This is a quick post to explain what’s about to happen to this blog, for those who have just started following it (hello, and thank you, btw). The London Film Festival occurs at around this time each year, and I attempt to review every movie that I see there, even if they don’t particularly move me, or even if they suddenly show up on general release in the time between me seeing it and writing about it. I will then pimp those reviews out on Twitter over and over and over again every time the relevant film opens in the US or UK markets, or on Blu-Ray, or shows up on Sky/HBO, or someone mentions it tangentially, until everyone gets sick of me and unfollows me en masse.
We’re already at the halfway mark of the festival — meaning I’ve seen that unnerving and hectic “Aren’t films wonderful?!?!?” intro featuring the poor screaming SUPEREMOTION lady ten times already; more than enough by now — and I’m only now starting to write about it because I’ve really packed them in this year, not helped by the way the festival has been set up. Twenty films in all; many more than previous years. During those festivals I would find moments between screenings to write down notes and start posts, but this year it’s all about the travelling, with the festival making greater use of BFI Southbank’s NFT, and satellite venues outside the West End.
This has had good and bad consequences. On the downside I’ve had to leave Q&A’s for two films so far (Juan Carlos Medina’s Painless and Mika Ninagawa’s Helter Skelter) because I had to bolt from the screening and race across the city using the 100% reliable Tube system AHEM in order to blast through another cinema, exhausted and sweaty, to pant all over the poor suckers sitting either side of me. By the third day of the festival every joint in my crappy arthritic body was aching. This is not the way to experience a cultural event. (Here is a picture of me trying to get on a Victoria line train to Brixton on Friday.)
That said, despite the panic, both me and Daisyhellcakes are getting to experience bits of London we would otherwise never see, which has turned out to be a massive plus. Previous festivals have centred on the West End, primarily the Vue and big two-screen Odeon, which has been hellish due to the seemingly never-ending reconstruction of Leicester Square. Walking from one side of the square to the other was, last year especially, like the scenes in universally beloved sci-fi masterpiece Terminator Salvation where the humans are being funnelled into the camps where they would be turned into [insert reason for those seemingly pointless scenes here].
This year the square is clear, not counting the eternally damned Leicester Court, which will never ever be completed, I’m sure of it (see below for an overhead shot of some proper Leicester Court glamour), but now most of the screenings are elsewhere. It’s almost — almost — funny to note that London, now revealing itself to be a sentient living being with a macabre sense of humour, has decided to keep trolling festival-goers by blocking one of the key routes between Waterloo station and the NFT. Hahaha very clever, London. And thanks for all the train delays too. You are a worthy adversary.
But then we end up in the lovely Ciné lumière for the first time, and it all seems fine. Overheard upon arrival – “They don’t sell popcorn here? Oh, it’s a posh cinema I suppose.” Plus 100 points, Ciné lumière. It means I have an excuse to revisit the quite wonderful Ritzy in Brixton, and relive the moment I watched Brokeback Mountain and had a crying fit so extreme it almost hospitalised me, ending with me hiding out in Woolworths on the high street while I tried to compose myself as wracking sobs shook my helpless body. It also means I get to show Daisyhellcakes my old Hackney stomping grounds while being amazed that in the ten years since I lived there it has become utterly unrecognisable. There was no glorious Hackney Picturehouse there when I lived around the corner; if it had been there maybe I wouldn’t have moved.
And it’s not like I’m missing all of the Q&As. Just last Saturday we saw three, including one for Rust and Bone with Marion Cotillard, Jacques Audiard and Matthias Schoenaerts, which was enormous fun. The supergrainy iPhone picture shown below — with Cotillard, Schoenaerts, Audiard, friendly translator whose name I didn’t catch (sorry) and new LFF director Clare Stewart — was taken minutes before a directional cock-up meant that the lovely Ms. Cotillard collided head-first with the director. This meant I spent the entirety of the movie panicking and thinking she wouldn’t be there at the end, or would appear wearing an eyepatch. But she was fine. Chill out, Cotillard fans.
And so, my reviews. In the past I’ve written huge posts which I hope to trim down this year just because of the amount of films I’m seeing. Also, frustratingly, many of the movies I’m seeing are either already on general release worldwide or will arrive in the UK very soon; if I wait too long there won’t be much point doing it. As usual I’ll try to lump films together that I think have thematic connections; this is mostly because seeing a large number of films in a short space of time means my thoughts cludge together and it’s harder to separate them than it is to combine them, somehow. Now all I have to do is write the damn things. #EnthusiasticBlogger
Once upon a time Shades of Caruso flourished like a beanstalk borne of magic beans, sprouting poorly edited posts on a regular, almost daily basis. It was a simpler age, when I had lots of downtime at work and could futz about there in the company of other people similarly unoccupied. Ah, t’was glorious in that subterranean office, with nothing but lots of frothing about Torchwood and attempts to create running gags about Reed Richards to fill the billions of empty hours. As I’m sure many of you know, blogging can be addictive, and for a while there it grabbed me with greater force even than smoking or pasta. The Publish button was the plunger on a syringe full of opinion-smack, and refreshing the Sitemeter page was the high.
Luckily the love of a good woman and general indifference from the blogosphere persuaded me to scale that shit back a lot, but even so the sense of obligation remained, as if I had to keep something going for the sake of… I don’t know, truth or something? Or maybe to lance the boil of opinion in my head that constantly replenished itself over time? Probably more like that. I had thoughts that needed to be shared, it seemed, but now I so rarely blog the upshot is that the thoughts pile up, and I end up writing epic posts that are just stupidly long. 6,000 words on Prometheus? 9,000 on The Dark Knight Rises? 10,000 in total over three posts about theLostfinale (still one of my least-read blogging projects)? The less I blogged the more I wrote, paradoxically.
The busiest period of the Caruso year is September to December, where I seem to focus most of my energy. First comes the Caruso TV Awards, in which I would choose the best and worst episodes of the year, best and worst characters, and then sundry other observations I had accumulated during that TV season, though the size of those posts meant they would be finished about a month into the new season, rendering them even less relevant. Then comes the two weeks of the London Film Festival, during which time I’ve reviewed every film I’ve seen there for the past three years, leading to either barely any hits (Bernie/The Monk) or big numbers, such as my absurdly glowing review of Black Swan, which got mad hits (like it was Rod Carew). And finally, in December, a blow-out with the Shades of Caruso movie awards, which takes me months to write. I’m not kidding; I started working on this year’s awards in August.
But why? To have a voice? If part of living in the new world is servicing the compulsion to continually scream, “I am alive, in the world, and I opine!” then I have Twitter for that, and Letterboxd if I can be bothered to put up with the worst of the commenters there (the good people make up for it, but being talked to like a 6-year old two weeks ago because I didn’t ejaculate with glee over Rian Johnson’s otherwise very good Looper was enough to put me off for a while). Am I doing this for my loyal readers? I do have some and they mean the world to me, but when I have #TheProject sitting unwritten in the writing study in the cobwebbed west wing of my mind, the thought of doing this in the hope that I might somehow enhance the wider cultural debate even a little seems absurd and quite arrogant.
Of course, I also feel compelled to do it, which explains why I spent weeks building up the courage to write about The Dark Knight Rises, and I feel much better for sliding that out of my head and onto the page like I’m moving Iron Man armour schematics from screen to screen like Tony Stark (quick thank you to everyone who RTd it or commented on it or offered kind words; it’s a huge relief when I get positive feedback). There’s also my standard response when people ask why I do this; watching and dissecting TV shows is how I catalogue how I feel about works of fiction, how they have failed or succeeded, and how I can develop my own writing or understanding of story structure and artistic accomplishment through those studies. That’s the best reason of all, and watching TV has been incredibly educational in that respect.
But sometimes it feels like the lesson is merely, “Be more like the writers of Breaking Bad and The Good Wife, and less like the writers of CSI: Miami and Dexter“. That’s a broad lesson that’s learned already, and picking these things apart to see how they tick (or clunk) isn’t as useful as it once was. Actually, I’m learning more about writing fiction by writing fiction, though I’m glad I spent so long preparing my brain-soil before planting idea-seeds. All those hours watching The Shield / Buffy / Lost and learning about character and pace and timing of revelation really paid off, I can feel it.
And so, to my point. The LFF reviews will probably remain, though I might make them smaller. The end of year awards will remain because they make Daisyhellcakes laugh and I get a shitload of hits for them (I think it’s just image-trawlers but still). The Caruso TV Awards? No can do anymore. They take forever, I get about 12 hits a post, and no one ever mentions them even on Twitter, where no thought is left untranscribed. It’s a waste of time I could spend elsewhere. Agonising over that series of posts, which I dreaded for months, has been one of the most depressing things about this year, when much of the time I wanted to work on #TheProject.
Giving up on that plan has lifted an enormous weight off my shoulders; the weight of having to watch the rest of Revenge, the second season of Boardwalk Empire, or any of Grimm after that risible pilot. I honestly think I would have killed myself if I’d felt obliged to watch the second season of Falling Skies just for the purpose of writing 200 words about it that no one would even have noticed. As for the sitcoms; I will only endure comedies starring Zooey Deschanel or Krysten Ritter if someone pays me megadollah, and, as I have found to my great embarrassment, no one wants to do that, so you can forget it.
And why should I write a huge post about these things even for money? There are more than enough people doing that on a weekly basis anyway. The AV Club alone covers literally every episode of every TV show airing at the moment. Sometimes I wonder if they’re going to start recapping the news. The vast majority of their reviews are so far-and-away better and more insightful than anything I could come up with that the futility of it seems even more overwhelming, and even if that wasn’t the case, do I really want to become an active, visible member of a critical subculture in which writers I like can be pilloried and insulted by fans with the permission of bitter showrunners, as those who have criticised Sons of Anarchy or Community have found? What’s to be gained from participating? It’s just asking for trouble.
But those observations remain in my head, standing between me and #TheProject like an inspiration dam, making a blog purge necessary. So I can get on with my goddamn life, here’s what I thought of TV this year. I wrote a shit-ton; feel free to bail now if you want, I’ll understand:
A million people can tell me that Boardwalk Empire improved in its second season but it would have had to be reset entirely for me to even think about giving it a chance. Plus I know everything that happens at the end because Twitter. A character I didn’t care about killed another character I didn’t care about? Maybe if that suddenly transforms the show into The Chalky and Van Alden Intensity Hour in the third season, then I’d think about it. Perhaps I’d have been more willing to watch Boardwalk Empire if I hadn’t tried to get through the interminable Hell on Wheels. Five episodes in I had to give up. A Western! And I couldn’t get through it! I blame the drama-dampening work from Colm Meaney, who was only slightly less hammy than he was in Get Him To The Greek, which is still a huge Serrano Ham of a performance. Even Common and The Swede couldn’t keep me watching. Sorry AMC.
And sorry for not being more enthusiastic about The Walking Dead aka The Neverending Circular Conversation About Oh The Humanity n’ Ting. A lot of folks hated the fact that it was set on one farm. I understood the need for this; budgetary constraints made it necessary, and to be honest it’s theoretically possible that a show could work from one locale. But if the only thing that happens is that everyone has conversations about the thing that’s on their mind? For several weeks? And all anyone ultimately does is swap philosophical positions with someone else, before swapping back? I don’t care how many main characters you massacre, I stopped caring 8 hours ago. There’s no drama here anymore. There’s just talking and an occasional zombie ZOMBIE THEY’RE CALLED ZOMBIES NOT WALKERS ZOMBIES FOR FUCK’S SAKE ZOMBIESZOMBIESZOMBIES.
This lack of enthusiasm spelled doom for other shows. Revenge seemed like it would be campy fun but it wasn’t compulsive enough or trashy enough to keep me and Daisyhellcakes interested. A lot of folks like it but time is just too precious to use on something I think is okay. Especially when you waste 13 hours on Alcatraz, which seemed like it might have been a grower like Fringe, but was merely a series of narrative dead-ends before the enormous cul-de-sac that is Being Cancelled. They couldn’t even make good use of the excellent chemistry between Jorge Garcia and owner of the Best Hairstyle of the Season Sarah Jones. I don’t know if I’d like more of Alcatraz, but I’d like more of those two. However, watching that meant I never even got around to Person of Interest / Awake / Enlightened / Boss / House of Lies / Magic City etc. At least, that’s my excuse and I’m sticking with it.
Two fairytale shows arrived and became hits, improbably. The pilot for Grimm so offended me with its dreary sub-Buffy mythology that I dropped it instantly, and even though it’s apparently OMG sooooooooooo good now, again, my priorities have finally shifted, hallelujah. Once Upon a Time, on the other hand, was only really marginally better but for a Lost fan such as myself, that dual-timeline structure was like finding a packet of chocolate in the back of the cupboard that you’ve forgotten about. For all its many faults it was a great bandage on the wound that is the absence of Lost, plus it’s nice to watch less demanding, pleasant shows now and again. Best of all, it featured a fantastic villain in Rumpelstiltskin, one good enough to keep me tuned in even during the longueurs. Hopefully the second season will make good on the first’s promise.
Some of our favourite shows returned and were merely just good. Nothing spectacular, just eminently watchable and occasionally inspired. The Good Wife had its weakest season yet but it was still so sharply written and bouncily performed that even a few malfunctioning plotlines and strangely curtailed arcs couldn’t ruin it. Can anything? The show is a miracle of network TV; a pacy procedural that’s culturally relevant and politically complex without alienating the audience through impenetrable continuity. It’s still the most entertaining show of the week almost every week; nothing else surprises me as often or makes me feel as happy. I hope it runs forever.
Fringe understandably felt a little off because of the wait so many of us had for the timeline in which Peter exists to come back into being. Peter did return, but neither universe had ever known him. Still we waited for a reset but it never came, and maybe fans were disappointed that Olivia regained her memories of him because of love. But the show is about love, more than any other TV show except maybe Once Upon A Time. The wobbles in mid-season settled once the show basically came out and said, “IT’S ABOUT LOVE! CHILL OUT, NERDS!” and looking back it was stronger than it first seemed, and had a surfeit of terrific hours, as Noel Murray found recently. It would be churlish of me to be too critical of a show this entertaining and increasingly emotionally charged, especially if it’s willing to send two characters back to the Big Bang itself, just because it could.
The sitcoms, on the other hand, were a mess. The Office finally broke us, and we stopped watching it, our “Memories Of The Office” switch firmly stuck in the “That was a shit show overall” position. Maybe unfair, but the woeful start to the season was enough to banish many of the good memories. It should’ve ended halfway through season five, I tell you. Parks and Recreation was thankfully better, but the Leslie/Ben relationship annoyed Daisyhellcakes to distraction, the insane and desperately unfunny Tom and Anne coupling infuriated us both, and the promising campaign arc didn’t provide the LOLz we were expecting. A good idea in theory, but one poorly implemented, even with great guest turns by Paul Rudd and Kathryn Hahn (aka the hardest working woman in showbiz). Veep was good but worked better if you thought about it as a drama with jokes. Hopefully it’ll hit its stride soon and find its own voice.
Even Community disappointed this year, with a terrible split between bland formula and crazy concept stuff. The ambition gap between the two was way off; season two seemed perfectly blended in comparison. Which is not to say there were no great episodes; as it wore on it felt like there were good and clever things being done but they were being lost in the shuffle. I’ve spent the whole year trying to figure out what it was that bugged me about this season, and the main candidates were the long set up for arcs that got paid off in baffling haste, the endless, increasingly unfunny references to Inspector Spacetime (the worst running joke in the history of comedy), and that the performances were pitched way too manic and perky compared to previous years, which I attributed to everyone wanting to please the NBC box-tickers. And we all know how that turned out. [Edited to add: FFS]
But holy crap, 30 Rock bounced back with a bang, surprising everyone, and by everyone I mean 100% me and about 80% Daisyhellcakes who didn’t enjoy it quite as much as I did which is no knock on her because seriously I was SO THRILLED by this season you have no idea, guys. About four weeks into this year it kicked in and went from “About to be dropped” (yes, my favourite sitcom, and the previous season had been so bad I honestly nearly gave up) to “highlight of the week”. I want to hug everyone involved for finally fixing the Kenneth problem (i.e. they gave him something to do and cut back on his screentime), revitalising Tracy by pairing him up with Jenna (who had similarly become tiresome), and just doing everything better and funnier and snarkier and smarter and better and betterer and betterest.
Which is more than I can say for The Newsroom, which was so unbelievably, monumentally terrible on almost every conceivable level that I’m amazed even Aaron Sorkin’s most die-hard fans didn’t suddenly realise their Studio 60 boxset was filled with lemons. We tried to tell them to do what we did, and turn those lemons of preachy, repetitious tone-deaf mansplaining into the lemonade of mockery! Oh how we laughed as Sorkin turned his female characters into desperately flailing and shallowly-drawn comic relief! Oh how we marvelled as he filled the screen with Sorkin surrogates (Sorkingates) for everyone to fawn over, listing the person’s achievements and TELLING us they’re great so Sorkin never has to figure out how to SHOW us that greatness! Oh how we despaired whenever he’d get within pissing distance of a good point and then cut to the Maggie-Jim-Don-Lisa-Sloan (Oh lovely Sloan!!!) love pentagon or Neal going on about Cthulhu or some shit.
By the end of ten deliriously awful episodes we thought people would finally see that those of us who are fans (seriously, we are) but who feel obliged to call him out on his worst excesses were right all along but no, his more devoted/blinkered fans doubled down, and as the final episode aired, all of them spontaneously said, “he stuck the landing”. Yes, but he landed on a PILE OF FUCKING LEMONS AND KILLED EVERYONE ON BOARD! HE’S NOT AN ELEGANT GYMNAST! HE’S AN AIRBUS A380 BECAUSE THAT’S THE ONLY PLANE BIG ENOUGH TO CARRY HIS EGO, AND THE PILOT OF SAID METAPHORICAL PLANE WAS DISTRACTED FROM HIS PURPOSE BY A RIDICULOUS CONSPIRACY SUBPLOT ABOUT PHONE-HACKING, AND SO NOW WE’RE ALL DEAD AND COVERED IN PIPS!
Honestly, there were two shows I wanted to write about each week this year, the first being The Newsroom so I could list all of the imbecilities, and the other being Lena Dunham’s Girls, but that would mean I would be adding fuel to the awful fire that has raged across the Internet for months now, only to flare back up again last weekend when a very ill-worded tweet (if I can put it rather mildly) from Caitlin Moran led to many angry followers damning her and Dunham as at worst racists or at best feminists with too narrow a focus on their own issues. I have no wish to risk offending anyone who has any strong opinions either way about this show, so I will direct you to these two superb and insightful posts about the controversy from Sarah Ditum and Bim Adewunmi (and this new, excellent one from Ms. Bim), note that it was easily my favourite new show of the year (sorry), and leave it at that.
Mad Men! It was the season where all the metaphors and messages were really offputtingly obvious! Except that season one did that as badly and no one complained then. Admittedly this season was a retrograde step back from the fine-tuned subtlety of seasons 2-4, but even then it was still elegant, impeccably made, and filled with deliriously pleasurable moments. Yes, the Joan thing was unfortunate, but if Janet Street-Porter is to be believed in this column about that piece of shit Jimmy Savile, women were a commodity in this era and Joan was never going to escape it, and in fact was being used as a prop way back in the first season. The past was a miserable wasteland for a lot of people, and focusing on the mechanics of this plot overlooks the horror of the reality, and the brilliance of the storytelling here (as upsetting as this storyline was, at least Joan is finally an agent in this decision, and wins big as a result). And hey, at least we got Far Away Places, the infinitely clever and bold portmanteau episode that almost rivaled last year’s masterpiece The Suitcase. That more than made up for Don’s absurd throttling hallucination a few weeks earlier.
Fans also turned on Breaking Bad, not long after Matt Zoller Seitz wrote a review saying the train heist was one crazy step too far into the realms of action movies. Considering the MAGNETS, BITCH setpiece just a few weeks earlier, escalating Walt and Jesse’s ambitions and abilities a little bit more is not a dealbreaker, and betrays a dismissive attitude toward the action genre (disclaimer: my favourite movie genre next to superheroics). That episode of BB was easily the highlight of the truncated season, but I guess someone had to be the first to backlash against it. After that there was a tide of complaint about the hurried pace. Yes, it was regrettable. No, it didn’t mean the show was ruined, as will become apparent when it’s over and the plan makes sense. I have faith. Move along. Move along.
Did anyone complain about Game of Thrones? If so I didn’t hear it over the sound of me screaming “OH GOD THIS SHOW IS THE BEST!” This is the only season I watched twice this year and it works much better in one quick go, but even week to week it was remarkable. In one block, though, the War of the Five Kings is propulsive, thrilling and necessarily absurd in equal measure; the politics of the crazy situation are held up as the joke that they truly are without the stakes being diminished. And Brienne! And Jaqen! And Arya and Tywin chilling in the Banquet Hall Of Conveniently Face-Obscuring Shadows! And White Walkers! AND MOTHERFUCKING TYRION AT THE BATTLE OF BLACKWATER BAY! I spent ten weeks pooping myself over this masterful exhibition of imagination and emotion, and I can’t wait to watch it again for the third time. Best show of the year.
Basically HBO had an amazing year, and that’s not even considering the other instant classic show they had and then cancelled in a panic like it was an accidental Amazon double order. Michael Mann and David Milch’s Luck was a fascinating artifact, a labor of love from the writer and a triumphant return to TV for the director, but ultimately a sadly incomplete triumph, the ultimate in coitus interruptus. Watching it after the cancellation was frustrating, especially when it sank its hooks in early. I heard some say they “got” the show during the exquisitely shot horse race in the fourth episode, but some of us fell in love right away, and not just because its confidence and focus quickly erased the memory of John From Cincinatti. And the races? Simply some of the best setpieces in the history of the medium. Every one made me crane forward in my seat and scream at the TV. The last episode shouldn’t have mattered because of the cancellation, but I screamed anyway, and cheered at the results. Just look at the fourth episode race; it’s glorious.
Writing about a show as powerful, ambitious and off-kilter as Luck is one of the reasons why I wanted to blog about TV in the first place, but the downside of that is the obligation to cover other things, to make sure I’m not just watching shows from one country. Consider this another reason for giving up; I couldn’t bring myself to watch Borgen or The Bridge after the disappointment of the original Killing, have yet to try Continuum, and barely watched any UK shows. Missed Blackout, missed The Hour, missed Line of Duty, have never wanted to watch Downton Abbey and never ever will, am almost 100% sick of Doctor Who and the relentless one note smart-arse dialogue, not to mention the Doctor’s current arc as “sulky child man who twirls too much”.
Other than that there was the now-off-the-love-list Misfits which sadly had a really poor third season, what with Rudy basically being Nathan after a Find/Replace script job in the wake of Robert Sheehan’s departure. True, Joe Gilgun managed to make it seem like that wasn’t the case by adding notes of self-doubt, and his performance was the only bright spot of the show’s year, but we could still tell it was meant to be Nathan. By the middle of the season 10 minutes of drama was being dragged out to 45 mins a week, and when three other leads left the show that was it. Stick a fork in us; we’re done. Doubt I’ll stick with Who either, unless I’m wrong about the new companion, aka Sexxy McDalek.
Another bad thing about blogging is seeing people react badly to a show you like and having to deal with the inevitable arguments. If I’d been doing a weekly column about Homeland when it aired in the UK I think I would have entered a mild depression at the reaction to the show’s finale. Many seemed to think that the dramatic choice made by Brody was a cop-out, made necessary by the imminent second season (cue complaints about the US strategy of making more episodes), that he should have blown himself up and be done with it like would have happened in a short-run UK series, which wouldn’t be expected to flog the story to death. At around this point someone will inevitably mention Fawlty Towers.
To say I disagree with this would be to be talking around the fist I have crammed in my mouth so I don’t say anything that would be construed as too hostile (the last thing I’d want to do while talking about something as essentially unimportant as a TV show). But, if Brody set off the bomb then the entire season, with all of the debate about his motives and the extent to which he has turned against the US, would have been for nothing. It would have been ten episodes of watching a clock tick down, Brody would have been reduced to a fuse, and Carrie would have been vindicated but what then for her? This way, yes, there is a possibility that the show will go on too long or lose its momentum, but we also get to see Brody continue to wrestle with his obligations with new, even higher stakes, and Carrie can continue her fight for respect. That’s where the drama of this brilliant show lies, not in waiting for things to just end. It’s not Day of the Jackal, the series. It’s The Manchurian Candidate, and it will run for as long as it needs to. (Edited to add, having seen the second episode of season two, I feel utterly vindicated in this belief.)
Short runs lead to stories with the potential to only do approximately as much as other shows of similar length, with a consequent fall in dramatic and emotional potential as more event possibilities are curtailed. Though I like lots of short-run dramas (Edge of Darkness and The Shadow Line, in recent years, are a perfect length), the rise of longer continuity-heavy dramas has revolutionised TV drama, and despite viewer argument over the padding in Lost (which I didn’t mind) or other disliked network shows, such long-run shows will always win out in my eye just because they can do things you won’t expect (if they’re bold enough). Seeing a key line by Xander at the end of season 2 of Buffy being brought back with three years of subsequent drama in season 5 was like an epiphany for me. See also The Shield; the perfect seven-season show in which everything that happened mattered, cumulatively. Homeland has the potential to match that achievement.
Of course I get that shows run out of steam, as shown by The Vampire Diaries‘ third season. As a soap opera about two families of vampires it was a lot of fun, and Ian Somerhalder, Candice Accola and Joseph Morgan are still good value for money, but this season was entirely composed of moments of necessary détente punctuated by someone saying, “I’ve just found out there’s an ancient spell and/or amulet that will magically kill the thing we previously said was unkillable,” before someone else finds it and double-crosses everyone else by conveniently destroying it. By the halfway mark the repetition got pretty goddamn annoying. Hopefully the finale’s shocking events can reset this, because spending a whole season attempting to generate tension while also going out of its way to maintain the status quo meant what was once vital became as lifeless as about two-thirds of the cast. (P.S. I’m now a Klaroline shipper, just accept it haters.)
One show that has been fallen right into a balance between a short and long run is Spartacus, which has, through awful circumstance, run 6 episodes longer than it might have (the mini-season Gods of the Arena), but is still facing its final season as Steven S. DeKnight probably wisely reckons there isn’t enough story to keep it going beyond the next year. The sad outcome of this is a season that got rid of many of its best characters, leaving behind a stripped cast and a million corpses. That finale was great but if you want more of the show, it’s so horrible to see so many terrific foes or beloved heroes bite the dust that eventually the joy is tainted. Nevertheless, it was another strong year for TV’s most outrageous show, and as with previous seasons, once it got into its stride it was exhilarating. It will be sorely missed.
It would have been nice to watch American Horror Story to see how a show is willing to reinvent itself drastically in order to keep a story going while also providing the closure that people wanted from a short run, especially as this would maybe soften my argument about Homeland, but after giving up so much of my life to Glee (which I finally dropped this year), one episode was enough. I might still go back to it, especially as the idea of it appeals more than the bizarre execution (plus, Connie Britton Connie Britton Connie Britton), but I’ll only do it if someone can promise me I don’t have to see Dylan McDermott frantically jacking his dick in the midst of a nervous breakdown again. It was bad enough watching Damian Lewis do that in front of a horrified Morena Baccarin; like some kind of awful nightmare the night after a Firefly / Band of Brothers marathon. Whoever told TV executives that “the kids these days just love sad wanking” must stop this madness now.
FX was lucky to have AHS there because otherwise I would have ignored it as part of what might be a subconscious war against the network for cancelling Terriers. Still haven’t finished season 3 of Justified; we just don’t have the enthusiasm we once had. And I didn’t watch season 4 of Sons of Anarchy either. That’s how boring the third season was, no matter how well it ended. I’ll get to it eventually but conflicting reports about its quality are not making me want to hurry. As for Louie, it was FX’s finest hour, but even though I loved almost every episode I’m never enthusiastic about watching it. This hesitance mystifies me. If it wasn’t for Daisyhellcakes pushing me into it I would’ve missed that amazing episode with Parker Posey, or that insane Letterman three-parter, which were among the best TV of this year.
But maybe this is the problem. I’ve got so much on my mind lately that I find it hard to switch off enough to even get through a half-hour show that will almost certainly entertain me, and then something that has given me such pleasure like Sons of Anarchy languishes unwatched on the Sky+ box for months. Perhaps this is part of the malaise that has made me get annoyed at every nearly every film I’ve seen this year, or maybe my mind is champing at the bit to stop watching other people’s fiction and just get on with my own. I have to get #TheProject out of my head, you guys. You’re gonna love it, I think.
All I know is, this year I tried to watch TV to generate thoughts to fill out these posts, and even though this is yet another epic, it’s nothing like what I expected. This is surely a sign that I should just watch TV for me, and not bother trying to add to a cultural conversation that is doing just fine without my occasional post. Let’s hope that refocusing my energy means I have time to create something more constructive, while approaching TV shows as entertaining diversions, not homework assignments. I’ll keep you all posted. In the meantime, here are my top ten episodes of the year, for completion’s sake.
10. Spartacus: Vengeance – Libertus
9. Louie – Daddy’s Girlfriend Part 2
8. Fringe – Welcome to Westfield
7. Homeland – The Weekend
6. Girls - Welcome to Bushwick a.k.a. The Crackcident
5. Luck – Episode 4
4. Community – Remedial Chaos Theory
3. Breaking Bad – Dead Freight
2. Mad Men – Far Away Places
1. Game of Thrones – Blackwater
Anyway, thanks to all who have ever commented on the Caruso Awards; your kindness gives me strength. I’ll be back soon enough, hopefully.
2009 was the first year I attended the London Film Festival — despite having lived in the capital for ten years – and the experience was so enjoyable the concentrated cinematic download instantly became my new secular Christmas. 2010 has been a less than ideal year for many reasons, the most trivial of which being the disappointing summer season, which has traditionally been a highpoint for me. This year the sting was removed: knowing I would be seeing far superior (and, as it turned out, inferior) movies in the first few weeks of October made the torment of enduring Resident Evil: Afterlife 3D almost bearable.
I won’t lie: part of it is the glamour — or should I say “glamour” – of seeing and/or meeting filmmakers and celebrities, though the resolutely dismal setting does tend to make the experience a lot more humble. It’s one thing to see tiny Michelle Williams in the flesh – a vision of indie-movie chic in her Erdem dress at the first screening of Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine – and another to cringe at the thought of her forced to eschew the comfort of the West End Vue cinema lobby due to a torrent of water pouring from a burst pipe in the ceiling, and thus ending up posing in a cramped alley outside, the sound of the paparazzi cameras drowned out by the noise of renovation work on the knackered old building next door. If she had ever wondered what the diametric opposite of La Croisette was, now she knows. (Imagine this alley half obstructed with bright blue panels.)
Nevertheless, for an amateur blogger / professional starfucker who has yet to be jaded by encounters with the creative people I admire, there is still a frisson of delight when your experience of watching a movie is enhanced by a quick introduction by Darren Aronofsky and an appearance by Mila Kunis and the impossibly cool Vincent Cassel, though I’m sure my enjoyment of Black Swan was down to the quality of the film (spoiler alert: it’s phenomenal). As I intend to make attendance of the LFF an annual thing (as long as I’m living in the UK, of course), I’m sure the novelty will wear off, but for now, please forgive me if I get annoyingly breathless recounting these little moments.
Luckily the festival started promisingly with Gillian Wearing’s debut movie Self Made, an almost uncategorisable experimental piece in which seven volunteers participate in a method-acting workshop that takes on a therapeutic aspect. Judging from comments made by acting coach Sam Rumbelow after the screening, there was never the intention of providing therapeutic help to the participants as learning the Method is not meant to double as therapy, but it seems to have been an inevitable by-product of the project, especially as Wearing selected the seven volunteers on the basis of the life stories they had described to her when applying to take part. As the film progresses we get an insight into the histories of these people, see what has shaped them. Uncomfortable truths are exposed, traumatic experiences unearthed, and in some cases a kind of catharsis is reached by addressing these psychic wounds via role-playing, method-acting exercises, and performances in small filmed scenes that force the participants to face the problems that are causing them so much pain.
It’s a description that makes the movie sound dry, but Wearing is more of a showman than you might think. She consciously plays with the audience’s expectations, melding the reality of the participant’s lives with the fictitious acting challenges, casting her subjects in “roles” that play with what we have previously discovered about them. She even manages to throw in one of the best shock-jump moments I’ve seen in years, superior to anything in Paranormal Activity 2 – a perversely funny directorial decision she can be proud of. She is also unafraid to show some almost unbearable scenes of revelation: scenes featuring participant Ash Akhtar are so raw it’s hard to watch. (Disclaimer: I know Ash via Twitter – and now real life – so it was always going to be tough to see him in such a vulnerable state, but I doubt that anyone watching the film will fail to be moved by his devastating scenes.)
It’s been said before that fiction gets closer to the truth of things than non-fiction, and Self Made shows Wearing playing with that idea. It’s possible she was inspired by Godard’s comment that ”Every film is a documentary of its actors”. She makes her participants recreate moments from their past, finding out more about them through this process, and then making them act out situations that mirror the events that have filled them with dread for the future. Lian Stewart, a young woman who is saddened by the absence of her father, plays out the role of Cordelia in King Lear, and consciously rejects a father figure. James Baron, a young man whose past was marred by bullying, acts out his own death at the hands of a group of “youths” (to use the emotive phrase employed by the Right-Wing press to demonise young people). Ash… well, that would be telling, and could likely ruin the startling opening scene.
What makes Wearing’s movie so fascinating is how these fictional scenes are informed by our understanding of who these people are, and the empathic knowledge that acting out these scenes is affecting the participants on an emotional level. It says much about the nature of acting, how we perceive the act of performing, and the nature of celebrity, in the sense that we often experience stories performed by people whose private lives are known to us, while also understanding that there’s a good chance those stories are unreal as well. We have to mentally shuffle through levels of emotional expectation when watching stories performed by actors, and Wearing cleverly makes us aware of that thought-process by providing a new perspective on the audience/performer line. It sounds like the sort of meta-commentary lampooned so brilliantly in the recent episode of Community (Messianic Myths and Ancient Peoples), but it’s less self-conscious than that, and just as satisfying as any Charlie Kaufman thought-experiment. And Variety was right: Ash Akhtar should consider chasing this alternate career. ::fistbump::
While it’s hard to know whether to categorise Self Made as a documentary or a “reality” film, Errol Morris’ new film Tabloid is most definitely a documentary that follows his traditional themes of the shifting nature of truth and fiction, and would make an excellent companion-piece to Wearing’s experiment. Tabloid is much jauntier than his previous triumphs The Fog of War and The Thin Blue Line, but similarly focuses on (arguably) unreliable narrators. The stakes seem lower this time: though the tale of Joyce McKinney was once the centre of a tabloid storm in the UK, Morris smartly uses McKinney’s natural showmanship and good humour to crowdpleasing effect which was absent in those gloomy documentaries. The tale of the abduction and seduction of her Mormon lover begins weirdly and Morris beautifully edits the multiple testimonies for maximum audience pleasure: the reaction at our screening was delightfully raucous.
What’s most astonishing about the tale – at least for me – was that it happened during my lifetime, but entering the cinema I remembered nothing about it. Yes, I was a kid and can’t be expected to recall all of the things that happened in the 70s that didn’t involve Steven Spielberg or George Lucas, but as events progress you see that the story of the Manacled Mormon was pretty much inescapable for about a year, with market-leading tabloids the Mirror and the Express running constant updates on her exploits. That light and breezy tone hides a seriousness of purpose: Morris provides a useful insight into the fleeting “importance” of these sensational stories, as well as reminding us of the unscrupulousness of journalists chasing the scoop that will render their competitors’ exclusives mundane.
It’s not exactly a startling revelation that the furore surrounding Cat Bin Lady, or John Terry’s extra-marital exploits, or Gamu Nhengu’s visa troubles, will eventually amount to nothing more than a trivial distraction (though not for those involved, obviously), but just as experiencing the accelerated churn of the news cycle on Twitter shows up the gadfly nature of the media’s attention span, it’s healthy to see the long view as well, and Morris has found the perfect example of a scandal that keeps on giving. As a welcome contrast to the nonsense we find ourselves transfixed by in recent times, it’s great to experience a truly novel tabloid story: there is no way I’m going to spoil any of the twists and turns of McKinney’s life. Suffice it to say, she is a fantastically engaging and amusing individual, and some of the oddest moments of her life happened more recently than you would think. I saw “better” movies at the festival, but Tabloid is almost certainly the most amusing and infectiously enjoyable, and watching it with such an appreciative audience was an early highlight.
We’re still going, even though my attention has been completely taken over by the London Film Festival (one film down so far! Gillian Wearing’s Self-Made, a fascinating experimental movie that explores the lines drawn between reality and fiction, emotional truth and manipulation, and the way we create the narratives of our own lives. Proper brain food). The shows here are the ones that started this year and generated the strongest responses in me. The three good shows are almost tied for Best New Show, but I had to make a decision, and I think the right one won out. It’s made me easily as happy as my favourite new show of last year (Sons of Anarchy, which had a second season that dwarfed the first: not an easy task), and has already become the show I would most miss if it were cancelled. The bad shows, on the other hand, made me livid. The visceral response I got from my least favourite new show of this year was actually scary.
Best New Show: Community
One consequence of watching more shows this year is that I ended up seeing many more good shows. And yes, many more bad ones too, but let’s accentuate the positive for a moment. The Golden Age of TV got significantly goldener this year, and even though we lost some great shows, we got many more back. For how long, we do not know. Justified and Spartacus are popular enough that they’ll be around for a while, as is the case with BBC’s Sherlock and Channel 4′s Misfits. Caprica looks doomed, sadly, with its recent return to Syfy being a bit of a ratings disaster. It’ll be a one season show unless it magically picks up, but I don’t see how that can happen. My favourite new show of the year, the one that just pips the other fantastic new offerings, is in a pickle. Is Community going to stick around? Will its average ratings be enough for a show-starved NBC to stick with it? Or is the mainstream critical apathy (as evidenced by a sickening Emmy shut-out) a sign that we won’t even get to see the main characters graduate?
At least Community has already had a better run than the Greatest Non-Picked-Up Pilot Of All Time, Dan Harmon’s infamous Heat Vision and Jack. We can be thankful for that, but for those of us who have fallen in love with Community‘s ability to be a sitcom, a spoof of the sitcom genre, a celebratory pop-culture melting-pot and — with the addition of superb commentaries from creator Harmon — a dissection of comedy and storytelling, the attentions of the Cancellation Bear are not welcome. Nevertheless, I suspect Community‘s greatest moment is yet to come, and it will keep gathering in-show momentum the same way 30 Rock has. That show started out wacky and has now become it’s own mini-universe, with its own laws and common elements. Watching first season episodes of that show is discombobulating now: it has turned up the volume on its comedic voice so much that the first eleven episodes look positively humdrum. That’s inevitable: perfect examples include The Simpsons, The Office, etc. 30 Rock showed there was a way to make sure this escalation of boldness didn’t alienate fans: start out weird. Of course, fans did eventually rebel, but it held that traditional rattle-throwing nonsense off for three seasons before everyone turned on it, which is ironic as season four of 30 Rock is arguably the strongest yet. My theory on that rift between show and audience is a post for another day…
I remembered Community‘s pilot as being very broad and unafraid to be quirky, but rewatching it this week (thanks to Daisyhellcakes’ super-thoughtful birthday present: the first season boxset with tons of great bells and whistles, boxset fans), it seemed so placid compared to what follows. What’s most notable about the triumphant first season of Community is that even as the comedy becomes crazier and bolder, the characters hold true throughout. The final episode’s bombshells with Jeff, Britta and Annie are proper WTF shockers that have an emotional punch, enough that some fans were outraged (those complaints were brilliantly answered in the superb season two opener, but we’re focusing on season one here).
A common complaint about Community is that it is all about the hipster sneering and not about people, but I think that’s the most wrong thing ever said on the Internet. The ENTIRE Internet, which was, at last count, 99.9999999999999% wrong. It’s so wrong it very nearly negates the concept of Truth with the gravitational strength of its inaccuracy. The characters are heightened, peculiar, set in a world that doesn’t quite work in our own, but they’re still people who want the things we want, and get hurt the way we do. Their ups and downs, discoveries and resolutions still mean something, even when we’re presented by insane paintball competitions run riot, a sports mascot that is the stuff of nightmares, or a chicken-fingers racket that plays out like the plot of Goodfellas (complete with Layla-piano-moment). The characters still speak to us, no matter what is going on. They’re the framework for the show, well-drawn enough to make it an essential watch. They’re recognisable but not cliched: they couldn’t be more different from the crude stereotypes of many sitcoms (e.g. Modern Family), and manage to be unpredictable but consistently written and performed.
Nevertheless, its the events that are placed on the character-frame that make me love Community as if it had been on the air for years. The joy of it is that you never know what is going to come next. The confidence of the showrunners is incredible. Most other sitcoms on TV either play it safe (e.g. Modern Family), or misjudge their own tone and stretch the credibility they have previously set up (e.g. The Office), but Community is perfectly constructed to allow for any oddness to come along. With such a diverse set of main characters you’re already able to spin out situations that you would never normally get on TV (e.g. a young Muslim man with Aspergers reconnecting with his father by manipulating two of his friends into acting like two uncaring parents and then making a terrible movie which turns out to be about his parents’ divorce), but even better there are a growing set of secondary characters to enjoy. The best example of that might be nervy, enthusiastic Dean Pelton, with his fear of being seen as politically incorrect. He’s one of the most enjoyable comic creations on TV in years: kudos to Jim Rash, who is magnificent in the role.
It’s obvious it isn’t for everyone: the weird war between Community‘s fans and Modern Family‘s fans shows that. But whereas Modern Family‘s fans might see their favoured show as a well-constructed gag machine based on a very specific sitcom template that has been a staple since the beginning of the form, Community takes that as a starting point and runs off in a completely different direction. It has the same sentimentality as Modern Family, but is not as cloying, and those moments are earned instead of introduced at the format-mandated moment because of Reason X. It manages to comment on who we are as a culture with a confidence and playfulness that Modern Family often cannot due to format and tonal restrictions. It looks fresh, going for cinematic confidence over the increasingly tired faux-documentary format. It speaks to those who revel in popular culture, instead of those who don’t have time for it.
It’s vibrant, imaginative, unpredictable, and buzzes with the sense that it is new, all while picking apart the format it has grown out of, adhering to its rules just enough to be able to break them where necessary. It’s the best new sitcom of the season, the best show of the season, and one of the cultural events of the past 12 months. I urge you all to watch it so my obsession doesn’t isolate me completely from polite society.
Best Pilot: Justified – Fire in the Hole
It’s almost a shame when a show has a really great pilot. Last year Kings started off so well that it could only disappoint after: the showrunners deserve praise for keeping that disappointment to a minimum, and delivering a show that was still superior to almost every other show on network TV. Justified landed with such a satisfying thump — with the mesmerising short story adaptation Fire in the Hole: have the short story on me and Harper Collins — that it was tempting to not bother watching the rest of the season just in case it ended up becoming a disappointment. Much of the Internet chatter following its broadcast became a debate about whether it would be a procedural or a serialised long-form narrative, as if this was the difference between good and bad.
As I’ve mentioned before, if it had become a procedural it would still have been great, as its main asset was the fealty to the sassy, laidback tone of Elmore Leonard’s best work, and its fascination both with the protagonist and his various nemeses. The pilot set up the show with impressive skill. Within three minutes of it starting, we’d seen Raylan Givens meet his arch-enemy, shoot him to death, and get transferred back home against his will in order to avoid retaliation from his enemy’ employers. That’s the set-up of the entire series right there: after that thrilling download of information — as elegant and exciting a burst of exposition as you’ll ever see — the rest of the pilot is about establishing the supporting cast (some of whom disappear a few episodes later) and giving you a sense of who this attractive gunslinger really is.
Part of the joy of the pilot is revelling in the perfect casting. Timothy Olyphant’s emergence as possibly the most charming man on TV — as opposed to one of the scariest, as seen in Deadwood – is one of the biggest factors in Justified‘s success, but we shouldn’t forget that he shares screentime with terrific character actors such as Nick Searcy and Natalie Zea, not to mention SoC favourite Walton “Shane from The Shield” Goggins, cementing his reputation as an acting colossus. Later episodes would feature performances from Alan Ruck, Rick Gomez, Jere Burns, M.C. Gainey, W. Earl Brown, and Raymond J. Barry, but the core cast was already strong. I’d like to add fellow “main” characters Tim Gutterson and Rachel Brooks (Jacob Pitts and Erica Tazel), but they have almost nothing to do after the pilot. Goes to show how drastically a show can change in mid-stream, though that fact doesn’t ruin the pilot: they’re introduced with the same deftness as everyone else, so it’s not as if any time was wasted.
The key to its success, though, was the effortless pacing. For much of its running time Fire In The Hole seems to be going nowhere, as Raylan catches up with figures from his past, getting into theological debates with Boyd Crowder and emitting TV-scorching sexual chemistry with childhood sweetheart Ava Crowder. Nevertheless, there is a constant stream of relevant information in every moment, but you don’t even notice it because of the snappy dialogue and mastery of tone. It’s shocking when these seemingly lackadaisical events coalesce into the last-act shoot-outs, but when they arrive they’re exciting, well-shot by director Michael Dinner, and cleverly reveal that these seemingly dopey Southern law enforcers are actually a band of badass warriors. Our preconceptions are brilliantly scuttled in a tense ambush in the final act, as Mullen and Brooks take down some neo-Nazis, giving Raylan a chance to save the girl who, of course, does a very good job of looking after herself most of the time.
The one big flaw of the pilot is that it looks like the denouement takes Goggins out of the show, but thankfully no. Biblical doofus Boyd Crowder, one of the most entertaining and ambiguous characters on TV right now, isn’t going anywhere. If only I’d known that when watching this exceptional pilot.
Most Surprising New Show: Spartacus: Blood and Sand
When I saw the first episode of S:B&S I thought I had found my new Torchwood. It was unhinged, silly, and unabashedly derivative. It seems disingenuous to refer to the 300-esque filming style as a “nod” to Snyder and Miller’s movie: the action scenes are a straight rip, along with the elements from Gladiator and any number of other sword-and-sandals epics. Its hilariously florid dialogue draws far too much attention to itself. It’s also so violent and pornographic (for a TV show) that it becomes self-parodic almost immediately, meaning it will either be your favourite thing about the show or the factor that turns you off it for good. The lead character is forced to become passive for a long time, which seems like an odd choice on a week-to-week basis. Some of the casting is questionable: I wonder how many viewers were shocked by the incredibly broad performance from Viva Bianca in the pilot, and then silenced by the subsequent full-frontal shot. Gotta give it up for Bianca: she makes one hell of an initial impact.
Going forth from this point I expected to be making fun of the show at length on this blog. Instead my new Torchwood turned out to be the BBC’s murder-melodrama Luther, while Spartacus gradually became my new obsession, a show often derided by those who dropped out early, before it became one of the best examples of long / short arc pacing in this golden age of TV. Spartacus is a machine, with plot elements fitting together like cogs and characters set up to deliver pleasing arc resolutions when the time is right. Too many shows this year got that timing wrong, waiting for their finales to show off their results of their calculations, with some shows — Heroes and FlashForward spring to mind — being nothing more than a long series of delaying tactics in order to get to the fireworks at the end. Spartacus eclipses them by hiding its workings so well that when the arcs and set-ups pay off, almost every time it features some surprise element that you hadn’t realised was there, though it makes perfect sense that it would. Characters are written well enough that they can spring out of the boxes you think they are in, with Illythia’s hidden madness and staggering ruthlessness being a perfect example.
The hysterical energy of the show is bound to turn off folks, and the shakier performances and insane declarations about Jupiter’s cock thrusting into poor Batiatus’ ass whenever he has a bit of bad luck are inevitably going to strike more delicate viewers as a bunch of silliness, but beneath the crazed visuals and high-pitched tone is some beautiful pacing. The result is a beautifully constructed narrative engine, something that has a satisfying purr when idling and a thrilling roar when pushed to its limits. Almost every episode could exist on its own with just a cursory “Previously” at the start and still provide an excellent hour of entertainment, but the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Former Mutant Enemy writer and show creator Steven S. DeKnight and his band of writers (which includes, at the start of the season, Andrew Chambliss and Tracy Bellomo of Dollhouse, and at the end of the season Daniel Knaupf of Carnivale) have taken great care to populate the central setting of Batiatus’ ludus with a cast of appealing characters whose close proximity allows for a web of interpersonal connections, both positive and negative, that are all doomed to go sour at exactly the right time.
The result is a series of plot twists, character revelations, and breathtaking action set-pieces that drove me screaming and cheering to the edge of my seat every week. It’s simultaneously sophisticated and low-brow, filled with fighting, fucking, and political intrigue — a perfect combination. From the fifth episode on — which ends with the stunning fight in which Spartacus and Crixus are forced to team up against the terrifying Theokoles — I became horribly obsessed. This paid off well, as the actors found their feet, the dialogue became a bit more restrained, and the ambition of the showrunners became apparent. By the time the blood-drenched and obscenely satisfying finale came around, I felt like declaring my love from the rooftops. Beyond that berserker madness, it’s the extreme effort to give the viewer a great time every week that gives me a sense of satisfaction I haven’t felt since Buffy or Angel in their heyday. I can think of no higher praise.
Worst New Show: Modern Family
Shades of Caruso tries to be as honest about its reactions to shows as possible, to approach things from a perspective of openness and acceptance, and not let other opinions get in the way. Sometimes this backfires: we’re finally getting around to watching The Wire after the rest of the TV-watching world did, and the fanaticism of its fans has inevitably had an influence on our experience. How we wish we could’ve seen it before being bombarded with the relentless cries of its fans. Try as we might, we are judging the show not on its own merits, but against the praise we’ve been exposed to for the past few years. Don’t get me wrong: it’s plainly obvious that it is a remarkable and ambitious show lovingly created by smart people, and we’re enjoying it immensely.
Regrettably, the endless praise may have had the unfortunate side-effect of making The Wire something we will admire but never really love. Still, we’re only one season in and that could change. Time will tell. The praise for Modern Family was not as intense as for The Wire, but it was just as one-note. By the time it had aired we’d had weeks of positive reviews from just about every critic around, and though I was sceptical about the showrunners’ previous work, the word on the street gave me hope. So what happened? Is my visceral reaction to the programme just a consequence of the notion that humour is subjective, and no one joke can make everyone laugh? It’s almost certainly a factor, but it’s more than thinking it’s not as funny as its fans maintain. I mean, I fucking hate this show. Real, actual HATE.
We haven’t experienced such a vast gulf between our opinion and that of critics since Studio 60 appeared, and that was a show that eventually alienated almost everyone. Even Dexter fans are a little weary of the show’s lack of emotional range after five seasons that are almost identical to each other, meaning I feel a little less alone in thinking it’s overrated trash. Modern Family appears to be the exception. It receives tongue-baths from seemingly everyone on a regular basis, as well as gaining viewers and winning awards that should be lavished upon shows like 30 Rock, Party Down, and my beloved Community. It’s on its way to becoming an institution, something as adored as Cheers or Friends. And yet, it is just unbearable. Who could’ve known that my Kryptonite would be an ostensibly modern, progressive sitcom featuring Ed O’Neill and Ty Burrell, two actors I’ve been fond of in the past?
And yet here we are. What is it about this farrago that makes my skin crawl? Not the progressive aspects of the show, or rather the progressive politics it pretends to honour. The loving gay couple of Cameron and Mitchell certainly do a lot of the things TV gay men do, such as mince, fret about furniture, and not kiss for a long long time (a situation that has finally been rectified and treated like an event when what we need to see on TV is a gay kiss that ISN’T an event). It also features a marriage between an old white patriarch and an immigrant, though luckily for the writers the wife is a hot and spicy Colombian who is just so sexy, what with her boobs and fiery demeanour and her hilarious mispronunciations. Oh how my soul withered when, during the pilot, she repeats Phil’s name as “Feel” and he thinks she is inviting him to grab her ample bosoms. This is the most celebrated sitcom of the year?
What else are we treated to? Clueless men and competent, disapproving women from the worst and most reductive dishwasher ads, hyper-smart and confident kids making fools of their parents, and a dad who thinks he’s hip and with it. It’s a standard, unimaginative and predictable multi-camera sitcom with one camera, no laugh-track, and a documentary format that never makes any sense. What’s worse than even the cobweb-coated jokes from the 90s is the acting: all of the jokes are telegraphed and accentuated by pauses that hint the show is being paced as if making room for audience laughter. Cue lots of mugging at the camera. Almost all of the cast — especially the kids — are so pleased with themselves that the air of smugness pouring out of them smothers any laughs that Burrell and O’Neill might muster. Each week it’s like watching 5 episodes of Scrubs simultaneously. That much mugging would set off a Geiger counter.
Worst of all, it is swamped in the most unconvincing sentimentality, robotically ending on group hugs, reconciliations and reassurances that only belong in snarky spoofs of the sitcom genre, yet played here as if its brand of laboratory-engineered Warmth™ is an insulation against criticism. Unfortunately the tone of obnoxious satisfaction makes every last-act burst of feel-good vibes feel as phony as the most cynical of churned-out mid-afternoon sitcom flotsam. Modern Family is treated like the future of comedy, but it feels like a slightly more ambitious version of According To Jim. For all its artificiality, it’s tempting to argue that Glee is more successful at creating an honest emotion onscreen. At least that can fall back on the occasional well-performed song (usually by the amazing Lea Michele). What does Modern Family have? Ty Burrell saying “What up, my homey?”, causing Julie Bowen to roll her eyes while Sofia Vergara natters on in the background, because you know those South Americans sure do talk fast!
Modern Family is the first programme I’ve had to stop watching so I can protect my health. I tried to stick it out, but once I got to the eleventh episode I could take it no more. Sitting through an entire episode made my stomach churn and my heart race. There was a strong possibility I would strain a muscle in my eyes from rolling them every time a lazily set-up gag would pay off in exactly the way you would expect. By the time I got to the end of that episode, I began to wonder if the show was made up of all the first draft jokes that had been deleted from the laptops of sitcom writers for the last fifteen years. Instead of being erased for good these comedy scraps found themselves beamed via delete-button into a humour-tesseract, an empty and endless and terrifying place. These jokes huddled together for warmth and companionship, and after a time realised the only way they could survive was to form themselves into a new sitcom. Filling out this miserable void, Modern Family became the most mundane universe imaginable, one in which the only effort you need to expend to fill the joke quota is to have a child act wise beyond their years, or make a dopey husband turn into a lascivious buffoon every time a vaguely attractive woman walks past him.
It’s obvious that a large proportion of the viewing public would love to live in that uninspiring world, but let’s be honest: these sitcom scraps have actually formed into a sentient blob of cloying death, a mediocre monster whose rictus grin of smug satisfaction generates pure anti-comedy. If only it could have stayed where it was, everything would be okay, but some cruel bastard cast a spell of awful Eldritch sorcery, creating a bridge between our world and the squirming black pit where lazy comedy goes to die, giving the Bastard Spawn of a Million Failed Jokes a way out of the Hell it should have stayed in. Now it squats on the highest peaks of the TV landscape, fat and tentacled like Lovecraft’s Ghatanothoa, driving anyone who sees it insane: an unusual form of insanity that manifests as a compulsion to babble incoherent streams of exaggerated praise.
The only way to kill it is to stop looking at it, to deny it the “eyeballs” that sustain it. Quick, everyone! Delete it from your TiVo or Sky+ machine! Turn over! Buy a Community boxset! Watch your old Arrested Development DVDs! Buy some 30 Rock merchandise, before it’s too late and its Elder God brethren infest the Earth!
Worst Pilot: V – “Pilot”
Yes, the pilot of V is called “Pilot”, and not “The Arrival” or “When The Big Ships Came” or “Someone Save Elizabeth Mitchell From This Farrago Because She So Fine”. V is so half-arsed that no aspect of it appears to have been thought through with any care. Every character, line, situation has been seen somewhere else, not just in the original series. It’s the worst kind of committee-written show, formulaic and unimaginative and built only to soothe the audience instead of challenging them. The entire show is like that, but it’s not like we weren’t warned. The pilot contained no energy, no sense that there would be any surprises down the road. It mechanically introduced a main cast of ciphers, added a quick plane crash so that the trailers would look a bit more exciting, and that was that. Cue 45 minutes of entirely predictable drama. It’s no wonder it was developed during the writers’ strike: the sense you get is that the showrunners just chopped up a bunch of other average scripts, threw them on the floor, and made the show out of that.
Nevertheless, there were two things about this pilot that made it just a little bit more hateful just to separate it from the many other ill-conceived first episodes broadcast last year. Firstly, it blatantly panders to the nerd demographic by casting Lost‘s Elizabeth Mitchell, The 4400‘s Joel Gretsch, and Firefly‘s Morena Baccarin and Alan Tudyk in major roles. Fair enough if you’re trying to attract those nerd eyeballs to your show, but they get very little to do. All of them (except maybe super-earnest Gretsch) are better than the material — one of the few surprises of the season was seeing the often bland Baccarin bring so much wacky energy to her part — which is more likely to annoy the nerds than please them. It merely serves to remind us of how much better those other shows were than this lowest-common denominator tripe.
Even worse is the Tea Party politics seen early on in the series, and at its worst here. Evil alien Anna gives Obama-lite speeches about change and inclusiveness, hiding her true lizard nature behind a messianic and benign face. Her message is so persuasive that even the clergy are converted to the V’s cause, and the pilot tries so hard to make the point that stupid gullible people are falling for a false prophet (just like the Dummycraps!) that it doesn’t even bother with the slowburn of the original mini-series. We go from alien arrival to global acceptance to Tea-Party resistance in the space of a single episode. Because that’s what happened with all the politics in America! You stupid bastards, don’t you understand? While you drink the Soma Juice this country is going to hell in a handcart. Only Sarah Palin and her Big Fucking Gun can save us from the Arcturan Reptiloids laying their eggs in the United Nations prayer rooms! Etc.
It’s a David Icke wet dream, and even worse than that appalling right-wing message and the insane pandering to the most unhinged of conspiracy theorists is that the show eventually ejects that aspect of it, and becomes nothing more than a tedious slog. Yes, I found the politics of the pilot to be objectionable, but there’s room to work with those ideas, perhaps even satirise them. After four episodes the show was taken off the air and tinkered with: how much funnier and more relevant could it have been if the show were used to satirise the wingnut side of American politics, or even make fun of the Obama administration from a position of sly knowingness, rather than that initial knee-jerk hostility? Instead we got a nasty pilot and a boring show, one that should have been cancelled in order to save the daft but marginally superior FlashForward.
It’s a decision that ABC must assume is pretty innocuous (or maybe lucrative), but the toll it will take on our cultural history is immeasurable. It’s as if ABC — the network that gave us Modern Family, Happy Town, and this debacle — is trying to ruin popular culture for all of us. Our collective unconscious has been irreparably tainted by this network. It would’ve been better if they’d put Leno on every night. If I were a more arrogant man I’d think they were single-handedly trying to make me give up TV by hurling so much shit at me, but little do they realise how stubborn I am. Even when I’m coated from head-to-toe in network-poop, I’ll still be watching their crummy shows. Except Modern Family. That show gave my soul a hernia.
And there’s still more to come. What! I watched 30-odd goddamn shows! I had a lot of thoughts while watching them and nowhere to put them except here! Even Twitter wasn’t interested.
Though I’ve lived in London for a decade, it was only this year that I finally joined the BFI and made an effort to attend the London Film Festival. Even when a colleague saw the original cut of Miike’s Ichii The Killer (which he maintains is far superior to the really quite tedious UK cut included on this DVD), I was not compelled to try. If the giddy joy I experienced this year is anything to go by, mark me down as a fool for not trying earlier. I’ve not been this excited about a cultural event since 2000, when Scott Walker’s Meltdown festival on London’s Southbank featured Smog, Jim O’Rourke, Elliott Smith, Jarvis Cocker, and the unforgettable Fuckhead, all in the same week.
Perhaps I’m most excited as the movies I saw were, for the most part, extremely good, not to mention impossible to see in the UK any time soon. Enter The Void, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, Les regrets, White Material, Extract, Metropia and Valhalla Rising don’t have release dates yet, and some of the others are coming out slowly. The Men Who Stare At Goats is out now, with The Informant!, Un prophète, We Live in Public, and Up In The Air rolling out over the next couple of months. Getting a jump on some of these was essential, as I plan to spend the rest of the year catching up with as many movies as possible before the traditional end of year Shades of Caruso Listmania! event happens. At the moment I think I have my top ten sorted, though there are still a couple of yet-to-be-released films that could crack the list. We shall see.
There’s no doubt in my mind that Jacques Audiard’s Un prophète is on my list. Newcomer Tahar Rahim — in one of the performances of the year — plays Malik El Djebena, an Arabic youth with a troubled past who is sent to prison for six years after assaulting a police officer. Though he is intent on keeping his head down, Malik’s stay is complicated by the arrival of an Arab prisoner (Reyeb – Hichem Yacoubi) who is to testify against Corsican gangster César Luciani (played like a kind of corpulent and manipulative spider/crook hybrid by the amazing Niels Arestrup). The Godfather-esque crime boss cannot approach Reyeb, who is surrounded by Arab prisoners, and so enlists Malik upon pain of death. The young boy has no choice but to kill Reyeb, leading to his estrangement from his brethren. Even worse, he is treated like a servant by the Corsican gang. Humiliated, powerless, and haunted by the murder he has committed, Malik begins to plan his revenge, but first he must better himself, consolidating allies and resources during his six year sentence.
After I stumbled from the screening, my jaw scraping along the floor like a broken fender, I found it impossible not to compare Un prophète to De Palma’s Scarface, but please don’t take that as a comment on the quality of Audiard’s film. Even as a fan of early career De Palma, the appeal of Scarface has baffled me for decades — it has struck me as one of his most misjudged films, half deathly serious cautionary tale, half gaudy semi-parodic nonsense. The one or two good setpieces are surrounded by kitsch, madness, and a horribly pitched central performance from some kind of demon who resembles mid-80s Al Pacino but can’t possibly be him because that kind of roaring caricature didn’t show up in his filmography until the 90s. If it was a demon taking Al Pacino’s place in Scarface, I reckon the name of the demon is Hooahhh, and is a distant relative of Pazuzu.
Nevertheless, the similarities are there. Tony Montana and Malik El Djebena are immigrants who fall foul of the law and find their calling while in “prison” (actual for Malik, symbolic for Montana, who is kept in a camp for Cuban immigrants with criminal backgrounds in Florida). They both kill to get out of their tough situation, and undergo baptisms of blood (Montana in the notorious chainsaw scene, Malik in the soon-to-be-notorious razorblade seduction scene). They start off as enforcers but climb their way to the top using ruthlessness, opportunism, and pluck. There is even a straight homage later in the film, as Malik and his colleague Ryad are given the job of eliminating an associate of Luciani, a job which begins to go wrong almost immediately and ends with Malik taking matters into his own hands. Compare this to a similar scene in Scarface as Montana resists killing a Bolivian anti-government activist with a bomb. Despite being shot in similar styles, there are deviations. Malik’s decisions don’t doom him the way they do Montana, and both films have very different endings: there is no “Say hello to my leetle fren!” craziness in Un prophète. The most dramatic and satisfying moment in the final act is played out silently, and manages to be even more emotionally resonant than Montana’s final stand.
Audiard’s style couldn’t be further from De Palma’s, yet he generates far more cumulative power and tension through careful use of pace and composition. His only concession to stylistic excess comes with Malik’s dreams/hallucinations, as he is visited and advised by the ghost of Reyeb, who gives him glimpses of the future that, at least once, save his life. The fantastical touches are scattered so lightly through the film that they barely register. Compare that to De Palma’s near-insane overkill, all long takes, flashy Hitchcock references, and crash-zooming. In many of his other movies that’s just fine, but Scarface always looked like a red-tinged mess, and now — when compared to the spartan aesthetic of Audiard’s instant classic — it looks even sillier.
Plus, while De Palma and writer Oliver Stone liked to play up Scarface‘s depiction of the American Dream gone awry in an attempt to add inject profundity into what would be more acceptable as an out-and-out exploitation flick, Audiard and his co-screenwriters (Thomas Bidegain, Abdel Raouf Dafri and Nicolas Peufaillit) touch on enough uncomfortable aspects of modern French life that — as Dafri explained prior to the screening — many politicians have used the movie to score points against their opponents. French prisons are notoriously overcrowded, and relations between French natives and Islamic immigrants are fractious, so a movie which deals so frankly with both issues is bound to be explosive. No matter how much Audiard protests that his movie has no message, the backdrop of his crime drama is portrayed vividly enough that it’s hard not to take the film as an indictment of the system as it stands. Scarface‘s message about the corrupting effect of greed on the human soul was crushed under tons of tacky sludge, and amounts to little. Here, Audiard tells the story of one young man bettering himself (at the expense of others, sadly), and speaks volumes about contemporary racial and economic politics in Europe. Everyone who adores De Palma’s movie should do everything they can to check out Un prophète, because this is how it’s done.
Attending so many movies in such a short space of time left me greatly fatigued and mildly ill. Like some kind of Vitamin B injection, Audiard’s crime thriller gave me a burst of energy that lasted until I saw Cédric Kahn’s Les regrets. Kahn was responsible for L’ennui,one of my favourite films about sexual obsession. Adapted from a novel by Alberto Moravio, L’ennui depicts a philosophy teacher (Charles Berling) who falls for a young woman (Sophie Guillemin) to such an extent that his life falls apart as he pursues her, oblivious to her dark past. His efforts to stalk her and keep her interested in him become frantic, though as the object of his desire seems utterly unmoved by his devotion, there is a poignancy there too. It’s a memorable portrait of a man made into a fool by his desire.
Sadly, Les regrets feels like a retread of the same themes. Whereas the earlier film is an adaptation, here Kahn directs his own screenplay. Architect Mathieu (Yvan Attal) returns to his childhood home while visiting his dying mother, and accidentally encounters the former love of his life, Maya, played by Valeria Bruni Tedeschi (who spookily resembles Virginia Madsen). Though married to another architect with whom he owns a small company, Mathieu is compelled to sleep with Maya in an attempt to make right what once went wrong. At first Mathieu seems to be fighting against his urges, but it’s not long before his desire for Maya takes control of him, and he jeopardises his marriage and his career. Maya is similarly afflicted, unable to resist her attraction to her former lover, until eventually she realises that Mathieu’s obsession will destroy both of their lives. Though she recovers a little, Mathieu is too far gone, and his actions doom him.
Les regrets is not without its pleasures. The three leads — Attal, Bruni Tedeschi, and Arly Jover as Mathieu’s neglected wife Lisa — are all wonderful, balancing on a line between absurdity and pathos with skill. Several scenes are simultaneously farcical and gutwrenching, with Mathieu and Maya racing around France to grab brief moments together, their desperate lovemaking becoming more passionate but less intimate. Late in the film Mathieu finally meets Maya’s daughter — a figure who has been mentioned but never seen — and yet this sobering collision does nothing to stop him, so determined is he to reclaim Maya’s love. Those regrets, those lost years, drive both characters to self-destructive lengths, and every so often Kahn captures a moment of panic or lust that perfectly reflects that experience and our own desire to turn back the clock and make things right with those we once loved, all while satirising the awful selfishness of these middle-class idiots who only occasionally give a damn about anyone else in their lives. The final ambiguous scene is especially damning.
Nevertheless, this feels more like a variation on a theme than a movie on its own, and as I’ve only seen once of Kahn’s movies it was especially disappointing. Perhaps if I had seen one of his thrillers (Roberto Succo or Feux rouges) this similarity would have seemed less bothersome, and certainly the stakes aren’t as high as in L’ennui, but the scenes of Attal and Bruni Tedeschi racing around to arrange one of their trysts were too familiar. Plus, I’m sure Kahn intended to make his protagonists so unlikeable, but for much of the movie the tone wavers between romantic tragedy and satire. Daisyhellcakes is convinced the movie is making fun of French erotic cinema, right down to the stolen moments of passion, the agonising and sub-poetic exhortations of love, and the overheated final act with characters passing out from stress and exploding with erotic rage. It certainly has its share of funny moments, but as a cultural visitor and heathen with only a passing knowledge of French cinema, I can’t help but feel that I was laughing at the tragedy and feeling empathy during the comedy.
These reservations are, of course, entirely subjective. Consider Les regrets recommended, especially if you’ve not yet seen L’ennui, though I’d say that’s still the superior movie. Of course, similarity to other films isn’t really a killing blow. There was one other film we saw that was heavily indebted to another, but this film was inspired enough to add iguanas, abuse of the elderly, and an uncanny — and entirely random — impression of Ed Sullivan. More to follow…
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.
