I have no opinion either way on the Mills/McCartney divorce trial other than that it's horrible that something private has to have been conducted in front of the entire world. Rumours have flown around about their behaviour in private and public, with both getting their share of criticism. I don't care about that. I hope, for their sake, that it gets resolved if not amicably (which seems to be an impossibility by this point), then at least within the ballpark of not actually killing each other in the High Court.
However, the newspaper coverage has been really annoying. I often wonder what it must be like to be a journalist, and wonder if I have the chops. What is the average day like? Wake up, go to work on tube, refuse to stand up for pregnant woman on tube, arrive at office, shave face in toilet, listen to recording of the Today programme, base inflammatory article around out-of-context argument between Ed Balls and John Humphrys, copy out press release about film opening, get all the facts wrong, reword study into teen behaviour so that it sounds like New Labour are brainwashing women into having unprotected sex with immigrants and then having an image of Stalin tattooed on their backs (I'm imagining a Daily Mail journalist there), head to bar at 12:00, stay there until 23:30. Perhaps that's horribly horribly unfair, but even worse, how hard can it be to be a sub-editor coming up with headlines? Dealing with crappy copy from those addled hacks means they don't have enough time to come up with better headlines for the Mills/McCartney story. Here are today's examples.
Get Back (The Mirror)
A Hard Day's Fight (The Sun)
Yesterday... (The Times)
Mucca: Let It Bea £100m (Daily Star)
She Hates You, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah (Metro)
We Can't Work It Out As Macca Faces Mills (Also Metro)
We Can Work It Out (The Herald)
Mr Justice Bennett Tries To Work It Out (The Guardian)
I don't work for a newspaper so I can only speculate, but my theory that it doesn't take much effort is not exactly being tested by these weak puns. So, please consider this to be a demonstration of my ability to come up with pithy and punny headlines for news stories. This list took me about twenty minutes, and I think they show much more variety.
Got To Get You Out Of My Life (surely this one has been used a million times)
Love Me Don't (same for this one)
I Don't Wanna Be Your Man (seriously, these write themselves)
You Never Give Me Your Money (didn't even need to change that one)
Things We Said Under Oath Today
I Don't Want to Spoil The Party But You Are A Selfish Asshole Who Owes Me Pounds
Without You, Without You
Happiness Is An Expensive Lawyer
You've Got To Hide Your Millions Away
I've Just Seen A Face That Asked Me For Millions Of Pounds
She Said She Said (I Hid Her Bedpan)
You're Totally Going To Give Me Your Money
Because (You're A Bastard And You Owe Me Pounds)
I Don't Want You (She's So Crazy)
P.S. I Loathe You
Fuck Prudence (Hand Over The Pounds!)
Being For The Benefit Of Ms. Mills!
Here Comes The Son-Of-A-Bitch
I Want To Hold Your Pounds
Heather In The Bank Vault With Diamonds
The Fight Album
You Won't See Me (For Dust Once I Have Your Pounds)
Good Bye Fortune
I Am The Plaintiff
The Blonde And Whining Ho
Please Mr. Justice Bennett
She Came In Through The Bedroom Window And Tried To Take All Of My Pounds
Everybody's Got Something to Hide Especially My Horrible Soon-To-Be-Ex-Husband And His Law-Monkey
Golden Numbers
While My Bedpan Gently Weeps
Mean Mr. McCartney
When I'm Sixty-Four Million Pounds Richer
With A Little Help From Nicholas Mostyn QC
Why Don't We Do It In The High Court With The World's Media Watching?
I'll just sit here and wait for the Daily Mail to contact me and offer me a job interview for a position as sub-editor writing headlines like "Cancer Gives You Cancer" and "UK Population Now 175% Foreign, Says Migration Watch Survey" (my politics are to the left but that can change given enough of those lovely lovely pounds).
As I've mentioned before, Steve Gerber was one of my favourite comic writers when I was young, responsible for the satirical comic Howard the Duck. Here is his blog, currently left in the capable hands of Mark Evanier. Gerber's gift for writing piercing social comment was unlike anything else I had ever experienced, and my childhood was all the better for it. I'd like to think that experiencing his satirical genius has made me a better and more questioning person than I would normally have been, that perhaps his words and thoughts have opened my eyes enough to get me through life in a healthier state than I would have without his work filed away inside my head.
He could have managed more if Marvel had treated him a bit more fairly. I often wonder why so many comic writers seem so cantankerous, but seeing how they are treated, with the copyright to their creations out of reach, it makes sense. Sadly, this can lead to misunderstandings. Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude owes a great debt to Gerber's Omega The Unknown, and at a book signing a few years ago Jonathan Lethem geeked out about his work when I mentioned I was a fan. His enthusiasm for Gerber's work was immense, with special affection for Omega (so much so I hunted down the original run of ten issues the next day), and when he told me Marvel had asked him to write a comic for them, he got so psyched, though he admitted he was perhaps a little unsure about whether it was a good idea. I'd like to think that my enthusiastic reply convinced him to go ahead with it, but I'm not that arrogant (this is a lie). He went ahead with the project, choosing to update Omega, but Gerber interpreted this as a bad faith move on Marvel's behalf, and damned the project. After meeting Lethem and realising the project had been borne of respect for the original he relaxed his stance, but it's still terrible that the issues of copyright and ownership take such a toll on comic writers and artists.
Gerber will be sorely missed, especially now that he was beginning to work on more projects. I gather Paul Levitz has suggested fans donate to the Hero Initiative, a charity that I know for a fact employs very very good people who look after those left behind by the comics industry. As soon as I get paid, I shall offer what I can.
Also sadly departed is Roy Scheider, whose performances in Jaws, All That Jazz, Sorceror, and The French Connection thrilled me when I was younger. In later years he didn't seem to crop up in films anywhere near enough, though he was great in John Frankenheimer's 52 Pick-Up and David Cronenberg's underrated Burroughs adaptation Naked Lunch as the vile Doctor Benway. I was going to post a clip of him singing the final song in All That Jazz (if you've seen the film, you know what the song is and what context it's sung in), but it made me so damn sad rewatching it that I just couldn't do it, despite his brilliant performance and the craziness of Ben Vereen. So, instead of that, here he is triumping over Malcolm McDowell's effete British helicopter pilot in the finale of one of my favourite movies, John Badham's technoporn thriller classic Blue Thunder.
Not wishing to be repetitive here, but Torchwood is a polyp on the colon of British TV, but sometimes, even when it's at its horrible worst, it raises questions that demand answers. At gunpoint, obviously. Here are some that came up during last week's episode, "Meat". Just to get you up to speed if you didn't see it, our team of bumbling sex addicts investigated metaphorical cruelty towards animals that manifested as big chunks of space meat, while Gwen dealt with her trust issues as her stupid fiance finally found out about the existence of Torchwood. That was something that made absolutely no sense, as the first episode of the season featured an old lady taking the appearance of Mr. Fish in her stride before grumbling about Torchwood running around in their ridiculous SUV, so it's not like they're that secret. There's a question posed straight away. If Rhys is that stupid, how did he get the job at Harwoods Haulage?
How technologically advanced are Torchwood?
They totally have computers that project onto walls instead of just on screens! Star Trek looks so analogue and unsexxy now.
Of course, such incredible technology means sod all if the wall is white and makes the information all smeary.
How feeble is Tosh?
As I've said before, Toshiko Sato has no defined personality at all, other than being the kind of desperate person who stares longingly at those she loves and is too nervous to do anything about it (exactly the kind of panicky insecure person you'd want protecting the world from alien encroachment). Her yearning hopefully reached its zenith (nadir? Apogee? LaGrange point?) when supplying the object of her desire (Owen) with some sandwiches, and did a little half-hearted gesture to denote how much she wanted to touch him and hug him and kiss him and love him love him love him right up!
All through the episode she makes sad little comments about how it is possible to have relationships while working as world-saving nymphomaniacs while staring pointedly at Owen, but all she gets in return are glances like this as the man in question tries to tolerate her needy whimperings.
Keep dreaming, Tosh! At least they have their dreary love for people thrown through time to talk about.
Is Gwen blind?
Several times during the episode Rhys stands within Gwen's eyeline, and yet she doesn't see him. Here is a representation of the lack of stealth employed by the haulage company manager.
Later on, he drives a few feet behind the Torchwoodmobile for several miles, and then continues the pursuit onto an abandoned industrial estate, and yet they still don't notice him, even though he's driving his car, something that surely Gwen should have noticed. So, is she blind, or is this just lazy contrivance and shoddy direction at play? (Clue: The answer to a lot of questions will be the latter.) How long will it take for Jack to make a laboured double entendre revolving around the meat plot?
Nine minutes forty, which was shocking considering we'd run through several possible candidates by that point. Delightfully, after Gwen asks how it was eating alien meat, prompting Jack to respond, "He seemed to enjoy it," it takes Gwen a good few seconds of intense duh-face to get it.
I love his rakish grin as he waits for her to figure it out.
Will someone please stop Owen using guns or teach him how to look cool?
Because seriously, this made me laugh so hard I scared Canyon. I do this terrible wheezing thing when I get too amused, and this episode made me do it about four times.
And here's a gif of it for when that clip gets taken down. Accidental brilliance. That said, a lot of Burn Gorman's choices are a little peculiar. The face he pulls when staring at space meat is inexplicable.
I note that the character has been toned down a lot since the first season. His loathsome nature was show-wrecking, but this season, as he dials down the dreadful misanthropy, his position as Torchwood Gupta is being seriously challenged by the increasingly vile Gwen. Here, for instance, is how she looks at Jack while kissing her fiancee.
Considering Jack is very very old, you'd think he'd see through high school bitchery like that, but apparently no, he's heartbroken by it all. Remember the cool, sexy, confident, raffish gadabout who thrilled and delighted us in Doctor Who? He's been absorbed and replicated by pods from the planet WeakassLoser.
Do you remember the pterodactyl?
The showrunners finally did. It's been missing for ages and now it's back.
It was probably hiding from the rest of the team just in case they tried to shag it.
Is the poor, hacked-up space whale/metaphor for poorly treated livestock as cool as a pet pterodactyl?
In a word, no.
Sadly it looks, as Canyon pointed out, like a slightly-melted Snickers bar, but while the low-budget for the effect excuses the execution, the design is pretty crummy, being nothing more than a long blob with a silly mouth that splits open for no reason. Here is a picture of that as well, in the emotional finale when it goes bonkers and starts thrashing about to such an extent that Owen has to inject it with a bucket full of drugs and then snarl, "Mercy killing!" in his best tortured Toughguyese.
I really don't want to bitch about those effects too much, but honestly, if the budget could have been spent on a cool alien used sparingly instead of on a rough looking alien that is displayed in crane shot after crane shot after superfluous crane shot, it could have been a memorable visual. Of course, the show has a lot of time to kill (about eight minutes longer than a US show), and they have to fill that out with a lot of nonsense. Sadly, this time it was Spacey the Space Whale that suffered. As Jack melodramatically intones upon meeting it, "What have they done to you, my poor friend?"
Who has the most intense grief face?
Is it Jack, bemoaning the imminent death of Spacey the Space Whale?
Is it Owen, grieving over his decision to give Spacey a "MERCY KILLING!"?
Or is it the chap in the background, responsible for drugging Spacey, and horrified at the turn of events when his employers turn out to be trigger-happy scumbags?
Tough call.
Is John Barrowman taking the piss?
We're fans, don't get us wrong, but some of his line-readings in this episode buried the ham needle (steady on!). Here he is slamming Gwen against a wall because she was about to leap to the defence of Rhys.
He growls, he gesticulates, he hints at giving her a good old Captain Jack rogering right up against that wall! Barrowman is seriously operating on Warp Acting Speed 9 right now, and I love it love it love it. Shame he's not getting much opportunity to be dashing, but it's just not going to happen while he's on this show.
What's the main bad guy's major malfunction?
Not that the main antagonist is particularly effective, what with him bitching at his staff for not working hard enough and whining about how he's never had any luck and now a big slab of alien meat has landed in his lap and no one is going to take that from him, but he does have a bizarre intolerance for lying. About five minutes of the show is taken up by him asking hostages how many people are in the warehouse, and warning them not to lie, which of course they do immediately. He gets so pissed off by this that he tries to shoot Gwen even though she poses no threat. He's just so mad that she lied to him! Do real people do things like this? Perhaps, but it strains credibility somewhat. God help his friends when he gets a bad new haircut and they pretend to like it.
This silliness is eclipsed by this awful moment. Even though Gwen has plenty of time to get out of the way of this guy shooting at her, she stands stock still, and it's up to Rhys to further their trust plot by clumsily struggling to get past her and take the bullet instead, which is the catalyst for her acceptance of him at the end.
As he lies bleeding, she administers medical help to him by stroking his hair and telling him he's going to be alright. For about five minutes. And he lives. And walks around at the end of the episode with his arm in a sling laughing and joking and acting like nothing has happened. ::bangs head against table:: Why why why why why why why!??!?!?!
Why is Ianto suddenly such a wisecracking hardass?
In the first season Ianto was the sketchily written teaboy in an improbable suit with his half-human, half-Cyberman girlfriend hidden in the basement. He was so anonymous that when he turned his guns on the rest of the team and repeatedly lied to them about how deadly she was in an attempt to save her from their intervention, I thought he would get written out. But no. Now he's Jack's lover (another event that came out of nowhere), and after the first episode (where he reverted to whiny needy type) suddenly morphed into the snarky action hero we see now. Don't believe me? Here he is on a taser rampage. First, he uses jokes to distract a guy before electrifying his stomach.
A few minutes later, he saves Owen by blasting the vet guy with volts. Note that this doesn't affect Owen, probably as he is made from cardboard.
This guy gets a door in the face before Ianto shocks him, causing some amazing painface.
Then he gets the guy who shot Rhys, kicking his gun away (it looks like he connects as well, which must have stung), and with a barely convincing threat ("Pray he survives!"), tasers the guy right in the forehead! Nice!
So by rights I should have enjoyed Ianto's rampage, but early on in the episode we see him eating pizza, with what looks like a tablecloth protecting his nice suit.
Would Wolverine worry about grease-stains? Did Anton Chigurh ever do anything so prissy? I think not. Sorry, Ianto, but you get a FAIL rating for that one. Thanks for the mayhem, though. It was the episode highlight.
Which is the worst scene of the episode?
Is it the scene where Gwen confronts Rhys about his involvement in the meat factory, during which her gesture circuits explode so hard that the cameraman loses his footing and whip-pans right past his mark, missing Rhys and ending up looking at the bookcase behind him?
Or is it the meeting-room scene featuring Jack imitating Tom Cruise from the recent Scientology video, Ianto betraying his ignorance of the plot of Moby Dick, Gwen being remarkably childish to the embarrassed horror of the rest of the team, and a final line delivered so ineptly that I did the gaspy overlaugh thing again?
Or is it the final scene where Gwen tells Jack she won't neuralise Rhys because she loves him and what does he know about it? Again her gesture circuits blow, and it fries what's left of Jack's subtlety chip, leading to possibly my favourite line delivery of the entire episode, which occurs right at the end of the clip.
Actually, that final scene did do something I liked; Rhys keeps his memory! If the showrunners had erased his memory and made him ignorant of Gwen's career, it would have shown, once and for all, that they have no ideas and no courage whatsoever. Allowing him to move beyond his current role as bewildered and cuckolded plot element to actual proper character bodes well for the show. See also Buffy (when she told her mother about her calling) and Journeyman (the first brilliant decision on that show was for Dan to tell Katie about his time-travelling. It opened up numerous interesting plot avenues as a result). Is Torchwood salvageable?
In my previous excoriating post I expressed a hope that even though the show is regularly awful, it could, in time, become good, though perhaps never great. The premise isn't particularly promising, and the characters don't make much sense from episode to episode, but surely there's some way to make it work.
Then, while finishing off this post today I stumbled across this interview with Meat writer Catherine Tregenna, where she reveals that Russell T. Davies never created a show bible, and encourages the writers to write fast and loose.
“As long as you stay faithful to their past, the characters really are up for grabs. With a series like EastEnders or Casualty you are sent the story bible. Although you do write entire episodes with EastEnders, it has been pre-planned by the production team and they know what they want to happen. You work out the structure – give them a scene breakdown describing what happens in each scene, so people can see how the episode builds. The dialogue comes right at the end.
"Casualty is slightly different when you bring your guest stories. It has been running for years and goes out 50 times a year, so there the problem can be when you pitch your medical story, it might have been done before. Someone looks out for that at a very early stage. But inevitably your character will bring a new angle to it, so it isn’t a case of what an interesting piece of medicine but who is going through the interesting piece of medicine.”
But she says writing for Torchwood is a “very liberating” experience.
“There is no bible at all. I said to Russell T Davies when I first met him I felt agoraphobic because I didn’t have the limitations and boundaries of, say, being in an emergency ward.The danger, however, is sometimes just sticking to a guest story in that episode and having the Torchwood team reacting to it. The best episodes are where they are personally on some sort of journey. I have noticed in this series how Torchwood can hold different genres, so you can have a very character-driven episode followed by an action alien invasion episode but it all holds together quite well.”
That's all very nice for Tregenna and her buddies to have this liberating freeform writing experiment to practice their craft on, but it makes for some particularly shoddy TV for the rest of us. And what journeys are they going on? Tosh in love? It's rather Niles and Daphne, isn't it? And Gwen? She's gone from dork to adulterer (which made some sense) to harridan (which makes none) in a few episodes. Earlier I asked why is Ianto suddenly a tough guy with a sarcastic sense of humour, and why does Tosh have no personality. It's because they have no inner life, and will be whatever the writers want them to be from episode to episode. Sadly, the writers seem to think they're doing the opposite. Tregenna says:
The unsung hero is the script editor. I have worked with Helen Raynor who also writes for Torchwood and Brian Minchin and they will help you with the overall continuity of the character’s voice, for example they will say Ianto has a very dry sense of humour, so don’t be afraid to give him the very dark gags.
But why? When did he become the guy with the dark jokes? For the entire first season he wasn't like that, but suddenly this year he ineptly tells snippy jokes. Maybe someone noticed the show didn't have someone who tells jokes, and Ianto got forced into that joker-shaped hole, which is dumb but understandable, but please don't tell me he's always been like that. I've watched the show. He wasn't. He just was suddenly written differently.
Perhaps with a competent showrunner to keep things consistent this wouldn't matter so much. Joss Whedon is notorious (in a good way) for running a very tight ship, polishing his writers' scripts and ensuring nothing appeared on his shows that ever contradicted anything that had happened before. His characters (and those of many other professionally made shows) could be imagined offscreen behaving in exactly the same way as onscreen because they had been fully worked out.
With Torchwood, you don't get that sense at all. I have no idea who these people are or what their motivations are (other than that they are perpetually horny and not very bright). No matter how often they say the showrunners make sure the characters are consistent from week to week, anyone watching the show with open eyes would see that this is anything but the case. Knowing that the show is being run by Chris Chibnall and Helen Raynor (who wrote the appallingly bad Daleks in Manhattan double bill from Doctor Who last season, not to mention two dreadful Torchwood episodes), it's a miracle the next episode doesn't show our heroes inexplicably transformed into otter/potato hybrids working as sanitation engineers on the moon. No show bible, no coherence or consistent internal logic, no hope of improvement.
Did Russell T. Davies not bother with the show bible because that's just how he works? It's possible. I didn't see Queer As Folk so I have no idea how coherent it is, and the one thing of his I saw before Doctor Who was The Second Coming, possibly the best non-Cracker drama on ITV in the past twenty years. That didn't need a show bible, and Doctor Who didn't really, what with the huge mythos of the previous series to draw from.
So was Torchwood created without the bible because RTD thought it was the best way to go? Or was he rushed and just didn't have time? I've got no evidence of the latter, but it strikes me as a plausible theory. The BBC were eager to capitalise on the success of Doctor Who, and hastily developing a promising idea from someone as talented and successful as RTD is bound to seem like a sure-fire proposition. Sadly, it was put into production right after Doctor Who's first triumphant year while RTD was working on the second (plans that were complicated by the departure of Christopher Ecclestone), instead of waiting another year to make sure all the right elements were in place. Without proper foundations to build on, the show was crumbling from the get-go, and isn't getting any better. As far as I can tell, it's not even vaguely salvageable.
Now I'm just watching it for the car crash screw-ups, the FX work from The Mill, and John Barrowman being big, camp, and silly. Plus, I need to keep an eye on it as a barometer of the delusion present in the Guardian Guide, which each week points out how this week it's good, unlike the last week, when it wasn't, and please ignore the fact that we said that that week was good, and better than the week before that, even though we said that was great too, and... erm... ::infinite regress:: Meanwhile, as they praise this neverending horror as, "an improvement on last week," Phelim O'Neill makes pissy comments about Lost being made up as it goes along. Oh boy, oh boy! Anger! Rising!
Many moons ago I considered starting a chain of posts regarding my favourite movie explosions, because I get a big kick out of film pyrotechnics, and had hoped to start with the crazy bridge explosion from the end of The Long Kiss Goodnight. Sadly, I took it for granted that it would turn up on YouTube, and ended up posting about something else.
Well, as a result of faffing about all day and not getting anything constructive done, I thought hey, time to be lazy and post a YouTube clip and wonk on about it! Easy. This blogging business is a piece of piss. Sadly, the internet has let me down again. Why oh why oh why has no one put the amazing helicopter explosion from Andrew Davis' Under Siege on YouTube? I can find a million clips from Black Dawn, for crying out loud, but only a couple of badly recorded clips from Under Siege. This is as good as it gets; the trailer, featuring a quick shot of the stunt at the end.
His most successful film! It's probably Warner Brothers pulling them down, which is understandable, but very sad for those of us who want to pay tribute to the awesomeness of Steven "Blues and Explosions" Seagal taking out a Huey (or something) with a knife, a can of paint thinner, and a grenade, and then jumping over the side of an aircraft carrier as it bursts into a ball of orange flaming death. It really is something to behold. So, another post ruined, for which I am eternally sorry. To make up for it, I figured I should post a clip that is arguably even better; the gratuitously brutal bar scene from Seagal's masterpiece, Out For Justice, directed by the late, great John Flynn.
Out For Justice was the first Seagal movie I ever saw, and it never got topped, which is kind of a shame, but it was good enough that I would continue to follow his career even when it went wonky and unpredictable. So good that I would buy Ticker, possibly the third worst movie ever made. So good that I would strongly consider buying a copy of Out For A Kill, the second worst movie ever made (the first is Lars Von Trier's pompous burning-turd-bag of a movie, Dancer In The Dark, which sadly does not feature Seagal). So good that I'm going to buy another copy of Vern's Seagology even though I already downloaded the ebook a while back. So good that I actually like his Thunderbox album, Mojo Priest. He's no B.B. King, obviously, but it's kind of a fun album, if you're willing to be forgiving.
There is so much to love in this scene. The outrageous brutality, the stick fight, the running gag with the phone booth. Introducing a killer pool ball is a magnificent touch; the sound effect of it banging against the stone floor being replicated whenever it crashes into teeth and skull is sickening and intimidating. Even better is Seagal's line readings and dodgy accent, something that sounds off throughout the movie but goes totally berserk here. "Anybody seen Rich-EEE? Anybody know why Richie did Bobby Lu-PO? I'm gonna keep coming back til somebody. REMEMBERS. Seeing Rich-EEE!"
My personal favourite moment is when he preceeds an order to the gathered bad guys to stand on the pool tables with the whiny line, "You know Vinnie, ah'm startin' to get inuh bad mood, you know. Maybe it's my moodswings, or my hormones, I dunno. Maybe it's my need to impose my will." Obviously this doesn't faze anyone, and when he fires two bullets into the ceiling to get everyone's attention Vinnie chastises him about it because there might be people upstairs. I love that he genuinely seems confused for a moment, like he forgot where he was. Anyway, check it out.
Enough about Seagal. Turns out this week there was another fight that happened this week, one that gives even that epic battle a run for its money. Conan vs. Colbert and Stewart. Obviously it shows that without writers the show hosts have really started to run out of ideas and only a fight pastiche could adequately fill the air time, but that doesn't dim its brilliance, nor the novelty of seeing TV hosts pretending to kick the shit out of each other, or Colbert's startlingly good impression of Bruce Lee's nimble footwork.
Remember, Steve, don't concentrate on the finger, or you will miss all that heavenly glory. [/Obnoxious Enter The Dragon reference]
I’ve spent the last week and a half watching the BBC show Life On Mars, the first series DVD box set of which was a gift from friends this Christmas. (We introduced them to Veronica Mars last Christmas, so there was a certain symmetry to this.) My girlfriend and I were sceptical about the show at first. We reasoned that it had never appealed enough to encourage us to watch it when it was on TV, and that we generally find current British drama uninspiring and inferior to US programmes. We also heeded the words of Admiral Neck, who had not watched much of the show but mentioned how much Britain’s rightwing newspaper pundits loved its supposedly joyful evocation of policing in 1970s, largely free from such “politically correct” concerns as sexual equality and citizens’ rights. Meanwhile leftwing groups such as the NASUWT condemned its use of homophobic language. Despite the assurances of the friends who gave it to us (whose recommendations are normally reliable), it didn’t seem an attractive prospect.
It took us a few weeks to get around to it, but when we did crack open series one, it lasted a matter of days, and we immediately bought and consumed the second series too. It is terrific for a number of reasons, but the main one is that it’s a thoughtful slice of complex sci-fi masquerading as a knockabout police show. And its creators got it on BBC1 in prime time. And it was a huge hit. This was an astonishing achievement.
DCI Sam Tyler, the modern Manchester copper who wakes up in 1973 after he is hit by a car, is not the simplistic Connecticut Yankee the premise might suggest. I assumed there would be some ambivalence throughout about whether Tyler was really stranded in the 1970s or imagining it, but it quickly becomes apparent that he is in a coma – he hears the beeping of the life support machine and the voices of doctors and family members imploring him to hold on – and we are left in no doubt that Tyler’s journey is about finding a way “home”, or back to his real life. Whether his comatose fantasies would really take place in traditional hour-long three-act form is beside the point. Creators Matthew Graham, Tony Jordan and Ashley Pharoah have delivered a classic sci-fi/fantasy platform used by everything from The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz to ET: The Extra-Terrestrial to 12 Monkeys to The League Of Gentlemen: the stranger in a strange land, trying to negotiate the unfamiliar and get home safely. They do this to enable the show to perform that other classic function of science fiction, especially when it’s time travel-based: portraying, and satirising, a clash of civilisations.
The conflict in Life On Mars comes mainly, as you’d expect, from the difference between sensitive, educated Tyler’s approach to police work and the instinctive, often brutish methods of his boss Gene Hunt. (Tyler’s presence in the station is explained by a convenient “transfer from Hyde”.) But the aforementioned rightwing columnists were wrong to suggest that the show delights in the, ah, direct methods employed by the 70s cops. Rather, these are employed as blackly comic relief – we’re invited to sympathise with Tyler, even despair along with him, as Hunt or his sidekick DS Ray Carling takes pleasure in kicking in a “nonce”.
Tyler occasionally admits that the 70s way is better in some respects – it gets results and is certainly speedier than the tedious bureaucracy of the 21st century – and, in the series one finale, he’s exposed as a hypocrite: he trusts his instincts and desires rather than the cold facts when his own father, whom he meets as a young man, becomes a suspect. This isn’t a one-way street, either. Hunt may be boorish and sometimes thuggish but he’s not stupid, and he frequently appreciates the logic and clearsightedness that Tyler brings to the job (not that he likes to admit it). It’s usually left to the virtually stone-age Carling to provide the quaint values we associate with the era, such as casual racism and suspicion of anything resembling good sense.
All the while Tyler is struggling to make sense of the world around him, both the apparent reality of Hunt and the hallucinations he suffers – as well as hearing voices, he is visited in dreams by the TV test card girl, offering cryptic advice and scaring the bejesus out of him. Tyler confides in WPC Annie Cartwright, a down-to-earth sort who demonstrates remarkable patience as well as considerable intelligence, leading to her promotion to detective in series two (at Tyler’s instigation and against Carling’s wishes, naturally). He also builds a rapport with young detective Chris Skelton, who is open to “modern” ideas, and Nelson, the black barman of the local pub who covers his Yorkshire accent with a Caribbean lilt that he thinks will comfort his regulars. Each episode starts out with a standard police-drama plot – a dead body, a hostage crisis, a bomb threat – but Life On Mars uses these as a framework for skilfully woven drama that examines the culture clash astutely, again in the best sci-fi tradition.
We are never allowed to forget Tyler’s desire to get home, although Mars slips up with this strand occasionally. Some clunkingly awful dialogue reminds the audience that he is trapped in the “wrong” time: when Skelton refers to someone as being “like David Janssen in The Fugitive”, Tyler says, “You mean Harrison Ford”. This in the tenth episode! When Tyler has been going on about being stuck in 1973 for months! Of course he doesn’t mean Harrison Ford, you idiot! Tyler is also unnecessarily smug at times, even bearing in mind that he has three decades more progress under his belt than the other officers. It takes an intensely charismatic performance from a likeable actor to get you on Tyler’s side, and not surprisingly John Simm delivers. He’s thoroughly convincing as he swings between confusion and terror on one hand and dignified professionalism in adversity on the other. He’s also pretty sexy, something I didn’t believe until I watched this.
It’s Philip Glenister as Hunt who has proved the breakout star of the show, though, and this isn’t surprising either. I expected Life On Mars to be more of an archetypal two-hander, a classical dialogue between the enlightened man and the fool, but it’s Simm’s central turn that carries it. Even so, Glenister casts the longest shadow with a peformance of rare energy and wit. Sometimes the show lacks the courage of its convictions – it tries to address racism in series two and dares to use the term “Paki” but shies away from any stronger insults, which must have been in currency – but Glenister never does. Hunt truly believes in his methods and his motives, and you don’t doubt it for a moment.
Life On Mars isn’t perfect. As well as the aforementioned daft dialogue (the prosaic Hunt improbably refers to himself in the third person as “the Gene Genie” for no other reason than to continue the David Bowie motif) and occasional reticence about the big issues, some episodes are oddly directed and – especially early on – somewhat flabby and overextended. During series one, I often felt it would have benefited from the 45-minute runtime of a Doctor Who rather than a full hour. (I did come to find some of the flaws endearing, particularly the clunky expositionary lines, which reminded me that this was broadcast in primetime on BBC bloody One.)
But the show’s problems are largely corrected in series two, especially by the time it reaches the final three episodes. Episode 2.6 is close to being my favourite, not only because it guest-stars the breathtakingly hot Alex Reid – last seen getting really, really stabbed in the neck during the most horrific caving trip in history (she definitely would not rather be spelunking) – but also because semi-legendary comedy writer Guy Jenkin provides the cracking dialogue.
Skelton: I wonder what killed him? Hunt: That’ll be the bloody enormous hole in his chest where the bullet went in!
Cartwright: Boss? There’s a viscous yellow liquid in his ear. Hunt: No, that’s a drip from my fried egg butty, love. Well done, Miss Marple. That’s why we need women detectives.
Tyler: I think we need to explore whether this attempted murder was a hate crime. Hunt: As opposed to one of those “I really really like you” sort of murders?
Hunt: Now, yesterday’s shooting. The dealers are all so scared we’re more likely to get Helen Keller to talk. The Paki in a coma’s about as lively as Liberace’s dick when he’s looking at a naked woman. All in all, this investigation’s going at the speed of a spastic in a magnet factory. Tyler: I think you might have missed out the Jews.
But it’s the superb final two episodes that crystallise what Life On Mars is about. In 2.7, Hunt is accused of murder and while he’s banged up, acting DCI Frank Morgan (a splendidly creepy turn from, of all people, Ralph Brown) tells Tyler that the reason Tyler is there is to force Hunt out. Once he does, he can come back to Hyde. Tyler seizes on this, believing it to be his subconscious’s way of telling him how he can wake up, but he finds he can’t help but prove Hunt innocent. This raises all sorts of questions – can Hunt’s means-to-an-end methods be justified? What does Tyler believe in? Where does he belong? Is Morgan the surgeon from the hospital where Tyler is lying comatose? Does Tyler owe his 1973 colleagues loyalty even if they’re figments of his imagination?
Before these are answered, Morgan tells Tyler – in a clear echo of Terry Gilliam’s superlative time-travel fable 12 Monkeys – that everything he thinks is wrong. He is not in a coma in 2006; he has amnesia; his persona is an undercover one they constructed between them using names from gravestones; and that this, 1973, is reality. Tyler has no way of knowing whether this is truth or his mind telling him that he is slipping away, that he has accepted his fate. The questions are still unanswered when he awakes – at the worst possible moment. Episode 2.8 is a thrilling, dizzying, heartbreaking, ferociously intelligent hour of TV that should stand as an exemplar to everyone else making drama in this country.
The review quotes on the DVD boxes say “The best police drama since the 70s” and “A thumpingly enjoyable piece of television”. Neither is wrong, but they don’t even come close to describing the triumph of the show. Obviously I meant the title of this post as a rather convoluted bit of punning whimsy, but it does apply. Just as men and women can learn to live together (despite those oh-so-significant differences!), Life On Mars is a wonderfully harmonious marriage of sci-fi and police drama. So harmonious, in fact, that – at the risk of repeating myself – it drew between five and seven million viewers to BBC1 at 9pm, even when up against the ratings behemoth of Champions League football on ITV. The end of series two was watched by 7.7 million. Such a large mainstream audience must have included a large number of people who never thought they’d watch sci-fi, let alone such complex, thought-provoking sci-fi.
The spin-off/sequel to Life On Mars, Ashes To Ashes, starts this Thursday. It’ll be fascinating to see how the show will do without Simm. I’m a fan of his replacement, Keeley Hawes, and making the central character a woman should certainly provide a welcome twist, as will shifting the action to Thatcherite London in 1981. But can it survive the artificial recreation of its original premise with a different character? Possibly. Let’s face it, the concept is artificial enough as it is, and I hear that the writers have got around the problem of why Hawes’s Alex Drake ends up in the same fantasy as Tyler by making her a student of Tyler’s case. But there’s a danger Ashes won’t thrive in its Simmlessness; Hawes, though talented, has never demonstrated comparable warmth and presence, and it remains to be seen whether she can carry off the deranged, dislocated despair that lies at the show’s heart, or whether she’ll even be asked to. I’m hopeful, though, and I’m remembering that I didn’t expect much from Life On Mars.
*Warning! Cloverfield, Miracle Mile, and Atonement spoilers ahead!*
Last Saturday Canyon and I paid an extortionate amount of money so that we could get motion sickness. That's right, we went to see everyone's favourite successful whipping boy, Cloverfield, and were in two minds about it. If I were to give it an overall grade, I'd give it a B, or 4 stars out of 5, or a thumb up at about a 65 degree angle. When Canyon's stomach had settled down, she came to a similar conclusion.
Sadly a lot of the things I liked most about it were the things I liked about it before I saw it: the concept, the set-up, the ambition. Watching the movie just confirmed that Drew Goddard and Matt Reeves had come up with and visualised a brilliant idea, and J.J. Abrams was a smart guy for spotting its potential and getting it made. Apart from those things, I also loved the slow open, the bleak tone, the depiction of the mass exodus and shell-shocked reaction to the invasion by the people of New York. The monster was cool, the smaller monsters were even better, and if this doesn't become a huge franchise I'll be very surprised. There were enough ideas introduced and left hanging to be fleshed out in future films, and I look forward to them. Especially the whole exploding bite victims thing. That was unnecessarily horrible, and of course, unnecessarily horrible is often a good thing in a horror movie.
However, it wasn't all good. As the always-reliable Moriarty pointed out in his excellent AICN review:
The single biggest complaint about CLOVERFIELD is that nobody likes the kids that you’re supposed to follow through the movie. I’m a little surprised at just how much everyone hates them... they didn’t strike me as “rich fucking douchebags,” as I’ve seen many talkbacks describe them. But I don’t think any of the characters are defined enough or interesting enough to really pull you through the film.
I certainly didn't hate any of the characters in the movie, but I wasn't really that concerned when any of them died. Okay, perhaps I had a moment of sadness for Hud when Marlena exploded, but it was muted as I had only a vague idea of who Hud was, having only seen him for a couple of seconds early on and then hearing T.J. Miller's voice for the rest of the movie (poor guy). Instead of feeling a strong emotion about that, I was more impressed with the way Goddard and Reeves organically introduced pacing into the movie. Hud's reaction - having to stop running for a moment to regain his wits - was a perfect moment for the audience to do the same, and these elegant pacing devices cropped up several times throughout the movie.
I think I know why the movie had very little emotional effect on me, and I'll get to that later. Despite the distance I felt from the characters, the film certainly did some things right. When Hud is blabbing about Rob's affair with Beth I was furious with him, and yet I also felt awful for him when Rob mistakenly believed he had erased the tape of his special day. It's odd, though, that I was made more anxious about that than I was by the monsters, or the action scenes (though the crowd scenes were incredibly well done and utterly convincing).
The only time moment Cloverfield really scared me on a visceral level was during the rooftop Poseidon Adventure-style rescue, when the camera catches a shot of the monster advancing down the road towards our "heroes". More than the possibility of being stomped on (surely a rather slim chance), or being attacked by spider-mite thingies (you might be able to fight it off before it bites you), the sight of the enormous creature heading towards the tilted building gave me the horrible fear. If it had hit the building, there would have been nothing they could do. It would be the end. Those moments were the most effective, and it wasn't because of the characters, who were mostly cyphers. It was the sense that you have no control over what happens to you, except that when that happens to you it probably won't have anything to do with an enormous alien.
And that, perhaps, was the point of the film, that sometimes shit really does just happen and you can't do anything about it except struggle to understand it somehow. With only a tiny amount of pre-amble and exposition (effortlessly introduced, to my extreme pleasure) we're thrust into the lives of a bunch of pretty twenty-something catalogue models and get to watch them getting picked off without learning very much about them or seeing them grow as characters. They're monster fodder for most of the movie and as such aren't really worth our attention. However, I'm not so sure the film is just the empty rollercoaster ride it seems, and might be making a more interesting point about not just narrative, but the narratives we make. I'll get to that in a moment, but first, another thing that irked me: the scary similarity to Steve De Jarnatt's lost nuclear-paranoia classic Miracle Mile.
In a garish '80s Los Angeles, Anthony Edwards accidentally gets a phone call from a soldier in a nuclear missile silo trying to get through to his mother in order to warn her of the impending apocalypse. From that moment on the movie depicts, in real time, Edwards' efforts to find his true love (Mare Winningham) and get her out of LA before the missiles destroy the city. By the time the film finishes the city has descended into chaotic panic, and as the missiles destroy the city Edwards and Winningham's efforts to flee fail, and the helicopter they are in crashes into the La Brea Tar Pits, where their bodies will be preserved forever.
In Cloverfield, Rob (played by Michael Stahl-David, who totally looks like a composite of Alias actors Michael Vartan and Bradley Cooper) heads back into the rubble-strewn centre of Manhattan to find his true love and get her out of the city, only to fail when the helicopter they are in crashes into Central Park, where they profess their love prior to being blown up by what might be a nuke, their declarations preserved on camera. I'm really not saying Drew Goddard ripped off Miracle Mile (mostly because I really respect his work and don't want to countenance the possibility that he consciously rewrote De Jarnatt's film), but the similarity is striking nevertheless.
Miracle Mile is mostly a conventional film, and as such is emotionally affecting thanks to some skillfully manipulative writing and direction by De Jarnatt. Cloverfield doesn't follow those conventional filmic rules, and as a result is less emotionally resonant for the most part. At the time I thought that was a strike against it (and certainly made me compare it negatively with Miracle Mile, which is a very moving film), but now I'm not so sure. I still very much like the finale of Cloverfield, and think it shows that Goddard and co. were trying to make a comment about how we now record our lives in an attempt to make some sense of them. Why else begin and end the film with the recording of testimonials, first as a recording of Rob's friends and family saying their goodbyes as he leaves for Japan, and later as the last memorial of two otherwise anonymous people facing death. We do these things not only to set in stone the events of our lives (much as Miracle Mile shows two characters leaving an impression on the earth in the face of enormous events), but to understand who we are in a confusing world, using digitally-enhanced hindsight to give shape to our lives.
Cloverfield mimics that confusion and amorphousness. To the characters, the narrative they thought they were in (a pretty mundane love story) turns into the worst nightmare imaginable, and for the majority of the film, while they attempt to survive and try get their heads around the catastrophic events around them, we try to make sense of what the story is. For a long time I did think it was just a gimmicky ride, but as their predicament changes, so to does the genre of the movie. At first a love story, it becomes a Gojira-style monster movie, then a traditional monster-horror movie in the subway tunnels, then a war movie as the Army attempts to help our heroes, then a disaster movie as they make their way into Beth's fallen building, and finally a tragic love story as almost everyone dies and Rob and Beth have one last moment together before being blown up in Central Park.
Just as life has no narrative form until you have a chance to look back on it, so too does Cloverfield. For the majority of the movie we are held at a remove from the events onscreen, emotionally uninvolved as the characters foolishly run around and get into scrapes. Only as the last shot on the Coney Island ride appears does the film generate any frisson, as we understand the journey the filmmakers have taken us on, and understand the heartbreaking consequences of the monster invasion.
In that sense it's reminiscent of that overrated award-baiting prestige flick Atonement, in that a large stretch of the movie is filled with events that appear flat, inexplicable, and emotionless, until the final scene reveals the secret that unlocks the meaning of the entire film. I've not read the novel, in which I'm sure this final surprise is used to explore narrative theory and the purpose and value of storytelling (much as I feel Cloverfield does, perhaps to a lesser extent), but in the movie it feels (if you're willing to be uncharitable) like little more than a twist ending, despite the efforts of Vanessa Redgrave to bring the conceit to emotional life.
The end of Cloverfield has no twist (unless you count the sight of a meteor crashing into the sea off the coast of Coney Island, which I missed), but it does finally generate an empathic connection with Beth and Rob. The contextless video-glitch "flashbacks" have, before this point, added very little to the movie, but the final glitch, with them commenting on their happy day, made me tear up. Finally they were people, and their deaths struck me as a (movie) tragedy in much the same way that Atonement's final reveal made the characters I cared little about seem worthy of my pity.
Okay, so I've talked myself into liking the film more than before. It's certainly more worthy of your time than Atonement, even though that film does explore the storytelling theme in more detail. One last thing about Cloverfield, though. I've seen that a lot of people have raged against the film online, angry that the film failed to live up to their expectations. Now, I would never argue the film is perfect. It did drag at times, and belief needed super-extra suspension throughout, and the performances were mostly forgettable (though I hope T.J. Miller gets some more work, this time in front of the camera).
However, I'm not angry at the filmmakers for not making the best film ever, and I'm certainly not angry at them for promising they would make it, because they never said that. What kind of a delusional fool claims that his or her film is totally the best thing ever? It just doesn't happen. They might express a belief that they've made a good film, but they won't expect everyone to agree. Plus, advertising is often handled by the studio, with the filmmaker having some input into the process but not having full control over it. Why blame the filmmaker for over-the-top promotional blitzes that were set in motion by the studio?
And for that matter, why blame publicists for coming up with clever ways to generate interest in movies? A lot of the time they do their job by getting the word out about new releases, but then the audience takes over from there and blows things up more. Case in point: Cloverfield had possibly the best marketing campaign I've seen since The Blair Witch Project, another film that suffered terribly at the hands of viewers who felt they were sold a lemon.
The campaigns for both movies were brilliantly innovative, using the prospective audience's interest in the subject matter to generate the hype with not really that much help from the publicists. When the Cloverfield trailer aired, it was the fanboy websites like AICN and CHUD that went nuts over the initial trailer, while the Bad Robot team actually kept the plot secret. Hence the ridiculous Cthulhu/Voltron speculation debacles that occured in the first few weeks after the film was announced.
The expectation a person has while waiting for a film is their fault and their fault alone. Hype doesn't make you expect greatness from a movie; it gives you some possibly misleading information about it that you can ignore or believe depending on how invested you want to become. It's never an accurate representation of what the movie is like, and if you haven't figured that out yet, then you can't have been watching movies that long. Believe me, I know how it is, because I get excited about movies too and go crazy when new trailers or photos appear online, but I still try to hold off on expecting the movie to live up to the speculative images in my head.
Oh sure, I still get disappointed from time to time, but it's only when talented directors mess up. My disillusionment last year over Spider-Man 3 and Eastern Promises was nothing to do with any external hype. I was just pissed because I personally expected more from Sam Raimi and David Cronenberg. Okay, so I got really upset over Superman Returns, but that was me believing the hype. It does happen, but I really hope that that was the last damn time. Stupid movie.
Anyway, sorry to end the post with some niggling. It's just a real bugbear of mine. The hype did not brainwash you! You chose to believe the film would cure cancer! If you didn't like it it has nothing to do with overhype! The hype is separate from the film! The film stands and falls on its own merits! If you didn't like it, try to figure out why instead of blaming a bunch of trailers and posters and overwrought early reviews! Exclamation points ad infinitum!
That said, ZOMGOMGOMG how incredible is Iron Man going to be!??!?!
That trailer is so awesome! It's going to be such an amazing movie. I feel it in my old bones!
Was there ever any doubt? It's been years since he got slimed, but he finally gets his reward. Well, winning this definitive vote and winning the heart of Dana Barrett twice. Which is nice going.
Dr. Peter Venkman - 5 (38%)
Dr. Egon Spengler - 4 (30%)
Dr. Raymond Stantz - 2 (15%)
Winston Zeddemore - 2 (15%)
Louis Tully - 0 (0%)
When I had the idea for the Ghostbusters poll, Canyon thought it pointless. Who wouldn't vote for Venkman? He gets most of the good lines and moments and does that silly one-foot walk thing outside the Lincoln Centre. Plus, it's Bill Murray! Emissary ofthe Umami fairies! However, Venkman's also a creepy stalker whose disrespect for those in a position of power is so strong that you have to wonder how the guy got anywhere in life, especially when his scientific knowledge appears to be lacking compared to that of Stantz and Spengler. But he has heart, and a bit of courage, and a grading system for the dirtiness of his clothes. In the world of paranormal bounty hunting, perhaps that's all you need. Plus, the people in a position of power who get insulted by him (Dean Yeager, Jack Hardemeyer, and Walter Peck) are the worst kind of jellus and officious assholes who deserve his wrath, so bless his irreverent ass and the amusing gibberish he spouts.
Second place goes to Egon Spengler, who comes across as so enormously stiff and inept at human interaction that I honestly thought for years that Harold Ramis was just the worst actor imaginable and that he only got to play the character because he co-wrote the film, but having seen him since (most recently as the Jewish record mogul L’Chai’m in Walk Hard), and realising that he can be a very likeable comic actor, makes me retro-actively damn myself for being so bitchy. Ah well, they call it hindsight for a reason.
Then a couple of votes for Winston Zeddemore, one of them mine. Yes, he was my favourite Ghostbuster, mostly because I loved that he was just a guy thrust into this quirky world for no reason other than that he needed a job. As a result he was perhaps more sympathetic than the other characters, who were funny and likeable but had an eccentricity that could be somewhat distancing. He was down-to-earth, and also got possibly the best line of either film ("Ray, when someone asks you if you're a god, you say 'YES'!"). He also walks away from this photo with his cool relatively intact.
There were also a couple of votes for Ray Stantz, and perhaps he would have received more if it wasn't for that creepy sex-dream scene with the ghost from the first film. That still icks me out a bit, and I have difficulty figuring out which part is a dream, and which isn't. I'm not sure that's reason enough to gloat about him not getting enough votes, but I just can't help the way I feel, man. Stop judging me! And no votes for honorary Ghostbuster Louis Tully! That didn't surprise me either. He throws the worst parties ever, and brags about how he can get cheap Nova Scotia salmon; a classic indicator of douchiness that has served me well in life.
So, with that settled, I should come up with another poll, but right now all I can think to do is one about how awesome the first episode of Lost season 4 was, but it was SO AWESOME there really isn't any point. Anyone who disagrees probably loves Torchwood or works for the Guardian Guide and is therefore beyond help. [/mean-spirited delusion] I'll come up with something soon. Hang tight, readers! In the meantime, here's proof that Ghostbusters lives on. Hallelujah! Can't wait.
ETA: Got my poll sorted! Which film are you looking forward to most this year? There are many choices, all of which are skewed to the nerd end of the spectrum, but hopefully you will find something there that you like.
However, the newspaper coverage has been really annoying. I often wonder what it must be like to be a journalist, and wonder if I have the chops. What is the average day like? Wake up, go to work on tube, refuse to stand up for pregnant woman on tube, arrive at office, shave face in toilet, listen to recording of the Today programme, base inflammatory article around out-of-context argument between Ed Balls and John Humphrys, copy out press release about film opening, get all the facts wrong, reword study into teen behaviour so that it sounds like New Labour are brainwashing women into having unprotected sex with immigrants and then having an image of Stalin tattooed on their backs (I'm imagining a Daily Mail journalist there), head to bar at 12:00, stay there until 23:30. Perhaps that's horribly horribly unfair, but even worse, how hard can it be to be a sub-editor coming up with headlines? Dealing with crappy copy from those addled hacks means they don't have enough time to come up with better headlines for the Mills/McCartney story. Here are today's examples.
