[Note to new readers: for the record, I've had other meltdowns over the offensive content of BBC Breakfast, usually about their treatment of young guests on the show or their poorly-researched and alarmist comments on technology. Here are my previous rants, ordered chronologically:
It’s been a while since Shades of Caruso has addressed the aggressive Daily-Mail-esque ignorance of the news-and-Strictly-Come-Dancing info update service known as BBC Breakfast, but then it’s been a while since they’ve been as stupid as they were this morning, probably because Kate Silverton was on there for a while being much more sensible than the other presenters. Oh sure, every so often one of the presenters — usually Bill “Confusion” Turnbull — will treat a teenager like a cross between Charles Manson and Typhoid Mary, or Sian “Disapproving” Williams will bring her withering school-marm-esque Victorian sensibilities to bear on some poor person who thought they were just going on another stage of a PR tour for a book, not a Spanish-Inquisition-style interrogation as to why they are a Satanist in disguise, but these things happen so often that it would get very boring for me (and, of course, for you, dear reader) if I came on here every day and said, “Bill just acted like the atheist he was interviewing was chewing on baby-flavoured gum and masturbating all over their tacky chat-sofa”. Though I have been tempted.
Today, though? Hoooooo-boy. I was struggling to extricate myself from bed while being pinned down by multiple angry cats when Daisyhellcakes started using the profane language she saves for extra-stupid segments on Breakfast. It’s like the Bat-Symbol being flashed over Gotham when she does that. I put my ass into high gear, and 35 minutes later I’d made it downstairs to watch one of the most shockingly biased interviews I’ve ever seen, which can be summed up in the phrase “Concerned Parent Armed With Zero Knowledge But Infinite Outrage Vs. Scientist Making Good Points”. It was the worst kind of interview: one where the interviewer refuses to accept the information given to him by the interviewee, and actively goes out of his way to distort the interviewee’s message in order to quash it.
Before I get into it, here’s the caveat I always have to crack out when I take on Breakfast. Yes, this is not Newsnight. We’re not talking about Mecha-Paxman here. This is not the Today programme with John “Sarcastic Voice” Humphrys, and it’s not even The Politics Show with Andrew “Brillo Pad” Neil (a man I should hate for his terrible behaviour during the News Corp strikes, but would get on my “People I Would Like To Have A Beer With” list). Breakfast is one notch above Richard Littlejohn’s Daily Mail column, which means it’s two notches above Jan Moir’s column. This is where rationality and relevance goes to die, and so my heart bleeds for poor Professor David Nutt from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, who was interviewed by Charlie “Young Bill Turnbull” Stayt after Nutt, during a lecture, criticised the government’s decision to reclassify cannabis as a Class B drug.
Of course, the Daily Mail beat Breakfast to the punch with this article, but to be honest, even though it features a few snide digs and references to outraged comments from drugs campaigners that haven’t actually happened yet — a typical Mail trick to create the illusion of controversy when there is none is to say “His comments are likely to prove explosive” –it’s a bit more balanced than the Breakfast coverage. The Mail even quotes Richard Garside, director of the CCJS, who said, “Professor Nutt’s briefing gives us an insight into what drugs policy might look like if it was based on the research evidence, rather than political posturing and moralistic positioning.” That they put this comment in without making monstering Garside is a real surprise, though yes, it is at the bottom of the article. They’re not going to put something like that in the first paragraph.
Breakfast, on the other hand, dived in with both Fists of Fury flying. Taking place via super-futuristic vid link, Charlie Stayt quizzed Prof. Nutt — who was in the BBC Bristol studio — about his statement, and the good Professor talked about scientific evidence and popular opinion pointing to cannabis as being a Class C drug rather than a Class B drug, and mentioned that arrest for possession of a Class C drug carries with it the possibility of a two-year prison sentence (I assume for possession of large quantities. Two years for having a half-smoked lump of black in your pocket seems pretty harsh). Fair enough, but nothing was going to stop Stayt. Having got the pleasantries out of the way, Stayt then said:
If I’m looking through — and correct me if I’m wrong — if I look through what you’re saying at this stage, it seems to me one of the things you’re saying is that, effectively, taking LSD, sort of on a given night, is the equivalent of having a beer. [At this moment Prof. Nutt looks a little startled, though I could be misreading his reaction] Now a lot of people think that just doesn’t make any sense. Is that effectively what you are saying?
Prof. Nutt immediately points out that Stayt has started talking about a lecture he gave in July, which has nothing to do with what he did last night. That report concerned population impact of all drugs, both prohibited and accepted by the mainstream, such as booze and fags. Nutt said:
In the UK at present, LSD actually causes very little harm. Because it’s relatively little used it has a low propensity to cause dependence. And so in comparison with other drugs, in particular drugs like alcohol which are very very heavily used with very high levels of dependence and toxicity, the LSD would rank more low… lower because it’s relatively — in population terms — safer.
These comments made by Nutt earlier in the year have followed him around ever since, but then that’s exactly what happens when someone uses an inflammatory but pithy soundbite to describe a series of statistical observations. It’s especially annoying when those stats seem to make so much sense. Anyone who wanders the streets of London between 10pm and midnight will know exactly how widespread alcohol usage is. Where are all the hallucinating fools sitting on the tube and screaming about the gargoyles climbing up their legs or telling everyone around them how connected they feel to The Cosmic Mesh? Okay, they’re at home, probably, but at least they’re not starting fights, accosting women, or falling down escalators. Sadly, Stayt is immune to statistical truth, and continued to ignore Nutt’s findings with studied and insulting insistence:
Yeah, it’s funny though, isn’t it, cuz if you… if you… Say you think about this as a parent, and you think about your child, you’ve got a teenage child, and you think well… I know you’re saying that “LSD, cannabis and Ecstasy are less dangerous than alcohol and cigarettes”. Now, if you ask a parent which of those you want your child experimenting with, I would suspect — and I’m not sure about this — they might say they really don’t want them experimenting with Ecstasy and LSD, and drinks and cigarettes, they might think, is the better of the options, but you seem to be presenting it the other way around!
How many parents out there are saying to their kids, “Right, I’ll let you experiment with one drug of choice, and you can take your pick. Oh shit! Not LSD! Wouldn’t you rather try some nutritious Guinness?” Stayt makes it sound like parents are giving their kids an option of trying just one, and the horror of Nutt’s report is that now kids will be picking LSD instead of booze. Of course, if the findings of the scientific community are right, then this would be a good thing, because — drumroll — it’s less dangerous than alcohol. This finding will not penetrate Stayt’s head, though. LSD is more dangerous than booze, and science has a terribly immoral pro-hallucinogenic bias. Stab science with a big knife because it is so evil!
Anyway, this is how the rest of the interview went, though the transcript sadly doesn’t capture the clarity of Nutt’s responses, nor the sneering and patronising anti-rational questioning by Stayt:
Nutt: [Re: Stayt's last question] Well, that’s precisely why we’re having this debate, because it’s very difficult to give guidance to parents, because these drugs are all very toxic in different ways, and what I am doing is engaging you — and, hopefully, the general population, including parents — in a debate about this. Today… tonight, a child in the UK will die of alcohol poisoning. No one will die of LSD. And that’s the kind of issue that parents should really be taking onboard: what advice do you give to your children when they go out and they drink heavily? Alcohol is currently the biggest, most worrying killer of the drugs that we’re not really grappling with under the Misuse of Drugs Act.
Stayt: Yeeaahh, well I’m not suggesting that alcohol doesn’t have its problems too. If we talk about cigarettes, for example… Now in relation to cannabis, are you saying there is a link with mental illness or not? Is it just a possibility?
Nutt: [talking over Stayt's last sentence, probably because he's sickened by the level of debate] Oh, cannabis is not good for mental health. Cannabis certainly can make schizophrenia worse if you’ve got it, but what has confused people is this claim that it is the cause of schizophrenia. Well, it contributes to a very small percentage of the cases of schizophrenia, and most people who smoke cannabis do not end up getting schizophrenia or psychosis from it.
Stayt: And do you know, one of the problems is — I’m sure you must be aware of this — there is a possibility that people listening to your sort of train of thought on this… and I know you’re trying to prompt debate, but in the gist of what you’re saying, there will be some people who come away from this thinking, “D’you know what, these drugs — LSD, cannabis, Ecstasy — they’re not so bad, really”, and that might be the message people get from what you’re saying.
Nutt: Well, the message they should get from what I’m saying is that they are bad but they’re not as bad as heroin and crack. That’s why I think it’s really critical that the Misuse of Drugs Act properly represents the global harms of the drugs that are controlled in the Act, because unless the Act is correct, we can’t give the right message.
After which Stayt thanked the Professor and we got to see a shot of co-presenter Susanna Reid looking like she was sucking the world’s biggest Disapproval Lemon. Daisyhellcakes saved her biggest expression of disdain for Stayt’s playacting of a foolish teenager thinking the report was pro-drugs, shouting out, “They’ve trotted out the Hypothetical Idiot!” Long-time readers will know that I’ve railed against the rhetorical use of the Hypothetical Idiot in the past, as shown in the posts I’ve linked to above, because everyone knows that no matter what you do, someone out there (“there” being the mind of an aggrieved and ill-informed paranoid desperate to win an argument by creating numerous straw-men) will use any idea or object to kill themself and millions of others, thus justifying the banning of any piece of information or any object just in case someone uses it as a weapon.
That’s not even the worst part of the interview, though. The moment that enraged me the most was Stayt accusing Nutt of unintentionally promoting the use of drugs by talking about them in a way that could be misinterpreted while deliberately and repeatedly misinterpreting the findings himself. The man is a cretin. Get him off TV now before he further defecates all over the public forum. We don’t need his kind of alarmist, knee-jerk moralising getting in the way of adult discussion when there are plenty of people out there who will think Stayt is speaking from a position of intellectual certainty and superiority simply because he’s wearing a suit on the telly.
Compare his snide interview with the news bulletin coverage just a few minutes earlier, which quotes Nutt’s concern over the reclassification of cannabis potentially leading to an increase in usage. The more transgressive a drug seems, the more attractive it becomes to rebellious teens. Isn’t this obvious? We’re so busy treating teenagers like criminals in waiting without even trying to address the psychology of pubertal and post-pubertal kids, just assuming they’re bound to break the law without considering the societal prejudices and actions that can trigger this behaviour. During the short news piece on Nutt’s lecture is a voxpop from Debra Bell, who runs the website Talking About Cannabis. Mrs. Bell has been chronicling her son’s drug use and rehabilitation for several years now, attracting the attention of the UKpress and some angrybloggers. Of course, as this was a voxpop Mrs. Bell’s comments were not challenged at all, and again she seemed oblivious to the psychology of teenagers, thinking that telling them cannabis is bad for you and is frowned upon by the authorities will be enough to make kids reconsider smoking the drugs.
She also seemed to think that Prof. Nutt was actually saying cannabis should be downgraded to Class C because it’s not harmful at all, which is not what he is saying. I get the feeling that the only acceptable way to describe the effects of cannabis is to scream “IT WILL SEND YOU TO HELL AND SATAN WILL SODOMISE YOU WITH A TRIDENT-SHAPED BONG!” Anything less than that is to imply that dope-smoke is little more than fragrant air, and all of those deaths from cannabis usage will be on your hands, mister! Of course, Mrs. Bell was concerned that telling kids the truth about drugs was the most important thing, but her page of “facts” about cannabis features many statistics that have been debunked by Godlike super-genius Ben Goldacre, so she’s the last person who we should be listening to on this subject.
I’m not one who takes illicit substances anyway, but the interview is offensively biased enough that I just have to rail against it, howling into the emptiness like an impotent wolf bellowing at the uncaring moon. This interview was, as if often the case on Breakfast, a fucking debacle. Any attempt to increase the public’s knowledge about any moral issue is treated with disrespect and distrust, with the ill-prepared and incurious presenters relying on willful ignorance and hearsay, Old Wives’ tales and superstition. It’s taken as fact that the BBC’s news operation is the best in the world, but with this carbuncle on its face, how are we to ever take it seriously? I know breakfast TV is meant to be trivial, but treating important issues in this way is making things far worse. They should have a serious journalist in reserve on set, someone who can rush out and present something like this instead of relying on a fellow who, during an undemanding interview with Enid Blyton’s grand-daughter Sophie Smallwood, commented on her work on a new classic Noddy book by saying:
Stayt: It’s a big responsibility, isn’t it. Cuz, obvi… I mean, you knew your grandmother very well…
Smallwood: Well, no…
Stayt: Did you?
Smallwood: I was two years after she died.
Nice work, BBC. This is exactly the guy you need interviewing scientists about their research. (Sidenote: the small feature on Noddy showed a short clip from the recent TV show, which updated the character, and true to form, both Charlie and Susanna regarded it the way a reluctant babysitter regards a soiled nappy.)
Of course, the embarrassing and biased interviews are not the only bad things featured on Breakfast. This morning’s installment also featured the most information-free puff-piece I’ve seen on TV recently: a survey — probably taken in a conference room within Television Centre when someone realised Breakfast was going to run three minutes short one morning — says men are crying at films more often. Cue lots of free-publicity for Up, with “comedy” reporter Tim Muffett — talking to a psychologist about what makes people cry when they watch movies. FYI, according to Dr. Simon Moore:
In terms of the characteristics of a kind of a “sob-film”, or a “weepie” as we might call it, there are technical skills you could use in terms of facial expression, you can use colour. Sound, for example, or lack of it. All these things could, for certain individuals, have an effect, but it won’t happen for everybody.
I’ve always said that Kubrick’s use of white in 2001 is what makes that film such an emotional rollercoaster. I’m sure it was the lovely balloons that made my cry while watching Up, not the emotional connection you feel towards a man who has lost the love of his life after decades of loving companionship. God forbid it would be empathy that causes these emotional responses. It must be brane-science and some kind of subliminal tricksiness! The worst comment made during this most desperate of time-filling fripperies came from Peter Bradshaw, much to my horror. When talking about Up (surely the most emotionally devastating movie of the year), he said:
I was one of those people sobbing away like a baby. It’s all the more sad because you don’t expect it. This is a kind of high-gloss digital family comedy from Pixar Disney. You don’t expect to be moved. You don’t expect to be moved to tears.
He’s got a point. Disney and Pixar have never…
…ever…
…ever…
…ever…
…even tried to make audiences cry before.
::Disclaimer – None of the quotes in this post are fabricated. Not even the “sob-film” one. They have been very carefully transcribed from my Sky+ box, and the idiocy contained within is not my property or my fault. Sorry for foisting it upon my readers, who deserve better.::
ETA, date 30.10.09: As the Mail predicted, Professor Nutt’s comments did indeed provoke outrage, as Home Secretary Alan Johnson has had him removed as head of the Advisory Council on Misuse of Drugs, saying he has created “public confusion between scientific advice and policy”. So, basically, it’s not whether he is right or wrong. He’s just not towing the party line. Pathetic. It’s obvious the ACMD is only there to back up governmental policy with a veneer of scientific authority. Drugs policy in this country continues its backwards march.
The 2009 London Film Festival is still going, though it’s over for me. I’ll admit to feeling pretty burnt out. Illness has made my voice as deep as Dr. Mrs. the Monarch, and my brain as mushy as overcooked Maris Piper potatoes. How I managed to make it through three films on Monday is beyond me, with an imminent coughing fit scratching away at my uvula for most of the day. I trust that every festival-goer in those three rooms will be glad to know I didn’t ruin their entertainment, even the latecomers who kept swapping seats throughout, driving me into an almost murderous rage.
It took until last Friday to realise that the latecomers who had plagued me throughout the festival were return-ticket-holders who were being allowed in at the last minute — a theory postulated by fellow festival-attendee and friend of the blog Mr. Millan. He’s a more understanding person than I am, but even so, when people were still stepping over us twenty minutes after the lights had dimmed, all sympathy vanished. While the audiences at the festival were generally wonderful, attentive and respectful, this late attendance and the inability of some patrons to sit in their allocated seats really ruined some movies. It’s hard to concentrate on the really rather important opening scenes of movies when people on either side of you are arguing over who gets what seat.
One selfish person who seemed affronted by the suggestion they get the hell out of someone else’s seat managed to completely distract me during the opening moments of Nicholas Winding Refn’s gruelling Viking Grrrr-a-thon Valhalla Rising. A title card flashed up with something on it about clans going to the ends of the Earth and killing each other with a variety of gruesome implements. I think it did, anyway. For all I know it could have been talking about Viking couture and ancient Scandinavian infrastructure investment, so annoying were the lady’s adamant pronouncements that she was not going to move. She did, though. And then sat in someone else’s chair, meaning she put up the same struggle three minutes later. This second disturbance was during a series of moody shots of some gruff looking gents huddling on the side of a hill, so it wasn’t so bad.
If there was any image that summed up Valhalla Rising, it would be of gruff looking gents huddling on the side of a hill. There was a lot of it. The thin story follows the final journey of mute Viking warrior One Eye, played with silent intensity and motherfucking epic badassery by Mads Mikkelsen. Disclosure: he only gets to dole out a bit of ultraviolence here and there as Winding Refn’s carefully paced movie grinds toward its inevitable conclusion. The movie has been marketed as a Viking combat actioner like The 13th Warrior or the deeply tedious and offensively stupid Pathfinder, but it’s much more meditative than that. Audiences may not be prepared for the funereal pace of the actual film. That said, when it kicks off between our taciturn anti-hero and some gruff gent who had just been huddling on the side of a hill, One-Eye is a riveting protagonist, effortlessly and brutally destroying all foes. He’s the Viking Brock Samson, and very fetching he looks in his leather jacket and trews.
After escaping from capture by some folk whose identity might have been revealed in that title card I didn’t get to read thanks to the annoying lady, One-Eye and a tag-along boy (Are, played with mischievous charm by Maarten Steven) come across a band of idiot Christian Vikings, who think they can reach the Holy Land — from Scotland, mind — via teeny boat, in order to crush the infidels in the name of Christ. This does not go well. A long stretch of the movie shows the band of zealots — plus One Eye and his adopted companion — sitting in a boat surrounded by thick fog, desperate for water. When they eventually land it seems they are in Hell, but in fact they have found the endpoint that One Eye — who appears to be psychic, considering his rather accurate visions of doom and misery — has been heading towards all along. Does his journey doom them, or do they accidentally doom themselves? One-Eye appears to be the only person who has any idea of what is going on. He is yer actual one-eyed man who is king in the land of the blind.
As with Von Trier’s Antichrist, nature is the enemy here, even more so than the various warriors dispatched by One-Eye. Though our hero and the annoying band of treacherous Christian Viking jerk-offs come up against a very real antagonist in their final destination, the thing that finishes them off is their inability to comprehend and adapt to their surroundings, or to move past their ignorant superstitions and suspicions. Though One Eye’s feelings are unclear, it’s likely he does think he has reached the afterlife, which is a forest where only predators lurk. The Christians, on the other hand, bicker about whether it’s the Holy Land or Hell, and their foolishness and fear of the landscape is the end of them. One Eye is lucky. He soon realises what his visions have been showing him: the moment of his death, which he embraces gladly. I didn’t get to see John Hillcoat’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road at the festival, but I’ve heard troubling rumours that the final act is more reassuring than the one in the book. Funnily enough Valhalla Rising has an even darker final act than McCarthy’s book. In this world there is only madness, loneliness, and death. It’s worse than having your movie-going experience disrupted by thoughtless Londoners.
It’s not all death and misery. Valhalla Rising is staggeringly beautiful, with Refn and cinematographer Morten Søborg filling the screen with terrifying close-ups of rugged tough guys contrasted with imposing hillsides, dark forests, overwhelming mists and breathtaking skies, almost exclusively depicted in murky greens, blues and shocking reds. Along with Enter The Void, it’s the film festival choice I’m most pleased with getting to see on the big screen: both movies would be greatly damaged by being seen first on a small screen. Though much of the movie is taken up with aimless wandering and muttered conversations, the atmospherics are perfectly handled by Refn. The imagery looms down at you, as if choking you. At times I felt like I had a mute Viking badass standing on my chest, it was so oppressive. If the narrative leaves you unimpressed, I can’t imagine the grimy precision of the mood mechanics won’t make an impression. I left the room annoyed by the longueurs but unable to shake the memory of the experience. It’s possibly the best deeply flawed movie I’ve seen in a while, something I can’t in good conscience rave about but want to recommend to everyone.
Unlike Metropia, which is just deeply flawed. As with Gerald McMorrow’s Franklyn, I would love to be able to praise Metropia unreservedly for being so defiantly odd and ambitious, but the unsatisfying narrative, murky visuals, and deathly pace are hurdles too big to jump. As far as I could tell it was set in the future, in a Europe suffering from oil shortages. That’s what it says on the film’s Wikipedia page, so I’m going with that. The title cards that set up the background were obscured by — yes — several people coming in late. Seriously! You thought I was over-reacting in the first half of this post? No! We’re talking about a screening that was delayed by about twenty minutes so the director could introduce it! This was going on all the time, and I seemed to be the douchebag-magnet. God!
Roger — The protagonist of Metropia – is a paranoid loser who resists using the underground rail system run by yer bog-standard sinister post-dystopic corporation Trexx (not named after the brand of vegetable fat). This same corporation — which, wouldn’t you know it, is totes ev0l — is using a microchip-laden shampoo called Dangst to monitor and control the minds of those who use the product. Well, I say control, but in fact Roger just seems to be plagued with chatter from Trexx worker Stefan — voiced by Alexander Skarsgård — who gives him vague suggestions and listens in on Roger’s dreary thoughts, which revolve around his fear of the underground trains, his potentially adulterous girlfriend Anna, and the woman featured on the side of the mind-controlling shampoo bottle. And I thought I’d had shitty jobs in the past.
As with much post-PKD SF, the potentially schizophrenic protagonist is manipulated by forces greater than him to do something something [vagueness supplied by movie, not by blogger]. In fact, Roger’s complicity in some kind of shareholder battle between Trexx CEO Ivan Bahn and his daughter Nina (voiced, respectively by Udo Kier and Juliette Lewis) seems more accidental than anything, and has barely any effect on him. At the start of the film he’s cowardly and having relationship troubles, and in the final scene he doesn’t seem any less plagued by his nervousness, and his relationship has been saved by events outside his control. I’m not saying a movie has to follow rules of narrative, but if you’re going to try something different, make sure it’s worth doing that. Bring something new to the narrative melange. I couldn’t care less about Roger at the start of the film, and that opinion didn’t change one jot by the end. Plus he looked like a creepy-ass bobble-head and he freaked me out.
I’m a sucker for visually innovative movies, so none of that would matter if the film looked great, but even though Metropia is certainly distinctive the animation is an additional turn-off. As the Wikipedia page details, the bizarre characters are actually photos of random people manipulated using Photoshop and Adobe After Effects, then animated in front of photos of European locations. I doff my cap to director Tarik Saleh, lead animator Isak Gjertsen and art director Sesse Lind for creating something this distinctive, but the murky visuals have the unintended consequence of being soporific. Saleh talked about the movie, and his charming anecdotes about the movie energised the room, but by the mid-point it felt like the audience was flagging. The biggest obstacle is the inexpressive facial animation. Vincent Gallo and Juliette Lewis’ dialogue is already mumbled (as per), making comprehension an issue, and with the fleshy bobble-head faces being animated as minimally as they are it’s all but impossible to become emotionally invested in what’s going on. The cluttered absurdist plot doesn’t help.
Responding in such a negative way to a movie when the director is in the room is something I never thought would happen to me. Throughout Metropia I was annoyed and frustrated, but a little voice was telling me, “Dude, the guy that made this is behind you. Have some respect.” And I should, really. Unlike the really unforgivably dreadful movies I’ve seen this year — such as Lesbian Vampire Killers, The Proposal, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li — this was made with passion and love by a group of individuals who obviously believed in what they were doing. It’s not a lazy cash-in or tacky exploitation flick, but sadly it’s also a rote SF movie with a unique aesthetic that gets in the way of telling the story. Nevertheless, as with Franklyn, I wish all those who worked on the movie the best of luck in the future.
Nope, saying that doesn’t make me feel any better about criticising the film. ::sigh::
For the first time in a couple of years, it seems we’ve taken a break from music gaming. With much of our spare time used up on TV shows that are failing to live up to their potential, attending the London Film Festival and having to brave the mosh-pit-simulator that is Leicester Square, or tweeting until 2 in the morning, we’ve not spent much time on Rock Band. Even The Beatles: Rock Band — a game I’ve been going on about for a while — only got a few hours of play, partially because we’ve not had a chance to use the extra mics we bought, and partially because while it’s been fun learning more about the band, it’s been less fun playing Paul’s songs.
He seems to be a kickass bass player, but his songs are the worst kind of mawkish tripe. I mean, Hello Goodbye has nineteen actual words in it (not counting the three nonsense words at the end), repeated over and over again in combinations of varying meaning but persistent insignificance. This Spitting Image sketch once struck me as cruel, but no longer:
Luckily, with other songs, The Beatles: Rock Band has done exactly what I had hoped: given me a better understanding of the appeal of the Fab Four. The unbearable repetition of their songs on the radio during my childhood was enough to create a mental block between me and the band, but that Rock Band magic has worked again, with the interaction between the player and the song breaking down that mental barrier so that I can finally get “into” the songs to experience their beautiful structure. McCartney’s bass lines are surprisingly complex, Ringo’s drumming occasionally much stronger than myth would have have it, and the songs by Lennon and Harrison are all inspiring and complex. Simultaneously playing guitar and singing on Here Comes the Sun is guaranteed to cheer me up.
And yet we’ve let it gather dust for now, and even Rock Band itself has been played infrequently. This, despite the recent DLC addition of ten Queen songs, including Under Pressure and Somebody To Love (my two favourite Queen tracks), a Raconteurs track-pack, and The Metal by Tenacious D (previously on Guitar Hero 3 but now given full Rock Band attention). This busy-ness — plus lack of funds — means I’ve paid little attention to the forthcoming release of Activision’s DJ Hero, which is expensive, potentially time-consuming, and based on dance music. As I have little interest in dance music or culture, this indifference was inevitable, but the real killing blow was the baffling gameplay videos (here’s one)…
…and the perplexing turntable peripheral. The actual experience of using the peripheral and seeing your actions keep the song going are not adequately conveyed by the information given out thus far. The Rock Band and Guitar Hero controllers are pretty self-explanatory. Strum, hit and bellow, and the lights on the screen do the happy thing yay. In contrast, how does that turntable controller enable you to do the things on the screen? It made no sense to me. Until today.
An impulsive trip to my local branch of Game paid off nicely this morning. The turntable controller had been set-up with a demo of DJ Hero, and no one else in the shop seemed even slightly interested. Maybe it was that alienating peripheral, with its peculiar buttons and knobs. Whereas my first try at Guitar Hero 2 had been intuitive, here I had to go through a series of tutorials hosted by Grandmaster Flash which quickly explained the basics of the game with enormous enthusiasm. Following that were three easy game tracks: Marvin Gaye – “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” vs. Gorillaz – “Feel Good Inc.”, Gwen Stefani – “Hollaback Girl” vs. Rick James – “Give It To Me”, and Black Eyed Peas – “Boom Boom Pow” vs. Benny Benassi – “Satisfaction”. Either the songs got easier as I went along, or the learning curve has been worked out well, as I went from three stars on track one to four on track two and five on the last one. In Easy mode there is no cross-fading or complicated scratching. You just push the buttons when necessary and half-ass the scratching. Simple.
Well, simple-ish. The scratching is not as easy as I’d hoped. For a start you’re supposed to let go of the button as soon as the scratching symbols have passed through the active area on screen, but if you’re holding the button and using that for leverage you can’t let go without the turntable getting away from you: disastrous if another scratch symbol is coming up. The other problem is caused by physics. Scratching while holding down the green button is easy enough as it is at the edge of the circular turntable, but the blue button is nearer the center, so it’s harder to push and pull the circle around, thanks to Pi or some other geometry thing. My struggles with Blue Scratching rocked the display around enough to attract the unhappy-seeming attentions of the shop owner. This was not good: he is so grizzled and rugged that I suspect he is actually the Authentic Battle Damage version of some other guy.
Even more annoying, the cross-fader switch has three positions, but the default position in the middle is very tough to hit. There is a slight click when you get it into position, but when swiping back and forth quickly, it’s easy to go too far without feeling that tactile reminder. I suspect this is something that will become second nature in time, but on advanced levels, with rapid cross-fader spikes zipping around, there will be many points lost, and much frustration added. A stronger bit of feedback from the controller would have really helped. I would also have liked to know what the purpose of the middle “effects” button is. As far as I could tell it was there to send out the odd “ZORB!” sound when pushed. The effects dial allows you to change the effect, so for a while there I was sending out a series of ear-scritching “PEW PEW PEW PEW PEW” sounds that made the entire shop’s energy turn against me. It was much more fun during the third song, where pressing the middle button makes an androidal lady intone “Sat-is. Fack. Shun” over and over again. No one seemed to mind that as much.
Other than choosing lasers over booms, the basic tutorial didn’t give a hint as to what the effects dial does, but apparently you use this in the same way you use the Whammy Bar on a Rock Band/Guitar Hero controller, to “customise” the sound on screen. As with Rock Band and Guitar Hero, all this pointless distortion does is ruin the song, and from what I can tell from other tutorials posted on YouTube, it doesn’t even serve a purpose with charging up the “Euphoria” bar. Maybe it does and we’re not privvy to that info just yet, but the Whammy Bar at least allows you to gain more Star Power / Overdrive points if you rattle it around as hard as you can, further ruining the song you’re playing.
As for Euphoria, it doubles multipliers just like with the rock games, but it doesn’t generate the sense of satisfaction you get in the rock games. Star Power or Overdrive are triggered by the Guitar Neck Tilt Move, the Drum Fill Move, or the Eccentric Microphone Scat Singing Move, which effectively — and entertainingly — mimic the show-off actions of a typical rock douche. Triggering this score multiplying mode by just pushing a button lacks that translation of action and effect that makes Rock Band and Guitar Hero feel even more like a replication of the live music experience. That said, how could DJ Hero trigger Euphoria otherwise? Have you wave a Wii-mote style Glowstick peripheral over your head? Require you to chew on an E peripheral? There’s no easy way around it, I guess.
Though the display had a guitar controller hooked up to it for the DJ Hero/Guitar Hero mash-up game mode, there was no one around to play it with. The shop owner was too busy giving me stinkeye, and the four kids who congregated behind me to watch as I demolished Benny Benassi’s infectious monstrosity looked too scared of the flashing lights and raving avatars to join in. (It was definitely the game that scared them. Not me. Honest.) I guess that co-op mode would be a lot of fun, and would probably be the thing that tips me over into buying the game, but I note that the only other party gameplay modes are just using multiple turntables to battle against each other. That made sense back in the days when the only peripherals around were guitars, so you could have boring face-offs in Guitar Hero 3 (no amount of complicated Snapped String weaponry could make that mode any less of a failure), but here it shows up the biggest problem with DJ Hero: it might be a great solo player game, and it might be an even more entertaining turntable/guitar co-op game, but it will never be able to replicate that amazing four-player co-op that makes Rock Band the best party game in the world.
It has been proven again and again that if you get a large enough group of people into a room and start playing Rock Band at midday, you will still be going at midnight with only the occasional break to eat Pringles. DJ Hero isn’t going to have that, and it isn’t going to have that instant click of cognitive understanding that Guitar Hero and Rock Band has. Once you get going on DJ Hero, it’s enormous fun. The demo I played was way way way too short, and I’m sure I would’ve stayed there all day if I’d had the chance. It even made me tap my foot, which is a big deal for someone as dance-averse as me, no counting that Megadog/Eat Static gig I went to that very very nearly converted me to rave culture because it was so fucking out-of-the-body AWESOME to the extent that even to this day I’m convinced someone slipped me a mickey early in the night and had a right old laugh watching me stomp around the dance-floor like a malfunctioning Cyberman. However, I’m not sure that’s enough. When I win the lottery, I’ll get it. Until then, maybe I should go and practice Fat Bottomed Girls, now that I’ve paid for it an’ all.
We walked on a red carpet on Monday. I felt like an interloper, especially clad in hobo jacket, Converse, and Green Lantern T-Shirt, but it was still a weirdly thrilling moment. Getting tickets to the first UK performance of Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant! (oh, that infuriating exclamation point…) was an accident of timing, not an attempt to rubberneck at a glamour collision, but it’s fine. The London Film Festival seems to be pretty casual. Only Soderbergh, writer Scott Z. Burns and producer Gregory Jacobs were dressed to the nines, and even then they seemed relaxed. Seeing Soderbergh delighted daisyhellcakes, who has had terrible luck spotting celebrities in the past (so far she’s seen Johnny Vegas, Bill Bailey, Jeffrey Archer and Queen Nigella), but refused to take a picture of the great man, stating that it would be gauche. As I’d seen the Enter The Void audience eagerly snapping away at Gaspar Noé last week, I figured it would be okay, but after taking this blurry picture…
…I convinced myself that the final stutter in Soderbergh’s short speech was caused by him spotting me and thinking, “Dude, that’s totes gauche.” For the record, I’m sorry Mr. Soderbergh. I liked Solaris, if that’s any consolation.
The lack of a distribution deal for Enter The Void is making me unbelievably sad. Attending that screening was something I did on a whim after seeing Drew McWeeny become so enthusiastic, and now I realise that if I hadn’t gone I might never have had the chance to see it on the big screen. Just yesterday Edgar Wright was tweeting his frustration at having missed it, and it threw my good fortune into perspective. Is there any way to start a campaign to save it from oblivion on DVD, when the only distribution deal it has seems to be getting a release in Finland next April? As the version I saw was seemingly different from those at Cannes and Toronto, perhaps it’s still being fine-tuned, and then it will be put on the market again. Certainly there are longueurs at about the 100 minute mark, but I’m not sure what could be removed without ruining the flow.
The one thought I had would be for the Prince Charles Cinema to stump up for their very own print. Despite its punishing length, this is the perfect midnight-screening cult movie in waiting, with massive appeal to counter-cultural audiences and cinephiles who can understand what Noé is trying to achieve (a group that excludes J. Hoberman and Variety’s Rob Nelson, who completely missed the point of the movie). It would take time for them to get their money back, as the buzz on this film has yet to grow properly, but it would be a wise investment. Unless it did suddenly get a distribution deal and the film turned up elsewhere, but still, right now, it’s not looking too good.
Sadness over the fate of that one movie aside, the festival has been extremely enjoyable so far. Even the one movie I’ve not liked — Jason Reitman’s disappointing Up In The Air, which I hope to write about soon — has its pleasures, especially the terrific performances from George Clooney and Anna Kendrick. For the most part audiences have been great too, with enthusiastic responses to The Men Who Stare At Goats and The Informant! reminding me why seeing movies at the cinema can be a rewarding experience, though Mr. Honking McOverlaugh who sat behind us during The Informant! was a bit of a trial. Yes yes, it’s a very funny film, but Mr. Soderbergh is sitting at the back of the room and even your guffaws cannot reach that far, especially when my eardrums are absorbing 90% of the sound energy.
It’s not all roses, though. If you’re a new reader visiting this site after searching for info about London Film Festival screenings, please can I beg you to do the right thing and arrive at the screenings with plenty of time to spare? If you’ve not already picked up your tickets, there can be terrible queues, and that’s after navigating the barriers, security guards, and photographers blocking the pedestrianised roads of Leicester Square. The movies have tended to start a few minutes late, but there are no trailers or adverts, so if a film is supposed to start at, say, 16:15, the film will be on the screen at around 16:20, and arriving at 16:30 is going to piss a lot of people off. Oh, and the tickets have allocated seat numbers on them FOR A REASON. This message is directed at the numerous people who seem to love sitting wherever they want, and then look put out when they are evicted from their seats by ushers not long after the film has already started. I’m looking at you, selfish idiots who figured sitting by me was the thing to do and then ruined the start of Enter The Void and White Material, with extra bonus fuck you’s to the couple who turned up late at White Material and then left their phones on. Assholes.
I’ve had fun with the odd connections between the movies I’ve seen so far. The Informant! and Claire Denis’ White Material are centred by main characters (played with great skill by Matt Damon and the incredible Isabelle Huppert respectively) whose inability to see the dire consequences of their behaviour dooms them. In Soderbergh’s movie Mark Whitacre’s insanity is played for laughs for the most part, though those laughs run out by the end as you realise the man is so deeply embedded in his fantasy life that he doesn’t even seem capable of keeping track of it. Maria Vial — the protagonist of White Material — is in just as much denial, but perhaps even to the extent of not recognising her own cultural and ethnic background. Her ambiguous actions in the final moments of the film could be the product of derangement or berserk revenge, but whatever their origin, they were enough to deeply upset the lady sitting next to me. She seemed traumatised, poor dear.
Other connections abound. Jason Bateman teams up with Jason Reitman again for Up In The Air, and also features in Extract, which I’m hoping to see tomorrow. Melanie Lynskey appears in Up In The Air and The Informant!, and is similarly weak in each movie. Clooney appears in The Men Who Stare At Goats and Up In The Air, and co-produced The Informant!Up In The Air and Up (which I saw again on Sunday, though it was not part of the festival) is about men who find escape in flying, and learn to connect with others. The protagonists of White Material and Enter The Void are often filmed from behind: in White Material as a representation of how Maria is hiding her true face from herself and others, and in Enter The Void as a consequence of the PoV conceit. Enter The Void and The Men Who Stare At Goats features talk of esoteric beliefs, as well as the use of hallucinogens.
That was one of the things that annoyed me most about Goats. While Enter The Void took the use of hallucinogenic compounds seriously, Goats used it as a stupid punchline, with characters acting as if they were drunk and high-lariously falling over a lot and talking about how hungry they are. Goats was a lot of fun, but the relentlessly silly tone made it hard for the film to shift gears in the final act when we see the negative consequences of letting a bunch of insecure New Age dipsticks into the army. What was, in Jon Ronson’s excellent book, a sobering portrait of US psy-ops torture techniques gone weird is here transformed into a slapstick romp with one minute of “Oh noes, war is bad” added to give the protagonists something to fight for. The book still manages to be funny, but Ronson’s a skillful enough writer to juxtapose the wacky with the awful. Here it’s shoehorned in, and seemingly only to give a dramatic edge to the Larry Hooper (Kevin Spacey) character arc that suddenly appears midway through the movie. Writer Peter Straughan does some good work in translating the oddness of Ronson’s book into movie form, and keeps the funniest material mostly intact, but the artificial three-act structure and neatness of the final few minutes smack of laziness. Still, it remains very entertaining, and what it gets right it really gets right. Jeff Bridges — as New Earth Army leader Bill Django — perfectly channels the craziness of First Earth Battalion leader Jim Channon…
…and first-time director Grant Heslov is good enough to recreate the pictures shown in Channon’s manifesto: a lovely touch. It feels like the film will touch on all aspects of the insanity of war in a similar way to Clooney’s previous Gulf War film Three Kings, but even with the addition of warring Blackwater-esque security forces and asides showing Clooney and Ewan McGregor wandering through Iraq getting into scrapes, it never fully takes off. I’d still recommend it, though. As with Up In The Air, Clooney does miracle work holding everything together. It’s easy to forget what a great film star he is. He does comedy and drama equally well, and now he’s removed almost all of his tics, he can excel at both over-the-top dopey comedy or subtle and moving character work. We’re lucky he’s around.
My recommendation for The Informant! is much stronger. Though we were exhausted while watching, and were sitting in the Odeon West End which — unlike the Vue West End which is showing the majority of films — is not air-conditioned, it turned out to be almost as good as we had hoped. Spoilery trailers and press releases have given away the delusional nature of Mark Whitacre, but Soderbergh and ace writer Burns hide the depth of his craziness until a wonderful final act where everyone involved in the Lysine price-fixing investigation is shocked by his slowly unravelling web of lies. The cast doesn’t have a single weak link, with an unexpectedly complex performance from Matt Damon at the heart of the movie, but I have to give special props to Scott Bakula, who is particularly affecting as the enthusiastic FBI agent whose career goes awry thanks to Whitacre’s deceptions. His increasingly heartbroken face adds a bittersweet note to the zany proceedings. Props also to Joel McHale in his first dramatic role: weird seeing the snarky Soup host playing straight man to Damon.
I also heartily recommend White Material, but I’m still processing that one, so I won’t go on about it too much, except to say that a) Claire Denis has a mastery of pace and atmosphere that would shame other directors, but then you probably already knew that, and b) Christopher Lambert was good enough to make me partially forgive him for his dire performance in Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales. I can lay the blame for that on Kelly, I guess. He doesn’t really know what he’s doing, after all.
The great controversialist Gaspar Noé appears to be a very nice, softly spoken man who keeps making films that polarise audiences. Seul contre tous and Irréversible are notorious enough that I already have a very distinct idea of what Noé’s movies are like without having seen them. This is an embarrassing admission. An attempt to see Irréversible was abandoned through lack of backbone, leading me to see Confessions of a Dangerous Mind instead. Nice enough movie. Nothing particularly memorable about it, other than Hott Sam Rockwell’s performance. Still, it irks me that I didn’t see Noé’s movie, that I thought it would be too much for my sensitive constitution.
Before the first London Film Festival screening of his latest movie — Enter The Void — Noé chatted to us via a typically British mic (i.e. unreliable and sporadically malfunctioning), briefly describing his battle to get the movie made, before doing something a filmmaker will rarely do: he gave us the key to understanding the movie. “Watch the expression of the woman in the final shot. The very final shot. Keep looking at her. It changes everything. It’s very important.” I assume with great confidence that everyone in the audience did keep their eye on that final face, but it did not answer anything. It’s possible to watch that scene and have wildly divergent ideas of what just happened, as evidenced by the muted chatter of my fellow filmgoers as they filed out of the screening.
That expression is viewed by Oscar (or rather “The Soul That Was, At One Point, Within Oscar’s Body), a drug-dealer making a paltry living in Tokyo, and portrayed by Nathaniel Brown in the very few shots we see of him. His only goal in life is to protect his sister — Linda, played by a seemingly drowsy Paz de la Huerta — after they are both orphaned in a car crash, but in doing so he seems to have effectively damned them both. While making what seems to be a simple drug transaction, Oscar is killed by the police, and then leaves his body to go on a journey through the afterlife that tallies with a description of The Tibetan Book of the Dead given early in the film by Oscar’s best friend Alex (Cyril Roy). However, is this death, or a DMT hallucination? And if it is death, where does the journey begin and end? There’s enough ambiguity here to fuel discussions for years.
My own interpretation (which I won’t include here, in order to keep this as spoiler-free as possible) seems to differ from others I’ve heard. All that can be said with certainty is that if you’re willing to give yourself over to it, Enter The Void is a revelatory experience, and the most immersive expression of a person’s viewpoint ever made. Noé’s dedication to presenting lead character Oscar’s point of view is already impressive enough — even down to adding blinking and breathing in early scenes — without then killing him and showing his afterlife experience from the same perspective, albeit now with the laws of physics being no obstacle. The camera floats over the characters, flies through the air above Tokyo, flows through walls, dips into people’s head’s to experience their perspective, and bursts back and forth through time. It’s disorienting, terrifying, liberating.
Comparisons have been made to Kubrick’s 2001 — there is even a direct reference to the Stargate sequence in one throwaway shot — but Noé’s visuals also invite comparison to Ken Russell’s Altered States, and especially Doug Trumbull’s Brainstorm. Trumbull’s attempts to create a hallucinogenic post-death sequence to end all such sequences was scuppered by budgetary troubles and technological restrictions. Enter The Void manages to do what Trumbull dreamed of, to the point that one visual conceit employed by Noé — having the camera move from one light to another to convey a passage of time from one nightmare vision of the future to another — is very similar to the way the camera reviews moments from Louise Fletcher’s life in Brainstorm, passing through a lattice of lights, each containing a single memory.
Before the movie began, Noé described his experiences with hallucinogenic drugs, which he believed had never been replicated properly onscreen, and had been trying to make Enter The Void for years. Until now no one had the technology to accurately depict the experience, but also no one had the single-mindedness to film something as ambitious as this. His formal daring — unmatched by anything else I’ve seen in a while — sadly overwhelms his story, which is as dreary as his presentation is beautiful. The humdrum couplings and binges, indifferently acted, are written with depressing inarticulacy. As the audience’s eyes and ears are hypnotised by everything else, the heart is left unmoved for large stretches, particularly during the long nightmare sequence. It doesn’t help that this is one of the worst performed movies I’ve seen since 300. Perhaps that’s the regrettable downside of filming in such a way that for much of the movie you can only see the tops or the backs of the actors’ heads.
These flaws could have wrecked the movie, but it is saved by the relentless visual flow, beautifully rendered by Buf, and the hypnotic sound design by Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter. If you let it, this throbbing ebb and flow of sound and vision will carry you through any longueurs, dazzling you with astonishing model work that makes Tokyo look like a tilt-shifted playground that gives off its own ambient thrum. All of these atmospherics pay off with a bravura final act that fully engages all senses and emotions. Tipping over completely into pure visual fantasy, Oscar completes his journey through death, and Noé – with endearing sentimentality, not to mention the use of an image that drew amused gasps from the very British audience — brings us to a conclusion at once expected and surprising. Perhaps understanding that the experience of watching the movie is liable to leave his audience in a state of mental disarray, Noé cares enough to bring you out of his dreamstate with a final image and two title cards that act as a slap in the face. Very thoughtful of him.
It’s doubtful that Gaspar Noé would appreciate the comparison, but last year’s Speed Racer was another formal experiment in replicating a particular experience — the Wachowskis with the visual conventions of Japanese anime, Noé with his subjective hallucinatory experiences — which managed to transcend its mundane plot by sheer effort. The Wachowskis and Noé found their movies treated with indifference or hostility by the critical community, and had difficulty finding audiences for their projects: literally in the case of Enter The Void, which has no US distributor at the moment.
The subject matter of this movie is liable to alienate many people for very different reasons than those that made Speed Racer the pariah of 2008′s summer season. While that was a candy-coloured action movie containing a sweetness and innocence that failed to connect with critics. Enter The Void is excessively unpleasant for much of its running time, featuring violent death, graphic sex, and a scene in an abortion clinic destined to achieve notoriety. This kind of unflinching visceral imagery is relentless enough to fuel criticism that Noé isnothing more than a provacateur. To do so would be to ignore the very specific plot structure that is set up early in the movie, as Alex explains to Oscar the distinct stages of the post-death experience as detailed in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. If you’re going to endure a vile nightmare after death, Noé is going to make you experience it. And then some. This point seems to have flown over some critics’ heads, as well as the very obvious fact that the PoV never shifts from Oscar. We experience what his consciousness experiences in one unbroken 155 minute blast, not a melange of images, as some seem to think.
Whenever something as purely sensory as this comes along, it’s easy to complain that the flash hides an empty core, but even if it did — which I don’t believe it does — why should we dismiss something that succeeds so completely at generating a mood, or a mental state, or a new form of telling a story, just because it offends our sensibilities, or celebrates sub-cultures that are considered beneath contempt? The mundanity of the subject matter is easily forgiven when a filmmaker goes to such extreme lengths to bombard your senses, or has such loyalty to his vision that he will change the language of cinema to do it. This is a movie to feel and experience, much as Lars Von Trier’s Anti-Christ achieves such complete mastery of mood that any reservations are swept away. Save the pondering for later, once you’ve reached the end of Noé’s trip. Last year my exhortations to see Speed Racer on the biggest screen possible — preferably IMAX — fell on deaf ears, but — if this gets an international release — the imagery of Enter The Void demands to be seen in a cinema with the best projection and sound system possible. Sit in the middle of the cinema. No popcorn. Take a bottle of water and a catheter. Drop a tab (actually, don’t drop a tab. It will probably negate the hallucinatory properties of the movie and make you think you’re watching something mundane, like a Mike Leigh movie). Keep your eyes open like Alex in A Clockwork Orange. Prepare for awe.
The other change is, in comparison to the good news, utterly trivial. Actually, compared to most things — even down to the impact of the life of a single ant on the ecosystem, or a blob of pollen blown out to sea, or an amoeba that is bleached to death before it even gets to split in two — this news is trivial. Basically, it occurs to me that this blog dwindles in usage when I try to write enormous posts, because time is tight and my attention span is not what it used to be. So, I’m going to try to be more concise. Blame Twitter for this realisation.
Did that deserve a blog post of its own? Probably not, but I need to dare myself into doing this. Fingers crossed I take this challenge seriously, especially with the London Film Festival starting. If I can write a few pithy reviews of the films I’m seeing there, that will be good. If I need to write more, I’ll do that too.
This still doesn’t deserve a blogpost of its own, does it? Look! It’s my favourite thing on the Internet ever! StSanders’ best ever Shred video: KISS presents I Will Never Go To School.
Couple of quick things I wanted to mention on here. First, and most important of all, is the arrival on planet Earth of the very first Shades of Caruso baby! I try not to use this blog as a place to talk about personal real life things (except for a few exceptions which I kinda regret), but how could I not talk about this? It’s extremely exciting.
Sometime SoC contributor Masticator (now renamed masticateur as a consequence of the Great WordPress Migration of the other week) and the lovely Masticatrix have announced the birth of baby Alice on Tuesday night. There were many details given to me by masticateur but I sadly didn’t take them all in with 100% certainty as I was too busy going “ZOMG” and “XOMG” and “¬~^^^G|!!”, so please forgive the dearth of information. Masticateur did say Alice was the best baby ever, and I believe he was telling the truth.
My best wishes — and those of daisyhellcakes (the SoC Blogger Formerly Known As Canyon) — go to NewMom, NewDad, and NewPersonAlice. We can’t wait to meet her, and teach her how to play Rock Band.
England just got substantially less green and pleasant. Temperatures have plummeted, and I’m having to wander around the house in a pair of warm slackerpants (and yes, in case you were wondering, I am a nerd). There’s no use denying it. Even though the local cinemas are clogged with top-of-the-line blockbusting audience-pleasers — such as The Soloist, Surrogates, and the Fame remake which made critics pine for the Alan Parker original in defiance of all that is holy — it’s fair to say the Summer Movie Season (aka My Christmas) is now over. And what an exciting time it was! Four million romantic comedies came out and actually did well, everything seemed to be 3D all of a sudden, and Michael Bay became the most hated film director on Earth, an event which apparently annoyed previous title holder Roman Polanski so much he gave himself up to the rozzers just to remind everyone what an asshole he is.
Compared to last summer, it was a pretty underwhelming few months, with the odd high spot and pleasant surprise tucked away. Nevertheless, there was at least one stone-cold masterpiece, and even flat and kinda pointless movies often had something to recommend them (I’m looking at you, Meryl). There was also the occasional spectacular failure, the sort of disastrous and ill-thought-out fuck-up that gives the Summer Movie Season its bad reputation. So, in the interest of collating an overview of what people loved and hated this summer, I have begun two polls, asking for your favourite and least favourite movies of the 2009 summer season. The list is the same in both:
Final Destination: We’re Trying To Get Inside Your Eyeballs
Eric Bana Is: An Endearing Aussie Cuckold
Christopher Johnson and Wikus Van Der Merwe’s Excellent Adventure
Harry Potter And The Toenail of Effervescence
Terminator 4: When Third Acts Collapse
Cover Me With Drool, Drop An Anvil On Me, Then Drag Me To Hell
The Ugly Truth Is That Katherine Heigl Is Not Charming
Hangover: (n. painful & unamusing experience)
Eric Bana Is: An Absentee Time-Travelling Husband
X-Men Franchise Sabotage: WTFverine
G.I. Joe: STOP THE NANOMITES, JOES!
Publicity Hungry Enemies (Now In Grainy-o-Vision)
That’s No Moon; It’s Hott Sam Rockwell’s Talent!
When Anti-Matter Met The Vatican
Eric Bana Is: An Especially Tetchy Romulan
STREEP, TUCCI & LYNCH vs. a Blogger and her Annoying Husband
Night at the Museum: Sound, Fury, & Nothing
Futile and Fatuous
Dad! My Guinea Pig Sounds Like Tracy Morgan!
The Shaking [Cameras] of Pelham 123
Oh Will Ferrell. A TV Show Remake? We Want Anchorman 2 KTHXBAI
As I’ve never used PollDaddy before, I don’t really know what I’m doing. There’s a good chance I’ve got this wrong and it will all implode, taking all the votes with it, but then Blogger once started to randomly excise votes from polls I had going over there, so I’m sort of prepared for crappy functionality. Anyway, please vote in this poll. I’ll close it and collate the data later this year. Apologies if I’ve missed out a movie you feel passionately about. Feel free to leave a comment if I have.
ETA: I just checked out PollDaddy. Once you’ve voted on the poll you can leave comments. Click on the comment link and it takes you to a dedicated page for each poll. Oh, the future. Next you’ll be telling me you can embed videos in blogposts.
The new TV season is full swing, and yet here I am, still talking about last season. Of course, I’ve farted around for a couple of weeks doing very important things (not playing Halo 3: ODST, no matter what my endless tweets and Raptr updates will say), and am only now getting around to putting this up. Please forgive my tardiness.
Though I don’t want to say too much about the new season, which is just coming into shape, I will say that some shows (Fringe, House) have yet to get back to full strength, some (CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Dollhouse, Lie To Me) have come back with a confident bang, and some new shows (Community, Flashforward) have really piqued my interest. One new show (Modern Family) made me think I will never trust another critic ever again. Unless something really dreadful comes along, I think I have my Worst New Pilot of the 2009-2010 Season winner already sewn up.
Anyway, here are my final thoughts on the 2008i-2009 season. There were originally going to be more YouTube clips on here, but I’ve had a dispiriting day watching them get taken down. Fox and NBC, sorry for infringing on your copyright, but all you did was get rid of some free publicity, as I was going to tell the world how awesome your shows were. Except for that clip from Heroes. That was up because Angela Petrelli’s insanely histrionic reaction to her son’s death was the funniest thing of the year. So I can understand that one. And now, on with the hyperbole…
Best New Show:Sons of Anarchy
If one were to be unduly harsh, you could compare the first episode of Sons of Anarchy with the pilot of The Shield. Considering that is easily one of the most impressive and instantly captivating pilots ever made, there was little chance that showrunner Kurt Sutter could ever compete. That he made a pilot as good as the one that kickstarted his biker epic is a testament to his skill as a writer, and his decision to get jusdhfjsh in to direct it is exactly the kind of smart move that a good showrunner should make. The first few episodes were not perfect, but the building blocks were there.
What setsSons of Anarchyapart from every other show debuting during the 2008-2009 period — even the eventually superbDollhouse– is how quickly changes were made, and how confidently they were put in place. By the time season highlight The Pull came around, it was already shaping up to be essential TV, but that episode propelled it onto a completely different level of excellence. Ramping up the pace of the show and throwing one or two of the less interesting characters into terrible danger and potentially ruinous moral compromise, the show became something that could well rival the mightyShieldfor complexity and dramatic power. It helps that it features one of the best casts on TV right now, filling out its main cast (which includes Ron Perlman, an impressive star-making turn from Charlie Hunnam, and relentless magnignificence from the ever-awesome Kim Coates, let’s not forget) with guests spots for Mitch Pileggi, Drea DeMatteo, Jay Karnes, Dayton Callie, Maggie Siff, and the incredible Ally Walker, wwho blows everyone else away with her unhinged warrior mentality and fearless sexuality. And in season two, we get Adam Arkin and Henry Rollins. Seriously, what’s not to love? From all accounts, the second season is even more unhinged than the first, which is saying something considering the incredible brutality and amoral shenanigans from the first. I can’t wait to dive in.
If one were to be unduly harsh, you could compare the first episode of Sons of Anarchy with the pilot of The Shield. Considering that is easily one of the most impressive and instantly captivating pilots ever made, there was little chance that showrunner Kurt Sutter could ever compete. That he made a pilot as good as the one that kickstarted his biker epic is a testament to his skill as a writer, and his decision to get Sopranos director/producer Allen Coulter in to co-direct it is exactly the kind of smart move that a good showrunner should make. The first few episodes were not perfect, but the building blocks were there.
What sets Sons of Anarchy apart from every other show debuting during the 2008-2009 period — even the eventually superb Dollhouse — is how quickly changes were made, and how confidently they were put in place. By the time season highlight The Pull came around, it was already shaping up to be essential TV, but that episode propelled it onto a completely different level of excellence. Ramping up the pace of the show and throwing one or two of the less interesting characters into terrible danger / potentially ruinous moral compromise, Sons of Anarchy hinted that it could become something that will rival the mighty Shield for complexity and dramatic power. It helps that it features one of the best ensembles on TV right now, filling out its main cast (which, let’s not forget, includes Ron Perlman, an impressive star-making turn from Charlie Hunnam, and relentless magnificence from Kim Coates) with guests spots for Mitch Pileggi, Drea DeMatteo, Jay Karnes, Dayton Callie, Maggie Siff, and the incredible Ally Walker, who blows everyone else away with her terrifying warrior mentality and fearless sexuality. And in season two, we get Adam Arkin and Henry Rollins. Seriously, what’s not to love? From all accounts, the second season is even more unhinged than the first, which is saying something considering the incredible brutality and amoral shenanigans from the first. I can’t wait to dive in.
Worst New Show:Parks and Recreation
Creators Greg Daniels and Michael Schur are not idiots, obviously, but this landed with a terrible splat and couldn’t convince me to hang around long enough to see if it would improve. Part of that was because I was mad at the dip in quality over at The Office. Was it fair to blame this show for that? Probably not. Parks and Recreation has been mooted for so long (remember when it was supposed to be a straight spin-off of The Office?) that their attention has probably been divided for a long time, and the fourth season of The Office was great. Nevertheless, the energy of one show definitely seemed to have been split between two, and the result was a listless hour of supposed comedy.
I have fought with myself over whether it would have been worth hanging around to see if it got better, but then I remember little things that irked like the way the showrunners differentiated the talking head interjections from those of The Office — using two cameras for the faux-interviews instead of one — which drove me into fits of absurd rage. The Office already has trouble keeping the faux-doc format going, and this conceit draws even more attention to the fakeness of it all. Perhaps I’m just burned out on this format. ABC’s new comedy Modern Family has been heralded as the next great sitcom after just two episodes, with across the board raves. We watched last week’s pilot in a state of shock. Flamboyant gay stereotypes? Clunking, obvious jokes about the generation gap? Appalling overacting from everyone (with Julie Bowen being the worst offender)? A character misinterpreting the accent of a Columbian woman? (I say Columbian because Sofia Vergara is from Columbia. She’s probably expected to play someone from a different country in this.) Modern Family is exactly the kind of retrograde laugh-track-enhanced sitcom that seems almost archaic now, but because it’s filmed in a single camera faux-doc style, it’s treated as a cutting-edge exploration of modern American mores. Bullshit. It’s Everybody Loves Raymond. Dressing a raccoon in baseball gear doesn’t make it a baseball player. It just makes it a raccoon covered in sport gear. (Note to self: use less raccoons in metaphors. It just complicates things.)
I also remember one potentially funny scene in Parks and Recreation — involving hapless and strangely unlovable Leslie trying to convince a bunch of ill-informed citizens that her plans are worthwhile — failing to take off, and I realise that after this summer of purposely ignorant right-wing hijacking of the health-care town hall debates, this kind of scene probably won’t ever be funny again. Democracy failing to work because of the Crazification Factor getting in the way of intelligent debate is something I just can’t laugh at right now. What makes this turn of events most sad is that the concept is so full of potential, and yet it didn’t even work before the protests. I can’t figure out how you could take an idea this promising and fail to make something that mixes madness and profundity in the same way as The Office. Compare that to Knight Rider. That was always going to be shit. This should have been a potent mix of satire and ridiculousness. That’s why I have to put it in this category. Apparently it has found its stride in the second season, from what I’ve heard on the Hinternet. Sadly, the people who are saying that also keep going on about how Modern Family is hilarious. So, you know…
Best Title Sequence of the Year:Hung
The choice of music (I’ll Be Your Man by The Black Keys), the phallic objects in the background, the pace of it…
…It’s a perfect title sequence.
Best Pilot:Kings
From what I can gather, there was very little publicity for Kings when it made its way onto the screen. Many have said this was the reason for its failure to find an audience, though to be honest a literate curio like this was unlikely to ever become a breakthrough hit. Alternate histories? Playing with Biblical stories? Unappealing main characters? It just seemed like a real long shot. It was impressive to see NBC gamble on making the show in the first place, but as with the equally intelligent Journeyman, making a show and trying to make the show available to a wide audience are two different things.
To be honest, with Journeyman the hurt is greater. That show was less ambitious, but as a result was more likely to find an audience if given a chance. It also improved as it went along. Kings started off incredibly strong and then stalled a little. That’s the problem when a show gets a pilot this impressive. Written by showrunner Michael Green and directed by the underrated Francis Lawrence, Goliath (the name of the pilot) was like no other pilot I’ve ever seen. Even though it was made on a shoestring, it looked incredible. Even more appealing, it had a weird edge of fantasy even beyond the alternate earth conceit, with God interacting with certain characters in a matter of fact way even though the show did not explicitly preach Christian values.
Perhaps this more than anything alienated audiences: atheists might rebel against a show that openly debates the wishes of God, and Christians might be irked by this God not being a recognisable version of their God. While I fall into the first category, I don’t mind God turning up in fiction as long as It’s not used as a deus ex machina or Unexplainable Puppeteer (hello Battlestar Galactica) or as an accurate version of “our” God (a sky bully who gets pissed off if we don’t play by Its crazy rules). The version of God in Kings was not a big deal, but Its mysterious behaviour, and effect on the behaviour of the main characters, was fascinating.
As was the superb character King Silas Benjamin (not to mention his allies and enemies), and the superb use of New York locations (standing in for the fictional city of Shiloh) to give a sense of epic scale to the show, and the incredible cast… As I say, the show was fascinating to watch right up until its unfortunate cancellation, but it never quite lived up to the promise of that amazing pilot, simply because the pilot made you think you were watching the most amazing show ever. We weren’t, but it was damn good nevertheless. Even the slightly disappointing finished product was better than almost everything else on TV. You could practically sense the cult following develop as you watched, not to mention hear the knives coming out for it as you realise how odd the project was. We’re lucky we saw any of it, to be honest.
Worst Pilot:The Unusuals
Seemingly rushed into production as a result of the writers’ strike, The Unusuals matched an underwhelming concept with a poorly defined set of uninteresting characters, failed to find a consistent tone, and handed off directing chores to the ever-feeble Stephen Hopkins, a man who has never made even one good film (I remember liking The Ghost and the Darkness when I first saw it, but I fear I’m being kind). There was no way I was going to enjoy this.
The main reason for my annoyance is that there were some good actors in there who just couldn’t rise above the material or the execution. Some of the most interesting actors — both promising and established — flounder within the show’s poorly thought-through format, with some characters played as broad as possible and others reining in the madness. Jeremy Renner in particular looks like he’s wandered in from another show. Harold Perrineau does okay with his skittish character, while Adam Goldberg sucks all of the energy out of his scenes with a sour and unappealing demeanour, not to mention a terrible mustache. The conceit that a hypochondriac with a fear of death is partnered with a man who wants to die and yet seems blessed is one of those ideas that sounds great on the page and fails on screen.
As for Amber Tamblyn, playing a high-society girl trying to make it as a cop in the cuh-rayzee precinct, it was a more entertaining concept when rich-boy Carter turned up in E.R. That was only one of the shows this seemed to emulate. M.A.S.H., NYPD Blue, Hill Street Blues, Hooperman (for crying out loud): it was an echo of greater shows, a throwback to 80s cop dramas when they started to become more confident and complex. Sad thing is, we don’t want babysteps any more. We’ve moved on. The low ratings and inevitable cancellation of this show proved that. Let’s hope those good actors turn up in better projects now.
Best Pilot of the Year Not Selected For Series:Virtuality
I won’t go into how much I hated the Battlestar Galactica finale again, as I’m beginning to come across as a total crazy person who is obsessed with going on about it, but it did make me reconsider trying out Caprica, the Stoltzified spin-off. Why should I keep watching shows set in this universe, made by this team, who had so disappointed me throughout the last few seasons? Yes, Jane Espenson would be there too, and I love her work, but still, I cannot imagine being invested in this story any more. There is a good chance I’ll relent, because good SF is hard to find on TV at the best of times. Nevertheless, my annoyance remains.
You can imagine how uninterested I was in another Ronald D. Moore / Michael Taylor show (I was never fond of his BSG episodes), especially one that seemed so prosaic. Moore has stated in the past that he was interested in making BSG because he felt the urge to rebel against Star Trek‘s chirpy universe and its reliance on holodeck technology to change up the show, which made Virtuality — a show about space travellers who use virtual reality technology to relax — a curious proposition. I resisted this too, and then relented after seeing the feeble Defying Gravity, which seemed to be drawn from the same template. Thinking Virtuality would be nothing more than a space soap along the same lines as the other network drama, I gave it a spin, expecting little.
I love it when I’m proved wrong like this. As much as Fox’s other new SF show – Dollhouse – Virtuality is a fascinating and challenging exploration of ideas, dramatically filmed and featuring an excellent cast. In fact, the cast is even stronger than that of Dollhouse, with excellent turns from Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Sienna Guillory, Richie Coster (who needs more work, stat), and the ever-dependable Clea DuVall. All the actors are on top form, but these four really stand out. As for the comparison with Defying Gravity, the only thing they have in common is being set in space. Virtuality is about so much more: our perception of reality and how it will inevitably be twisted by the lens we observe through, how technology can affect us emotionally, how we refuse to let it go even when it is obviously not doing us any good (an idea expressed far more clearly here than in Lee Adama’s ridiculous speech in the final BSG episode). While Defying Gravity really is a soap set in space (with one character seemingly completely defined by the pregnancy she once terminated, which is as regressive a character arc as is possible), Virtuality is about ideas. It’s proper SF.
At least, it was proper SF. Even though it was obviously incredibly ambitious and beautifully made (with top direction from Shades of Caruso favourite Peter Berg), and even though were was huge potential for relatively cheap but gripping drama, it was shelved. I’m utterly depressed by this turn of events. There was only one misstep in the whole pilot, with a nasty perception-rape sequence that made me uncomfortable. Reliance on rape plots always upsets me, but here even this most unpleasant of plot threads is used to further the show’s exploration of whether there is a gap between virtual and actual reality, and what happens to us when we lose track of the difference between the two. If the show was willing to treat something potentially exploitative as cleverly as this, we would almost certainly have seen a lot of very smart SF in the rest of the series. But no. While Whedon got lucky with Dollhouse, the Virtuality team saw their show taken away before they could go any further. The best thing I can say about it? It was better than most movies I’ve seen this year. It’s a crying shame there will be no more.
Most Unfairly Cancelled Show of the Year:Reaper
Patton Oswalt is a brilliantly funny and caustic man, but recently he broke my heart. In this interview, he explained how, while filming his turn on Reaper, he saw the crew and cast crushed by their parent network, The CW.
When I did Reaper, the episode I originally did was supposed to be the beginning of this introduction to this overall mythology, because they clearly were taking the Joss Whedon playbook: You have a monster of the week for a while, and then you start linking it all up, and you create this overarching kind of world and story. And in the middle of the week, the network just came down on them and said “No, go back to monster of the week.” And you could feel this deflation amongst the actors, because they really understood that they had to start putting mythology into things. The network was just like, “Nope!”
This is the network that, when it was The WB, cancelled Angel, so I already have a big problem with them. Now I have an even bigger one. It may have not become something more ambitious, but it was endlessly lovable, and became admirably silly in the second season. The first was funny, but at times the second season was funnier than many sitcoms. The monster-of-the-week format of the show, which had seemed so restrictive, sometimes ended up shoved into the cold open, with the rest of the episode dealing with silly relationship drama, Sock shenanigans, or sly mythology expanding business with recurring characters like Nina or Tony. This might not be as involving as Buffy, but it was never as blandly diverting as something like The Mentalist. It fell right in the middle, which is apparently deadly.
That greater focus on just being daft was working for us, but the lack of a coherent arc from week to week (other than Sam’s lacklustre efforts to get out of his contract, and the hints that he is a more important player in the battle between God and The Devil) seemed to doom it. More than any other show departing this year, this is the one we’ll miss. Goodbye to one of the most entertaining casts on TV, some of the most eccentric writing of the past few years, and most of all, goodbye to the best Devil in recent pop culture history. He may be showing up in Dollhouse, but will Ray Wise be this mischievous, charming, delightful? Ray Wise fans everywhere, please come together one last time to marvel at that beautiful, beautiful grin.
At least one of us is smiling, I guess. [Insert sad-face emoticon here]
Best New Double Act of the Year: Ray Drecker and Tanya Skagle - Hung
When compiling the list of best and worst characters, I had certain unspoken rules in place to stop myself from focusing exclusively on certain shows. Party Down‘s cast of beautifully observed characters could have dominated the first list, and Knight Rider could have dominated the second. My biggest quandary was caused by Hung, HBO’s lovable male-prostitution-and-economic-disaster comedy that has so entertained us recently. How do I get to honour two of the funniest characters of the year without breaking that rule? As ever, inventing a new category is the perfect answer. Hung is a show that has a few tonal errors (what was going on with the horribly misconceived Jessica, played with occasional delicacy by Anne Heche?) and a very loosely defined season arc (two pimps fighting over Ray and his magical dong), not to mention some wasted actors (why hire Gregg Henry and put him in about five scenes?). At times, it felt like we were watching half a show.
Nevertheless, it became appointment viewing just because of the wonderful work of Thomas Jane and Jane Adams. Their chemistry, and their relentless bickering and grudging friendship, was the thing that made Hung exceed its limitations. It also made Shades of Caruso reconsider the talents of both actors. Thomas Jane was given moments of pathos which he has never really had a chance to play before, and he excelled, especially in the season finale. Jane Adams has always played sad-sack losers, but this time she was given a chance to give Tanya some nobility even as her plans fell apart around her. Both actors also got to show off their physical comedy skills, with Adams especially amusing during her many impotent temper tantrums.
It was their interplay that really held the show together. Even as other plot threads and arcs seemed to falter or shoot off in predictable directions, watching these two actors play off each other was more than enough to save the show. It’s notable that episodes where Ray and Tanya aren’t onscreen together were the weakest of the season, whereas the ones which explored their dependent relationship and accidental exploration of each other’s personality were the most satisfying. Hopefully the show continues to throw these polar opposites together next year.
Best New Couple of the Year: Sawyer and Juliet – Lost
Ah yes, the love triangle/quadrangle. The constant refrain of Lost doubters (and some fans) is that the show is wasting its time whenever it focuses on the relationship drama of Jack, Sawyer, Kate, and Juliet. “We don’t care about that shit! Show more Faraday!” Yes yes, love drama tends to make me go to sleep as well. Many shows are hamstrung by tedious relationship dramas: House is at its dreariest when Thirteen and Foreman, or Cameron and Chase, go on and on about their coupledom; Kings ground to a halt every time David and Michelle made goo-goo eyes at each other. Hell, even the otherwise perfect Party Down was at its least interesting every time Henry and Casey got together. So there is precedent.
However, I love the relationship drama from Lost for two reasons. One: at the end of the season, we see how far Jack has fallen from grace. We thought he was the square-jawed all-American hero who would bring everyone out of the wilderness like a be-stubbled Moses, but over time we see he’s a deeply damaged, semi-psychotic loser who – as we find out in the final episode of season five – even lied about his character-defining anecdote from the very first episode. How much of a loser is he? After pushing away the woman he “loves” with his whiny attitude and various emotional breakdowns, and after years of trying to figure out what his purpose is now that his dad isn’t around to torture him, he has two choices to make a difference in his life: a) man up and seek help for his depression, all while giving up on the thought of making a go of things with Kate, or b) detonate a nuclear bomb, killing everyone on the island, in the hope that it will change history and allow Oceanic 815 to land safely in LAX so he doesn’t have to put up with the mess he made of his life. I’ve said before that one of the things I love about Lost is that it shows the psychology of its characters in minute detail, and this final touch – showing how far people will go to avoid making simple changes in their lives because of their fear of what will happen if it fails – is the perfect metaphor for how we hold onto our broken selves even when we know how to make things better.
Two: It also gave us the wonderful, tragic pairing of Sawyer and Juliet, which justifies all of the sturm and drang to get there. So far, all of the pairings that have been tried were wrong somehow. Jack and Kate didn’t work because Jack is insane. Kate and Sawyer didn’t work because Kate keeps messing with Sawyer’s head. Jack and Juliet didn’t work because Jack was not even slightly into Juliet and was just using her to get over Kate. However, as soon as the fourth season ended with a shirtless Sawyer walking out of the sea towards a drunken Juliet, I knew we would get to see something go right. And, for the most part, it did, even though it was not to be.
It’s not just that the combined hottness of Sawyer and Juliet is so great that it probably melted most of the TVs in the world. It’s also not just that selfish Kate and crazy Jack were finally out of the equation. It’s even not just because seeing Sawyer and Juliet flirting while shooting people was the most awesome thing ever. It’s that there was barely any controversy in the relationship, which probably would have even survived the forthcoming Purge, somehow. It’s only when Kate returns to the island and reignites Juliet’s psychological damage (previously caused by the break-up of her parents, the infidelity of her ex-husband, and the death of her lover Goodwin) that it all goes horribly wrong. Did Sawyer still hold a candle for Kate? Probably. Did he love Juliet? I reckon yes, and I believe he would have done anything for her if she had given him the chance. All of this made the quadrangle emotionally powerful, as we finally had something to hang on to. Would Sawyer and Juliet survive the machinations of the island/Esau and Jacob? More than any other relationship in TV history (except for Fred and Wesley in Angel), my nerves were set on fire by the possibility that those kids might not make it after all. Of course…
Most Upsetting, Most Harsh, and Most Unfair Scene of the Year: The Incident finally happens – Lost
…we all know how it turned out. Nothing else this year made me cry as much as this.
Damn you, stupid TV show! Damn you for being so fucking mean! And damn you Emmy voters for not giving nominations to Elizabeth Mitchell and Josh Holloway. They were amazing all season.
Worst New Couple of the Year: Luke and Bess - In Treatment
In Treatment‘s second season deviated dramatically from its source material — the Israeli drama Be’Tipul — when it moved main character Paul Weston from Maryland to Brooklyn, allowing the show to dramatise his dislocation from his family, as well as to provide a reason for why he suddenly has so many new patients. This meant that we lost the chance to see season one patients Amy and Jake return, this time as a divorced couple fighting over their son, leading to the creation of two new patients, Luke and Bess. With their marriage in tatters and resentment flying between them, their son Oliver suffers terribly, putting on weight and falling into depression as his parents either fight for custody of him or, amazingly, against custody.
None of the characters in this show are particularly nice to Paul, but the games Luke and Bess play with him, using his advice as justification for a serious of awful, selfish choices, were worse than the usual antagonism people show their therapist. Many times during the season I was horrified by their behaviour, and by the time the season finished they were openly talking about how their lives had been ruined by their marriage and how they wanted another chance at what they had with barely any regard for Oliver’s well-being. When Paul finally loses his temper with them in episode 28, it elicited a round of applause from us. Figuratively speaking. And to be honest, he should have been even angrier with them.
Of course, this being In Treatment, these two horribly selfish people are written so well that we can see their point of view — and their humanity — clearly enough that even at their worst we cannot completely write them off. Their eventual remorse is a relief, but it’s still not enough considering how completely both parents are oblivious to the young boy’s needs. Thankfully, Paul is there to prove to Oliver that he will still be there for him, in some respect. His final scene with Oliver, talking to him via “phone” in his office, started a deluge of tears from this admittedly weepy viewer. If Oliver escapes this miserable situation with his psyche intact, it will have nothing to do with his parents.
Most Underused Character of the Year: Boyd Langton - Dollhouse
Whedon has a talent for peppering his casts with older character actors playing the “parents” to the younger crew. With Buffy we had Giles, in Angel there was Wesley (though his efficacy is doubtful; he’s arguably more flawed than any of his compatriots), and Firefly had Shepherd Book. These stern characters with hearts of gold gave their respective shows some kind of grounding when things got wacky, though Whedon wasn’t averse to making them run through some ridiculous hoops (Book’s mad hair, Wesley’s various pratfalls, Giles’ guitar playing). Sadly, while Langton got a chance to be silly in the disappointing comedy episode Echoes, he rarely got a chance to do anything interesting either. Many characters got to have interesting arcs and secrets, but Langton seemed to be getting less and less screentime as the series wore on. Making him head of security broke the student-mentor relationship between him and Echo, but then this might be Whedon trying to throw his own archetypes out, confounding our expectations. That he would give handler-duties to someone who appears to have an unhealthy sexual attraction to Echo (I’m talking about the plasticine-man known as Ballard) shows there might be something to that.
Nevertheless, it is a shame to cast someone like Harry Lennix — who has intense onscreen presence and then some — and then not give him as much to do as possible. His new role means he will interact more with Olivia Williams, meaning the two best actors on the show get to bang heads together: joy! That promotion, along with his new connection to Whiskey/Dr. Saunders, suggests he will be given more to do in the second season, but nevertheless, his relative inaction in later episodes was one of the few things I didn’t like about the improved half of the first season.
Most Entertaining Villain of the Year: Gemma Teller Morrow – Sons of Anarchy
One of the great pleasures of Sons of Anarchy is how it mixes up its Shakespeare. The debt it owes to Hamlet has been acknowledged by creator Kurt Sutter, but less attention has been paid to his shameless steal from Macbeth. Gemma Teller Morrow — former wife of SAMCRO leader John Teller — at first seems like a strong biker chick, but by the end of the pilot episode has revealed herself to be a conniving, power-hungry Queen whose sense of morality has been twisted until she will do anything to protect her family and the direction of the gang, a fact proved by her attempt at driving Jax’s junkie wife Wendy to an overdose. Later in the season she apologises to Wendy for this act, but even then she’s only doing it because she’d rather her son stay with a recovering junkie than return to his longtime sweetheart Tara. Plus, she does seem to be implicated in John’s death, possibly committed by her current husband Clay Morrow, which appears to have been done to prevent a change of direction towards legitimacy for the biker gang.
The most miraculous thing about this character is that she has dispelled my previous reservations about the talents of Katey Sagal. I’ve complained about her terrible voicework on Futurama before, where she leaves no joke intact, but I had suspected her dramatic work was not as shaky. She was great as John Locke’s departed love Helen in Lost, for example. In Sons of Anarchy, she’s even better, outacting even Ron Perlman when she’s in full flow. This display of Macchiavellian sneakiness got even more entertaining as the season progressed. There was a certain amount of character modulation during the latter half of the season, with some of her excesses toned down, and the horribly stagy confrontations between her and Tara tweaked until they sounded like actual human conversations, but even so, her Lady-Macbeth-esque manipulations of all around her were a source of delight even when she misfired a little. Gemma, as Journey almost said once, don’t stop conniving.
Least Entertaining Villain of the Year: Miguel Prado - Dexter
Dexter sure does have some crappy nemeses. In the first season, he goes up against his own brother, played with ridiculous camp evilness by Christian Camargo. In the second season, he is forced to conquer his evil girlfriend, manifested by Jaime Murray with a bag of absurd tics even more annoying than those of Dexter’s sister Debs, who is played by the equally dreadful Jennifer Carpenter. In the fourth season we’re getting John Lithgow. My memories of his madness from De Palma’s Raising Cain do not bode well for any Over-Act-O-Meters used to track the progress of this show, though I reckon he will be infinitely more entertaining than Dexter’s other “villains”.
Last year we got to see Jimmy Smits contend with the usual quota of ineptitude, improbable motivation, and mustache-twirling obviousness that comprises the Dexter Big Bad, and he made a meal of it. Amping up his intensity to sky-high levels, Miguel Prado went from saint to madman in the blink of an eye, all pretense at showing him as a morally complex human thrown out of the window with a haste even this most feeble of shows has never exhibited before. His cluelessness meant his occasional victories against Dexter relied upon our “hero”‘s IQ dropping 100 points, which is a flaw that has run through the show from the beginning. Prado would then, naturally, make a bunch of mistakes, all the while chewing scenery like a murderous Donald Sinden. I say he was the least entertaining villain of the year because watching his character arc was deeply unsatisfying, with him changing his personality from moment to moment in order to move the plot, and not vice versa, but I did get a lot of pleasure from his reaction after he finally kills a bad guy.
Nastiest Villain of the Year: Nolan – Dollhouse
I can’t make any glib observations about this. Whedon is an avowed feminist, and this new show seemed to be a peculiar expression of that worldview, drawing both perplexed condemnation and optimistic readings. The fact that the show didn’t immediately say that the Dollhouse was a bad place threw a lot of viewers (including myself), but I’m sure a lot of Whedon’s fans (again, including myself) hoped that things would be clearer in the long run.
By the end of the season it was obvious that the Dollhouse tech was meant to be The Worst Thing That Has Happened To Humanity Ever, and not just because it brings about the end of the world (or at least, the end of Humanity). The most graphic and upsetting example of this comes in the excellent episode Needs, where the Actives come to and “escape” their prison (but only because they are allowed to). Drawn to the terrible things that have made them volunteer for Activeness, we see November visiting the grave of her child, and Echo deciding to stay behind to rescue her fellow Actives (surely this should worry the Dollhouse executives a bit more). Sierra, who I’d never found to be particularly compelling, goes to see the man who has paid the Dollhouse to make her an Active. Any doubt that the Dollhouse is a force for evil is removed once we find out that Nolan (played with oily menace by Vincent Ventresca) has paid the Dollhouse to turn her — a woman who once refused him — into an Active just so that he can violate a woman her whenever he feels like it. As Couch Baron says here, there truly are no words that can describe how awful this is. It was the most potent way to show how dreadful this technology is, and upset me deeply. The bad taste remained for the rest of the season. How rare for a network show to explore this kind of moral depravity without shying away from it.
Best Cast of the Year:Party Down
Just as with this year’s Best New Double Act category, I created this category last year to give shout-out to Reaper‘s wonderful cast, which featured a host of great actors, especially Ray Wise, Tyler Labine, and Ken Marino. This year, Party Down gets a nod for featuring so many great actors, including Ken Marino. If I’d been blogging when Veronica Mars started, I probably would have highlighted the terrific cast of that show too, which would have meant discussing Ken Marino’s turn as sleazy private investigator Vinnie Van Lowe. Basically, Ken Marino seems to be my weakness. If he’s around, I am helpless.
Which is not to say Party Down worked solely because of him. As I’ve mentioned at length in my Best New Characters award list, Jane Lynch is breathtakingly good as Constance Carmell, and her replacement (Jennifer Coolidge) was just as good. Of the core cast, I’d highlight Ryan Hansen too, playing the adorably clueless Kyle Bradway — basically Dick Casablancas with a heart of gold. His vapid interactions with Jane Lynch are the highlight of many episodes, and he even manages to make tolerable the time spent with Martin Starr, here doing worryingly convincing work as the deeply unpleasant Roman DeBeers. He’s probably the weak link in the cast, though I would also become annoyed by the endless hipsterish emotional evasions of Casey Klein, played by Lizzy Caplan. (Side note: I think it’s fair to say that, thanks to real-world annoyances too numerous to count, I automatically take against any character on TV who spends all of their time on the phone instead of doing their job, or while other people are trying to talk to them. Those caveats are meant to signify that Jack Bauer is not to be considered one of these people. When he’s on the phone, he’s actually saving the world).
At the heart of this amazing ensemble is Adam Scott, formerly playing Palek the Vulcan Inseminatron from Tell Me You Love Me, and now utterly rehabilitated from that indie-movie-aping earnestness after his incredibly bold turn in Step Brothers. Here he is required to be in enormous emotional pain for the majority of the time, and it’s a credit to him that playing a completely shut-down shell of a man doesn’t mean he isn’t funny. His ability to mix up this world-weariness and emotional vulnerability with deadpan wit is essential to the success of the show. He’s Tim-from-The-Office, but even more pathetic. You weep for him in every episode.
So, they’re a fantastic core group, but they’re not the only reason Party Down wins this award. Just as with 30 Rock and Arrested Development before them, this show manages to get some of the best character actors around to populate the secondary cast. In the first season we saw Ken Jeong, J.K. Simmons, Steven Weber, Marilu Henner, Joe Lo Truglio, Mather Zickel, Joey Lauren Adams, Molly Parker, Breckin Meyer, Rob Corddry, Rick Fox (as himself), George Takei (also as himself), not to mention — for the Veronica Mars fans out there — Kristin Bell, Enrico Colantoni, Daran “Cliff McCormack” Norris, Ed Begley Jr., Alona Tal and Jason Dohring. Matched up to the best sitcom scripts of the year, there was no way this show was going to fail. Even though I’m agnostic on the appeal of Megan Mullally (drafted in to replace Jane Lynch in season two), I have a strong feeling she will be magically transformed by this most glorious of shows.
Worst Cast of the Year:Parks and Recreation
I feel a little ill, because I’m about to criticise the casting of a show that has Amy Poehler in the lead role. Amy Poehler, who was the best thing about last year’s Baby Mama. Amy Poehler, who was one of the best things about SNL for the past few years. Amy Poehler, who was one of the three things in Southland Tales that was actually great and entertaining instead of desperately bad and misery-inducing (the other two things being The Rock and Wood Harris, with whom she shared her scenes). She makes me laugh pretty much every time I see her, but not here. In that case, I’m willing to assume she was just dealt a bad hand, and given a character who is unworkable. The only times Leslie Knope comes alive and becomes more than a badly formed lump of unrealistic character flaws is when she pines over Mark Brendanawicz, her selfish and unappealing colleague played by the talented Paul Schneider. Again, another talented actor playing an unlikeable and uninteresting character. Maybe I should rethink this category. Is it the cast, or the show, that I don’t like?
Well, Aziz Ansari is in it. I’ll admit, I have not seen much of his work. He was in Funny People for a couple of minutes, and the effect he had on me was akin to having my soul Maced. Perhaps I’m wrong. This show seems to be underwritten and poorly thought through, which could account for it, but his turn as Tom Haverford is almost unwatchable. I’d say that’s more than just a glitch in the writing. The same goes for Nick Offerman as the Dwight-Schrute-esque Ron Swanson, a character that screams desperation from the writers but is not at all helped by Offerman’s flat performance. Both Haverford and Swanson seem like the kernel of a joke expanded to character-size without much thought given to whether these characters will work. As it is, they’re just belligerent. The less said about Aubrey Plaza and her pointless teenage character April Ludgate, the better. (See above for comments about affectless, oblivious characters like Ludgate and Casey from Party Down.)
Perhaps the thing I resent most is putting someone as funny as Chris Pratt opposite a comedy void like Rashida Jones. She was charming enough in The Office but wasn’t expected to be particularly funny. Here she is either a dope being manipulated by Pratt’s Andy, or she berates him, making her seem churlish and him seem like a victim, which he isn’t. Crappy couples on TV are not often fun to watch (ask any Lost fan who despairs whenever Jack and Kate get together). I’m more than willing to accept that a lot of these actors are far better in other roles. Hell, I’ve seen them be better. Pratt was hilarious in The O.C. as Che, and Paul Schneider was riveting in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Perhaps I’m being way too harsh on these actors. Sadly, the bottom line is that, unlike The Office that came with only a couple of good characters, already based on archetypes from the UK series, and then built the supporting cast as they went along, Parks and Recreation started from scratch and got none of the characters right. Even a good cast would have trouble making this bunch of half-formed comedic scribbles come to life. In time, if it doesn’t get cancelled, perhaps this will change. Let me know when it does. Until then, I’ll stick with Community, Dan Harmon’s brilliant new sitcom, which recently started almost fully-formed and will hopefully keep getting better.
Best Guest Star of the Year: Jon Hamm - 30 Rock
For a little while, we were non-converts to the Cult of Hamm. He entertained us enough in Mad Men, but we had enough reservations about the first season that he didn’t really register in our consciousness, even after the Dick Whitman revelation gave Hamm the best acting opportunities. Perhaps we thought he was just a pretty face, and couldn’t imagine there was anything else in there. Canyon was also offended by his Brylcreemed hair. She deemed it unappealing. I wasn’t about to argue.
Then came the far superior second season, and sightings of his normal hair (adorably floppy), and then a turn on Saturday Night Live that was so confident and charming that I fully expect Hamm to eventually challenge the hosting records fought over by Christopher Walken, Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin. Dramatic excellence, perfect comic timing, a willingness to play off his image, and seriously, one of the handsomest faces on Earth; if he can sing and dance, he’s got it all. We are now members of the Cult. Wearing robes and everything. It’s proper infatuation.
His three episode run as Dr. Drew Baird on 30 Rock was joyous. It was so good that the plot of his final episode, with him coming to realise that having everyone fawn over him all the time is something that doesn’t happen to anyone else, was even alluded to in the third season of Mad Men (reacting with bemusement when Sal points out that he doesn’t get hit on by flight attendants on every flight he takes, unlike Don, who is obviously spoilt for choice). Once Mad Men is over, Hamm can pretty much pick a direction. Not many actors get to achieve stardom and show both comedic and dramatic chops. Maybe he’s more like Dr. Drew than he realises.
Most Resurrected Character of the Year: Captain Jack Harkness - Torchwood: Children of Earth
I thought I always wanted Captain Jack’s immortality to be used more, as it’s a nifty little gimmick. I don’t think that any more.
Most Surprising Directorial Work of the Year: Akiva Goldsman on Kings and Fringe
Akiva Goldsman has done some awful things. His script for Batman and Robin is rightly reviled. He’s great at simplifying complex narratives and turning them into multiplex fodder (A Beautiful Mind, I, Robot). He’s the go-to guy for big movies based on crappy thrillers by bad writers (he’s adapted John Grisham and Dan Brown). When nerds hear his name, they sob with misery. “Why is this man so beloved of Hollywood?”, they shout. “It must be proof of its awfulness, along with the career of Michael Bay!” Of course, my own feelings about Bay are not so straight-down-the-line, and now, Goldsman has begun to win me over.
All he had to do was build up his experience as a director by making two of the strongest hours of TV of the 2008-2009 season. His debut, on Kings‘ The Sabbath Queen, showed a talent for atmospherics and interesting visuals, pacing the episode beautifully and getting some good performances from even the weaker actors on the show. After that he wrote and directed Bad Dreams, one of the highlights of Fringe‘s first season. Again, the creepy atmosphere was beautifully judged, and the opening few minutes were hypnotically staged. Even better, the big finale was disturbing and tense, even as it played with some less than fresh ideas, and then we got a video clip of a young Olivia that wouldn’t have looked amiss in Hideo Nakata’s Ringu. If you’ll forgive me for cheating and ignoring my own rules, we’ve also seen his work on the first episode of the second season of Fringe, and again, it was very impressive. In time it’s obvious that he will be directing films too. I hope he finds some interesting material to work with, but even if not, I look forward to seeing what he will come up with.
Least Surprising Directorial Work of the Year: Greg Yaitanes on House and Lost
Shades of Caruso took against the TV (and occasional film) director Greg Yaitanes after some hilariously overwrought and showy work on shows such as Heroes and Drive, and we’ve yet to be convinced he deserves reappraisal. Last year he won an Emmy for his work on the first part of the House season finale, which would have been understandable when you take the logistics of the shoot into account, but is frustrating when Katie Jacobs’ work on the far more affecting final episode wasn’t even considered (and she’s listed as co-director of the Yaitanes episode too, but didn’t get a nomination). Since then, Yaitanes has been given a co-producer credit on House, and contributed numerous episodes to this season, including the shocking Simple Explanation, in which Kutner (Kal Penn) commits suicide offscreen.
I will say this: the scene where Foreman and Thirteen discover the body was brilliantly done. Unfortunately, Yaitanes had a vision for this episode and went ahead with it. Everyone at Princeton Plainsboro is obviously very depressed about Kutner’s death, so Yaitanes lights the entire episode as if all the colour has been drained from the hospital. It’s an entirely grey hour of TV, just in case you didn’t get it from the performances or dialogue or sad music all over the place. To be honest, the episode Joy, directed by an unexpectedly off-colour Deran Serafian, featured the worst direction of the season, but Yaitanes was consistently bad here, and worse elsewhere.
You see, he also managed to infect my beloved Lost with his ridiculous film-cooties. I could talk about the flashy work he did on Heroes, but to be honest he’s the least of that show’s problems, so I don’t really mind if he stays on it. Lost, however, is a totally different matter. He had worked on the show before, in the first season, and as we started rewatching the show recently, I noticed he was kinda bad then too. That was when the show was in its infancy, and was still trying to find its tone, so his attention-seeking excesses were less obvious. By now, we all know what works and what doesn’t work within the very specific Lost world, which made Yaitanes’ excesses even more noticeable than usual. We know that Ben is creepy and Sayid is scary and intimidating, which are characteristics stressed by their very specific line-readings. In He’s Our You, we see a flashback to a face-off between the two characters, and both Michael Emerson and Naveen Andrews draw out their sentences to absurd lengths, with poorly edited pauses between each shot emphasising that they are both very methodical people who hate each other.
Lost usually treats these big moments with a sense of grandeur that works well, considering the unapologetically grandiose nature of the narrative, but this scene stepped over the line between epic and ridiculous. It made my favourite show seem like a parody of itself. I don’t even want to get into the awful “interrogation” scene later (included above), which was poorly written but even more poorly directed. What was Andrews doing here? It’s all over the place. The final scene with Sayid shooting young Ben was brilliant, but it was the only bright spot in a very disappointing hour of Lost. When you compare this horrible misinterpretation of the tone of the show to the consistently impressive work of star directors Jack Bender and Stephen Williams, it just looks amateurish. I keep hoping he’ll settle down, but the latest episode of House was directed by him, and as it was about a games programmer, most shots seemed to feature arms coming out of the side of the frame towards the person being observed, just like an FPS, so it might be a while before he realises less is more.
Best Shout-Out of the Year:House
Stephen Colbert is a huge fan of House, and it seems the feeling is mutual. (It’s the photo above his shoulder, obviously.)
This is the only way Colbert is ever going to get on a Fox channel without being mischaracterised as a baby-eating Trotsky clone.
Intensity of the Year: Lance “Intensity” Reddick – Fringe
While Parks and Recreation fans, or Dexterites, or people with Unusual taste, might be mad at me for being a big meanie and saying such terrible things about their favourite shows, surely there can be no controversy here. No one else this year was so stern and scary and just fucking in charge.
I suspect Lance “Intensity” Reddick can atomise titanium just by looking at it. As with Harry Lennix on Dollhouse, Reddick is pretty under-used on Fringe. Most of the time he is onscreen he’s taking the Fringe team to various crime scenes, or giving Olivia either a bollocking or a pep talk. This is not a good use of this man’s talents. He also showed up in Lost, as the sinister Matthew Abaddon, where he stopped being sinister just before getting shot and killed. Which sucked. I hope season two of Fringe sees him doing more entertaining stuff. I’d like him to shoot one of their ridiculous monsters (a part squid, part mushroom teenager hiding under carpets, for instance), or have more screen time with Blair Brown and Her Metallic Arm. If the Fringe showrunners don’t hurry up, he could well get very bored very soon. In this AV Club interview, he says he wants to try his hand at comedy. (For the record, though he is seemingly never required to show it on TV, Mr. Reddick is fully capable of expressing amusement, and isn’t just a scarily intense man.)
If he left Fringe to do that, you know I’d be checking it out.
And that’s it for this year. In the next few weeks, some new polls or something. Maybe some chatter about the London Film Festival (I got really carried away buying tickets the other week). Stay tuned, new readers. As you can see, I may not post as often as I would like, but when I do, I tend to post big.
