Monthly Archives: October 2008

All Hail the Fingers Of Fury!

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If a writer has writers’ block, then a blogger will suffer from Blogger Clog, and that’s certainly the case here. There are numerous reasons for my infrequent posting, perhaps most importantly this goddamn illness, which, while little more than a cold, has been hanging around for weeks. Hard to be prolific when one side of my head feels heavier than the other. On top of that is a much busier than usual week at work which has drained me of much energy, and oh God this election this fucking election it’s driving my brain crazy with the excessive checking of the politiblogs, so much so that, even though I’ve been enjoying his updates, if Andrew Sullivan writes “know hope” one more time I’ll either turn violent or cry or cry violently. It’s the classic split between his faith and my atheism; he can know hope all he likes, but I’ll not relax until Obama’s inauguration. People who know me will be very familiar with my fatalistic tendencies. ::takes break from hard minute’s blogging to check fivethirtyeight.com::

Another reason, which is probably the main one if I was willing to sit and poke at my ossified brain in order to find out, is my attempt to finish reading Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. Though I’m wary of saying anything about it for fear of angering her many many fans/followers/cultists, I have to say it is about to defeat me. No, Randian visitors, her worldview has not dominated mine, as if it had been dismantled and bested by a philosophy of vast strength and power, like the machines that conquer and crush the rocks and mountains of the earth. I’m just, well, really really really fucking bored by now. Her insanely florid prose might have amused me before, but by now, after being shouted at in a self-pitying and mean-spirited tone for 700 pages, I might not be able to make it. But I must! For am I not a human being? Is not my mind the Alpha and Omega, the force that can harness nature and bend it to my will, able to withstand this mighty onslaught, bearing the winds and rains of her ideas and rising, triumphant, like a Titan, like the owner of himself and his destiny, masterful and immortal? Fuck you, book! You shall never defeat me!

However, I do just want to get it over and done with by now, if only because I need a break from it. I’m glad I’m reading it, especially at a time like this, when one presidential candidate is bellowing “Socialist!” and running from person to person like Kevin McCarthy in the first two versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and the world’s most powerful Objectivist, Alan Greenspan, is talking about how there is a flaw in the world that makes his free market ideals untenable (I’m totally paraphrasing; please don’t correct me, people). Before reading Atlas Shrugged I would have thought his comment rather cheeky, blaming people for the market disaster and not The Market itself, but now I see his point (though I don’t necessarily agree with it). If I’m reading Atlas Shrugged right (again, don’t comment, I don’t need clarification just yet), the Objectivist creed would work just fine as long as everyone was “moral” by Rand’s code, but after many many years Greenspan has apparently discovered that people (i.e. traders and bankers and economists and anyone who deals with money anywhere in the world ever) won’t abide by that code of behaviour, and will in fact take as many short cuts as possible to fill their pockets with as much Fat Bank as they can. I see where he’s coming from. I think he’s a bit tapped to be suddenly saying, “Oh, it’s humanity’s fault for this and not mine for coming up with a system of economics that doesn’t take into account actual human behaviour as it really actually exists for reals, but instead bases its assumptions about what people are like on the idealised ramblings of a writer from the 50s who had a weird thing for dominatory industrialists and smokestacks and trains going into tunnels and which therefore cannot possibly work,” but I do see where he’s coming from. Thanks for the recession, jerkwad.

So yeah, it’s been interesting to listen to Republican and conservative thought with a new, deeper understanding of where it’s coming from, and to finally comprehend why followers of that creed hate taxation as much as they do even though I think they’re wrong, and so I do owe a debt of thanks to Ayn Rand for giving me such a long-winded peek into that mindset. Sadly, my brain is dying from the melodrama and the hate and the victimhood, and I just want to get it over with so I can move onto something fun (I got John Hodgman’s new book two days ago and it’s begging to be read). Until then, time I would devote to blogging is being taken up with enduring the endless Rand-ting, so it’s like another blog slowdown, and one I really don’t want to endure but will because I’m stubborn like that and hate leaving books unfinished (especially when I’m 700 pages in). I will get back to the planned post about Mad Men, and some Face/Offs I’ve been looking forward to as soon as I can, but for now, I must complete this mammoth task.

In the meantime, here is the other thing that has totally possessed my mind over the last week, but luckily it’s a thing that is making the brain very very happy. Marnie Stern, super-genius guitarist, has just appeared on my Radar of Unbelievable Awesomeness with her new album This Is It and I Am It and You Are It and So Is That and He Is It and She Is It and It Is It and That Is That (which is a phrase attributed to Zen philosopher Alan Watts, according to AV Club). It is absolutely incredible, easily on my 2008 best list along with Re-Arrange Us by Mates of State and The Family Afloat by Bound Stems and several other lovely works. Stern’s guitar playing is unlike anything I’ve heard before, and strumming along to it would be the most insane Rock Band challenge ever (especially as Zach Hill’s drumming is almost as complex and frenetic). This is her new single, Transformer, and it should be number one across the planet.

Even better is her song Ruler, which you can find on her MySpace page. Thank you for keeping the book cooties from smothering my brain, Marnie Stern.

This Week In TV Year II (Week 7)

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As I have already said, I’ve been taking my time on this one for several reasons, but one of the most important ones is that The Shield was so great last week it overwhelmed my brain in much the same way that Lost does when it’s on. Except for one notable exception, this week was pretty poor, and my enthusiasm for some shows is waning. It doesn’t help that I started writing this while the wonderful In The Name of the Father was on Sky Movies, distracting me even more (and holy shit, Mark Sheppard plays one of the Guildford Four!), and tried to finish it while The Incredibles was on. That’s my favourite film of the decade we’re talking about. How could I not get distracted?

Non-Shield Highlight of the Week:

As this week’s Friday Night Lights ended, and the final slow-motion shot of “Smash” Williams faded to black, Canyon said, “My God, it really is back on form.” I couldn’t agree more. Though we enjoyed the second season more than many, this third season has been exceptional even by this show’s high standards. The latest episode was just about perfect, and was filled with examples of how the showrunners have upped their game this year.

Part of it is the shorter season. This time there won’t be any Carlotta missteps, or new characters not given a full arc (I’m still upset at how Santiago was treated). Sticking with the core characters and seeking to build upon old tensions rather than introduce new ones, the show has done the miraculous and made a season that feels like the first season while telling stories that are new enough to feel fresh but have expanded from previous concerns. The best example of that is Matt Saracen’s relationship with his grandmother. Though his position as QB1 is now endangered, and has generated a great deal of turmoil for himself, Coach, and the Dillon fanbase (who are jerks, let’s be honest), we still have the old, unresolved arc featuring his grandmother’s illness informing his every choice.


That story should have become boring a long time ago, but while season two featured that awful Carlotta plot, this season sees Matt reaching out to his mother in an act of desperation, and from there we find out more about him, his family, his capacity for forgiveness, etc. Carlotta told us nothing other than how teenage boys get horny and make mistakes. This new plot has been a revelation in more ways than one. Most importantly, it’s given Zack Gilford a chance to show what he’s capable of, which seems only fair after season two gave Taylor Kitsch numerous opportunities to shine. His scenes with his mother, played by the ever-excellent Kim Dickens, were a joy to behold. I’m glad the showrunners got around to giving Gilford a shot at the prize.

Another consequence of the shorter season is the chance to finish arcs conclusively. Next week we’ll find out what Jason Street has been up to, but for the first four episodes we saw Smash get a second chance to get into college. Last week I admitted I was getting a bit sick of the constant doubts Smash had, but luckily this frustration was assuaged by this week’s conclusion. By the time Smash gets his phonecall of acceptance, he’s really earned it, having faced down every obstacle going. If he didn’t make it, it might have been “realistic”, but it would also have been wrong.


The whole point of Coach’s philosophy, and Smash’s confidence, is that hard work and dedication bring you what you want, and this was the perfect dramatisation of that. My misgivings faded as Coach delivered yet more stirring speeches about living up to his promise, and the last five minutes of the show were viewed from behind a veil of happy tears. It was exactly the ending we had hoped for, and justified everything Smash has gone through. If only all TV could be like this.

What the Hell Just Happened? Disaster of the Week:

As this season has progressed, you’ll note that my fondness for Fringe has increased from my initial position of slightly optimistic reticence, with much of that interest based around Dr. Walter Bishop and The Observer, that bald Easter Egg I love so much. In the first season of Alias, created by J.J. Abrams and often written by Fringe creators Kurtzman and Orci, I remember the pilot episode being one of the strongest hours of TV I’ve seen, and that first season containing pretty much no clunkers, so confident was the showrunning team. Though the Fringe pilot was nowhere near as good as the first hour of Alias, it was still compelling, and the premise grew to be more interesting than I had first thought by the time The Observer showed up. So how the hell did last week’s episode turn out to be so feeble, even though it opened with such nasty events as brain-cooking and blood tears?


Much of it comes down to a truly crappy script, which was little more than a list of cliches of forehead-slapping overuse, with serious misjudgements throughout. I’m not sure which was worse: the scientist who, when rumbled, shoots himself in the head; Olivia’s rogue investigation and sudden random and hilarious aggressiveness; the race against time kidnap plot (also used this week in CSI), and much more. Perhaps the worst crime was sticking Lance “Intensity” Reddick with some dialogue of look-away-it’s-so-awful clunkiness.


There were other problems, though. One scene at a horseriding club was lit so badly you could see shadows on the floor even though it was supposed to be filmed during late-afternoon, and other scenes were blocked terribly, with characters pulling guns on each other in a room so small the camera almost gets in the way. I understand that the show has to make the most of its budget, and the shooting schedule is tight, especially as development on the show would have been affected by the writers’ strike, but it still seemed amateurish. These egregious errors are above and beyond the main problems; that it was sluggish, boring, silly, littered with tonal errors (having a main villain played, by Canyon’s least favourite actor Chris Eigemann, with outrageous mustache-twirling evilness), and criminally over-writing Walter so that he is almost annoying. Almost. I’m sorry, but even though he went a bit far, having him get upset over microwaving a papaya to death because it’s the friendliest of fruits made me laugh too much to get angry at him.


Fringe is away for three weeks, what with sport and elections and whathaveyou. It’s a good job the fourth episode was so freakydeaky, because otherwise I would be walking away after this. It wasn’t as bad as Knight Rider (surely impossible), but maybe it was approaching Flash Gordon levels of awfulness. It gives me no pleasure to say that, and the only thing that makes me feel better about that judgement is that I refuse to believe the show is going to sink. Surely this is an anomaly. I’m just hoping the number of bad episodes don’t end up outweighing the good.

Slowly Improving Show of the Week:

As I had hoped, this week’s Mentalist was definitely organised around a central location, a sort of bland office complex that featured last week without being named as the CBI HQ.


Other notable features of the episode included more screen time for Gregory Itzin (working as the pencil-pushing jerk I had hoped he would be), more panicky reactions from Patrick Jane upon being confronted with a gun, and some humour. It’s babysteps, but the hour went much quicker than some of the other shows we watched this week. Spotting some of Derren Brown’s techniques helped (the fumbling disarming of a gun-toting Eastern European was particularly welcome), and I hope we see more of his team using elaborate lies to fool the criminals into giving themselves up. That said, I still don’t think I’d recommend it to anyone who’s not a huge fan of procedurals, though. It’s still not quite there yet, but it’s a little victory that, five episodes in, it’s managed to create an episode that is arguably more entertaining (if less well constructed) than this week’s episodes of House (not as bad as I had feared, but a little dull) and CSI (would have been better if the serial killer introduced this week didn’t get arrested at the end).

Heartbreak of the Week:

Oh Friday Night Lights, how you torture us. Tyra and Landry’s ill-fated love was never meant to be, only beginning because of the murder/rape plot that annoyed the fanbase so much. This week, Tyra definitively moved on, leaving a heartbroken Landry behind with nothing but his slowly weeping guitar for solace.


Yes, the murder plot might have been handled well but was not welcome on the show. Yes, it was a contrived way to get Tyra and Landry together when in real life there is no way she would ever want to be with him. But who cares about that when we get to see acting of the calibre displayed by Adrianne Palicki and Jesse Plemons? Fuck it, they could have been abducted by aliens for all I care. Seeing Landry’s heartache and Tyra’s sadness over the consequences of her decision was one of the acting highlights of the season so far.

Your Sex Is On Fire of the Week:


And so were the words to transpire, whatever that means. Yes, this week House finally had bisexual Thirteen have some gay sex, because in TV land, as Canyon pointed out during the hectic sex scene (which was as hot as a fever), bisexual means lesbian, but a lesbian that the male viewers have a chance with. I really doubt that having lesbian smooching and the attendant rattling bones hinted at in trailers means twenty million more viewers tune in, but even if the opening felt unusually exploitative for the show, it kinda matched Thirteen’s desperate effort to live her life to the full before she dies. Sort of. Well, it was edited really frantically. Luckily, it’s not forever, but it’s just tonight, oh we’re still the greatest. The greatest! The greatest! And YEEEAAAAHH Yo’ sex is on fiyah!

Yeah, you know Kings of Leon are the shit.

Actor We Love of the Week:

Lee Pace is always great on Pushing Daisies, but we want to give him a shout out this week, just cuz.


Actually, it’s more that we just saw him in The Fall (directed, of course, by… TARSEM!), and he is unnaturally great in it. Let’s hope that the imminent cancellation of this lovely show frees him up for more great work. For instance, the West End loves American actors lately, Mr. Pace. Some are very close to pie shops. Plus, you can stay at our house while you are here. We have a very small bed that only slightly smells like cat vom. You’ll love it.

Improbably Attractive Biologist of the Week:

Evil David Esterbrook, evil CEO of evil pharmaceutical company Intrepus, is more than happy to hang around while a woman is injected with a compound that will turn the strontium capsules in her head into a weapon, but he won’t be doing any of the injecting himself. Instead, he has an improbably attractive biologist to help him out.


As you can seen, the improbably attractive biologist is wearing a HazMat suit, and if you think she took off the helmet and shook her long black hair out like the stereotypical sexy librarian who lets her hair down to the amazement of all the horny chaps nearby, you would be right.

Sudden Romantic of the Week:

Though Landry and Tyra get the award for most heartbreaking relationship failure of the week, Dwight Schrute’s agony over the imminent marriage of Angela and Andy came a close second.


That he kept undercutting that pain with such horrible treatment of Phyllis was perfect, but even better was his pathetic but noble attempt to make it up to her at the end.


Of course, there were other romantic developments in this episode, but this was the one that seemed to get forgotten in the rush to squeal with delight over the other stuff.

Worst Performance of the Week:

I’m beginning to think that the Fringe showrunners made a huge mistake in casting Anna Torv to head their new show. Though all of my affection for the show rests with either John Noble or Lance “Intensity” Reddick, I’m willing to open my arms to allow others in. No one has stepped up yet. Kirk Acevedo’s tics irk me, Blair Brown is as shaky as she was during Altered States, and even though I thought he was okay opposite Patrick Stewart in Mamet’s A Life In The Theatre, I’m otherwise baffled by the appeal of Joshua Jackson, especially in a role as poorly written as this one.


Torv, on the other hand, has shown little spark of life in Fringe, which we attributed to the lifeless role of Olivia, who has been asked to swallow her grief over her lover’s death and possible betrayal (and, you know, the fact that his consciousness is living inside her brain or something). This week, however, Olivia has been re-written as an angry young lady, all guns drawn and snarly, telling tales of her evil step-dad and going after nasty pharma-jerks who abduct women to make their brains a big radioactive weapon, or somesuch. (Check out this week’s appearance of The Observer, who seems to find Olivia’s inept flirting more interesting than someone’s head exploding in the opening scene. He truly is inhuman!)


While I would definitely say Olivia needed a revamp, and pronto, and while I would accept a mid-flow personality change as a quick fix to what must have been an obvious problem with the template for the show, did the showrunners realise that Anna Torv can’t really pull it off? With the whole episode revolving around her dangerous past and sudden no-nonsense attitude, her acting quirks were on full display, and warning bells sounded throughout.


While I’m not able to discuss her acting technique using technical terms, and though a lot of what was wrong with that episode is down to the shockingly poor script, it was still a dispiriting display of faux-rage and stroppy, confrontational bluster, none of which convinced. Though Torv’s voice is possibly the most soothing thing currently on TV, hearing her spit sarcastic and furious lines at her co-stars just made us laugh in incredulity. Her goofy reaction to the scientist’s suicide was amusing too; this picture does not do justice to the WTFness of it.


In other venues, I’m sure Ms. Torv is just fine, and she must have done something right to get the job, but so far this role seems like a bad fit. Perhaps it’s unfair to compare her to Jennifer Garner, whose work on Alias was so consistently impressive (shut it, haters), but she had some warmth or lightness that Torv desperately needs. Of course, perhaps she is not meant to portray that, in which case the character needs to be rethought, as she can’t do tough guy, so it’s going to be a problem if Olivia 2.0 is meant to go all Horatio Caine week after week. Nevertheless, Torv is on probation until there is another change, because right now, Angry Olivia is still good for a few laughs, which harms the show’s atmosphere, but holds our attention more.

Magnificent Insanity of the Week:

It’s official: America’s Next Top Model has lost its mind. Words cannot describe the lunacy on display. I’ll let this photo montage do the explaining for me.















There really is nothing else to add.

Troubling Development of the Week:

We’ve been thinking it for a while now, and this week might have set our opinion in stone: Ugly Betty is now officially boring. While we’re a week behind on Pushing Daisies out of regrettable error, we’re not up to speed with Betty mostly because we just don’t care about the majority of the storylines currently running. While Claire Meade’s incarceration was amusing, this week’s prison sub-plot just made me wish I was rewatching Arrested Development, an urge more pronounced after Jeffrey Tambor turned up on CSI the following week.


The biggest problem the show has this season is that there is very little it can do that it hasn’t done before. The O.C. had a similar problem in its middle two seasons, after the crazed first burned through major arcs in the space of a couple of episodes. Eventually the show had nowhere to go, and the penultimate season ended up filled with clanging plot failures like Sandy’s descent into evil, Marissa’s infinitely boring friendship with the world’s most depressed surfer, and Ryan’s war with the adorably named Volchok. Ugly Betty is in similar trouble. Other than the attempted murder of Christine, which was done and dusted in two and a bit episodes, we’ve wasted hours (or thereabouts) on Hilda’s affair and Daniel’s son, both of which are the most tedious sub-plots of the year so far.


A large proportion of each episode is now given over to stories that don’t go anywhere, merely offering cloying moments of grief from minor characters who are unhappy over events that don’t really matter. Don’t believe me? Watch how often Daniel mentions his son over the rest of the season. Also, Hilda made her true love go back to his wife to try to make it work out? Yeah, I’m sure that the guy who was crazy about you and didn’t want to be with his wife any more is real happy about that decision. It was all so dull that even her son looks like he wishes he was on Heroes or something.


Of course, while The O.C. had a similar quality dip, it found its feet again for a mostly entertaining fourth season, but that was by ditching the dark plots and going all out with the weird (alternate realities?), which might have annoyed the purists (if there is such a thing as an O.C. purist) but kept us happy. How can Ugly Betty go that route? It’s already cartoony, and until now has worked by maintaining that slightly hysterical soapy semi-dramatic tone. Turning it into an out-and-out comedy might make it more fun in the short term, but it might finish the whole thing off as well. It’s worth a try, though. Even the happy-making return of Gio became a meta-comment on how much the show has begun to annoy us.


My suggestion is the same as I’ve been saying for a while now. Give Marc and Amanda more to do. Make Claire Meade a catty matriarch again. Give Wilhelmina something else to do other than plot to takeover Meade Publications every week. Betty’s fine for now, but her family is dragging the show down (plus, Justin is realistically snotty as a teenager, but he’s also zero fun). Give Daniel a victory or two, or bring back his tacky lad’s mag (dozens of story possibilities flew out the window with that decision). Most importantly, make it funny again. Jokes are flopping lifelessly to the ground with depressing regularity, and it’s making the show a chore to watch. I’m not sure how much longer we’re going to stick with this, and I bet we’re not the only ones.

Shurely Shome Mishtake Moment of the Week:

Olivia Dunham spends much of last week’s Fringe being grumpy about her birthday, which is later explained away as a consequence of her abusive stepfather beating up her mother so much that Olivia ends up shooting him. He nearly dies but somehow survives (is Mad Science responsible??!?!?!?), before disappearing. His only contact with Olivia is sending her a birthday card every year since. That the whole speech was only lacking a reference to the screaming of the lambs was not the worst thing about it, nor was the cliche of Olivia transferring her anger of her stepfather over to her investigation of Evil David Esterbrook. It was the fact that she shot someone when she was nine and grew up to become an FBI agent.


Oh sure, she did it in self-defence, but surely there has to be some rule that someone who once tried to kill someone else, no matter what the circumstances, should not rise through the ranks of the FBI to become an agent. It just strikes me as being highly unlikely. No doubt someone somewhere knows that it’s actually mandatory or something, but until then, I call bullshit.

Gratifying Performance of the Week:

We’re a week behind on Pushing Daisies, and rumours of its imminent cancellation are sapping our enthusiasm, but that doesn’t mean we’re not getting any pleasure out of it. The episode from two weeks ago, with Ned, Chuck and Emerson visiting Olive’s convent featured many amusing moments, but most pleasingly it gave Anna Friel a chance to show off her acting skillz. Wracked with doubt about her place in the world, and whether or not she should have received a second chance at life, she is saved from a potentially terminal depression by the news that Aunt Lily is actually her mother. Her tear-soaked reaction was almost enough to set me off.


I’ve been waiting for years for Friel to live up to the promise of her Brookside performances, and regrettably she’s not had any roles good enough to give her a chance to show off what she can do, but Chuck is perfect for her. I especially like that even though she is becoming more unhappy as the show progresses, she is still cheery enough to hide it convincingly. Plus, the way she keeps waving at Olive is adorable.



Here’s hoping we get to see a full season of endearing character moments like this.

Distracting Embonpoint of the Week:

It is my sincere wish to be as progressive about gender politics, the insidious male gaze, and the negative impact of the objectification of women as possible, but Catherine Willows’ breastal area seemed way way larger than usual this week, causing me to lose focus on the plot.


This, in turn, made me feel like a lecherous wanker for getting so distracted. Was I being irrational? Am I no better than some Daily Star-reading creep whose favourite word is PHWOAR? Surely I’m better than this, I thought as I rewound subsequent scenes several times because I had become so anxious about my distraction and the psychological consequences of my sudden fascination with the boobs. It was upsetting me so much I had to blurt out my suspicions about a size increase to Canyon, who, thankfully, had been thinking the same thing. Not that I’m saying, “It’s okay for me to be staring at boobs because my wife was as well,” but it did make me think I was onto something with my suspicions. And I’m not judging Marg Helgenberger if she has indeed had cosmetic surgery. That’s her choice, and more power to her for doing it. Good on her. Not “Good on her for having bigger boobs. Or not, if she’s not done anything and I’ve made a mistake.” Just, you know, good on her for doing what she wants to do. If it is what happened. I’m not saying it definitely is. I’m not the kind of guy who gets obsessed with these things. It’s just idle curiosity. So, what happened? Cosmetic surgery (not that there’s anything wrong with that)? Or just that top she is wearing? It could just be shadows. Not that I’m insinuating she has small boobs normally. I’ve never really thought about it one way or the other, to be honest. They just caught my eye this week, which is unusual. It’s almost aberrant, you could say. Me noticing her boobs, that is, not the boobs themselves. I’m sure they’re as great now as they have always been. Though of course I don’t go around saying, you know, “Hey, boobs are great! Yowsa boobs!” And I certainly don’t think women are expected to have cosmetic surgery done. It’s totally their choice and it’s none of my business. Of course, I also think that wanting to enhance boobs is totally acceptable, and I would never suggest otherwise. And it’s not just for women either, or wymyn, should I say. Men can have them too, if that’s what they want, certainly if they are intending to change gender, which, again, is supercool with me, and I would never think to make any disparaging comments about that either. Which is getting me away from my question about Catherine. Now that I think about it, I’m fairly sure it’s an optical illusion or something to do with the lighting, and I’m reading too much into things, which is more than likely. It’s the culture we live in, you know, obsessed with body image and looks and what-have-you, reducing people to their parts instead of dealing with them as a whole. It’s so terrible. I never ever do that. Except this one time. And earlier on when I was going on about all of the hott gay sex in House. But that was just me pointing out the show using sex as a ratings winner, in an exploitative manner, otherwise I wouldn’t have mentioned it at all, because of course I don’t want to seem like I watch TV just to ogle anyone, because I totally don’t. So, we’re settled with this, right? It’s just a very nice top she is wearing, and I should be ashamed of myself for being so interested in it. Good. Glad we’re clear on that. [/torrential flopsweat]

Distracting Groin of the Week:

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Holy shit! Don Draper is 150% more man than most! (Believe me, that bulge next to the AMC sign is not the pleats.)


He could appear in the porn version of this show. As Dong Draper.

Inaccurate Depiction of Bloggers of the Week:

CSI wandered into dangerously luddite CSI: Miami territory last week, with our heroes hingeing their investigation on the comments section of an art blog. While a serial killer left macabre posed corpses around Las Vegas, an immoral blogger (seen below, with more hair than is usual for bloggers) made vodcasts about the project, leading the killer to post comments about how awesome he was.


I say the blogger was immoral because, in a bit of judgemental stereotyping, the blogger was more concerned with the statement than the crime, though he got the message after being pulled in to lay a trap for the killer. If this was CSI: Miami the blogger would have been the killer, and he would have broadcast the murders on The YourTube, the sick bastard. He would also have been a pedophile. And a terrorist. CSI: Classic was not as bad as that, but it still chafed.

Still, the thought that the police were going to trace the IP addresses of the commenters in order to find the killer must have made the hearts of many bloggers soar in much the same way that the end of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back did, with fantasies of finding abusive jerkoffs and making them apologise for being douchey. Ah, how lovely the internet would be if everyone had some goddamn manners.

Shock of the Week:

Hard to believe, but last week’s Heroes did not totally suck. I’m not saying it qualifies as good, but it was intentionally amusing at times (as well as unintentionally), and contained some surprises that actually worked until you thought about them for a moment, instead of seeming like contrived nonsense right off the bat. I have no idea what last night’s episode was like (I intended to get this finished before it aired, but I’m still feeling super-rough), but this episode managed to be flawed but fun. Things to like: Hiro’s tantrum after getting hit over the head with a shovel for the second time…


…Daphne trying to ignore the power of Parkman’s turtle totem…


…Pops Petrelli’s power being a new variant on Peter and Sylar’s power absorption, and best of all, Peter going down like a punk in the final scene.


Things not to like: Daphne wondering how Parkman could know so much about her which is stupid as, even though it’s not the reason for his knowledge, she has just read a folder on him pointing out he is telepathic; Adam also going out like a punk, with much crying and whining and dessicating…


…Peter not reading his dad’s mind before getting powersucked; the utter lameness of Pops Petrelli’s Association of Evil Individuals…


…Hiro’s power suddenly freezing Daphne, even though it has been established that he can’t, which also means that last week’s fake-out murder of Ando was just as stupid as expected…


…all of the deeply boring Puppet Man plot, especially finding out that Meredith went after him even though she knew he could control her body…


…and everything involving Tracy, Nathan and Suresh, who are an Unholy Trinity of boring stupidity.


Still, that’s a lot more in column one than in recent weeks. I strongly doubt the show is ever going to be what we hoped it would be, and some viewers are never going to warm to it, such as a disgusted Canyon, who barely made it through this installment, but it might get to the point where it makes sense once in a while, something the second season seemed to render impossible.

Guest Stars of the Week:

Just recently I made a comment about how CSI often blows the mystery of the week by casting guest stars who are obviously going to be the killer, but this week convention was shirked, meaning Alex Kingston really was a grief counsellor, and Jeffrey Tambor really was just a snotty artist. The killer turned out to be just some guy doing a weak Kevin-Spacey-in-Seven impression.


Tambor is one of those rare Scientologists its okay to like, such as Beck, Chick Corea, and mid-to-late 90s Travolta. It’s always a treat to see him on TV, and he was lots of fun here. Kingston did an equally good job as the counsellor who ends up facing off against Gil following a misunderstanding, but even so I was worried that the show was suddenly employing two guest stars.


It’s a bit of overkill that suggests the showrunners were eager to distract the viewer from the new character, who would otherwise be the biggest deal in the episode. Speaking of which…

Unorthodox Introduction of the Week:

…new character Riley Adams, played by Lauren Lee Smith, arrived at CSI HQ with an aggressive attitude and a malfunctioning sense of humour. As Lee Smith appeared in the credits, replacing Gary Dourdan, we discussed how difficult it would be for her to fit in with the fanbase’s expectations, who treat in-show change with a range of emotions running the gamut from thwarted yet undeserved entitlement to seething indignant rage.


Perhaps the CSI showrunners realised that, and didn’t bother creating a likeable character, knowing it would all be for naught. Better to just alienate the audience on purpose and win them over in the long term (I wonder if naming her after a famously unpopular character who joined a show late in its run was part of the plan). Also, I noted that Riley is the first permanent team member added since Holly Griggs (not counting Greg, who was promoted. Griggs, of course, was murdered in the pilot due to Warrick’s negligence. So far Riley is the total opposite of Griggs, which makes the whole thing nicely symbolic. Or cyclical. There’s a point being made here, but sadly the grogginess is making it hard to find.

Model of the Week:

We’ve decided on our favourite for this cycle. I had been convinced that Lauren Brie was going to win for sure, despite being partially covered in an almost inedible rind, but it was not to be. As is now the way with ANTM, we got to see her being a big bitch two weeks ago, and not long after she was SENT! HOME! Unfortuately the same happened to the awesome Joslyn, leaving us kinda bereft. Now, we’re not sure she can pull it off, but we’re totally rooting for Analeigh, who has been adorable and is getting better every week.


Her CoverGirl ad this week was possibly the best in the show’s history, and her in-house diplomacy has been a refreshing change from the usual catty shenanigans (Marjorie and Samantha have been moved to our Shut-The-Fuck-Up Corner). Of course, Elina will probably win now that Tyra has made it her mission to break her spirit and mold her into something else as if she were V and Elina were Evie, but we’re hoping Analeigh (and therefore justice) will win out.

Grisly Moment of the Week:

Was it Pops Petrelli yanking a tube out of his throat after absorbing Adam’s power?


Or Fringe Mysteriously Experimented-Upon-Person Emily Kramer after her head exploded due to some particularly Mad Science involving Strontium or something?


Or the eerie image, from CSI, of a child suspended in a tank filled with carbon monoxide?


That wasn’t gross, but it was deeply unnerving, especially as it brought back uncomfortable memories of Vincent D’Onofrio’s elaborate murders in The Cell, which was, of course, directed by… TARSEM!

Silly Bet of the Week:

Not only does he have a name guaranteed to make Brits laugh for all the wrong reasons, Wayne Rigsby (played by Owain Yeoman) bets Mentalist Patrick Jane that he can’t seduce the widow at the funeral they are staking out. For crying out loud, not only is he The Mentalist, but he’s played by Simon Baker.


Yum! He’s such a mischievous hottie. No woman could resist his Amazing Powers of the Brain and his sexxy waistcoat. Bet lost. (Actually, Rigsby kinda wins, but only because the widow is a murderous psycho and Jane has to put her away using psychology and subterfuge. Bad luck, Mentalist.)

Hitchcock Reference of the Week:

Having an obvious but non-showy Vertigo reference in Pushing Daisies was very welcome.


You see, later that week we watched Eagle Eye, and the hamfisted way D.J. Caruso visualised his rip-off of the big finish of The Man Who Knew Too Much, with a CG overlay of a sheet of music with a big note sticking up where the bomb is going to go off, was just horrid. Just showing the tower, identical to the one in Vertigo, is the way to go.

Intensity of the Week:

Even from a distance…


…Lance Reddick brings it.

I’m really startled by how much this week has disappointed me, stripping me of all of my enthusiasm for this project. It’s not just me, either. Brian Michael Bendoom was harder to track down for comment, but after leaving numerous messages for him, he got back to me to say…


…and to be honest, I think he’s being generous. Be better this week, TV!

Tip Of The Hat, Jon Hamm; Wag Of The Finger, D.J. Caruso

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Loyal readers of this blog know that I try to use the weekend to review this week in TV, but a mixture of things have delayed me: shopping, lethargy caused by the tail end of a really shitty ill patch, a trip to see Eagle Eye at IMAX, the usual habitual refreshing of Huffington Post and Daily Kos and Daily Dish and Salon and FiveThirtyEight just to be sure that the desperate Republican-originated October Surprise hasn’t happened yet. I’m working on that post (spoiler alert: nothing topped The Shield, just as predicted). Until then, yes, I’m again being naughty and resorting to linkblogging. It’s linked to the Mad Men End of Season Review I hope to get on with later in the week, so it’s almost as if this is a prologue to that. I just needed to say, good work hosting Saturday Night Live this week, Jon Hamm, and I will have more praise for your recent work in a few days.


Here is Don Draper’s Guide To Picking Up Women, and here is some of the Mad Men cast opposite Jason Sudeikis and Kristin Wiig. Why have I not embedded videos onto the blog? Because NBC videos are too large for this horrid template, Hulu won’t allow me to embed because I’m in the UK even though US readers would still be able to see it, and AOL had embeddable videos that were the right size but their code is as shitty as any of their godawful programs, such as the IM app that crashed Canyon’s iPhone and made her lose all of her contacts, or the IM app that wrecked our new laptop to the extent we had to reinstall everything down to the operating system OH GOD AOL YOU SUCK RACCOON ANUS!!! Anyway, check out the links. Jon Hamm is great, and I especially liked Bill Hader’s impression of Sal.


Oh, and Eagle Eye? Note to director D.J. Caruso (formerly of The Shield, just to keep this “topical”). Mr. Caruso, if you’re going to film a series of car chases that are going to end up projected on a screen as high as three double decker buses, move the camera back far enough that people can see something more than five minutes of smudgy black shapes flashing past the camera with white dots zipping back and forth. I think they might have been bits of glass. Seriously, people bitch about Michael Bay’s incoherent car chases, but compared to the scenes in Eagle Eye, this…

…looks like Peter Yates’ crystal clear Bullitt setpiece. The first Eagle Eye car chase was so poorly shot and edited that I thought Shia LaBoeuf and Michelle Monaghan had died four times, but instead four other identical cars had crashed, leaving our heroes improbably untouched. It ruined an otherwise entertaining, if utterly preposterous, bit of nonsense, and one that featured Michael Chiklis, earning the berserk project 10,000 bonus Chickie points.

One more thing. Thank you, YouTube, for allowing me to link to a crazy Nic Cage vs. Sean Connery car chase, and for not being as shitty as AOL, who lick dead toad scrote.

Reed Richards Is Brane Smart (2)

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From Fantastic Four #542, written by Dwayne McDuffie, pencilled by Mike McKone inked by Andy Lanning & Cam Smith, with colours by Paul Mounts. Reed Richards explains to his former nemesis The Thinker (formerly Mad, now just extra pensive) why he helped create the Superhero Registration Act.





“That’s all very interesting, Richards, interesting enough to give me a terrible headache. If anyone was going to be able to make something like this work it would be you. However, surely a plan like this only works in terms of determinism, which presupposes a closed system where you know all of the variables and can extrapolate from them. But what if there is a variable introduced from outside that closed system, something that you know nothing about, like, say, a long-planned and secret infiltration of our planet by shape-changing aliens. Like the Skrulls, perhaps. What about if something like that happened, or was already happening? I’m speaking of a hypothetical situation, of course. If something enters that system from outside, such as hundreds upon hundreds of Skrulls, all acting with an agenda that you have not factored into your equation, then perhaps your calculations are wrong, and there was no need for you to throw away our civil liberties in the way you did. However, if your calculations are so complex and so far-reaching that you can take into account any and all possible variables, i.e. using the universe as your closed system and therefore making calculations for all matter that exists, then you would know about any future invasions of Earth and would be able to counteract them before they could cost the lives of millions of innocent humans, right?”

“SHUT UP MAD THINKER I AM SMARTER THAN YOU!”


(N.B. This is not a criticism of Dwayne McDuffie’s short run as writer of Fantastic Four, as his work was superb, second this decade only to Mark Waid’s run, but even though I loved his effort to prove Reed Richards is not just an reactionary dick as portrayed during Civil War, it might have worked better if he had been able to plan around Secret Invasion.)

This Week In TV Special: Vic and Ronnie vs. Shane

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Knowing that any weekend posts about this week in TV would be completely derailed by the gut-wrenching hour of TV we saw last night, I thought I would get some of my feelings out here to save me time later. Though this week’s Mad Men, which we have yet to watch, is reportedly horrifying and gripping and brilliant, and I’m sure something we watch regularly will impress us (or disappoint us ::aims stinkeye at Ugly Betty::), there is no way, and I really really mean NO WAY, that anything will wrench the Highlight of the Week mantle from this week’s episode of The Shield, Parricide. The only episode of this magnificent show that is more upsetting, shocking, template-destroying, and beautifully made is the season five finale, Postpartum, an hour of TV that almost made me vomit, if it’s possible to vomit while sobbing uncontrollably and wailing the odd exhortation to God or Crom or Neo or whoever.

——–Beware Shield spoilers if you have yet to watch it, which, really, is kinda unforgivable——–

Over the last couple of months, we have sped through six seasons of the show, hooked by the moral quandaries and thrilled by the efforts of lovable thug Vic Mackey and his Strike Team to escape the mistakes of the past with their souls and families intact. Of the many things to praise, perhaps the thing that excites me most is the show’s willingness to take its format to the brink of destruction as often as possible and reel it back without removing consequences for its characters. It’s not just splitting the Strike Team up at the end of season three and figuring out a way to realistically bring them together again midway through the next season — it’s having one of the team killed in the most heart-rending way at the end of Postpartum and still keeping the show running even though some of the characters have been transformed into psychotic versions of their former selves. Most of that is due to the superb writing staff and the sure hand of showrunner Shawn Ryan, but it’s also a function of that format. The setting (The Barn and Farmington), the set of characters (the police force of The Barn, including the Strike Team), and the antagonists (the various gangs and their bosses) remain unchanged from season to season, but the cast and the scope of the show expands while the morality of all the characters contract, becoming touched more and more by Mackey’s crimes, and the compromises everyone has to make to do their jobs and survive. Episode to episode the show looks the same, but the format is not “See what scrapes Vic gets into this week”; it’s “When will Vic pay for his moral failure?”, as the show is all about Vic’s long arc from cop-killing crook to desperate do-gooder trying to atone for his multitude of sins, all the while corrupting everything he touches in barely perceptible increments. As a result, even though an occasional observer might think the show is static, it’s always changing, always travelling toward a core of darkness.


This final season shows that better than most, with Vic’s efforts to save his soul and his link to his estranged family overshadowed by the consequences of his murder of Terry Crowley, the Armenian Money Train heist, Lem’s death and, most recently, Vic’s failed attempt to set up his former best friend, Shane. Most of the season has been about moving pieces into place, such as pushing Shane so far that his only hope of survival is to kill his former Strike Team partners, though his traditional ineptitude means the plan fails. This week’s episode featured a bravura moment of drama, as Shane watches his reluctant accomplice, Two Man, cave under pressure, revealing Shane’s part in that murder plot. If the show has pushed itself almost to destruction many times before, in that incredible moment The Shield as we know it fell apart (or, to be more exact, exploded), and yet we still have five episodes left to go.

Watching the whole beautifully choreographed mess unfold, we kept trying to predict what was going to happen. Shane’s gonna kill Ronnie! Ronnie’s totally gonna murder Shane! Vic’s gonna snap and kill Ronnie to save Shane even though Shane is totally off the chain! And yet we were wrong. A colleague recently praised The Wire by saying that when a plot line kicks in, surprising you completely, in retrospect you realise there was no other way it could have come down, and The Shield does that too, but perhaps no better than it did in this incredible hour. Thinking there were only one or two ways the episode could unfold — with murders and cover-ups — we couldn’t see this grand surprise coming, as it changes the show utterly. Of course, as The Shield reaches the end of its life, it can afford to do something like this, but still, watching it happen was a thrilling experience.


Of all the things to love it for, though, best of all is the performance of Walton Goggins, which deserves award recognition next year. Seeing his mask of bravado and overconfidence slowly crumble as his cover-up falls apart was entertaining enough, but the final moment — as he watched his goon, Two Man, weigh up his options, and realised that his career and friendships and possibly life are finally all over — was on a par with Michael Emerson’s performance as Ben Linus in The Shape of Things to Come, which, for me, is the highest praise I can give. It was heartbreaking and darkly funny and thrilling and a million other things. It’s the sort of performance that signals the arrival of an actor that people follow from project to project for the rest of their career, and the sad thing about it is that Shield fans have already seen him give a performance that is just as amazing, in his final scene with Lem, and yet he has not been given a multicoloured coat like that Joseph guy, except with dozens of reinforced pockets to hold all of the awards he deserves. That’s the sort of crime that should be investigated by the Strike Team, with all of the door-smashing, body-blocks, and threats that the award judges deserve.

Okay, enthusiasm purge over. That is all. (Canyon just told me that genius humorist John Hodgman’s third book is going to be callled That Is All. It’s the little things that make life worth living.)

Don’t You Get It? Homo Superior Is The Future!

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I’ve got time to kill for the first time in aeons, so hey, here’s a trailer for Push, starring alternate-reality megastar Chris Evans and my favourite candidate to play T’Challa in a Black Panther movie, Djimon Hounsou.

Yes yes, it’s just Heroes, except set in Hong Kong, but as Heroes is now officially broken, there’s room for a competent version of it. If it is competent. It might be rather dull, especially for an action thriller, considering how the trailer features lots of shots from two locations. That suggests there are only two action scenes interspersed with Dakota Fanning being super-knowledgeable and mature beyond her years. Of course, from that trailer it also looks like the “heroes” are only interested in saving one of their own, with the side effect of helping humanity just by keeping their friend out of the hands of a secret government agency. So it’s as much a rip-off of The Fury (sans John Cassavetes and his dead arm) as it is a million other things, like Firestarter and Scanners etc. etc. but, as far as we can tell, without the exploding people. You can’t have films concerning governmental abuse of psychic superheroes without exploding people! It’s like mint choc ice-cream without chunks of chocolate. Surely this is obvious.

Just to complicate matters further, The Fury is already being remade, but will it feature anything that could top this?

It’s one of the greatest endings to a movie ever filmed, and justifies the rest of the film, which is meh at best. After rewatching that scene just now I got called into a meeting about departmental restructure, during which terms such as “metadata delivery” and “upstream involvement” were bandied about, terms that my brain tries to grasp only to see them slip from my fingers like wriggling fish. It means nothing to me. I’m obviously in the wrong line of work, and it occurs to me now that surely there is an opening working for these shady governmental agencies. But how to get an interview? It’s not like they’re going to be advertising in the Telegraph, because, you know, shady. Should I have been in the army, perhaps? I’d assume that handling people who could bat you across the room with a flick of their premotor cortex is risky enough that you should know how to trepan a person with your thumbnail, and, well, I don’t. I can kill a fridge with a knife, though. [/bitter]

Maybe I could still try, somehow. With the economy in the toilet government spending is down (except when spending money on saving banks, obviously), which means that even though spending on weapons is probably going to remain high, it’ll still drop, and so that investment will have to go further. What’s a better use of money? A bunch of nukes costing trillions of dollars? Or a bunch of pasty-faced telekinetics covered in Celtic tattoos and black coats with sleeves too long? All they need to keep going are Disturbed albums and cases of Mountain Dew. Provide those, and figure out a way to demonise The Other in a way that their youthful minds can understand and react to (“They hate our freedoms,” ain’t gonna cut it), and you’ve got the cheapest army ever.

The only other investments you’ll need are in wrist restraints and tranquilizer darts (for when you need to experiment on them), and development of psychic dampener technology to stop them going apeshit if you run out of Mountain Dew, or Disturbed split up. It’s a growth industry waiting to happen, and I reckon I’ve got what it takes to jump in at ground level and make a difference. As long as my first day on the job doesn’t end like this.

Consider this my resume, Psychic Corps of the UK.

This Week In TV Year II (Week 6) Part 2

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I’ll be thrilled when I get this done, you know. The Illness From Out Of Space has made us feel so crappy and so woozy-headed that we’re actually behind on TV watching. We’ve not yet seen last week’s Ugly Betty or Pushing Daisies, or the premiere of Crash, opting instead, through sheer laziness, to sit through the mediocre failure that is Jan de Bont’s remake of The Haunting. I mean, I’ve already seen it twice, so I know it’s terrible, but I made Canyon sit through it anyway. What was I thinking? Anyway, let’s do this thing.

Correction:

Remember I said in the previous post that the Fringe lift error was Mistake of the Week? I forgot this egregious screw-up from CSI.


I’m making an effort to praise this show for its intelligence (something a lot of haters who don’t watch it think it lacks), and they pull this trick. It makes me look like a chump. A chump!

Grisly Visual of the Week:

Peter did to Sylar what most viewers have been hoping would happen to Peter when he snapped the neck of his “brother” (give us a break)…


…and then we got to see him fix it. I’m sure the effect was a lot easier to do than it seems, but then the simple stuff is much more effective, sometimes. Flashes of coolness like this are all the difference between watching crap like Heroes and watching crap like Knight Rider and Torchwood, which can’t even get the spectacle aspect of sci fi right.


Oh, and as for wishing harm on Peter Petrelli? Someone (Daddy Parkman?) read my thoughts.

Kill those stupid brains!

Downright Nausea-Inducing Visual of the Week:

At the start of this week’s CSI, a woman is compelled by hypnosis to jump out of her apartment window to land with a crash on a passing bus. So far, so much like the opening of Lethal Weapon. However, that film didn’t show a coroner trying to pick up the body afterwards.


And we were eating when it happened. Thanks, CSI.

Heartbreaking Moment of the Week:

The scene in last week’s Mad Men, where Sal listens to a blast of homophobic drivel from his colleagues (including his secret crush Ken Cosgrove), was already superbly played before we get to his stoic reaction.


Bryan Batt perfectly illustrates Sal’s heartbreak with a forced smirk, his eyes doing the rest. It was almost impossible to watch.

Best Appearance By A Beloved Character Actor of the Week:

Though we’ve not yet seen The Wire (which is a temporary arrangement now a loyal friend has bought me two seasons), we’ve heard great things about Andre Royo, aka Bubbles the drug addict. Having him show up in Heroes seems like a good idea for a show populated by this shower of twerps.


His power, creating deadly vortices, is supercool, Royo’s performance was full-on, and his character is interesting and tragic. Hiring him is one of the first smart moves the showrunners have made this season, and I can’t wait to see how it all plays out.



::sigh:: Never mind.

You Couldn’t Make It Up Moment of the Week:

We’re up to speed with America’s Next Top Model for the first time ever, which means sitting through the catch-up episode for the odd morsel of new content. Though it might seem pointless, the catch-up episode often features a new insight into some of the contestants that either illuminates events from previous weeks (such as when did the dreary but hypercompetent model/cheese hybrid Lauren Brie turn out to be such an asshole?), or sets up arcs in the final half (the inevitable separation of BFFs Marjorie and Analeigh).


However, while the catch-up episode spent too long going over Tyra’s ridiculous unfunny stunts again, it did feature the absurd sight of McKey (who really should have been sent home by now) getting upset when Elina tried to kill a bee with her hairspray, and not because Elina is a hypocrite after ranting with dogmatic vehemence at everyone about animal rights earlier in the episode. Taking the bee outside and (I’m not making this up) trying to revive it with water, McKey announces that killing a bee is the first step to becoming a serial killer. You’ve got to start somewhere, apparently.


Crazy knows crazy, I guess.

Smug Dope of the Week:

When Meredith stopped Claire’s mom from searching for the newly gloomy immortal with this bitchface, I rubbed my hands with glee, and not just because she obviously thinks that having hands like small gas hobs make her the equal of any villain.

Unfortunately, considering how much I was looking forward to seeing her eat her words, her nemesis proved to be a puppeteer type, the kind of mind-control sleaze that crops up way too often in comics (for a while there DC was filled with Dr. Psycho cameos and Marvel kept playing with the loathsome Purple Man, which turned my stomach quite a bit).

What’s even worse is that Meredith seems to have been puppetised without even singeing her foe even a little bit. Come on, Meredith, cook that bastard! Braise him! Sautee his eyes!

Unexpected Turn of Events of the Week:

Breaking from House season four tradition, we actually saw Cameron and Chase onscreen, together, at the same time, in the same room, and interacting no less! At first I thought they were only going to be shot like this, out of focus (God forbid they would share the same geometric plane)…


…but later that episode they were actually right next to each other (though with zero eye contact, as you would expect).

I would love to see the effects budget for this week, because I still can’t believe they’re on set together. Of course all of this sarcasm is covering for the fact that I feel really bad for Jesse Spencer and Jennifer “Captain Kirk’s mom” Morrison after their break-up, but it’s had the unfortunate after-effect of making watching them together very uncomfortable, as well as making me think the reason the original Cottages/Housettes got side-lined is because of tension on set. Of course, I don’t know that this is indeed the case, but it does create a weird show/audience dynamic.

Frustrating Show of the Week:

We like The Mentalist, and not just because of the awesome title. We love the central idea, and Simon Baker is very watchable as Patrick Jane (no relation to Thomas “Homeless Dad” Jane). However, as I have said before, the secondary cast is not lighting our fire yet, but that’s not the only problem.


At the moment we have no idea what the hell they are all doing, or where they are stationed. There was a hint that the Serious Crimes Unit, or the California Bureau of Investigation, or Brain Squad, or whatever they are called, do in fact have a base of operations, but so far they have been going from place to place, interrogating people in what look like closets full of filing cabinets. If this is a procedural, it’s an ill-defined one. With a base of operations a la the lab in CSI or a precinct or anything, it would help give the show a visual shape to counteract for the loosey-goosey approach that it seems to be going for so far.

Crappy Easter Egg of the Week:

I’m not even going to look on the net for information about the Pinehearst Company, and considering how easy it is for me (or many others) to futz about looking for uninteresting crap, that’s saying something.


It’s fair to say I’m not even pleased that the company logo explains the odd tattoo that many of the “heroes” (pfft!) have on their bodies, though it’s not exactly a shock that it represents half of the DNA spiral.

Cool Easter Eggs of the Week:

While Heroes stinks up the TV with FAILstench, Fringe, though not quite firing on all possible cylinders yet, is still promising enough that its many Easter Eggs are exciting, providing a new avenue of investigation into the show’s ever-expanding list of mysteries. Strengthening the sense that the Fringeniverse is an actual place, the Massive Dynamic logo keeps cropping up in odd places.


That poster hints at some MD involvement in personal development projects such as the one created by the evil Jakob Fischer (and makes me wonder if Massive Dynamic is meant to be what the Dharma Initiative would be like if it actually got anything done, instead of spending all of its time being attacked by Richard Alpert and his band of Unmerry Men). Fischer’s ads appear early on…


…and were also seen on a telegraph pole in the fourth episode. That said, the ad beneath it would surely lead to a lawsuit for discriminatory employment practices, wouldn’t it?

Of course, the show’s best Easter Egg is The Observer, seen here eyeballing Joseph MEEEEgar, prior to the elevator accident.


Fact Burst! The Observer is played by Michael Cerveris, who plays guitar with Bob Mould’s band (meaning I might have actually seen him live that one time in Wolverhampton when he was supported by Mercury Rev), has played Sweeney Todd on Broadway (OMG we love Sondheim!), and has recorded an album with Steve “Sonic Youth” Shelley, Norman “Teenage Fanclub” Blake, Corin Tucker and Janet “Quasi” Weiss from Sleater-Kinney, and others. He is the coolest Easter Egg EVAH!

Almost Impressive Exposition of the Week:

Actually, this is a two-parter. Displaying a pleasing adherence to reality, The Mentalist used not-hypnotism to drag the truth out of some feckless, murderous surf brats who seemed to have read Donna Tartt’s The Secret History prior to killing a friend. Before fooling them, our hero primes the kids with an explanation of what hypnotism is and what its limits are. It was refreshingly free from artifice.


Seems hypnotism wanted to snatch the Overused Theme spot from hallucinations, as CSI featured a thread about bank tellers handing over large sums of cash to Glenne Headly, who had hypnotised them as part of a weight loss/quit smoking program, which meant it was not only stepping on The Mentalist‘s toes but also Fringe‘s creepy mad science self-improvement plot.


Headly, upon being interrogated by Nick and Catherine, gives a long speech about what hypnotism can and can’t do that was surprisingly thorough and well-researched, dismantling a lot of pre-conceptions about the technique. Sadly, our glee was dented by the final act resolution, where we discover she had hypnotised one of the bank tellers by phone and convinced her to jump off her balcony.


When Nick points out that, according to her earlier speech, a hypnotee (?) can’t be made to do anything that is not in their nature, Headly darkly hints that maybe it was in their nature after all. Though the show was trying to make a point about hidden dark tendencies in her subjects (the same excuse was given for their criminal behaviour in handing over the money), it was stretching credibility to breaking point. Shame.

Frustrating-And-Cool-At-The-Same-Time Cameo of the Week:

Way back in the second season of House we were given a clue about the origin of the cranky doctor’s supercrankiness upon discovering his father was R. Lee Ermey. Or at least played by him. Obviously meant to evoke memories of his stock character of abusive drill sergeant, a big blank was filled in. This week, Ermey returned to play a corpse.


Though it’s frustrating to see Ermey but not get a performance out of him, the continuity nerd in me was happy to see him turn up to complete his arc. (If you’re curious to see what he can do when not barking orders at cadets, hunt down his superb performance in Dead Man Walking.)

Comedy Team of the Week:

Much as most people hated the Feudal Japan thread from last season, Adam Monroe and Hiro at least had a funny chemistry that made it almost bearable. Though the third season is more fun than the second, it’s possibly stupider, so I was surprised at how happy I was to see Adam reunited with his former friend, now enemy.


Their scenes together were endearingly funny and silly, especially with the wonderful Ando added to the mix. Hopefully there’s much more where that came from.



::sigh:: Never mind.

Justice of the Week:

Okay, so this is over a few weeks, but this cycle of America’s Next Top Model seemed to feature more objectionable small-minded catty morons than usual, with the presence of Isis bringing out record levels of hateful prejudice. Even though one rotter, Sharaun, was kicked out in the first week, I girded myself for a long period suffering the idiocy of Hannah Palin from Alaska, Brittany the Bitch, and Manly Clark. But check it out!


In a flurry of awkward contrivance that made me wonder if ANTM was quickly discarding the truly awful contestants as early as possible before lawsuits started flying, a runway challenge became an instant eject button for Hannah, whose walk was truly dreadful, though curiously it didn’t have the added problem of making the designer have a meltdown about hoochy posing destroying the purity of his vision, as Samantha’s equally misguided display did.


It really should have been Samantha getting kicked out, considering the vitriol aimed at her later (see below), but it was obvious Hannah had to go just for being a clueless little ninny. So off she went, with barely another mention that week, and the catch-up episode only spent a moment with her and her ha ha so hilarious Pixie Dust.


Worst contestant ever? Maybe. There was competition this year. Brittany was also godawful, picking on Elina who was dealing with family issues that completely perplexed her bitchy co-contestant, whose mom was soooooo awesome that she couldn’t even imagine a mother being anything less than perfect, and OMG Elina you’re so selfish for not loving your mother despite the psychological damage she caused, GOD!


When up before panel with Analeigh the Angel, I thought that, as in previous seasons, the nice but dull model wannabe was going home and the bitch would stay, as drama equals viewers. But no! Time to go home to your saintly mother, Brittany.


That was so awesome I howled with delight. There was only Clark to go, and she had suddenly seemed to be getting better, which gave strength to the theory that she would be hanging around as this season’s catty standout. After coming first before panel the week before, she was especially obnoxious, but after a really terrible photoshoot, she was gone, tiara and all.


Watching a lot of these back to back really made me feel better while the evil disease ravaged my body. And then, as a bonus, Kenley didn’t win Project Runway!


Of course, the fact that she was copying other designers and was in denial about it was no impediment to some more super-whiny crap from her. “It’s bullshit,” she said of the judges’ decision, not realising that she was actually passing judgement on her own nasty behaviour. Thank you TV for punishing the wicked! Though really, it should have been Korto winning over one-trick Leanne, according to Canyon.

Troubled Couple of the Week:

Though many hate them, we’re big Gil/Sara ‘shippers, and midway through the latest episode of CSI Canyon began to worry that Gil’s imminent departure would lead to the horribly cruel twist that he leaves too late to make a go of it with his nerdy lover.


If that happened, I would totally boycott the show. (This is a lie. Morpheus is on the way. There’s no way I’m missing that.)

Internal Monologue of the Week:

“Don’t mind me, Gibson. I’m just here for the meeting. I’m sure these guys won’t notice that I can’t drink you. Just sit there and I’ll ignore you. I’m totally not staring at you.”


“And that’s not drool on my chin, by the way. Tum te tum te tum. Not thinking about you. Not at all. Hold on, did those guys just say they don’t want to rehire me?”

“Come here, booze! BOOZE! Thank you for catching me when I fell, you beautiful liquid. I feel alive! ALIVE!”

Holy Shit Who Is This Guy? of the Week:

In a small role as Joseph Meegar, the Fringe Scientific Oddity of the Week, Ebon Moss-Bachrach knocked my socks off.


The X-Files is littered with hundreds of similar characters, their lives disrupted by unnatural occurrences. They were often forgettable, though with the odd stand-out. Moss-Bachrach’s nervous energy meant that only three minutes into the episode we were rooting for him in his efforts to woo receptionist Bethany in a way we would normally reserve for a character we have been watching for months. Hopefully he will be back later in the series; I get the feeling that Fringe will be bringing back characters as and when they are needed.

Asshole of the Week:

Heroes is full of terrible villains, but terrible in the sense that they’re really lame. It’s doubly annoying that the showrunners are trying to artificially make good guys bad and vice versa, either with contrivance, misunderstanding, or serums that turn people into spiders. And yet, the biggest villain on TV recently was designer Jeremy Scott, who behaved like a colossal jerk on an America’s Next Top Model by bitching out Samantha for being a bit too flamboyant while modelling his shitty clothes.


Dude, you look like a minicab driver pretending to be Adam Ant. Bitchiness rights are therefore forfeited. Admittedly, after watching the catch-up episode it turned out he did keep telling Samantha not to be hoochy while modelling his disastrous creation, and she didn’t listen, so he had a right to be pissed, but saving it for panel just because the runway challenge was used as a convenient way to get rid of Hannah the Bigot was low class. His drubbing of her seemed to have been given to him as a consolation prize, as there’s no way someone as talented as Samantha is going home yet, but it seemed like a re-run of Nigel’s shitfit when CariDee was a bit too familiar with him a few seasons back. Tyra likes the idea of the show as a school for these beginner models, but having the judges bitch them out like this just makes it look like the exploitative sideshow that it really is. Leave Samantha alone! That said…

Hypocrite of the Week:

Samantha really tested my support for her by being relentlessly catty about Marjorie. Though the nervy French model-Padawan’s ongoing mental breakdown and self-loathing piss me off too, Samantha’s behaviour went from being arguably defensible to out-of-line with a quickness. During the catch-up episode she made a big bitchy deal about Marjorie and Analeigh’s superfriendship, complaining about their adorable touchy-feeliness and seeming devotion to each other. And then we get to see what Samantha’s been up to!


Bathtime with Lauren Cheese and the odious Clark! What a hypocrite! God! If she’s down with lesbi-erotic events like this, I get the feeling she’s jus’ jellus about Marjoleigh. Is it a secret Sapphic love for either the skittish semi-European or the angelic skater? Or does she just want an awesome loyal friend of her own? Whatever the reason, I can imagine Elina is not happy that anyone else got to splash sudsy water at her beloved Clark, even though Clark is a cocky bigot and I’m glad she’s gone.

I love America’s Next Top Model.

Disappointment of the Week:

In an act of attempted matricide that would have improved Heroes by dozens of percent, Peter Petrelli, well on his way to becoming the evil Greaser Petrelli because he absorbed Sylar’s hunger by fixing a watch just so he could something something, tried to chop the top off his annoying mom’s head.


At least Pops Petrelli is played by the wonderful Robert “Alligator” Forster, which makes up for Ma Petrelli, one of my least favourite characters on TV. What is the point of her? Her allegiance changes every fucking week. I know people get annoyed at Lost for having morally ambiguous characters, but at least our perception of whether they are good and bad changes through plot, not contrivance, which accounts for the majority of the power and emotional impact of that most wonderful of shows. Heroes, on the other hand, seems to have been plotted as if by Luke Rhinehart. Next week, when she gets released from the nightmare trance she is stuck in, she’ll be a volunteer fireman. The week after, a neo-Nazi. Can someone else chop her head off? Can Meredith broil her? Anyone? Please?

Dashing Blade of the Week:

Jay Manuel should dress like this all the time.


Seriously. I love his blue-rinse hair styled like this. He’s like a cross between Prince Charming and a gay John Forsythe.

Ludicrous Contrivance of the Week:

Claire speaks for all of us when she calls her dad on his absurd Marvel Team-Up with the worst and most dangerous villain on Earth, even if he intends to kill him.


What’s even stupider is that Sylar suddenly wants to go straight, and is getting all of the hero moments that the actual heroes should be getting. I know this season is all about muddling the loyalties of the main characters and playing with our expectations, but just clumsily switching good to bad and back again is untenable from a narrative point of view, as the changes are being done with barely any preparation. For all its faults, season two’s exploration of Parkman’s temptation to misuse his power was way more convincing than Sylar suddenly declaring, “I’m a good guy now!” prior to performing one of the very few acts of heroism this season by saving Claire.


And really, is this the only heroism possible on this show? Saving other heroes from their own stupidity? And then Claire changes her mind at the end of the episode and gets mad at her dad for trying to get rid of Sylar even though the psychopath ruined her life, just as she had said at the start of the episode? It’s like the show is trying to fail. However, this PSA for John McCain from Hayden Panettiere helps.

She’s my actual hero.

We Love Doctor Walter Bishop Moment of the Week:

As Fringe gets down to establishing its universe, Walter has receded into the background a bit, which is a little frustrating, but still, even a little Walter is better than no Walter at all.


A still image doesn’t do justice to the eccentricity on display, as he rubs his besocked feet in a carpet to generate a static charge that he uses to shock Boring Peter out of his boring, sarcastic revery. Shame it wasn’t deadly. Less Peter, more Walter!

Fashion Improvement of the Week:

Masticator seems to be a fan of Maya’s sexxy sexxy get-ups, and I should explain that it’s not that she’s not an attractive superlady. I just think her fashion sense is awfully tacky, with some potentially stereotypical “Hispanic” trappings added by unimaginative showrunners that make her look like the cartoonishly tacky Hilda Suarez. I just thought she wouldn’t be played like a ditzy bit of eye-candy, but that’s too much to ask of Heroes. Still, this week she straightened that shit out.


Hopefully now that she has become a bit less over the top with her boob-exposing dresses and super-high-heeled sandals, she’ll get to do something interesting and heroic. That would dispel all of these suspicions that the showrunners don’t know what to do with her character, making her hang around just to give Suresh someone to interact with and eventually menace, when in fact there’s every chance she could be a pro-active and interesting character at last.


Oh, for fuck’s sake!!!!

Intensity of the Week:

There wasn’t even another contender this week.


He has Intensity of the Year all sewn up already.

As is traditional, I was hoping Brian Michael Bendoom would sum up this week’s TV for me, but he was too busy vomiting orange mucus into his diabolical metallic mask.


I feel you, dude.

Hawkmonkey PWNs Puppet Angel

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It was my birthday recently, and Canyon got me the best present ever: Hawkmonkey!


She gave a custom order to a craftsperson on Etsy called Siansburys, who makes incredible sock monkeys, many of which are of her own design, and some of which are based on established pop culture icons (I especially like her Captain Jack Sparrow Monkey).


Canyon, being an awesome wife who has had to put up with a lot of my nonsense about what an awesome asskicking megahero my beloved Hawkman is, has outdone herself, and Siansburys, whose designs are all wonderful, has astounded us with the enormous skill, attention to detail, and adaptive imagination on display here (the packaging was wonderful too). Zoe, on the other hand, is not so pleased.


I love this photo Canyon took this morning, of two crimefighters contemplating the world they are about to clean up using fangs, fists, and a big mace.


The only downside to this wonderful present is that some unscrupulous, awesomeness-hating creeps might come to my house one day and put Hawkmonkey in some kind of compromising position not befitting his majestic splendour. If you think I’m being unduly paranoid, there is a precedent.


I’d only had those action figures a couple of days, dammit! To be fair, one of the criminals responsible for that tableau did get me two Wire boxsets this week, which are greatly greatly appreciated, though I do worry that the Wire cultists are now getting so desperate for new blood that they are buying DVDs for the rest of us. Plus, nice work spotting that Hawkman is so totally a top.

Sci Fi Through Space/Time: The Wild Blue Yonder

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A shameful admission before begin. The Wild Blue Yonder is the first movie I have seen by Werner Herzog, even though I have Rescue Dawn somewhere in this house, not to mention a Herzog/Kinski boxset that has been touched by me only to move it from house to house. Pitiful. Until I saw this movie, the only experience I had of Herzog was to experience what Klaus Kinski thought of him, as expressed in his demented, perverse, brilliant autobiography. Apologies for the long quote, but really, if you’re going to quote Kinski, you have to quote a lot:

Herzog is a miserable, hateful, malevolent, avaricious, money-hungry, nasty, sadistic, treacherous, cowardly creep…

He should be thrown alive to the crocodiles! An anaconda should strangle him slowly! A poisonous spider should sting him and paralyze his lungs! The most venomous serpent should bite him and make his brain explode! No panther claws should rip open his throat–that would be much too good for him! Huge red ants should piss into his lying eyes and gobble up his balls and his guts! He should catch the plague! Syphilis! Yellow fever! Leprosy! It’s no use; the more I wish him the most gruesome deaths, the more he haunts me…

His speech is clumsy, with a toadlike indolence, long winded, pedantic, choppy. The words tumble from his mouth in sentence fragments, which he holds back as much as possible, as if they were earning interest. It takes forever and a day for him to push out a clump of hardened brain snot. Then he writhes in painful ecstasy, as if he had sugar on his rotten teeth. A very slow blab machine. An obsolete model with a non-working switch— it can’t be turned off unless you cut off the electric power altogether. So I’d have to smash him in the kisser. No, I’d have to knock him unconscious. But even if he were unconscious he’d keep talking. Even if his vocal cords were sliced through, he’d keep talking like a ventriloquist. Even if his throat were cut and his head were chopped off, speech balloons would still dangle from his mouth like gases emitted by internal decay.

The word on the street is that Kinski’s autobiography was full of exaggeration, obfuscation, and insane bullshit, but even so, that’s the kind of description that makes an impression on you. For some inexplicable and inexcusable reason I never got to see Herzog’s work, but I made an effort for The Wild Blue Yonder, because the idea behind it, of a monologue delivered by an alien played by Brad Dourif, was immensely appealing. Perhaps I should have realised that this was to be one of Herzog’s minor works, and an exercise in audience frustration, rather than his larger projects.


While I say minor works, I’m aware that the documentaries made between his major films are highly regarded, and that what might appear to be dashed off are done with intelligence and enthusiasm. At least, that’s the impression I got from Wild Blue Yonder, which was simultaneously trivial and fascinating, though perhaps more for what it says about filmmaking and storytelling than I says about its subject matter, which is an amusing but slight satire on modern culture, environmental concerns, and the urge to explore our surroundings, with a possible side order of comment on the sci fi genre and its reliance on spectacle.

Made on a shoestring budget, mostly utilising bits of footage found by or donated to Herzog, Wild Blue Yonder is a long tirade delivered by an alien, relating an alternate history of earth. His race, escaping an ice age on their home planet orbiting Andromeda, arrive on earth with the hope of rebuilding their civilisation but instead fail because, in Dourif’s words:

You see aliens as these technologically advanced superbeings who destroy New York city in two minutes flat. Well I hate to say it, but we aliens all suck.


Much of Dourif’s tale is told in a rundown Midwestern town, with deserted streets, dilapidated faux-Grecian buildings, and decrepit trailers, standing in for the aliens’ hubris-wrecked Babylon. The setting, and the tale told, are reminiscent of Nicolas Roeg’s adaptation of Walter Tevis’ The Man Who Fell To Earth, but Roeg didn’t visualise the alien’s arrival on Earth using old stock footage of crashing airplanes.


Herzog’s reliance on found footage to relate his galactic tale is both frugal and, for a while, amusing, cleverly linking shots of NASA scientists examining a probe to the next part of his tale, as an Andromedan virus escapes from the Roswell UFO during its examination at Cape Canaveral, and infects the planet.


A spacecraft orbiting Earth contains the only uninfected humans left, and their fate depends upon leaving Earth’s orbit and finding some way to travel across the galaxy to the home planet of the alien refugees, in the hope that they might find some way to build a new life there, with scientists desperately trying to invent methods of faster-than-light travel in order to speed up the journey.


This section of the movie is possibly the most problematic. Using footage of zero-G shenanigans from the STS 34 Space Shuttle mission, a long stretch of the short running time is taken up with mundane shots of astronauts sitting (well, floating) around, doing very little. The narrative grinds to a halt at these points, possibly to mimic the boredom of the astronauts, forced to play a waiting game while trying to leave Earth’s orbit, but also, maybe, as a pointed antidote to the grandiosity of much sci fi. Just as exotic fantasies of interesting alien cultures are punctured by Dourif’s resolutely unglamorous and self-loathing shlub, the wonder of space travel is presented as a flat, gray, nothing, a life of chores and boredom.


Scattered through these scenes are very entertaining rants from Dourif about the sins of humanity (breeding pigs and climbing mountains. It makes sense in the movie), weird alternate history interludes (Galileo’s launch figures in), and occasional breaks for baffling interviews with astrophysicists discussing theoretical intergalactic space travel methods, including one really awesome one from Martin Lo, explaining his Interplanetary Network theory. Nevertheless, these interruptions, delivered with no concessions to layman speak, are so perplexing that I began to suspect Herzog was making a point about mainstream sci fi, replacing the genre’s meaningless sub-scientific babble with actual science, in all its impenetrable complexity.


Eventually, using Lo’s method of interstellar travel, which he refers to as chaotic transport, the astronauts reach their destination, the ice encrusted planet from which Dourif’s ancestors travelled, and Herzog switches to footage of divers swimming under the ice at Murdo Sound, which was given to him by musician Henry Kaiser. With Dourif’s narration describing his homeworld as one with a frozen blue sky and bizarre alien creatures, we see divers passing under a thick blue crust of ice, surrounded by unfamiliar underwater flora and fauna. Compared to the eventless middle section, this part of the film is fascinating and, again, playful.


The kicker, delivered in the final moments of the film, is that the astronauts, so isolated and harried by their desperate trip through space, return to Earth with good news about the possible relocation spot, only to find that Earth has been deserted long before, making their journey a useless one. Even worse, the remnants of the human race are now living in space and Earth has become a national park for holidays.


This, in turn, makes the entire film seem like an absurd and futile joke, and makes you wonder what the point of it all is. Is it a treatise on humanity’s urge to trivialise the glorious? Some of the photography at the end is so beautiful it seems Herzog might be angered by the thought of his fellow man taking this beauty for granted. Harking back to the start of the film, the aliens’ plans for their stay on Earth, which requires building a city featuring a mall, a court room, a Pentagon, in an effort to replicate Washington DC, all fail. It’s likely this is a metaphor for the death of the American dream, and the way intelligence or wisdom can be ignored by many. One funny moment, with Dourif describing the alien lifeforms and their incomprehensible languages matches up with an image of a floating aquatic blob as a human language, possibly Farsi, bubbles up through the soundtrack. Is this just a silly joke? A comment on Western attitudes to foreigners, with a hint of war-on-terror criticism thrown in for good measure?


By film’s end I was baffled as to what Herzog was aiming for. A lot of the voiceover (and the denouement) is pointedly satirical, especially about humanity’s inability to take responsibility for the consequences of its actions. However, it also ends on a flatly ironic note, a Shaggy Dog tale ending that makes the journey as pointless as the one taken by the astronauts. After that, much of the movie seems purposeless. Long stretches of the film pass with little happening, leaving room for contemplation but it has very little (if any) narrative drive. It also makes you wonder if Dourif’s alien is nothing more than a crank rambling about his conspiracy theories from the wreckage of his trailer park home, which makes the movie even more absurd, as if the faux-documentary is doubly faux. There are layers and layers of falsehood here, which suits a movie that takes existing footage out of context and creates something new from it.


Of course, trying to assign meaning to a film as blank and mischievous as this one is an exercise in futility. All of these interpretations could be correct, but I could theoretically micro-analyse the movie for years. From where I’m sitting it could either be a prank, a critique of a genre I love, or the most profound movie ever made. Of course, obsessively dissecting this movie might still be missing the point. Herzog might have merely been trying to create a poetic experience, a hypnotic fusion of image and sound, but on a subjective level I’d have to say it fails in that respect as well. The imagery in the final third of the movie is beautiful but grainy, and the mid-section is utterly drab, the only colour provided by many out of context displays of blurry cosmic events.


What makes those long narrative-free sequences in the middle bearable is the beautiful soundtrack by German cellist Ernst Reijseger and Senegalese singer Mola Sylla. Recorded prior to making the movie, it lives independently of the film, unlike something like Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi, which is as perfect a melding of abstract vision and non-diegetic sound as is possible. Wild Blue Yonder, perhaps intentionally, splits the visual content almost evenly between mundane and strangely beautiful, and not even the haunting soundtrack Herzog has presided over can make the dull half work as well as the other. If the movie sounds like hard going (and it can be), I recommend the soundtrack CD, Requiem For A Dying Planet, which has been stuck to my iPod for months now.


If the movie doesn’t fully succeed as story or satire, it does make a strong case for cobbling together a narrative out of things that are available to you. Herzog was lucky enough to get hold of Henry Kaiser’s footage (which he also used in his documentary Encounters at the End of the World), and the space shuttle footage, which comprise the majority of the film, and much of the film looks like stock footage from a library, acquired either for free or at least cheaply. The only expenses incurred, other than post-production and research, is getting Brad Dourif into the middle of nowhere for a couple of days, and hiring musicians and studios to record the wonderful soundtrack. For these, Herzog got some funding from Centre National de la Cinématographie, France2 and BBC Films. Well, I say BBC Films, but it was actually Nick Fraser and the Storyville guys, who are currently responsible for 90% of the interesting things coming out of the BBC, including James Marsh’s super Man on Wire. I doubt BBC Films proper would never have any interest in funding Wild Blue Yonder now that they’ve rebranded themselves as The Keira Knightly Period Costume Factory in an effort to emulate the rest of the British Film Industry instead of supporting exciting projects like Morvern Callar and Last Resort [/rant].


As I said recently, the idea of cobbling together the resources to tell a story any way you can and using whatever means necessary to communicate ideas is very alluring. One way, the Michel Gondry way, involves making things and using your imagination to get around problems in a script already written. Herzog’s idea (which is not solely his, but merely one he is using here) is to take found footage and construct a narrative out of it. Using free stock footage (available online), it’s relatively easy to make a film telling a story you want. As I say, this is not a new idea; within the narrow parameters of my experience I’ve greatly enjoyed the work of Chris Morris, Armando Iannucci, and Adam Buxton, all of whom have used found footage for comical purposes, and of course Orson Welles’ last movie, F For Fake, played with truth and falsehood by manipulating the real and unreal until the audience doesn’t know which is which. Herzog has even used this technique before, in his 1992 movie Lessons of Darknesswhich re-edits footage from Operation Desert Storm into a reflection on faith, magic, and madness. Even so, it was not until I saw The Wild Blue Yonder that I realised how easy it could be. It was an exciting moment.


That’s beside the point, though. Wild Blue Yonder, as a film, is not a success, being only sporadically entertaining, narratively simplistic, and thematically jumbled. As a reflective space to let your brain wander in, visually it’s often too murky or drab, though the leisurely pace certainly helps generate a hypnotic state. It’s more successful as a kind of cinematic prank, daring to corral unconnected imagery and playful ranting into a coherent, if ephemeral, whole. Nevertheless, throughout I kept wanting a little bit more; more narrative, more energy, more purpose (or, to make the project more of a joke, less purpose). There’s a strong case that Herzog, seeking to confound audience expectation, has deconstructed the sci fi genre, showing the tedium of real space travel and the lies at the heart of the sci fi movie: they have alien worlds created in the heart of a computer, he has an underwater world that is as real as it is alien, but when seen in the context of the movie is as false as the CGI vision. That’s possibly the most intriguing critique of the movie, but that means the film only works on an intellectual level. Having to sit and watch it is still an occasionally frustrating experience for this ADD afflicted film buff.


Falling between two stools, one of entertainment and the other transcendental art, Wild Blue Yonder ended up leaving me unsatisfied as a movie, even while it made my brain whir with excitement as a creative template. There’s no way I could think ill of it, even if just taking it as a quirky curio starring one of the great character actors of our time in full flow, but I hesitate to recommend it either, simply because even after pondering it for months, I’m not sure what it set out to do or what it achieves. Maybe that was the point of it.