arcs, wants and desires. How appropriate, then, that he produce these Disney movies with two of their better writers. Disney's animated movies, at best, always make the 'gotta' very clear. ("I want more than this life", "I want to walk on land", "I want to be king someday".)

Then we have the director - Gore Verbinski. A strange cove indeed, with a fascinatingly erratic CV: he scared the crap out of me with his Ring remake, did broad slapstick in Mousehunt, and lensed one of the weirdest 'nearly brilliant' mis-fires of recent history with The Mexican.

Now he does big comic action and FX. Really bloody well.

Yes, Knightley and Bloom are 1-D performers. Don't mind that too much, really - they're the Luke and Leia of their saga, and Hamill was as flat as...well, as Knightley's chest. They work as functional chess-pieces, with positions and back-stories that do their job for the bigger plot. They'll do.

Still, all this is pretty much as film one, and I'm meant to be talking about film two.

Which adequately makes Point Number One: if you like the first movie, you'll like this. If you didn't, you won't. Don't even bother.

Mark Kermode, a reviewer I always enjoy (for bonus points he also introduced my uni class to The Exorcist), hated film one, and he hates this. He says this wasn't inevitable - that he goes in with an open mind.

Big deal! It has the same cast, director, writers, producer, and it's doing all it can to be a direct relative to the first film audiences flocked to. At what point was he likely to enjoy it?!

Ugh - never mind.

Bad stuff first, then.

The Empire Strikes Back. Anyone see this at the time? I didn't. I saw it as a kid knowing, vaguely, that it was an episode in the middle of a saga. I let it all slide past and loved it. It's still my favourite of the series.

But watch it back and it's really, really odd structurally. The main characters are split up early on and never ruinited. Han Solo and his gang spend the bulk of the film trying to fix an engine. Luke spends the same bulk training to be a Jedi in a swamp. At the end, Solo is captured, Luke's found a father and lost a hand, and Leia's attractions are moving towards the roguishly sexy side of the Force. That's it.

Seriously - isn't that a weird way to structure a blockbuster? Imagine if James Bond spent an entire film trying to get his Aston Martin running. Or if Indiana Jones spent the whole flick taking bullwhip lessons and target practice. It's strange, no?

Not if it's the middle of a trilogy, probably.

And Pirates 2 wears its Star Wars influence sewn to its eye-patch. By the end of Dead Man's Chest - SUPER SPOILER ALERT - Will's found his father, Elizabeth's got a crush on the rogue, and Jack's encased in carbonite...well, sort of. And the saga also finds its bad-guy-turning-better-Lando-Calrissian character in its final shots.

The ways that we get to these conclusions are massively entertaining. Monster attacks, tricks and double-crosses, terrific jokes, and plenty of swash and buckle. Oh, and some more cross-dressing. It's all performed as it should be, directed well, realised in photography, score and design with aplomb.

And yet it's all a little bit...I dunno...inconsequential?

All the fuss doesn't actually climax. As a second act, this is probably the way it should be. And yet...and yet...it does mean that we've done an awful lot and achieved very little.

I have problems with the first swordfight in the first film between Will and Jack because I'm not on anybody's side. It's hard to feel exhilarated when everybody HAS to win. Well, film two has another - brilliantly rendered - swordfight, this time between Jack, Will and Norrington. And, again, I want all three of them to win.

So it's BIG, but it ain't POWERFUL.

Much better are the fights against the Kracken. Now that sucker is big, and we DO want to beat it. The odds against are huge. And oh yes, that battle works.

But...we never see beyond the Kracken's tentacles and massive maw. Nor do we actually kill it. Saving for movie three, no doubt. As we're saving the defeat of the East India Company (this film's Evil Empire; headed up by Tom Hollander as Cutler Beckett, who, like the Emperor, only gets to sit and boss people around this time). As we're saving the defeat of Davy Jones, presumably.

The thing is, everything you get is great. The plot has been derided as being 'too complicated' or 'non existent' (CAN you be both?), which makes about as much sense to me as the people who say they weren't able to follow the ONE AND ONLY TWIST in Mission: Impossible (One).

If you go back and watch Pirates 1, it has a lot of layers. Everything feeds into something else. Will's history is tied to Jack's mutiny, which is tied to Barbosa, who is tied to the Aztec gold, which is tied to Elizabeth. Even the small stuff matters - the crappy compass, the gun with one shot.

The second film is, once again, more of the same. Everyone has their own agenda. All the little stuff matters. Even that last post-credits scene in the first film matters. You actually do have to pay a little attention. Maybe you're not used to doing this with big films - one bad guy and one objective is easier, right?

Right. But it also results in films like Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. So let's give complexity its moment, shall we?

Also, thanks to the writers' cunning self-referential style, you can run exposition as an audience recap. As in the first film, the dumb double-act of Pintel and Ragetti (fat bloke and wooden eye) turn to each other and ask "So, what's going on?" And it's actually FUNNIER this time, watching as they try to make sense of three men sword-fighting over the same treasure chest. (The contents of which, by the way, makes the film's subtitle insanely, wonderfully literal.)

Also lambasted are the set-pieces. Not for being what they are, but for making Pirates 2, ironically, little more than a theme park ride. Again, if that's what you're seeing, you're missing something.

The final scene makes you realise what these films are really about. It's not a big, explosive sequence. It's a character walking into a room.

In that moment, the series is more like Buffy at its best. In knowing that a CHARACTER will affect people and events far more than any incident could, Pirates 2 shows its real cards - it's about the gang. Of course it is, otherwise the jokes wouldn't be working.

Check out, for example, Norrington's return. Last seen chasing Jack and losing Elizabeth, he's now a Tortuga drunk, sleeping out with the pigs. Now, think back to the first film - Gibbs is seen, at first, working for the fleet (he's the one who warns young Elizabeth about pirates when she's still a little girl); later, he's a pirate himself, a Tortuga drunk, sleeping with the pigs.

Gotta love that symmetry. Even the minor characters are getting their beats - and Norrington's line that he's living the same story, just a chapter behind, is sheer poetry.

To conclude, then - I'm bloody loving this series. If you weren't, though, you still won't. Dead Man's Chest has more flaws, more good jokes, but less originality, than Curse of the Black Pearl. As a series fan, it'll have you gasping repeatedly. (Go back and watch the first film before heading to the cinema, there's a lot of detail points to pick up that mean WAY more if you have.)

Oh, and Jack's entrance? While not as great as his arrival aboard a sinking ship in film one, it IS funny and surprising.

"Not as great, but still funny and surprising." Actually, that sums this whole thing up pretty well.

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Additional: If you have Pirates 1 on DVD, there's a deleted scene showing the pirate town of Tortuga - made up of various rampaging extras looking a lot like the original Pirates theme-park ride. (Including one guy being dunked in a well.) This one shot, removed from the first movie, appears in Pirates 2.

Oh yes, I noticed. Bonus points for me! Gaaaarrrrr!

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Additional additional, July 12th. Seen the film a second time and there's SO much to pick up on with another pass. Mostly cute or clever things, or background details, but there's one story point I think I'm the first to notice. So I post now, and await the judgement of history.

Davy Jones had, on his organ (fnar), a musical box/locket. A silver heart. The same design was around the keyhole on his chest.

BUT - we saw a third heart, silver, same design, same size as Jones'...in the home of the voodoo priestess Tia Dalma.

Could Tia be the woman Jones fell in love with? The woman he cut his heart out for? It might explain her actions at both the start and end of the film. (Alternatively, less spectacularly, it could just mean that she gave him the magic to do what he did in the first place...)

Everyone, by now, is talking about the pair of feet the monkey runs to in Tia's hut early on. But this...this is something we'll have to wait a year to get an answer on. Book early to avoid disappointment!

Great British Holiday

2006-07-05T21:12:00.001+01:00

Alan Bleasdale is in my top-five of great British TV drama writers. Others on the list include Jimmy McGovern (Cracker), Dennis Potter (The Singing Detective) and Russell T. Davies (Queer as Folk). Paul Abbott is probably the fifth.

I mention this because you NEED to switch on to More Four on Saturday at 10.15pm.

The show is G.B.H. It's over a decade old. And it's probably still going to be the best thing you see on TV this year.

Bleasdale wrote what is, on the surface, a political thriller. (G.B.H. appears to have been a huge influence on the more recent State of Play.) But it's really a study of power versus strength, and the signs of madness. It's a study of people.

Okay, so maybe you saw this thing go out the first time. Or maybe, like me, you just picked up the DVDs (which I had intended to write about before finding out that the repeats were starting). If so...watch it anyway. Watch it again.

Because in a country that lacks a left wing, that's stuck with a soundbite leader and more conservative (small c) global influences than can be entirely healthy, Bleasdale's voice isn't just an echo. Right now it plays like prophecy.

G.B.H. tells a story about a guy whose principals, while not exactly bought, are sacrificed for a bigger standing. For ego trips and the promise of yet more power. Michael Murray (played by Robert Lindsay) makes claims to a Labour revolution that he doesn't necessarily want. He doesn't want change so much as he wants to WIN.

Caught in a scheme conjured by yet more powerful men, Murray starts strong and crumbles right in front of our eyes. Piece by piece his facade peels away - the women he beds (throwing away spare condoms to pretend he used more than he did), the prefect physical appearance (he's balding up top and desperate to hide it). And with it goes the power.

As his world crumbles - his chauffeur (and brother) kicks him out of the car, takes his mother away, leaving Murray with a wife we never see beyond some terrifying heels and a loud, loud voice - Murray develops ticks. A wink in the eye, and a spasming hand one step away from Dr Strangelove.

And for all this pain and tragedy, G.B.H. is the funniest damn thing you've seen. It WILL take you to the borderline of hysterics as Michael, unable to control his ticks, swings around his hotel, accidentally hitting things, trying desperately to borrow condoms ("Borrow? I wouldn't want them back!") while avoiding his wife...right in the middle of a Doctor Who convention. ("Durex! The greatest exterrrminator of them all!")

It's a powerhouse performance from Lindsay. It will make your sides ache. And afterwards, you may just cry.

Playing Murray's polar opposite is, of all people, Michael Palin.

Seriously - Michael Palin. Parrot sketch, chips up the nose, globetrotting - THAT Michael Palin.

God knows who thought to cast him. It seems such a bizarre idea - why not go all the way and have Cleese doing Michael Murray's saluting-in-hotels schtick? But it WORKS. And not in some 'decent effort' way. Palin is gobsmackingly good with dialogue that's just the right side of poetic melodrama...and sometimes brilliant sitcom.

Jim Nelson teaches at a 'special' school. He has no power, but he does have acres of familial responsibility, masses of inner strength, and a genuine love of others. He is, in no uncertain terms, Murray's opposite; still where Murray is frantic. He's also a little crazy, in his own way (hiding in the wardrobe or the shed, naked and sleepwalking). But he's everything Murray is not - including a pillar of true socialism.

(For the record, I don't care where your politics lie. You shouldn't care about mine. Let's just agree that good drama is good drama, and we can accept those merits regardless of the message you choose to take away. (That message, by the way, could be 'Right wing politics are by nature cruel, selfish, devious and deadly' or 'The left is a fundamentally weak position that will inevitable never succeed, doomed to cave in on itself'.))

Murray and Nelson, though. These two in a room together - it's everything that DeNiro/Pacino scene in Heat should have been. It crackles. A string of fast-played banter lines, constantly backed up by character and purpose. Palin all stillness, Lindsay perpetually about to explode.

Lump in the throat. Every time.

By the end, as we reach Jim Nelson's empowering speech to his Labour club - "Proof that the further left you go, the more right wing you become" - you will have been through tragedy, comedy, intrigue. You will have seen the press and politics and celebrity and life all weaved together with breathtaking style. You'll have seen a master at work.

Every character, it seems, gets a beginning, middle and end in G.B.H. From the major characters to bit-parts and cameos. Murray's hired researcher is bribed with a hooker...who he falls in love with. The wine waiter goes from comedy prop (perpetually delivering to the wrong rooms because he's "numerically dyslexic") to Murray's ally to victim and political tool. The borderline-psychotic holiday resort owner who plays Electrical Storm Russian Roulette with an umbrella.

Everyone is a hero in their own small story. And ain't that just life.

I implore. I BEG. I know it's a digital station, I know it's Saturday night and you'll likely be out larging it up. I know decade-old drama isn't on the top of your viewing list. But please, try it. Set the video. Try episode one - it does everything the series will do in a microcosm.

And you won't be able to resist coming back.

----

Oh, by the way - the title? It's the G.B.H. that Bleasdale initially wrote about - his half-novel the TV drama was to become. The Nelson family take a holiday and are robbed of an important file while the manipulators hold a gathering inside their empty house. But this isn't just about bodily harm, it's about the harm done to hearts and minds. And it definitely isn't about two holiday-based episodes. So - the title was reduced. Quite right too.

Do Da Da Vinci Dance

2006-07-02T13:41:00.000+01:00

A while back I had planned to write a review of X-Men 3. It wasn't bad, it just wasn't BOSS, y'know? And the direction was okay, so I'm not blaming Brett 'scapegoat' Ratner. The man's a hired-gun, not an artist, and he does fine with what he's given. (Bottom line, look at Red Dragon. It's WAY better than Ridley Scott's Hannibal. But nowhere near Michael Mann's Manhunter. Thus Ratner has made a better film than Ridley Scott. Thus - not a complete waste of celluloid.)

Anyway, that Hannibal stuff is for another time. As is the X-stuff, as my opinions have been mostly ably summarised in Todd's review.

So we move on to the Worst Morning Of My Life. The morning I went to see The Da Vinci Code.

Where do you start with a train-wreck of a film like this?

Right up front I want to say that I really enjoyed the book. It's written the way a cat plays the piano, but it rolls along at a decent lick and keeps you guessing. Dan Brown's books may be idenitkit thrillers, but there is at least some thrill to them. And you do sit there trying to puzzle stuff out.

Well, except for that 'mirror writing' bit. While all the characters are saying stuff like 'hmm, I think it could be a language derived from the ancient Sumerian', the reader takes one look and thinks 'backwards'. (This is the only improvement the film makes over the book, by the way; Tom Hanks immediately demands a mirror. No faffing.)

So what's wrong with the film?

More or less everything, really. The tone is as solemn and reverential as a monk on Easter Sunday. This isn't a rollicking romp, it's a dour history lesson. The score treats every action like it's a Chuck Heston biblical epic. What's missing from the thriller is THRILLS.

To be fair, many of the issues come from adapting the book TOO closely, a phenomenon no longer limited to the Harry Potter saga. Yes the public loves the book, but if they want it that badly they can read it again. This is a FILM - screenwriters, show some backbone! Adapt the thing, don't just transcribe it.

I would have loved the Da Vinci Code adaptation job. The plot's all there for you, you just have to get rid of the novel's worst aspects - the prose and the dialogue. Dan Brown's text goes in the bin, his structure remains. It's ideal. You get to take a near-brilliant structure and wrap it in your own brilliant dialogue.

Well, you might...if you hadn't hired the screenwriter of Batman & Robin and Lost in Space. Seriously. (Yes, okay, Akiva Goldsman also has an Oscar for A Beautiful Mind, but come on...)

So we get some of the same crappy dialogue, plus some all-new crappy dialogue. We also get a grafted-on back story for Tom Hanks. Presumably feeling left out because Paul Bettany gets a flashback history, and Audrey Tatou gets two, Hanks gets to be 'the kid who got claustrophobia by falling down a well'. Ugh.

To be clear, this phobia appears twice in the film. Once at the start, in a lift, just to establish it. Then, later, he gets a little sweaty in the back of a van.

Later in the film he will also hide in a Limo, travel in a small plane (and presumably use its bathroom) and hang out in an underground crypt. None of which will affect him in the slightest.

It's presumably supposed to lend the character some depth. It doesn't. Adding a characteristic does not amount to the same thing. It's no better than saying "Why doesn't he play the flute when he's nervous?' Characteristics are NOT character.

Worst of all, any screenwriter knows that these problems are created to be overcome. At the climax of the story, the claustrophobe is meant to overcome his problem as the villain traps him in a tight space. Or something. Doesn't happen.

Tom Hanks is, pretty much, lousy in this film. I can't REMEMBER when Hanks was ever bad in a movie. Oscars be damned, he's an incredibly watchable actor. If you didn't like the parts he got the nod for - Forrest Gump and Andy in Philadelphia - that's fine, but you surely liked him in Apollo 13, Big, Saving Private Ryan, The Green Mile, Toy Story...

The lousy performance, I've decided, is his attempt to fit in with the rest of the film. He plays dead-pan and flat because his character is flatly written. He's overly solemn because the direction is. It's an appropriate performance for the film.

Poor old Audrey Tatou, meanwhile, is scuppered with too much back story and, again, no discernible character. She's written, though, to be pro-active and hard-edged. So why cast the girl who was Amelie, the French Meg Ryan? Tatou does waifish and vulnerable better than anyone, but this part needed a Sophie Marceau.

The rest of the cast do what they do. The World's Coolest Frenchman, Jean Reno (erm, who was actually born in Morocco to Spanish parents and lived in Africa until his late teens) is given NOTHING cool to do, something even a mess like Godzilla managed to achieve. Alfred Molina is villainous...over the phone, mostly.

Paul Bettany comes off best. His albino make-up is shocking, the self-inflicted wounds more so, and his accent is pitched perfectly. But so what? Big deal. All he does is stalk and kill...and get caught. Oh, and then die miles away from the action having accidentally killed his mentor. (Another book-flaw made large here - two of the villains are dispatched miles away from the action by generic cops. Imagine if British Bobbys defeated the bad guy while James Bond was off somewhere else. Again, it's just poor writing.)

All the way through The Da Vinci Code I kept asking myself why it wasn't working. Other critics have pointed to the nature of the material - following clues and dishing out exposition isn't exactly cinematic.

Wrong. It's just not EASY.

When you figure it out, it's ideal cinema. They're making 66 episodes of CSI every year, and every one of them works. We follow the clues, the one-dimensional characters dish out exposition at the right times. It works - and it's the biggest-selling show in the world right now. (Which explains why Da Vinci tries to ape its CGI crash-zoom close-ups and ghostly flashbacks laid over the real word. Though it doesn't explain how it does them so badly and in the wrong places.)

Audiences who flocked to last year's Nic Cage movie National Treasure know that this stuff can be done. Sure, not a great flick by any stretch, but the clues were clear, we sat in the cinema and thought them over, and we watched as the character figured them out, following them along the trail of logic.

With Da Vinci, they blast past the clue-and-solution stuff so quickly, you barely notice it. And all the CGI anagrams in the world won't help the fact that, half the time, you're unsure what just got solved, or how. (The Fibonacci Sequence, for example, is named as such and never explained. Without the book I'd have no idea what they were talking about.)

Exposition CAN be cinematic. Moreover, it can be dramatic. Courtroom drama thrives on it - not just the revelation of information, but just what that revelation can mean. Da Vinci's secret could, apparently, change the world. Erm, okay - prove it.

Ghastly lip-service is paid to the controversial nature of the revelation that Christ had a child. In the final scene, Hanks goes off on one about how Christ's humanity doesn't contradict his divinity. (An argument that didn't work when Last Temptation came out, so probably won't this time, however reasonable.) Then Tatou, apparently Christ's heir, makes a jokey attempt to walk on water.

To coin an expletive - Jesus Christ. (This is tied in to an earlier scene where she stops a man in a park taking heroin so she can use his picnic table. Hey, maybe that was like a miracle cure! This is, actually, a vaguely interesting idea, but so at odds with the rest of film, because it's a new addition, it just feels ham-fisted and unrealistic.)

It's ironic, in fact, that the two best scenes in the film are the exposition sequences they otherwise work to avoid. At the start, Hanks gives a lecture showing the history of some icons. Watch for the swastika. Someone in the production office created a great piece of work while nobody was looking - how it made its way into the film is anyone's guess.

Then, later, the film's ONE GOOD THING shows up. Ian McKellen. In the book he's written as an English cliche. In the film he might be, too, but McKellen saves it. He's fast, funny (to be fair, some of this DOES come from the script. It's as if Goldsman got sick of writing histrionics so loaded up one character with all the irony) and - blimey Charlie - interesting to watch.

Mostly this happens in his first scenes, where he lectures us in grail history. It's great stuff - it's interesting, no matter how preposterous. And while director Ron Howard seems to think that this is the dullest part of the film, doing his best to avoid anything like it again, audiences will find themselves intrigued for the only time in two hours and twenty minutes.

You do feel that everyone - writer, director, cast - read a different book to the rest of us. Theirs was dull, ponderous, ruined by puzzles. Ours was fast-paced, lightweight and revelatory.

You can tell this by the fact that the few changes that ARE made, are made for the worse. Even to the point of making fundamental mistakes.

In the book, Hanks' character is woken in the middle of the night and taken to the Louvre, to the murder scene that kicks things off. The dead man was someone he had dinner plans with the following night.

In the film, Hanks is at a book signing after a lengthy lecture. The cops take him to the Louvre. The dead man was, apparently, someone Hanks had had dinner plans with THAT night, only he didn't show up. Y'know, cos he was dead.

Hang on, though...

So Hanks went to dinner, didn't find his guest, then gave a lecture, then signed books. That's three hours or so at least, right? Probably more like five, given that you plan a decent time for the meal.

The victim was shot after setting off an alarm in the gallery. Which means that the police must have been there within, say, 30 minutes. Then what? They waited hours before contacting Hanks? It never made the news - prominent guy, killed in famous location?

Don't start taking apart the toaster unless you know how to put it back together.

And don't waste you money on this film. Everyone here has done better work elsewhere. Rent National Treasure, or watch CSI. Hell, just read Brown's books.

I'm too late, of course. A sequel has already been greenlit, based on a huge box office intake.

Christ save us all.

-----

Additional: The book has suffered no little controversy by, well, being about Jesus. Because Christian groups everywhere seem to believe that the power and influence of their One True Lord and Savior can be damaged by a fictional book. (Yes, shock horror, it's a NOVEL, not a legitimate historical tome.)

Seriously guys, the religion has a strangle-hold on the planet, your God is apparently all-powerful and eternal. Do you seriously think He gives a damn that some American academic has written a book about his kid, and that that book might bring the whole homophobic, judgmental, unforgiving house of cards down? Not likely.

More hilarious, though, is the fact that Brown was (unsuccessfully) sued by the writers of Holy Blood Holy Grail, an alleged history book that tells, more or less, the story that Brown's book also 'reveals' - Christ had a child, the holy grail is Mary Magdalene's body, secret societies, blah blah.

Brown obviously read their book - one character's name is an anagram of one of Holy Blood's authors, and the title is namechecked in the novel.

Thing is, if that book WAS a true history, can they sue? Can they really claim Brown ripped them off when all his characters do is believe what Holy Blood Holy Grail says? You can't copyright history. If what those writers claim was true, as suggested, then they can't sue. Nobody owns World War II. If I write about it as a history, I can't sue someone who sets a novel in the midst of the action.

Ah-ha, but...what if the whole thing is bunkum? What if Holy Blood is a made-up pile of tosh? Made up by the same kind of conspiracy-crazy authors that have ruined investigations into Jack the Ripper, concocting nonsense theories based entirely on supposition.

Well, now. If they DID make it up...yes, I suppose Brown nicked their fiction and used it in his. That is grounds for legal action.

Which, then, brings the whole thing down to this: you can claim it's true, and in which case have no legal case. Or you can admit it's balls and sue. Except you always claimed it to be true. Oops.

Your Exclusive FHM Cut-Out-And-Keep Interview

2006-07-02T00:14:00.000+01:00

So you're a young and sexy thing on your way up the ladder of fame. You've had a boob job, a role in a teen soap and a public relationship with a minor pop-star. In short, you're ready to flash some skin for FHM.

With all that in mind, B-M-Eyes presents a handy guide to your very first interview. Take these easy-to-remember phrases, mix up the order, add a few personal details, and you won't have to think once while that grubby little journo lets his tape-recorder roll.

"I love my new boobs! They make me feel so sexy."

"These pictures are the sexiest I've ever done."

"I love FHM. We read it all the time on the set. Me and INSERT SEXY FEMALE CO-STAR are always looking at the sexy pictures and taking notes."

"Oh yeah, when we're out I kiss my girlfriends all the time. It's really sexy and it drives the guys mad. I love it!"

"I've never had a threesome, but I'd love to. Maybe with INSERT FHM COVER STAR ONE or INSERT FHM COVER STAR TWO. They're really sexy."

"In my new film/TV show/children's book I do go topless. But it's really important to the story, and kinda sexy. INSERT GENERIC MALE CO-STAR was so funny, we just kept laughing about it."

"I am single right now. It's been, like, years since I even had a snog. It's a shame, cos I feel so sexy." (This will make the readership think they have a shot. See, also, the next line.)

"To impress me a guy should just walk up and be funny. A sense of humour is the thing most likely to get my attention - I love to laugh. It's really sexy." (So David Beckham? No chance. Joe Pasquale? Result!)

"Me and INSERT PAPARAZZI-SNAPPED BLOKE? Oh, the press blow these things right up. We just had a few drinks one time. He's great, though; so talented. We're just friends. He's really...oh, what's the word?" (Don't forget - you must NOT mention Max Clifford's involvement in putting the relationship together, the fact that the guy's five times as famous as you, and gay, and the way you brutally dumped your existing boyfriend to do it as it would be 'good for your career'.)

It's worth noting that Emma Caulfield once gave an interview to a lad's mag (I forget which one) saying something along the lines of "I've never had a sexual experience with another woman. It just doesn't interest me. It's never felt like it's for me to kiss one of my friends or something. Though I'm not against it."

While the quote WAS used in the main body of the interview, the pull-quote - the big-type quote printed large on the page and used to attract casual readers - read "I've never had a sexual experience with a woman. I'm not against it..."

I mean - come ON!

Are we really this shallow? Seriously? That with every set of semi-naked pics (to which I have zero objection) we have to have a tick-box of wish-fulfillment answers? Up for a threesome, lesbian tendencies, single and looking, willing to shag ugly blokes (read 'good sense of humour').

Apparently so.

What nobody seems to have noticed is that these lines are just the weak-gened cousins of porn mags' own set of pull-quotes.

Proper porn mags don't bother with the interview, obviously. They just print a few lines in large print to...aid the process. Stuff like "I want you to lick me til I cum" or "Can I suck you off? I really want to."

Is there anybody reading who doesn't know that these lines are written by Big Geoff in the office? In between pizza slices, cold coffee and watching I'm a Celebrity, Geoff's job is to impersonate a horny, if mentally deficient, nude model. Nice work if you can get it.

So, look, FHM - can we drop the pretence? The latest Hollyoaks actress has sod-all to tell me anyway. Phone Geoff - he'll have some time on his hands once Big Brother ends - and give him a job.

-----

Additional: Does gay porn and girl-porn have the same line in pull-quotes? If you know, please post! I find it hard to believe a woman is likely to be turned on by man-based Geoff-isms such as "Would you like to see me play with my nipples? I bet you would."

A Special Message From The Roosevelt Hotel

2006-06-28T19:56:00.000+01:00

When I visited New York last year, I spent a night at the Roosevelt Hotel. And, as people have since reminded me, the 'message' I sent subsequently deserves a place on the blog. So here it is.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt once said that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself". But clearly he had not seen the service on offer from his hotel namesake!

It is with pleasure that we welcome you to the Roosevelt Hotel, New York City. Please arrive promptly in order that we can tell you that your room is currently unavailable, and would you mind waiting three hours.

Still, never fear - we have a fully-stocked bar available all day for your beverage needs. Unless those needs should include a cold soda, in which case we haven't got any. There's a box of them around somewhere, but they're a bit warm. It is July, y'know.

This is why New York's Roosevelt Hotel has been outfitted with a small Newsagency and snack venue. Conveniently located behind a staircase in a section of the hotel you should never actually be able to see, the staff are specially trained to cope with minor inconveniences such as the till not working. Their mathematical skills are second to none. Well, that's what they estimated them at. Three hours after we asked.

When you finally make it to your room, you will no doubt be glad to escape the sweltering New York July heat, and every room has been outfitted with an air conditioning unit. This handy device will rattle, shake, moan and hum at a constant high volume to remind you that it is both on and working.

Private bathrooms are available to all guests...though we'd by lying at this point if we recommended using them for anything. Y'see, after the first flush your toilet will maintain a small leak into the bowl that will prevent the cistern from ever actually filling. Just think of this as your very own relaxing water feature! And quite the compliment to that clunking air-con unit, we're sure you'll agree.

On to the bathtub and, once again, there's no reason to imagine run-of-the-mill service when dealing with a hotel named for not one but TWO U.S. presidents. (Hey, Dave - maybe we should rename the hotel The Bush? It has the same kinda kudos, but at least people will know to be pissed off before they arrive.) The bathtub mimics the American economy by failing to keep those involved buoyant, and siphoning the bulk of its contents to unknown and seemingly unnecessary areas. Which is to say - the plug don't fit the goddamn plughole.

Not to worry - our staff will be on hand all hours of the day and night. Not to help, just charging up and down the corridors shouting at each other. Still, you can't really blame them - if their journey up to Level 9 was anything like yours, they got in the elevator, arrived two floors short, then found themselves (and another half-dozen sweating passengers) descending back to the lobby for no discernible reason, making none of the requested stops on the way.

Like you, they will eventually have tired of this routine and got out that coupla floors early and eventually located the under-lit, painted-concrete stairwell at the side of the building.

Please ascend in comfort, and ignore the mounting paranoia that the doors will now all be locked, this being primarily an emergency fire exit - for departure rather than entrance. This is intentional, and has been designed to take your mind off those worrying lurches the elevator made that caused two of your fellow travelers to scream and get off at the first opportunity.

Nothing to fear but fear itself? Baby, that guy Franky had no idea...

THIS POST IS FACTUAL. NO NAMES HAVE BEEN CHANGED IN ORDER THAT FUTURE INNOCENTS MIGHT BE PROTECTED.

Who Review

2006-06-26T20:45:00.000+01:00

Strange time though it may be, I'm going to post some thoughts on the lastest series of Doctor Who - BEFORE the final two-parter changes everything. (At which point you may reasonably expect a follow-up post.)

Now, I saw a bit of Who as a kid, but as an adult it never really got to me. The new series have made me go back and look at the old shows again, but I'd never call myself a 'fan'.

With that in mind...

THE DOCTOR
David Tennant is proving to be a remarkable choice. He's funny, charismatic, sexy, peculiar...

Hang on. Sexy? Since when was the Doctor sexy?

Yah. Interesting, that. He never was, really. And yet here we are, with a TARDIS driver of serious hotness. Was this a bad decision? Probably not. TV has a different landscape now. In (perhaps misguided) attempts to mirror American TV, casting has lurched to the hottie end of the scale. The theory Russell T. Davies puts forward for this is that it works to bring channel-flippers to your show. They stop mid-flip to check out the sexy face that caught their eye.

And dammit, shallow or not, the guy's not exactly wrong.

Still, he's balanced it by actually making sure the Hot Doc is also very talented. No question, Tennant is 'a good actor'. Oddly, this is where my real issues begin.

I had the same problem with Eccleston, who, as an actor, I worship above almost all others. His death in Cracker is burned into my brain, and his work in so many things since - not the least of which are Jude and The Second Coming - is just awe-inspiring.

But, like Tennant, he's an actor-actor. A proper 'I shall allow the character to inhabit me' type. And, for me, that robs the Doctor of something. That thing, it turns out, is madness.

I had zero problem believing that Tom Baker was crackers. Pertwee, too. Nutters. Because the actors were nutters. Because they weren't just nutters, they were 'characters', and blended those (somewhat affected) personalities with the Doctor. Which really, really worked.

When Tennant or Ecclseston do the 'eccentric' bit, I always feel it's all script, no nature. It's the turn the script said to take. Not that I'm against sticking to a decent script - it's just that, when a writer writes madness, it's almost impossible to avoid being deliberate, being structured. Which madness, of course, isn't.

The structure of filming the way they do makes this necessary, of course. You can't spend an hour lighting one part of the set only to have tour Doctor bounce over the another part mid-scene. This was the gift of the old, cheap production. I'd hate to have it back, but it DID force directors to floodlight entire sets and just follow the actors - no cutting, no stopping, not unless you absolutely have to.

Quite what the solution is, I dunno. Videotaped rehearsals, maybe? In a rehearsal room somewhere, long before filming, letting the actors go nuts and picking what stuff to keep - maybe not the stuff the writer had in mind - for the final shoot?

Not sure. And frankly I'm getting a little edgy at the idea of ignoring the script, so let's move on.

ROSE
The companion is, apparently, due to leave. There was a BBC statement, confirming rumours the actress had denied. Me, I hope it's the crew trying to fake people out. Sadly, the trailer for the coming episode suggests otherwise.

Billie Piper has huge teeth. She's also very likeable, even when her performance hasn't been top-drawer. (I'd also point readers to Queer as Folk, a series written by Doctor Who head Davies, where, again, performances are often a little...stiff. But, again, this is traded for charisma, charm and production value.)

Why does the teeth thing matter? Not sure. Sometimes an actor doesn't engage you enough and your mind wanders, I guess.

Still, every so often I'll watch her and be surprised. Often - more so this season than last - she'll find line readings that really impress. I mean, it's the same line, as written, but she manages to play multiple meanings without killing the joke. This is, frankly, a HUGE skill. I can name only five or six actresses of the younger generate who can do it well on TV - Billie, Alyson Hannigan, Emma Caulfield (both from Buffy) and Lisa Kudrow (from Friends) among them.

It's like...funny and scared, or joking but serious, confused and narked. Sure, it ain't rocket-science, it ain't DeNiro, but it goes beyond what's on the page. Keeps the old meaning and adds a new one. That is, FACT, good acting.

NEW EARTH
What a flat old start to a series. Great make-up effects wasted on characters with very little going on. (Shame, really - Cat-Nuns, coulda been interesting.) A plot that never gets beyond ticking over (though I don't bemoan the ending as some have. Sure, drugging people with a shower wouldn't work as a disease cure in real life...but it makes emotional sense. And I'll take that over a hundred Trek climaxes that go heavy on science which is probably true, but has zero connection to an audience.)

Still, we did get Cassandra's return. Pointless as it was, it made for a body-swap sub-plot that allowed Billie to be HUGELY funny. So, that's fine.

A lot of the problems of the solid previous year return - most importantly a reliance on zombie armies and/or cash-hungry characters. Both of which I enjoy, but they do suggest a shortage of new ideas. Not that I have better ones.

The overriding feeling I got from this episode was that the wad had been shot on the Christmas special. A series opener should be kick-ass. It should get you pumped for the later episodes. This didn't do that - it felt like episode two. Which, if you count the previous special as episode one, makes sense...but still leaves you kinda cold.

TOOTH & CLAW
Supernatural? Nonsense. Not in the Whoniverse. Werewolves, ghosts, devils...these are all alien entities. It's all explicable. And, for this one show, I like that. Even if it does mean we keep getting the same couple of riffs time and again. One being 'I'm breaking through to your world' (the Gelth last year, The Satan Pit this year - and, if I'm guessing right, the forthcoming Army of Ghosts). The other being 'possession'.

So - Queen Victoria, wolf creatures, lunar light, big diamond...interesting stuff. This one gelled. It was exciting, climaxed just right - last piece of the mystery in time with the life-saving solution. Character chemistry, too. All good. A little on the nose (snout?) occasionally, but basically sound.

Plus, hey - ninja monks!

SCHOOL REUNION
Get down with your sweet self! The Doc faces off with a genuinely convincing bad guy - one who looks human. WAY scarier than all the Dalek Emperors and CGI Devils you can muster. Good job, Tony Head.

Another lovely Buffy trick is utilised - bringing back a character and using it to reflect on the 'now'. Remember how the return of Oz made Willow look closely at her relationship with Tara? How super-straight Riley's one-ep come-back showed Buffy just how...messed up she'd let her life become?

It's like that. Only with a robot dog.

Rose had to face up to the fact that all the Doctor's companions have to go bye-bye sometime, somehow. And it was sad. As, in its own, funnier, way was Mickey's realisation that he's the mechanical canine.

THE GIRL IN THE FIREPLACE
There are three truths to the new Who series. One: the production will have to make a cheap episode or two to compensate for all the explosions and graphics in other stories. Two: cliffhanger resolutions will be disappointing (see later). And three: Steven Moffat will typically write the best non-arc episode(s) of the series.

Yes, from the pen that wrote 'Are you my mummy?" comes a sweeping tale of romance, terror, mystery, wit...all the stuff good Who can do brilliantly.

And it does it. Brilliantly. Natch.

Clockwork creatures - no CGI, all real, all sinister. Comedy horse? Funny, and yet great for the climax.

And that final shot. The audience gets the mystery solved, the Doctor doesn't. It makes perfect sense of everything...it's gasp-worthy.

RISE OF THE CYBERMEN/THE AGE OF STEEL
Sorry, I may have dozed off. Yeesh! What went wrong here? Sarcasm review mode:

'Hey, I know - we'll bring back the cybermen. Only, we'll ignore their interesting history and just do it on Earth. With an overacting loony in control - cos it's a great cliche that. That's why Who already did it with the Dalek's creation. Then we'll drag Rose's daddy issues out all over again, cos that's an easy way to manipulate the audience's emotions. Plus, we can use them twice by re-dressing those issues as Mickey's Granny issues. Brilliant!

'Plot...plot...erm, hang on...Oh, got it. They make cybermen, they kill, the doctor stops them, lots of stuff blows up. Remember when we dangled Rose from an airship? We'll do that again, too. And let's dump Mickey for a surprise comeback in the season finale by having him stay behind...for no adequately explained reason whatsoever.

"Finally, we'll set it in an alternate universe so there's no knock-on effect and nothing means anything. These aren't even the proper versions of anyone!'

Sorry guys, it was fan-fic. Fan-fic with a LAME cliffhanger resolution at the half-way point.

THE IDIOT'S LANTERN
After last year's The Unquiet Dead I had the feeling that writer Mark Gatiss had a knack for solid, rather than exceptional, episodes. Plots and ideas that worked well enough, managed so-so supporting characters, had at least one Good Idea at the heart...and managed, somehow, to have a brilliant title.

Well, check all them boxes, m'friend. Uninspired, consistent stuff. Please see my post entitled Wonderfully Average for more.

THE IMPOSSIBLE PLANET/THE SATAN PIT
So how come this two-parter, which uses as many SF cliches as the cybermen story, is so much better? I have no bloody idea.

Oh, no, hang on, yes I do. Execution. Manage to be actually scary, not just tell people 'this is scary'. Manage to puzzle, confuse, astound, instead of just chucking plum visuals and old emotions at people.

Sure, the guest characters were pretty 1-D. But man, this is the closest I've been to behind the sofa in a long time. Walking outside in zero-atmo, cracking glass, corpse of a pretty girl floating in space, tattoos appearing on hands with no warning. Rock and roll - this is the stuff!

Some flaws still - the sets were a bit 'Space Vets' - but the good massively outweighed the bad. And still we don't forget the emotional angle, as the Doctor and Rose discuss the possibilities of being TARDIS-less. Would they share a house, get a mortgage? I believe that little sit-com might be worth watching...

Maybe they could have a comedy Ood as a next-door neighbour? Why not - they're the best creature-designs since the new Who began. Gotta love a malfunctioning translation unit that claims domination and death in the same tone of voice as offering you some lunch.

Cliffhanger issue: same as before - which is to say, disappointing. POV shot of evil thing rising from pit...only it turns out it's not a POV shot at all. It's just a camera move. The biggest anticipated scare of the cliffhanger and it's just something the director's doing with the camera. Cheats!

LOVE & MONSTERS
Or 'The Comedy Episode That The Doctor Isn't Really In'.

Davies himself mention Buffy: The Zeppo in reference to this show. Good for him, saves me doing it.

Still, where we get into trouble in what is, basically, a fabulously energetic piece of comedy, is the fact that our lead character - Elton Pope, played without too much 'blatant geek' by Marc Warren - ISN'T Xander. He isn't a series regular. He doesn't appear in most of the shows, albeit as second fiddle.

In short, he has nothing to prove. Xander proved how important he was - that's what these 'look at the little guys' episodes do. But Elton, fun though he is, isn't the heart of our show. He's a newbie.

Still, the fact that the episode still mostly worked is credit to a decent script. Peter Kay over-acts even before he gets into the monster make-up, but it's a performance that suits the episode he's in. One that's so related to the farting aliens of last year that the character is made a cousin-race. From Klom, apparently.

It's an ep that proved too strange for some tastes, and I can see why - the chasing of a monster in corridors was ACTUALLY 'Scooby Doo' - but I hope that people will eventually see it for what it is. It's a lightener. An episode designed to pull back from the intensity of the last few weeks; to make things fun before the Big Finish that's due.

It's worth asking, though, what's next for this production. Last year, to make the schedule work, they wrote a sub-plot in for a minor character (it involved having a hatch put into his forehead. Not especially inspired). Just so the main actors could have a break. This year they made an entire episode without the mains (a couple of scenes aside).

My suggestion: split the buggers up. Doctor goes one way, companion goes the other. Then you spend two weeks on a single storyline, told from both sides, from two perspectives. You can even cliffhanger the companion's half, then resolve it at the 30-minute mark of the Doctor's ep.

Oh, and get Steven Moffat to write it. Because he does fragmented narrative structure brilliantly (see BBC2 sitcom Coupling).

FEAR HER
I seem to be alone in my liking of this ep. Lacking in effects due to low budget, It's written, instead, to generate atmosphere in boring old suburbia.

The kid who traps people in her drawings. And can also CREATE from drawings. (Killer scribble!) It's such a straight, clear concept. And when you get to the drawing of her abusive dad in the closet...wow, that's primal fear.

Getting bored of alien possession, but the fact that the entity was a child as well had a nice feel. Not evil, just a lonely tantrum. This also had some sharp dialogue from the creator of Life on Mars, yet more solid performance. Better secondary characters than usual, too.

And, yes, I liked the ending. Doctor grabs the Olympic torch and takes it to its destination in order to send the alien home. Hackneyed? Hell with it. I likes me some cheese. Cheer at the telly!

Particularly special, for me, was the way the Doctor was accepted into the crisis. The psychic paper has done so much work, just to keep stuff moving - this ep suggested that, actually, when a crisis occurs, you'll accept the help of anyone who sounds like they know what they're doing.

WHAT'S NEXT
The cybermen return, Rose leaves, blah blah. I dread it because it has so much to live up to, while at the same time being a sequel to my least-favourite story to date.

That, and the fact that I'll have to wait until Christmas for the next episode!

Maybe 'Harder Candy'...?

2006-06-17T20:13:00.000+01:00

Cinema-goers, please put this on your 'to see' list.

The move is Hard Candy. The director is David Slade (you've never heard of him), the writer is Brian Nelson (um...episodes of Lois & Clark and Earth: Final Conflict). It stars Patrick Wilson and Ellen Page, who might be vaguely familiar from Phantom of the Opera and X3 respectively.

But the track-record means nothing - certainly it proves nothing. Because what cinema audiences are seeing right now is one of the sharpest, slickest little indie movies you'll see.

If you missed the hype (it has only two main actors, only three locations and most likely zero budget, but there HAS been hype), here's the nutshell:

14 year-old girl meets 32 year-old guy on the internet. They get on in that special way, so meet up. Flirt, flirt, flirt, she ends up at his place. Oh dear. Next thing you know - he wakes up tied to a table and she's about to castrate him with her help of one of her Dad's textbooks.

That, by the way, is no spoiler. It's more-or-less in the trailers, and it's the first half-hour.

Hard Candy is a movie of wonderful ambiguity. You will NOT be offered easy answers. He's a child-molester (possibly with consent...maybe), she's a psychopath. Pick a side.

Well, actually, no, don't. There are no sides here. There's no good coming out of this. He should be locked up, actually; something I'll come back to in a second. But her? She's a danger to society, too. Scary-smart and totally insane.

So, should he be locked up? She's flirting with him clear as day, she's mentally much older than 14 (though very much not physically), and he even says he'll have to wait four years for her. (That's America, though. Over here he'd only have to wait two.)

That kinda greys things up a little.

Still, in what is by far the best discussion of an extremely intelligent screenplay, Hayley gives a compelling argument against the whole 'SHE seduced ME' angle. The essence of it is something like this: A child may be able to pretend to be an adult, but that doesn't mean she is one. When she comes on to you, you're still the responsible adult in the situation - you don't encourage it. You tell her to cut it out and back off. That's the adult thing to do.

Now I know, I know. I've seen 20 year-old hotties who've been revealed to be 13 year-olds developed beyond their years, deliberately pretending to be older. I know, I understand. But that's not what we're talking about here, with this movie. We're talking about two people:

- A girl who looks young, is young and admits to being young

- A guy who searched the internet to find someone underage

These undisputed facts of the film mean that the basics of the blame are totally clear. If she hadn't been so forward, he'd have seduced her anyway - he's good at it, he's done it before. When she offers to go to his place it could just as easily have been him letting her THINK she suggested it. This is NOT the grey area.

It's hard to talk any further without blowing the twists. Suffice to say that your sympathies will bounce from one to the other, rarely rest in either place, but similarly they won't disappear completely. That, friends and neighbours, is one hell of a juggling act for a writer and a director.

So, kudos for a script that's deliberately claustrophobic but never feels small - despite the whole thing being based around two characters talking in three locations. (It is, frankly, almost a stage play.) Ditto kudos to a director who brings smart visual flair to what could have been a very bland shoot. The photography is lush but harsh, the movement constant. And the performances are as genuine, classy and un-cliched as you can imagine. No type-casting here.

The final act loses things a bit, with the twists used up it falls to a case of demand and counter-demand. But at least they don't go the Wild Things route and chuck in two more twists just for the hell of it. And yes, the film draws some annoyingly straight lines between pedophilia and murder - the topic is simplistically handled in what had, otherwise, been a layered and complex script. (The guy's job, photography, causes Hayley to ask interesting questions about just what all those images of young flesh actually mean.)

That aside, it's a golden flick. It crackles. And the torture? Horror directors everywhere wish they could work this kind of magic. Because all the squirming in the world doesn't change the fact that a) it's a nightmare to watch, and b) you hardly see anything. An out of focus video camera shot in the background. Maybe some blood on a scalpel after the fact. That's all.

And the dialogue in the aftermath, from both players, delivered with such intense truth, is some of the blackest, funniest, most uncomfortable you've seen since...well, let's say Fight Club.

Still, go, see it, have an opinion. The Internet Movie Database message board is rife with nonsense about it - blowing twists left and right as some yell that he got what was coming to him and others miss the point entirely and wonder why Hayley wasn't cast as a hot cheerleader-type. (But have a look after you see the film. There are some really DUMB interpretations about twists that aren't twists for a crowd who, I guess, are more used to the Cruel Intentions movies.)

This, though, is my final point. And it's one I hope I'm wrong about.

In this write-up I've mentioned Cruel Intentions and Wild Things. Two film series (yes they are, both have had two direct-to-video sequels each) that thrive on a popular mix of nubile sexiness, seduction, murder/violence and double-cross.

Now don't get me wrong, I love all those things as much as the next guy. But when an audience confuses Hard Candy with this...well, what shall we say? This more 'base' kind of cinema...you have to worry about sequels.

Cruel Intentions and Wild Things both had solid first films, remember. Reputable, even. Classical adaptation, strong cast, decent director, whatever. Proper, solid movies - films.

But the sequels? Fun they are, and entertainment. But not so much with the great art. And that's just fine too. I like a movie that gives you a mystery and the horn.

What I don't like is an audience who thinks Hard Candy is ready for this kind of treatment. Because it's not. But when they go DTV for American Psycho 2, you start to worry just how many people - executives and audiences alike - missed the point.

So I'm asking now for a total ban on any of the following:

Hard Candy 2: Cherry Red
Hard Candy 2: Sweet Centre
Hard Candy 2: Jawbreaker
Hard Candy 2: Suck It and See

Thank you.

Things They Never Say In 'Lost'

2006-06-06T00:42:00.000+01:00

"Hey, this is kinda like that time I did something very different, and yet emotionally similar..."

"Anyone think we should sit down and talk about all the weird stuff that's going on?"

"Isn't it funny how we keep having conversations when we don't like each other....and yet I never chat to most of the other 40+ crash victims on the island?"

So, a few quick points about a show that's half joyous, and half utter toss.

I just watched back the pilot episode of Firefly - a flawed start to an amazing series - and check out the character! By end of play, I get them all. Some I have backstory for, some I don't, but where I don't have it...I generally don't need it. What made most of these people is written in their actions, their existence.

And while I loved finding out how this disparate bunch got together...I never questioned it. I never watched thinking 'Sure, but I don't buy that they all ended up on the same ship."

So - Lost.

Let's be clear here - the island mystery surrounding Lost is glorious. Not always amazingly written, but painstakingly plotted and generally thrilling. A drip-feed of revelations that, in retrospect, will seem cheap and tedious, but for now works a treat.

But the flashbacks...Ye gods, the flashbacks! They make me want to take an electric drill to my forehead.

In the last season and a half, we have seen the following shocking revelations:

* The couple who are married...met, once, and fell in love.

* The wife of said couple, who has a difficult, bullied relationship with her husband...once seriously considered leaving him.

* The guy who lost his son in a custody battle...found that separation difficult.

* The single, pregnant girl...wasn't sure she wanted to keep the baby after all.

* The doctor who married his patient...once fell in love with his patient.

* The fat guy had a bad case of unrequited love for someone thinner.

...and so on. Let me know when any of these comes as a shocking revelation worth 50% of any given episode.

Now here's the thing: this is not the fault of the flashback in general. It can be a great device (please see Firefly: Out of Gas, also referenced above.) And in one single, solitary episode, the flashbacks actually worked to tell an emotional story. It was 'Walkabout', the fourth episode of the series.

That's one. Once. And they do these things every bloody week!

I ask you - if Doctor Who's Tardis-based stories didn't work for a series and a half, wouldn't the writers re-think? If CSI's extreme-close-ups failed to tell the tale right, wouldn't the producers have dropped them, reformatted, or at least taken a long hard look at how to make them function?

Sure, these things are designed to reveal character, to peel back their layers. But let me introduce you to the characters:

* Fat Guy Who Likes Movies, TV, Music, Comics and Hanging Out.

* Doctor Who Can't Always Be God.

* Bad-Boy Trouble-Maker Who Actually Has a Warm Heart Under All His Fear.

* British Rock Star With Drug Addition.

* Iraqi Guy With Violent Military Past.

...and, again, so on. If there's a single non-Lost viewer reading this, you tell me - you think you need any explanation of who these guys are? Or have you pretty much got it already?

Sit down, open up a Word page, or a new email, and type the first few things you expect you know about one these characters. Their natures, how they were formed, who they get on with, what their issues might be.

I guarantee you'll be right about at least 70%.

COMPLEX characters are entitled to flashbacks. Lost has one and a half complex characters. Cut-outs and out-of-the-drawer types attached to actors deserve no such luxury.

Would you be amazed to learn that our rock star has to battle his drug addiction whilst trapped on the island? Would you be stunned by the fact that the fat nerd is lovable, but gets on people's nerves? That the Iraqi eventually has to delve into his past and torture someone...for the good of the group?

Oh, and did I not mention the spoilt little rich girl? She is learning Valuable Life Lessons while marooned. Ain't that special?

It's ridiculous, the time they're given. It's a show built on function, on the release of information. It's almost impossible to care about these people. So we'll settle for being interested in the events that surround them.

Which is why cutting away from those events for half of every show is REALLY DUMB.

Another consequence of this type of formatting - sticking rigidly regardless of usefulness - is what it does to the island story on the off-weeks.

Every arc storyline has to take a beat sometimes. You can't progress it every week. (24 tries, and just keeps being forced to throw in more and more stupid twists. Again, slave to the format.) The dust has to settle before you kick it up again.

On a normal show, fine. On Lost, this is a major problem. Because in between the Shocking Flashback Revelation that a character once found stubbing their toe painful is an island story of dust settling. A B-plot of, say, the islanders making themselves a golfcourse.

In a regular show, such a B-plot is fine, it's light entertainment, relief from the A-story.

In Lost, it means you get a C-plot supporting a B-plot.

Oh dear blessed Jesus and all his many comedy sidekicks.

That Lost remains addictive as popcorn, or picking a scab, is without doubt. But I would, happily, exchange 20 minutes of every episode for...well having that time back, frankly.

"Memorise This Map"

2006-05-16T23:51:00.000+01:00

Silent Hill, then. It's a turning-point for cinema as we know it.

It really, really is a decent movie based on a computer game. For the first time ever, someone's figured out how to do it.

There are two key issues with video game adaptations.

Number one is plot. Games have them, but they either have too much, or not enough - at least so far as the playing sections are concerned. It's either 'get gun, shoot blokes, shoot more blokes, shoot next lot of blokes' or it's 'find key, open door, find passcode, unlock vault, find gold, give gold to wizard, get spell from wizard, use spell to conjure dog, follow dog to cave...' and so on into eternity.

Either too much, or not enough. And neither of those works for a film.

Problem two is the REST of the plot. The cut-scenes that make up a game. And cut-scenes do not a movie make, either.

Why? That's a little tougher. They get a lot of beats across - character, time, place, next steps, all in just a few minutes. With more time, surely they'd be deeper, more satisfying. Just what a movie can do.

Well, yeah, okay. But most video games suffer from second-generation syndrome: they're already based on something else.

How can you make a movie of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City? Won't it just feel like a cheap rip-off of Scarface? Didn't Doom just end up being Aliens-lite? Of course it did! The games-makers were Aliens fans, they were influenced. And for a game, that's great - I WANT to feel like I'm playing the Aliens movie, that I'm Scarface. Why the hell not?

Which brings us back to Silent Hill.

Not being a fan of the game, I'm not going to be totally clear on what of the movie is game-based. But I can take an educated guess.

The story - a mother loses her child in an abandoned/possessed town in the middle of nowhere - is based on stock characters and situations. Horror movie staples. Woman alone, abandonment issues and dark, scary rooms. It's textbook.

But then, a decent horror movie should be aware of the textbook.

The Scream film series was always fun, but it had one enormous problem. You can't, actually, subvert the genre. Horror movies do what they do because, to some degree, it works.

To be ACTUALLY subversive, Scream needed to have a male hero, without any dark secrets or vulnerabilities. No character would ever have gone anywhere alone, nobody would ever have cornered themselves, and the lights would always be on. Always.

At what point does that film get, in any way, scary? It doesn't.

You gotta use the textbook.

So Silent Hill catches a break. It's a horror movie built on a horror game built on the horror movie genre.

What the film-makers got spot-on, though, was an understanding of just why Silent Hill was rich for adaptation: the visuals.

It's the game's imagery and atmosphere that stuck with players. And cinema can do that. It's astounding how many directors fail to realise that. In trying to make a generic plot and generic characters adapt into a generic film, someone misses the reason for the adaptation in the first place.

In truth, mostly that reason is money. But the money's there because the game's memorable. What made the game memorable? Nine times out of ten it's gameplay. And no amount of clever writing will make Halo's playability transfer to the silver screen.

Again, Silent Hill catches a break. It's key appeal was never the find-and-use gameplay...it was the atmos.

The film, in terms of 'good horror' and 'atmosphere', works an absolute bloody treat. The photography is amazing. Bleached-white skies, raining ash...and then it gets really evil. Dark, blood-stained, ashen Silent Hill, barbed and rusted and ugly. This stuff looks INCREDIBLE.

The final trick - clever at first, but ultimately the thing that makes the movie's tasty coda work - is that there's a THIRD Silent Hill in the film. White and dark are two, the third is 'real'. It's just what a town that's died looks like. Three parallel versions of one place. And nobody ever, EVER explains it. We get it though. The visuals tell the story.

That's CINEMA, man. Tell the story, use pictures.

Silent Hill, the film, is apparently larger on exposition than the elusive game ever was. But it's still in no hurry to tell you anything. When you get info, pay attention. Remember the names. Because it may only be coming once.

Concentrate. Because you won't be getting one of those awful dubbed-on lines. You know the ones - they put them on when you can't see the character's face; add a line or two because the preview audience got confused. They're over-exposition, and they're almost always for the cheap seats.

Silent Hill, with its admirable restraint, shows amazing class here. And everywhere.

Nobody's doing this the easy way. The performances are universally strong...even hard. Sean Bean has a bit of trouble with the American accent, but that's about it.

Also, for a supposedly sexist genre - the video-game adaptation brought us two inexorable Lara Croft films, lest we forget; where bra padding got more attention than the story - this is an admirably all-girl film.

The two male characters give some context, keep the viewer aware of a 'real' world away from the weirdness, but just when you think they're going to be doing the exposition (while Radha Mitchell gets scared, dirty and sweaty), they bail. They don't unearth much of anything. One knows plenty, one knows nothing, and they never share it with each other or the audience.

Radha Mitchell, meanwhile, is caught in a terrific maelstrom of mother issues, sister issues, grandmother issues. Of blood and life.

You see where I'm coming from, right?

Silent Hill's secrets, its crimes, are all girl-on-girl. They nod back to The Crucible. And they're shocking. You respond emotionally. Not bad for a video-game.

The visuals, it turns out, spring from that emotion. It all fits together - not in some script-school-handbook kinda way, but tonally, thematically. And, also, they just plain RULE. God loves a director who holds back on the CGI until he needs it, and then uses it in interesting ways.

The prosthetics in this film, the sets, the REAL stuff - just gorgeous. Mixed with casting, movement, camerawork...gasp-inducing. Take a corridor filled with white-clad, white-fleshed nurses with mangled faces and the stuttered movements of epilectic zombies - it's affecting. The flesh (legs and cleavage) has an effect when coupled with the make-up, the lighting, the movement. No way that works a tenth as well in CGI.

But when the CG turns up, it works. One reality peels away, rots off, to reveal another. But it's...slick. Not in a 'wow' way, but in an 'ugh' way. Like insect movement, or oil on water. Preternatural...but not in a computer way. In a...well, in a natural way.

Sure, there are flaws. Pacing is a little off - fast to get to Silent Hill, slow to move through it - and much of the narrative is pretty hum-drum: visit room, find clue, follow clue to room, find clue, follow clue, all with some scares in between.

But, seriously, the last three scary films you saw - were the plots much better? And could they lay claim to carrying some hefty feminist weight? Some serious questions about sin, righteousness and revenge?

I'm going to guess not.

"Memorise this map," our heroine is told. "It may save your life."

It's hard to shake off the feeling that we should grab a pen and paper and make a copy of the map. We may have to navigate out of the level later. But it's only in these not-too-prevalent moments that the video-game shows too strongly.

Most of the time, you're too busy thinking about the story, feeling for the characters, or jumping out of your skin.

I can think of no stronger recommendation.

It's a four-star film. It's not revolutionary. But it does mean that Peter Jackson and his team have, at least, SOME kind of bar to aim for with the Halo film next year.

Atmosphere, Pete. Remember - atmosphere.

***

Additional - May 17th

After a quick Wiki I've discovered a little more about the original Silent Hill game. Interesting, this - it seems the first game, which has roughly the movie's plot, actually starred a MALE character looking for HIS daughter.

This puts us less in the standard horror category, and more into the world of Stephen King. Paternal love is a big King dealy. (Firestarter, for one of several examples.) And, again, he's a definite videogame influence. Throw in the wacky town of the undead and it's all very Steve.

But here's the thing - King horror stories, despite being some of the best ever written (Carrie, The Shining, Pet Sematary and The Dark Half all rock my world), don't usually transfer all that well to cinema or TV. His stuff is horror-drama, and nobody seems to know quite what to do with that...

Except some do, at least to make it movie-ish. DePalma, for example, made the Carrie movie a pyrotechnic set-piece wonderland. He made it iconic horror cinema, often by making changes to the book. (The death of Carrie's mother, which ends up using crucifixion inconography, makes for a visual feast; the book was smaller, more dramatic than visceral.) And Kubrick's Shining, which I have some issues with, did things with a steadycam that changed horror movies forever. Again, made it cinema...by embracing genre-ness.

So, Silent Hill changed the male lead to female. And while we can argue the cliché of this forever, it works to transfer a King-like game into a piece of genre cinema. In the best way.

Good for them.

Things I Have Learnt About Germany

2006-05-14T18:44:00.000+01:00

I've just returned from a few days in Germany, and here's what I have discovered:

* Everybody stops for a red 'Don't Walk' signal. Everyone. It's incredible - it's like that bit in The Matrix where they freeze the programme and the entire street stops moving. It's almost as if they value common sense over getting somewhere fifteen seconds earlier.

* There is not a single sausage roll in the entire country. Not one. You try to explain 'pig meat in pastry' and they look at you like you're from Venus. (There may have been a 'beef roll', but I didn't risk it.)

* If you stay very quiet and smile occasionally, people forget you don't actually speak the language.

* As a result, you start to pick up words - maybe one in twenty. That's after two days. Extrapolating this figure, a person could become fluent in, ooh, about a month. No wonder Germany children find it so easy.

* Outgoing flight - three and a half hour delay. Homebound - exactly on time. Through this one example I choose to see all myths about German efficiency as accurate.

* Oh, and prostitution is legal. Something I didn't discover until the end of my final day. Typical.

Top Movies

2006-05-02T18:13:00.000+01:00

A few years ago I compiled my top ten movies for a website list. These were they:

1 The Fly (1986)
2 The Breakfast Club (1985)
3 Goodfellas (1990)
4 Back to the Future (1985)
5 A Few Good Men (1992)
6 Se7en (1995)
7 Always (1989)
8 It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
9 The Paper (1994)
10 Metropolis (1927)

Interesting to note what's changed and what hasn't then. Well for me anyway; if it's no fun for you you should feel free to suffer in silence. Or post in the talkbacks...it's never been done before, why not start a revolution?

Spielberg's Always pegs higher for me now than it did then, and A Few Good Men still makes the grade, though drops a little due to The West Wing TV series being even better. (Aaron, you're a bloody genius, but the price you pay for getting better is it makes your older stuff look less great. This is why embracing mediocrity is clearly the only way to go.)

Se7en might drop out of the list, to be replaced by Fincher's OTHER great movie, Fight Club. And The Paper might fall off altogether - despite still being massively underrated.

And what gets added? Crash for sure - the Haggis film, not Cronenberg's. Despite its lazy title, it's an amazing screenplay. One of these days I'll write something about the backlash the film has faced, and why I couldn't care less about it. But not today.

The Lord of the Rings movies might go in as a single film. It would normally be against the rules, but when they're all made together - a cohesive whole in a way that Star Wars or the Godfather series could never be when they're filmed separately - the rules kinda change. (That said, I can't accept Back to the Futures 2 and 3 as one film because, despite being filmed together, they strive to be individual.)

*****

So, which from this badly-organised list fit my 'not fade away' mumblings from the other week?

The Fly, oh yes. Great finale. Blows the guy's head off, cries, fade out. That's an ending.

The Breakfast Club does it - making sense of the opening voiceover (it's Brian's detention essay), sending everyone away in a reworking of the opening introductions.

Goodfellas - spot-on. Henry Hill reduced to a common schlub in a single shot, followed by a direct crib from The Great Train Robbery (silent, black and white): Joe Pesci fires his gun into camera. The gag being that there's no definitive print of the Train Robbery flick, and because those movies used to run on a loop nobody knows for sure whether it was the closing shot or the opening (making it an interesting precursor to the James Bond gunbarrel sequence).

It works as start or finish. So it just plain WORKS.

A Few Good Men kicks everyone out of the courtroom and never follows up on the prosecutions to follow - very bold. It's a Wonderful Life gets it all done in one scene, too; for that matter, Metropolis concludes in the rubble of the climax, too.

Always, Crash, The Paper and Se7en round off - not too hard, but not too soft. A Springer-esque 'final thought', if you like. Or even if you don't. And Back to the Future hits a (previously mentioned) memorable coda.

Only the Rings movies go fade-out and coda crazy. But it's hard to be mad when, truthfully, it's actually the codas from three films all together. Or it would be, if Samwise didn't go Springer at the end of films 1 and 2.

So - what are your top films? And, more importantly, how do they end?

Question: Can a great film - not a really good one, but one that hits your top five - have a weak ending? Examples to the usual empty-posting place.

Not Fade Away

2006-04-27T15:16:00.000+01:00

Something that really bugs me - songs that fade out.

I don't know when this started, but I'm guessing it's with radio and recorded media. Because it's pretty difficult to perform a fade out live on stage. I'm always moved to laughter when I see some pop act on TV performing live (read: miming). The dance moves are rehearsed, the lip-synching spot-on...so how come nobody ever noticed that, come the end of the track, the poor singer has to stand there mouthing to a microphone while their voice gets lower and lower?

This is presumably WHY I don't like the fade out - because it doesn't make any attempt to sound like a real, live performance.

When music tracks are mixed down, there's usually some effort to imply that the singer and musicians are really doing what they're doing; more specifically that they sang the song in one go. You try to make it sound like the track isn't pieced together from various takes. Let the listener hear the singer take breath, not come in again so quickly that they couldn't physically have done it.

But come the end of the song...ah, sod it. We've versed, chorused and middle-eighted ourselves out. To hell with a solid conclusion, we'll just ramble on until people stop listening. Fade out.

And yet you see these performers live - really live, or at least in live concert footage - and someone, somewhere has realised the problem. Suddenly the track has a solid conclusion. Because it's the only way the band, the singer, the dancers can work.

So how come nobody mentions this when recording the track?

I guess some of it has to do with radio - it gives DJs something to waffle over, makes things less abrupt. Plus there may be an off-air piracy issue - a solid ending makes it easier to tape the track cleanly. No DJ waffle.

Only...well, is anyone recording off air any more? Isn't digital piracy really where it's at these days when it comes to illegal music recordings?

I was going to say that you don't get this anywhere else. Books and movies don't just keep going until the steam runs out. But sometimes, if we're being honest, they kinda do.

How many times have the codas for movies gone on too long? Everything from Return of the King to Schlinder's List. The story ends, and yet here we still are, reinforcing the themes, making sure all the characters are neatly tidied away.

Isn't this just a fade out of a different hue?

Not quite, actually.

I had a film lecturer once who hated the final scene of The Commitments. Jimmy does his voiceover, tidies all the characters away in a nicely cut and shot coda that lets you know just what became of everyone. He hated it. Why not finish outside the nightclub? Wilson Pickett's limo shows up - he came after all, but too, too late! - and drives off. Jimmy and his merry band missed out on greatness by minutes.

Me, I like the coda. You can have too many, sure, can bang on too long. But without it, it's brutal, harsh.

So maybe THAT'S why the music fades out. Because anything else seems harsh. And, indeed, some of the live tracks you hear with the newly-added full-stop DO feel brutally cut off.

The trick - in films, in books, and in music - is to find a coda that gees you up, that reinforces your love of what's gone before without affecting it. I adore 'new location' movie codas - Blade completes his mission, then cut to Moscow and he's off on a new one. The sword comes out and - hard cut. End of film.

I love films that end like this. Back to the Future did it, and that's one of the best movie screenplays ever. (Name one other time a sci-fi-action-comedy got an Oscar nomination!) I love it when people get to the end and close lids, car boots, doors. (Hey, now we're talking - The Godfather. Best. Ending. Ever. And I can't tell you how many TV shows since I've seen that have nicked the door-closing-on-a-formerly-trusted-friend tag.)

Still, why shouldn't the Star Wars guys be given medals and applause at the end of Episode IV? It mirrors the audience's feeling. It works.

So, like a coda, and love a solid The End moment...but hate a fade away.

Wonderfully Average

2006-04-18T15:28:00.000+01:00

I saw Inside Man this weekend at the flicks. A decently crafted heist thriller with good performances, solid scripting and deft direction.

So why do I feel like I'm slagging it off?

Reading the reviews, it's amazing to note how much faint praise is being directed towards the film, and how damning that praise feels. Check out that first line again - decent, good, solid, deft. All of which reads, it seems to me, as 'not bad'.

But is that what I meant? I enjoyed the movie - I reacted well to it, thought well of it afterwards. I took something away from the experience. Since when has massive competence been a bad thing? Or, rather, a 'not bad' thing.

Not bad is neutral. 'I have nothing negative to say about it'. Only I have POSITIVE things to say, surely? Decent, solid, deft... these are compliments, aren't they?

I feel like championing this film now just because nobody else is. That the ho-hum reaction deserves a bit of a kick. You SHOULD go and see good movies. It's a hell of a lot better for you than, I dunno, Scary Movie 4 or something.

(Not to denigrate solid comedy, but I suspect SM4 ain't solid comedy - not if films 1 to 3 are anything to go by. The writer, Craig Mazin, whose blog I admire greatly, reasonably points out that reviewers generally compare those flicks to genuinely great comedies - Airplane, say. But for me the Scary Movies have yet to be up to...well, what shall we say, the 'not bad' standard.)

I remember having this same vibe when I first saw Arlington Road, which is an amazingly well-made thriller and I tried to make everyone I knew go see it. But even as I try to think of ways to describe it now, I'm leaning back towards good, solid words...

Because, I suppose, critics - by which I mean anyone who's passed the 'it's awesome' teenage phase - should be measured in their response. Call a film magnificent and, well, everyone's going to think you're be talking about the next Godfather or Citizen Kane or Fight Club.

The English language has more words than any other, so how come I still don't have the right vocab for this? Why don't we have a few more gently positive descriptions, uncontaminated by the faint-praise virus? Not every writer is Sorkin or Whedon...but there's nothing wrong with being David Fury, is there? In being the guy who writes the 'not bad' episodes. The stuff that's solid, entertaining, thought-provoking.

Not every film or TV show or piece of pop music has to be era-defining, does it? It can't be, and it would be exhausting to experience. I love solid, decent stuff. And solid decent stuff makes the extraordinary possible.

So - celebrate the Wonderfully Average. Let's agree that these are things worth experiencing. Forgettable sitcoms that made you laugh, music you danced to just that once, movies whose titles you can never quite remember. Not the bad things. The not-bad ones.

A Question of Length

2006-04-13T23:27:00.000+01:00

So, King Kong on DVD. The big monkey movie.

I enjoyed it a lot. And I love the production diaries. I don't think there's any proof that online video diaries actually help promote a movie - Narnia didn't have em and it outgrossed Kong by miles. But they're a joyful celebration of a production. Shame they can't actually TELL you anything, can't comment on the key elements of the film, because they're keeping it all secret for the release.

Also, and you'd expect this frustration from me, there's almost no word on pre-production. No discussion, in particular, of the writing process. Which is a shame, because some really interesting decisions were made there.

I'm always baffled by the complaints about Kong's length. "How did a 90 minute movie get remade at 3 hours without loads of extra plot points?" Well, for a start, the characters are given some heft this time around. Jack, Carl ands Ann all have developed backstories. In the original, Jack's the first mate. And that's all he is. Square-jawed and heroic because...well, because he is.

The new Jack, though? He's the writer. He's artistically frustrated, screwed-over, but lacks the courage of his convictions. Which gives him an arc. At the start of the movie, he won't jump from the ship despite claiming to love theatre. By the end, he'll do anything for the one thing he REALLY loves - Ann. Plus, do you really thing the Jack at the end of the picture would stand for some wanky actor changing his dialogue for something 'funnier'? hell no.

So to all those who critque the hour-long wait for Skull island I say this - bog off. Me, I'm happily anticipating the 4-hour cut of the film on DVD. Not just more monsters, but more character stuff.

Still, I do kinda hope the re-issue fixes that bloody awful compositing. CGI that impressive deserves better bluescreen work. You can see the cut-out lines. You can see the actors not accurately interacting with their environment. It's crazy. Good directing helps, but there's a technical team somewhere who had too much to do in too little time, and the work suffered.

***

An interesting extra thought on the extended edition, by the way. You know that trailer scene of them filming on the coast, Ann screams in character, Kong roars back from within the island?

Didn't make it into the flick...but a very similar scene did. The gang are attacked by the natives, Ann screams...and Kong roars back.

Was this part of the much-mentioned pick-up shoots? I'm gonna guess yes. The scene was dropped, but Jackson moved the moment. (Interesting, also, to note that the film's trailers were not on the DVD. So you can't see this clip, or compare the original shots of Kong to those in the final film.)

My question is this - will the extended edition be a full-on recut? Will moments like this mean it HAS to be? Surely we can't have that same riff in twice?

Lacking...?!

2006-04-11T19:45:00.000+01:00

My first post, my first whinge.

Had an email from a friend I'm trying to turn onto Buffy. Because it's a great show, and because it will improve her life to have seen it. She's a lover of Firefly/Serenity, so this should be a breeze, right?

Not so much.

Part of the problem seems to be preconception. She thinks she knows the show, cos she's caught a few eps now and again. How do you convey that so much of what she's worried about doesn't matter? "Don't people notice all the killing?" Well, kinda, but..." Why don't they leave the town? "Well, it's built on a Hellmouth..."

Then there's the vague knowledge. Willow's crush on Xander? "But Willow's a lesbian, isn't she?" Buffy and her mother... "Hang on, though, I thought Buffy had a sister."

So I kicked her off with series two. It's got the best arc (though more weak single-eps than series three), is less outwardly silly-seeming than series one, and it doesn't take too much to follow. (Come series five, damn, there's some explaining to do! Otherwise I'd have kicked off with Hush, The Body and Once More With Felling and to hell with it.)

I get the email. 'Saw episode one. Seemed to be lacking the Whedon magic. And the humour was kinda of lame."

You may cough and splutter now.

Okay, the emotional oomph of Buffy's return and anguish over being killed...not gonna work when you missed that season. But the sharpness of the cruelty, making Angel jealous, using Xander to do it, Willow with foam on her nose! And Snyder can smell trouble, "It's like a sixth sense." Giles: "Actually, that would be one of the five."

"Lame"?

"LAME"?!

I breathe deep and wait for more eps to go by. Then I realise that in amongst gems like Halloween and School Hard are things like - ulp - Reptile Boy and Some Assembly Required. Plenty of funny and cool in there...but not a little nonsense, too.

So, much like Red in The Shawshank Redemption, I hope.

I hope.

***

Additional - April 17th.

So it turns out she watched the fifth episode first by mistake - a DVD selection error that meant her first exposure to this amazing piece of television was...Reptile Boy. One of the worst episodes of Buffy ever! No wonder it went down like a ton of demons.

Things are picking up now, apparently. I'll have them sobbing at The Body in no time.