Monthly Archives: November 2008

That Week In TV Year II (Week 10)

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The things that delayed the completion of this post include:

  • The nineteenth century stylings of London Underground
  • Doing overtime even though all I wanted to do was stay home and play Civilisation Revolution
  • The UNBELIEVABLE series finale of The Shield
  • David Mamet’s incredible Redbelt
  • Repeated listens to Deerhunter’s Microcastle and Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s Lie Down In The Light
  • Seeing The Dark Knight on IMAX one more time before it disappears
  • Plumbing emergencies
  • A hellish visit to the soul-chasm that is Westfield in White City (though it was for a good cause, so that makes up for it)
  • Compiling a list of mundane events that are of no interest to anyone, even The Blog Gods who watch over bloggers and follow our every word with rapt attention. Sorry, Blog Gods.

    • Enough of this list-compiling shit. Let’s get this fucker rolling!

    Week 10 (10 – 16 Nov):

    The Shield 3:11 – Petty Cash
    America’s Next Top Model 11:12 – Good Times & Windmills
    Friday Night Lights 3:07 – Keeping Up Appearances
    CSI 9:06 – Say Uncle
    The Office 5:07 – Business Trip
    House 5:07 – The Itch
    The Mentalist 1:06 – Red Handed
    Heroes 3:08 – Villains
    Fringe 1:07 – In Which We Meet Mr. Jones
    30 Rock 3:03 – The One With the Cast of Night Court

    Highlight of the Week:

    Debate rages about whether The Office has become too broad, deviating so far from the template created by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant that is no longer relevant as a comment on the drudgery of office working and how it can bring out the worst in people. Having Michael drive his car into water, or making Dwight clamber over the top of a house to check how sturdy it is, or any number of oddities, has turned some fans off for being too wacky.


    Two defences spring to mind, the first being, if it’s funny (which it very nearly always is), who cares? The other is that is still able to reveal subtle truths within the context of a broader show that features Dwight hiding weapons around the office, or Creed hinting that he might be a murderer. This episode, set on a feeble business trip to Canada for some of the Scranton crew, featured an alcohol-fuelled Andy trying to get Oscar laid before phoning Angela to demand sex (which she is having with Dwight right at that moment), and Michael becoming convinced that the female concierge of their hotel was like a Geisha. Both plot threads were pleasantly farcical, but become part of a thematic trend when linked to Jim and Pam’s relationship woes, or Ryan’s attempt to woo back Kelly to restore what he sees as tarnished honour, inadvertently freeing Darryl. (Side-note: Craig Robinson has been great all season, and possibly the one thing that saved the previous episode, Employee Transfer, from becoming too uncomfortable to watch.)


    The original show kept the office relationship thread restricted to just Tim and Dawn (with David’s woes coming later in the series), as there was more than enough horror to document already. The US version, while still dealing with the horrible mundanity of office work, has definitely branched out to more outlandish plots (while keeping the characters internally consistent), but slowly a noose has tightened around many of the characters’ necks.

    What could be considered an over-reliance on soapy relationship drama still feeds into the central theme, that the drudgery of office work is a living hell from which there can be no escape, a miserable fate that, until this episode, was made funny by Michael’s (and, in the original, David’s) obliviousness to this fact. Of the main characters, the number of characters who appear to have a social life outside Dunder Mifflin is shrinking. Angela and Dwight and Andy are in a love/sex/emotional torture triangle, Pam is unable to complete her course and fulfil her dream, Ryan is playing some weird game with other people’s feelings, and for a while now Phyllis has been married to Bob Vance of Vance Refrigeration, who works in the same building, and has his own bizarre and seemingly unbreakable connection to his job. The office has taken over their lives over time, and while I’d agree that it’s debatable whether that theme in the show is intentional or merely a side-effect of the emphasis on relationship plot threads, it is there nevertheless.


    Most poignantly of all, Michael, who has considered his job to be the second most important thing in his life, has just seen that job ruin the actual most important thing: finding a partner to have numerous kids with, an obsession he has had since childhood. If his delusional attitude to the realities of working life has kept him happy in the past, it probably won’t for much longer. Given a shitty business trip as a sop to his upset over Holly’s departure, and feeling lonelier than ever after a depressing tryst from which he expected more, Michael snaps and bitches out David Wallace.


    For the character, and this show, it’s a dramatic (and beautifully performed) moment that’s on a par with Michael Corleone deciding to kill Sollozzo and Captain McCluskey. That’s not hyperbole, my good friends. After all, I could have said it’s on a par with him ordering the hit on the heads of the other four families and Mo Green while his nephew is baptised, but I didn’t. I’m not that crazy.


    While Michael (Scott, not Corleone) had a depressing epiphany (which may or may not play out in coming weeks), we also got to spend a lot of time with Andy, a prospect that made me miserable. I loved Ed Helms on The Daily Show, but when introduced to The Office, I was disappointed that I couldn’t get a bead on who Andy was. Other than some odd belligerence and insecure Ivy League posturing, I didn’t believe in the character, especially after he became deferential to Dwight. I understand that was a consequence of his anger management training, but at the time it seemed too drastic a change, and rendered the character kinda pointless. Surely there was a place in the show for someone with an anger problem. As long as it didn’t flare up too badly, it could have been a new and interesting dynamic to have on the show. As it is, we’re just waiting for Andy to have another nervous breakdown, and as his wedding to Angela is not going to be a harmonious affair, it sometimes seems like we’re on a straight course to it. Maybe this expectation is why I’ve been bored with Andy, as I’ve been unable to see what else his character is there for.


    Thankfully, this episode showed a new side to Andy, given his own plot instead of being a featured player in The Dwangela Show. His successful attempt to bond with Oscar over many strong drinks, and his endearing insistence on trying to hook Oscar up with a couple of heterosexual businessmen, went a long way to giving Andy a real personality at last. It also meant we got to see Ed Helms and Oscar Nunez playing drunk, which was surprisingly funny (playing drunk can go wrong so often). It was a total pleasure seeing them becoming friends, as well as getting more screentime for Nunez, who is often regrettably sidelined.


    Most surprising of all, at least to me, is how the showrunners have managed to keep the Jim/Pam story going for so long without running out of ideas. It’s especially gratifying for me as, in direct contrast to the original series, Tim/Dawn was my favourite thing about it, whereas here I often tune out as they flirt. No offence to Krasinski or Fischer, who do a great job, or to the writers, who have managed to make their characters fun and flirty, as well as slightly tragic (both of them are doomed to never live up too what they think their potential is, providing much bittersweetness to their romance). I just have more fun watching the other characters, and think their low-key comedy moments are less amusing than Creed’s occasional utterances, or Dwight’s epic delusion.


    This week made me care about them. In a scene as well acted, written, and directed as anything in the entire run of the series, Pam phones Jim to tell him she has failed her course, and will have to stay in New York to retake her exams. Both actors do amazing work conveying the misery of that moment. As I’ve said, the US version of the show is still doing what the original did, i.e. showing how office work can kill the soul unless you’re careful. It also shows that life can throw you terrible curveballs outside work, and this cruel event was a perfect example of that. Of course, that was, thankfully, not the final word (see below).

    Almost Highlight of the Week If Only It Hadn’t Fallen Apart At The End:

    Coming hot on the heels of the exceptional Leave Out All the Rest, this episode looked horribly like a CSI:Miami-esque cultural embarrassment, as a shooting in Vegas’ Koreatown is covered up by the locals who are distrustful of the police force. I seem to recall an episode of some procedural show about Korean gangs and the Omerta-like silence of the Korean residents, but I can’t remember which show it was in. Whatever it was, this vague recollection made me more than a little uncomfortable with the portrayal of Korean immigrants as skittish, incomprehensible, and ignorant. Seeing this episode open with the shooting made my heart sink.


    Luckily the gang plot turned out to be akin to a red herring, with the murders caused by familial strife over a series of clinical trials performed by an unethical pharmaceutical company on a very young HIV-infected boy. Introducing this plot element defused some of the uncomfortable events that had occurred by that point, most notably one elder Korean woman’s panicked near-shooting of Nick, thinking he was going to abduct the boy and perform more experiments on him.


    Even better, it served as a metaphor for the dismissive attitude of mainstream (and corporate) America towards its working class immigrants, seeing them as dehumanised, manipulable resources and not as individuals, which was a bold narrative stroke that I did not expect, and echoed last season’s episode about the consequences of costcutting at a water treatment plant. The other great thing about this plot is that Gil gets screentime wearing his scrupulous scientist hat and not his forensic investigator one (and by hat I don’t mean this one).


    Right now, with Eleventh Hour and Fringe dealing with bonkers pseudo-science, it’s great to have a show present both good and bad science in this sober way. Well, I say sober, but that’s probably too generous. If Big Pharma fudges the statistics on their clinical trials, it’s probably more insidious and subtle than just ignoring a couple of days of results, but it’s satisfying to see the show address the issue from the point of view of someone the audience trusts. Even better, it’s also a great character moment for Gil, coming so soon after Sara’s message from a scientific expedition. While she left the team due to the psyche-wrecking stress of working in such miserable conditions, Gil is slowly realising that there is more to life than sitting in a sexily-lit office and eschewing real research. His natural curiosity, that was once one of his more endearing qualities, has become a curse, and maybe now he realises that Sara has found a better way. It’s likely this will be the thing that makes him leave the team.


    As I’ve said before, I’m looking forward to the arrival of Morpheus as Dr Raymond Langston, because that voice is like the planet itself intoning profundities and, if that photo is anything to go by, he will look motherfucking sharp, as ever, but I will miss Gil’s socially awkward alpha nerdery, and his belief in the power of science. Perhaps Langston will be like that too, though the early talk of him having a psyche similar to that of a killer not only smacks of gimmickry, but drags the show into Will Graham territory (ironic, as the early seasons of the show, with Gil more outgoing and lean, brought back memories of Michael Mann’s Manhunter). I’ve got no problem with that per se, but I’ll miss Gil’s positive perspective on science, and besides, Cracker did forensic profiling definitively, so this can only suffer by comparison.


    So why is it not the highlight of the week? Partially because The Office was so great, but also because the killer turned out to be the HIV positive child. While this was a great way to explain away the silence of the Korean community, which naturally wants to protect the child from the deadly consequences of defending himself and his uncle from his greedy and unscrupulous mother, it sadly joined the long line of episodes where the killer turns out to be the child. Though this stopped shy of the bad seed explanations used in the past, it’s still an over-used tactic, so much so that we can now add “It was the kid that did it!” to “It was the guest star that did it!” as probable third act reveals. In individual cases there’s no problem with this; this episode was generally terrific, and both Hannah West episodes were superb. It’s just becoming formulaic, and is used too often as a way to illustrate the generally awful state of the world, and can smack of “Save the Children!” handwringing, which ticks me off.

    Directorial Excellence of the Week(s):

    Since the pilot episode, helmed by TV vet Clark Johnson, The Shield has always been strongly directed, with a roster of in-house talent making TV gold out of their low low budget and crazy shooting schedule. On top of such fine directors as the late Scott Brazil, D.J. Caruso, Dean White, Guy Ferland and even Michael Chiklis, the show has featured some classy guest directors, with Frank Darabont and David Mamet providing two excellent episodes.


    This week’s nerve-shredding installment of The Best Show On TV™ was helmed by Craig Brewer, aka the Southern Douglas Sirk. As a big fan of Hustle and Flow and Black Snake Moan, I was particularly thrilled, and this episode was a perfect fit for him, with quirky moments like Shane and Mara’s inept hold-up, and Vic’s drug deal, complete with panicky money transfer. It was terrific stuff, as always, and made me eager for his next movie.

    Also pleasing was the chance for ace director of photography Rohn Schmidt to direct an episode two weeks earlier. His contribution to the show (and to Darabont’s The Mist, which looked way more expensive than it actually was) is such that it was nice to see him get a chance to step up. It was a decision in keeping with the rest of the season, which has seen several characters come back, sometimes to wrap up loose ends. That the showrunners are eager to honour the road they have taken by giving us one last look at the rich tapestry of characters they have created to populate Farmington is one of the things I love most about this season. This is how you end a show.

    Best Use of the Golden Hour of the Week:

    The Office, as well filmed as it is, cannot be said to be a pretty show. The cast are mostly believably plain, though the rabid internet fans of John Krasinski and Jenna Fischer might disagree. The palette of the show, all greys (grays) and… well, greys (grays), is hardly easy on the eye either. It’s all in the service of the bleak tone, and so please don’t consider this a complaint, just a statement of fact. However, this week we got to see a little colour, used to great effect, as Pam returns to Scranton just as the sun is setting behind her. The result, all lens flares and backlighting, was beautiful.


    It felt like a different show for a couple of minutes.

    Personality Overhaul of the Week:

    Remember when I said Marjorie was an annoying skittish bird of a woman whose fear of everything made it hard to connect with her? Well, seems she agreed, because this week, to paraphrase Dr. Evil in Goldmember, she went men’al on account of the booze.








    And yet, following all of that madness, this is how her photoshoot ended.


    Oh Marjorie, your crazy European mind is a source of constant mystery.

    Improvement of the Week(s):

    What is depressingly stupid, peppered with plot holes and narrative contrivances, woeful performances from a bunch of lucky amateurs, distrust of logic, a total lack of embarrassment when it comes to retconning continuity problems, and a perplexingly huge fanbase? Obviously, it’s world’s worst sci-fi show Torchwood. But what has all of the above minus sexual progressiveness and plus Robert Forster and Malcolm McDowell working hard(ish) to get that kidney-shaped swimming pool they always wanted?


    Yes, it’s the Metahuman Family Variety Hour, with laughs (see Suresh buy “something to take off the edge” from a drug-dealer with a plummy British accent), thrills (will a major character get killed and/or brought back to life this week, before being resurrected and/or killed again the week after?), and suspense (how much can the showrunners ruin the character of Sylar this week? Quick answer, quite a bit, if they’re going to trap him on a bed that he can just walk out of even without powers. Look at his hands! They’re not even tied down!).


    The episode entitled Villains spent much of its running time showing how Sylar, who was introduced in the first season as an evil bastard, took a momentary retcon break in the middle of his bastardiness to sappily regret his first murder (David Berman from CSI!) while hanging out with Elle after a meet-cute involving attempted suicide. That this remorse makes a mockery of the entire first season is possibly the most infuriating thing that has happened in the whole show, made worse by the “reveal” that Sylar ended up being re-evilled by HRG, manipulating Elle into throwing some hipster douchebag into his line of sight, which triggers his hunger and makes him super-extra evil.


    Poor Sylar! HRG was the real villain all along! At least, that’s the big narrative conceit there, that the characters we thought were heroes and villains were all vicey-versa. King Kring and his Krazy Kronies in the writers room may have thought that this was a promising direction to take the third season, but all it’s done is waste our time. Did any of the Peter-bad, Future Sylar-good stuff mean anything, especially now Peter has no powers? If Kring is so in love with this idea, wouldn’t it have been cheaper and simpler for him to just play Dungeons and Dragons instead? If you want your characters to change alignments in that game you just reach for another character sheet and scribble in Chaotic Evil instead of Lawful Neutral.

    There were other things happening this week. Having Meredith and Pyrokinetic Man turn out to be siblings was simultaneously annoying (is this just one big incestuous family by now?) and gratifying (for the first time in a long time it felt like the showrunners had planned something ahead of time instead of giving the impression the script was rattled out by someone who had never attended a script meeting to date). That didn’t change the fact that even the momentary return of Eric Roberts didn’t make that plot interesting.


    Actually, now that I think about it, is Eric Roberts interesting? He’s kinda funny, unintentionally, and I do love him for being in Worst Movie of All Time contender The Specialist, but I think the casting of someone well known in this show I once liked has blinded me to the fact that we’re talking about someone who is Roy Scheider, except not cool (N.B. I wrote this before rewatching The Dark Knight a couple of nights ago, and he’s really good in that, so I think he is now hovering around the edges of cool).

    It’s the same with Malcolm McDowell. It’s impressive that he’s in it, until you remember he’s also been in Tank Girl and Fist of the North Star and any number of bad movies, and it’s not like he was any good in them. Does he suck now? Was he only ever notable for being the anti-establishment poster boy in 60s British cinema? That dangerous young man is not who we see grappling with Patrick Stewart in Star Trek: Generations, or haunting Adrian Pasdar. Or is Heroes so bad now that it’s infecting my memory of him as Alex the Korova-drinking asshole, or young H.G. Wells in Time After Time?


    It’s not just him. Canyon and I were discussing Veronica Mars earlier this week, after I updated her on the terrible silliness Kristin Bell has to endure in this (falling for Sylar, being very very angry in almost every scene, wearing some really unflattering clothes). I committed the terrible sin of saying I don’t even remember whether she was any good on that show, and Canyon justifiably chided me. Turns out the suckage of this show is so complete that I cannot remember how charming and intelligent and tragic she was in Mars. All I think about now when I see her is, at best, the hilarious deleted scene from Forgetting Sarah Marshall where she gets abducted by a horse, or, at worst, every single second she was on screen in this episode.


    Maybe that’s the worst crime Heroes has committed, other than squandering a great premise, not to mention Tim Kring’s insistence on insulting the fanbase. Dude, when Aaron Sorkin did it we forgave him because The West Wing was the shit. Your silly show hinted at impressive things for half a season, and has been a laughing stock ever since.

    So why did I call this Improvement of the Week? Because it was much less ponderous than the usual nonsense we have to endure, ignoring Suresh, Parkman, Peter (for the most part), “Tracy”, Claire, and The Ridiculous Mr. Sniff. Some of the retconning was fun (Linderman’s attack of conscience), and it temporarily fooled me into thinking the writers were interested in gathering up loose ends. So, possibly the best episode of Heroes since the penultimate episode of season one. It was still the worst thing I watched all week, though.

    Visual of the Week:

    This New Yorker piece (recently reprinted in the Daily Telegraph without acknowledging the originating magazine) paints Alec Baldwin as a tragic and miserable figure, wracked with self-doubt/loathing, overthinking everything, and seemingly suffering from anhedonia. But look at him!


    If only he knew how much joy he brings us.

    Voice-Off of the Week:

    Fringe returned this week, luckily being just good enough to erase the memory of the previous dire installment. It wasn’t all (tolerably) good, though. Ever since seeing Jared Harris in the execrable Resident Evil: Bollocks Overload (I can’t remember the proper title; it was the second one), I’ve been more than a little creeped out by his voice, which is almost exactly the same as his dad’s, except higher-pitched. It’s like English Bob during puberty, and it really irks me. Such a petty thing to be annoyed about, and I appreciate I must seem like a jerk, but it bothers me so much that I have no idea whether he is a good actor or not, as I concentrate so much on the voice that I don’t pay any attention to what he’s saying.


    This week’s episode featured a Face/Off between Harris (as the predictably mysterious Mr. Jones) and Olivia, played by Anna Torv and her Amazing Voice of Amazingness. It was like matter and anti-matter colliding during the scene. Torv may still make some regrettable acting choices (her love scene with Billy Burke was tough to watch), but her voice is like angry chocolate. It makes up for a lot.

    Oddly Subdued Direction of the Week(s):

    I’ve railed against Greg Yaitanes many a time in the past, but to my surprise this week’s episode of House was restrained, and all the better for it. Considering how annoying Deran Serafian’s work on Joy was (see previous post), I’m wondering if the title cards were mixed up. Or their minds were swapped! That’s much more likely.

    Tonal Victory of the Week:

    The Mentalist has got into a groove of above-average entertainment, despite the relative anonymity of the supporting cast, mostly because the showrunners seem to have found the right tone for the show. While it concerns murder and kidnap and other forms of criminal behaviour, the show is uncommonly genial, which is pretty much what creator Bruno Heller is aiming for.


    This week’s installment showed Patrick Jane, super-handsome Mentalist Supreme, winning lots of money at a casino (in the line of duty), and sharing it with his colleagues and a woman trying to buy a new liver for her mother. It was playful and silly, with the murder mystery plot going unmentioned for a weirdly long stretch of the show, and when it re-focused on the murder, we ended up getting a ton of face-time with Gregg Henry, one of the most watchable and likable actors around. As most procedurals tend to be dour, it’s refreshing to have something that is willing to strike a chirpier tone, and a lot of that is down to Simon Baker’s wonderfully charming lead performance. His devilish grin and joie de vivre is the key to this show’s success, and the news, from that link above, that we are going to see how much of that is a cover-up for his inner anguish, means there is enough depth to the character that we’re not about to get bored of that multi-layered gregariousness any time soon.

    Disgusting and Confusing Imagery of the Week:

    Dear God, Fringe made me want to boak for reals, with this week’s burst of Mad Science involving a weird worm thing wrapped around someone’s heart and pushing tendrils into the guy’s veins, eventually coming up through his IV drip. Seriously, I have a vivid imagination, but this is totally sickening. Problem is, when the guy’s chest is cracked open, we see the worm around his heart…


    …and for a whole minute I thought a big-lipped fish was growing in his chest with its mouth around his heart, which would have been gross, upsetting, confusing, and batshit insane all at the same time. Canyon thought it looked like Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors, which is also regrettably true.

    Frustration of the Week:

    Watching America’s Next Top Model and knowing McKey is going to win really got us down. Analeigh was, as ever, amazing during the challenge and her photoshoot and, outside the competition, protective of Marjorie and gracious and sweet throughout. It was bad enough seeing her sadness when Marjorie got kicked out, but knowing that she will lose to someone who can’t even flirt convincingly…


    …made watching this episode a chore, filled with much shouting at the TV. Again, this is why I don’t watch reality TV. Its unreality makes it too real for me.

    Funny Expressions of the Week:

    What was up with Tina Fey this week?







    And no, this is not just a flimsy excuse to post lots of pictures of Tina Fey, and I’m offended you would suggest that.

    Fight of the Week:

    Friday Night Lights was, as usual, amazing, with several disparate plot threads coming to natural and satisfying conclusions during the final football game, but even though I was in my usual FNL-induced joy-fugue, it was sad to see Street fighting yet again with his obnoxious friend Herc.


    Their fractious relationship is one of the most fascinating on TV. Their bond withstands the terrible frustrations both feel toward each other, and this fight, one of many, was just as entertaining and touching as all the others. With Street’s arc resolved in the next episode, I’m going to miss their bitchiness and semi-hostile supportiveness.

    Intensity of the Week?:

    Is this intensity?


    If you were to assume so because that’s what I say every week, having never met a joke I can’t beat into the ground like a tent peg, then maybe it seems that way. In fact, in context, Lance “Incredulity” Reddick is actually staring in baffled horror at Walter Bishop, who, at that point, is recounting a non-anecdote about eating a fruit cocktail once upon a time. To the hardcore Fringe-watcher it might seem like this is an easter-egg of some kind, like the appearances of The Observer (seen here at a German airport)…


    …but to Broyles, it’s an excuse to give Peter a lecture. As we’re hugely bored by Peter’s reflexive annoying sarcasm and exposition (sarcexposition?), we’re happy either way.

    Can you believe we’re still plodding through shows from week 11? We only just watched that week’s Fringe and House (both very good), and even though Thanksgiving shrank week 12 (i.e. this week), we’re behind on that too. I will get up to speed and talk about something else soon, I swear.

    That Week in TV Year II (Week 9)

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    Of course, this was the week Barack Obama was elected President of the United States of America, a week spent fretting, then rejoicing, then fretting again (I did the last bit on my own, I think). Not much aired, but there were still some highpoints, including, of course, The Shield.

    Week 9 (3 – 9 Nov):

    The Shield 3:10 – Party Line
    Friday Night Lights 3:06 – It Ain’t Easy Being J.D. McCoy
    America’s Next Top Model 11:11 – The Final Five
    CSI 9:05 – Leave Out All the Rest
    The Office 5:06 – Customer Survey
    30 Rock 3:02 – Believe in the Stars
    Ugly Betty 3:07 – Crush’d

    Non-Shield Highlight of Week 8:

    For several seasons CSI would feature the occasional episode written by edgy former drug addict Jerry Stahl, writer of the addiction memoir Permanent Midnight, subsequently made into a movie starring Ben Stiller. In the book Stahl freely admits to megalomaniacal behaviour when crazed by drugs, hijacking Twin Peaks writers’ meetings with zany behaviour that ended up costing him his job.

    Luckily for him he got cleaned up and ended up on the most successful show on US TV, where his scripts stood out like a sore thumb by repeatedly exploring the extremes of sexual experimentation and drug abuse, ostentatiously flying his freak flag as high as possible. That’s not to say his work was bad. While Canyon is more sceptical of his episodes, they struck me as cleverer and funnier than regular episodes. He also created the fan-favourite character Lady Heather (played by the ever-excellent Melinda Clarke), dominatrix, therapist, and muse to Gil.


    Stahl’s moved on from CSI now, but this superb installment, written by Jacqueline Hoyt, echoed his repeatedly used themes while offering a more downbeat and morbid story than he maybe would have approached. Following a murder that looks to have been committed during bondage play, Gil takes that opportunity to visit Lady Heather (last seen brutally whipping a thug), ostensibly to gather information about the BDSM culture, but secretly to find comfort following his breakup with Sara, who dumps him via laptop.


    Not cool! Hoyt does a splendid job of weaving the complex murder plot with Gil and Heather’s confessional conversations, delivering exposition about the crimes in beautifully paced montages, and giving William Petersen plenty to sink his teeth into. Even better was the inconclusive verdict, with the team up-ending several lives to get to the truth only to find they had gone in completely the wrong direction, which echoed the episode from last season when Catherine let her emotions get in the way of her forensic mind, causing her to cast judgement on an innocent man.


    It helps that the episode was directed by the ever-reliable Kenneth Fink, again providing a visual feast (with Nelson Cragg on DoP duties). Fingers crossed Jerry Bruckheimer gets hold of a low-key crime film script and hands it over to Fink to direct. If Gregory Hoblit could make the jump to the big screen with Primal Fear, Fink could do the same.

    Shocking Assault of the Week:

    The Shield has often horrified the audience with totally out-of-the-blue violence: Aceveda’s horrifying rape, the almost deadly attack on Danny at the start of season 7, and of course the soul-numbing awfulness of the season 5 finale. In this episode Aceveda, seemingly cowed by the deals between Vic, Pezuela, and the ICE team, instead explodes into startling violence, raining down such a flurry of blows on Pezuela that even Vic and cartel head Beltran stand by in incomprehending shock. Of course, Aceveda is doing it to try to sabotage Vic’s plan and keep himself in the loop, not caring that he has made Pezeula look so weak in the eyes of the cartel that he has effectively signed his death warrant. In a series full of staggering moments, this was yet another stand-out, made all the more powerful by the fact that, as Noel Murray said in his excellent AV Club review, Aceveda has been walking towards that confrontation for years. Fans should have seen this coming, but as ever the magnificent Shield writing team kept us focused on Vic so much that the moment Aceveda snaps is still a huge, gut-churning surprise.

    Fashion Faux-Pas of the Week:

    Did a Great Eatlon take a big mystical dump on Tyra’s top?


    And why is it held up with straps from a backpack?

    Question of the Week:

    Did they or didn’t they? Julie and Matt (in another stellar episode of Friday Night Lights) finally get back together after a day spent frolicking in a lake, spending the night together under the stars next to a big bonfire, which is such romantic overkill it positively screams OMG they totally did it. The next morning they’re utterly unafraid to be as soppy as possible, and Canyon and I spent the whole scene debating whether they did, but it was this naughty exchange of looks…


    …that convinced me. They totally did it! After their previous failed attempt in season one it makes sense the show would be tactful about it, having already shown the conflict between Tami and Julie. Of course, if it turns out they didn’t do it, I’m coming back here to erase this part of the post.

    Dear God Shut Up Already! Moment of the Week:

    I don’t think anything on America’s Next Top Model has inspired me to such an explosion of splenetic rage as Marjorie’s endless self-loathing and inability to accomplish anything.


    I already hate go-sees (they make me very anxious), but her nervy race through Amsterdam made it an even more excruciating experience. Her signature hunchback photo style is not so impressive once you realise she only uses it so much because she has no backbone.

    Funniest Scene of the Week:

    In a classic Office scene, Michael makes Dwight role-play a conversation with a customer (played by Jim) in order to assess his ability to interact with clients, all because evil Kelly faked some customer reports to ruin their chances of a bonus.


    What made it so entertaining is that it was possibly the perfect example of the running joke of Michael and Dwight’s inability to distinguish reality from fantasy.

    Least Funny Scene of the Week:

    Jim listening to Pam, via teeny tiny handsfree, as she discusses her possible future in New York with a classmate (played by Mad Men‘s Rich Sommer) was excruciating stuff, with Krasinski selling his subdued anguish brilliantly.


    Even bringing Dwight in at the end of the scene couldn’t make it funny. Just horrible to watch, but then The Office has always been very good at yanking the audience from happiness to sadness, which possibly accounts for my occasional reticence to watch it even though I think it’s wonderful. This scene was also way more effective and convincing than the rushed denouement to Michael and Holly’s relationship in the previous episode, Employee Transfer.

    Visual Gag of the Week(s):

    The third season of 30 Rock may have opened with a weak episode, even with a customarily welcome appearance by Will Arnett as Devon Banks, but the second episode was a huge improvement. Of the many great gags on offer, Octuples Tennis might have made me laugh the most.


    Synchronised Running worked well too.

    Irksome New Character of the Week:

    With Tyra (Collette from Friday Night Lights, not America’s Next Top Model) all loved-up with her new fella (whose apparent drug addiction seems sure to wreck the relationship and doom Tyra to remain in Dillon forever), Landry attempts to cope with the fallout by listening to love ballads in his car and focusing his energies on Crucifictorious. After a bust-up with his bass player, a tryout for a replacement leads to the arrival of Devin, yet another cute hipster for Landry to fall for (considering how square Dillon is meant to be, it seems to be a more of a mecca for Flaming Lips-loving nerd-hotties than nearby Austin). Of course, she instantly joins the band, changing it from a prospective death metal Nirvana into Blake Babies or something.


    Our initial misgivings about this new character were partially motivated by the unimaginatively convenient timing of her introduction, providing Landry with someone at exactly the right moment in his post-Tyra downward spiral to put him in a happy enough mindset to forgive Tyra and make them friends again. Luckily, Devin turns out to be gay, which pushed the plot in a much more satisfying direction, with Landry’s confidence shaken and Tami stepping in to give him some reassurance in a beautifully performed scene. Our other misgivings, however, were not allayed. Devin’s just kind of annoying. Purely subjective, I know, but having her around makes me especially unhappy about the absence of Jean, played by Brea Grant. Written with a peculiar lack of subtlety for a show that is the acme of subtlety, Jean was obviously meant to be Landry’s soulmate, in stark contrast to his relationship with Tyra, born of murderous necessity. In a perfect world that character would return to love up our hero, but instead she’s racing around the Heroesverse and getting macked on by some turtle-totemed guy old enough to be her dad. It’s depressing on a number of levels.

    Spoiler of the Week:

    When I started writing these posts I had no idea who ultimately won America’s Next Top Model, but of course it’s impossible to avoid spoilers these days. Canyon managed about twelve hours after the finale aired before being spoiled by a huge photo on the front page of Yahoo News, and I did okay, until yesterday. All I know is, when I see this photo at the start of this week’s go-sees…


    …there is one goofy looking woman there who really should not be in the competition, and four others who all have promise. Except Elina and her Face of Stone. And yet McKey wins? This model wins?


    Maybe when I finally see the finale I will get it, but by this point, the only thing that can get her to the top is some artificial and bullshit arc. I’m curious to see what it was that robbed Analeigh so completely. I am very very upset about this! It’s even more upsetting than Cycle 4 when Kahlen lost to proficient but boring Naima, but in that case at least Naima was an excellent model, though Kahlen had a much greater improvement curve and, you know, a personality. This is why I don’t watch reality shows very often. They create an unquenchable pain in my heart.

    Background Music of the Week:

    Top Gear returned with a splash of testosterone strong enough to turn our cats into human males, and even thought it’s not been long since the last mini-season it was still good to have it back, not-faked-at-all-wink-wink stunts and all. A particularly good one came when Jeremy Clarkson drove a lorry into a brick wall at high speed and nearly killed himself. His panicked grab for his chest was genuinely worrying. Best thing about it, though, is the astute choice of music. In the first week we got Panda Bear, the week after we got a burst of Wendy Carlos’ soundtrack to Tron, and this week was covered in Kings of Leon-y goodness. I love the ladies and gents who sort this stuff out, and even though I can imagine it’s horribly expensive to clear these tunes, it’s really worth it. I mean, Panda Bear! I couldn’t get over that. And it worked perfectly with the shot too.

    Your Familiar Face Is In a New And Confusing Context And Is Therefore Rendered Alien Moment of the Week:

    The awesome BDSM episode of CSI gave me terrible deja vu, with the snooty club owner Michelle Tournay giving me real problems.


    A quick check of IMDb later, and it turns out she’s Peyton List, aka Jane the conniving secretary from Mad Men, and yes, it’s okay for me to say secretary as I’m just following the customs of the time period. Also familiar was the scarily dominatrixy Kumari, who had more red hair than five Debra Messings put together.


    To be honest, I don’t know where I’ve seen Rachelle Lefevre before, but I do know she is going to be in Twilight, which I was ready to assume was going to be a big pile of nonsensical gloopy shite about sparkling vampires, but having seen how rabid (and willing to provide me with lovely hits) the fans are, I will accept is actually the most profoundly romantic and moving exploration of vamp-slash immortal and beautiful dedication and love ever made. Good for her and her mane of crimson hair for getting into this year’s hottest and biggest hit movie about lame vampires.

    ETA: That picture, showing her sticking needles into some guy’s nipple in a scene that made me want to barf, doesn’t do justice to her incredible hair.


    If Marvel are smart, they’ll start work on an Inhumans movie, and cast her as Medusa. And get David Beckham as Black Bolt. All he needs to do is look gorgeous/impassive and not speak. Perfect!

    More to come. Seriously. I was really way behind on this mini-project. Blame Obama.

    That Week In TV Year II (Week 8)

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    While life gets tied up in elections, work disasters (boy, I really don’t want to talk about that), Civilisation Revolution benders, and other distracting miscellany, TV marches on like a flickering, gaudy, hypnotic glacier, only slightly dented by by the unavoidable scheduling obstructions of the last couple of Obamariffic weeks. We totally took our eye off the ball, but then fatigue has begun to set in. I’m almost totally disillusioned by Ugly Betty even though Canyon is sticking with it, she has escaped the gluetrap that is Heroes while I remain hooked even in the face of cortex-wrecking stupidity, and both of us have lost interest in Pushing Daisies. That’s especially galling for me as I really like it, but as with the cruelly cancelled Journeyman last year, watching a show that smells of death is a dispiriting experience. I’m sure I’ll get around to it eventually, but it will be bittersweet.

    So, I intend to rush through the three-to-four weeks since our last Week in TV, seeing as how those weeks ended up being fairly similar in terms of what rocked and what sucked. Here is a rundown of what we watched:

    Week 8 (27 Oct – 2 Nov):

    The Shield 7:09 – Moving Day
    Friday Night Lights 3:05 – Every Rose Has Its Thorn
    America’s Next Top Model 11:10 – Planes, Trains, and Slow Automobiles
    CSI 9:04 – Let It Bleed
    The Office 5:05 – Employee Transfer
    House 5:06 – Joy
    The Mentalist 1:05 – Redwood
    Heroes 3:07- Eris Quod Sum
    30 Rock 3:01 – Do-over
    Ugly Betty 3:06 – Ugly Berry

    If I don’t mention the show now, I might in subsequent posts, when an episode worth chatting about crops up.

    Highlight of the Week(s):

    With a ninety-minute finale set to air tonight that will finally tell us whether Vic kills Shane / Shane kills Vic / Ronnie kills Mara and Corrine / Dutch kills Beaver Casablanca / Julien kills some time by doing nothing interesting / Tina kills everyone through outrageous negligence (delete as applicable), The Shield is almost at the end of a final sprint of astonishing and thrilling brilliance. If only every show could end with this amount of confidence and nerve-annihilating daring. Though we have rushed through all six and a bit seasons in almost no time, I can imagine fans who have been with it since the beginning must feel totally vindicated in their patience, as the knot of plotlines gets tighter and tighter. It sounds like hyperbole when I write it down, but I feel privileged to have been able to take this narrative trip.

    Non-Shield Highlight of the Week:

    The third season of Friday Night Lights already hitting absurdly high new highs at the moment, and Every Rose Has Its Thorn might well be the best of the year. It was certainly the best thing on air this week that didn’t feature Michael Chiklis doing his angry face. Opening on a fraught football game, with Coach gambling on a crazy plan which entails switching between two offensive teams headed by Matt and new QB JD McCoy, we see the changing of the guard as dependable Matt wins the game at the last minute but is effectively ignored by the town, who embrace the new quarterback. It was nerve-wracking and sad and beautifully filmed, with its position right at the start of the episode a masterstroke.


    Even better, this week saw the return of Jason Street, desperately trying to save his relationship with the mother of his child by getting involved in a half-arsed house-restoration deal with the Riggins brothers and the ever-belligerent Herc. As I love all of these characters, seeing the four of them bickering over even the smallest things was TV heaven.


    In particular it showed how hollow Street’s inspirational chatter can be when aimed at the wrong people, doing little to keep his quartet together (hilariously it’s Riggins’ appropriation of some bullshit salesman speak from Buddy Garrity that makes the difference), and failing to convince Erin to stay with him, while at the same time showing how he can trade on his pre-paralysis reputation in convincing Buddy to sell his house to him. His options are beginning to shrink within Dillon, which is a great set up for later episodes.


    Nothing was extraneous. Tyra’s Bueller-esque day off to hang with her pill-popping hottie boyfriend has an air of tragedy following her earlier scenes with Tami, where she gives up her college dreams just to shack up with some guy even though this is exactly what doomed her mother and sister, Matt’s demotion brings about a reconciliation with his mother and gives Coach reason for some intense soul-searching as he gambles on a 15 year old quarterback, and even the unpromising thread with Julie’s tattoo was filled with beautifully realised character moments, jokes, and touching speeches. It was a total triumph from beginning to end. Here is a visual representation of how happy it made me.

    Lowlight of the Week:

    Much as I hate to beat on a show I once loved, but Ugly Betty‘s unfortunate run of sub-par episodes now seems to be the default setting, with only the slim chance of temporary improvement. After enduring another depressingly mirthless episode, Ugly Berry, which revolved around the repellent Kimmy Keegan, played with her now-permanent lack of enthusiasm by Lindsay Lohan, I realised that I had no desire to watch another episode (though thankfully I did; see below). As Canyon intends to stick with it there’s a good chance I will see it through to the end, and I do enjoy Marc and Amanda a lot, so much so that I wish they would get a spin-off to themselves. However, Canyon hit the nail on the head when she said about Ugly Berry, “It’s just not funny any more.”


    Yes, Marc and Amanda make us laugh, but Michael Urie and Becki Newton are gifted comic actors and could probably make even the worst joke in the world work. What’s worrying about that is that during the past twelve episodes or so there’s a good chance they have been given the worst joke in the history of the world but we didn’t notice thanks to them. I wouldn’t put it past the current writing team to have stooped that low, as they are content to rest their show on tired pop culture references, farcical misunderstandings, and pratfalls, not to mention a Get Out The Vote PSA of episode-hobbling awfulness. It made the Wicked episode look subtle.


    My distrust of the showrunners is not just paranoia either. Little did we know last season, as things started to go awry, that five writers, two producers (and one director) were let go from the show, all of whom had provided memorable episodes in the first season. Whether this had something to do with the strike or the imminent relocation of the show to New York, I don’t know. It surely isn’t a coincidence that the quality of the show dropped at that point and never returned to normal.


    I will admit, the episode Granny Pants, in which Kimmy begs Betty for a job, was passable, but the script was credited to Sheila Laurence, one of the old guard of writers who has contributed a number of above average episodes, and the following episode written by Ugly Betty ace writers Poust and Kinneally (who are both still in the credits as producers) was a very entertaining hour, with some humanity instead of the empty farce of the rest of the season, but I can’t help but feel the show is now broken, and has been for even longer than I had suspected.

    Gay Event of the Week:

    Analeigh, Marjorie the timid mouse, and Elina and her Face of Stone decided to annoy the rest of the surviving models with hott bathtub action at all hours.


    Though there was probably nothing to it all, Samantha deemed it gay. She, of course, would know all about that (scroll down). The increasingly annoying McKey complained the most, which leads me to believe the potentially Sapphic trio should make sure to distract her before embarking on further bathtub parties. All they need to do is punch a wasp in the face and she’ll be out of their hair for hours nursing it back to health. Either that or they can try to rust her ridiculous chainmail outfit until she can’t use it any more.

    Shockingly Ill-Judged Direction of the Week:

    Joy, the episode of House featuring THAT KISS featured some of the best writing of the season, with Cuddy getting more screentime than is usual as she deals with an antagonistic pregnant woman whose child she hopes to adopt.


    The disease of the week plot was fascinating too, as a father and his daughter sleepwalk through their lives without realising it, thinking they are blacking out when in fact they are living a phantom life, which neatly matches their secret life as Arab-Americans disguised as caucasians. The problem with the episode was that director Deran Serafian, whose work on House and CSI is usually very good, went nuts, turning the sleepwalking events into surreal nightmares…


    …filming many of the main cast in exxxtreme close-up…


    …or staring at the camera…





    …and hilariously shaking the camera a bit during a drug buy, in feeble imitation of grittier fare such as The Mighty Shield.


    This overdirection from the man who brought us the admirably economical Terminal Velocity (written by Riddick helmer and ace screenwriter David Twohy). It was utterly perplexing, as his work is usually flashy enough to be interesting but not so much that it distracts from the show. This week he got the balance all wrong. I get the feeling the credits got mixed up with the following episode (more on that in a subsequent post).

    We Need An Acting Coach, Stat! Performance of the Week:

    It’s hard to get a bead on new Ugly Betty non-Gio-therefore-non-interesting love interest Val Emmich, who appears to be killing time in acting (notably on 30 Rock) while waiting for his music career to take off.


    I hope it does, just so his depressingly flat line readings never happen again. He gives somnambulism a bad name. Quick! Everyone buy dozens of copies of his album!

    Creepy Assault of the Week:

    Poor Samantha just can’t seem to sort out her panel outfit, a cardinal sin in a show as shallow as this one. After turning up looking like a white-trash Barbie yet again, Tyra (who professed to love McKey’s ridiculous Aragorn-esque battletop) took matters into her own hands, launching herself at the poor girl and proceeding to wreck her top before yanking at her skirt.



    To make things worse, she even patted Samantha on the butt at the end of it all.

    Boundaries, Tyra! Respect them!

    Shortest Amount of Time Spent Watching a New Show:

    Okay, Gordon Ramsay’s Cookalong first aired in the previous week, but I need to address it. Over the past year or so, I have tried many new shows, but have been forced to bail from some due to sheer awfulness or boredom. Here is a rough list:

    Chuck: 7 episodes
    John From Cincinnati: 6 episodes
    Dirty Sexy Money: 4 episodes
    Drive: 3 episodes
    Knight Rider: 1 episode

    Canyon is a fan of Gordon Ramsay, while I think he’s one of many member of the Cult of Gratuitous Shittiness, a witless bully with more talent than most hidden behind a formica veneer of despicable attitude, false bravado, and relentless, embarrassing star-fuckery. It’s that talent that makes the whole thing tragic. The man obviously know his shit (and then some) but I just cannot watch the man. So his new live show, Gordon Ramsay: Expletive Explosion LIVE! or whatever it was called?

    1 minute 30.

    I’m a nervous guy, and maybe too empathic for his own good, so it’s hell on my sanity when I see something epitomise fat honking FAIL within seconds of beginning, as a live link-up immediately went haywire, and Ramsay’s cocky bellowing gave way to that weird chittery laugh he does when he’s nervously waiting for his over-encumbered brain to kick in and fill the emptiness with the usual profanity or exclamations (like when he had Meat Loaf in his kitchen on The F Word that one time. In the youth parlance, I have to say, “Bitch crazy!”).


    I might have been feeling bad, but the resident Ramsay fan sitting next to me started howling, “No! OH GOD NO I can’t take it!?” and switched it off before it got any worse. This is without considering that he’s trying to get people at home to “cookalong” with him at 21:00 on a Friday night, which is surely a terrible idea. If a show makes you wish Homo Sapiens had evolved with an enormous shell on its back so you could crawl into it just to escape the misery, then it’s not going well. Still, our empathic cringe is not the worst thing that’s happened to Ramsay in recent times. As I’m sure he said when this happened, DONE up like a kipper!!!

    Least Sexy Kiss of the Week:

    House taking advantage of a heartbroken Cuddy was depressing on a number of levels, perhaps most importantly that he might not have been taking advantage of her and they both wanted this somehow. Yuk.


    Like catching mom and dad snogging. Please let it never happen again.

    Further To Canyon’s Mates of State Post

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    A couple of days ago Canyon posted about Mates of State, whose most recent album, Re-Arrange Us, is our joint favourite album of the year. It is sheer pop brilliance, seemingly light and fluffy but musically complex (Pitchfork thought otherwise). It has not left my iPod since we got it. However, I was sad that the incredible song The Re-Arranger didn’t appear on YouTube. Nothing I can do about that, of course.

    However, a day later, I realised there was a technique for creating videos for songs, after seeing this wonderful collage of images culled from public domain films, here used by locke325 to accompany Panda Bear’s Take Pills, from my favourite album of last year, Person Pitch.

    For the record, I’m disavowing that one for its reliance on a specious comparison that gets made by over-emotional people, and am disgusted by the inflammatory juxtaposition between the audio of the newsreel and the visuals of an evil dictator addressing his followers. I think it’s disgraceful that a comparison appears to have been made between the Republicans, who are entitled to their beliefs, their leadership, who represent those beliefs, and the fascist regime on Mongo.

    Hipster Douchebag Music Recommendation Of The Week: "Get Better" by Mates of State

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    Well, it looks like I’ve left this so long that Masticator has subverted the formula, leaving the douchebags among us out in the cold. So typical of corporate types like him: stealing our ideas and squashing all the soul out of them for mainstream palatability. And since this week’s band is slowly leaking hipster cred by the day, much like a tipping can of Pabst Blue Ribbon in the slackening hand of a passed-out, cardigan-wearing skinny teenager, it seemed time I got back to the job.


    So anyway, this week’s month’s quarter’s entry is yet another band we discovered through The A.V. Club. No, wait — we actually saw them first on Conan’s show, which tends to have the most unusual music of all the late-night talk shows (Okkervil River were on the show awhile ago, and Conan seemed genuinely shocked at how good they were). They were playing the first single from their latest album, and when I went to The A.V. Club to see if they’d reviewed it, I found this. I was a bit surprised and disappointed to see such a negative review when I’d enjoyed the song so much, but I downloaded procured legally purchased the album anyway on the strength of the single. Turns out that the writer was just some freelancer they’d gotten in, who’s apparently gone through a bad breakup recently, given his seeming hatred of happily married life. At any rate, the rest of the A.V. Club permanent staff absolutely loves the album, and many of them are planning to put it on their end-of-year best-of lists. Sucks to you, freelance reviewer who probably just wanted a paycheck and may have some lingering problems with his parents’ divorce!

    The two band members, Kori Gardner and Jason Hammel, are indeed married, which gives the band a nice hook for feature writers, but it’s not like we’re dealing with Raffi-level sentimentality here. Their sound was a little bit spikier on previous albums, but it’s still much the same: lots of harmonies, disjointed melodies, and pop songcraft. Take my favorite song off the album, the first single “Get Better”:

    Yes, there are people dressed as animals, but they’re more reminiscent of the bunny from Donnie Darko that freaked me the fuck out than anything boringly suburban (even though the video does have a bit of an Ice Storm vibe). It’s not a hard-driving song, but the clarity of the piano, the thump of the drums, and the gorgeous swell of the string section (have I mentioned that I’m a sucker for a string section?) all blend with the counterpointed vocals to create something beautiful, lighthearted, and yet a little bit creepy (maybe I’m just flashing back to Frank here). And yeah, the lyrics “Forget your politics for awhile / Let the color schemes arrive” are a bit hippie-ish, but it feels like a joyful song to me — not a song cloistered in middle-aged smug, boring contentment but a paean to wary hopefulness (“everything’s gonna get lighter, even if it never gets better”). Or at least a very good potential song for an AT&T commercial.

    As for my other favorite song off the album, “The Rearranger,” it’s not available as a video on the intertubes except as a live version, which makes it at least 78% less awesome, because much of its beauty comes from its meticulous, heavily layered production. Thus, I instruct you, loyal reader(s), to go here and listen to the audio alone. The first few seconds should hook you in, as the horns seep in like an aural sunrise (ah yes, I’m a sucker for horns too); after that the harmonies come in, and then come the weird tempo shifts, and then the bursting sun of the chorus, where all the elements come together beautifully, as sunny as a Californian summer day (to drag this dead metaphor a little further).

    As usual, the band is starting to get more recognition just after I find out about them — unfortunate, since I should have written about them months ago when I first heard their albums — and now they’ve got a song on an Ugly Betty episode. Is this the end of their hipster coolness? Or was it the AT&T commercial that did them in? Or is it cool to sell out now? The backlash begins. Time to put on my trucker hat and wade in.

    And now that I’ve profiled some good music, it’s time for my…

    Shameful Non-Hipster Possibly Douchebag Admission of the Week:

    This is a new addition in which I admit my not-so-secret, undying love for cheesy pop tunes, thus undermining all the careful hipster-image-building I’ve done in the previous paragraphs. I’m going to do it quick, like ripping off a Band-Aid (“Right off!”).

    “Spiralling” by Keane

    I’m not proud of it, but come on, it’s catchy, right? That retro synthesizer hook, the bizarre football-crowd-witnessing-a-nasty-tackle “Oh!”s in the background, the irresistible chorus, and…the, um, video:

    Okay, I don’t know what’s going on with the aerobicizing “Video Killed the Radio Star” robots, and nothing says high production values like Windows Media Player visualizations, but obviously the director is a very smart man — namely because he’s kept lead singer Tom Chaplin’s horrifying visage out of the video as much as possible, and when he’s been absolutely forced to show it, he’s masked it in so many layers of Photoshop effects and shadows that Chaplin looks more like Mr. Stay Puft than a recognizable human (though actually, this is what he normally looks like — as brilliant Never Mind the Buzzcocks host Simon Amstell put it, he’s a skinny man with the face of a chubby toddler).

    But my favorite thing about this song is the lyrics in the chorus:

    When we fall in love
    We’re just falling
    In love with ourselves
    We’re spiralling

    Looks like someone’s really proud of paying attention in his Intro to Psychology class. Or was this song his end-of-term assignment? I’m really looking forward to the next single, “Cathect My Heart, Mother (Or I Will Project My Neuroses Onto My Lover).”

    And with that admission, I take off my trucker hat and slowly back away.

    Super Or Not-Super? That Was The Question, Ages Ago

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    I hate it when a plan doesn’t come together. This poll, which was originally meant to end several months ago, got dragged beyond its natural endpoint by me because it seemed to keep attracting votes from netsurfers randomly sent here by such Google search terms as “sexxy women boobs”, “January Jones bad actor”, “Seth Lakeman”, and, of course, “Moon Bloodgood”. Of all the things that we have done on this blog, be it incurring the wrath of Torchwood fans, incurring the wrath of Bible fans, or incurring the wrath of friends of super-actor Jesse Plemons, the response to that poll, although small compared to bigger, more professional sites, was significant for us. The temptation was there to keep it up until the next wave of superhero movies comes out, which could be a while, thanks to the writers’ strike.

    However, Blogger decided to fuck me. Right now the poll states 65 votes have been counted, when last week that number stood at 74. Nine votes lost to the ether! WTF is that about? Perhaps that’s a glitch that can be explained on Blogger forums, but I’m too distraught to check. As far as I can tell Blogger hates democracy. Someone should call Greg Palast.

  • Robert Downey Jr. (Iron Man) – 24 (36%)
  • Christian Bale (Batman) – 16 (24%)
  • Ron Perlman (Hellboy) – 7 (10%)
  • Huge Ackman (Wolverine) – 7 (10%)
  • Tobey Maguire (Spider-Man) – 3 (4%)
  • Jennifer Garner (Elektra) – 3 (4%)
  • Brandon Routh (Superman) – 2 (3%)
  • Halle Berry (Not-Catwoman) – 1 (1%)
  • Ben Affleck (Daredevil) – 1 (1%)
  • Patrick Warburton (The Tick) – 1 (1%)
  • Chris Evans (Human Torch) – 0 (0%)
  • Thomas “Homeless Dad” Jane (The Punisher) – 0 (0%)
  • The Shaq (Steel) – 0 (0%)
  • Nicolas Cage (Ghost Rider) – 0 (0%)
  • Wesley Snipes (Blade) – 0 (0%)
  • Ang Lee In A Motion Capture Suit (Hulk) – 0 (0%)


    • Anyway, before any more votes can go missing, I might as well shut it down now, and reveal the final tallies. Unsurprisingly (at least to me) the clear winner is Robert Downey Jr., who did what only a couple of other superhero actors have been able to do, i.e. take a character we thought we knew and add another dimension to them. Christopher Reeve showed Superman’s fear and vulnerability, Nicholas Cage revealed that Johnny Blaze loves monkey documentaries, and Robert Downey Jr revealed that Tony Stark is funny. For too long the character has seemed like little more than an intense cypher in a suit, but Downey Jr. found the spark that brought him to life.

    Of course Stark is a show-off and narcissist, traits that don’t really go away even when he comes to realise what a negative effect Stark Industries has on the world. That balancing act, between playing Stark as a charming but aloof playboy and as a committed but humorless crusader, is what makes Downey Jr’s performance so perfect. It’s such a complete and satisfying incarnation of everyone’s favourite Registration Act-supporting dickbag that, upon seeing it, I immediately hoped that he would get Oscar attention next year. Just like Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl, he was so great and entertaining and instantly transformed into A-list superstar material that people came to see the movie to see him as much as they did the superheroics. Add to that his amazing work on the otherwise disappointing Tropic Thunder, and it’s so much his year that I’d bet his chances are higher than you’d expect. Of course, Tropic Thunder is too offensive to get a nomination for anything other than technical Oscars, so the buzz will transfer to Iron Man. The campaign is apparently in full swing, and though I still harbour natural doubts, there’s hope.


    Second place goes to Christian Bale, who did something subtly different than Robert Downey Jr. by showing how the character was meant to work. It’s repeatedly stated in Batman comics that the character is meant to be terrifying, but the image of a guy dressed as a bat and unable to turn his head has never seemed scary to anyone. Bale (and Christopher Nolan) finally cracked how to make Batman as fearsome as his reputation demands, and while some find Bale’s Batvoice ridiculous, I totally bought it, so much so that when reading the comics, I now hear Batman’s dialogue in that insane raspy growl. That said, while I give multiple props to Bale’s intense and customarily intelligent performances, I still hear Kevin Conroy’s voice for Bruce Wayne. Fans of the legendary animated series will know what I’m talking about, especially one regular reader who loves him some Mask of the Phantasm.


    Coming joint third, (unless, of course, those nine missing votes went to Shaq for his sensitive portrayal of Steel) Ron Perlman also brought his character to life, but maybe only for me. As I’ve said before, the character of Hellboy never worked on the page (subjectively), but once Perlman appeared onscreen, I finally understood what his appeal was. With the talented Perlman usually relegated to gruff bad guy roles, I’m immensely grateful to Guillermo Del Toro for giving him a chance to show how charming he can be, though I think it would go a lot smoother if he wrote Hellboy some funnier dialogue.


    Even though joint third place is a good showing, I expected more votes for Hugh Jackman, whose fanboy-appeasing performance as Wolverine was the instant star-making role that gave the superhero genre its big break in film. More than anything else, the massive popular acceptance of this almost unknown song-and-dance guy as a feral killing machine with leaky tear ducts and a heart of gold made everyone who saw it realise there was a way to make superheroes work in serious movies. Without him and his fantastic hott torso (and the guiding hand of Bryan Singer), I doubt any of the subsequent superhero movies would have been possible.


    Speaking of Bryan Singer, his random casting of Brandon Routh as Superman ended up paying off brilliantly, which makes the mediocrity of that movie all the more galling. With The Man of Steel seemingly stalled as of this moment, it’s a source of almost infinite annoyance that Routh, who managed to convince many fans that he could embody the nobility and vulnerability of Kal-El, will probably not get another shot at playing the role. When DC and Warner Brothers announced the Justice League movie, they caused me much sorrow by announcing he wouldn’t reprise the role, made up for it a lot by hinting that he would be replaced by Scott Porter (who is often the moral centre on Friday Night Lights), then pissed me off again by casting some other guy instead. Then they cancelled the film altogether. Whatevs. Seemingly forgotten, Routh only gets two votes, one of them from Canyon.


    Though it appears to be an unpopular opinion on the net, I think Jennifer Garner is the tops. I’m pleased she got a few votes, expecting the dreadful nature of Rob Bowman’s Elektra to dissuade voters. I’m not as enthused about Tobey Maguire’s votes, as my initial glee at the casting of yet another serious actor as a popular superhero has waned over the course of three Spidey movies as Maguire seems to be doing almost no other work (nothing on this planet will make me watch Seabiscuit, so don’t even go there), so I can’t even tell whether I think he’s a talented actor any more. He’s just the guy who’s too old to play a young loser with powers, dances badly for no reason other than to make the audience put their hands over their faces in embarrassment, and looks like a stack of wet flappy pancakes when he cries. And he’s coming back for three more movies? Oy.


    I can only assume that the single vote for Halle Berry as Not Catwoman was an ironic statement, because even someone utterly transfixed by her infamous beauty couldn’t ignore the ineptitude and total misunderstanding of the character on display here. A lot of fanboys complain about several recent Marvel adaptations, but even the real disasters cannot compare with DC’s run of terrible movies. Daredevil has its detractors, though I still maintain Affleck, with his single vote, was better than the haters say, and it at least made an effort to honour the characters. Ghost Rider was appalling but Nic Cage’s total commitment to the weird saves the film from total fail. The Fantastic Four movies might be kiddie versions of the bonkers science fiction adventures we FF fans love, but even when it’s hard to watch Reed Richards dancing, or Doctor Doom played like a bad guy from some 80s cheap-ass 8 frames-per-second animated shite, you’ve still got Michael Chiklis and Chris Evans (who received one votes in this poll, though I’m sure he had more at one point) honouring Ben Grimm and Johnny Storm with their valiant efforts.


    What do DC offer us at their worst? The nigh-unwatchable Supergirl, with Peter “Go! High-Ah! Gehhhhlll!” O’Toole’s career worst performance? Steel, which remains the only superhero adaptation I’ve been unable to finish due to overwhelming psychic pain and disappointment? Batman and Fucking Robin? I’d rather rewatch Jonathan Hensleigh’s The Punisher any day, especially as Thomas “Homeless Dad” Jane is my hero, and to be honest the worst crime of the movie is to be a homage to Don Siegel-style economy in the age of Michael Bay-style excess (not that I think emulating Don Siegel is a crime, just a question of misjudging a mood). I predict a wave of reappraisal when the forthcoming sequel is finally released.


    Batman and Robin would be the worst DC adaptation so far, except that it at least gave the world the line “You’re not sending me to da coolah!”, which is still in constant rotation in our house. It’s not much, but that vaults it above the complete failure that is Catwoman. Her weakness is insensibility upon exposure to catnip? Her nemesis is an insane cosmetics entrepreneur (played with an offensive lack of skill by Sharon Stone, no less)? That this anti-feminist fiasco was made while Daniel Waters’ brilliantly subversive script sits on a metaphorical shelf would make me doubt the existence of God if I didn’t already doubt the existence of God. A lesser blogger than I would probably write something pun-tastic like, “It was a purr-fectly hair-i-ball cat-astrophe that you should make a fe-line to avoid.” An even lesser blogger might refer to it as Scatwoman. However that kind of dismissal isn’t enough for a failure this total. It’s diarrhoea in the middle of the night. It’s vomit in a pile of freshly washed clothes. It’s nappy rash, poison ivy, tennis elbow, insomnia, and anaphylactic shock all at the same time. Never let it be spoken of again.


    Zero votes for Nicolas Cage (which will sadden Johnny Blaze-fan Canyon, I’m sure), Ang Lee in a Motion Capture Suit (even after the blank Hulk Smash performance on the most recent movie failed to generate even a fraction of the character that Ang Lee did), and, most shocking of all, zero votes for Dr. Wesley T. Snipes, who kicked so much vampire bottom in the Blade trilogy? How soon we forget. Or perhaps people thought they would get hassled by the IRS for supporting him. Wimps! Haven’t superheroes shown we should stand up to tyranny? I’m tempted to hand those nine votes to him, giving the Dr. of Asskicking a third place spot. Oh, and kudos for noticing poor Patrick Warburton at the bottom of the poll. I’m glad someone threw him some one vote worth of love for his heroic blue-suited silliness.

    Right. I’m done. Happy now, Blogger? ::pouts::

    BBC Breakfast Watch! World Of Warcraft Will Kill You Stone Dead

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    I’ve not watched BBC Breakfast for a while, replacing the misery of watching Bill Turnbull and Sian Williams (aka Mail-tuttery-personified) with the endurance test that is Atlas Shrugged. Well, I say that, but I will admit to taking a break from that as well, so that I could binge on Ed Brubaker’s genius run on Captain America (surely the classic Cap run) and Ultimate Spider-Man by Bendis (on top form, thankfully) and Stuart Immonen. I know! I should end that frigging book, but I needed to see the new Captain America kick some right-wingers around, especially now that they’re feeling so down. Obama’s got a mandate, bitches! A mandate! Suck it up!

    Anyway, this morning I paid more attention to BBC Breakfast than is healthy, primarily because today some evil corporate bastards have unleashed a new weapon against humanity, striking against our precious children by chaining them to an artificial reality in order to drain them of their resources, their souls, their potential. Such an apocalyptic event deserved full expression of their dismay, as they tried valiantly to prevent the theft of an entire generation. Yes, though it sickens me to say it, Blizzard released another WoW expansion pack. Those evil mind-controlling motherfuckers! Save the children from that thing we don’t quite understand but will distrust anyway just to be on the safe side!


    As soon as I saw the two disapproving parent-archetypes sitting on their sofa with all of the moral authority of two angry bags of compost, announcing the imminent discussion with all of the severity their little brains could muster, my heart sank. As I have said before when railing against this most insultingly alarmist show, I understand that early morning TV is meant to be light, but surely the release of an MMORPG expansion pack for one of the most successful, popular, and beloved games in the world is not going to bring about the death of childhood, and so acting like it is is surely the antithesis of “light chatter”. I missed the start of the show, but Canyon informed me that even before their little snippy piece about the game began, they predictably brought up the death of a South Korean gamer from exhaustion which, in traditional BBC Breakfast style, was linked to World of Warcraft when, in fact, the guy died playing Starcraft. A small point, but indicative of the rigour with which the disapproving Luddites had researched the piece.

    I almost didn’t watch. It’s been a while since I spent time watching Bill and Sian, simply because they make me so mad I can barely stand it. For all I know they have been railing against gaming with miserable regularity. “The release of a game called The Force Unleashed has raised concerns that children may turn to the Dark Side after playing it.” “This game, Spore, encourages children to cultivate and eat diseases!” “Your children are at threat from LittleBigPlanet, which might make your children sew themselves into sacks!” Of course, this morning they were particularly terrible, using their stern faces to register disgust over the thought of anyone daring to play computer games which corrupt minds and destroy lives and many other imaginary things.

    Though they’ve done this before, and even though they were talking (down) to three WoW fans instead of having some typically ineffectual and token balanced debate (which is usually conducted with the inclusion of some non-gaming crazy person with a head full of suspicion and fear), their behaviour this morning was even more snotty and dismissive as usual, probably because they resented wasting their time discussing something as “silly” as a game when OMG! They had the thrill of introducing a previously filmed clip of a BBC journo on a press junket interviewing Angelina Jolie about Changeling! The glamour of presenting BBC Breakfast should never be sullied with something as decadent and corrupting as a mere game. Get off our sofa, worthless fools, I could imagine Sian saying, as Bill sits and devours numerous custard creams while humming the theme to Dixon of Dock Green.


    I felt especially bad for one player, Marijke Jensen, who was still clad in the Night Elf costume she had been wearing to the special release event at HMV Oxford Circus last night. It was a cool costume, and — after Bill had expressed a somewhat unhealthy interest in it — she seemed to not expect his sneering “Whyyyyyyyyyyy?” because, you know, you don’t think a TV presenter would be openly rude and dismissive like that. Luckily she was friendly enough to defuse the moment with a genial acknowledgement that wearing something like that might seem extreme to, say, a trad-dad square from the McCarthy era magically transported to W1, 2008. The other guests — a hardcore player (Ben West) who had also attended the launch, and Tim Edwards from PC Gamer Magazine — then had to put up with Bill and Sian stumbling to understand what the game involves, not to mention returning to the same goddamn question, over and over again, about how long people play it. The poor guy who attended the launch, who had waited 36 hours in line, was mocked by Bill for waiting so long, but at least he tried to explain that he did it for the feeling of being a part of something, a community of like-minded people, that playing the game is a social thing and leads to real friendships (as regular Shades of Caruso visitor Jaredan can attest to). It’s something Bill can’t understand, as the only community he belongs to is Daily Mail Island, and they despise the BBC. It must be horribly depressing for him.

    The piece continued for only a few minutes, but it felt like a million years, with both presenters tut-tutting at the amount of time devoted players spent on the game, and then reading out one viewer email from a Concerned Mother who complained at her 18-year old son’s daily WoW marathons (12 hours a day, which seems excessive and probably exaggerated for effect), stating that he has no friends. Of course, anyone who plays the game will know that it’s very easy to make friends online, and the game depends on social interaction and cooperation, but parents (and Bill and Sian, obviously) won’t accept that because internet friends can’t possibly exist or mean anything to their children, oblivious to the fact that they are probably grateful to meet people with the same hobby as them, who don’t judge them for doing something they enjoy. After that single negative email Sian deigned to read a positive one, prefaced with the dismissive and frustrated bleat, “I have to say, the majority have been positive because they do play the game,” which is the perfect example of how her mind remains closed against new information. Closed, because otherwise all of the Hypothetical Idiots she has invented will come spilling out, babbling hysterically, running into traffic, or eating quicklime, or maybe even playing a computer game for eight days without a break and then dying from dehydration.


    As I said earlier, this anti-gaming suspicion is something I’ve gone on about before, and it’s a really silly thing to get annoyed about, but the Today Programme is also getting in on the technophobia with a depressingly one-sided report, and the BBC News homepage features this special report, which makes me suspect the corporation is secretly really pissed at the failure of Fightbox. (Night Elf Marijke is on the far left on the homepage picture.)

    Still, despite the depressing blanket suspicion across the BBC’s coverage, I’m most incensed by Bill and Sian’s obnoxious behaviour, telling their guests off for playing WoW for any amount of time (Bill kept tutting, “That’s still a lot” no matter what the response), frowning constantly and belittling them for having an interest in something they don’t understand. With the only “professional” interviewed being a young journalist, they felt free to treat their guests like ill-behaved delinquents, sniping at them and their hobby with distasteful arrogance. Even Bill’s “jokes” about the Night Elf’s ears were framed as a nasty side-effect of playing too long.

    Obviously there is an issue about compulsive playing there; I’d be crazy to deny it (probably driven crazy by obsessive gaming!). However, any pursuit can potentially create obsessive behaviour in those who follow it, and many of the complaints about WoW are coming from parents whose children, who have retreated into what they see as a pointless fantasy world, would probably retreat into some other world away from their parents if they weren’t gaming. It’s called adolescence, and is a fact of life. Nevertheless, that coverage is not what annoys me. It’s the distrustful attitude of much of the mainstream media, possibly resentful that young eyeballs are being stolen by gaming (or whatever the dehumanising term for viewing figure decline is this week), that gaming is always framed in terms of the harm it must do to children, that it is never seen as a positive thing or a potential source of much artistic value, that the fact that it brings people together is treated with much amusement by commentators stuck in their 20th Century world and unable to believe that social networking via any new form of technology can be enormously empowering and, at its most base level, a lot of fun. Families are being formed or brought together because of these developments. It’s not threatening our way of life, it’s enhancing it. Embrace our machine friends!

    Most immediately, though, I’m furious about the rude attitude of Bill and Sian, who acted like stern parents to these total strangers, all of whom are over the age of 18 and surely deserving of some respect. It was bordering on bullying behaviour, to be honest, and I’m sick of seeing gamers treated like potentially unstable children. Even worse, I feel especially bad for gamers who have been up all night, filled with excitement about the release of a long-awaited expansion pack and happy to have been part of a joyful event populated by people who share the same interests as them, turning up to a BBC studio to enthuse about their hobby only to be treated like delusional freaks or criminals by the sub-moronic presenters of this appalling, amateurish, poorly researched piece of shit show.


    Compare Bill and Sian’s awful treatment of the three gamers with their fawning interview of singer and sentient oil slick Jonathan Ansell, whose oleaginous insincerity was only matched by their boundless delight at his dreary anecdotes about how wonderful he is. A truly nauseating display. If I could I’d organise a boycott of the show by bombarding gamer and legendary literary leviathan Charlie Brooker with incensed all-caps emails, but that’s just the fatigue-induced temporary insanity talking, and has nothing to do with my recent Civilisation Revolution binges, which have lasted for up to five hours. Nothing to do with that at all.

    Still, it was not all misery. They also had Dragon’s Den judge Duncan Bannatyne on. I’ve yet to express my immense frustration at these pompous, self-aggrandising sinkholes who have convinced the BBC — a publicly funded corporation — to air a show that allows them to interview inventors and cherry-pick the best ideas for investment, from which they then make a fat wad of cash. Truly imaginative entrepreneurial thinking, there. Of course, I take great pleasure every time I hear that one of their rejects — usually dismissed with derision and laughter — has become a huge success without their minimal investment (usually offered in exchange for almost punitive shares in the new businesses). If I came up with a solid idea, the last thing I would do is give these crooks a chance to absorb my profits with their rapacious plundering.


    Anyway, Bannatyne was on, and looking grumpier than usual. I wonder why? (There was a copy of the Sun sitting around the studio earlier in the show, during the sports news, and I can imagine it was whisked away and hidden with a quickness once they were done with it. Poor Duncan.)

    ETA: Good to see I’m not the only one annoyed by Sian and Bill’s arrogant embrace of technological ignorance, and worded with far more elegance than I can muster to boot.

    An Incremental Uptick In Civility Should Be Welcomed

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    ::Cannibalising this rant from my Quantum of Solace post in order to keep that epic a teeny tiny little bit more focused. Apologies for looking like a lazy bastard by reprinting something as a new post::

    As I said yesterday, we saw finally saw Quantum of Solace many days after it opened (which is torture for a Bond fan). While the main reason was sheer lack of the pounds, we also balked at seeing it in the midst of a seething mass of ill-behaved douchebags, which has happened way too often over the years. We went to great trouble to see the movie at our local Vue, which was offering an over-18s only screening, which, according to the jerkoff who wrote that Guardian article, is the kind of behaviour only fun-hating assholes could possibly want. Fine, I’m a fun-hating asshole, but I’m a fun-hating asshole who was absurdly happy last night. Only about forty people attended the screening, but with an employee on hand to keep an eye out for bratty kids (the traditional bad apples that spoil the bunch) sneaking in and causing havoc, for the first time I’ve ever experienced in a big chain cinema, there was a feeling of happy community as we all got on with watching the goddamn film like we wanted. I’ve had too many shitty experiences going to the cinema, and it’s the main reason I don’t go as often as I used to. Quint had a memorable rant on Ain’t It Cool News a while back, and I love that the talkbackers were almost 100% united behind him, something that almost never happens.

    Paint me as a curmudgeon all you like, hack Guardian loser, but I’m sick of going to the cinema only to have to endure ice cubes thrown at my head (Ocean’s Thirteen), kids having a party three rows in front of me (William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet), threats of violence (Blade), incessant phone use (The Dark Knight, which was, other than that, a superb experience), or sitting in the middle of what felt like a flash mob gathering designed to create the maximum amount of carnage, misery, noise, and disruption possible (Fantastic Four: The Rise of the Silver Surfer, which was exactly like that scene in Gremlins where they all watch Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, except scarier). I’ll pay the extra pound just for some enforced civility which, of course, didn’t need to be enforced because the people who bought tickets were eager to watch a movie without distraction and not have a get-together with their mates. It’s fucking science. Kudos to Vue for making the experience feel a little more special than it usually would.

    How We Waited Out The Election

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    Only now, as the smoke clears and the euphoria dies down, do I realise how much the wait for November the fourth had turned my mind into a stagnant pond, a Moebius strip of re-thought thoughts, cognition turned into a chore thanks to the insane worry over something I literally had no control over (at least Canyon could vote, an act that made her justifiably happy). Two days later, and look at me! I’m all florid and shit, like what I was previous, like.

    During that interminable wait, we tried to keep ourselves occupied and not just keep reading the same four websites (though we enjoyed it all) and getting even more obsessed than usual with The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Our efforts bore some pleasant fruit (the cherries and strawberries of the week) and some disappointing fruit too (mangoes, sharon fruit and unripe bananas, metaphorically speaking).

    Burn After Reading

    I had high hopes for this after the excellence of No Country For Old Men had erased disappointed memories of the previous four Coen Brothers movies (yes, I’m not crazy about O Brother, Where Art Thou? or The Man Who Wasn’t There), but it was frustratingly slight. Being more of a fan of their hyper-weird comedies than their dramas, with The Big Lebowski at the top of my faves list and Raising Arizona close on its tail, I was hoping this would be similarly unhinged and frenetic, but instead it was like Fargo with more jokes, which is a problem considering I don’t really like Fargo that much. At least, not as much as many seem to.


    Of course, mid-level Coen Brothers movies still have a lot to recommend. Almost all of the performances were great (though weirdly Malkovich did my head in with. His. Stilted. Fucking. Line. Readings. And. Laboured. Fucking. Profanity.), with special kudos to the ever-wonderful Frances McDormand and Richard Jenkins (who broke my heart). That said, why did they bother casting Tilda “Goddess” Swinton for a part that had about twelve lines? Don’t get me wrong, I’m more than happy to see her on screen in any capacity, but she seemed ill-served. Here’s hoping she becomes a Coen repertory player and turns up again, except with something to do other than be annoyed with the men in her life.


    Even with that cast, the film never seemed to come alive, though the central point, that of lampooning the arrogance and solipsism of a bunch of self-regarding twerps who think their pitiful lives have some greater meaning, when in fact all they are little more than a bunch of horny morons, was beautifully done, perhaps even more so than the previous times they have tried to make that point (No Country, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, etc.). I’ve had more fun thinking about the film than I did watching it. That said, Brad Pitt is a better comedic actor than I thought possible.


    I’m grateful to the Coens for proving that.

    Quantum of Solace

    Casino Royale is possibly my favourite Bond movie since On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, leapfrogging over The Living Daylights, The Spy Who Loved Me and Goldeneye, but poverty has delayed us going to see the latest movie. Instead I’ve been rewatching this over and over again.

    We might still see it this week, once I’ve sold a kidney, following the wonderful news that Vue Cinemas have instituted over-18′s only performances for people who don’t want to put up with hordes of little shits treating cinemas like the local bus depot. A black man is elected President of the United States and a cinema chain (in our home town, no less) finally realises moviegoers have been staying away because of the behaviour of a bunch of oiks, all in the same week? This truly is the golden age of civilisation. Speaking of which…

    Civilisation Revolution


    If anything stops me blogging, it will be this game. In its previous manifestations it was already the greatest game ever made (yeah chess, thass right. What have you done for me lately?), but now it’s less fussy, faster paced, and filled with endearing silliness. Canyon has been forced to put up with my wasting hours on the hellishly addictive thing, so much so that I’m now responding to her conversational gambits with a reflexive “Follum follum!” If you’ve played it, you know what that means.

    Tropic Thunder

    It’s taken us way longer than we would have liked to see Ben Stiller’s attack on Hollywood, and it was not even worth the wait. Despite the odd great moment, the whole ambitious exercise falls flat with upsetting regularity. Though Robert Downey Jr.’s performance is just as amazing as we had heard, he didn’t actually seem have anything funny to say, and we ended up laughing at Jack Black’s cold turkey shenanigans instead. Stiller’s original concept for the film is hugely appealing, but the execution of it just didn’t seem to click at all, with the plot drifting along from one lengthy and ultimately unfunny scene to another, seemingly without direction or purpose. It made Zoolander look like a tightly plotted Preston Sturges movie (I say that as a fan of Zoolander who thinks it sometimes ambles when it should be sprinting). While Adam McKay’s movies mostly come alive in the editing room, this never takes shape, and no amount of amusing scenes with Tom Cruise dancing and swearing can save it. Dispiriting stuff, though I’m hoping to see a longer cut soon that might justify that brilliant idea, and maybe even give Jay Baruchel and Brandon T. Jackson something to do other than be straight men. Zoolander got funnier with each viewing, so maybe something similar will happen here, though I doubt it.


    Compare that to Pineapple Express, which we watched again, and is now, definitely, my favourite comedy of the year. Considering it’s a stoner comedy it’s built with the same care that Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg lavished on Superbad, progressing with logical beauty from scene to scene with only a couple of moments at the end of the second act that show they love their McKee a bit too much. It’s not a deal breaker at all, though, and the Hot Fuzz-style genre mash-up of the final act is even more satisfying second time around, with kudos going to Rogen’s repeated declarations of, “Nice!” whenever anything goes his way (such as the hilarious respawning machine guns in the underground lair).


    In comparison, Tropic Thunder looks like a first cut mess, something you would show to a studio head to reassure them that the money is on the screen. How talented individuals like Stiller, Etan Cohen (partly responsible for the magnificent Idiocracy) and Justin Theroux could botch this is beyond me. The latter name is especially troubling. My previous excitement at his participation in Iron Man 2 has withered completely. Let’s hope he’s better off without the improvisational scenes between the leads that appear to have derailed the film so badly.

    Justice Society of America by Geoff Johns and Dale Eaglesham

    Is this the best comic on the market right now? In terms of superheroism, perhaps it is, though of course it has been great since Geoff Johns jumped onto the title early in the previous incarnation. Johns is always great value (especially lately; he’s on fire), but JSA is better than ever, making me retroactively like Kingdom Come more than I originally did. However, the main reason is…





    …OMG Hawkman is a TOTAL BADASS. Trust Goody-Two Shoes Jay to get in his way though.

    Hunger

    Turner Prize-winning director Steve McQueen’s meditation on Bobby Sands’ hunger strike has been damned by some of the UK press for daring to portray the Republican struggle in a noble light, which is hilariously inappropriate as that is absolutely not what the film is about at all. While, yes, it is set in The Maze and follows Sands’ strike from conception to death, and while it shows in horrific detail the back-and-forth mental and physical combat between the imprisoned IRA soldiers/terrorists/politicians (delete as applicable) and the guards, it’s pretty much an abstract exploration of what art is. Prisoners daub the walls of the cells with shit, flood the corridors of the prison with urine, and, eventually, stage a protest that turns their bodies, as depicted by McQueen, into a time-lapse photo of living, breathing decay. Even the poster shows one of the “paintings” by a prisoner (a nod to previous Turner Prize winner Chris Ofili?).


    This is, as far as I can tell, the one reading of the movie that explains the peculiar structure. The first third of the film concerns a new prisoner (Davey, played by Brian Milligan) learning the ropes of prison life and the protests therein via his cellmate Gerry (Liam McMahon), the middle third is the much-debated conversation between Sands (Michael Fassbender) and his priest (Liam Cunningham) about mortality and politics, and the final third is an impassive, minimalist depiction of Sands’ lengthy death with Davey and Gerry disappearing from the movie altogether. Bear in mind, except for the middle section, there is almost no dialogue, with only a minimal amount of verbally communicated information giving background on what is happening. There is barely any character development, but then that’s not what the film is about. It’s about their acts, their attempts to say something with little more than their bodies as the conduit of their emotion and rage. Much of what they do has little effect. The shit paintings are blasted away and the urine is washed up in a shot of audience-patience-defying length. Only the deaths of the hunger strikers seem to have any effect, though that is relegated to a few title cards at the end of the movie giving a few nuggets of information about the subsequent years.


    Getting angry about the movie for glamourising the strike (shurely shome mishtake; it’s nigh-unwatchable) or having a pro-IRA agenda seems wrong-headed, though I understand many people are never going to allow themselves to move on from those horrible years during the struggle. However, in the terms of the film, that struggle is less important than McQueen’s interest in the way the prisoners and hunger strikers express themselves, with the only scene that debates the details of the Republican battles and the morality of politicised suicide being the notorious static art/anti-art shot of a drab room and Sands and his priest smoking and talking for twenty minutes, which, while hypnotic and superbly played, stands in contrast with the bleak, almost silent beauty of the rest of the movie. McQueen seems to be staring into his soul and wondering why he is an artist, and how his art compares to something as drastic as turning the place you live into a hellhole using only the waste products of your body, or allowing yourself to be brutalised just to make a statement and to psychologically affect those who torture you. Isn’t art meant to affect the people who experience it? Isn’t making a person beat you to a bloody pulp the most extreme way to do that? Where does that leave McQueen and the rest of the YBAs?


    Can you tell that I thought it was amazing? There’s a lot to digest (really, no pun intended), especially as it is attracting some fascinating debate, as in this excellent piece from Frieze magazine. It’s definitely on my end of year best film list, and strongly recommended for anyone who can handle the body horror.

    I’m unsure as to whether admitting that I spent the last couple of weeks doing all of that in addition to habitually checking on Obama’s progress makes me look more or less sad. I could lie and say I also went sailing, if that helps. Of course, now we’re waiting for his press conferences as if they were episodes of Friday Night Lights, as we tuned into CNN last night to see him talk about getting a shelter dog (which made Canyon almost swoon) and expressing condolences over a journalist’s damaged arm (which almost finished me off). Compared to that slavish devotion to the President-Elect, acting like a couple of lovestruck groupies, six hour marathons of CivRev almost look cool.