Listmania ’12! Miscellaneous Movie Observations: Part Two

Posted on January 18, 2013 by admiralneck

I’m coming to the end of this latest round of reviews, though this post is less objective than the others I’ve written — quite an achievement considering how often I forcefully insert myself into these rambling monologues. This will inevitably strike many people as being obnoxiously reflective; narcissistic, even. Even though I aspire to keep myself out of these reviews — and fail utterly — this will have to be self-referential to the point of sounding like a diary entry. Forgive me, but sometimes my reactions to movies cannot just be reduced to whether I liked the photography or not. Sometimes they reveal things about myself as all good — or bad — art will, and to explain why this is the case I have to spend ::checks word count:: 5200 words talking about that least interesting of subjects: me. If that sounds like a slog, feel free to skip this. But I’m compelled to explain why 2012 was almost the year I left the internet for good, and what brought me back from the brink.

Biggest Gulf Between Critical Opinion and My Own Reaction of the Year: Amour

Lauded by most as a masterpiece, Michael Haneke’s sober depiction of the end of a relationship is certainly intelligent and powerfully wrought, but Amour left me unexpectedly cold. Considering how pretty much everyone else found it painfully moving — almost too much so — this perplexed me and made me wonder, as such things often do, if I was watching it wrong, or if I’m emotionally immature, or merely ignorant of some aspect of Haneke’s artistry. The latter may well be true; I’ve only seen Cache and thought it was a superb thriller, but this restricted awareness of his themes meant that the only thing that struck me as being “classic” Haneke, other than the stark production design and precise compositions — ten points to ace cinematographer Darius Khondji — were the hints that love is as much a corrupting influence on a person as it is a thing of wonder.

There were merely flashes of this, enough that I picked up on it but only in the sense that it gave me a misleading idea of where Haneke was going to take us. It ends with a shocking act that made me gasp, but even that didn’t cut to the core of me. Of course that’s not to say that the film ends with a decisive act that must affect all who see it, but consider this: I’m very very very very very very sensitive to tales of the inevitable unhappy resolution to even the longest-lasting relationships. There are two things that will make me cry within an instant of reflecting on them; animals being unaware of the deaths of their owners and searching / waiting for them (I refuse to watch Hachi: A Dog’s Tale), and the emotional devastation caused by the loss of a long-loved partner. I can’t listen to The Luckiest by Ben Folds, or I Will Follow You Into The Dark by Death Cab For Cutie without instantly breaking down.

You can imagine what the opening scene of Up did to me. I cried like I was suffering a seizure. However, when trying to figure out why Amour failed to do anything other than hold my attention for two hours (oh how disappointing, I was riveted by a film but didn’t have a nervous breakdown midway through, it must have been TERRIBLE), it was Up that I returned to. That did as good a job as Amour of giving us a window into a realistic relationship, of making us feel like we had a good idea of how much these characters loved each other, to the point that we want nothing more than for them to prevail, with bonus points to Up for doing so in such a short space of time. It’s a rare thing to be able to convey that depth of emotion compellingly and believably, so full marks to both movies for that.

And yet I’d take Up over Amour any day of the week, and not just because Pete Docter’s movie features far more talking dogs, chattery birds and zeppelins piloted by an evil amalgam of Kirk Douglas and Christopher Plummer than Haneke’s movie (though Amour does have a Pigeon Of Great Metaphorical Significance, which counts for something). The key difference, of course, is that the tragic death of a loved one is the inciting incident in Up, and the culmination of a film’s worth of slow, grinding pain in Amour. Which is fine. Both stories are perfectly valid, and both Docter and Haneke deserve all the critical plaudits they have received for their incredible work in these movies. No wonder audiences react so strongly to both stories, when they’re told with such skill.

But only one made me feel alive, made me run through a spectrum of emotions both good and bad, and told a story that chimed with me, and that’s the one with the balloons. Because no matter how skillful Haneke was, no matter how intelligent his approach, his story is basically “In a relationship in which two people love each other a lot, and one gets ill, the other will have to make a terrible sacrifice to bring peace to both of them.” Which is a good story, and done without flinching, even when it comes to its wrenching denouement. But Up‘s story is “Even the most awful ending can be the beginning of something wonderful”. More sentimental? Maybe so, though I think Docter does a damn good job in subverting easy emotional uplift, avoiding any kind of gloopy manipulation and creating something admirably level-headed, and more importantly this message is just as valid as the other one. Docter isn’t lying to the audience; he’s doing them a favour in pointing this out in vibrant, emotionally-honest style.

However I’m not going to find Haneke’s downbeat story anywhere near as compelling as Docter’s because I run through the bad scenario in my head literally every day, sometimes over and over again. I hear people hail Haneke’s courage in tackling this story in such a full-on way, that he is a brave soul for looking at our inevitably miserable and tortured final days with confidence, and yeah, compared to the rest of the output of all the film industries in the world, he’s achieved a minor miracle in getting it made and holding to his vision, with all of the ugliness and wonder and even more ugliness that is necessary to maintain his point’s integrity. But in the case of adding new thoughts to my head, this didn’t do it. I agonise over this scenario. I constantly have multiple panic attacks over it, day in and day out, and have done for decades. Seeing Amour was like returning to the office five minutes after I clocked off, and so all I experienced was a movie that told me, “you’re right, your life is going to end and end badly. You’re right to panic about it.”

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a big boy. I know that life is a mix of wonder and horror. I can look at it and recognise it and occasionally even expand my awareness of it enough to feel a soul-deadening sense of paralysing existential dread all on my own, and when a work of art approaches that kind of terrifying power I can embrace it, even absorb it whole and keep it within me. I’m not afraid of that, and I don’t need fluffy palliative art to make the pain go away (well, okay, I do very occasionally, but most of the time I’m cool). But Up‘s message, that in life there are multiple endings and as many beginnings, that there is an alternative to the terror of oblivion, that there are enough years to find new wonders; that’s not something that I think very often. Up made me happy to be alive. Amour didn’t even tell me anything I didn’t already know. It just told me an obvious truth; a truth beautifully and sensitively rendered, but still a truth that I experienced with a shrug of bored recognition.

So basically I’m massively jaded. And I’m sure it could be said that loving Up‘s positive message over Amour‘s negative one is evidence that I am looking for solace. Fine, okay. But I’ll always respond to tales of the fight against nothingness (Up, The Grey) or the existence of some form of continuity of existence (Cloud Atlas, Enter The Void) with gratitude, because I’m under no illusion that horrible things await me. However, I’d argue that to start in a place of grieving terror at the worthlessness of it all and still tell a story offering a hope that’s smartly delivered, that’s not the easy consolatory message of Hallmark-level entertainment, that can look the horror of existence full in the face and still say, “I don’t think so, buster,” is actually harder to pull off than to just wallow in misery, even when the level of artistry involved in doing so is of such a high standard. In other words, while you’re crying at the incredible performances by Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintingnant, I’ll be over here watching Liam Neeson taping broken bottles to his knuckles, thanks.

Film I Never Ever Ever Want To Fucking Talk About Ever Again: Prometheus

While Amour has generated very little in the way of debate — I’ve only seen one or two other people online who were similarly less-than-amazed by Haneke’s film — other movies have created a firestorm of passionate discourse. None moreso than Sir Ridley of Scott’s Prometheus, which was bafflingly expected to be some kind of sci-fi masterpiece right out of the gate, if some speculation was to be believed. The reaction against it was swift and unpleasant, meaning I couldn’t help but see it through a lens of expectation; will this really be the most appalling insult to the hearts and souls of the nerd culture that I have heard it is? My initial feelings were inevitably reactive, leading to this epic post which, I have to say, was the best thing to come out of watching Prometheus. It has led to me meeting and talking to a lot of very cool people, for which I’m eternally grateful.

There is inevitably a downside to this. In the weeks after Prometheus was released, online opinion seemed to become set in stone, with an overwhelming majority of people coming out in frothing hatred, while we few, we happy few, we band of brothers who admitted it wasn’t perfect but was worthy of attention beyond the relentless derision it inspired… well, we fought our corner as best we could, but all this did was ossify opinion on either side, leading to endless pointless arguments in which “mistakes” in the film were cited without reflection — as I said in my review, many of the things listed as errors are thematically consistent; thankfully I’ve seen a few others pick up on this as well– and those of us willing to give it a chance are dismissed outright.

Boo hoo, right? Poor Admiral Neck done got into an argument or two. Well, yes, but that’s not the problem. The discussions I’ve had about it have been, for the most part, quite civil and jocular; in fact as I write this another one has sprung up on Twitter. It’s been going on for about 9 hours now, meaning this post — which should have been finished this morning — is only now being completed, hours after I left in despair. Now, I’m extremely fond of all of the people involved in this discussion, and all of the other discussions I’ve participated in, so I’m not referring to any well-liked friends-of-the-blog when I say this, but after nearly seven months of seeing Prometheus referred to by numerous unknown film fans as an absolutely, undeniably, transparently awful and disastrous failure and Exhibit A in the case against the quality of cinema in 2012, I must declare BASTA! ENOUGH! I DON’T WANT TO ARGUE ABOUT PROMETHEUS EVER A-FUCKING-GAIN!

What broke me? I can’t pinpoint the moment, but I know I lasted longer than Anne Billson, who tweeted a while back that she was done with the relentless negativity about it, especially as she had quite liked it, again with the reservations we all had. I feel much the same way, finding myself constantly on the defensive about a film I think was merely okay. This is the crux of my problem, and why I’ve found myself as annoyed as I seem to be about this and not, say, The Dark Knight Rises or Django Unchained or Zero Dark Thirty, all films which have generated a ton of online conjecture, some of which I agree with and some of which I think misses various important points. The problem with Prometheus is that those who dislike it think it’s not just flawed but actually moronic and genuinely, indefensibly awful, and so to praise it for any reason is to seem similarly stupid.

You can see why this is a problem. Prometheus has generated a tidal wave of disgusted opprobrium from a large percentage of the people who watched it, more so than any other film I can think of this year, and that’s a consequence of its origins as a “prequel” to one of the most beloved film franchises of all time, made by the man who started it off. Unlike any other franchise this year, its success or failure would inevitably be compared to the success of the original Alien, a film that helped change the way films were conceived and made, a cultural artifact of immeasurable influence and importance. If Prometheus wasn’t 2001 x Dark Star x Halloween x Star Wars it was pretty much fucked, and when we got a bit of a misfire with some unexpected narrative choices, a lot of people turned their backs on it without a second thought. This wasn’t just a movie that was arguably good or bad; this was the worst and most catastrophic failure in the history of popular cinema, proof that classical filmmaking was gone forever, the nail in the coffin of an entire cinematic genre. Pack up your things, sci-fi. George Lucas stabbed you in the back and Ridley Scott finished you off.

Except it’s not anywhere near that bad, and I reckon those of us who have rallied around it are just trying to say look, give it another chance. There are things that can be salvaged from this movie if you’ll just let us explain why we think it has some interesting ideas. The last seven months has taught me that this is a fool’s errand, and the biggest casualty here won’t be the hours wasted in trying to make a case for this movie as Not As Stupid As Alien Vs. Predator (a truly worthless, franchise-ruining calamity of a film that generated a fraction of the loathing that Prometheus did, amazingly enough). The casualty will be the online reputations of those who dare to speak up. Admittedly this is not that big a deal, but all we have online is our reputation, and if you acquire the stink of worthlessness or cluelessness, it follows you around.

If the first thing you hear from me is that I quite liked Prometheus, and you hate it as much as many seem to, then you’re going to think that there’s something wrong with my brain. Among a significant proportion of the online film fan community, there is NO DOUBT that Prometheus is Plan 9-level awful, and to say that it has any kind of merit is not to have spotted a wrinkle that some might have missed, or to have a viewpoint that might shed positive light on choices made by the filmmakers that seem to be risible, but is evidence of a failure of critical thinking, or that one is ignorant of film lore; an unfortunate trend in a lot of online criticism recently which suggests that contravention of some unspoken set of artistic rules is enough to consign a movie to The Hell Of A Million Snarky Jokes, and ignorance of such rules means you shouldn’t be allowed to even talk about such matters.

Disclaimer: I have a very strict policy of not allowing insulting comments to get onto the site, mostly because letting them through means I kinda have to engage with them or they’ll just sit there like I’ve accepted them as fact, and time and time again, especially in the case of contentious nerd-bait subjects like Prometheus, BSG or Lost there is very little chance that I’m going to find common ground with someone anonymously telling me to go fuck myself. I regret this now for many reasons, but mostly because I’d love to link to the amazing comment I got under that Prometheus review by someone so incensed by the existence of this film and my defence that he or she wrote something like 5000 words (or, more accurately, cut-and-pasted 5000 words from their own takedown of Prometheus), impolitely telling me I shouldn’t be allowed to talk about films. This isn’t the first time I’ve heard this, and it’s not like I was upset. It was too ridiculous and hilariously unhinged to be offended by.

But I didn’t let it through because by that point, and doubly so now, I’ve found there is nothing to be gained by sticking up for Prometheus. And that made me think that there’s nothing to be gained by talking about films in any capacity. I’m talking about not engaging on Twitter, not reading any reviews even by people I admire, and certainly not writing about films on here. Not because one comment got to me, but because seven months of this circular, combative chatter, much of which was spent merely repeating obnoxious, petty criticisms instead of bringing anything new to the conversation, felt like 150 years of screaming war, and it wearied me so completely, and put me off engaging with strangers — and occasionally friends — so much, that the grand experiment of online discourse as a way to meet like-minded people seemed like it would ultimately prove to be a waste of time. I might have met some cool new people who have agreed with me, but eventually we’re just going to disagree on something else and if the Saga of Prometheus is any indication, these differences of opinion might prove to be insurmountable, and could well jeopardise our nascent friendship, just like the incessant quibbling over Prometheus‘ flaws has threatened to. It’s no coincidence that since writing that review, and meeting a ton of great new people, I’ve nevertheless considered quitting online interaction about once every two weeks.

So I’ve got a bad case of whiny butthurt. Poor me, I didn’t change the world with my groundbreaking views on a movie based on Erich Von Daniken’s own-brand daftness. Honestly I didn’t expect to, but if ever I felt a sense that this blog was a waste of time, it was this year. It’s not just Prometheus; it’s the whole damn thing. People breeze in and out of your online life, attracted by an RT from a friend but so disgusted by your apparent stupidity that they have to tell you this immediately, because to keep such an ultimately useless thought to oneself is unacceptable. A couple of times this year I’ve been RTd by celebrities (fortuitous and accidental events every time), and the result is random abuse from strangers who object to… fuck, I don’t know. Just things. And this is a fraction of what those celebrities experience every day. I can’t imagine what it would be like to endure that, because I despair at the slightest point-missing stupidity, and a sustained blast of that from dawn ’til dusk would make me throw my laptop onto a skip.

Maybe it’s just this one film. Maybe I can sacrifice it, just forget about it and think of it as the dangerous place on the map. Here Be Dragons, the forbidden land which holds only misery for those who trespass. Perhaps I can live with that. I don’t love Prometheus anywhere near as much as the many other derided genre films that I’ve tried to defend in the past, like Speed Racer or Enter The Void or John Carter. The problem here is that it’s never going to be just one film, that I can ringfence Prometheus but some other unexpectedly inflammatory opinion is going to come up again, and I’m going to have to face those fleeting disparagements. How offputting is the knowledge that by sticking my neck out this blog risks becoming a pariah within this community, the equivalent of the house on the street that the kids love to TP because the person who lives there is some unapproachable weirdo. Maybe I should just give it up altogether. Maybe I should, in the words of Corporal Hicks, nuke the site from orbit; it’s the only way to be sure.

And yet… and yet…

Film That Might Just Show Me The Way To A Better Online Life: Looper

As I’ve said a number of times in my last ten or so posts, this year has been one of baffling frustration. A series of highly-anticipated films left me feeling disappointed and annoyed, emotions placed in stark contrast with the utterly uncomplicated joy provided by The Avengers, which was as pure a hit of euphoric pleasure as I’ve ever had in a cinema. Compared to that, the bursts of pleasure I anticipated from everything else has been stymied, and little has truly surprised me other than Wolf Children and a couple of others. Even genre films I thought would be slamdunks — The Raid, Dredd, Skyfall, The Hunger Games — were close-calls that would have made me happy any other year but, this time around, just didn’t slake my thirst for cinematic satisfaction.

Looper was the worst offender. Watching it on opening night was even more exasperating than my first viewing of Dredd or The Raid — why is this movie not sending me sky-rocketing into the air with joy? — and as infuriating as my first crack at Skyfall — not only did I miss the first few minutes because someone working at Odeon Swiss Cottage inexplicably and incorrectly told me the film was starting ten minutes after it actually began, but a woman sitting six rows behind us translated every line in the movie into Cantonese for her mother; Skyfall was ruined by sitting in a roomful of drunk and bored idiots with tiny bladders, not to mention kids who couldn’t figure out why there was so much talking instead of the shooting they’d been promised. Was this why I didn’t respond to Looper the same way everyone else did?

Over the last week I’ve been chatting with ace critic and all-round top chap Nathan Ditum about Looper, which he loves with a terrifying and persuasive intensity. This was the reaction I expected to have; I love the time travel genre like no other, it stars a number of my favourite actors (and Paul Dano), it’s made by an artist I think is touched by the hand of genius — my love of The Brothers Bloom often feels like a lonely cry in the wild — and who does things with the camera that no one else has even considered before & always, always pulls it off even though by all the laws of filmmaking he shouldn’t. He’s the anti-Tom Hooper, pretty much. All of this is why my grudging acceptance of the movie made me so annoyed.

Nathan gave me a passionate rundown of everything he thought Looper did right, and I responded by talking about the things that left me cold — mostly my frustrations with the way Rian Johnson keeps the mechanics of the time-travel rules unclear in order to give himself room to manoevre on an emotional level, and how this meant that the central conflict between the two Joes didn’t hit me as hard as it could have. Old Joe’s need to find and kill the Rainmaker only really works in the abstract, as his explanations of why this all-powerful and terrifying force is something to be feared made me wonder if maybe he was in the right. Of course this is a terrible thing to think, but if all we have to go on are the vague descriptions in Johnson’s script, all of which are done to keep the time travel conceit working, then it’s impossible to fully side with either Joe.

This wasn’t the only thing that bothered me; the drop in energy in the second half frustrated me, I found the child distracting and overwhelmingly horrible (thus skewing my feelings about his survival even more), and the inclusion of two disparate SF concepts in one film — time travel and telekinesis — felt clunky, a choice that felt like it was made only for the sake of adding spectacle and danger to the plot. If the emergence of TK had been linked to the beginning of the time loops, using even awful ST:TNG technobabble, I’d have bought it immediately. Merely adding TK so the film could have an Akira-esque telekinetic antagonist is not really that bad, but it felt like an arbitrary and pandering inclusion, instead of an essential element without which this fictional world would have collapsed.

All of these things could be filed under “nitpicking” (thanks to the ever-excellent Sam Binnie for giving me the heads-up on this Film Crit Hulk article), much like many of the criticisms leveled at Prometheus are almost comically trivial and tend only to be employed to bolster the argument that it is inherently worthless, but at least some of these criticisms feel like valid explanations for why I wasn’t as moved by Looper in the way I’d expected. The power of the story is blunted by these choices, especially the time travel rules one. I will happily admit I’m anal about time travel, thinking only Primer and Lost (and maybe Back To The Future 2) have told stories that adhere to believable time travel mechanics, and my hopes for Looper were raised sky-high when I heard Shane Carruth helped Johnson out.

And yet even if I drop my usual fixation on temporal, causal rigour, I still have to take an intellectual leap to swallow some of the motivations here. I don’t feel Old Joe’s pain in my gut; I have to use maths to get there, and this is going to take me out of the film no matter how good Bruce Willis is at depicting the regret and sadness of the aging assassin. I was already thinking hard all the way through, constantly checking my reaction to the film to see if I was having a good time, and then analysing every element in the film to figure out why it wasn’t giving me the uplift I had expected. As I said to Nathan, I had hoped this would slip down like a cool drink of water on a hot day, but I ended up spilling most of it before I got the glass to my mouth.

There’s the rub. After this conversation (not included here because it was quite long and I don’t have Nathan’s permission), I’ve come to realise I am overthinking it, especially as we found much common-ground regarding the brilliant use of the two Joes to dramatise the generation gap, with young and impetuous Young Joe learning to grow and take responsibility after coming up against the mournful Old Joe who is willing to do awful things to save the things he has lost as a result of his earlier poor judgements. The nebulousness of Johnson’s time-travel rules irked me then, but the more I talked about it with Nathan (and others on Twitter and Letterboxd) have made me think I’m being too hard on it, that if I’d just rolled with it I would have experienced something of great power instead of finicky complication. That intellectual leap was unnecessary on the day; I should have had faith in Johnson.

In much the same way that everyone should have more faith in Ridley Scott and Damon Lindelof. Both men were set up for a fall with Prometheus. Fans of Alien were sceptical of the old man’s abilities, even though in recent years he’s given us Black Hawk Down and Kingdom of Heaven, both of which are not the work of someone phoning it in. Former fans of Lost, or those who didn’t watch it and based their opinions on what they heard about the show from highly vocal people who didn’t like how it developed, need no help in hating Lindelof, and any similarities between the Island-set fantasy and this sci-fi epic were bound to be taken as proof of his incompetence. As I argued in that original post, there are a number of significant overlapping themes, and they’re the ones that viewers of Lost didn’t respond to, so Prometheus didn’t stand a chance.

But if I’m going to argue that people should give Prometheus a chance, I have to be willing to do the same thing with one of the nerd kingdom’s causes célèbres, even if I don’t think I’ll ever be able to accept the make-up on Joseph Gordon-Levitt, or like that goddamn kid, or swallow moments that probably sounded great on paper but don’t work onscreen like Young Joe escaping death by shooting the floor to create a huge obscuring cloud of dust. I’m going to try Looper again, and I’m going to… well, not exactly turn my brain off, because that’s an insult to Johnson, who is obviously not trying to create some no-brainer here. But I’ll dial down my reservations, try to meet him halfway, because he deserves a second-chance as much as Scott and Lindelof do.

As for my ongoing internal debate about whether or not it’s worth my while to stay online, Nathan pretty much settled that one for me. There will come many a time when someone smart, with interesting views and something to add to a conversation, will wander past this blog or see me talking to someone on Twitter, and in a moment of unfortunate impulse tell me that I really should just go fuck myself. And that’ll be a shame. And a rare occurrence. More often it’ll be someone I’ll never really like, and they can go with whatever God they believe in. Because the important thing is that I’ve met many more people who are worth the effort to stay here, and even if they end up being the only people I meet here, then that’s a goddamn great thing, and these differences of opinion on Prometheus or Looper or anything else are no biggie, and can even, if this discussion about Looper is anything to go by, end up altering my viewpoint for the better. And that’s another point in the plus column for Looper.

Good news! Only one post left to go in Listmania!, and it’s the stupid one that won’t get bogged down in introspection. Now all I have to do is find 18883 photos on IMDb.

Lost, In Space: In Defence Of Prometheus

Posted on June 8, 2012 by admiralneck

(WARNING! Massive spoilers for Prometheus and all six seasons of Lost. Contains inessential footnotes that can be ignored if you want to leave this page with your sanity intact.)

It took about thirty seconds from the end of the first public screening of Sir Ridley Scott’s Prometheus before co-writer Damon Lindelof shared this tweet from an Alien fan:

And there were many more to come, which he “kindly” RTd to his followers. Those quote marks are there because Mr. Lindelof’s Twitter behaviour often feels like a self-flagellatory performance piece, as he attempts to engage with the many aggrieved fanboys who despise him for Lost, the Star Trek reboot and now this. With Lost at least he created his own accusatory and gallumphing anti-fanbase, but by working on the other two franchises he’s surely leaping into the path of endless butt-hurty bullets. I can’t help but respect that kind of courage. It’s testament to his inner nerd, that he would risk the barbs and complaints of the most easily-irked subcultures on Earth just to work on the things he loves. ^[1]

Going into Prometheus last Friday, days after it had aired for many of the critics I follow, as well as in some European countries, there were already rumblings that it was a failure, or a partial failure, or a “waste”, as Mr. Beaks from AICN bluntly put it on Twitter. I didn’t look any closer as I didn’t want to spoil the movie any more than the obscenely spoilery trailers had already done (wanna give a fuck you shout-out to Fox’s promotional campaign which effectively stripped every bit of mystery from this movie in a way even Robert Zemeckis would have considered extreme), but my concern was that even if there were legitimate concerns about the quality of Prometheus, some of the criticisms were evidence that the boring old rift between Alien and Aliens fans was being reopened.

There are many nerd debates that will never be resolved. Marvel vs. DC, Star Trek vs. Star Wars, Hunger Games vs. Twilight; none of them are as boring as the Alien wars. There are factions within the Alien fanbase who prefer the long, slow takes and exquisitely-paced suspense of the first Alien movie to the bombastic, militaristic rollercoaster of James Cameron’s sequel, and there are vicey-versa types who think Cameron’s beautifully structured sexy machine of kill is better than Ridley’s hesitant original. There are those who think David Fincher got close with his mangled but bold third installment, and there are even those who think Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s French sensibilities reinstalled some of the original’s perversity back into the series. I’d like to think no one believes the two Alien Vs. Predator movies are on the same level as even the fourth movie. ^[2]

So was the initial burst of grumbling about Prometheus borne of the scars caused by this war, one that should have been ditched the moment Paul W.S. Anderson stepped behind a camera on the AVP set? Because seriously, fighting over the deckchairs on the Titanic while the iceberg that is PWSA’s monolithic ineptitude, crossed with the desperate short-sightedness of Fox, gets us nowhere. Alien and Aliens are different approaches to similar material; the very simple template for this series – space monster terrorises humans – is blank enough to be used as a canvas for experiments in differing tone and narrative approach. AVP, on the other hand, was a blunt knife that stabbed right through the canvas so nothing could ever be painted there again.

Even if this would end up fueling a new round of arguing about which approach was better, it would at least mean an objective viewer might enjoy Prometheus; the alternative was that the complaints were justified. Sadly, as the fans said, Prometheus has problems, mostly caused by its attempts to connect to the franchise, but there is still much to like in it, most significantly that it definitively removes the AVP movies from the canon. Even if Prometheus isn’t as innovative and beautifully-wrought as the original Alien, fan predictions that Scott would restore dignity to the Alien universe have proved true, just by excising the banal AVP and idiotic fratboy b-movie AVP: Requiem like a surgeon removing a tumour. For that alone, Prometheus should be lauded.

What else is there to love? Certainly some of the lead performances, especially Noomi Rapace as Dr. Elizabeth Shaw, the most resilient human being since John McClane, who spends much of the movie in either extreme emotional or physical turmoil. It’s arguable that her character is sidelined too often to act as a real centre, and her relationship with atheist Logan Marshall-Green isn’t as developed as it could have been; surely some room could have been found for it. This is a shame as her damaged faith, shredded by ill fortune and nauseating, psyche-shattering body horror is meant to be one of the central planks of the movie’s structure, but even if she’s not given enough screentime, she’s still good enough to be memorable.

Michael Fassbender is arguably even better as David, the Weyland Corporation android who tends to the crew of the Prometheus. As with Ash and Bishop in the other movies, David’s agenda is mysterious, setting up many of the movie’s most interesting moments and calling back to one of Lindelof’s finest creations, Ben Linus, as well as the infamous AI Hal 9000. Is David malevolent? Mischievous? Innocent? Vengeful? Badly programmed? It’s likely that much of the forthcoming debate about Prometheus will focus on his motives. Lindelof has a real talent for creating such ambiguous characters and situations which, if the tenor of his treatment online and elsewhere is anything to go by, annoys many who want certainty from their fiction.

The rest of the cast are fine enough, though many of them have little to do. Nice to see Red Road‘s Kate Dickie here, though she generally just imparts exposition, while Rafe Spall plays another eccentric. His reliability is a bit of a coin-toss, and for this movie we sadly got the “tails” that gave us his excruciating performance in One Day, and not the “heads” of The Shadow Line. Fans of DJ Big Driis will likely enjoy his performance as Captain Janek, with his accordion, scamp-like charm and fine habit of standing on the bridge, legs akimbo, like a big sexy legend; classic Elba typecasting. Guy Pearce is also in it, buried under so much latex I wasn’t sure what he was up to. I think I found him amusing? Certainly incongruous. A perpetual snarl on Charlize Theron’s face is also in it. Make of that what you will.

On a technical level the movie is astounding, as you’d expect from the infamous stylist and detail-obsessive Sir Ridley, though the creatures in the movie are a mite disappointing, looking like waxy and unimaginative first drafts; passable in any other movie but unacceptable when sharing a universe with HR Giger’s nightmarish vision. One particularly annoying design failure has Noomi’s disgusting squid baby connected to her by an umbilical cord that juts out of the side of its head. The lengthy sequence in which Shaw gives herself a grisly automated abortion is unarguably the highlight of the movie, but I couldn’t stop looking at that stupid dangling umbilical cord. Who signed off on that distracting touch?

That said, the horror is already undercut by the confusing threat. Is the crew of the Prometheus threatened by a deadly virus? Zombies? A Lovecraftian Old God? A mutated version of the Trash Compactor monster from Star Wars? All of those things are upsetting on their own, but by not settling on any one thing it dissipates some of the tension as the viewer tries to match them up. Here’s where the Alien comparisons do the most damage. The elegant and rigorously thought-through reproductive cycle in Alien is now muddled, evolving from some ill-defined matter to become the Apexiest of Apex Predators, though it’s perversely pleasing to think that at some point in the evolutionary timeline of the Xenomorph, one of the most diabolical and primally terrifying creatures ever imagined, is a devout human woman struggling to hold onto her faith in the face of indescribable horrors.

There’s also the fact that this movie feels so familiar; something noted by Daisyhellcakes as we left the IMAX. ^[3] That’s mostly due to the central conceit regarding our origins that’s been used in other movies or books; At The Mountains of Madness, Chariots of the Gods, Stargate etc. have dealt with the same idea in differing ways. Additionally, David’s impenetrable behaviour evokes memories of 2001; not just his HAL-like unreliability but early scenes with him puttering around the ship and busying himself with chores resemble Dave Bowman’s relaxed moments on Discovery One. The weird alien special sauce that dooms the crew is, of all things, reminiscent of the organic meteor matter in Ivan Reitman’s Evolution. Its purpose is the biggest mystery of all. It accelerates evolution? It breaks down DNA?

Further muddying the waters, the Alien movies are overtly referenced throughout, thus making it hard to separate this from the previous films no matter how hard we’re told not to. The look of the movie directly reflects the other films, with the (remarkable) production design by Arthur Max evoking memories of Syd Mead’s work, but the script is where the main resemblances occur. Lindelof has peppered familiar scenarios and lines of dialogue from the previous Alien movies throughout Prometheus; so much so that Sir Ridley’s comments that the movie “shares Alien‘s DNA” is a wry comment on the DNA / RNA manipulations in the plot as well as an acknowledgement that this often feels like a rehash. The structure, apart from some significant diversions, is identical to the other movies:

Discovery of message > waking from cryo-sleep > introduction of characters > arrival on planet > visit alien object > find unpleasant things > attempt to return during storm > things go wrong on the ship involving unpleasant births > android / corporate stooge has shady agenda > chaos ensues > lifepod ejects in which a showdown with the antagonist occurs.

It’s worth noting that Prometheus also borrows thematic material from Blade Runner, to such a degree that for a confusing moment I wondered if Blade Runner also occurred in the Alien universe, and Weyland Corporation’s androids were merely following in the footsteps of Tyrell Corporation’s replicants. Prometheus feels more like the third part of a thematically-connected series a la Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance trilogy than the fifth/first part of a franchise, thanks to these concerns. The main characters are searching for answers to questions about their origins, and Weyland is also looking for extended longevity, just like the replicants in Scott’s other sci-fi favourite. The showdown with the Engineer is as disastrous as Roy Batty’s encounter with Eldon Tyrell, with a popped-off android head and some vanilla butt-kicking replacing Tyrell’s crushed noggin.

And what answers do the team find? Nothing satisfying, of course, because nothing can truly satiate the whole audience, even if the movie ended falling either on the side of Shaw (faith) or Holloway (science). Those of us who forgave Lost its “trespasses” will recognise Lindelof’s approach. Prometheus asks the question, “who made us, and who made the race that made us?”, but instead of God or benevolent celestial beings we’re given the possibility that we might be the subject of an experiment, the organic components of a long-played terraforming operation, or the accidental biological waste product of a botched suicide by an alien trapped on Earth after missing his ride. That Carl Sagan line, “We are all made of star stuff,” is only half right here. We’re also just clever human-shaped sludge. (In fact Prometheus is the anti-Contact. They’d make an interesting double bill.)

Viewers of Lost were led to believe that its central mystery – what the hell is going on with this crazy island, and what has it got to do with these chosen ones – would be answered by one of the regularly introduced characters who seemed to have the answers. This was not to be. The Oceanic survivors, especially poor Locke, expected answers from the leader of the Others – Ben Linus – but he too was in the dark. So the audience waited for his mentor Richard Alpert to provide answers, but he had none either. In fact, as a result of a time-travel accident he thinks it’s Locke who has answers; a brilliant joke played by Lindelof and co-showrunner Carlton Cuse, highlighting the point that we make fools of ourselves for looking to others — Messiahs — for answers.

After Richard we expect Jacob has the answers, or the Man in Black, or their “Mother”, but none of them had a clue. They only had their own humanity, for better or worse. The layers could be peeled back forever, and all we would ever find were more confused, stupid people bringing their own baggage to the mysterious island, which contained a glowing thingy that was basically a magical Maltese Falcon. Over the course of six seasons Lindelof and Cuse could fully explore this idea, and some people even seemed to get it, though most complained that with no answers the show was a failure, instead of the slyly subversive success it actually was. Prometheus, with a running time of only two hours and a lot of info to get through, can only suffer in comparison.

So why ask these questions if you have no interest in answering them? Because there are other things you can dramatise with these questions, and the late-movie revelation that the Engineers were actually on their way back to Earth to eradicate our species using toxic goop wrong-foots the audience in a way that is reminiscent of Lost‘s games with expectations, as well as being a nicely mundane counterpoint to the grandiose first half of the movie. This resembles the way Lost teased epic and supernatural answers to its mysteries that were almost always caused by trivial but recognisably human things like confusion, venality, greed, delusion and the hilariously panicky reactions of characters who feared that they would soon lose their tiny allotment of power. ^[4]

The juxtaposition of the importance of the questions and the triviality of the human drama was one of the most pleasurable aspects of Lost, creating an unexpected frisson that transformed what could have been a simple mystery show into a Vonnegut-inspired treatise on the absurdity and arrogance of the human quest for knowledge it cannot handle. Prometheus does a similar thing, but that comment on the futility of our quest for truth is wrapped up in the tropes of a horror movie, which threatens to overpower the cosmic joke. Perhaps there’s another story they could tell that fits squarely into the sci-fi genre without the need to adopt Alien‘s horrific genetics, giving that commentary on our hubris more room to breathe and/or be recognised.

That said, the thought that humanity is a mistake that needs to be eradicated by beings more powerful than us is a chilling one, and the atmosphere of existential dread experienced by the Prometheus crew as they realise they have have been rejected by their creator is its own reward. It even thematically matches the responses of David, daily reminded of — and seemingly disgusted by — the flawed nature of his creators. Does he poison Holloway because he wants to punish his creators, as Shaw does re: the Engineers in the film’s final moments, or is David hurt by Holloway’s dismissal of his sentience? The fact that he invades Shaw’s dreams suggests Holloway’s racist behaviour arrived too late to affect David’s actions. David may have been broken all along.

Is this a consequence of his programming by Weyland or Vickers, a flaw in his construction (as suggested by Burke in Aliens), or that he has manifested a dark soul of his own accord? ^[5] These questions are as interesting now as they were when first asked in Blade Runner, and are given extra power by Fassbender’s brilliant work and Lindelof’s commendable restraint in explaining things away. I’d expect nothing else from the man who created Ben Linus and Charles Widmore, though I wonder if pointing out that Prometheus is yet another tale of children struggling to understand, placate, or wreak vengeance upon their fathers will make former Lost fans turn against this as fiercely as they turned against the island show.

It can be argued that Prometheus strengthens Lost and vice versa. It’s easy to assume that Lindelof truly is the bad writer of popular myth, a man smart enough to ask big questions but too stupid to answer them. Some ugly exposition and leaden dialogue does little to dispel that argument, though this could be down to necessary editing choices. There are other complaints ready to be levelled at the filmmakers that don’t fit within my forgiving parameters, and my defence is not meant to be a blanket dismissal of reasonable, non-trolling complaints, or an excuse for the film’s flaws. But what if Lindelof’s actually smart enough to know there’s no satisfactory way to settle the science / faith debate, to understand that drama that aspires to profundity demands that these questions be asked despite the inevitable disappointment that follows when the answer given falls short of expectation?

The drama here isn’t resolving “Why?” It’s in showing how people react when given a chance to find the answers. Lindelof’s done this twice now. Why is it beyond the realms of possibility that he’s not just some idiot who doesn’t know how to end a story, but is making a point about the ineffable mysteries of the world, and the possibility that matters of great significance are actually mistakes or trivial events that show up the absurd randomness of existence? ^[6] Vonnegut and Philip K Dick would enjoy the cosmic jokes of Lindelof’s worldview, and how he uses the gulf between our expectations and the truth to illuminate the failings of humans when they believe that they are in the position to acquire the greatest commodity of them all — truth — showing us up as cowards, fools, villains or, occasionally, noble heroes willing to sacrifice themselves to prevent the extinction of what they love.

Most other creators would be given a break at this point but ill feeling towards him for not ending Lost the way people wanted ^[7] will probably follow him forever now (check out this terrific, revelatory interview where Lindelof reveals he suggested to Scott that they make the ending clearer as he was “still eating shit a year on from the end of Lost“). As a result Prometheus is viewed as a mistake, with him taking all of the blame; convenient that he gets all the flak when Sir Ridley is notorious for changing the direction of projects and, if that interview is anything to go by, was developed with much input from the great director who was, never forget, considered for the longest time to be the only one who could save a franchise sullied by pretenders to his crown.^[8]

What a shame that this couldn’t be a blank slate, to be approached with open minds ^[9], instead of being a failure for not being an Alien movie, a failure for being as inconclusive as Lost, a failure for appropriating beloved sci-fi tropes and treating them with a populist’s unsubtle touch, a failure for lacking the beautifully judged stillness and artistic tableaux of Blade Runner, a failure for not being as classically-wrought – or as gloriously obscure – as 2001; I’m not dismissing these points as automatically wrong or worthless but I don’t think they qualify as sufficient reason to reject a movie which should be considered on its own terms. It doesn’t matter. Fans love a big raging debate, and given years of practice arguing over the merit (or lack thereof) of each Alien film many will launch themselves at Prometheus with great hunger. New flesh to tear apart! Why isn’t this Alien? How dare they? Sellout Ridley! All movies suck now! I hate 3D! At least it’s better than Robin Hood I suppose! Etc. etc. ad infinitum.^[10]

Hopefully this will all settle down and people will eventually engage with it without baggage. Maybe further editions of it – and maybe even sequels, if its apparent success inspires Fox to fund more – will provide a clearer idea of Lindelof and Scott’s vision, and improve what even I, a fledgling defender of Prometheus, think of as an imperfect project that nevertheless doesn’t deserve to be thrown out of an airlock. The breathtakingly spoilery trailer also shows a moment in which Shaw prays after her grisly abortion scene. The film is already ill-served by the conflict between its lofty thematic goals and the need for distracting, grotesque horror; perhaps that scene – or other scenes about religion / science – would have unbalanced the film further, and maybe for the better.

But these possibilities, and the new battles over Prometheus‘ worth, are at least an evolution of those long-running skirmishes mentioned earlier. The fighting over the previous movies feels like quibbling over the individual threads in the tapestry of this surprisingly diverse franchise; Alien is classy/cold, Aliens is tacky/exhilarating, Alien 3 is uncompromising/cruel, Alien: Resurrection is inept/stupid, Alien 3 should’ve been the William Gibson version, Aliens should’ve been made by Ridley, Newt should’ve lived, Ripley should’ve stayed dead, Jean-Pierre Jeunet should not be allowed to direct movies ever again… The arguments are only about the movies as cinematic artefacts and not as narratives with metaphorical purpose, spats that are only of interest to cineastes, to be futilely rinsed-and-repeated forever, accomplishing nothing, changing no minds.

Prometheus, on the other hand, offers up a text that can be interpreted and debated on its own.^[11] Sure, fans of the franchise are raging about it, whether it should’ve been made or not, whether to build a guillotine for Lindelof, whether the design is a failure as HR Giger was not asked to participate, whether it’s just total shit and a shallow insult to the ambitious speculative ambitions of genuine hard sci-fi, etc. But, as with Lost, there are mysteries within the film that can be discussed by even those who don’t agonise about that loathsome fantasy, the “childhood raped by the uncaring creator”.^[12] Dear God/Grouchy Space Engineer, how do we impose a moratorium on that insensitive and ridiculous sense of entitlement?

Whether even those mysteries are worthy of discussion is another debate to be had, though as someone who greatly enjoyed thrashing out theories about Lost with fellow fans I think my mind about Prometheus is already made up, but it’s worth noting that Scott and Lindelof have intentionally given us something different than The Greatest Space Monster Series Of All Time; a puzzle box that may or may not become more complex and more interesting as time goes by. As Mr. Lindelof himself has said…

Dude, have a rest. You’ve earned it.

Return 1. Who knows what Sir Ridley thinks, as he doesn’t have a Twitter account, shockingly. I assume his response to the kind of abuse Lindelof is getting would be a pithy, “Go fuck yourselves”. I believe he doesn’t suffer fools gladly.

Return 2. And yes, I admit that these paragraphs, were they to appear on Wikipedia, would be covered in “Citation needed” warnings, but these wars are fought as much in pubs and nerd gatherings and comment sections and forums etc. as they are in scholarly publications or blogs. Stick two nerds in a room together and there will come a moment when this debate begins and immediately descends into acrimony and deeply-held opinion blurted out as fact. This paragraph, which asks you, the reader, to just go with me on it, is my tribute to that ephemeral dark cloud that hovers over fandom. ^[13]

Return 3. Warning: never sit in the front row for a 3D IMAX performance; the miserable trailer for The Amazing Reboot Of The Spider-Man was a black and red blob wiped across my eyeball, and the ickiest bits of Prometheus were thrust aggressively right into my face as if I was being assaulted by a cross between a drunken football fan and Yog-Sothoth itself.

Return 4. There are other aspects of Prometheus that seem familiar to a Lost fan. The black toxic sludge, when seen within its ampoule, floats within a green fluid; when tipped up it floats down like a black cloud. This substance must never reach Earth, much as the Man in Black, aka The Smoke Monster, must never escape the island or he/it would cause an event that would signal “the end of everything good”. Jack sacrifices himself to prevent this, as Holloway, Janek and, to a lesser extent Shaw, also do. Meredith is obviously horrified to think her father, Weyland, considers his mechanical son David to be more of an heir than she does, much as The Man in Black is jealous of Mother’s love of Jacob. Holloway and Shaw are a man of science and a woman of faith; Lindelof choosing to make them lovers here may be his way of getting some unpleasant Jack/Locke slash out of his system. I’m sure there are dozens of other parallels between the two tales.

Return 5. And does this evolution within David echo our own development beyond that which the Engineers had planned, thus prompting their decision to destroy us? What does the Engineer’s reaction to David mean? Is his burst of violence triggered by David’s use of his language, proving that we have the potential to become a threat to them?

Return 6. On this point, I’d like to stress that yes, it could be argued that this assumption — that Lindelof has no idea what he’s doing and is bluffing his way through these stories like a faker — is valid if you consider Lost‘s finale on its own, but the show made this point over and over again throughout its six season run, so we have enough evidence for this theory to at least consider it, instead of dismissing it because of Occam’s Razor or something. We’re talking about one of the main themes of the show, not just a couple of incidents. Who knows, perhaps if we look back through his other TV shows we might find further evidence for this theory, though somehow I can’t see Nash Bridges being a treatise on the unknowability of the great questions pondered by philosophers and scientists of times past, no matter how potent the chemistry between Don Johnson and Cheech Marin.

Return 7. Here’s yet another fantastic interview with Lindelof, who seems to be one of the most approachable and friendly of creators despite the torrent of bullshit that keeps getting poured over his head. Lots of good stuff there, but the comments made by the interviewer, asking why all the characters in Lost had been dead all along ^[14], and his hypothetical argument that a concrete answer at the end of the show along the lines of, “they were being experimented on by aliens all that time,” would have been more satisfying gives a depressing insight into the extent to which many of the show’s naysayers were prepared to engage with it. Seeing the interviewer talking about gadgets on a recent edition of Late Night With Jimmy Fallon made me so pathetically angry I pitched an undignified shitfit and nearly threw one of our cats through the TV.

Return 8. Note that Jon Spaihts, who was the original writer on the project, is also free from opprobrium, at least as far as I can see, even though he’s already been treated like a mound of bear scat by sci-fi fans for making the not-well-liked alien-invasion movie The Darkest Hour. That’s how much people hated Lost. Seriously, admitting that I love that show in public often makes me fear that it’ll trigger a flurry of movement and then suddenly everyone will be pointing a gun at my face like they do in the movies.

Return 9. I include myself in this assessment. Watching Prometheus was a horribly confusing experience as my own expectations kept getting in the way. Much as I’m frothing away throughout this epic post about the — as I see it — unfair criticism Prometheus is receiving, I can’t honestly justify my anger at fans for judging this movie in relation to the others, as the promotional material and the unconvincing statements by Scott and Lindelof did little to prevent the growth of these assumptions. There are no words for how inept the marketing onslaught of the past few months has been, though I can’t figure out a way they could have promoted this without making the same mistakes.

Return 10. Funny that Scott includes footage from Laurence of Arabia, in what is one of the movie’s most endearing moments. For a while it might have seemed that a filmmaker with such a feel for composition and epic scale, indeed a man who made Kingdom of Heaven (which is heavily indebted to David Lean’s movie), might be the next in line to claim Lean’s crown as King of Classical British Cinema, even despite beginning his days as a lowly commercial director, but that seems far less likely now, and some of the criticism of Prometheus is that it’s not as restrained as Alien. Perhaps not, but it’s made with commendable skill, and now he has more money that he can use fill the original movie’s money-saving suspenseful longueurs with cacophony and event, for better or worse. I guess once Jerry Bruckheimer’s had his claws in you, you can never go home.

Return 11. Three months after Lost finished, once I had recovered from the dehydration caused by my uncontrollable sobbing, and removed my black armband, I wrote these three posts — part 1, part 2 and part 3 — which outlined my theories about the show’s ultimate meaning (i.e. as a primer for atheists about what it is to experience faith in something for which there is no proof). In the midst of that was my rather pompous, meta-fanwanky description of the show’s “plotholes” as “interactive plot gaps” (yes I did, and I’m very serious about this being a real and good thing), which are basically intentionally positioned blank spaces within a story which can be filled in by the audience with theories and / or non-meta-fanwank. Prometheus has plenty of these holes, which have this week been the focus of much of the ire of those viewers in my Twitter timeline who were appalled at the movie’s “mistakes”. As I said earlier, there are plenty of things wrong with the movie that deserve censure, and I wouldn’t accuse anyone of being wrong for holding a negative opinion, but I do think what some see as errors or first-draft fuck-ups might be something more interesting and justifiable on second viewing.

Return 12. How about this for another take on the film. Is it also a sly commentary on the inevitable sense of dismay felt by the fanbase, as humanity / Alien fans return to the source of their existence and find something there that doesn’t live up to expectation, causing all kinds of aberrant behaviour? Maybe this is all just Lindelof’s response to the long-running anger directed at him over Lost, and his experience with being verbally assaulted by the angry former fans is akin to wrestling with a Lovecraftian proto-Facehugger and then getting an inseminating tentacle shoved down your throat, leading to the birth of a proto-Chestburster, which in the case of this strained metaphor would be Prometheus.

Return 13. I also appreciate that this post reads like a very direct assault on pretty much anyone who has ever held an opinion on the Alien movies, and might even seem like a declaration of war against anyone who didn’t like Prometheus, making my concerns about the creation of a new front in the Alien Wars seem rather cheeky. That’s not my intention at all, especially as I have spent literally years of my life arguing the toss over the first two movies.^[15] The inspiration for this post, the thing that has compelled me to write over 6000 words (my God!), is not so much the criticism of Prometheus, much of which I agree with to some extent or another, but the increasingly hostile attacks on the filmmakers for daring to sully something as perfect as Alien. We fans all bring baggage to this movie no matter what we say, and anyone else’s reactions are not necessarily invalid even if they dare to be different to my perfect opinion, obvs (joke). What galls me is that we are now in a post-”wow Internet” period, where the use of the net has become such a familiar way of life that we can finally settle down and inspect our behaviour. Unfortunately this means we’ve found that many people here are so badly brought-up that they feel it’s acceptable to direct untold splenetic rage and disgusting hatred upon others for putting their hearts and minds into creative endeavours. What’s most upsetting is that many of the worst offenders are those I would ordinarily consider my Nerd Brethren, people whose passion I can understand on some level, but whose love of these cultural objects and events has mutated until they become compelled to bombard a guy with cruel messages when all he did was, at worst, write a movie that isn’t as good as another movie. He didn’t rape any childhoods (yuk), he didn’t erase all copies of Alien, he didn’t mock the fanbase or set out to diminish the originals in any way. He just wrote something, with the input of some other people, that he thought was cool. He doesn’t deserve to be hunted across the Internet like a rat, for fuck’s sake. And that goes for George Lucas too. I don’t like the Star Wars prequels either but they didn’t ruin my life in any way.

Return 14. I mean really? There was a VERY CLEARLY EXPRESSED SPEECH by Christian that made it VERY CLEAR that the events on the island, everything we had seen outside of the season 6 afterlife HAD HAPPENED exactly the way we saw it, that they had NOT been dead all along, that nothing we had experienced as viewers was rendered meaningless by some moronic final St. Elsewhere-esque twist. This is why I’m continually spouting off about Lost, and why I decided to write this ridiculously long review of Prometheus, that will most probably only be read by about 12 people, many of whom will think I should just get over this and move on instead of having a serious of life-threatening embolisms over something that almost everybody has forgotten about by now, because if fans such as myself don’t take the time and effort to restate facts about stories that are rushed past by storytellers who don’t want to belabour a point for fear of burdening their work with extraneous explanations that would take more attentive audience members out of the story-experiencing spell they have worked so hard to create, then we end up with the “official” take on something being, “You haven’t seen Lost? Oh man, don’t bother. They were dead all along. How lame is that?” or, “You haven’t seen Prometheus? Oh man, don’t bother. They don’t really explain how the Xenomorphs were created. There’s just a bunch of plotholes and then it ends on this weird inconclusive note because the writer is some kind of idiot who doesn’t understand how to tell stories.” When did it become unfashionable to surrender yourself to a work of art? To have faith that maybe the creator has a greater awareness of his or her work than someone experiencing it for the first time? To just go with the flow and stop with the, “Well, I’d have done it differently because I know these things more deeply,” thoughts until the work is over and you’ve had time to process it? Jesus Christ, sometimes it feels like we have to retrain audiences to just shut the fuck up and absorb something in one go without thinking that any plot event that isn’t identical to a million other plot events from a million other stories is a mistake or evidence of “ignorance of storytelling rules” (my own personal bugbear), instead of an intentional choice to tell a story that’s different to all the carbon copy stories cluttering up the world. [/crazy rant over]

Return 15. For the record, just so you, the reader, can better frame my feelings about this franchise, my favourite of the two is Aliens, but the difference in preference between the two is infinitesimally small, like, a micron thick, and the only reason I argue so vehemently for Aliens against the literally psyche-changing cinema-shaking brilliance of the original is because many of the arguments against the sequel — it’s garish and manipulative and stupid — are arguments used to dismiss many of my favourite films, and I just happen to like movies like Aliens that wear their heart on their sleeves, especially as I honestly believe that those criticisms are wrong. Aliens is as hard as nails. It has a beautiful structure used in other notable action movies such as Assault on Precinct 13, 13 Assassins, and even future beloved classic The Avengers. It is also very loud, but it has an emotional charge more powerful than about 99.999999% of movies made to date. Loving something that makes me sit on the edge of my seat screaming at characters to move faster even though I’ve seen it 100 times is not a problem for me. I also don’t think James Cameron is the enemy of cinema that many others do, mostly because Aliens is perfect so there INFINITY no comebacks. #Iwin

Bayhem Productions Presents: The Chicago Explode

Posted on June 29, 2011 by admiralneck

Let’s get my main criticism of Transformers: Dark Of The Moon out of the way before I get into the specifics of what works and what doesn’t: WHY DID TYRESE NOT GET TO SAY BRING THE RAIN? That phrase is like the “This shit just got real” of the Transformers franchise, and its absence is sorely felt. Yes, okay, he didn’t say it in the second one, but he did write it on an Army-issue napkin or something, and that counts for a lot.

At one point in this someone says something like “shorten the threat chain” or something similar while pointing at a screen with some rapidly oscillating graphics on it. I can’t quite remember the exact wording; I was too busy being distracted by the guy on my left engaged in some top-level phone-checking, and the three folks on my right who were loudly narrating the movie to each other. “Optimus is fighting now!” Yes, thank you, I had noticed.

Perhaps that’s the most noticeable thing about Transformers 3D: Moondance. It’s the first Michael Bay Experience that contains enough pauses and/or longueurs to allow the attentive viewer to be distracted by the real world. Which is not to say the man has made a reflective piece about the human condition. Rest assured, this is still a frenetic montage of sparks, flames, smoke and mirrors. Nevertheless, shooting in 3D has slowed him down enough that even the lengthy battle in Chicago feels like a collection of discreet setpieces instead of the incoherent and exhausting examples of overkill from his previous films.

These setpieces are still narrative-light – they are all basically “We need to get from point A to point Z to accomplish goal X” – but still, this feels like progress, as does the more cautious editing and cinematography. Bay really does seem to have taken the 3D process seriously; this feels less disorientating than some other 2D movies I’ve seen in IMAX (I had no idea what was going on in Eagle Eye or Star Trek; the latter only made sense to me once I saw it on TV).

And really, IMAX 3D is the way to go if you’re going to see this. Anything less is a waste of time. As I said to someone on Twitter this week (I think it was the lovely Max Renn, who has had to put up with my paranoid pleas not to unfollow me for going on about this movie so much this week. Hello Max Renn!), this is not a movie; it’s a cacophony delivery system. Seeing it on a smaller screen takes away much of its impact, and impact is all it’s aiming for. As a result everything else is merely present for the sake of being present, and as such I honestly feel that criticising it for failing to do the things that good movies do is almost missing the point of it.

Bay isn’t here to address issues or construct finely-honed character arcs, to deliver subtle wit, quiet moments of introspection, a pleasant flow of mood and tone. He’s here to make crude neanderthal-pleasing jokes, objectify the hot ladies, cram in as much cacophonous sound and flashing imagery as possible, and to DESTROY ALL THE THINGS. This is a well-established stylistic choice on his part. A lot of people hate him for that. I get it, and I understand, though I think it’s a waste of energy. Let’s move on.

Bay really does destroy all the things in this one. Thanks to the exceptional effects work, I honestly believed that Chicago had been almost entirely torn to the ground by the end of the shoot. It’s only because I’ve communicated with Chicagoinians since it finished that I know it’s still standing. The main attraction in Transformers 3D: Moon Unit Zappa is the long final act which sees the Decepticons taking control of Chicago and repelling a valiant attack by the Autobots and – in a gratifying expansion of their roles – the human soldiers who have spent the last couple of movies ineffectually bringing the rain. In this movie, they finally bring some thunder and lightning along as well. Some of the most exciting moments of the finale involve the NEST soldiers doing cool shit like jumping out of airplanes (in an astonishing stunt that actually happened and wasn’t an effect except for the bits when they fly through burning buildings because that would be beyond even Bay).

It’s a bravura sequence, which amused me by bringing to mind the far superior 13 Assassins, which also featured a slow build-up before a huge blowout finale. Of course, Takashi Miike’s samurai epic is a modern action masterpiece made with laser-like focus, unwavering control of pace, and a real emotional and visceral charge. Transformers 3: Dark Moon Rising has none of the above. It has speaker-shaking noise and that special kind of lighting that makes everyone glow orange like over-tanned supermodels shot during the magic hour. But that’s fine, in its own way. I wouldn’t recommend TF3 to anyone, to be honest; most folks seem to have made their mind up about it, which is their prerogative. I would recommend 13 Assassins, though. You haven’t seen it yet? Get on that shit.

To be honest, I expected to have more to say about it, but I think I may have exhausted my supply of opinion about Bay in these two posts. Transformers 3D: Moonlight Shadow is probably the best of the trilogy but that doesn’t mean to say it’s a triumph or anything. It’s just the best example yet of this kind of movie, but it is riddled with the same flaws that his movies always do, above and beyond the usual complaints that critics level at him.

Surprisingly, the final third of the movie is the most stern thing he has yet done. The cheap laughs that populate the other 66% of the film dry up in order to facilitate a grinding gear change into solemnity. There are approximately four trillion shots of people rising up into the frame with a sad look on their face, debris and ash blowing in the air, Jablonsky-Strings emoting all over the place like a crying orchestra. Even for someone like myself who tries hard to take these movies seriously, this was kinda hard-going. Oh how I yearned for Bumblebee to piss all over Jon Turturro one more time.

There were other things to like, though. Without Mudflap and Skids shucking and jiving in the background, the concerned liberal can relax a little. I’ve seen some take offence at the characters played by Ken Jeong (a weird and manic scientist) and Alan Tudyk (a sexually “ambiguous” facilitator associated with Turturro), but I didn’t really see anything that bad about them. Jeong is playing the stock Jeong character, and Tudyk’s sexuality isn’t really the joke. The comedic point of him seems to be his shame at being a tough guy hacker genius; a curious joke, but one pulled off with such charm and aplomb by the great man that it’s hard to hate him.

It’s also great to see Frances McDormand here too, as one of the very few female characters in the franchise that actually gets to do anything other than point their sculpted behinds at the camera. John Malkovich is in high energy mode, and I’m sure his presence in such a wacky role will be considered a black mark on his filmography, but he made me laugh, so job done. Who knows what these beloved thespians thought when they signed up for this, but they give their all, like the professionals they are. In a way I wish Bay could go back in time and hire Laurence Olivier to be in one of his movies. Olivier would have jumped at the chance; people forget some of the shit he turned up in. It can be argued that Bay’s habit of employing Oscar-nominated actors to appear in his lowbrow epics is a cynical move, but he has money and he wants talented and recognisable performers in his films. Why wouldn’t he?

Perhaps the biggest casting surprises are Patrick Dempsey and Rosie Huntington-Whiteley. Dempsey is an actor I have only ever had the most passionate dislike for; repeated viewings of Enchanted have left me almost paralysed with rage at his floppy, lustrous hair and oleaginous demeanour. These are put to great use here; the franchise badly needed a human villain (Turturro was too silly to be a bad guy in the first movie), and he manages to pull off the final act misgivings, fears and inevitable mustache-twirling resolve very well. He should stick to villains in future.

Huntington-Whiteley is not exactly a revelation, but she’s likeable, funny, and – from what I could tell by the lingering shots of her body – slightly attractive. Her character is obviously meant to be Megan Fox’s Mikaela; some of the choices she makes at the very end are obviously meant for someone who has had dealings with these robots before. Nevertheless, Huntington-Whiteley’s good-natured charm is a world away from Fox’s sullen and unconvincing efforts. It’s a nice change, and a shrewd casting move by Bay.

(I note that this week that “lovable” scamp Shia LeBeouf hinted that he managed to have conjugal relations with his former co-star Fox, saying that their close proximity and high-emotion onscreen relationship meant that there was some bleed-through into the real world. If we’re to take this bold claim at face value, there is also the assumption that because he has the same onscreen relationship with Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, that means he probably got it on with her too. I wonder what her real-life boyfriend, Jason Statham, would think about that. I trust that Mr. Statham will be having words with Mr. TheBeef in due course. Words that are delivered through the medium of his High-Kicking Action Feet.)

Other than that, what is there to say? The robots are better written than before. When some of them die there is finally a sense that something other than a swirling congregation of pixels has met his maker. I particularly liked Megatron’s new look; wearing a hood of tattered cloth and held together with chains after the events of the second movie. Optimus Prime and Sentinel Prime have a mildly diverting back-and-forth throughout. In terms of the Transformers franchise, this is as close as we’re going to get to an actual relationship between two people, though inevitably it ends up being about explosions and rain-bringing. There’s also a line delivered by Leonard Nimoy (as Sentinel Prime) that will likely make Star Trek fans vow to hunt down and kill Bay and screenwriter Ehren Kruger. I suggest they avoid Comic-Con for the next twenty years.

Basically, what I’m trying to say is that I didn’t think it was a very good film but I did think it was quite a good fairground ride, and as I quite enjoy fairground rides and don’t feel cheated when they don’t have a complex and resonant narrative, this feels like a win to me. Perhaps it helps that I watched Green Lantern earlier this week; a truly execrable movie that failed at doing just about everything that Transformers 3 failed at doing but didn’t have any of the fun stuff to make up for it. So yeah, “Transformers 3: better than Green Lantern just by being more confident, which is all you can hope for, I guess.” And that, my friends, is the poster quote.

The 2009-2010 Caruso Awards: The Best Episodes of the Year (10-1)

Posted on September 23, 2010 by admiralneck

As I said in an earlier post, Shades of Caruso needlessly busted ass to watch as much TV as possible in an effort to widen the scope of these awards. It meant catching a lot of reliably great shows and finding some new favourites, such as Justified, Community, and Spartacus: Blood and Sand. Naturally it also led to the discovery of some new sources of bemused frustration like V and Luther, which stand alongside long-time SoC bêtes noire such as Dexter. Even though we watched over thirty shows in their entirety, there were some that fell by the wayside. Well-regarded shows like Archer, Bored To Death and Cougar Town threatened to take up even more of our time, as well as established fan favourites like Southland and True Blood (three seasons behind on that one). Who knows, maybe this list would be completely different if we had seen those shows. Maybe there would be sexy vampires all over this list, having all of that sex they have all the time because vampires are all about the superpowered sex-genitals after all.

This is a last burst of positivity before I put on my mean face next week, but I hope my extreme giddiness goes some way to mitigating that inevitable negativity. The majority of the shows featured in this final post are genuinely incredible episodes, better than almost all of the films I’ve seen in the last few years. Certainly my number one pick rivals (but doesn’t quite top) my favourite hour of TV ever, The Shield‘s Postpartum. More on that season-dominating masterpiece down the page. Rules applying from the previous posts: only completed seasons, only one episode from each season, there will be spoilers, though I’ll keep them mild, etc. Here are the first and second parts of the list, in case you’ve come here a-fresh.

10: Treme - Smoke My Peace Pipe

David Simon and Eric Overmyer’s civic-minded project drew attention to the recovery of New Orleans after Katrina, and balanced joy and sadness with enormous skill. One of their greatest achievements was ensuring the show focused as much on the indomitable spirit of the residents as it did the sickening failure of the American government to come to their aid. This episode felt like the moment the balance shifted. The closure of Desautel, which had been brewing since the first episode, hits harder than you’d expect, with the always superb Kim Dickens doing a great job at conveying how the restaurant’s failure is a cultural loss as well as a personal one. Albert’s protest at the Cooper projects starts off well but eventually becomes terrifyingly violent. Antoine’s mentor passes away, Davis sells out, and Annie fails an audition. It’s all great drama, but low-key compared to the revelations about LaDonna’s brother Daymo. His body is finally found in a makeshift morgue: the back of a freezer truck containing stacks of corpses, the unclaimed victims of the hurricane. The wordless moment with Khandi Alexander leaving the truck and looking around at dozens of identical vehicles, all containing lost bodies, is possibly the most wrenching image of the year.

9: 30 Rock - Emmanuelle Goes to Dinosaur Land

Take that, backlash! Forget the complaints about 30 Rock running out of steam: the fourth season of my favourite sitcom EVER was arguably the best since the first, building on a slow start to end on a series of hysterical high-notes. 30 Rock‘s alternate universe – a universe that also seems to contain 60s ad agency Sterling Cooper, if a mid-season throwaway line is to be believed – grows each year, and this is never more apparent than when revisiting the show’s cast of amazing secondary characters. The first half of the two-part season finale sees Jack still unsure which of his perfect partners to commit to, and Liz Lemon desperately revising her past boyfriends to find a date for a series of weddings — the combination of plots mean we get some choice moments with Elizabeth Banks, Julianne Moore, Jon Hamm, Dean Winters and Jason Sudeikis. This fealty to the show’s history also raises the hope that we will see Michael Sheen’s magnificently clueless Wesley Snipes in future seasons: his terrified rant about the London 2012 Olympics was pitch-perfect. Even better was Tracy Jordan’s trip into his own past. Breaking through some serious psychological blocks, Tracy rattle through a rush of memories as if they were some kind of hysterical “Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” of bleak poetry. “I watched a prostitute stab a clown! Our basketball hoop was a ribcage!” By now 30 Rock is operating on a level of imagination and boldness that all other sitcoms can only look at with miserable envy. Long may it reign.

8: The Thick of It – Episode 4

“I made my daughter come to this fucking school away from all her friends and she just turned into a total fucking droog!” The Thick of It is often spoken of as just a display of poetic profanity and a cynical dissection of modern politics with little “heart” in it. In the latest season showrunner Armando Iannucci and his band of improvisational writers and actors expanded upon the specials (Rise of the Nutters and Spinners and Losers) which had touched upon an emotional angle that critics often miss while praising the breathtaking wordplay. Though this episode features a memorable verbal demolition of odious Phil Smith by Malcolm Tucker, it is DoSAC head Nicola Murray’s quandary that sets it apart. The decision to send her daughter to a comprehensive school to avoid a political scandal backfires after she bullies another pupil. With her daughter facing “exclusion”, Nicola begs the blameless headmaster for help, which he duly provides. Horribly, as the spin doctors and press conspire in the background, the headmaster is forced to resign. More than any other episode, this is where the miserable cost of our ghastly, dead-end spin-obsessed politics is expressed with the greatest clarity. It’s hard enough seeing decent people like Murray and opposition counterpart Peter Mannion being manipulated by unscrupulous, short-sighted spin-doctors as it is, but it’s the final scenes of Nicola (great work from Rebecca Front) breaking down in Tucker’s office that make this arguably the best episode of The Thick of It to date.

7: Sons of Anarchy – Balm

The sophomore season of Kurt Sutter’s hyper-macho biker epic was arguably less outrageous than the first, but more coherent, ambitious, and exciting. It had everything you could hope for: porn wars, sickening revenge, neo-Nazis getting stomped, healthcare PSAs, violence against eyes, an infected scrotum, double/treble/quadruple crosses, and lots and lots of cigars. Racing through ten UK drama’s worth of event in thirteen breathless episodes, it’s hard to pick a highlight, but praise is due writers Dave Erickson & Stevie Long and ace director Paris Barclay for confidently placing a calm in the middle of the storm, and yet still managing to provide the most dramatic and moving moment of the season. At this point SAMCRO VP Jax Teller has been pushed so far by his anger at “King” Clay Morrow that it is jeopardising the club, to the extent that even his allies realise it would be best for him to leave and go Nomad. The episode unfurls at a slow burn, the sound of rock music and bike engines subdued, as the club members come to terms with their decision to lose the young prince. Realising the club will be doomed without her son, “Queen” Gemma makes a fateful decision that changes everything. The final montage, featuring career-best work from Katey Sagal, Charlie Hunnam, Ron Perlman and Maggie Siff, is quietly devastating.

6: Community - Modern Warfare

It’s not even the funniest episode of Community‘s freshman year (that would either be Beginner Pottery with its insane boating setpiece, or The Art of Discourse, featuring the exhausting “Duh! A-DUHHH!” showdown), but when the magnificent first season closed, this — with a college-wide paintball game used as an opportunity to pay homage to the entire action genre — was the one everyone remembered. And with good reason. Though on first viewing it seems a bit like a wasted opportunity, subsequent viewings reveal a humbling mastery and understanding of the genre, above and beyond the spot-on references. The structure of the episode — with the cast whittled down, allegiances made and broken, friendships betrayed and then restored in times of adversity — refer to all action movies, not just specific ones, all while telling a story relevant to the characters and the season as a whole. That’s the key to Community‘s success. Beneath the hipster attitude and referential fireworks, the show is about a group of lonely individuals slowly accepting their need for each other, a point missed by the show’s critics who don’t even notice what the show’s name means. Modern Warfare dares to remove those alliances and affections, and the result is discombobulating: proof that the core characters have grown on us. Other than that, numerous highlights spring to mind: Jeff’s ruthless use of Pierce as a decoy; the hilariously mean-spirited (and accurate) digs at Glee; the many Mexican standoffs. Best of all is Senor Chang entering the common room in a wonderfully well-judged nod to both Hard-Boiled and Scarface. Perhaps the best compliment I can give the episode is this: I would happily pay $16 to watch a 90 minute director’s cut at the cinema.

5: Fringe - White Tulip

Has a show ever rebounded from a slump with a run of such unexpected excellence? The second season of the other Abrams-produced sci-fi show had — for the most part — lived down to complaints that the show was merely an X-Files rip-off after abandoning the momentum from the end of the previous season for several uninspiring standalones. One-third of the Shades of Caruso Massive had given up, and another third was considering it. Then, there was the miracle. A couple of episodes were reassuringly good, though the threat of a return to procedural doom remained. Then came Peter, a superb flashback episode that gave a sometimes bland show a powerful emotional core to build on, and then a couple of weeks later came this time-travel story about two men who have lost a loved one, and the terrible things they will do to dull their pain. The existence of Fringe is entirely justified by this episode alone. Guest star Peter Weller and fan favourite John Noble do stunning work here, with a beautifully performed scene about God and science being the riveting centrepiece of a sensitively written episode, but it’s the time-spanning, faith-inspiring final scene that pushes this into the pantheon of truly great sci-fi TV, alongside Star Trek‘s The City on the Edge of Forever, ST:DS9‘s The Visitor, and The X-Files‘ Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose.

4: Friday Night Lights - The Son

By now it feels like praising this nigh-perfect drama is an act of defiance against an indifferent world, but it’s been worth it. Slowly but surely people come around to its understated charms and well-judged realism: this year it even got some Emmy nominations. Four years too late, but still. This fourth season was arguably the best yet, spending more time in deprived East Dillon and exploring the African-American experience that made up such a significant portion of H.G. Bissinger’s book. Most of the original characters have left by this point, making way for memorable newbies like Vince Howard and Luke Cafferty, but the most memorable and affecting moments of the season belonged to Matt Saracen. As with Buffy‘s The Body, this episode deals with the aftermath of terrible loss with a laser-like focus, to the extent that it’s hard to remember anything else about it. Zack Gilford’s performance is the stuff of legend, a towering display of technique and honesty that caught FNL fans by surprise. Instead of your tidy TV funerals, with their acoustic guitar backing and choreographed tears, we see unchecked anger, horror, messy humanity and the confusion it can generate in those on the periphery of a tragedy. For this episode’s bravery and sensitivity, the only logical response from the audience is a kind of grateful awe.

3. Lost - Ab Aeterno

The tale of Richard “Ricardo” Alpert’s arrival on the island was the closest the sixth season of Lost came to providing an episode as moving as The Constant or La Fleur. While fans’ expectations of a flurry of answers was stymied, those of us who value Lost as much for its superb storytelling as for its skill at generating compelling mysteries were thrilled by this sweeping, epic tale of love lost and found. At the heart of it was a heart-breaking performance from Nestor Carbonell, showing us a completely different side of his immortal Other, whose confidence and gravitas were replaced by fear, sadness, and frustration. His final scene of redemption, aided by great work from the underrated Jorge Garcia, was just as powerful as the final scenes of The Constant: a miracle considering the tragic story of Alpert was being revealed for the first time with no significant build-up. Praise is also due to Tucker Gates for creating such a rich visual experience: many shots here became instantly iconic. Somehow he managed to make the island seem like new, just as we began to realise that the tales on the island were as old as time itself. The final moments, which gave us a sense of the enormity of the animosity between Jacob and The Man in Black, took the breath away, and cast the entire series in a new light.

2: Mad Men – Sit Down and Have a Seat

A common complaint during the third season of Mad Men was that it lacked the focus of the first season. The ambling pace that had set the show apart had become too slack, until there appeared to be no direction to it. As the main characters were all falling apart perhaps that formlessness seemed apt, but for those who had taken Matthew Weiner’s comments about not planning season arcs to heart, the downbeat atmosphere and increasing pace of dissolution were signs that the show had been planned too loosely, and that a satisfying resolution was impossible. Nothing could have been further from the truth: the season finale was a spectacular success, turning the show on its head and providing more laughs and thrills than any action-oriented show made this year. From the moment Roger, Bertram, Don and Lane come up with a plan to create Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, to the final scenes with the new ad company taking shape in a hotel room, Sit Down and Have a Seat was a joy to watch, as assured and hipster-cool as a 60s heist movie, but providing devastating character beats and pay-offs with what seemed like no effort. It proved the naysayers wrong, made perfect sense in the context of the season, and showed the faithful that the best cable show on TV was willing to throw its format and icy tone out of the window, meaning we can all rest assured that the show’s best years could well be on the horizon. If anyone reading this doubts that, I suspect they have yet to see season four’s The Suitcase, the masterful bottle episode featuring Don and Peggy on a long dark night of the soul. As mentioned before, award rules mean I can’t include it in this year’s list, but it is such a miraculous episode I can guarantee it will be on next year.

1: Breaking Bad – Full Measure

When SoC saw The Shield‘s Postpartum, our reaction was a kind of horrifying existential nausea that lasted for days. It’s an emotion that no other narrative or work of art has been able to generate in our guts. Until now. Breaking Bad has excelled at exploring how even the strongest sense of morality can be corrupted by fear or greed. By the third season things have spiralled so far out of control that Walt’s sense of humanity is in danger of becoming completely distorted. Is he involved in a criminal drug-dealing industry because he needs to be, or because he’s secretly enjoying the power it gives him? Showrunner Vince Gilligan tested audience sympathy in the second season by giving Walt an opportunity to do a good thing with terrible consequences or a terrible thing with seemingly good consequences, and the ensuing carnage was on a scale that no one could’ve anticipated. This time around we see the fallout from his criminal activities on a much smaller scale, and the result is far more upsetting.

In the third season we spend a lot of time rooting for Walt because we want his partner Jesse to survive, if not for Jesse’s sake then for the sake of Walt’s soul, to see all of the horrific choices he has made become justified. We’ve come to an understanding with him, knowing with awful certainty that he is now capable of doing terrible things to help his family and friends. The audience can be forgiven for pessimistically thinking there is no moral line left to be crossed, but little did we know. The finale of a pretty much perfect season (every episode would qualify for the top ten of this list, and three of them would top it) finds new horror to explore, placing our drug-dealing anti-heroes in mortal danger with their only hope being an act that will ultimately corrupt their souls. All the audience can do is wait and endure the dread as the intricate plot plays out like clockwork, all while posing a question that cuts right to the heart of our humanity: how far would we go to ensure our survival?

Can The Best Show On TV maintain this level of excellence? Will the audience still root for Walt and Jesse in the fourth season, and if we do, is it because secretly we realise that we might do the same thing if we were in the same situation? Have Vince Gilligan and his incredible writing team written themselves into a corner? Sadly the wait for those answers is longer than ever: the hiatus between seasons is almost unendurably long. In the meantime, everyone who reads this blog and hasn’t seen this phenomenal show yet has plenty of time to catch up. You won’t regret it.

That’s my pick of the bunch in this long and ultimately wonderful season, but unfortunately where there is light there must also be dark. It’s not pleasant for Shades of Caruso to dwell on the bad shows of the year, but dwell it must, if only to justify sitting through the crap and lance the boil it has left on my soul. That’s a crappy journey I shall embark on next week, but it won’t all be me complaining: I’ll put some happy stuff in there too, including the best new characters of the year, the best new shows, and miscellaneous things about stuff. Join us then.

Summer Movies Poll: Readers Choice Bonanza

Posted on December 29, 2009 by admiralneck

Many moons ago I asked readers to cast their votes for best and worst movies of the summer season circa 2009. First: Best.

Eric Bana Is: An Especially Tetchy Romulan – 7 (25%)
Quentin Tarantino Presents: Quentin Tarantino’s Masterpiece - 7 (25%)
Christopher Johnson and Wikus Van Der Merwe’s Excellent Adventure – 4 (14%)
That’s No Moon; It’s Hott Sam Rockwell’s Talent! – 3 (11%)
Pixar’s The Bucket List – 4 (14%)
Cover Me With Drool, Drop An Anvil On Me, Then Drag Me To Hell – 2 (7%)
G.I. Joe: STOP THE NANOMITES, JOES! – 1 (4%)
Hangover: (n. painful & unamusing experience) – 0 (0%)
Publicity Hungry Enemies (Now In Grainy-o-Vision) – 0 (0%)
When Anti-Matter Met The Vatican – 0 (0%)
STREEP, TUCCI & LYNCH vs. a Blogger and her Annoying Husband – 0 (0%)
Night at the Museum: Sound, Fury, & Nothing – 0 (0%)
Futile and Fatuous – 0 (0%)
Dad! My Guinea Pig Sounds Like Tracy Morgan! – 0 (0%)
The Shaking [Cameras] of Pelham 123 – 0 (0%)
Klansformers: Revenge of the Fratboy – 0 (0%)
X-Men Franchise Sabotage: WTFverine – 0 (0%)
Eric Bana Is: An Absentee Time-Travelling Husband – 0 (0%)
The Ugly Truth Is That Katherine Heigl Is Not Charming – 0 (0%)
Terminator 4: When Third Acts Collapse – 0 (0%)
Harry Potter And The Toenail of Effervescence – 0 (0%)
Eric Bana Is: An Endearing Aussie Cuckold – 0 (0%)
Final Destination: We’re Trying To Get Inside Your Eyeballs – 0 (0%)
Zooey Hall – 0 (0%)
Oh Will Ferrell. A TV Show Remake? We Want Anchorman 2 KTHXBAI – 0 (0%)

The number of high votes for Star Trek are no surprise at all. People have been calling for a light, fun movie with some substance during summer for years now, and Star Trek‘s blindingly bright visuals and hectic tone hit the spot, disregarding the fact that all of the fun surrounds the genocide of several billion Vulcans in the middle of the film. Yay summer movies! I’m a little more surprised that Inglourious Basterds (or, as the TV spots would have us believe, Inglourious!) got that many votes. Not because it doesn’t deserve them: more because many who liked it only seemed to just about like it, not love it with a passion. Perhaps there are more of us out there who think it’s a flat-out masterpiece and one of the greatest movies of the decade. Did the former camp vote for it because they thought “good enough” made it better than everything else on the list?

It was a great summer for genre fans, with the release of two audacious low-budget SF movies that were good enough and popular enough to stop nerds complaining about the success of less intellectually ambitious mainstream SF movies like Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and — later in the year — Avatar. Ha ha! Only kidding. Nerds will never stop being mad about mainstream filmmakers making money off their beloved genres. For a while there it felt like the only reason Moon and District 9 were being praised by nerds was that they were not Michael Bay movies, and indeed Duncan Jones’ film was the anti-thesis of big budget pyro-movies. The rush to praise them for what they were not meant it took a while for anyone to spot that there were problems with both of them. Moon‘s considered pace was refreshing, but at times faltered on the wrong side of slow, and it was perhaps not as surprising as it thought it was. District 9‘s problems were more glaring: the sub-plot about how Nigerian gangs dabbled in prostitution and cannibalism was horribly ill-judged. I could see where Neill Blomkamp was going with it — i.e. painting a picture of all of humanity as a broken, venal species with no compassion to spare — but by explicitly stating it was Nigerian gangs running the show in District 9, that bleak message of living creatures as selfish and brutal became unpleasantly specific.

That said, despite those flaws, both movies were terrific, and I would never argue that those flaws overshadowed the things Jones and Blomkamp got right. Moon was a lot of fun even just to look at, with those Gerry-Anderson-esque production designs and lo-tech FX. It also featured possibly the best performance of the year, with Hott Sam Rockwell giving what might be his best work ever. For that alone, I’ll be eternally grateful Jones took us on his genial ride. District 9 risked more, caused me more agita over its racial politics, but in the end thrilled me far more. With all of humanity — and Prawndom — portrayed as singularly awful, the whole movie boils down to a single act of sacrifice. The final action scene of District 9 was powerful enough to overshadow my concerns over Blomkamp’s tone-deaf error, and even managed to make me cry, completely catching me by surprise. All of that despite sitting next to the most inconsiderate woman in film-going history, who spent the entire movie narrating the onscreen events to her annoyed boyfriend, and then got pissy with me when I asked her to be quiet an hour in. The kind of behaviour that makes me wonder why I bother going to the cinema.

The other three movies gaining votes were Up (a movie I didn’t care for on first viewing due to terrible projection in a crappy NJ cinema, but loved when seen in IMAX), Drag Me To Hell (Sam Raimi’s delirious instant horror classic), and G.I. Joe: Road To Nowhere. Seeing that get a vote made my soul cry. Still, it got another vote, in the Worst Summer Movie List, as seen below:

Klansformers: Revenge of the Fratboy – 7 (30%)
X-Men Franchise Sabotage: WTFverine – 6 (26%)
The Ugly Truth Is That Katherine Heigl Is Not Charming – 4 (17%)
When Anti-Matter Met The Vatican – 2 (9%)
G.I. Joe: STOP THE NANOMITES, JOES! – 1 (4% )
Publicity Hungry Enemies (Now In Grainy-o-Vision) - 1 (4%)
Hangover: (n. painful & unamusing experience) - 1 (4%)
Dad! My Guinea Pig Sounds Like Tracy Morgan! – 1 (4%)

The rest of the movies on the list got no votes, so let’s just move on. It doesn’t surprise me that Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen topped this list. It had been treated like a soiled nappy long before it was even released, and though I wasn’t crazy about it, I certainly didn’t hate it either. If people really hate it that much, more power to them (and certainly whenever I think about those fucking racial-stereotype-bots I feel like putting it at the top of this list as well), but I suspect a lot of Internet commenters who rail against it just haven’t seen enough bad movies this year. Of course, if that’s the case, they’re lucky. We’ve seen so many shitty movies this year that T:ROTF doesn’t even get on our bottom twenty list, let alone bottom ten.

It certainly doesn’t beat out X-Men Origins: Wolverine as worst movie of the summer. Who’s to blame for that farrago? I’m willing to let director Gavin Hood off the hook, as his work was so often compromised by Fox executive Tom “Nerd-Sauron” Rothman. He has long interfered in the making of Fox’s slate of superhero movies and been rewarded with high box office grosses despite the shitty quality of those films. X-Men Origins was the worst yet. David Benioff and Skip Woods’ script was impossibly bad. Could there be a draft of it that wasn’t a morass of cliches and tired jokes? Did there ever exist a single line given to Sabretooth that wouldn’t make me risk breaking bones through convulsive super-cringing? Compared to this disaster, T:ROTF was a source of almost endless delight. I truly wish it killed off the X-Men movie franchise, because now it has made money we’re looking at yet more soulless, brainless movies soiling our memories of those fantastic original stories.

I also have no problem with the simply appalling Ugly Truth getting some votes, and would like to think that my renaming of it helped. Gerard Butler is not very good in that film, but he’s Rudolph Valentino compared to Katherine Heigl. Her appeal is completely alien to me. Spiky, charmless, and unable to sell even the most basic of jokes, her continued success is a mystery. I know Grey’s Anatomy is very popular, but even if every fan of that show traipsed out to the cinema to catch the latest Heigl movie, would that account for the high box office The Ugly Truth managed? (We’re talking a worldwide gross of $203m on a budget of $38m.) Rail against the success of T:ROTF all you like, but that did everything it could to attract and entertain a certain sub-section of the audience (i.e. fans of BIG). The Ugly Truth did the bare minimum to get the job done and is technically far more profitable. Yay for cheaper movies, but boo for movies that are crafted with such lazy indifference towards their audiences, that said nothing about gender politics, that think a lumbering joke about vibrating panties was classifiable as entertainment.

What else got votes? Two for Angels and Demons, which was a passable enough thriller, and was certainly more entertaining than the flat-as-Holland Da Vinci Code. I can’t get angry with it, even when it was being very silly (i.e. for much of its length). A vote for The Hangover, which ranks alongside Up In The Air as most overrated movie of the year. The one thing I liked about it — that it is a comedy with a well-developed script and fascinating initial premise — meant nothing when the jokes were so lazy and the characters so unappealing (other than Zach Galafianakis’ Alan Garner, who was a delight). Watching Graham Linehan rail against it on Twitter during the summer made me feel a lot less alone. After that we get a vote for G.I. Joe, a movie I did not like at all, and single votes for Public Enemies and G-Force, both of which I liked to varying degrees.

Thanks to everyone who voted. What now? No poll for a bit (I usually add polls after the Oscar nominations are announced), but more lists. Been working on the damn things all year.

A Much Longer Review of Avatar

Posted on December 17, 2009 by admiralneck

Warning: Avatar spoilers litter this review like Ikran droppings across the rocks of the Hallelujah Mountains.

As I mentioned earlier, Avatar is a movie made almost specifically for me. It’s directed by a man whose obsessive attention to detail and fanatical devotion to technology has provided us with some of the most clearly designed and thrillingly executed movies of recent times. It’s about exploration of alien worlds and has an anti-imperialist message of clunking obviousness but surprising emotional power. It features the most startling visual effects ever committed to the big screen, and constantly pulls the rug out from under you with its dedication to outdoing itself. It’s filmed in beautifully rendered and cleverly composed 3D, and for once puts paid to criticisms that the format is a gimmick (even the sceptical Roger Ebert has been won over). It’s got a big battle between space marines and space monsters, and features a world that looks like a Yes album cover come to life (thanks to Anne Billson for the apt comparison). Basically, if it was going to make me hate it, it would have to try hard.

Luckily for me, after all of that anticipation, it didn’t piss me off — at least on first viewing, which was an overwhelming experience — but I can’t praise it without addressing some of the concerns raised by it. In the post-experience discussion I had with Daisyhellcakes, we kept coming back to the depiction of the Na’vi as a race of Native Pandorans treated so poorly by the colonial humans that they weren’t even offered beads for the rights to their sacred grounds. It’s problematic, to say the least. They are portrayed as simple, honest folk who hunt (but apologise to their prey before stabbing them in the heart, so that’s okay) and pray to a tree-god, and need to be rescued by one of the oppressors who just happens to be smarter and even more in tune with nature than they are. Scenes where the Na’vi cede control over their destiny to Jake Sully’s avatar make for queasy viewing, even if he did just land in their sacred space on the biggest, baddest, coolest multi-coloured dragon thingy you could imagine.

As Daisyhellcakes said after seeing it, she didn’t want to admit to liking the movie as much as she did because the wrongness of Cameron’s attitude to his noble alien race was so glaring. As Charlie Jane Anders points out here, this is a race that is so unfailingly noble they come across as a clumsy patronisation of the Real-World indigenous races that Cameron wants them to metaphorically represent. Apart from some douchebaggery from one guy early on, they’re all so great that they treat the imminent death of a human with the same amount of grieving and solemnity that greeted the destruction of their home and the death of their leader. Hey, I’ll bow to no man in my admiration for the eternally awesome Sigourney Weaver, but if I was an alien who had just lost the cornerstone of my culture and my civilisation, I’d be a bit more concerned about that than the death of some missionary who had been nice enough to hand out useless medicine that one time.

Still, as we talked we came to a sort of conclusion that although it made us uncomfortable, what the hell else was Cameron supposed to do? It’s tempting to think he is not up to the task of adding subtlety to any story he tells, but then he’s telling stories that fall apart when subtlety is introduced. He has his work cut out getting a lot of story and scene-setting out of the way, and at times the rush of exposition — either via voiceover or clumsy explanations by the various scientists studying the planet — means we’re really getting broad strokes already. This superb “nature documentary” about Pandora contains almost as much information about the planet and the creatures on it than is found in the movie.

As well as the Na’vi culture, some of the human relationships are sketched so lightly that their progression feels like a hint rather than an arc. Cameron was obviously ruthless in the editing room, and it stands to reason that he was already aware that portraying internecine battles within the Na’vi clan that embraces Jake would just bog the movie down further. We lose something to gain something else, and your enjoyment of the movie will likely depend on which you would rather have: sensitivity or bombast. If you think Cameron missed a trick not giving us tales of the ascerbic Na’vi arrow-maker or the cranky Na’vi mother who longs to join her lifemate on the hunt and is annoyed by his retrograde gender politics, you’re watching the wrong movie. This is good versus evil, and he’s going to make damn sure you know which is which.

Also, he might oversimplify the Na’vi, but so much thought has gone into the creation of the world and the people and their intertwined relationship that he can’t be accused of not giving a damn about the small stuff. Kudos to the production designers and astrobiologists and astrobotanists who came up with the convincing flora and fauna of Pandora. Their work is the most impressive thing about Avatar, and makes it feel like a real place. Even when doubts about the effectiveness of Cameron’s story began to itch at my brain, the secondary story — of Pandora and its ecology — was far more successful. I suspect that repeat viewings might make the problems of Cameron’s plotting seem more glaring. This morning Mr. Beaks from AICN quoted Kenneth Turan, who said Avatar would be the Jazz Singer of the 21st Century, a movie that changed everything but was widely disliked ten years after release. I expect my considerable affection for this movie will follow a similar trajectory to my opinion of Titanic, which I loved on first viewing, but disliked more and more with each revisit. Nevertheless, while the narrative clumsiness will likely annoy in time, the level of detail in this stunningly realised world will continue to hold my interest, and seeing new interconnections between them will become more interesting to me.

Of course his interest in creating a complex faux-eco-system is part-and-parcel of his environmental message, which is heavily pro-nature and anti-strip-mining. This too has come under scrutiny, especially by those who think a movie that features this much CGI has been burning through rainforests worth of energy to keep its computers humming along. The pro-tree message is rammed home with such relentlessness that the mid-movie action scene is the lengthy destruction of a single tree, though to be fair it’s a pretty goddamn awesome tree. Complaining about how Cameron paints his political pro-environment message is fair enough, but where were these complaints last year when Andrew Stanton’s Wall-E told a similarly unsubtle story? That got a free pass, but Cameron gets pilloried. Not everyone has done that, and I speak as someone who was pleased to see Stanton’s messages stated so clearly, but the double-standard still irks. I guess that’s what you get when you make an action movie instead of a Pixar movie.

Besides, Cameron’s ideas about why Pandora should be left untouched are far more interesting than mere tree-hugging. The central idea of the movie is that all lifeforms on Pandora are linked together in a way that expands even upon James Lovelock’s Gaia theory, or Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere concept. Pandora is a kind of brain, and the creatures that live upon it can access that brain through a neural connection. The Na’vi are also able to connect to the minds of the creatures around them, and control them in much the same way the humans connect themselves to their machines, except the Na’vi also form emotional bonds with the creatures and treat them as equals. It might just be an expansion of the idea that we are connected to all other living things, but when taken literally like that it is enormously appealing and deepens what might have initially seemed like a wishy-washy justification for the Na’vi’s special nature.

It also means that the “God” they worship is actually a kind of world-mind/flesh-internet that allows them to upload and download memories. Note that their culture doesn’t seem to have a history told via words or pictures: it’s stored inside the network of life on the planet. I’ve heard the movie referred to as Luddite as it praises New-Age-style philosophy over reliance on technology, but the biotech of Pandora works as a metaphor for the connectivity we currently enjoy thanks to the Internet. Though some scenes with the Na’vi plugged into the ground and radiating outwards from the Tree of Souls look kinda dippy, they have an unexpected emotional charge. The great revelation of our age is that we work better when we’re aware of each other, and seeing this network of co-operation represented in glowing visual style is a powerful reminder of how lucky we are.

It’s an idea that makes Avatar more nuanced than a mere Dances-With-Space-Wolves and more like Dune-In-A-Forest, especially as Sully can be seen as a Space Marine/Kwisatz Haderach hybrid. That said, no matter which pop cultural artifact Cameron was influenced by most, when necessary he pulls out all the stops and tops the action work he has done in the past. With the goodness of the good guys and the badness of the bad guys clearly explained, he can go all out with an emotionally satisfying final act where heroes are forged, villains are killed, and revenge is taken. This is what Cameron does best, and the final half an hour is some of the most thrilling cinema I’ve ever been lucky enough to witness. Any reservations we had earlier melted away in an onslaught of last minute rescues, defiant last stands, and tragic slow-motion deaths. Cameron’s facility with action serves him well, with skillfully handled set-ups paying off in a series of sub-setpieces that are layered together with a master’s touch.

Praise is also due for an earlier scene where Sully captures and tames a wild Ikran on top of the Hallelujah Mountains, and then goes on his first flight with Neytiri. It’s a stunning sequence, featuring visual effects of such complexity and clarity that I choked up. At that moment I knew I loved the movie with very nearly all my heart. It also helps that Cameron has elicited such strong work from his cast. Stephen Lang and Giovanni Ribisi are deliriously evil but enjoyably hissable, with Lang’s Quaritch getting a couple of cool moments in the finale that drew murmurs of great pleasure from the audience. You expect Sigourney Weaver to be great — and she is — but I was surprised at how good Joel “Hottie and the Nottie” Moore and Michelle “Ana-Lucia” Rodriguez were. Even better were the heads of the Na’vi clan, played by the ever-reliable CCH Pounder and Wes Studi. Praise is also due Laz Alonso as cuckolded Tsu’tey, and Sam Worthington makes good on the promise shown in Terminator Salvation with an impassioned and charismatic turn.

Best of all is Zoe Saldana, who gives an astonishing performance as Neytiri. With the performance-capture technology now developed to the level Robert Zemeckis has always aspired to, it feels as if there is no intervening layer of CGI between us and the actor, and of the entire alien cast, it is Saldana who seizes the moment with the greatest relish. Her manifestation of this serious and tragic character was the heart of the movie. If she had failed, our suspension of belief would have fatally faltered, but thankfully she exceeds beyond our wildest dreams. About twenty minutes after her introduction, I was amazed to find that I believed with all of my heart that Neytiri was real, and it is as much a testament to her skill as to the effects chaps at WETA that this mental conversion occurred. Thanks to this — and her entertaining work as Uhura in this summer’s Star Trek — I now look forward to her future work with much enthusiasm.

It’s an unfashionable statement to say I gave myself over to Cameron’s sincerity, especially as we’re dealing with a filmmaker who is considered to be a crass populist who can only bombard audiences with glossy imagery that hide a hollow core. I’d argue that Cameron believes deeply that the message of his movie is meaningful, and will be happy to have touched the hearts of millions rather than appealed to the refined intellects of a handful of joyless twerps. If so, I reckon he’s right. As for Avatar‘s status as the most advanced display of CGI wizardry yet made, and whether this is enough to qualify it as a great movie rather than one that is just okay but pretty, my own bias intrudes. Artistic merit is attributed to movies for many reasons, many of them nebulous. Such concrete things as effects work or production design are often not included among these criteria, as it’s surely obvious that they are base and do nothing to reveal human truth (often considered the least thing that great art should do).

In my eyes, though, the technical work done on Avatar in bringing to life an entire world filled with believable creatures in a series of interlocking relationships is as close to perfection as we’re going to get at the moment. If the breathtaking design work and detailed effects work displayed here isn’t allowed into the leather-and-mahogany drawing room called Art, then no design or effects work ever will be. At its best this is a moving sculpture, a dynamic tapestry, a web of interlaced speculative concepts and exquisitely rendered visual representations that literally dazzle. Ignore the faults, and forgive it for being clumsy. You need to see Avatar so you can experience the feeling of having your point-of-view float through the most beautiful landscape painting you’ll ever see.

In The Summer, In The Cinema

Posted on June 19, 2009 by admiralneck

My most recent poll was put up probably too late to draw much attention, but for once that screw-up was only partially my fault. As I mentioned before, this is a particularly weak summer line-up, and we can perhaps attribute that to the after-effects of the writers’ strike, as well as the stellar quality of 2008′s summer season, which set the bar so high. How could this year compare to a line-up that featured such entertaining films as The Dark Knight, Iron Man, and Kung Fu Panda? Still, I should have at least made more of an effort, even if only for old time’s sake. Here are the results:

JJ Abrams Risks Death by Unwashed Nerd Rage-On – 8 (47%)
Quentin Tarantino and the Broken Spellcheck – 3 (17%)
Transmogrifiers 2: Return of the Awesome – 1 (5%)
I’d Rather Be Dragged To Hell Than Watch Spider-Man 3 Again – 1 (5%)
Pixar’s Whassup, Bitches? – 1 (5%)
The Time-Travelling Bana – 1 (5%)
Harry Potter and the Thing in the Place with the Whatsit – 1 (5%)
District 9 (AKA Neill Blomkamp Rocks Your Face Off) – 1 (5%)
Terminator Franchise: Salvage Operation – 0 (0%)
The Curious Case of Wolverine Wutton – 0 (0%)
Angels, Demons, and Probably Ewan McGregor’s Schlong – 0 (0%)
Another Worthless Woody Allen Movie – 0 (0%)
Hott Sam Rockwell’s Lunar Oscar Bid – 0 (0%)
Depp and Bale in: Untouchablesque – 0 (0%)
Sacha Baron Cohen and the Inevitable Lawsuits – 0 (0%)
(500) Days of Self-Conscious Indie Movie Quirk – 0 (0%)
Demetri Martin + Ang Lee + Hippies = WTF? – 0 (0%)
G.I. Joe: The Struggle to Give a Shit – 0 (0%)
The Unnecessary Remaking of Pelham 123 – 0 (0%)
Final Destination: Rube Goldberg’s Revenge – 0 (0%)
Judd Apatow’s Self-Loathing People (feat. The RZA!) – 0 (0%)

What’s weirdest about Star Trek‘s overwhelming success is that people were still voting for it weeks after it had come out. From what I can tell people were seeing it more than once, so perhaps this was a retroactive vote of happiness after people had already seen it. Whatever the reason, it’s great to see so much support for something that was treated as a hubris-tainted disaster before even a frame of it had been shown. I had expected something approximating greatness for a while, hoping that J.J. Abrams would go for broke after playing safe with the frustrating Mission Impossible 3, but sadly my anticipation worked against me.

When I finally saw it I was a little disappointed, even though I liked it a lot. The hectic pace was necessary to get all of the characters into place while setting up the Trek universe for N00Bs and telling a story, but it might have been a touch too crazed even for me. It didn’t help that seeing it in IMAX made all of those whip-pans and lens flares far more exhausting than they would be on a regular screen, as well as making Zachary Quinto’s eyebrows and the… how can I put this tactfully… heavily-detailed face of Chris Pine hella-distracting. I have been trying and failing to see it again on a normal sized screen to give it another shot at blowing my mind. Even without that reassessment, so far it’s the movie to beat this summer. Why? Because Abrams destroyed Vulcan. That takes balls of brass. Or dilithium.

After that, the only movie generating more than baseline excitement is Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. All the more surprising after the critical drubbing it received at Cannes. Not that that matters. Tarantino is one of those rare artists that have created a work of pop culture art of such great impact that they get a free pass for life. Just as I’ll follow Eno or Dylan or Scorsese through thick or thin, Tarantino movies will always feel like an event, even when the result is a disappointment (I’m thinking Kill Bill Part Two). It worries me that a die-hard Tarantino fan like Bradshaw gave it a memorable slating, but he seems uncomfortable around schlocky b-movie stuff.

Yes, he gave Star Trek a big five-star review, but then claimed throughout the review that Nero and his grumpy cohorts were Klingon. It suggests he never really pays attention to the “baser” end of the cultural spectrum. Which is fine, of course. Thank God for him giving props to Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Andrei Zvyagintsev despite the whining of readers offended that he would dare like something “arty”. Nevertheless, if the movie is going to feature more than one explosion or decapitation, or is actually colossally dreadful, stupid, and predictable on almost every level, best to take his review with a pinch of salt/gunpowder.

Speaking of things that explode, Disguisatrons Two: There Will Be Oil got my vote. Yes the first one had as many flaws as it had great moments. Yes it could be confusing. Yes it blah blah ah fuck it. I loved the first one just because it set out to be a robot mayhem movie with broad jokes and explosions and unearned drama, and it did that with zero apology. I wasn’t a huge Transformers fan so I didn’t weep because Mammothtron was the wrong shade of teal. I think Michael Bay’s decision to make every action scene hectic and every conversation a series of unconnected smart-ass jokes is a terrible kind of genius because you can tune out every few seconds and never lose track of what’s going on, because there’s nothing coherent to lose track of, and nothing has any dramatic weight. It’s spectacle for the sake of spectacle. Criticising Bay for not being Ingmar Bergman is as futile as criticising cheese for not being gaseous. (ETA: I wrote that sentence yesterday, and what do you know, Bradshaw hated it, using a customarily brilliant metaphor about sex to illustrate the point. However, when criticising the awful Megan Fox, he invoked the memory of Liv Ullmann! Spooky.)

Bear in mind, he’s probably the only action filmmaker I’m willing to give this latitude to (see Stephen Sommers comments below), simply because he does this stuff bigger and better than anyone else. Without the outrageous spectacle, that dramatic emptiness is really apparent. As I feel obliged to say every time I get excited about a Bay movie, I’m not crazy. I’m fully aware it could suck, but I won’t have to wait long to find out. I’ll be seeing it on Saturday on IMAX, Crom willing, and if that format made Star Trek hard to watch, it will almost certainly render hardcore Bay nigh-unwatchable. But, you know, who cares? BOOM!

I’d be very very surprised if it gave us anywhere near the pleasure Drag Me To Hell did. Sam Raimi’s gloriously silly granny-spitfest entertained parts of my brain I’d forgotten I had, i.e. all of the neurons that were born during my first viewing of Evil Dead II. Much as I have grown to dislike seeing movies with large audiences, I would have liked to have seen this with more people, even if only to drown out the noise of this one old guy who chattered away when we went to see it (my intense glare of disgust did not phase him, oddly). The few dozen people who were in there hooted and shrieked and laughed throughout, and it was great.

I can’t remember the last time I saw a film work so well simply because it is so proudly base and silly, but then that’s probably because Sam Raimi has not been making those films for a while. Seeing his return to his roots has been one of the highlights of the year, and not enough people have experienced it. For shame, humanity! If you’ve not yet seen it, you have to go see it right now, even if only for the fight scene in the car about twenty minutes in. I can’t remember a more brazen attempt to get a response from a crowd, nor can I remember a scene that has been as successful in generating one.

Canyon’s vote went to Pixar’s Up, the long-awaited follow-up to Monsters Inc. from Pete Docter. This is a particularly hard movie to write about as the majority of Americans we know have already seen it, and we remain Ed-Asner-less. It’s not out in England until October, meaning we’re going to have the same silliness we had with Ratatouille, where we saw the movie on the big screen three weeks before the release of the region 1 DVD. Wall*E came out quickly, but we were not crazy about that. Up‘s trailers have been so wonderful, and unexpected, and glowing, that we’re more excited about this than any other Pixar movie to date. Now I know how the Japanese feel (movies get released months late over there, for reasons I do not understand).

Then there’s some weirdness. A vote for The Time-Traveller’s Wife? Was this a Journeyman fan? An Eric Bana fan? Just for having Ron Livingston in the cast, I’ll be giving that sucker a miss. Same goes for Harry Potter and the Wig of Translucence or whatever it’s called. I’m afraid I’m not a fan, though that’s partially because I stopped reading the books before they, apparently, got a lot more complex. While Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy captured my imagination, J.K. Rowling’s books almost completely passed me by. I enjoyed Prisoner of Azkaban (the book), but never got any further.

As for the films, Chris Columbus’ dreadful work on the first one put me off for good, even though Alfonso Cuaron eventually turned up to save the day. Of course, that fifteen-hour narcolepsy-inducing disaster is the one Potter movie that’s in constant rotation on Sky Movies, so there’s no getting away from it. I will watch them all eventually, even though the second one is full of icky spiders BAD BAD MOVIE!!! I like that they’re becoming darker as they progress (just like the books), but from the impressive trailers for the latest film, if the next two are darker, they’ll have to be directed by Michael Haneke. (Idea!)

One final vote, for Neill Blomkamp’s District 9. Alien Nation without a rubber-headed Mandy Patinkin drinking sour milk? I can’t wait either.

After that, the majority of the films on the list got no votes. Fair enough. I struggled to come up with a list, and most of these films wouldn’t interest me either. I had high hopes for Terminator Salvation, though most fans had written it off just because McG was involved. For a good stretch of the film he did a good job, with two stand-out setpieces in the first hour, and the good sense to hire Bryce Dallas Howard, Christian Bale, relative newcomer and scene-stealer Sam Worthington (Marcus Wright rocked), and last but certainly not least, internet search engine sensation Moon Bloodgood, as Tough But Beautiful Post-Apocalypse Lady In Sexy Tight Trews.

Sadly, it all fell apart in the final twenty minutes, with action scenes dragging on for too long, before a horribly compromised final reel fell flat. Then there was the distracting and relentless tide of references to the first two movies. I had had enough by the time Christian Bale pulled out the CD player and cranked out You Could Be Mine, an act that suggested he had occupied himself during the nuclear winter by scavenging in burned-out record stores when not shouting into his walkie-talkie. Sadly, there was more to come, with numerous shots lifted wholesale from James Cameron’s originals. By the time “Arnie” showed up, I half expected Rick Rossovich to rush in from stage left to hit him in the head with a lamp.

Still, at least I had enjoyed it for a while, and it exceeded my expectations by some distance. The opposite could be said for X-Men Origins: Wolverine, which could well be the worst Marvel adaptation to date. It’s definitely in the bottom three. There are no words to express how awful the goddamn thing is, and even my fanboyish pleasure in watching Hugh Jackman do his thing was dented, probably because I know he got more involved in the making of it, which means the stink of failure is upon him. Sadly, that stink oozes off the screen like some kind of miasmic deathcloud, and settles on us as well. And when I say stink, I’m talking a mouthful of skunk-ass-juice stink right in the mouth. That stinky. That FAIL-y.

Even weeks later, after numerous failed attempts to remove the stink with lemon juice, Viakal, and Febreeze, I was still flashing back to some of the dreadfulness. The hilarious sped-up shot of Wolvie hacking away at a fire escape; Ryan Reynolds wasted as Deadpool; that horrible final fight in front of a green screen; the pointless last act retcon of one major death just to have that death happen all over again; Cyclops’ eyes setting fire to things when any fule kno that his eyebeams are pure force, not heat; Wolverine meeting Ma and Pa Kent and getting them killed within a few minutes of showing up; “Why is the moon so lonely?”, which has to be the funniest line of dialogue of 2009; the galactic-level stupidity of the whole sorry enterprise. Right now, not even an Uwe Boll movie written by Paul Haggis and starring Cameron Diaz and Paul Walker could topple it from the Worst Movie of 2009 position.

I mean, Angels and Demons was not as bad as Wolverine. How is this possible? Middle-aged man runs around Rome shouting factoids about Catholicism vs. adamantium berserker rage. It should have been a slamdunk. And yet the former was more entertaining, even though the identity of the bad guy was obvious as soon as they opened their mouth. I spent the whole film being very obnoxious to Canyon, acting like a cross between Rex Reed and Sherlock Holmes, and I was even more annoying when my suspicion was vindicated. Still, my mom liked it, so it all worked out well.

What else is there? I have high hopes for Moon, as my mancrush Hott Sam Rockwell is pretty much the only person in it, which is how I feel about a lot of movies he’s been in. God knows when it comes out here. Public Enemies will thrill me no matter what: my love of Michael Mann is so strong that I liked Miami Vice despite its many many flaws, so the only thing this could do to disappoint me is to be less entertaining than John Milius’ muscular feature debut, Dillinger. Bruno could be fun. Who doesn’t love jokes involving dildos and rednecks?

Other than Woody Allen, who seems to have hired Larry David to replicate his own shtick but without the bite. No votes for Whatever Works, which tells me that this blog is not read by Larry King. He recently tweeted ‘Just saw Woody Allen’s new movie Whatver [sic] Works” It’s his greatest movie, even better than “Annie Hall” I can’t say good enough about it!’ Considering the endearingly random quality of his tweets, which are not that far removed from the comments in this prescient Onion article, I’m not sure this is an opinion to be trusted. After the hysterical car-crash that was Cassandra’s Dream, I just don’t see how Allen can even recapture the dizzy heights of Alice and Another Woman, let alone Husbands and Wives or Manhattan.

I’m also uninterested in (500) Days of Summer and Taking Woodstock, partially because they seem super-quirky, but mostly because I can’t help but think that Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Demetri Martin accidentally switched movies. Surely JGL should be working with Ang Lee by now? If we do see (500) Days, it’ll be in the hope that a) Zooey sings, and b) we find out if that fucking irksome (500) is justified by the plot.

For a change, I’m even less interested in seeing the last two action movies on the list, which is odd considering my love of pyrotechnics. G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra is by Stephen Sommers and will therefore have the same tedious talkFIGHTtalkFIGHT structure, but without the exuberance of Bay, or his gift for composition. (I will ignore all flaming on this point, so don’t bother.) Plus, it will not be anywhere near as good as the Warren Ellis-scripted cartoon on Adult Swim.

Speaking of futile attempts to improve on greatness, The Taking of Pelham 123 shouldn’t even exist. Last week we rewatched the original Joseph Sargent thriller, and it’s enormous fun. Plus, it’s already been remade as a TV movie, and indirectly by Spike Lee with Inside Man (obviously it’s not the same plot, but it has the same feel, and has great fun dramatising New York’s infamous air of exasperated cynicism and multicultural tension).

Though I’m not surprised no one wants to see The Final Destination (now in eye-shattering 3D!), why does no one want to see Funny People? Okay, so it sounds like incredibly mawkish navel-gazing sub-James-L.-Brooksian tripe, but The RZA is in it! Bobby Digital, people! Have you seen Derailed? He plays a postroom guy who hangs out with executive Clive Owen, and it’s the most out-of-place performance I’ve ever seen. Each time they interacted, my brain tried to leap out of my head. There’s that bloke from Chancer, walking through the office, and OMG HE’S CHATTING WITH THE RZA! Everything’s better with a bit of RZA in it.

So, anyway. Go see lots of movies, and in a couple of months, if I remember, I’ll put up my usual end-of-summer polls to determine which movies sank, which swam, and which soared like celluloid eagles.

Another Day, Another TV Channel Boycott…

Posted on May 7, 2009 by admiralneck

As Canyon recently mentioned on her Facebook page (yes, we have both succumbed to Facebook’s inexorable pull. I even have a Twitter page devoted to what I’m eating and what’s on TV), we have been greatly angered and saddened by FX’s decision not to renew its contract with Comedy Central, meaning the UK has become Colbert-free once more. A ~~very small but piercingly intelligent cross-section of a~~ nation mourns.

We have been dreading this since The Colbert Report debuted a year ago, a dread that intensified after FX (short for FuXX0rz) pushed the show back from 11pm to midnight (we even predicted it here). If a schedule is being tinkered with, something is going wrong. Was it low ratings that sank the show in the UK? Even the lovely folks at Late Show UK have not had any official confirmation from the channel as to why this has happened. That said, we are talking about a channel owned by News Corp, and they’re not big on listening to the little guy, preferring instead to take on the role of Heartless Corporate Monolith with such complete dedication that it’s almost parodic. I honestly believe they run on the tears of rage shed by the people they crush underfoot like so much blood-filled gravel.

So yeah, we’re fucking pissed off. And we’re not the only ones. An overwhelming two people are so annoyed at FX that they contributed to this forum. I smell the beginning of a grassroots campaign to change FX’s mind. Considering how News Corp got excited about the Tea Bagging parties recently conducted across America (shouldn’t that protest have been called Balls Across America’s Forehead?), perhaps we should send teabags to FX. Used teabags. That I’ve rubbed on my forehead.

Or we should just stop watching the stupid channel. I mean, they don’t even air the best shows US FX makes; The Shield is aired on Five and Five US, and Sons Of Anarchy is going to Bravo instead. Funny how the US FX business model is to make shows to sell around the world, and UK FX’s model is to buy other shows cheap and then dump them when they don’t fit their macho line-up. Though it’s nice that they’re showing Generation Kill, I’d rather see it all in one gulp on DVD. What else does FX have that’s worth watching? More Dexter? I’m dutifully plodding through The Most Overrated Show On TV™, but I can just get that some other way. I have no interest in The Listener, or the various Canadian or Australian police procedurals that keep cropping up, and I’ve got The Wire on DVD so I don’t need to watch that any more. Neither does anyone else, now that it’s being shown on BBC Four. The only other things they have to offer are Family Guy and American Dad, but seeing as how they are to comedy as Stephenie Meyer is to literature, that’s not exactly enticing.

So, we shall find another way to watch our beloved Stephen skewer the right-wing mindset so completely that conservatives don’t even realise it’s happening, and in the meantime, I’ll avoid FX and stick to watching Bravo (so much A-Team!), Sci Fi (Star Trek: TOS is getting a lot of rotation in anticipation of the new movie), Current TV (I can’t see enough documentaries made by well-off American post-teens during their most recent backpacking vacation through South America), and Controversial TV (it should be known as Edge Media TV but our EPG has renamed it so that it sounds like it was created by 1980′s-Ben-Elton). Fuck FX, fuck Fox, fuck News Corp.

‘Twas Here My Summer Exploded

Posted on May 5, 2009 by admiralneck

Summertime! Or, as Prince of Freshland Willard Smith once put it, summersummersummertime! All of its joys (such as the sunshine, the wasps, the ever-present sheen of sticky sweat) pale into insignificance next to my favourite thing in the world ever; the summer movie season. As usual, the anticipation is bound to be much more nourishing than the actual movies themselves, though last year saw an unprecedented bumper crop of excellent popcorn entertainment which should, technically, raise my excitement to even greater levels, what with the summer movie season finally offering brainfood as well as robot wars. Sadly, that 2009 highwater mark and the recent writer’s strike means I’m less excited about this year’s line-up. Sure, I’ll see a fair few, but there’s only one or two I’m goggle-eyed with obnoxious enthusiasm over. My face is sad.

Those who know me have a pretty good idea which movies have me froth-mouthed, but I’ll save that for now, because I’m more interested in what you, the readers of this blog, are most excited about. Just like last year, I want to see what is getting this small cross-section of people most pumped. Sadly, due to RL complications, I forgot to do this earlier, and have therefore included a film that has already been released (The Further Adventures of Logan T. Loganstein And His Whirring Claws Of Kill), but perhaps, if you’ve already seen it, you enjoyed it so much you can’t wait to see it again! I gather it’s ~~depressingly bad~~ hella-exciting. Anyway, here’s the list.

Terminator Franchise: Salvage Operation

I’d Rather Be Dragged To Hell Than Watch Spider-Man 3 Again

JJ Abrams Risks Death by Unwashed Nerd Rage-On

Transmogrifiers 2: Return of the Awesome

The Curious Case of Wolverine Wutton

Angels, Demons, and Probably Ewan McGregor’s Schlong

Another Worthless Woody Allen Movie

The Unnecessary Remaking of Pelham 123

(500) Days of Self-Conscious Indie Movie Quirk

The Time-Travelling Bana

Harry Potter and the Thing in the Place with the Whatsit

Demetri Martin + Ang Lee + Hippies = WTF?

District 9 (AKA Neill Blomkamp Rocks Your Face Off)

Hott Sam Rockwell’s Lunar Oscar Bid

Pixar’s Whassup, Bitches?

Depp and Bale in: Untouchablesque

Sacha Baron Cohen and the Inevitable Lawsuits

G.I. Joe: The Struggle to Give a Shit

Quentin Tarantino and the Broken Spellcheck

Final Destination: Rube Goldberg’s Revenge

Judd Apatow’s Self-Loathing People (feat. The RZA!)

Seriously! The RZA is in the next Judd Apatow movie! I can’t wait, though I’d much rather see a full-length Bobby Digital film than some navel-gazing James L. Brooks homage, no matter how good it is. Anyway, the poll will be up in a sec, and will be around for approximately numerous weeks.

It’s Trek Day!

Posted on April 8, 2009 by admiralneck

At the beginning of the year, in my Shades of Caruso Listmania quadrilogy of obsessive list-making, I gave Cloverfield the Best Marketing Award. Bad Robot and Paramount Pictures did a fantastic job of generating interest in their film, and by giving nerds at the Nerd Mecca of the Alamo Drafthouse a chance to see the first public screening of the new Star Trek film, complete with guest appearance by Leonard Nimoy, they’ve done it again by putting those relentlessly hatey buzz-killers on the back-foot, if only temporarily. Even with the release of a bunch of exciting trailers, old-skool Trek fans have been deeply upset about the franchise revamp, and this resistance has been the focus of much of the online coverage. With one fell swoop they put that on hold, and managed to generate far more enthusiasm about the movie than with the usual round of premieres and what-have-you.

They’ve also made me, and a lot of people, very very jealous. Just the act of scheduling a screening of Wrath of Khan, with Kurtzman, Orci, and Lindelof in attendance, and then bringing on Nimoy to announce a sccreening of the full movie, shows they care about the franchise and the reaction of the fans. How cool would it have been to be there? How playful an act? It’s no secret to readers of this blog that I think Damon Lindelof is a great humanitarian, but knowing he was involved in a trick this cool makes him even more awesome.

Of course, when the movie comes out there will be even more back-and-forth about whether the film is any good, and if it is a big success (which seems guaranteed by now), there will become a bizarre schism between old and new fans that will generate so much online debate that it will make all who stand on the sidelines wish that we could tap the wasted energy pouring off outraged and entitled fanboys when they get pissy. Whatever. I just hope it’s better than JJ Abrams’ directorial debut Mission Impossible The Third, which was technically proficient and featured a McKee-tastic plot constructed with the best punch-card computations money could buy, and yet felt like the most expensive episode of Alias ever. As much as I enjoy Abrams’ shows, they can often feel like lucite sculptures instead of flexible armatures. (This metaphor makes perfect sense to me. Sorry if it doesn’t translate.)

The enthusiasm during that screening has proven to be infectious. As a result of the numerous online reviews, I am now totally psyched about the forthcoming release, even more so than I already was. My childhood love of Trek was obsessive, and even after I stopped watching the TNG spinoff series (due to being at university in a series of pokey rooms without TVs), that affection remained. One of my most cherished childood memories was of the day my mom came to my primary school to take me home because of an unnamed family tragedy.

But there was no tragedy! It was a cunning ruse to get me out of that hellhole and take me to the first screening of Star Trek: The Motion Picture at our local cinema. How cool is my mom? Of course, I was pretty unhappy about the pace of the movie (the image used above is the one of the most exciting scene in the film, which tells you all you need to know), but even so, I tripped out on Doug Trumbull’s amazing effects, and at least wasn’t traumatised like this poor viewer. I also still remember the first time I saw Wrath of Khan. Best major character death in nerdfilm history? Very possibly.

So, today has become Trek Day, thanks to multichannel TV. Search For Spock was on Sky Movies this morning, and even though it’s not my favourite Trek movie, it was just the tonic. Though it’s far too uneventful, especially coming after the rightfully beloved Khan, there are some wonderful moments (the death of Kirk’s son, and the destruction of the Enterprise), some great FX work from ILM (especially the lovely matte paintings of Vulcan at the end), and some classic Shatner acting. Knowing that Trek is liable to be found everywhere on satellite TV, I went from there to Virgin, where they were showing the Voyager episode Warlord, which was notable for its creative use of nose/forehead prosthetics and some flirting with girl-on-girl lip-action (not consummated, those cowards).

Aired right after that was the second half of the final episode of Deep Space Nine. I had never seen past the end of the fifth season of DS9, so I was in two minds about watching it, but hell, this is Trek Day, so I left it on while I trawled Wikipedia and Memory Alpha for information about what the hell was going on. Gul Dukat looks like a Bajoran? Garak is in charge of the Cardassian Resistance? Ezri Dax is involved with Bashir? Hell, anyone at all is involved with Bashir? It was a lot to take in. And what the fuck? Sisko “dies”? Screw that. Nobody messes with Ben Sisko.

Still, it didn’t seem as contentious an ending as that of Battlestar Galactica, even though comparing the two is unfair due to BSG‘s greater ambition. Plus, this is an unfair criticism, but DS9, for all its strengths, looks horribly dated compared to Ronald Moore’s later series. Anyway, it was nice seeing it, but it pales into insignificance next to the original series. It’s an amazing coincidence that Sci Fi (or should I say SyFy) was showing one of my “favourite” episodes from TOS: the Trek-Meets-Taming-Of-The-Shrew craziness that is Elaan of Troyius.

It’s not particularly exciting, or thought-provoking, or performed well in any way, but my God it’s spectacularly, almost wilfully wrongheaded. As an insight into Kirk’s deeply worrying attitude to women, and his occasionally out-of-control machismo, not to mention how women were portrayed on US TV in the 60s, it is essential viewing.

Later on today Virgin is showing an episode of Enterprise, which I suppose I should watch in order to “catch ‘em all” even though I have no enthusiasm for that show whatsoever. Of all of the various incarnations of Trek, that is the one with the most depressing Good Character / Gupta ratio. I’ll get to that in a moment, but firstly, I have to unleash a howl of outrage from the depths of my nerdcore. There is no way – NO WAY! – that Captain Sam Beckett deserves high ratings like these compared to the feeble, barely above average scores given to Sisko in the card shown above.

Sisko would fuck you up six ways to Sunday! Archer was even crap at being captain of an intergalactic FAILcake. Anyway, that’s not the main problem with Enterprise. All of the later shows had some excellent characters – Picard and Data, Quark and O’Brien, Tuvok and The Doctor (the last one being my favourite modern Trek character of them all) – and a few total Guptas – Riker and Troy, Kira and Bashir, Neelix and Tom Paris – but Enterprise had almost no characters I liked at all. Only Trip caught my imagination in any way; the rest might as well have not been created at all. I only remember the weapons officer being a hostile British jerk, and there was a sexy Vulcan in it. A sexy Vulcan? There’s only one of those, thank you very much.

He’s fighting to gain access to your lovebits, you know.

Virgin is now showing a Q episode of Voyager (Yay Q!!!), followed by some TNG, which means I’ll have experienced all of the Old Trek (yes yes, I’ve not read any of the comics or books, or watched the animated series, but let’s just move on). After that I might stick on Wrath of Khan, if I can make it to the end without sobbing bitter nerd tears all over the laptop. All of this has been made possible by the recent screening of the film, so thank you, Bad Robot, for totally distracting me from doing far more important things.

ETA: Nice! The TNG episode is Redemption, one of Ronald D. Moore’s amazing Klingon episodes. He writes Klingons better than anyone. These were the highlights of the 1990s Trek renaissance, I reckon. Gowron is my bug-eyed hero, you know.

Shades of Caruso

Circuit interruptus.

Category Archives: Star Trek