Author Archives: masticateur

Adventures In IMDb Discussion Boards: Robin Hood And The BBC’s PC Agenda

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A couple of weeks ago, a discussion was started on the IMDb boards for the current BBC version of Robin Hood, with the title “Ruined By PC Casting”. Since the beginning of the third season of the show, the casting of black actor David Harewood as Friar Tuck has caused some controversy, with the rightwing press spinning some bland utterances from historians into “fury”, and the inevitable online commenters railing against the BBC’s so-called “politically correct agenda”, which is supposedly to undermine historical fact and encourage the nation’s children to believe that Britain has always been a diverse and tolerant society. (Oh, the humanity!)

The IMDb has often been a hotbed of such discussions, and the first post in this thread covered familiar ground although taking a slightly different tack.

Robin Hood is an enjoyable show, but unfortunately it has been spoiled by yet another example of Politically Correct BBC casting.

One of the Merrie Men is clearly not the person described in the many accounts of Robin Hood’s life. The BBC, with its agenda of encouraging multiculturalism, has cast an exotic actor in this role to indoctrinate children with the idea that people of all races and backgrounds have always been tolerated, or even welcomed, in England. The historical facts DO NOT SUPPORT this and it means the historical accuracy of the programme is completely skewed. This “update” of the Robin Hood story is basically a LIE.

The Merrie Men were not a diverse group. They were a bunch of local yeomen, bred in the environs of Sherwood Forest. For the BBC to suggest otherwise is patronising, arrogant and misleading. How are children meant to learn about our history when a supposedly historical programme like Robin Hood is based on falsehood and propaganda?

What I am saying is, everyone knows that Little John is ENGLISH and not SCOTTISH! And yet the role is clearly CALEDONIAN in this version of the legend. Surely GORDON BROWN is to blame!!

I (yes, I – did you see through my cunning obfuscation?) thought my point was fairly obvious. People complained about Harewood as Tuck but did not seem as upset about the casting of Gordon Kennedy as Sherwood stalwart Little John, despite his strong Scottish accent. And yet those people all claimed not to object to the fact that Harewood was black; they were up in arms because this casting was not “historically accurate” and smacked of “political correctness”. These protesters weren’t racists, you understand. They were simply standing up for truth, justice and the English way.

By using the same sort of language and arguments in reference to a seemingly unobjectionable piece of casting, I was trying to make it clear that the protesters were (a) ridiculous and (b) despite their claims to the contrary, racist. I was interested to see what the response would be to this (I thought) transparent bit of frivolous satire. User axtonuk quickly obliged.

How long will it be before your called racist?, I agree the BBC has bastardised the legend, its part of our English heritage, the BBC doesn’t seem to care that Robin Hood is close to our hearts. The series is rather crap though, so will probably be forgotten in a few years!

Seems to me that the BBC is a mouthpeice for Labour and its multicultural dream. They don’t think twice about rewriting historical facts, respect for other cultures doesn’t extend to English people.

This sums up all the predictable, clichéd elements of internet discussion of the matter: accusing the BBC of being government stooges with an invidious agenda of multiculturalism; confusion over the distinction between “legend” and “historical fact”; complaints that English heritage is overlooked in favour of more exotic or trendy cultures, and that you can’t speak up for Englishness without being called a racist. I was gratified that my parodic opening post had been taken so completely at face value, and looked forward to many similar replies.

But then something odd happened. User crazy_girl2 posted the decidedly non-crazy response:

Does it really matter that much as long as the actors can act?! We all know Robin Hood wasn’t a fox but that doesn’t make the Disney version any less enjoyable.

The enjoyability of the Disney Robin Hood is debatable, naturally, but I was surprised to see this response appear so quickly. Such eminent good sense is not what I expect from teh internets! And then auroracat-1 blew my whole premise out of the water, exploding it point by point.

From the very beginning of this show the writers/producers said it would be a “modern” take on the Robin Hood Legend. I seriously doubt that children are watching this and thinking that it’s historically accurate in any way. They’ve been off on the dates from the beginning, a casino, camafloge material, women wearing pants, black leather biker outfits,……the list goes on and on.

Given all this – I really don’t have a problem with the casting anyone for any of the roles. (Remember to, that this is a lond tradition. Shakespears plays were originally performed with men in ALL the roles.)

The show is meant for entertainment purposes only it has never put itself out there as an educational/historical documentary type program.

Finally, Robin Hood is a legend and it has had many incarnations. It’s not as if the subject matter has ever been hard fact.

When I posted again in an attempt to provoke a little more discussion along the lines of “The PC BBC is anti-Enlgish and rascist!!1!”…

The historical facts are well established. Everyone knows this. The BBC has simply ignored them. A Scottish Little John, really – whatever next?!

…I was quickly put straight by wieldy:

No they’re not. The historical facts of Robin Hood are almost non-exsistant. No-one really knows who he was and what he did. All the ‘robbing the rich to give to the poor’, Nottingham forest, evil Sheffif etc etc is a romanticised legend based on a few scraps of evidence. Even the Major Oak in Sherwood forest, supposedly Robin Hood’s hideout, is from the wrong era.

There is no truth about Robin Hood so the BBC hasn’t taken any liberties with history. It’s comparable to the Arthur legends, where there are a hundred different stories and very little tangible truth.

I could hardly gainsay this level-headed, intelligent post with any more ill-conceived rubbish. Fortunately axtonuk returned to do it for me.

The origins of Robin Hood come from: Hereward the Wake, Eustace the Monk and Fulk FitzWarin. All of those people existed! Either way Robin Hood is an old English legend set in a historical period, the BBC should respect that. They should also have respect for English heritage and culture. Its the English getting shafted again, we are supposed to respect everyone elses culture/heritage but no one respects ours!

Following this, a few posters picked up on other historical inaccuracies in the casting (Toby Stephens being too old to play Prince John) and the plotting (the show apparently named the wrong pope at one point), but pointed out that these either fell under the remit of dramatic licence or were too minor to affect anyone’s enjoyment of the programme. The killing blow came from theunderstudy1610, who stated:

Here we go again…

Look, if we’re sticking to the original legend, then there should be no Tuck, or Marion (Robin would be too fixated on the Virgin Mary) and Robin wouldn’t be some brave defender of Richard the Lionheart, or rival of the Sheriff. People have always been taking liberties with the legend.

Even the legend takes liberties with the history, sad to say that outlaws often weren’t very nice people, killing, raping and robbing anyone who crossed them.

What the BBC have done is they’ve modernised it – they use modern cultural references (think the casino episode, biker gear etc.), Robin Hood wears a hoodie, Guy of Gisbourne eyeliner, and the women raid the foundation, they killed off Marion etc. etc. What’s wrong with using actors of different races? There are plenty of other versions to watch if you don’t like it.

It’s not like it’s historically correct anyway, more of a fantasy programme, if everything was historically correct (and they actually looked like 12th/13th century peasants) then maybe Tuck would stick out, but it isn’t, and he doesn’t. I’d hate to think there were any children out there who were learning their histoy verbatum from this show! Regardless of the race of the actor’s there are just so many mistakes it would be ridiculous!

I just like that they’ve put a new spin on an old story – lets face it some of the classics would get dull if they weren’t being presented in a different way. I don’t care that David Harewood (Tuck) is black, same as I wouldn’t care if he was aisian, aboriginee, or whatever, all I want is a good actor with a good characterisation, and I think David Harewood is delivering this.

Surely no-one can argue with any of that. In fact no-one did, and after a few more posts the thread petered out. I confessed to starting it as a joke, and was pleased when theunderstudy1610 admitted that he/she had fallen for it because my original post was so convincingly authentic:

I’ve just reread your post and yeah, I guess it does come across as more of a parody the second time around – sadly I know far to many people who say this stuff seriously AND for some bizare reson I never noticed that Little John was Scottish – hence I took it seriously, tbh, I read the first couple of lines and thought here we go again…

So what have I learned from this trivial but fun exercise? Mainly that the IMDb discussion boards are perhaps not as densely populated with anti-PC idiots and out-and-out racists as I suspected, and that there are numerous intelligent and reasonable people in this country who don’t act as if our birthrights are being sold when they spy a non-white face in a British TV programme set before the Empire Windrush docked. In fact, it seems from this – small but hopefully representative – sample that the people who are best informed about history are the least concerned about “accuracy” in history-based drama and the most prepared to allow licence in entertainment, preferring to criticise flaws in the writing or acting rather than searching for some pernicious hidden agenda.

I guess it’s something to bear in mind next time I see a news article about the “controversy” stirred up by a historical film or TV show. These controversies are often created by PRs in search of easy publicity and/or the media in search of an easy story, and the people who are offended are those who make a habit or even a career of being so. And the problem, of course, goes way beyond such trifling issues as BBC Saturday tea-time dramas.

Formerly Much-Liked Welsh Rock Band PWNed By Bobblehead Predator

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Posted by SoC contributor Masticator

A friend of mine just called and asked if I wanted to see Manic Street Preachers in London next month. (The friend and the call are both real, by the way, and not just contrived into existence for the purpose of having this blogpost hung on them. The only part that isn’t really real is the “just”, because obviously it’s taken some time to compose the post, source pictures and so on. I’ve left it there for the sense of immediacy it confers. But I don’t want Shades Of Caruso to face accusations of lacking authenticity. There really is a friend, and he really did call me.)

Anyway, a friend of mine just called and asked if I wanted to see Manic Street Preachers in London next month, and I surprised both of us with the vehemence of my refusal. At one point in my life I would have dropped everything to attend one of the band’s gigs; indeed, between the spring of 1994 and the summer of 1996, I saw them a total of six times. Three times before Richey Edwards’s disappearance and three after, including Edwards’s last gig and their first show as a three-piece (supporting the Stone Roses at Wembley Arena). But now… I believe I actually used the words “You couldn’t pay me to see the Manics.”

So why is this? They were my favourite band in my late teens and early twenties, so even if their recent recordings haven’t exactly given me the Welsh horn, there should be a certain nostalgia value in seeing them live. Although they’re promoting their new material, the setlist will include plenty of old favourites for the fans, right? I couldn’t be less interested if you told me Ocean Colour Scene were the support act and threw in a copy of Kula Shaker’s Greatest Hits.

Why? Because of the new single – and I’m physically cringing as I type this title – “Jackie Collins Existential Question Time”.


I still rate The Holy Bible as one of my favourite albums. All four Manics unarguably hit a creative peak with the 1994 record: lyricists Edwards and Nicky Wire mined a seam of raw, confessional/political poetry combined with a literary quality not evident in pop music since the heyday of the Clash; songwriters and chief musicians James Dean Bradfield and Sean Moore pummelled the senses with ominous riffs, disconcerting rhythmic changes and thunderous beats. It was, and remains, an astonishing major-label release.

Either side of THB, the polished, more radio-friendly rock of Gold Against The Soul and Everything Must Go brought the band’s passion, integrity and songwriting nous to the charts – the albums contain most of the Manics’ biggest hits and best pop songs, while never less than fiercely intelligent. Their debut Generation Terrorists is mainly fuelled by angst and bravado, and certainly lacks much in the way of musicianship, but it still has a few great moments (“You Love Us”, “Motorcycle Emptiness”). However, it’s been downhill ever since 1998’s This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours, and “Jackie Collins Existential Question Time” marks a nadir.


In the early days, detractors sneered that the Manic Street Preachers were the worst kind of pseudo-intellectuals, using big words that they didn’t fully understand to show off and living up to the “preacher” part of their name. While it’s true that their lyrics are often awkward and make little sense at first glance (leading to countless “magnolia despair tumbles beneath basketball jumpsuit vegetable misery”-style parodies), fans pored over them and discovered – especially in the Edwards days – they were allusive, literary, even erudite, betraying the lyricists’ sharp intellects.

But surely even fans can’t defend bloody “Jackie Collins Existential Question Time”. The title is the worst kind of sixth-form non-profundity (the 40ish band members don’t even have the excuse of callow youth any more), with the use of “existential” particularly heinous. Its clever-clever juxtaposition of lowbrow and highbrow subjects is intensely irritating, not least because it’s hard to believe any of the band would actually read a Collins novel. Also because it has nothing to do with the song itself, which seems to be a reactionary rant about the supposed coarsening of society, with some nonsense about the marital fidelity of Catholics and the chorus a repetition of the question, “Mummy, what’s a sex pistol?”

“Your Love Alone Is Not Enough”, the lead single from the Manics’ otherwise unlistenable last album Send Away The Tigers, employed the Cardigans’ Nina Persson on vocals (it was almost as if they were trying to win me personally back as a fan). Although it did go on a bit, it was a decent track with a big chorus that harked back to the Everything Must Go period. “JCEQT” is a screechy, repetitive nonentity of a song whose aluminium-y production sets my teeth on edge. I gather the new material, including this song, uses lyrics left behind by Edwards (who has been declared legally dead). Perhaps there’s a reason they weren’t used in the intervening 14 years.

Manic Street Preachers seem to have reached that period of their career where every album is hailed by critics as a “return to form”, which is a pretty obvious journalistic reduction of “Bloody hell, are they still going? Can anyone remember their last album? Fuck it – let’s just say this album’s their best one since that really successful one they did.” I seriously doubt whether there’s any form to return to. On the evidence of “Jackie Collins Existential Question Time”, Wire’s and Bradfield’s breaks to record hugely underwhelming solo albums didn’t recharge any creative batteries, and if the rest of the album sounds like the lead single, you might be better off with a good book. Or even a bad book.

For Your Reconsideration: Jersey Girl

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Want to know a good way to ensure you’re ridiculed as a clueless cultural pariah in internet circles? I’ve got one: suggest that Kevin Smith’s Jersey Girl is not a black, gaping quality-void with a side order of suck. This happens partly because, on many blogs and forums, there are no grey areas when it comes to pop culture. A movie is either OMG amazing or man did it suck balls. It’s a triumph or an abortion. In light of this Jersey Girl has come to be seen as a disaster, a critically savaged bomb that all but destroyed Smith’s chance of mainstream success and drove him back to the “Askewniverse” milieu and characters he had supposedly left behind, in the form of Clerks II.

And yet Jersey Girl wasn’t a huge flop. While no-one would call it a hit, the movie recouped its $35m production budget in box office gross, and went into profit with DVD sales. The reviews weren’t terrible either: the influential Roger Ebert liked it; it has a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 40% and a Metacritic score of 43, suggesting that a good number of critics thought it fair or better. I’m on board with that, and I maintain that it’s a more worthwhile work than Clerks II, Smith’s supposed return to better form (Rotten Tomatoes 63%, Metacritic 65). I contend, in fact, that each film has gained a reputation it doesn’t really deserve.

The received wisdom – much promulgated by Smith – is that Jersey Girl underperformed partly because the public was sick of the high-profile relationship between its stars Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez. Possibly true, but you would think a public that avoids a movie because of the overexposure of its cast (big-draw movie stars generally being reclusive, publicity-shy types) would leap at the chance to see Lopez’s character die in pain in the first reel. Smith’s theory that the previous Affleck-Lopez film Gigli was so awful it put audiences off Jersey Girl can be given short shrift, not least because so few people actually saw Gigli. (As an excuse it is reminiscent of Spinal Tap’s claim that their support act was so bad, “the crowd was still booing him when we came on stage”.) But there’s no doubt the movie suffered terrible word of mouth. This was presumably in large part due to the central character, who has several glaring flaws.

  • He’s played by Ben Affleck. Affleck has been charming and/or memorable in a number of movies – Dazed And Confused, Hollywoodland, Good Will Hunting, even the little-loved Phantoms – but rarely, if ever, as a romantic lead. There’s something desperately uncomfortable about watching him emote, and emote he does throughout Jersey Girl (bereavement! Unemployment! Fatherhood! Embarrassment! Redemption!). Each time a human feeling strains to etch itself across his considerable forehead, you want to reach out a restraining hand to stop him hurting himself.
  • He’s named Ollie Trinke. There’s a gag in the film about how Ollie lumbered his daughter with the name Gertie, which only serves to underline the fact that Smith named him Ollie Trinke. Every time someone says “Ollie Trinke”, you’re jolted out of the movie and into a world where the writer could have given his lead character literally any name at all, but chose Ollie Trinke.
  • He’s an arsehole. He’s an arsehole on a personal level, as we see from his ingratitude when his father steps into the breach and raises his daughter (something Ollie is too self-absorbed to contemplate doing himself), and from his egocentric assumption that his daughter will naturally want the life he plans to give her. He’s an arsehole on a professional level too: a publicist, a paid bullshitter, who treats subordinates and rivals badly, and whose one moment of honesty in the workplace loses him his inconsequential job. Rather than realising from this how worthless the industry is, he pines for his lost vocation for years to the detriment of all personal satisfaction.
  • It takes a combination of two hackneyed movie contrivances to show him the error of his ways: one a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, a free-spirited, sexually liberated cutie with nothing better to do than fix this hapless sad-sack’s life; and the other a Magical Negro, who just happens to be both the indirect cause of his employment problems and the Biggest Goddamn Movie Star In The Whole World. Somehow these fantastic creatures get through to him while his own daughter can’t.

So he’s a dense, self-centred arsehole with a stupid name, played by a resolutely unsympathetic actor. That’s a lot of baggage for one character. But it’s not an inherent problem, because this is a movie about a dense, self-centred arsehole with a stupid name. The problem is that it’s aimed at a mainstream audience, who would reasonably expect a comedy about a nice, regular guy with a small flaw to be overcome in time for Christmas and the closing credits. A zany unreadiness to commit to a relationship, perhaps, or an adorable childishness that makes him scared to have kids of his own. The cutesy romcom images in the marketing material back up this impression, so it’s no wonder people came away confused and wondering why they spent so much of the movie disliking the character with whom they assumed they should empathise.

In general Jersey Girl is not a film that goes out of its way to be liked. Aside from the unpleasant lead character, it’s full of discomfort and close-to-the-bone domestic conflict, not to mention Lopez’s messy death. Few people watch a comedy to be reminded of their own human frailties. But its readiness to confront harsh realities such as mortality, selfishness, grief and abandonment are marks in its favour. This isn’t a fluffy crowd-pleaser, it’s a reflection on sacrifice, maturity, responsibility and finding your way in the world, and Smith deserves kudos for largely resisting well-worn romantic-comedy banalities. I guess people may want films consisting purely of schmaltzy, platitudinal frothiness or solely of scatalogical hijinks. Me, I’ll take uncomfortable, abrasive Jersey Girl any day over the dozen or more toxic comedies shat out by patronising studios each year.

There are other things to like about the movie. For one, an adorably non-adorable performance from Raquel Castro, whose gauche line readings and lack of neatly-groomed rehearsing-since-the-womb perfection make her infinitely cuter than most nominally winsome but actually creepily robotic child actors. George Carlin as Trinke Sr is sly, irascible and a choleric joy, avoiding the obvious softy-grandpa tropes as a grumpily realistic audience surrogate puncturing his son’s vanity and hubris. Smith has been as sentimental as any American director in his career, but he doesn’t romanticise the New Jersey suburbs here: Carlin doesn’t have some amusingly quirky small-town job but is a street-cleaner; Smith even manages to make Liv Tyler – who had just spent three years onscreen playing an ethereal elven princess – look like a reasonably normal woman.

And there’s jokes. I laughed out loud several times. Smith might not have married a mainstream romcom feel to his usual lowbrow sex-and-weed-jokes sensibility with total success, but his sense of humour’s still there. On my recent viewing of Clerks II, I laughed exactly once – at a throwaway Jay line – and spent the rest of the time wondering what this fundamentally conventional film had to do with Clerks, other than making me think Wow, these characters sure got more boring as they grew older.

Clerks II tries far too hard to be funny and daring – stupid high-school nicknames, slapstick, pop-culture riffs, donkey sex shows – and ends up just seeming awkward, like a youngish uncle attempting to impress bored adolescents. This is reinforced by the teenage character Elias (Trevor Fehrman), ostensibly a guileless whipping boy for Randall’s (Jeff Anderson) caustic wit, but surely a late insertion into the script when someone realised, whoops, our characters are all in their thirties and we need kids to go see this! Smith has undoubtedly improved as a filmmaker since the jejune flatness and stagey dialogue of Clerks, but here this translates into not one but two unforgivably boring montages: one in which Becky (Rosario Dawson) bouncingly teaches Dante (Brian O’Halloran) to dance and is suddenly backed up by a chorus featuring the entire population of New Jersey, and one in which Dante Drives Around Moodily And Thinks About His Life Choices. Montage sequences have their place but these are self-indulgent, tone-destroying annoyances.

Still, they’re not Clerks II’s worst indulgence, which is that from start to finish it’s basically an apology for Jersey Girl. Smith’s half-arsed excuses for the earlier film’s underperformance are understandable, but making a whole $5m movie pleading for forgiveness is a disproportionate response. At the start of Clerks II, Dante has been sucked in by the temptations of a normal adult life – marriage, house, working for his wife’s father, effectively Going Mainstream. Although the girl he is marrying clearly adores him and puts up with plenty of nonsense from him, Dante constantly questions his motives. Is he just doing this because it’s what society demands, because it’s what’s expected of him? After a day spent examining his options (and discussing them with Becky, who incidentally turns out to be a combination of Magical Ethnicity – see the aforementioned dance lesson – and Manic Pixieosity), Dante realises: he should just stay right here in Jersey and do the same thing he’s always done! He was a fool to think he should take the opportunity to grow and travel and try new things and explore the myriad possibilities open to a man! The parallels are glaring, and they do Smith no favours.

Jersey Girl doesn’t need or deserve this fulsome, self-vindicating coda – which ultimately fails, since it’s a less satisfying film than the one it’s apologising for. Apparently even Smith has realised that Clerks II’s message is bollocks, as the upcoming Zack And Miri Make A Porno sees him turn his back on his own personal QuickStop again to try something different. He’s even working with renowned improvisers, which he has confessed to loathing in the past. The film, which has garnered some good early notices, looks dirty (in all the good senses), honest and scabrous, and Smith has already butted heads with the MPAA over the marketing. Basically, and thankfully, it looks like he’s rediscovered some conviction, so I’m crossing my fingers he doesn’t lose it again and come up with Clerks III: Jersey Forever next.

A Bridge Too Far

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The advent of a new Will Ferrell movie is not cause for quite so much excitement for me as it is for my fellow bloggers, but I am a fan of the Ferrell. He rescued Wedding Crashers and Old School from total mediocrity; he taught Kevin Smith’s coterie a thing or two about comedy in Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back; he turned Elf from a potentially squicky schmoopfest into an adorable festive gem; Anchorman obviously fucking owns, and is a lot cleverer than it’s given credit for; I frequently need more cowbell; and, of course, he invented the piano-key tie. Despite his occasional tendency to coast, generally I think his success is one of the most pleasing things about the US movie industry today. It’s great to see people making risky comedies (by which I mean not that they are somehow ‘dangerous’, but that their material walks a fine line between audience-pleasing yuks and weird, even surreal humour that might easily miss the target) and it’s even better to see that people genuinely like them and go back for more.

It is with some sadness, then, that I must bring an end to my Ferrell appreciation. I was watching The Daily Show this week on More4, and received a nasty shock when Ferrell and John C. Reilly appeared on the programme to promote Step Brothers.

Your eyes do not deceive you, gentle reader: Ferrell is indeed wearing a Chelsea FC replica shirt. Chelsea! Of all the clubs! Chelsea, the upstart, nouveau-riche braggart of the English Premier League. The club bankrolled by a man who bought and bullied his way to enormous political and financial influence. The club captained by that charming John Terry. The club that spent over £50 million in fees and wages on a waning Ukrainian striker just to show off to everyone else that they could. The club that epitomises the rapacious, tawdry, mercenary, ultra-capitalist, self-serving free-for-all that English football has become.

I assume that Ferrell did not grow up on a council estate in southwest London being taken to Stamford Bridge every Saturday by his Blues-mad parents. Had Jon Stewart asked him what he thought about Luiz Felipe Scolari’s appointment as coach or if Didier Drogba had a future at the club, I doubt he could have answered. So why is a 41-year-old American prancing around in a Chelsea strip? Thirty seconds’ further investigation shows that this is not an isolated incident – he’s been pimping that shirt everywhere. Here’s Ferrell at a party for the release of his friend Danny McBride’s movie The Foot Fist Way:


Here he is on ABC News talking about Step Brothers:

Here he is on TRL:

I am baffled as to the reasons behind this newfound support for the most reviled sporting institution in England. While some comedians court and even thrive on hostility from their audiences, Ferrell is not that type. His characters are sometimes aggressive or unpleasant, but his overweening characteristic is “lovable”. He’s a puppy with a hat on, peeping out of a cardboard box and offering to do your ironing. That’s how lovable he is. He’s a jolly, friendly, cuddly, lovable comic… in a Chelsea shirt. No. No, that doesn’t work at all.

So why did Ferrell turn to the dark side? I suppose it’s possible that the club is paying him to wear the shirt for exposure, although this is unlikely because he would have been given the new 2008-09 season’s shirt, rather than the five-year-old version he’s twatting about in. Or maybe he really, really likes to Fly Emirates – but wearing the shirt won’t get him too many free tickets, since Chelsea ditched the airline’s sponsorship deal in favour of a more lucrative offer from Samsung. (Surely Arsenal, whose home is the Emirates Stadium and who play more attractive football and who, you know, aren’t Chelsea, would be a more enticing option.) Maybe he just likes blue. Frankly, that’s not good enough. Why not choose an eminently more likeable team, such as Colchester United? Or Peterborough United? Or Birmingham City? (Well, perhaps not Birmingham.)

The only way I can come to terms with his choice of club is to assume it’s some form of performance, that he’s playing the role of a Chelsea fan to gauge public reaction. Clearly he’s desperate to get one of those roles playing a serial killer or a corrupt police officer or a flawed father figure so that, like so many comedians before him, he can show range and get an Oscar nomination. He can’t be any of those bad people in the real world, so this is the next best thing. Can he walk around clad in his unholy finery and retain that lovable persona? Has he generated sufficient goodwill to prevent the masses turning on him with pitchforks and torches? Are memories of Mugatu and Ron Burgundy and Buddy enough to deflect attention from his apparent journey into the heart of darkness? If so, then he can play a mass murderer without permanent damage to his celebrity!

It’s literally the only explanation that makes sense.

But plenty of likeable actors have done the playing-evil thing and come out unharmed. Matt Damon in The Talented Mr Ripley. Kevin Bacon in The Woodsman. Robert Mitchum in Night Of The Hunter. Ferrell’s got it the wrong way around. I would happily have watched him take on a challenging role – but now I think of him as a Chelsea fan, I don’t think any amount of residual affection can atone for such an egregious misjudgment. He could spend a year wearing the colours of a nicer, fluffier club – like Unicef-endorsing Barcelona or fan-owned Ebbsfleet United or, I don’t know, Hell Bastard Rovers – and it wouldn’t be enough. He’s gone too far. It’s over.

Over.

Total Recall

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Title: Total Film
Cover date: July 2008

Mainstream movie magazines would seem to be under threat more than most from the rise of new media. There will always be a niche cinephile market for Sight & Sound, and the audience for the genre titles such as SFX and Starburst isn’t going to disappear. But considering that the likes of Empire and Total Film are propped up by big companies advertising big films, their position looks precarious; not only does every publication that covers anything to do with culture – newspapers, celebrity gossip mags, teen mags et al – carry features on, reviews of and ads for movies, but these days advertisers can easily target their marketing straight at people’s desktops and inboxes.

And yet. Empire can confidently say that it was not one of the primary reasons for EMAP to get the hell out of the consumer magazine industry, with a consistent circulation nudging 190,000 and a well-run, successful website. Its less well funded rival Total Film is also in reasonable health with a sturdy ABC figure of around 86,000. Advertisers, even with all the fancy modern marketing tools available to them, cannot pass up the opportunity to target those moviegoers who are eager enough to buy a monthly magazine.

There’s a tricky line to walk for such magazines between PR puff and genuine editorial content. Virtually everything in the mag, from the front cover to the soundtrack reviews, is effectively promoting something the readers can buy, and it’s the magazine’s job – its responsibility, even – to impart objective unbiased information, rather than just parrot publicity guff to sell these products.

One way to make yourself appear independent and maverick and not just a PR tool for movie studios is to create a fucking cool-looking cover that takes the daring step of making your magazine’s name virtually invisible:

Doesn’t that look fucking cool? Wouldn’t you gasp and simper and flutter your eyelashes and rush to spend your money on it? I would. But I didn’t, because what was actually on the shelf was this:

Sadly, a cover so reminiscent of Spinal Tap’s Smell The Glove is never going to make the newsstand because it contravenes received wisdom – black is depressing, you need a load of coverlines, you have to see the name of the mag. The bag that obscures all that shiny goodness is crude and ill-judged. Besides the shouty coverlines, the ostensibly Joker-generated graffiti all over it seems inappropriate. Various incarnations of the Joker have been kind of zany and lightly anarchic, but it’s unlikely that The Dark Knight will take this route. It might also be prudent to take a slightly more sensitive approach to this Joker considering the actor who portrays him is dead.

On the contents page we find the first example of Total Film’s unique selling point, the Predicted Interest Curve. For reviews of the bigger films, TF produces a graph indicating which it thinks are the best bits of the film and why – a neat way of summarising a review and getting some pithy humour in the mag. Here it prints a Predicted Interest Curve for the mag itself, which is a little self-congratulatory, not to mention pointless seeing as the staff presumably think most issues are pretty interesting. But this is a lucid contents page, with another pretty cool-looking Batman picture and a box pointing you to the reviews. It’s followed by a monthly planner including film and DVD release dates, plus some nice movie gags to make readers feel included and knowledgeable. (“24 June: New Jersey was founded today in 1664. Celebrate by going there. Don’t forget to visit the Quickstop. We assure you they’re open.”)

Page 12 I never cease to be amazed by the inanity of movie mag letters pages, with their standard “OMG your mag is totally better than that other movie mag!” and “My friends say [cult movie X] is stupid. Whereas in fact they are the ones that are the stupid ones and I am cool!” missives. I can’t really remember how we used to get through our lives without email but I’d happily see it banned to stop people sending fatuous messages to magazines. Elsewhere on this spread (yes, the asinine reader wibbling requires two pages) TF eschews an editor’s letter, preferring to relate office chitchat. I’ve railed against journalistic zaniness before, but I don’t mind this – even if it’s not funny, the point is to show that the staff are really into movies and make the reader feel part of a club.

Page 14 Buzz is the mag’s opening section, featuring set reports and news of upcoming releases. They go big on a preview of the next Narnia film, Voyage Of The Dawn Treader, which isn’t due for release until 2010, and there’s a substantial story on Quentin O’Shoelace or whatever it’s called, including interviews with Daniel Craig and Marc Forster. In fact there are a fair few interviews scattered through this ostensible news section – decent subjects too: Frank Darabont, Jack Nicholson, Jack Black – and just as well, because otherwise this is just stuff anyone could read anywhere, and probably did several months ago. Hey! Hey, you there! Have you heard about that movie Pineapple Express?! Oh, you have? In February, when the trailer first appeared on the web? Oh.

Buzz is scattered with mildly interesting bits, like where to find the best shorts on the internet (although if you wanted to, you could find them using… the internet), and a handful of limp attempts at humour (an act-off between Tom Hanks and Tom Cruise! That might be funny or apropos if this was 1993). The interviews and a handful of pictures just about legitimise the section’s existence, but it’s close. Actually the six-page report from Cannes is OK, but unfortunately there isn’t a Cannes every month.

Page 48 Here’s a question that’s already a hoary old standard: in an age when you can instantly check out what hundreds of Amazon reviewers and IMDb commenters think about a movie, do we really need professional critics? Yes, we do. Of course we do. Who wants to wade through 400 pages of LULZ and ZOMG when you can get properly written (and properly edited) opinions from people who know who they’re talking about? And movie magazines in particular need authoritative, entertaining reviews to keep people coming back. Any mag can print news and features of a reasonable standard, but you get to know the reviewers whose opinions you trust, your personal like-minded critics who can helpfully guide you towards the films you want to spend your money on.

I can’t get on with Screen, Total Film’s cinema reviews section. There are a couple of things to admire, such as their choice to go big on films that need championing such as The Visitor and The Mist, and those Predicted Interest Curves do provide a stamp of individuality, but overall it’s amateurish and unbalanced. It’s normal to select a handful of big or important films to focus on – 25 reviews of the same length would be monotonous – but 650 words is far too long for a movie review, unless the writer is a top-class wordsmith. In the hands of Total Film’s moderately talented staff, that much space encourages padding, inelegance and dullness.

Style-wise, TF’s over-reliance on the ellipsis drives me nuts. There’s nothing wrong with an occasional usage, but the review of Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull contains five ellipses, not counting the one used legitimately to truncate that unwieldy title. In fact, they annoy me so much, I’m going to quote them.

Before Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade there was no Matrix, no X-Men, no Spider-Man…

The teenage targets of summer blockbusters today weren’t even born when Harrison Ford last donned the fedora…

Story, then… the part-time professor makes his comeback

[Indy uses] whip and wit to dodge the baddies with a sprightliness that belies his age…

Shia and Hal head off to Peru to embark on a slow bout of tomb raiding…

Dot dot fricking DOT! Every single one of those sentences would be improved with judicious use of a full stop. This is sloppy, callow writing and it damages the credibility of the reviews.

The amount of three-star reviews suggests bet-hedging and fear of advertiser disapproval, rather than editorial conviction, and I especially dislike the “If you like this movie, you’ll like these movies” boxes on the long-form reviews, with movies evidently chosen specifically for the superficiality of their resemblance to the reviewed movie. If you like The Visitor, you’ll like Green Card, because they’re both about immigration? Are you kidding me?

Page 66 The features section is perhaps the trickiest in which to maintain the balance between editorial and promotional material. It’s only natural that the features should focus on current films – the readers want to know about them and the advertisers want the readers to know about them – but does the mag have the courage to deviate from the accepted norms, to throw in a surprise here and there, to introduce its readers to something that might enrich their cinematic life?

The closest Total Film comes is a brief feature about King Of Kong, the little-publicised but well reviewed documentary about record-breaking Donkey Kong players. The lead feature about The Dark Knight, meanwhile, chooses to tell the story of the making of the film entirely in quotes from the personnel involved. I don’t expect hyper-critical analysis, but is Christopher Nolan, Christian Bale, Gary Oldman or producer Emma Thomas going to tell us anything except how amazing and heartfelt and complex and important and amazing the film is? They also continue the annoying motif of having “the Joker” scribble all over the feature, although this conceit justifies its existence when it obliterates every word of Maggie Gyllenhaal’s contribution to the piece, presumably because it was too boring for publication.

The irritating ellipses are largely confined to the reviews, mercifully, but I can’t let a couple of egregious mistakes in this feature go unmentioned. It misspells “skilfully” as “skillfully” (I could be generous and assume they consciously chose the US spelling, but this is a British publication that uses no other American spellings – and besides, it suggests the careless application of a spellchecker) and compounds the error by circling the word in big red Joker pen. Even more heinously, it uses the construction “would of”! How can a professional journalist allow that into a magazine? And it’s not as if the piece is from an inexperienced junior staffer – it is written by editor Nev Pierce, who should hang his head. Hang your head, Pierce!

The section also contains a much-needed puff piece about the underexposed American actor Angelina Jolie and some tedious blather about movie-based amusement-park rides, which frankly doesn’t belong in a movie mag and also commits the unforgivable crime of using black text on a mid-blue background, which is impossible to read. Next is a special feature on how Hollywood is supposedly embracing TV these days, which is a pretty tenuous way to link a story about the new X-Files movie, a (boring) interview with the stars of Get Smart, a few pictures of people who have recently “graduated” from TV to movies (Tina Fey, Michael Cera, um, someone named Emmanuelle Chriqui apparently) and an interview with Ben Stiller, who used to be on TV you know. The X-Files feature is particularly flannelly and craven, to the extent that it uses the badly-Photoshopped image from the goddamn poster as its opening picture:

The final feature, TF Flashback, provides a good opportunity to include a more esoteric or obscure subject. This issue wastes this opportunity spectacularly, with a sniggering schoolboyish retrospective of the life and times of Mr Charlie Sheen. A subject matter which, as well as being distasteful (the feature is sympathetic despite his history of deplorable behaviour, concluding that he is “a born survivor” and still a success), is already well publicised, thanks.

Page 127 Lounge, Total Film’s home entertainment review section, is tighter than Screen, with pithier, more to-the-point reviews of DVDs, soundtracks, books and games. (Editor Pierce loses marks again, though, for his rambling review of The Orphanage, droning on about biological imperatives for a full third of the allocated space in the mistaken belief that we’re interested in his opinions on the matter.) I’m pleased to see that it includes games, which form a large part of people’s home entertainment, and the DVD reviews highlight classics such as Picnic At Hanging Rock rather than just new titles. This section also has Instant Expert, a beginner’s guide to a period or genre, which is a nice idea and well executed. Granting this more prominence would give TF more credibility.

The issue ends with four pages of quiz and TF ❤, a quirky celebration of an underrated character. The quiz is pretty testing (not least the Spot The Difference, which I swear is two identical stills from Gone Baby Gone) and provides considerable entertainment for movie obsessives, while TF ❤ is a knowledgeable and slick way to close the mag.

Bonus The supplement crassly called Sex & Spandex: A Celebration Of Comic Book Heroines On Screen turns out to be the best thing about this issue. Rather than the leering, adolescent sub-porn the title suggests, this is an erudite and analytical look at female characters in comic book adaptations, with contributions from Mark Millar, Frank Miller, Alan Moore and psychologist Rachel Andrew. It includes upcoming films such as Watchmen and GI Joe and it doesn’t stick to the obvious, with a piece on Edie Stall in David Cronenberg’s superlative adaptation of A History Of Violence. This won’t tell serious comic book fans anything they don’t know, but I found it a surprisingly good read.

Reading Total Film is a frustrating experience. It certainly feels like it’s put together by enthusiasts who care about movies, and there are one or two examples of knowledgeable, impassioned writing here. But the cinema reviews are weak and often overwordy, while the features section lacks personality and is just too promotional. The only features I really enjoyed were the King Of Kong one and the Ben Stiller interview. While the feature on The Dark Knight contained a fair amount of information and insight from the key people involved, it could have appeared in almost any publication. There was nothing to keep me coming back to TF every month.

Being the less successful rival to the market leader in your sector should encourage innovation and irreverence. You’ve less to lose, so why not attempt to provide a genuine alternative to the frontrunner, which almost inevitably plays it safe? I thought I might find examples of this on Total Film’s website, but its blogs are simply run-of-the-mill reports and brief interviews likely to find their way into the mag at some point. They’re also infrequently posted; only one appeared between 25 May and 19 June, for example. Could the movie fans on the staff not bash out 250 words on any filmic subject that took their fancy every other day or so?

It may be that I’m asking for the impossible when I long for this type of mag. Every so often a film magazine comes along that does attempt to be witty and iconoclastic and satirical and it invariably fails. In the late 1990s EMAP’s superb Neon lasted a mere two years; Hotdog, which originated at I Feel Good, was bounced around from publisher to publisher for a while before it finally folded in 2006. But these days, when so much of the media we view is straight-up promotional, there must be room for some idiosyncratic comment, for deviation from the usual, for something to make us think, goddamnit. Total Film doesn’t appear to be able to provide this.

The Magazine Whose Title Defies Feeble Punnery

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Title: Maxim
Cover date: April 2008

In 2004, Maxim UK appointed an American editor, Greg Gutfeld, with the remit to revolutionise the title and make it stand out in an increasingly homogeneous market. The result was an astonishing magazine. Surreal, daring, iconoclastic, hilarious, unafraid to take risks – even some of the nudey pictures were given a bizarre twist, featuring concepts such as “You Are The Fly” and “You Are The Slug”, in which the reader got an insect’s or mollusc’s-eye view of a glistening topless lovely chasing him with a swat or a salt-shaker. But the inevitable glossy images of nearly-naked women seemed almost incidental to the mag, which showed a consistently fierce irreverence towards everything on its pages. I loved it. It was the first time in years I’d enjoyed reading a lad mag. I enthused about it to everyone I knew and urged them to read it.

No-one did. Maxim spectacularly failed to pull out of its sales nosedive. After two years, Gutfeld’s contract was not renewed and Maxim was relaunched as a monthly version of the weekly lads’ titles that had enjoyed so much recent success. It stopped taking the piss out of everything and started rotating its cover between the likes of Gemma Atkinson, Sophie Howard and Emily Scott. In other words, rather than genuine celebrities, women who were largely known – if at all – for being the sort of women who appeared on Maxim covers.

Surprisingly, this wasn’t what the readers wanted either. With sales dipping below 100,000 for the first time in 2007’s final batch of circulation figures, Maxim has been rejigged yet again. Although most magazines undergo regular overhauls, to go through so many different iterations in such a short space of time is unusual (certainly compared with US Maxim, which has stuck with pretty much the same boring template since its launch and is looking decidedly dated) and reflects the difficulties in which Maxim finds itself.

Maxim’s choice of cover girls since the relaunch clearly demonstrates the changing nature of the magazine. Goodbye WAGs and models; hello actual famous people.


I’m not convinced Mischa Barton is the ideal cover star, though. The new, classier look of the front page (steely grey background, dark red fonts) suggests Maxim is aiming for an older reader these days, not the teenage market it once attracted. I’m a 32-year-old man who sat through all four seasons of The O.C., and even I’m not interested in Barton. She is too young, for one thing; not notably talented, for another; and, crucially, not very sexy, certainly by the traditional standards of men’s magazines. March’s issue featured the far more sultry Eva Mendes and May’s has Sarah Michelle Gellar who, while also not classic men’s-mag totty, is at least age-appropriate. So Barton is an odd choice, one which I strongly suspect was influenced by the availability of relatively cheap photos from US Maxim.

Elsewhere on the cover, there are clues among the sex and football staples that indicate Maxim’s shifting target readership: fitness, property, exotic holidays and a promise of “223 ways to look your best” in a fashion special. Not things you would imagine drooling 17-year-olds care much about. The mag’s slogan, which for years has crowed “The world’s biggest men’s magazine”, has become “Your life made easy”.

Page 8 The editor’s letter – have I mentioned that these set the tone? – is fairly straightforward, a matey, chatty intro that sticks safely to pointing up a few of the salient features in the mag. Its most telling aspect is that Michael Donlevy doesn’t mention sex or women until the final paragraph, another sign of where the title’s priorities now lie. It’s followed by Mailbox, which contains two interesting things (not the letters!): instructions on how to download sexy (on second thoughts that should probably be “sexy”) pictures to your mobile phone, and encouragement to go to the website and see more pictures, win prizes and join the debate on subjects brought up by features in the mag. Yes, that says “join the debate”. Maxim appears to be suggesting that its readers think! (And increase web traffic.)

Page 14 The front section is now called Inbox, which is less a sign of embracing technology and more an appropriation of what’s now a familiar everyday term. It starts with pictures of a woman in her underwear! Who could have guessed? I think it’s interesting, though, that the woman is 28-year-old mother of one Donna Air, wearing a cardigan.

I’m not suggesting that this makes Maxim exactly progressive or anything. But choosing this over all the other women and other photos and other poses they could have included shows, once more, a determination to grow up.

The rest of Inbox is largely composed of plugs for gadgets, games and kit and it’s fairly standard, but it also has The Maxim Debate, in which two writers (one woman, one man) consider the merits of couples fighting in public. Again, it’s not Plato, but it encourages readers to engage their brains – and it also gives women a voice in the mag, one that isn’t just talking about how much they love sex and being naked and kissing other girls and sexy sexy sex.


Page 34 The first feature is an interview with The League Of Gentlemen’s Reece Shearsmith, with questions provided by readers. A good subject and, as with Heat, a good way to interact with readers (although curiously this doesn’t appear to be connected with the website). The next one is World Of Maxim, pictures of women taken from editions around the world. In the previous Maxim incarnation this feature was in danger of taking over the mag, but now it’s just two shots over three pages. Considering these pictures must provide a fairly cheap way of padding out your content, its reduction is surprising and a little gratifying.

Men’s mags have always included what might be termed Dumb Adventures and this is no exception, as writer Jerome Starkey goes to Afghanistan and attempts to play Buzkashi, which is best described as a cross between rugby and polo with a dead goat for a ball. This is a fun read – unless you’re the goat – with some vivid, energetic pictures, although not for the squeamish.

Still, I’d rather look at these pictures than the Mischa Barton spread, in which the insipid starlet strives to vamp it up for the camera and fails comprehensively. The interview tries its hardest to make her sexy, as these interviews always do, but the suggestive questions about nudity and her character’s lesbian experiences in The O.C. don’t go anywhere. Not only is Barton not sexy, she’s not funny or interesting either. I appreciate it’ll need to get somewhat chillier round Satan’s way before men’s mag cover stars are chosen for their sparkling wit or ability to interpret Ibsen, but this is a feeble and wan interview. The captions – tellingly, likely to be the only part of the feature originated by Maxim’s UK staff – are the best things about it.

Page 54 Comedy is another staple of lad mags, and Maxim’s four-part comedy tour of the British Isles continues with Rob Brydon’s guide to Wales. This is a fine idea, and kudos to Maxim for netting the talented and in-demand Brydon, but unfortunately comedians are rarely as funny in interviews as when working with prepared material. Even with careful editing, this is a little dry. Next is an article on the psychology of football, examining why the sport can turn even intelligent men into emotional wrecks, which isn’t the liveliest piece either. But once again it shows that Maxim is no longer content to print the Ten Wackiest Own Goals or whatever.


I feel as though I’m defending the mag quite a lot, so happily here come five pages of dross to dismiss! The Sexy Seven Sins is a trashy sexy-girl shoot dressed up as helpful sex-life advice, and it’s poorly conceived. Some of the tips are about how to overcome “sinful” feelings such as sloth, while others are about making envy or gluttony work for you in the sack. Just nonsense. It’s followed by another Dumb Adventure, sending writer Martin Robinson to train as an SAS sniper, which is more like it.

Page 81 Fashion never sits all that comfortably in the mass-market men’s mags – whose readers probably feel buying a non-porn magazine is girly enough without it being full of shoes – but Maxim has embraced it thoroughly with this 27-page special. Strangely, it seems to be aimed at a younger readership than the rest of the mag, with lots of bright colours and not-very-classy brands (Ben Sherman, Fred Perry) although there are attempts to be more cutting-edge such as a focus on six up-and-coming British imprints. Perhaps it will take a while for the fashion pages, which after all are primarily designed to attract advertising, to catch up with the mag, which can’t afford to distance itself from its established ad clients.

Page 117 I do like a good reviews section and this, in the main, is one. It’s not huge, perhaps reflecting the fact that in 2008 we’re bombarded with promotional material every day and we hardly need monthly magazines to join in, but it’s smart and audience-appropriate. While the reviews are not in-depth, I like that it affords games the same space as movies or DVDs, acknowledging that they’re of equal importance to most young(ish) men. I also like the little featurettes sprinkled through the section, wittily comparing two straight-to-DVD releases or rounding up debut albums. I was already warming to it when I turned to page 122 to find an interview with Mark Heap and Kevin Eldon, two of the UK’s finest and yet most mysteriously underappreciated comic actors. Big hooray!


Page 131 Outbox, whose section name seems even more arbitrary than Inbox, contains the stuff to fulfil the “Your life made easy” pledge – tips for all the most important things in men’s lives today: fitness, travel, cars, poker. Poker? It may sound a little silly, but with the game’s popularity increasing, it’s useful to know at least a little about it these days – just so you don’t feel left out of conversations, if nothing else. This is also a handy pretext for some cross-promotion of Maxim’s sister magazine, betting title Inside Edge! The fitness and food pages in particular are simple and practical, although it must be said these few pages aren’t going to make your life that easy. If this stuff is what Maxim is about now, it could do with more space.

Page 162 Where other mags might stick a list or an interview, Maxim devotes a page to Girl Talk and, once again, this isn’t two young nubile wannabes in their M&S underwear chatting about groping, as you might expect from a lad mag. It’s a proper column, written by proper writers. It’s thoughtful, witty and not shy of using words like “unmitigated” and “chivalry”. All right, this one’s about sex and has “DILDO” in the headline in big bold capital letters, but I think the crucial point is that it’s what a woman thinks, not a man’s idea of what women think.

It’s official: unlike Jackie Treehorn, Maxim has decided that it no longer wants to treat objects like women, man. The focus of the relaunched magazine is on men and what they want out of life, rather than women and how we can get their bras to fall off. That’s not to say it doesn’t contain any female flesh but, as with the Gutfeld version of Maxim, it really feels as if the shots of partially dressed women are the least important component of the issue, included mostly because it’s expected of lad magazines rather than because the editor wants them there. To put it crudely, Maxim was turning into a wank mag, and it certainly isn’t that any more.

Maxim’s problem might be that it’s spent too long being Maxim. A magazine-buying man in his late 20s and early 30s who has outgrown the loutish teenage idiocy peddled by lad mags since the early 1990s is going to pick up Men’s Health or GQ, while teenagers themselves are buying Nuts. I don’t doubt that the readership exists for a non-laddish middle-market magazine. The difficulty for Maxim lies in letting potential readers know that it is that mag. I think it needs to take more risks with the cover. Unlike the upmarket men’s mags and its rival Loaded, Maxim has never had a man as its cover star. If it’s serious about changing its image and readership so totally, it needs to shake things up even more than it already has. That could be a place to start.

A Few Words On Patrick Swayze

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News is emerging that Patrick Swayze has pancreatic cancer and will be dead in a matter of weeks. Is it symptomatic of today’s modern blah blah world that when I first heard this, about an hour ago, I thought it was a bizarrely unfunny internet rumour? Nonetheless, assuming even the National Enquirer wouldn’t run with this story unless it was pretty sure, it seems to be true.


What an odd celebrity Swayze is. He is quite substantially famous and seems to have been for some considerable time. His level of fame equals that of far more talented, successful and prolific actors. Since his breakthrough in The Outsiders (1983), he’s appeared in 31 films, or a decidedly non-whopping 1.24 a year. Of those only two, Dirty Dancing (1987) and Ghost (1990) could be said to be solid commercial successes, although some of the others have cultish appeal. Perhaps most curious of all, after establishing himself as at least a moderate box office draw with those pictures and a charismatic, even likeable action-movie presence in Point Break (1991), he made only eight movies in the next decade, and among those were such gems as Father Hood, Tall Tale, Black Dog, Letters From A Killer and Forever Lulu. Five pounds to anyone who can prove they saw any of those. (Note: you will not receive five pounds)

So (a) how did he remain famous, and (b) why and how did he translate burgeoning movie success into a career thrown away on duds and non-starters? I suppose the answer to (a) rests largely with Dirty Dancing and its perennial popularity among teenage girls (and former teenage girls), a new generation of whom was introduced to the timeless story by the recent stage adaptation. Naturally, I affect to disdain and despise the movie, but I do have a certain respect for its simple appeal and capacity to tap into the wish-fulfilment fantasy of its audience. Some people have taken their love for the movie too far, of course, but if I were Swayze I’d be looking back on Dirty Dancing’s success with fondness and a certain pride.

Answering (b) proves more difficult. Could it have been his drinking? It’s hardly likely that that would have stopped anyone employing him, considering how many other actors maintain a career while in the grip of addiction. At one point he claimed to have “turned against Hollywood”, an interesting interpretation of the direction his career had taken. Presumably it was being “completely fed up with that Hollywood blockbuster mentality” that led him to take second-banana roles in minor British films. I’m sure he prefers things that way. Or it could be that he was just too ’80s to survive in movies much beyond that decade, his tough-guy chin and immovable quiff made obsolete by the grungey, floppy-haired skinny boys that succeeded him. (Surely no coincidence that his best role came when both chin and quiff were obscured, as Zen surfer Bodhi in Kathryn Bigelow’s Point Break. But – oh, sweet irony! – his floppy-haired co-star went on to be a much bigger star. Although mainly when he had very short hair. What am I saying again?)

Or perhaps there’s a more old-fashioned reason: he just isn’t all that talented. It seems ridiculous today that such a thing could prevent someone being famous, but for Swayze it seems to be true. Can there be any other reason why, after the huge home-video smash Dirty Dancing, the Oscar®-winning, mum-seducing, $500m triumph of Ghost and the genuine spiritual experience that was Point Break, the best follow-up he could produce was Father Hood? Nobody wanted to put him in their movies. Before long he was taking roles in quirky films whose quirk factor was only increased by his presence, the sign of an actor who knows his limitations.

It’s unlikely that Swayze would have undergone a late-career boost; although he received generous critical notices for his role in Donnie Darko, it didn’t herald a glut of high-profile roles (despite reports he turned down a crapload of money to star in Dirty Dancing 2). I guess no-one was convinced that playing an earnest aw-shucks ostensible nice guy hiding a shameful secret was much of a stretch for him.

It feels strange to say this of a man who is only in his mid-50s and still (just about) working, but he probably won’t be missed by his fans. His career has existed largely on video and DVD for the past 20 years – on several million worn-out copies of the same movie, that is, not in a Steven Seagal way – and no-one is eagerly awaiting his next project or keen to hear what he has to say about global warming or Amy Winehouse. It’s possible that – again assuming the story is true – the inevitable macabre media frenzy will rekindle his fleeting popularity and trigger a re-evaluation of his career.


Ah, forget it.

Ashes To Ashes Episode 1.1: Is There Life Beyond Mars?

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Last week we got the opportunity to find out whether the BBC could replicate the success of Life On Mars with Ashes To Ashes. The verdict is very much yes and no, at least according to the media. Critical reaction varied wildly, from AA Gill in the Sunday Times and Sam Wollaston in The Guardian who hated it, to Hermione Eyre in the Independent On Sunday and Gerard O’Donovan in the Telegraph who loved it. In between, the Independent’s Robert Hanks thought it moderately good and Helen Rumbelow in The Times said it showed promise, while in The Observer Kathryn Flett deemed it quite poor. Here in webland, the forumers of Digital Spy largely wailed and bemoaned the new show, while over at Television Without Pity it was received, almost without exception, rapturously.

But as we’ve seen, it was the press who built Gene Hunt up as the star of Life On Mars and often ignored the more cerebral sci-fi aspects of the show in favour of lionising the 1970s, so we can safely assume that literally none of those people have any idea what they’re talking about (Wollaston, you’re not even trying – see me after class). Meanwhile, it seems the web denizens who disliked it did so mainly because it was not Life On Mars, which makes you wonder why they didn’t just spend the evening with their lovely Simmful Mars DVDs instead. Many reactions, even positive ones, compared episode one of Ashes To Ashes unfavourably with the original series, which considering Mars had 16 episodes – and bearing in mind it took a good six or seven of those to really hit its stride – seems unfair, not to mention pointless. Ashes has set itself up as a different show from the start and the first episode was a cracking success, albeit with one or two missteps.

Within the first ten minutes DI Alex Drake was established as a working single mother and clever police psychologist who has made a close study of Sam Tyler’s case and subsequent suicide. She was also called to a hostage situation, terrified, captured, taken to an abandoned boat on the Thames and shot in the head. No messing around. She awoke on the same boat in 1981, wearing a fantastic outfit that all at once demonstrated she was deep undercover, showcased the garish fashions of the time and allowed Keeley Hawes to show off her ace pins.


She was taken hostage (again – d’oh!) only to be rescued by Hunt and his sidekicks, at which point she went a bit funny. Several reviews have commented on Drake’s supposedly unprofessional behaviour, fainting and shrieking and crawling over the bonnet of an Audi Quattro in an unseemly manner. Presumably when these reviewers were shot in the head and transported 27 years back in time, they weren’t disoriented at all! After the whirlwind beginning, the middle half-hour of the episode was non-stop delight, as Drake was forced to deal with the old-fashioned coppers while she came to terms with having the same fantasy as her study subject.

Although she quickly realised that the key to Hunt’s current case was the man who shot her in the “present” and used her modern analytical prowess to ensnare him, she hasn’t yet realised that – like Tyler – she has emerged from her trauma into a hugely significant period of her own “real” life. Whereas for Tyler it was the year his father left, for Drake it is several months before her parents died – an event mentioned by her captor in 2008. This is fine plotting. Not only did it give Drake a case to solve in episode 1.1, it gives the series a mystery arc that will no doubt be gradually revealed week by week.

The last 15 minutes were a bit wonky, unfortunately. The final showdown was set up by a transparently ludicrous scheme involving Chris Skelton and new cast member Shaz Granger (Montserrat Lombard from BBC1’s Love Soup), a ruse that might have been designed to get the young WPC abducted. During the gunfight that followed, I half expected Graham Chapman’s colonel character to wander on and order them to stop because it was getting far too silly.


And when Hunt, Skelton and Ray Carling turned up with machine guns on a BLOODY SPEEDBOAT to save the day (a day which in any case didn’t need much saving), the show surely tipped over into parody. But the resolution was nicely handled, particularly Drake’s understanding that she did not need simply to arrest her 2008 assailant just to get back home, prompted by Granger’s endearingly artless musings on death.


Despite the occasionally overdone 1981 touches – I think I could have done without the coppers singing Shaddup You Face to an Italian barman – the programme showed a sense for period detail as astute as that of Life On Mars; I especially enjoyed Drake’s white leather jacket, echoing Tyler’s ever-present coat in Mars. As for characters, WPC Granger (a nod to Harry Potter?) is already a decent addition – a sweet and down-to-earth figure similar to Mars’s Cartwright, but clearly meant as a love interest for Skelton – and I thought it was a nice touch to have the bluff Carling tell Drake about how Tyler had returned to them in 1973, which she couldn’t know because it was his death in 2006 that precipitated this. I was, however, a little disturbed by 1981-vintage Carling’s resemblance to Reed Rothchild.


He has other interests – he’s a magician! Dean Andrews handled this well. Philip Glenister was his usual larger-than-life self, although with a few reflective moments that suggest Hunt may have been through changes (or, as the programme would probably have it, ch-ch-ch-changes), and bounced nicely off Hawes, who was excellent in the main role. Some critics hammered her for all the shrieky stuff, seemingly forgetting that John Simm spent much of Life On Mars grabbing his head, talking near-gibberish and howling like a bereaved Noddy Holder. And for pity’s sake, she’s been shot in the head and sent back to 1981! Hawes did absolutely fine with everything the role threw at her, and even fleetingly displayed a hitherto unseen talent for comedy.


So episode 1.1 was by no means flawless, and at times it was trying a bit too hard to attract viewers, even for a pilot. Props to my girlfriend for pointing out that it also ignored its own internal logic by having scenes that did not feature Drake, which should be impossible if you accept that it’s her fantasy – unlike Life On Mars, which went out of its way to ensure Tyler appeared in every single scene. I suppose this might be due to the growing perception that Hunt is the real star (Glenister has also moved up to the top of the credits). But overall it was a great episode, both in itself and as a setup for the rest of the series, and I have every confidence that it can become as good as Mars did – and will possibly get there more quickly.

ETA: I feel I would be remiss if I did not mention Ashes’ replacement of Tyler’s test card girl with a clown, or strictly speaking a pierrot, from the eponymous David Bowie video. Although I don’t go along with the current coulrophobic consensus – seriously, it’s just a dude in a suit with some white slap on – I found this vision much more explicitly nightmarish than the little girl with the doll, especially when he took a run at Drake in the junkyard. I also liked that Drake was prepared to turn and face the pallid fiend, just one of the many subtle bits of character portrait that were scattered through the episode.


Hunt’s line of the week

Has to be his opening line, delivered to the sleaze who takes UndercoverDrake hostage:

Today, my friend, your diary entry will read, ‘Took a prossie hostage, and was shot by three armed bastards’!

Speaking of which…

Sleaze of the week

Life On Mars had a few memorable villains, notably Marc Warren in episode 2.1, but for me Ashes has already beaten them hands down by casting Adam James – last seen in the Extras Christmas special as slimy agent Tre – as a City boy/drug dealer. James almost smells of the 1980s; he could, and possibly does, teach a degree course in Advanced Sleaze at the University of Sleaze:


Eugh.

Most disturbing announcement by a one-handed childhood icon of the week

Zippy: Forget your mum, Molly. She’s never coming back.


Gorgeously cinematic/silly/genius/hilarious/unbearably pretentious shot of the week

Amusing 1981 reference of the week

Drake: There’s nothing on this hard drive but the time and date.
Hunt: Pong! I’ve got Pong.

Inappropriate Hunt moment of the week

It would be his pronouncement that an armed Drake in leather gave him “the horn”, had it not been for his reaction to Drake’s feeling of his heartbeat. Which was somewhat different from Cartwright’s when Tyler did the same to her in Life On Mars.

Speech we’d better get used to hearing over the opening credits every week of the week

My name is Alex Drake. I’ve just been shot and that bullet has sent me back to 1981. I may be one second away from life, or one second away from death. They say that as you die, your life flashes before you. All those memories and mistakes that form us. Well, bring it on. My life can flash away as much as it likes because I am not going to die. I’m coming back to you, Molly.