So, I Guess That's That

As I said in this post, for years I have been soaking in a morass of shoddy prose, poorly researched science and arts stories, trivia so trivial it doesn't even deserve to be called trivia, and mean-spirited, transparently biased opinion from nasty men and women with empathy deficits so bad that I'm surprised they're not serial killers. And now, I am released.

Though my escape from this quicksand-pit of faux-knowledge has its downside (a very big downside, obviously), it also has a big upside too. I never have to read the Sunday Express ever again, or endure Peter Hitchens' deranged honking (though his 29th April ode to America was unexpectedly touching, despite some madness breaking out here and there), or stare goggle-eyed with disbelief at Christopher Booker's conspiracy theories. Even though I'm kinda curious to see who will win the gilded shit-crown belonging to the one-true Glenda Slagg (formerly owned by Lynda Lee-Potter), I'm done with Carole Malone and Allison Pearson, who can contradict themselves every week for the rest of time, for all I care. I'll also never get to find out if Sam Wollaston ever joins a writing class to jazz up the dreariest "funny" prose in England.


So now it's goodbye Richard Littlejohn, you blustering homosexuality-obsessed buffoon. Au revoir Julie "Mrs. Tony Parsons" Burchill, with your Martian logic and your reflexive/risible contrarian streak. Farewell Kelvin Mackenzie, you absurd curio from another age. Auf wiedersehen Garry Bushell, and all of your adamant - and unconvincing - denials of bigotry, not to mention your shitty, shitty jokes. Arrivederci Deborah Ross, you solipsistic word-fountain. No tears at our separation, Charles Moore, you inconsequential rattle-throwing windbag (looking forward to reading your missives from jail after your licence-fee martyrdom goes horribly wrong).


Don't let the door hit you in the ass, Amanda Platell, you repellent, small-minded phony/failure. So long Crazy Liz Jones and your equally awful ex-husband Nirpal Dhaliwal, and extra goodbyes to your attention-seeking, column-filling "feud", which allowed Fleet Street's assembled hacks to tongue-bathe themselves for a month or so. Never darken my door again Lowri Turner, responsible for some of the worst journalism in world history.

Take care out there, Catherine Townsend, tawdry fantasist sex columnist extraordinaire. Your increasingly outrageous sexual escapades have been sorely missed. Live long and don't prosper, Martin Kettle, you laughably biased Blairite. Don't try to get in touch, Rod Liddle, for I shall not miss you, nor your swinging-dick public image.


Adios Jon "Gunty" Gaunt. I shall not miss your ill-informed ravings, your attempts to become a cross between Jeremy Kyle, Rush Limbaugh, and a disembodied, yapping mouth connected to a bucket full of rattlesnake venom, plutonium, dark matter, pondscum, and dogshit. Get out of my life, Melanie Phillips, and take your defensive, ignorant, and belligerent worldview with you. And Simon Heffer? Forgive me for betraying my coarse manner in this way, but please go fuck your fucking self, you berserk oompa-loompa. It would be greatly appreciated by me and the rest of us here in the 21st century, who are enjoying modernity and don't need your screaming ab-dabs from the past. Thanks in advance.

Naturally, there were sapphires gleaming in the Everest-sized shitpile. I'll still be buying the Saturday Guardian, so I'll get to read Ben Goldacre's Bad Science column, as well as The Brooker's Monday columns and Screen Burn (once he's finished justifying the licence fee with Newswipe, that is). Matthew Norman's nuclear-level sarcasm will keep me warm, as long as he doesn't leave the increasingly poor Independent (well done Roger Alton, you wrecked another newspaper). Every Friday I will check to see what's going on in the brains of Peter Bradshaw (5 stars for In The Loop! Good work, my son) and Nigel Andrews (Two stars? WTF?). I shall keep an eye on Sarah Dempster, who, eve since her tenure at the Scotsman, has been slowly been building a reputation for wit and passion that shames her colleague Wollaston.


I'm not sure I'll be able to keep reading George Monbiot's weekly column, simply because I'm already going to be feeling low and though he's a terrific journalist he can really ruin your day. There's a very very good chance I'll keep up with the magnificent Caitlin Moran, still the only journalist who can talk about celebrity culture without making me want to kill myself by dropping 300,000 copies of Top Santé onto my own head (though kudos also go to the highly entertaining Marina Hyde). I was also fond of Jeremy Clarkson's Sunday Times columns, but that might have been because they were an oasis of vibrant writing in the middle of an Arrakis-sized desert of nothing; outside that arena they might not stand up to scrutiny.

I might once have thought he was utterly without merit, but I've grown to enjoy Johann Hari's column; his recent piece on Dubai was chilling, essential reading. I'm also in two minds about Nick Cohen, whose slide into David-Aaronovitch-territory masks the fact that he can still be a fascinating, passionate writer. The same goes for Robert Fisk, whose rage can be intoxicating if you're not careful. Though I never really realised it at the time, I've enjoyed many columns by Deborah Orr, who has quietly been a sane voice in the Indie. Now that he has been (foolishly) let go by the Telegraph and (wisely) snapped up by the Guardian, I look forward to reading more by Sam Leith, who was the only reason to read that dreary Middle England rag.


Other than those examples, it's a lucky escape. I surely won't miss the transparent campaign against the BBC by News International's roster of worthless junk pamphlets, or the woeful research in the Observer, or the Independent's slide into even more irrelevance than it had already been sliding into. Even better, no more exposure to the most inept newspapers in the world, by which I of course mean the Northern and Shell disasters, the Express and the Star, which pollute the soul more completely than being employed as an assassin by Dick Cheney. Best of all, I can wave goodbye to the Mail and the Mail on Sunday, publications so evil and mendacious that reading them daily is like enduring serialisations of The Turner Diaries and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. With swastika-shaped bells on.


So I can at least rejoice as I fly, like an eagle, out of the lovely old building that has been my workplace for ten years, safe in the knowledge that I don't have to put up with that shit any more. Long ago I had already begun to realise that I was not reading the credible opinions of hyper-educated denizens of Brainworld, but in fact was enduring the puddle-shallow witterings of a bunch of overworked shlubs whose hectic output was such that they would never be able to keep an eye on their views from week to week, meaning we, the readers, were never sure exactly what their consistent beliefs were. As a result, we could never trust a thing they wrote.

That's before we get to the piss-poor science reporting (as regularly exposed by my new hero Goldacre), or the generally shoddy practices of many journalists, editors, and proprietors, as revealed by Nick Davies in his superb book Flat Earth News. When I started reading newspapers for a living, I thought I was going to learn a lot about the world, and I did, but only because I was coming at it from such a position of ignorance. If I have learned anything truly substantive since those first few years, it's because I was intrigued by a subject and endeavoured to find out about it on my own time. Midway through the decade, I realised that trying to educate myself using newspapers was futile.


And so I turn my back on the British press, but not without singling out my other favourite pieces of the past few weeks, written by journalists not included in my Hall of Fame above. I was particularly pleased by Gaby Wood's article about In Treatment, bemoaning the fact that the UK has yet to pick up this wonderful series. As an In Treatment addict, I fully understand her frustration. When it eventually arrives on TV, please don't be put off watching it by the absurd protestations of former ITV director of TV Simon Shaps, whose howl of rage at how unfair it was that no one in the UK media press was willing to compare Lost in Austen and Whitechapel with The Sopranos made me simultaneously enraged and amused recently. In Treatment is the best performed, best written, best directed show on TV right now. It would be a crime to miss it.


Also pleasing was this Times blog post that dared to suggest that gaming is not necessarily as bad for kids as studies suggest, if by "suggest" you mean "are often distorted by lazy journalists who understand that scaremongering plays into prejudices and sells papers". It's rare that games are treated with any kind of respect, and articles are often written by journalists who know nothing about gaming, so this article from The Independent on Guitar Hero and Rock Band was hugely appreciated. Except for the odd lapse into hand-holding, it's a fun little piece with a lot of interesting little snippets from programmers and developers, not to mention fans and the obligatory critic. As I fear I will spend my next few days obsessively playing both games in order to drown out the dissonance in my brain at my new situation, it acts as a nice bridge between the two states. Let's just hope that second state is an improvement over the first.

The Most Wonderful Newspaper Article Of Our Age

In my line of work, I have to read a lot of newspaper articles. Seriously, a lot. Many of them are vicious and unpleasant right-wing shrieks of terror as the world slowly disassembles their medieval belief systems. The likes of Peter Hitchens, Amanda Platell, Charles Moore, Melanie Phillips, Richard Littlejohn, Kelvin McKenzie, Leo McKinstry, and many many more yank handfuls of hair from their scalps in an effort to out-selfish each other, demonising everything and everyone that would look vaguely out-of-place in a 1950s Somerset country house. Reading their nauseating bilewords smeared across the page like a mental skidmark has been one of the more upsetting things I have had to do in this life, and tends to make me forget that not all Fleet Street pundits are Mannequins of Lazy-Thinking Evil.


This week, thanks to a link from, of all people, The Internet Commenter Formerly Known As Moriarty, I have found my favourite piece of UK journalism of the decade. Anne Billson, novelist and Buffy fan, has said the unsayable about the British film industry; it is in a terminal state, and the causes have been there all along.

I agree with so much of what she wrote that I could just copy and paste the whole thing here and just finish off this post with multiple exclamation points of joy, especially with her catty single-sentence drubbing of Mike Leigh. I love it so much I'll pretend I don't mind that she didn't give some praise to John Boorman, who made one of the most visually innovative movies of all time (as well as three of the battiest and most lovable), though I suspect she's more concerned with the recent crop of British film directors. Of all the targets she hit, this in particular struck me as a salient point:

I once heard a British film director say in an interview that he wasn't interested in telling a story visually (why were you directing a bloody film then?), and it's clear he's not the only one. Historically, Britain has produced more world-class writers than painters, and words tend to be valued far above visual imagery, if only because reading and listening apparently require more effort than looking, and so are deemed to be worthier pursuits.

Later on Billson mentions the UK directors who emulate shots from American directors for no other reason than that they liked that shot, not because it is the right shot for the scene. It's funny that she mentions Atonement earlier in the piece. Though there were some shots there that were admirable, the big setpiece single take shot of the Dunkirk evacuation is one of the most overrated shots of the past few years. I take my hat off to Joe Wright for managing the logistical nightmare of it, but what was the point of it? On a narrative level it was meaningless, even though a lot of extraneous information was handed to us.


While I understand that Wright was making a visual reference to the Dunkirk passage in McEwan's novel, it still looked stupid, with the characters wandering around the beach in circles in order to show everything off while Dario Marianelli's music did a lot of the heavy lifting. Compare that to single takes like the nightclub scene in Goodfellas, or the opening long takes from The Player, or Snake Eyes, or The Bonfire of the Vanities. Story happens in those scenes. We discover things about the characters. In Atonement, we're just checking out a beach.

This is not to say there are no British directors who have an amazing eye. Sadly, they're often not lauded in the UK and their careers stall. My favourite British style-genius of the past decade, Lynne Ramsay, created two distinctive and brilliant films, almost got to adapt The Lovely Bones, and then disappeared to work on un-named projects. Garth Jennings has spent so long making Son of Rambow made and promoted that he doesn't even seem to have anything else in the pipeline. Michael Winterbottom once made movies I couldn't wait to see, though that has sadly changed over time. Peter Greenaway buggered off to the Netherlands a while back and his movies retreated to the kind of Matthew-Barney-esque obscurity they always should have had, that weird successful period back in the 80s notwithstanding. We're still waiting for the next movie by the wonderful Pawel Pawlikowski. Terence Malick is now more prolific than he is, shockingly enough.


Many other UK directors who understand what to do with a camera (to varying degrees) have hopped over to America as soon as they could; Paul Greengrass, Martin Campbell, Edgar Wright, Roger Michell, Mike Newell, Stephen Frears, Kevin MacDonald, Pete Travis, etc. etc. The other conspicuous style-addict in British cinema, who won an Best Director Oscar this year and whose name I'm sick of reading everywhere, is probably going to spend some time in Hollywood making worthy films for a while. In fact, the only British director who wants to keep filming in the UK is Neil Marshall, bless him. His next film, Centurion, already sounds unmissable.


Still, I'm surprised Billson doesn't mention the Scott Brothers, as they are surely two of the most influential directors of the past twenty years even if they have made movies that many people consider beneath contempt. Their style has been adapted and ripped-off more than almost any other filmmakers around; surely that's something the patriotic UK film buff can be pleased about. That said, I can understand why she doesn't mention other style-heavy filmmakers from the same background (i.e. advertising), such as Alan Parker and Adrian Lyne, who barely have a good film between them.


Sadly for the UK, Ridley and Tony Scott stayed away while their films became more interesting (Tony Scott had a run of fun action movies in the early 90s, and Ridley makes a lot of flat but ambitious films I feel compelled to see, such as Kingdom of Heaven and Black Hawk Down), and Alan Parker came back to run the UK Film Council. Disastrous. It would have been the worst of all worlds if Adrian Lyne had made anything in the last seven years. I will never forgive him for his disastrous adaptation of Lolita, which remains one of the five worst films of the decade. Yes, worse than Fatal Attraction, Nine and a Half Weeks, and Indecent Proposal glommed together into a big lump of misogynistic Silly Putty, and then bounced off our eyeballs for over two hours. The man is a menace to society.

Why am I dragging up all of this bile? Because last week I saw possibly my favourite British movie of the last ten years, and what's most horrible is that I don't think Billson would like it, primarily because it's not that visual. More on that tomorrow...

ETA: And by "tomorrow" I of course meant two days from now...

Canadian Actor Saves Atheists From Assassins

Though there is nothing more boring than hearing someone telling you about their dreams, I'm going to totally tell you about the dream I just had, because it was strangely awesome. Yesterday, after spending two consecutive days obsessively reading The Huffington Post, Salon, The Daily Dish, Daily Kos, and various other websites pointing out the scary facts about vice-presidential candidate and nemesis of the polar bear Sarah Palin, I had a minor panic attack while washing dishes (not the first time), and then a really scarily detailed vision of what the world would be like if Palin became Vice-President and then President (because I'm thinking worst case scenario, here). It entailed Righteousness testing for all citizens, judging Americans for their loyalty to the Judeo-Christian God, and anyone who failed would be interred in camps for retraining. If that didn't take, they'd be shot. It was seriously terrifying, so terrifying that I forgot where I was and nearly stabbed myself in the hand with a soap-coated knife.

I think I know where it comes from. Recently I read God Is Not Great by that pissy souse Christopher Hitchens (the quality of the book is inversely proportional to his likeability), and having also read The God Delusion by the man Dawkins, and Sam Harris' The End Of Faith, it's made me very jumpy when it comes to my atheism and how it is viewed by fundamentalists of all different flavours. While I obviously have nothing against religiously inclined individuals, monolithic institutions do scare me greatly, and the thought that I would be punished for not believing in God weighs heavily on me. I appreciate that the books mentioned above are the atheist equivalent of the Daily Mail's Hate Your Neighbour ranting (though much better written, obviously), and that the effect they had on me (XXXtreme ennui and terror) was my own fault for gobbling them down, but the fact remains, they put the fear of not-God into me. Yes, my mind has come to the conclusion, after reading about her vehement belief in God, that Sarah Palin (seen here with a crustacean representing her soul)...


...is the living embodiment of Mrs. Carmody from The Mist.


Be afraid. Be really really really afraid. Another contributing factor to my upsetting vision is Ed Zwick's The Siege, which was on Sky Movies this weekend. When it came out years and years ago I thought it was passably entertaining, but then with my feeble understanding of the Middle East I didn't think it was insensitive either, especially as the real bad guys were Bruce Willis and Annette Bening (well, other than the poorly sketched Islamic terrorists who are just boogeymen with no dialogue and no inner life except "Kill Infidels!"). The thing that struck me most were the horrible scenes of New York Muslims interred in concentration camps, which were shown as an example of policy gone wrong, as a huge over-reaction and disastrous decision, and not as a possibly good idea should it ever come to that. At its best, it shows that Posse Comitatus is probably a good thing. Sadly, it's not at its best very often. For the majority of its running time, it's lunk-headed and doofy.


Of course, seeing it now with a bit more knowledge at hand, it is also prescient and uncomfortable viewing, not to mention dumb, cliched, and offensive on many levels, but if you don't focus on the ineptly presented politics, Bening and Denzel Washington have an entertaining chemistry, Tony Shalhoub is great value as ever, and OMG! Look, in the supporting cast! Lance "Intensity" Reddick (operating at minimal intensity, which is still pretty goddamn intense), and Aasif Mandvi in a depressing role as Cowardly Muslim What Gets Chased Everywhere. Seeing one of our favourite Daily Show correspondents saying little more than "Durka durka!" prior to getting roughed up by Bening's goons was a miserable experience. And what does he get out of it? Denzel feels sorry for him getting beaten up when it turns out he is a mere patsy, and then gives him a cigarette as an apology. Yay? Here he is in happier times.


So, with all of this playing on my nerves, nerves that are already shot due to frustrating economic and employment concerns, last night I dreamt that the UK had been hit by a massive influx of atheists flying over from America to avoid the pogroms against them, orchestrated by Sarah Palin-Carmody with miltary force. N.B. I'm using the word in the sense of violence against any group, and not in its (regrettably) more common anti-Semitic form. As the UK cannot cope with the effects of this huge exodus, it goes all Children of Men as camps are set up throughout the country to house the Americans. And yes, I'm aware that this is a fucked up dream. Even worse, President Palin-Carmody demands the return of all of the atheists for immediate religious retraining and righteous punishment by her Christian militia, and PM Gordon Brown, still in thrall to the American machine and concerned about the growing anger over the rise in immigration, strongly considers this. At about this point I turned up in the dream, as someone helping out at the camps, working as an liaison between the Americans and the British soldiers running the joint, but just to complicate matters I kinda woke up at about this point, and thought, as is often the case when half awake, that I was dreaming the best goddamn movie ever, and started to plot it out in my semi-conscious state. That would account for how I got replaced in my dream-movie by Nathan Fillion, someone several thousand times hotter and more charming than me.


Yes, the hero of this movie, played by Nathan Fillion, hears that the government is thinking of shipping the Americans back to the States, and helps lead a rebellion against this. The Americans, in horror, decide to stay within the camps, which in turn causes more trouble for the government. Unable to remove the Americans without terrible consequences, and with the British troops unwilling to act against them out of sympathy, the government allows fundamentalist black ops assassins to infiltrate the camp containing our hero, which is where the dream got a bit stupid. For a start, they were stealthily disguised as black leather-clad ninja-bikers with machine guns, and as they try to mow down the defenseless atheists, the hero takes them down, yanking one ninja-biker off his bike, snapping his neck with the machine gun strap, and turning the gun on the other assassins. Awesome violence ensues as he saves the atheists! Then, however, he starts to suspect that someone in the camp is not who they seem. And that someone is played by Sean Connery.


I know, I didn't get that either. Sean Connery tells Nathan Fillion that there is evil afoot, and while they sit around a camp fire eating marshmallows, Connery reveals that Gordon Brown has allowed the assassins free run at the camps, and thinks the slaughter of the atheists would get a sticky political situation off his back. Our hero is rightly disgusted by this, and storms into the visitors gallery in the House of Commons. Mid-debate, our hero reveals the dastardly plot to let the White House fundamentalists send their ninja-bikers into the concentration camps to kill the atheists, and there is uproar among the MPs as Gordon Brown slumps down onto his bench, shredded copies of Hansard fluttering around him, his sneaky and cowardly plans responsible for his downfall. I also remember thinking, while half-asleep, that that would be awesome.

Sadly my subconscious wasn't done yet. Upon returning to the camp to tell everyone the good news, a random American informs our hero that he has found out that Sean Connery is not who he seems to be. He is actually Allan Quatermain, as played by Sean Connery in The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen! (That must be because I've been thinking about Colonel Gentleman from The Venture Brothers recently.) Realising this, our hero chases Quatermain down to his ramshackle house in North London, where he lives alone with his enormous collection of goth porn. Quatermain insists that he regrets nothing, and that he is happy with his life as a collector of depressing pornography. However, our hero cannot escape with the knowledge of his true identity and depraved hobby, and so Quatermain pulls out a toy laser gun, modelled after something from an old Flash Gordon serial, and fires it! Except it doesn't go off as expected. In a weirdly elaborate effects sequence that played out in scarily vivid detail in my brain, a super-close-up of the gun shows electricity running through it, vaporising the plastic, causing it to explode. Quatermain doesn't die, but the words, "Don't let her down!" are splattered across the wall in hot plastic. The End!

Well, the end of the dream-movie, which wraps up with a title card and the frozen image of the plastic message, leaving me, Canyon, and Jaredan from World of Wahhhcraft sitting in a cinema, surrounded by geeks in Watchmen t-shirts. Yes! It was not my movie we saw, it was Zack Snyder's Watchmen, transformed from a deconstruction of the superhero genre into a cross between The Siege, Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, and some bad Mark Wahlberg action movie starring an undervalued Canadian acting genius. As we spilled out into the street, the nerds and fanboys rejoiced at this version of Watchmen, proclaiming it an enormous success (though I remember bitching that Moloch had been written out), and then all began cheering, "Fuck you Fox! Fuck you Fox! Fuck you Fox!" At that point, one of our cats put her paw squarely on my trachea, and I woke up.

I reckon, as long as I take out the Allan Quatermain references but keep the goth porn and ninja-bikers, and maybe add some transforming robots, I've got a hit on my hands. Watch this space!!!

What's So Great About The Dark Knight?

It's been over a week since I saw The Dark Knight, and yet I have not blogged about it, mostly because of the bizarre reactions to the movie as expressed all over the internet. It's the fastest backlash I've ever seen, which garnered an equally fast backlash against the backlash. As of now, with a worldwide box office gross that stands at the approximate figure of $597,387,000 after seventeen days (after being released in only a few countries), and IMDb users voting it the best movie of all time (as of today's date), there are seemingly only two available opinions about it: "it's a masterpiece", and "no it's not".

Warning to the four people who have yet to see The Dark Knight: Spoilers ahoy!


From my obsessive trawl through the heated debate which is popping up everywhere like weeds in a poorly tended garden, the opinion of the blogospherical joint consciousness seems to be bouncing back to an overall negative view of the movie's merits. Over the last couple of days I've seen The Dark Knight lambasted for not featuring enough Joker, for showing too much Joker and not enough Batman, for rushing Harvey Dent's transformation, for being too violent, for not being violent enough, for spending too much time on Dent at the expense of the Joker, for being too long, for not developing its ideas far enough, for not explaining the Joker properly, for smelling of rotten eggs, for being too loud (because Christopher Nolan is going from screen to screen adjusting the volume), for being badly lit (!!!!!), for not generating genital-obliteringly powerful spontaneous orgasms in those who see it like we were all promised, etc. etc. etc.

As a result of the excitement and enthusiasm of the fanboy massive, the drubbings have been especially vicious. Armond White's increasingly notorious panning (during which he suggests only 21 year olds could be enthusiastic about it, and compares it poorly against De Palma’s vapid and messy Black Dahlia, of all films) and Kevin Uhlich’s dissection of the film are especially forthright, coming early and thus gathering the majority of internet hatred like some much hatey pollen to a bee’s leg, much of which is so knee-jerk and poorly written that it does the fanbase a terrible disservice. There was more to come; Patrick Goldstein from the LA Times comments on the rapidly growing phenomenon here, and this Cinematical article followed the growing online controversy here, at the bottom of which you will find comments from critic David Edelstein, commenting on being flamed by many Batfans. It’s all depressing, but, as Cinematical points out, at least there’s this excellent response to Keith Uhlich and Stephanie Zacharek's reviews at Only The Cinema. It is possible to engage with the critics in an intelligent, non-flamy manner, and that proves it.

The question I pose myself, though, is can I do that? If some critics had an overwhelmingly negative reaction to the movie, then that's the experience they had. Obviously there's nothing wrong with that. And yet, my gut response to these criticisms, from paid reviewers and unpaid bloggers, is "What the fuck is wrong with these people? It's a work of unbelievable integrity, vision, and genius!!!" I'm not leaving insulting and poorly written comments on people's blogs, but still, I've been pissed. It's only once I've stopped gripping my Batman action figures with all the force of my frustration that I realise I've gone fucking crazy. What is going on here? Why have I taken leave of my senses in the same way that the Batman fanbase has? And why would I do that when Batman isn't even my favourite superhero? Or even in my top ten? It's deeply worrying, and a few days ruminating on it leads me to believe we (the fanboys) are all being silly, losing our perspective, but that we do have reason to be irked by some of the negative remarks, i.e. those that have been made from either a position of ignorance or snobbery. The problem with that is, how can I tell genuine, justifiable dislike from expressions of that critic's bias against movies of this type?

First, I'll address my craziness. One of my fears (an unprovable one) is that the negativity is just a reaction to the crazy praise it was getting prior to release. If this is one explanation, I understand, considering Peter "Shill" Travers was first out of the gate with the line "the haunting and visionary Dark Knight soars on the wings of untamed imagination", which is beyond parody. The IMDb vote craziness certainly justifies a slapped forehead of horror, even if you really loved the movie. Not that it matters much in the scheme of things, but it can make a viewer predisposed to disliking the film just because the fanboys are crazy (I gather this is one of the reasons people reject Joss Whedon; his fans are often seen as too enthusiastic). As I say, there's no way I can prove this, but it happens.


Another part of my frustration is definitely rooted in my nerdiness, and the reflexive defensiveness I have towards myself and those of my ilk (I make it sound like we're a put-upon ethnic group, for crying out loud), hoping for some validation from the critical establishment that the superhero genre (or the sci fi genre, or the horror genre, etc.) that I love so much is not just treated as the low-quality flotsam and jetsam of modern culture, that they are understood to be tools and canvasses for telling stories and exploring modern life, and not just whizz-bang-zoom spectacles that overload the eye but avoid the heart and brain. I realise that that defensiveness is my problem, not anyone else's. However, how can I take the thoughts of a critic seriously is his or her dislike of a genre is not backed up by anything other than a sense that it is not worthy of serious appraisal?

I get that critics might have biases against filmmakers; hell, I get angered to the point of localised space/time warpage at Lars Von Trier's experiments in audience baiting. But an entire genre? Canyon and I once had a long conversation about romantic comedies, and she made me see how crazy it is to dismiss every movie in a genre just because it doesn't appeal to me. She was right. We both think the genre has been ill-served over the last few years, but that's not the genre's fault. The movies have just often been uninspiring. That's not a criticism that can be levelled at the superhero genre (which bleeds into the action and sci fi genres, or the crime genre as in The Dark Knight). This year has already seen the vastly entertaining Iron Man and the bold failure Hancock (which tried to approach the genre from a different angle, though it didn't really succeed the way I had hoped), though the unambitious but amusing Incredible Hulk didn't help my argument. Luckily, The Dark Knight reaches higher than all of them. Which is where the difference of opinion seems to fall most often.

Sure, a lot of people are down on the movie for the filming of the action. To be honest, I only had a problem in the hostage sequence toward the end of the movie, though that could have been because I was trying to get my head around the moral quandary at the heart of the scene and I was freaking out a little (because, emotionally, I'm like a small child). Others think some actors didn't get much to do (I'd say Gyllenhaal definitely got the short end of the stick), and that Batman was sidelined (I'm not sure about that, but if that's your take on it, then... well... that's your take on it, I guess). Some hated the palette (totally! It really needed some garish reds and oranges and maybe some lemon yellows!). I'm sure someone out there hated it because the Scarecrow didn't get enough to do, or Killer Croc wasn't introduced, or because Batman contradicted something he said in a Denny O'Neil issue from the 70s. I would be crazy to have a problem with any of that opinion (except the palette criticism).

That’s not the kind of thing I want to rail against, though. I don’t agree with much of that, but it’s someone else’s opinion. However, what really does gall me is that UK critics seem to hate the movie mostly for trying to expand its ambition beyond the parameters of the superhero genre that they have decided upon, thinking it incapable of being more than a reductive and nuance-free depiction of a black and white battle between opposing forces. If you think no critic would ever dismiss an entire genre like that, read this wilfully nasty and unfair review by Michael Atkinson.

Somehow the entirety of American culture, young and middle-yeared and old, is embracing the childish universe of superheroes – which is structured around the easily-distracted worldview of kids, not around the reasoned, complex worldview we would hope children would grow into. Does America need that badly a post-post-9/11 big Daddy to vanquish danger so we can slumber in our cradles? The much-lamented infantilization of the mass populace continues, and at what cost?

As you can imagine, I have no truck with that opinion, nor with the rest of his pissy review, especially his comments about there being no story there, which baffle me. He must have been scribbling “HATE HATE HATE” in his notebook during it and forgot to watch it. That said, fair play to him for nailing his colours to the mast. UK critics exhibit similar bias, but don’t go as far in expressing their hatred. Superhero movies represent the most obvious example of dumbing-down in modern culture? Is he serious? The wish-fulfilment aspect of the genre is definitely an important part of it, but it’s not the most important, especially when a movie like The Dark Knight comes along and challenges that specific notion. Is he angry because once the genre is legitimised by this and, hopefully, Watchmen, he will have to go to the trouble of finding a new knee-jerk enemy of culture to hate on (I doubt this would happen, somehow)?


If you have read this blog before, you'll know that I have a bee in my BatBonnet about possible bias against genre movies (and all of the Shades of Caruso team has a problem with the possible bias against genre TV). I had hoped that The Dark Knight, directed by a Brit, would avoid that kind of thoughtless dismissal, but sadly not. I'm not saying the UK reviews are proof of a definite bias, and I'm certainly not saying it amounts to any more than a hill of biased beans in this crazy mixed-up world, but if I'm ever going to take the work of a critic seriously, I don't want to have to work around their preconceptions about an entire genre. Michael Atkinson in particular is someone I cannot bring myself to read again, not because he insulted me and my brethren, but because he is incapable of seeing the merits of a large proportion of popular culture, the best examples of which often become cultural signifiers or benchmarks of artistic quality over time. It’s not I'm having a hissy-fit just because his worldview doesn’t tally with mine 100%; whose does? It’s that he refuses to grapple with these pop-culture phenomena in a serious manner. I may not like comedies that do little more than spoof other movies in the most flat and obvious way possible, but I’ll at least engage with them, a position that once led to an unexpected fit of giggles experienced while watching Scary Movie 4 (bravo, Anna Faris. Bravo).

Anyway, here are some examples of what I see as an obnoxious bias against the superhero genre in the UK press, which was far more negative than the US press. Sukhdev Sandhu, in the Daily Telegraph, liked the movie, and yet still had to get a dig in [from this point on, italics mine]:

anyone who prefers their entertainment with less rather than more of a message may wish to shield their ears during the dialogue about the "cost of power"... Other reservations: shouldn't Nolan, marvellous as his directing here is, be creating original films rather than rebooting and retooling franchise fare? Why can't Hollywood put a tenth as much of the craft and vim into its average releases as it does into what is ultimately only a superhero movie?

Philip French seemed to like it more than most, but also said:

The Dark Knight is a clever, loud, technically brilliant film, superbly designed by Nathan Crowley and dramatically lit by Wally Pfister. Whether such a movie can bear the increasing moral weight imposed upon it is another matter.

Peter Bradshaw, whose Iron Man review annoyed me earlier this year, seemed to thoroughly enjoy The Dark Knight, but even so, is under the impression Christopher Nolan is doomed to do nothing but make nothing but summer superhero movies for the rest of his life:

Nolan has made an enormously profitable smash with the Batman franchise, but at the risk of sounding priggish, I can't help thinking it may be a bit of a career blind-alley for the talented director who gave us brilliant and disquieting movies like Following (1998) and Memento (2000), whose inventions still linger in the mind. The Dark Knight's massive box-office success has surely given Nolan the means to write his own cheque, and in addition something sweeter still - clout. I hope that he will use it to cultivate movies that are smaller and more manoeuvrable than that great armoured Batmobile.

Anthony Quinn thought it average, but when he gets the chronology of the film wrong you tend to think he wasn't really paying attention:

Art and entertainment feel locked in a deadly struggle, which accounts for the movie's peculiar schizoid personality. Just when it poses its most heart-stopping question – how do you tell a loved one facing imminent death that "everything's going to be all right"? – it swerves into a maniacal car chase, with our hero now hot-rodding a vehicle known as a Batpod, a kind of monster-truck tyre with a seat. The ear-lacerating volume and the automotive mayhem that attend these action sequences seem to be doing everything possible to shake whatever subtleties that may have entered one ear straight out of the other.

Dude! The shots of the BatPod racing through the streets are not part of a chase, but a tension-cranking cross-cut between the imminent death of two characters and Batman's attempts to save one of them. Surely this is self-evident, unless you're trying to score points against it. Fellow Independent reviewer Jonathan Romney also seems to have not been paying attention:

Played again by Christian Bale, he now speaks, when masked, in a gravelly synthetic bass; he also has an eerie habit of suddenly appearing out of and vanishing into shadows.

He now speaks and hides in shadows? What was he doing in the first movie, then? His comments about the Batmobile in the next paragraph suggest he didn’t see Batman Begins at all:

This is an impressive film in many ways, and Nolan directs with real confidence, yet the overall result feels cumbersome. The tenor is set by Nolan's conception of the Batmobile – a clanking all-terrain engine of war, a chunk of brutalist engineering that manifestly weighs tons. There's something comparably tank-like about the film, and despite several genuinely head-spinning moments, it all comes to feel grimly overwhelming, a vision of total war you fear will never end.

For goodness' sake, no one expected a return to Adam West and bad puns, but this cocktail of ultraviolence, artillery and pessimism makes for a gruelling, even depressing experience. Perhaps Warner Bros could offer the next episode to Werner Herzog, just to cheer things up a bit.

We see a genre damned for being fluffy, or damned for trying to do something more ambitious. Why did Nolan bother? Especially when Britain has its very own Michael Atkinson, except with a tiny IQ and a fear of the modern. Christopher Tookey, you win some kind of horrible internet award for being an out-of-touch Toryboy waggling a miserly fist at a world you can’t even be bothered to try to understand:

You can take a character out of a comic-strip, but you can't take the comic-strip out of the character. Batman is not a tragic hero at all, but an adolescent action-figure with the kind of problems most of us can only dream of having. This may make him good box-office - especially among males who feel ineffectual, impoverished and lacking in even one personality - but it doesn't give him the depth of Hamlet.

Oh Tookey, you little bitch!

This summer blockbuster explores grand themes: whether it can be right to use torture on terrorists; the conflict between public and private morality; and whether the public prefers to be told lies rather than deal with the truth. The Nolan brothers are clearly determined not to be confused with the Nolan Sisters [ZING!]. I appreciate their ambition, but they've over-reached - and lost their sense of humour... Their film is compromised by the perceived demands of its audience. It's grimly sadistic. It doesn't fight terror, it embraces it. Ledger becomes, in a curiously twisted way, the moral centre of the film, and this makes The Dark Knight an unintentionally sick spectacle, pretending to justify law and justice, but in reality celebrating violence and chaos.

Perhaps when you're a critic sitting in the dark with a bunch of similarly disgruntled men and women whose heads have been filled with talk of movie genius, it's easy to think that, but how does that account for the reaction of the audience I saw it with, comprising a demographic of men and women of differing ages, ethnicities, and cultural expectations, who reacted most strongly to Tiny Lister's disposal of the detonator during the ferry scene. I know I choked up at his decision, and the room erupted into applause and cheering. Sorry, Tookey. The Joker actually lost completely, both in Gotham and the real world. Rail against the Hypothetical Idiot all you like, but he/she is HYPOTHETICAL! Get used to it.

It wasn’t all bad. While this incoherent rant on the Guardian’s Comment Is Free section does little to dispel the suspicion that CiF is The Great Blogging Graveyard, this blog from The Times is endearingly nerdy and filled with good points . In fact, James Christopher is the only UK critic that seemed to really love it, though Cosmo Landesman's point-missing Sunday Times drubbing made up for that. The FT’s magnificent critic, Nigel Andrews, wasn’t crazy about it either, but at least his review was well-written and contained many good points, as always.

So is it just a knee-jerk dismissal of the genre? Surely something like that would have been universally applied across transatlantic lines, and while I’ve linked to some reviews that have just sneered, “superheroes are for kids”, most critics embraced the film for taking the genre seriously and showing what it is capable of illuminating. Jenny McCartney, who also rails against its rating in a dramatic piece full of Daily Mail-esque "WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN!?!?!?!!?? panic, also says in her dismissive review:

This is essentially an adult action thriller, in which the action itself is often difficult to discern from the darkened screen, a roaring tangle of crashes and explosions and muttered imprecations. Added to this is a jumbled sprinkling of philosophy on the nature of heroism, villainy and the necessary lies it takes to keep the public believing in something grander than selfish survival.

If the meaning behind the mayhem is difficult for an adult to perceive, it would be well nigh impossible for a child. But then, despite the heavy marketing and the almost inconceivably indulgent 12A rating (meaning that any under-12 can see it with an adult) this is not a film that pre-adolescent children should watch.

The Independent ran a piece about the rating that put the BBFC's decision in a clearer light, but I'm still pissed that the BBFC chose to do that (either in a fit of liberalism or due to pressure from Warner Bros.), if only because this adult movie now ends up being treated as Public Enemy No. 1 Child Corrupter (knocking Grand Theft Auto IV off its perch of evil) when it is plain to see it is not a movie for children. It's an adult movie dealing with adult themes (in a manner I found easy to follow, UK film critics, and I'm not alone in that judgment, I'm sure), and that it came during the summer months, when film critics froth at the mouth at the lack of substance to Hollywood movies, has served to confuse panicky critics who were expecting nothing more than BOOM BANG.


Yet what do we get? Relief that it is possible to fuse serious subject matter with the expected number of WOW moments? Of course not. Just anger that something from such a tawdry genre, designed merely to appeal to children, would be crazy enough to try to address a serious subject in a thoughtful manner, when it should only be full of explosions and bright colours and two-dimensional motivations and not be seen by anyone who has the complete Bergman collection at home, because liking genre movies means you are a simpleton and emotional retard who is incapable of seeing more than two sides to a conflict.

Of course, if The Dark Knight was like that it would be hated for not having any ambition, but what are you going to do? American culture is morally corrupt and intellectually dead, anyway. Oh, if only Christopher Nolan could return to the country that recognised his talent and threw money at it all those years ago! Then he could make another version of Northanger Abbey or Jane Eyre! Or a comedy about two mis-matched Islington professionals trying to find love in the middle of a multicultural city that conspicuously fails to show any significant characters of non-white ethnicity! Or Happy-Go-Fucking-Lucky!

Even worse than all of that, some writers are reading the film as a pro-Bush, pro-rendition, pro-phone-tapping argument. It's not pro-phone tapping or rendition. These actions undertaken by Batman are shown to have negative effects. Lao, captured by Batman and dragged back to Gotham to testify against Maroni, is brought into immediate danger and killed by The Joker. Batman raises the game with his bold actions and loses the love of his life, the way out of his psychic torment (though he was deluding himself all along with that), and even his support from the world, having to paint himself as a villain, a martyrdom that must have been borrowed from the little bits of messianic symbolism left over from Wall*E.

Yes, Batman prevails, but the Joker is still around, and to just capture him he has to betray himself and isolate himself from everyone, symbolised by the switching off of the phone-tapping program (which I thought was a nice nod to Brother Eye). If it is a straight reading from this to America and the War on Terror, it's saying, "if you're going to play as dirty as the bad guys, you're going to have to give up everything that you are and everything that you have, and even then you're not going to win. The only way the battle can be won is if we all agree to not lose our heads, to remember on an individual level that we are human". The battle rages between two men high above the city, but it is won with two simple choices by two "mortal" men, one “evil”, one “good”.

That's how it is done. We're not meant to approve of Batman's actions; Morgan Freeman, as the audience surrogate, proves that with his displeasure over "Brother Eye". Critics seem to have missed that point, thinking that because it's a superhero, he is the one we should be automatically applauding, which means the Nolans are expecting us to accept his immoral tactics, but that's not the case. We're meant to be horrified. Considering all of this talk about the movie not being as deep as people thought, it seems it was too deep for those who couldn't appreciate that glaringly obvious fact. The only writer who seemed to understand that the movie was loosely playing with War on Terror tropes without actually transposing them directly from our world to the world of Batman was Moriarty’s customarily excellent take from AICN. Some of the other cultural commentators would do well to read that.


Why should I care what anyone else thinks? Why would I get so monstrously obsessed with the experiences of people I'll never meet, and I regularly both agree and disagree with? And, perhaps most pertinently, why would I doubt the opinions of others, thinking them the product of some innate snobbery or inherited bias, and not just their actual opinion made from a point of view that is merely different from mine and not caused by some form of voluntary cultural myopia? Possibly because of all of the films I've seen recently, this was the one that moved me the most, more than almost any movie I have seen in the last few years. Believe me, I was as annoyed by the relentless hype as anyone, and tried to keep as open a mind as possible, fully expecting to like the movie but not love it, especially after a pre-Dark Knight viewing of Batman Begins revealed that I had increased reservations about it since it was first released.

Those efforts were futile. The Dark Knight amazed me more than I could ever have hoped, leaving me emotionally drained even before the final, heartbreaking scene. The escalation of The Joker's campaign of psychological torture, the city's response to it, and Batman's final sacrifice shattered me. Is that merely because I love superheroes and superhero movies? Maybe, but for the most part I forgot I was watching one. It was more like watching L.A. Confidential than a "popcorn flick".

Was it because I saw it in IMAX? Possibly. We were lucky enough to see it at the Leows IMAX in New York, with a mostly fantastic audience (except for the shrieky woman sitting in front of us who refused to turn off her phone and tried to kill the guy who asked her). Every big moment in the movie was greeted with laughter or applause; the pencil trick, the BatPod, the end of the big chase sequence, The Joker shuffling out of the hospital, and best of all, Tiny Lister and the detonator. I'm not ashamed to say that made me cry. What I suspect would have already been an overwhelming moment was made even more moving by the elation around me.

While critics have carped about the action scenes and what they consider to be faux-profundity, the only flaw in the movie that I could see was that Heath Ledger’s performance was of such an otherworldly nature that it overshadowed Aaron Eckhart’s excellent work as the inspirational Harvey Dent, and the twisted psychotic Two-Face. In the middle of a superb cast taking the subject matter as seriously as possible, he was a stand-out. Even better, those incredible IMAX shots of Gotham, shot with glorious precision by Wally Pfister, took our breath away. On that vast screen it was like looking through a window at a real world (I know it was filmed in Chicago, but surely there were buildings added in post-production). As we left Loews and walked around New York, it felt like we were still in the movie, so much so that I expected Batman to zoom past at any moment.


That feeling lasted all day, keeping the movie running through my head long after we left, riding past a construction site covered in signs featuring the word Gotham, and on to the Lincoln Tunnel, with its art deco spires. I didn't just see a movie; I had an amazing experience, and New York was only half of it. I've proselytised about IMAX before, and been obnoxious about it on message boards, but really, if you want to see The Dark Knight in such a way as to make it hard to care about the flaws or shortcomings of the film, you need to see it on a bigass screen. Maybe it won't work for me on a small screen. Maybe in time my high opinion of it will fade over time just as it has for Batman Begins. Perhaps critics who were agnostic about it would love it in IMAX, seen with an enthusiastic audience, especially one that isn't baying for blood like The Hapless Tookey imagines. Who can say? All I know is that for now at least, it might not be the best film I've ever seen, but I can't imagine 2008 offering up anything superior. It was everything I had hoped for and much much more. Now we have to see if it holds up to further viewings, as soon as IMAX Waterloo has some tickets spare.

BBC Breakfast Watch! Wii Insults Child Shocker!

I've got to stop watching this show. Isn't the whole idea that it's supposed to be a mental Valium for people getting up and going to work? Forget it. It's like a dose of adrenaline to the heart muscle for me. Or having an electrode jammed into my brain like in the amazing season finale of House.

I'm skewing my complaints about it toward the treatment of technology, which goes along the lines of, "Oh teh noes! We don't understand what this gadget does but it will probably be deadly!" (if this show had its way, we'd all be sitting in swamps eating mud and grunting with animal-like terror every time the moon appears in the sky). As that means I'm also watching them deal with children (because technology will turn our children into cyborgs or corpses of mass-murderers), I'm also judging them on what could be called a Daily Mail Quotient (DMQ), which measures the volume of their terrified screams of, "What about the children? Please, think of the children?!?!?!". That almost means Marvin Gaye should be judged for his DMQ, but I'll give him a pass, because, you know, it's Marvin Gaye, people.


The recent Grand Theft Auto IV panic would get a DMQ score of about 89%, as it posited the end of civilisation if kids kept playing it (which they shouldn't be anyway). Their total misunderstanding of what texting is, and their worry that it will make all children everywhere forget how to speak the English language got about an 84% DMQ, and probably would have been higher if they hadn't been shown up by the level-headed fifteen year old in their midst. Funnily enough, the news piece that annoyed me today was covered by the Daily Mail last week; a ten year old girl used a Wii Fit machine belonging to her friends and was referred to as technically obese according to the BMI.

Breakfast had a mother, the daughter in question, and another daughter for no apparent reason, and the Street Doctor, the improbably named Dr. Jonty Heaversedge. It was your standard nonsense, with Bill asking the girl what had happened and terrifying her into silence, Dr. Jonty saying kids shouldn't be measured according to the BMI, and the mother agreeing with that and being mortified because her daughter (who is obviously not obese or overweight) wanted to go on a diet.


There are a few things about the feature that annoyed me. Firstly, Bill terrorising the young girl by asking how muscular she is. Bad Pervert Bill! Secondly, the possibility that the machine was just broken or calibrated wrong. This seemed so self-evident to me that I was shocked no one brought it up until halfway through the interview, when Bill suggested it might have been knackered. Good Perceptive Bill! Boing Boing came to the same conclusion. Of course, the mother had never considered that and wasn't there when her daughter got on the machine, so it's possible her friends messed it and got the set-up wrong, or even worse, manipulated it to make it seem like she was overweight. It's possible, but no one wanted to consider that, because if that was the case, no one gets to get their Righteous Outrage on, send complaint emails to Nintendo, and get interviewed on TV and by the Daily Mail.

Even if the machine was working correctly, I'm still pissed, as the whole point of this "campaign" seems to be caused more by the fact that the parents had complained to Nintendo, demanding a warning be placed on the game, and Nintendo refused, issuing this statement instead.

Nintendo would like to apologise to any customers offended by the in-game terminology used to classify a player's current BMI status, as part of the BMI measurement system integrated into Wii Fit.

Wii Fit is still capable of measuring the BMI for people aged between two and 20 but the resulting figures may not be entirely accurate for younger age groups due to varying levels of development.

The fact that it measures kids from the age of two seemed to drive Susannah Reid (subbing for Sian) into paroxysms of outraged disbelief, which amused me. However, Dr. Jonty dissed the use of BMI for kids, as kids change size so often it's hard to quantify it, and the mother was probably pissed she didn't get a free Wii for her troubles upset that there wasn't a warning on the machine saying that the machine might inaccurately judge a child's weight to be problematic.

Dr. Jonty is right that if we use standard BMI calculations for children we would be silly billies, but BMI for children and teens is calculated differently, and even though it takes into account as many different variables as it can, it must still be used in conjunction with common sense, and the guidance of professional medical expert and parents who spend enough time with their children to know what their dietary habits and daily exercise regimes are like (and by "regimes" I mean as little as running around or using a bike, not pumping iron and running mini-marathons). Also, I don't own a Wii Fit, and haven't seen the instruction manuals, but these things are often really exhaustive, as Nintendo know all it takes is one mistake on these things and they will get hit with a million lawsuits. I wonder if the possible inaccuracies of the BMI is mentioned in it. I'll do some digging, if possible. (Don't count on it. A knackered ankle has laid me out for the day.)


I understand that telling a child they are obese when they are obviously not might damage the child's self-image so badly they might develop an eating disorder, but as it is not a function of a child's internal assessment of what the world considers acceptable (which, it has been argued, can be distorted by exposure to images of size zero models and skinny actresses on TV and in film), surely it's easily caught. If a responsible parent (who should surely be around when their kids are playing an exercise-intensive game like Wii Fit anyway) notices that their child has been told by a game that they are obese, then they can tell their child this is not the case. And that's exactly what happened. The young girl was informed by her parents that the machine made a mistake, and Susannah, having questioned her with more tact than Buffalo-Mouth Bill, managed to glean from the girl that she's fine now and doesn't consider herself obese or overweight. Have there been more cases of this happening? None that we've heard. Crisis probably averted.

There are multiple interesting and crucial debates to be had about children, weight, and self-image to be had, and I'd be crazy to suggest that any of that was trivial, but the paranoia about the Wii Fit is missing the point and confusing people about a machine that will be far more beneficial in the long run than any number of angry letters and outraged newspaper articles. This is the same whenever there is a launch of new hardware or software. People wonder how it will negatively impact on their lives and kick up a stink.

Remember when the Wii came out and everyone broke their living rooms because they weren't putting the wrist-strap on? Everyone was pissed at the Wii for a fortnight, complaining to Nintendo instead of just putting the strap on (that's what she said). It's the same here. New technology arrives that could change the way the world lives, and journalists have been waiting for a reason to demonise it. And here it is. And it's wrong. The Wii Fit is a good thing, and this one glitch, which might have been caused by any number of things and is easily resolved using common sense, should not overshadow the good that it can do. Try telling that to journalists and the panicky parents they leave in their wake, though.


Anyway, it wasn't all technophobia this morning. They had Genesis on the show, as BBC Four are wasting a night of programming on the one-time prog heroes turned unadventurous noodlers. That meant they had a particularly aloof Phil Collins in the studio. Quick! Someone tax him before he gets away!

Speed Racer Vs. Total Critical And Popular Apathy

Perhaps it was always going to be a hard sell. With the fanboys turning their noses up at what looked like a candy-coloured movie for babies, critics followed their cue, leaving a handful of cinema-goers excited about the film and feeling like pariahs (yes, poor me). Genre movies (by which I mean sci fi, fantasy, or horror) always get a hard time from critics, and while I'm not crazy enough to suggest that any film that fits the category is automatically worthy of praise (there's a lot of genuine shit out there), I would hope critics realise they are all worthy of serious attention. I get that it's hard for a critic to really give all of their attention to every movie released each week, but even so, any movie that fits the bill described above (and often any movie that can easily be sneeringly dismissed as "typically Hollywood") will be the one to fall by the wayside.


That I expected. The UK reviews of Speed Racer have been horrible, a litany of horrified complaint about the subject matter, the performances, the plot, the running time, and most often, the visual style. "A movie of such garishness and impenetrability as to test the stoicism of any audience member older than 14," says The Independent's Anthony Quinn! "I can’t begin to describe how creepy this futuristic movie is," says James Christopher of The Times! "You have to be 12 to like it, and I have to say there is little or nothing here to remind us why we were all quite so excited about The Matrix," says Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian, who also describes Lost as "interminable," and as a result is removed from my Love List and placed on my Shit List (he was already on probation for that appalling Iron Man review last week).

In fact, the only mainstream critic who liked it was Sukhdev Sandhu of the Telegraph, who still had reservations but seemed to get that it was for kids and not think this was a terrible strike against it. James Christopher seemed to think that it was a kids' film by accident. I won't even begin to point out the laziness of Anthony Quinn's review, which led me to believe he had lost his press pack and couldn't be bothered to even Wikipedia the source material; he also missed vital plot points that were not that hard to spot and then bitched about subsequent "illogicalities" (his comments about Speed's race up a cliff-face are the ones that made me mad, if you're curious).


I would have liked to have seen Nigel Andrew's review, as he usually responds positively to films that are a bit out there, but he appears to be missing in action at the moment. The most positive review I've read so far is from Moriarty from Ain't It Cool News, and he did what the "respectable" critics couldn't be bothered to do: forget his prejudices and watch the movie on its own terms. You could say he only gave it a chance because he's a nerd critic, but even now, with the film about to be released, nerd opinion is massively critical of it. "It's too garish, it's too childish, it looks stupid, I hated the cartoon, it's got a chimp in it, it's too colourful, it's too fast, it's too weird, it's not violent enough, it's not The Matrix." The Wachowskis seem to have made a movie that no one wanted to see. And they say Hollywood only panders to its audience.


From all of that it should be apparent that I have a huge chip on my shoulder about this, and not just because I regularly get annoyed when critics dismiss genre movies, an annoyance that has been exacerbated by my current reading material, Peter Biskind's Down and Dirty Pictures. It's a hugely entertaining read, and Biskind is a terrific writer, but it is laced with snobbery about Hollywood product, even -- at one point in the introduction -- claiming that its subject matter, independent film, appeals to "real people" in contrast to mainstream populist fare. So is the usual mass audience not made up of people? What are they then, figments of his imagination? Pod people? Androids?

Ridiculous. And insulting. There are millions of people out there (REAL people, even), that will happily watch a movie as transcendently beautiful and moving as Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter...and Spring one day, and then watch Pirates of the Caribbean the next day and have a different experience but one that is no more or less real than the previous one. One isn't better than the other because it does certain things that the other doesn't even attempt. If one has to be judged better than the other, let it be by internal criteria. Which one of them succeeds best at doing what it was made to do? Otherwise we're just going to be bitching at every movie that isn't Citizen Kane for not doing the things Citizen Kane does. That way lies misery and madness.


Sorry, I digressed. As I was saying, I do have an inherent bias towards Speed Racer that makes me touchy about it, and that's down to my love of The Matrix. It's my favourite film, one I can watch over and over again and never get bored of. I still remember the first time I saw it, and the shellshock I felt. I've heard the criticisms of it, and the carping about the sequels (one of which I liked), and I'm not interested. If a movie or book or song is meant to touch the viewer and move them, that's exactly what The Matrix did to me. It was as if the film I had been waiting all my life to see had finally arrived, and it was better than I had hoped for.

So I'm defensive about the Wachowski siblings, and get tetchy when their work is criticised, especially because experience has taught me that film critics will happily dismiss genre work rather than engage with it, as if by dint of its mere existence it is not worthy of the effort. The reviews have focused on two things that are cardinal sins of that enemy of quality that is glossy Hollywood product: how little the story matters, and how emotionally empty the movie is because of the technology used to create the film.


I'll grant that these can be valid criticisms, but only if they are used against films that fail in those respects (and many do; I'm not crazy!), and not just as a kneejerk response against that nasty Hollywood product. Well, I risked breaking my own brain with fatigue and sensory-overload by seeing Speed Racer yesterday, and I can give you my opinion on these most pressing of questions. Does Speed Racer fail in telling a story? No. Is it emotionally empty? No. Here are some other questions that are less important than those, but need answering nonetheless. Is it perfect? No. Does it matter? No. Is it impossible to follow what is going on during the races? As long as you're not sitting in row H of the London Waterloo IMAX or lower, no. Will it make any money at the box office? Probably not, no. Should it? Unequivocally, yes.

Here's a litmus test for anyone watching the movie, and that includes critics. The film starts pretty much in the middle of a race, during which we flash back and forth between the race and Speed Racer's childhood, where he bonds with his brother and idol, Rex, played by Scott "Whiny Jason on FNL" Porter.



The race continues for a little while past that clip, with Speed attempting to break the record set by his brother, who we learn died in disgrace many years later, an event that shaped the lives of the entire Racer family, who are gathered together in the stands watching Speed racing. It's a busy few minutes, setting up the bizarre palette (which you will grow accustomed to much quicker than you might expect), the otherworldly future physics of the race cars (all impossible spins, leaps, and crazy drifting), the family dynamic, the history of the Racer family, their triumphs and failures, and the sadness that haunts them.

If you've gone in expecting a garish, empty movie for kids, the sophistication of the criss-cross narrative format might throw you (there's a particularly bold time-shifting moment in the middle of the film I liked), but there's nothing there to convince you of any emotional depth, until the very end of the race. What Speed does as he's about to cross the finish line is a marker for whether the film is for you. If you don't notice or care about his decision, you're not going to care enough about the characters to give the film a fair shot, and you might as well walk out of the room. If Speed's decision makes you grin, and you understand exactly what his motivation is and admire the character for making that choice, then you might end up liking the movie a lot more than you would have expected.


And I did. A lot. For the majority of the movie I was very happy, if not overjoyed, by what I was experiencing. After a few minutes of discombobulation, the visuals made a lot more sense to me once I had figured out what the Wachowskis were trying to do with them -- i.e., they weren't building a multitude of 3D environments to place the green-screened actors in, and they chose instead to create a number of photographic backgrounds and use them the same way backdrops in animation are used, to slide past each other in a parallax effect.

The only time the environments look fully rendered is during the race scenes, with the tracks featuring a more conventional perspective. The other trick used throughout is the scrolling of talky-heads across the screen, just as in anime. I made my peace with that a lot faster, as it's a technique used so often in Japanese animation that I've become inured to it, though I had a moment of WTF, simply because I'd not seen it used in live-action before. It's a terrific effect, carrying us through expositional dialogue (of which there is quite a bit) without sacrificing pace.


In fact, the dialogue delivered during races, often as a form of flashback, barely alters the pace of the action, so completely does it add energy to what would normally be dreary. A lot of people have said the races are confusing, but I thought they were pretty clean and edited with plenty of clarity, though perhaps if you're not used to the floaty heads it might cause problems (plus, if you're invested in the narrative, they carry plenty of dramatic kick, contrary to the opinion of the critics, at least IMHO).

Those races would mean nothing if they were not surrounded by solid performances and a carefully crafted narrative, and the one we get, concerning the struggle of the little man to succeed in a world where the monolithic nature of The Market stands in the way of artistic expression or freedom of the spirit, as well as the value of teamwork and learning from your mistakes, is immensely satisfying, so much so that the final race, which is already overwhelmingly filmed, achieves a kind of emotional warp factor as dialogue from the previous two hours slides past the camera, and you see just how important it is that Speed wins that race.


The hapless Christopher Tookey of the Daily HateMail stated that the film is meaningless and soulless, but if you've been sucked in by the carefully constructed narrative, the committed, irony-free performances, and the emotionally resonant conflicts and tribulations of our heroes (all of which he missed, instead carping about not knowing what was going on and hating the commercialism of it), the final ten minutes are filled with significance. As I said earlier, for the majority of the film I thought it was very very good. However, my final verdict was boosted by the brilliant, resonant, and totally satisfying finale, where my "overall grade" leapt up about three notches. All of this is code for "I cried at the end." Laugh, you doubters! I don't care.


And yes, it is resolutely a kids' movie. The majority of the humour lies in the actions of Spritle, played by Paulie Litt, who has annoyed some critics but cracked me up consistently, and his simian buddy Chim Chim. They pretty much spend the whole film eating candy, getting into trouble, and throwing Chim Chim cookies around (and I'll let you see the movie and discover what they are). Maybe it's not as "sophisticated" as Jacques Tati and his pipe-smoking japery, but it works and fits the tone of the movie perfectly. However, the plot itself, though featuring a manichean battle between a big corporate scumbag (played to perfection by Roger Allam) and the innocent small guy Speed, is filled with corporate intrigue, reflections on achieving an almost artistic perfection through sport, and what it is to be free to do what you want. That it touches on some of the themes of The Matrix (purpose, free will, self-belief) came as a surprise even to a fan like me. There's even a shot of stock-market notations scrolling across the screen that echoed Matrix Code, a nice little touch that made me smile.


One of the criticisms I saw thrown around (particularly in Bradshaw's review and the AV Club's withering dismissal) is that the film is anti-corporate and yet, hypocritically, is a heavily marketed and expensive big-budget money-making machine unleashed by the Warner Brothers monolith. I'll be honest, I was very worried about that, and reckoned I might have trouble reconciling it with any possible enthusiasm I might have for all the whiz-bang. Again, the Wachowskis surprised me. Roger Allam's Royalton is obviously an unscrupulous bounder and cad, uninterested in racing as sport (or art) and only concerned about how he can gain a monopoly over the production of a revolutionary engine by manipulating the outcomes of races. However, his enthusiasm for the machinations of The Market (revealed in a brilliantly demented monologue about share values) is just as complete and almost childlike as Speed's obsession with racing, even if it does involve ruining the tiny, independent Racer family. Other CEOs featured in the movie do unscrupulous things too, but end up siding with Speed at the end, realising that he is blessed with true talent and artistry in a way that moves them.

Glenn Kenny of Premiere says in his review that, "the narrative of Speed Racer, such as it is, is one of the more blatantly anti-capitalist storylines to come down the cinematic pike since, I dunno, Bertolucci's 1900," which is not what I took from it at all. It's made clear that the Racer family is a business, one that thrives on making cars that will be used by Speed to win races, mostly for the love of the game. But as long as they are allowed to participate on a small level within the financial framework of their world, keeping their aims low, and not worrying about being swallowed up by big business, then they're fine. They don't opt out of the capitalist system at all. They just want to play the game on their own terms, using their talent and ingenuity to make a living. Surely that's at the heart of the capitalist message, something Anthony Lane should keep in mind as he delivers paranoid and inaccurate comments about the film being nothing more than "Pop fascism" (because it features crowds cheering at a sport, for crying out loud). Why doesn't he rail against actual crowds cheering actual sport? Why is it only bad in the context of a movie? Gah!!!


If anything, the film is merely anti-monopoly, anti-greed and anti-corruption, showing how a single spanner in the works of The Market can crush those who abuse their position of power, thus turning the pursuit of prosperity into a game on a level playing field, with room for monoliths and minnows, both aiding each other and prospering from that cooperation and mutual respect. Isn't that what Thomas Friedman naively thinks The Market already is? Of course, we're meant to side with the Racer family exclusively, but it's clear that, just as The Matrix Revolutions ended with a detente between the machines and the humans, Speed Racer finishes with a respectful distance left between his family's independent company and the almost benign Togokhan Racing. At least, that's how I saw it. I will admit I was more interested in the story as parable about one man chasing his dream, doing what he is built to do, and not letting anyone talk him down, but that's just where my head is at right now.


But enough of this. I want to lavish more praise on it. I've never really been a huge fan of John Goodman unless he's in a Coen Brothers film, but this is my favourite non-Lebowski performance by him. His sincerity won me over totally, as he screws up with one son and is given a chance to get it right with Speed. It's a testament to the skill of the Wachowskis that the scene where he attempts to bond with Speed at his lowest ebb is one of the best in the whole film, a finger in the eye of the doubters who insist the film is hollow.


Even better than Goodman (and I know Canyon will be pissed at me for saying it again [You are right. Foxy must be destroyed! -- Canyon]), Foxy is terrific as Racer X, playing it cool and mysterious for the most part, before opening up in two scenes towards the end that rank as my favourites in the whole film. He's come on in leaps and bounds over the past couple of years, and here he's in top form. Plus, he gets to beat up ninjas! Seeing him do some Neo moves on a bad guy made my nerd chip overheat. Also, much love to Owen Paterson, whose production design is a delight from start to finish, and Michael Giacchino, who delivers yet another wonderful soundtrack.

So yes, since seeing it, I've had images from the film popping up in my field of vision like a fever dream; the undulating desert landscape rolling behind Speed, the Eadweard Muybridge homage in the final race, cars exploding into flame and glitter, camera flashbulbs changing into love hearts, highways seen from a distance as glowing ribbons of light, oversaturated colours glowing during the single shootout, and, best of all, a Chim Chim cookie in a bad man's face. Even though I've been happy to rail against what I see as a dismissive critical attitude to it, at least some writers have been eager to point out how gorgeous the whole thing, and it is. It's new. It's something you've seen before done in a completely new way, and as such is a triumph of design, vision, and uncompromising chutzpah. I'd hesitate to recommend it wholeheartedly, because it's obvious it's not going to be for everyone (and I have a terrible feeling it will lose out at the box office to both Iron Man and What Happens In Vegas, which would hurt my feelings as I cannot stand Kutcher or Diaz), but try it out, and maybe apply that litmus test. It might surprise you. Bravo, Wachowskis! Bravo!