Category Archives: The Wire

The Rock and The Diesel: Titan Clash

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Until about ten days ago I did not give a single damn about the Fast & Furious franchise, having endured the first one several years ago and finding it wanting. It was easy to dismiss yet another ropey Rob Cohen movie, especially one starring Paul Walker and which was so obviously based on Point Break (or Donnie Brasco, I guess someone could argue). Its success just seemed like one of those things that happen in the unpredictable summer season, and at the time – and I stress, at the time – could have been attributed to Vin Diesel’s apparent rise to superstardom. I watched the movie, it fed my brain with vroom for a couple of hours, and then it vanished and I didn’t really think of it again, except as That Movie With Vin That Wasn’t Riddick Or xXx.

The second movie came and went without even disturbing my poorly-styled hair, other than to note that Vin didn’t return – surely a bad sign. Nevertheless his stalled career had caught my attention, and thus the success of the first movie suddenly seemed a little more mysterious. It wasn’t Diesel that audiences flocked to see, so what was it? Paul Walker? That seemed unlikely, especially as the third movie came along, this time without Walker, and still made money. At that point I just figured, well, boys like fast cars and women in short-shorts wiggling away from the camera, so that’s that. They struck me as straight-to-DVD actioners that had just managed to catch a wave of enthusiasm, perhaps from gamers who liked that the movies so often resembled a Burnout sequel with added booty.

Suddenly a fourth movie was upon us, and I briefly considered watching the others and then watching that latest sequel, but time was so tight, what with trying to pack in every other movie going, that I decided against it. Besides, surely this was a last roll of the dice, an attempt to keep the franchise going just a little longer by bringing the full team back from the first movie. It wasn’t worthy of my time, and would merely be the end of a franchise that had commendably defied its critics by lasting longer than expected (though I did recently notice this very astute and accurate article praising the series for its commitment to racial diversity, something that has been sadly ignored until recently but has now been picked up as an interesting critical take on the franchise).

But I was massively wrong, and apparently so were the many others who have mocked the franchise and its fans. Though I will admit I only recently took an interest once my beloved Dwayne Johnson signed on, the appearance of a fifth movie made me strongly question my dismissive attitude. You don’t get to five films in a series these days by barely squeaking into profitability. This series continues because it makes fat cash and is genuinely loved by millions of people, and just treating them like idiots who must have risibly low standards because they like car movies is unacceptable. It’s like the movie equivalent of Top Gear; hated by the monocle-wearing Snootingtons of the critterati but adored by many.

So last week I took advantage of Sky Anytime’s generous streaming of Fast/Furious 1, 2 and 4 (no Tokyo Drift, which I figured was because it wasn’t part of the main plot, though please let me know if I’m wrong) and caught up. The first movie was still nothing special, from what I could tell, but I enjoyed it a bit more this time around, taking time to enjoy Diesel’s performance and the pretty cars. The end still seemed problematic; at the seventy minute mark it suddenly goes, “Heist! Accident! Shooting! Bike chase! Drag race! Accident! End!” for no reason other than those elements were always meant to be in the movie but all of the reaction shots between Brian O’Connor and Dominic Toretto ate up the second act.

It doesn’t surprise me that this mulch of action beats was cobbled together by Gary Scott Thompson, the man who eventually gave us the horrendous Knight Rider reboot that died on its wheels last year, and the amazing 88 Minutes, surely the most entertainingly bad mainstream movie of the past few years. Still, I liked it more than the second, which seemed to lack even the momentum of the first movie, with Diesel’s diverting anti-hero missing and replaced by smartarse Tyrese Gibson. No chemistry between him and Walker plus a very silly final act (featuring a weak and poorly staged resolution that reminded me of Black Dynamite, for some reason) meant I strongly considered not bothering with the fourth.

Thankfully I ignored my better judgement and dived in, and was rewarded with easily the best in the series to that point. Chris Morgan’s plot had numerous inconsistencies, as pointed out here, but it was still noticeably sharper than previous scripts, and was willing to take the main characters seriously, meaning Brian and Dominic’s adventures finally had the heft they had needed in the first movie. Even better was Justin Lin’s muscular direction. He was already in my good books for directing the truly magnificent Modern Warfare episode of Community, where his knowledge of action cinema was apparent.

Fast and Furious showed he could bring the love to the big screen, with numerous superb setpieces worthy of mwahs of affection (especially the opening petrol truck heist-gone-wrong and the mid-movie street race with Brian constantly driven off course while his satnav nags him). If previous instalments had felt a little light on dramatic oomph – often by being primarily about racing/sexy male bonding but with a crime element dolloped on top like some cheap vanilla ice cream – Fast and Furious felt like a consistent film. The fractured relationship between Brian and Dominic breathed for once; even more so than the first movie, I became invested in their reconciliation, and was rewarded with a terrific final scene where Brian finally turns his back in the law in order to help his buddy. Ace stuff.

But Holy Fanbelts, nothing – NOTHING IN THE WORLD – could have prepared me for the absolute bug-shit-nuts insanity and balls-to-the-wall brilliance of Fast Five. It’s surely a contender for action movie of the year, and is so far and away the best movie of the series that everything to this point has felt like a mere pre-amble. I’m as surprised as anyone as my snotty dismissiveness has been transformed into rapturous adoration, and I would actually recommend everyone watch the other movies – even if they don’t really like them – just to get to the point where they can watch and fully appreciate the twists and turns of this berserk epic of melodrama, action, and bromance.

Writer Chris Morgan may have been memorably lampooned by The Onion this week, and again there are a number of times during Fast Five where the only response is befuddlement (one scene shows Dominic escaping some chains by just escaping don’t overthink it OMG look a pretty car!), but credit where credit is due; the decision to make the fifth movie a hybrid of Fast/Furious, Ocean’s Eleven and The Fugitive (or more accurately, US Marshals) was a stroke of genius. The mid-section of the movie – depicting our heroes planning a robbery – is enormous fun, with Diesel and Walker the B-list Clooney and Pitt, Sung Kang as Damon, Chris “Ludacris” Bridges as Cheadle, and Tyrese Gibson as Bernie Mac. This refocusing is a far cry from trying to find new ways to make Paul Walker fall out with his co-stars before winning them over with that… that… “smile” of his.

It struck me as I goggled in disbelief at this indecently entertaining slice of summer madness that there is no other movie series ever made where the fifth movie was better than the previous instalments, at least as far as I can recall. Even the fifth Bond movie  - You Only Live Twice – is not as good as Goldfinger or From Russia With Love, though it’s still a blast. The Bond series had several high notes later on, but there was a definite sense of fatigue after a while, necessitating a total revamp. The Fast/Furious movies have just hit their fifth instalment and now finally make sense as a whole, using the same cast and plot elements as before, taking the initial concept to its natural conclusion, and basically saying, “Fuck it, it’s kitchen sink time” and ramping the franchise up to heights that are almost epic in scale without abandoning any elements.

For a long time I’ve been increasingly annoyed by the complaints from critics and pop culture pundits when they talk about the lack of new ideas out there. “Too many sequels, too many remakes, too many spin-offs; can no one come up with anything new?”, etc. Yes, I will concede that tired sequels or remakes made with no imagination or no understanding of what worked with the originals – or what didn’t work and needs to be rethought – make me despair as much as anyone. I’m not crazy. When you’re sitting in front of the third Twilight movie and the plot is resolutely stuck in a rut and you can feel your soul turning grey with boredom, it’s easy to think we’ve built a cultural Pompeii on the side of a mountain that will erupt, spewing cliches everywhere and permanently submerging the things that make storytelling matter.

But this ignores the fact – two facts if you count “there are no new ideas, only new variations” – that sometimes, if done right, stories can get better the longer they run. Look at comics; Captain America has been good in the past, but its finest hour is arguably Ed Brubaker’s run, and he’s come in really late in the day. Look at TV shows; Lost had a couple of terrific seasons, admittedly with highs and lows, but the fourth and fifth seasons were incredibly surprising. Look at The Shield or Seinfeld or The Sopranos or The Wire or Friday Night Lights; they didn’t just wow us initially and then burn away because “all the ideas ran out”. They built worlds, filled with characters we knew and understood and loved. We connected with them more the longer we lived with them, and so our interest grew along with the new possibilities being spotted by the creators and then used as narrative fuel.

When lazy critics bemoan this rampant sequelitis, they often judge before they experience. There is always a chance that a creative team will come up with some new twist or idea, or some new possibility based on the seeds sown in previous episodes/editions/movies, that will excite the audience and break new and interesting ground. This should be obvious, but it seems to pass people by, mostly because it’s easy to just get stuck repeating complaints until they eventually become “self-evident”. Fair enough; we’ve all been burned a million times before, and so it’s easy and inevitable that cynicism increases. Some stories work best when told quickly. Not everything needs a million chapters. Some in recent years have been horribly overdone and stretched too thinly (numerous horror franchises or sci-fi epics could be trimmed quite easily). I get that, and in many cases, I totally agree.

However, Fast Five is a perfect example of something that takes a step back, surveys all of the franchise’s elements, and weaves them back together in a new and thrilling way. Perhaps it works better than most because at its heart the series is about artificially created and sustained families, both in terms of the people in Brian’s life and also around the world, as this community nurtures and sustains itself on the fringe of society and protects its members from the disapproving mainstream with mutual respect and codes of honour. This in itself is a fertile ground for stories and continuity, especially as Lin and Morgan have so far proven to be versatile enough to not just make the series about racing.

It also helps that the series has been to so many different locales, with Lin making great use of Rio de Janeiro in this instalment; he stages a rip-roaring chase sequence through a favela that resembles a scene in Louis Leterrier’s Incredible Hulk, except even more exciting. So we see a this template expand in scale, and because we have now arrived at a point where our numerous heroes have become familiar to us over time, Lin and Morgan can get on with setting these characters off against each other in various combinations of friendship, love, antipathy and distrust without the audience having to be led by the hand. The variations would not be possible without this familiarity.

Another beneficial side-effect of adding new chapters onto a story is this removal of set-up; we have about three film’s worth of story in Fast Five because most of the exposition is stripped out, having been dealt with in the previous films. This movie is lean while packed with incident, but – unlike some over-reaching summer entertainments –  is not devoid of emotive impact or dramatic weight (provided you buy into it, of course). The big muscular showdown between Diesel and Johnson is not only a crisply-edited and exciting brawl, it has considerable power due to the deftly-handled in-film build-up, and finishes on a memorable and cathartic moment that has great resonance to fans who have watched the whole series. The whole is truly greater than the sum of its parts.

As for the other participants, while Paul Walker and Jordana Brewster still have difficulty generating onscreen sparks, their characters at least matter to Dominic, and therefore to me. I’ve long held that Diesel is a more interesting performer than he’s given credit, especially as he seems drawn to morally diverse characters like Dominic and Riddick, and he does some strong and surprisingly quiet work here. Tyrese Gibson is now designated comic relief and seems to relish it; what had seemed to me to be a casting misjudgement in the second movie really pays off here. Chris “Ludacris” Bridges is slowly becoming a much more confident actor the longer he stays in the game, and this movie makes me look forward to more from him.

What about my hero Dwayne Johnson? He is BUILT TO KILL in this movie, having bulked up to terrifying size. His head is bald, his chin is whiskery, and his face is coated in a sheen of freshly-spritzed sweat throughout. It’s fantastic to see him finally play something a little meatier than his recent ill-advised child-placating roles; it’s not like he’s playing anything really shocking, but his character Hobbs is a bit of a sexist, kinda mean-spirited, a cross between Sam Gerard in The Fugitive and Leonard Smalls in Raising Arizona. He’s not in the movie enough (an unfortunate consequence of that kitchen-sink spirit), but its obvious he’ll be back, and hopefully he’ll have more to do. As previously mentioned before, the fight between him and Diesel – a fight I didn’t realise I needed in my life until just last week –  is as good as you would hope, but the best thing is the grudging rapprochement between hunter and hunted.

Allow me to explain. If there is any single relationship arc I love more than any other in all of written or filmed storytelling in the history of our world or any other, it’s the eventual thawing of hostilities between two diametrically opposed characters who hate each other or who cannot possibly ever be friends and yet somehow do because that’s how strong their love is. Midnight Run, Heat, the many buddy-comedy-dramas of Shane Black; these movies have moments that absolutely shake me to my core. Nothing makes me happier than seeing enemies become allies, and let’s just say, without spoilers, there is a moment in Fast Five that made me want to take off all my clothes and run around the cinema screaming “YEEEEEESSSSSS!” while sobbing and jumping and generally getting way too excited.

So yes, Fast Five is the business. For my previous ignorance on the Fast/Furious front, I humbly apologise (to no one in particular, as before today no one knew what I thought and will likely never care). The setpieces are amped up a thousand-fold, the bromance is intensified, the cars are still lovely, and what do you know, the final act throws out some major surprises that I wouldn’t dream of spoiling – I strongly advise fans of the series to stay in their seats until the traditional ropey CGI racing credits finish to see a terrific set-up for the next movie. I’d say it’s a guilty pleasure, if I believed in the concept. Screw that; everyone involved can be proud of themselves for making an action classic that gives the audience more bang for its buck than anything else in cinemas right now.

I might – I should stress might – even go so far as to say I enjoyed this more than I enjoyed Thor, and I really really really enjoyed Thor, though that might be because I’m still basking in the post-viewing glow, or perhaps the shock that something I had been so sniffy about could be so good. Who knew I would have this good a time just by dropping my sense of superiority and giving myself over to the love of two burly men rolling around on the floor and sweating over each other? Five more movies, please! Ten!

He’s Nitroglycerin!

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To all of those who have been experiencing withdrawal symptoms while the BBC tries to figure out what to do with their boneheaded SF-action comedy Torchwood, I have good news. You can satisfy the craving by watching BBC1′s galactically stupid Luther, or — as we’ve taken to calling it — Loofah. The first episode of the six part series featured the usual BBC drama gaffes (overdirection, rampant cliches, clumsy storytelling), but as soon as our maverick hero destroyed a balsa-wood door in a fit of thespian rage, we were hooked. To our delight, it has become even more unhinged and bizarre as the weeks have progressed, though there are concerns that our joy will be short-lived. I’ll get to that later…

Big Driis, or Idris Elba as he is sometimes known, is talked about in hushed tones whenever the topic turns to The Wire, though I find the tones are a lot less hushed when you watch him in tripe like The Reaping or Obsessed. Luther is another example: he’s doing a LOT of acting, but I’m not sure whether it’s actually any good. There are so many tics and bizarre choices that I’m beginning to wonder if Driis can inherit the mantle of UK’s David Caruso. He’s just as compelling a visual presence, and almost as entertaining.

The show itself is just as mannered as CSI: Miami, pitched at the same hysterical level of dramatic overkill, almost to the level of parody (in fact I am now sure that CSI: Miami really is meant to be a parody: the bear attack in a recent episode convinced me). It’s also an exercise in attention-seeking style over substance. Instead of day-glo orange filters and characters being filmed through about 20 panes of slowly shifting glass, Luther is filmed in shades of grey to match its “gritty” and “edgy” atmosphere. I can imagine someone on the showrunning team saying that restricted palette represents the shades of moral ambiguity in the show. Take it from me, this is no justification for the obnoxious off-kilter compositions: an aesthetic choice whose only merits are that they distract you from the muddled storytelling.

Much as it would be nice to credit Luther with asking big questions about morality, it is merely replicating the dramatic beats of better stories without understanding how they illuminate the human condition. Like a child re-enacting his/her favourite film, Luther pretends to be a peek into the dark heart of someone whose moral compass is going awry. Regrettably it’s a long way from the genuinely involving questions thrown up by The Shield (a show that played with audience expectations of its protagonists better than anything else I’ve ever seen). It’s closer to the kind of storytelling sophistication that thinks it’s okay to have the mustache-twirling villain say, “We’re not that different, you and I.” In fact, there’s a recurring character that is there just to make this point every 20 minutes: evil physicist Alice Morgan, played as a hilarious Anthony Hopkins/Lauren Bacall hybrid by Ruth Wilson.

It’s also a primer in how to write drama for  British TV. The latest episode featured these important lessons:

How not to describe a terribly “edgy” murder using grown-up words:

Ripley: She was found on the banks of a canal in Birmingham. Exsanuated [sic] and genitally mutilated.

How to establish character in one line:

Luther: Benny, appreciate you coming in.

Benny: It’s okay, I was just immersed in a world of King Crimson and World of Warcraft. (We would have also accepted, “I was just watching Wrath of Khan while working on my biography of Holger Czukay,” “I was just in a Halo 3 multiplayer match with my friends MalReynolds2828 and ValisIsTheTruth,” or “It’s okay, my 9/11 Truth bookclub got cancelled when one of our group got a call about a UFO sighting in Caversham.”)

How not to react to the aftermath of a brutal beating:

Luther: [sigh] …Oh dear. (This is insufficiently “edgy”, Loofah.)

How to explain to someone why you had a gang of female hoodies happy-slap them:

Alice Morgan: Why, I couldn’t help myself.

Mark North: I don’t believe that. See, I don’t think you of all people ever do anything unless you decide to do it.

Alice Morgan: No it’s true. I’m a bit like that. Bit random. Certainly… kooky.

Mark North: Kooky…

Alice Morgan: Absolutely…

How to establish that you are not afraid of appearing like the creepiest bastard ever during a conversation in your weird serial killer shop:

Luther: Five-’ahndred quid, for a poem ‘and-illustrated by the Yorkshire Rippah. 750 quid for a lettah from the Rippah to a female correspondent. Wow.

Lucien Burgess: That includes a small self-portrait. Sutcliffe. Snuggling up to a woman. Large breasted.

How to threaten a bent coppah with the threat of imprisonment:

Internal affairs-type cop Schenk (the fifth member of the Three Stooges troupe): I didn’t want to come for you, John, but they sent me to do a job. And if they send for me again, I will come again, and I will take you down, even if it means that I won’t be able look myself in the eye afterwards.

There’s this brilliant exchange at the start of this clip. The rest is a woeful attempt at creating a webisode to flesh out the story, featuring Schenk really enjoying his drink:

It all makes the risible, overrated Dexter look like Michael Mann’s glacially perfect Manhunter. Even worse, in the latest episode we see another hammy super-genius villain, the improbably named Lucian Burgess — a blood-drinking, Aleister-Crowley-worshipping mad man who kidnaps women, drains their blood, drinks it, and then freezes them to death. He also licks faces, giggles manically, and has hissy fits whenever he is thwarted by our hero. That’s all quite amusing, except for the vile, leering shots of his terrified victim, a woman with absolutely no agency, who spends the first half of the episode cowering in terror and screaming, before turning up dead in the final half.

It’s certainly “edgy”, and I’m sure the showrunning team were pleased with themselves for their narrative daring, but what about the fact that her death is nothing more than a device to ask even more shallow questions about Loofah’s corrupted sense of morality as he frames Burgess for the crime due to the lack of evidence? The victim, whose terror has been documented in even more shots than there are slow pans across the London skyline (i.e. a lot), is nothing more than a prop, a corpse in a box in the corner, ignored by our hero and his nemesis as they bicker about justice and the evil that men do. It doesn’t so much leave a nasty taste in the mouth as it does piss in it with arrogant disdain while quoting from Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

This is a pretty big factor in whether or not Luther inherits the Torchwood crown as worst drama on UK TV, and not the title of most odious: whether it can dial back the humourless, unpleasant tone and just deliver the requisite poor storytelling and over-eager filmmaking of our favourite Welsh SF show. Torchwood was gloriously awful but strangely lovable. Right now, Luther is on the verge of being unwatchably nasty, and a catastrophic mistake by the BBC. Let’s hope they pull it back from the brink in the latter half of the season.

Listmania ‘09! The Worst Movies Of The Year

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It’s arguable that I shouldn’t pick over the very worst movies of the year, that I should concentrate on the good and embrace positivity, but hell, I sat through these clunkers out of curiosity and got a whole heap of pain in return, so I’m going to make something of that experience. If that means writing a lot of words about how dreadful and misguided these films are, then so be it. Sadly, I know for a fact that this list contains movies that are loved by family members, friends, and Twitter acquaintances. Conversations about these films have previously been conducted with care, as I attempted to not give away my feelings about said films for fear of causing offence. As a result, pre-emptive apologies are due to all those who love movies on this list. If you derived pleasure from these films, that’s awesome. I’m genuinely glad that you had a great time with them. I’m just recounting my subjective experience of these films, and if they differ from yours, it is not a personal thing. Though it should go without saying, I feel it necessary to state that I consider it bad form to judge a person because of their opinion. I’ll like you or love you no matter what, and my disagreement doesn’t reflect a judgement upon you. Unless you like the number one movie on this list. If you do, there’s no helping you.

And so, with that defensive caveat in place, on with the hatred:

Worst Movies of the Year:

25. Angels and Demons

Ron Howard’s second attempt at breathing life into Dan Brown’s clunky prose was far more successful than The Da Vinci Code, and even managed to hold our attention for its duration. Only after the credits roll do you realise how extravagantly silly the movie was, and how little had actually happened. A harmless and entertaining failure, maybe, but a failure nonetheless.

24. Surrogates

Adapted from a graphic novel by Robert Venditti and Brett Weldele, Jonathan Mostow’s satire on the lure of social media and fears of modern disconnection was ill-served by two things: being directed by Jonathan Mostow, and being a satire on the lure of social media and fears of modern disconnection. Luddite witterings about the awful effects of reliance on new communication technologies are irksome already before being further mangled by Mostow, whose dead eye for action renders the movie as lifeless as its robotic characters. Any good ideas from the original comic are sadly buried under a layer of drabness.

23. The Hangover

A nervous nerd, a socially inept madman, and a gigantic, charmless wanker act like pricks in Las Vegas for two hours, and we pay millions of dollars to see it. Irreverent behaviour like this is always going to be appealing, but Todd Phillips has never been able to bring these moments to any kind of life in any of his previous comedies, and he fails again here. Jokes fall flat, comedic situations are resolved in witless fashion, and convicted rapist Mike Tyson is brought on as an ostensibly daring addition to an overstuffed cast, and succeeds in doing nothing but making the whole enterprise unpalatable without being funny. The main trio — all talented guys — are utterly wasted here.

22. G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen was not a great movie by any stretch of the imagination, but it was far more entertaining than Stephen Sommers’ leaden-footed series of explosions and bellowed exposition. Poorly staged action, predictable character arcs, boring tech designs, and most regrettably no spark of Bay-style madness. It also gives Channing Tatum more unwarranted screentime and squanders the talents of Rachel Nichols, Christopher Ecclestone and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. The worst toy-based movie of the year, by a nose. GO JOES! GO FAR AWAY!

21. Orphan

George Ratliff’s fascinating Bad Seed thriller Joshua was only given a small release a couple of years ago, but is good enough to warrant chasing it down. Ostensibly similar, but far inferior, Jaume Collet-Serra’s hysterical and misjudged horror movie brings an Eastern-European Other into an affluent family with A Dark Past and runs through a litany of thriller cliches with excessive energy. Crashing unsubtlety is only the beginning of Orphan‘s problems. Narrative implausibilities pile up the further in we progress, leading to a hysterical finale with a truly demented and silly twist. Kudos to Dark Castle for getting Vera Farmiga and Peter Sarsgaard onboard to lend a veneer of respectability, but boo to them too for making those actors look so horribly lost.

20. Paul Blart: Mall Cop

In 2008 Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison Productions did the world a great favour and produced the delightful House Bunny, starring the ever-magnificent Anna Faris. The world didn’t really seem to be bothered by this excellent gift, and it made minor money at the box office. In 2009 Happy Madison bankrolled Kevin James’ simplistic mall cop movie, despite the fact that the script contained no jokes even though it was obviously meant to be playing with the Die Hard template. Fertile ground, you’d think. However, when this short Ben Stiller sketch contains more funny lines than your entire movie, you know you’re in trouble. And yet it grossed way way more than House Bunny. ::sadface::

19. The Box

Richard Kelly attempts to redeem himself for the failure of Southland Tales by making a straight adaptation of Richard Matheson’s excellent short story, exploring the moral quandary therein with thoughtfulness and maturity. Only kidding! He garbles the whole thing with a needlessly complicated and confusing plot about aliens and morality tests and dimensional portals and the afterlife and chickens and sentient masonry and water and water and water and water and oh God, someone please stop him. (Warning: it does not feature chickens and sentient masonry. Please don’t watch it because that makes it sound more interesting.)

18. Knowing

How depressing to see a technically ambitious and interesting SF director like Alex Proyas trot out something so illogical and exploitative. With Nicolas Cage asleep and Rose Byrne in shriek-mode, there is little here for an audience to empathise with, and if this tale of extinction and salvation works at all, it’s because of a couple of grandiose setpieces, especially a poignant moment at the end set to Beethoven’s 7th Symphony. Other than that, it’s a muddle of poorly explained philosophy and New Age and Christian symbolism, and ends up as nothing more than a religious wet-dream, with the odious and smug conversion of our atheist protagonist at the last-second. Remember, the caves won’t save the Chuldren! Only blindly trusting the Sky-People will!

17. Away We Go

What could have been a vaguely interesting article in The New Yorker about Dave Eggers’ experiences during his girlfriend’s pregnancy was instead turned into a bloated and pointless road movie, an exercise in narcissism filled with unpleasant stereotypes broadly played by an array of actors far too talented to be left adrift here. At its best it could have been vaguely diverting, but then Sam Mendes horribly misjudges the tone of the film. His flat visuals and clunky control of pace consign this movie to oblivion.

16. The Taking of Pelham 123

It’s bad enough that anyone thought it necessary to remake this story, one already told twice before and one of those times in remarkable fashion, without it being tackled with such cack-handed aggression. Tony Scott’s sledgehammer style removes almost all of the character from John Godey’s original story, and then Brian Helgeland rubs salt into the wound by adding needlessly coarse dialogue. It’s also hobbled by a depressingly low-energy performance from the usually dependable Denzel Washington, and an even more depressingly high-energy performance from a never-worse John Travolta. It gets more wrong than it gets right.

15. I Love You, Beth Cooper

Larry Doyle’s screenplay probably had some interesting things to say about teenage life, expectations, and sexuality, not to mention referencing pretty much every great (and not so great) teen comedy of the past couple of decades, but you would never know that under the usual empty gloss of Chris Columbus’ direction. All subtlety or purpose is crushed by Columbus’ predictably awful take on the subject matter, with his tone-deaf approach being too crass to make the sweet moments connect, or too prudish to make the bawdy stuff go far enough to become memorable. It’s also utterly unfunny. Not a single joke lands. How is this man still making movies?

14. The Blind Side

Michael Lewis is a smart man and I reckon his book — upon which John Lee Hancock’s feel-good drama is based — is far more interesting than this. It will also have the benefit of not being a trite and patronising two-hour-long pat-on-the-back for affluent white Christian folk who took in lost youngster Michael Oher even though he is depicted here as an African-American Lenny sans rabbit. Wrong-headed in the extreme, this film contains less wit and insight into human behaviour than any randomly selected three-minute-long scene from any episode of Friday Night Lights. FNL also has the benefit of not featuring the dreadful Tim McGraw or Jae Head as the most annoyingly precocious child actor in film history.

13. Dragonball Evolution

Pretty much nothing in this horrible, joyless commercial product works, but it is especially irksome to see something that mangles another cultural work being made by James Wong. His X-Files work had always been so entertaining, the first Final Destination was an endearingly bleak project, and The One was an interesting project that could have worked with a few rewrites and a bigger budget. Since then he has floundered, and this awful sub-Matrix Kung-Fu pastiche is a true lowpoint. It made Chow Yun Fat almost unwatchably smug too. Horrible from overcomplicated beginning to incomprehensible end.

12. Twilight: New Moon

Even the world’s most powerful supercomputer, when given the requisite raw data and a million years to generate alternate scenarios with it, could not create a movie as tedious as this. A stagnant narrative mess filled with singularly unappealing, navel-gazing brats, this pop culture phenomenon continues to fascinate millions while doing little more than running on the spot. It takes an especially bad franchise to alienate a nerd such as myself, but Twilight: New Moon managed it by celebrating dysfunctional romantic relationships while being even less entertaining than the dreary original. The only bright spot was a demented performance by Michael Sheen. Other than that berserk cameo, there is nothing to recommend the most sloppily constructed movie of the year.

11. The Proposal

Romantic comedies are going through a really bad patch. The genre was represented by more cynical and shoddily made exercises than ever before. With only The Invention of Lying and (500) Days of Summer attempting to do anything new with the genre, this year’s commercial enterprises at least tried to do one thing that the genre does really well: explore the gulf in behavioural expectations between men and women in an age where we are more aware than ever of our differences and similarities. This is not to say this was done well, though. The Proposal was essentially a by-the-numbers trainwreck of comedy misunderstandings, last-minute changes of heart, and hilarious grandmothers, this time played by an unwatchable Betty White crushing jokes underfoot with obnoxious relish. Yet another terrible Sandra Bullock movie in ’09.

10. Precious: Based On The Novel Push By Sapphire

As with The Blind Side, life for poor African-Americans is here depicted as a kind of hell that even Heironymous Bosch would shrink from painting. Lee Daniels’ tawdry and exploitative adaptation of poet Sapphire’s novel of urban deprivation and depravity is a relentlessly nightmarish vision. If it were a kind of satire on the Boy-Called-It phenomenon of tell-all child abuse memoirs Precious might hold some tasteless appeal, but instead it is an insult to those who suffer real abuse every day. This racially insensitive melodrama’s only worth — other than in giving a showcase to a strong cast who work hard to make Daniels’ scattershot direction seem better than it really is —  is in celebrating those who strive to maintain support systems in America’s most deprived areas. Those hardworking Samaritans deserve a better tribute than this, though.

9. The Ugly Truth

The Proposal was marginally successful by dint of having Ryan Reynolds in the cast. The Ugly Truth, however, is a disaster on every level. Its odious reinforcement of cultural stereotypes about gender behaviour would be bad enough without featuring a mugging Gerard Butler defining “comedy timing” as “jutting out your chin at certain points in a sentence”. Nevertheless, compared to the joyless charm-void that is Katherine Heigl, he’s Spencer Tracy. While Butler tries to tell jokes, Heigl says every line with the same intonation and emphasis, making it impossible to tell where she is meant to be funny. Maybe she’s not meant to be. Bad-movie legend Robert Luketic has no idea how to modulate tone (or light or frame shots), saving his energy for the big vibrating panties scene: a joke so laboured and cringe-inducing that it should have killed this reductive mess on the spot.

8. Love Happens

Jason Reitman’s adaptation of Walter Kirn’s novel Up In The Air struck me as an insincere and mechanical exercise in sentimentality. I was deeply disappointed by it. Then I saw Love Happens and for a few minutes I felt like writing a letter to Reitman thanking him for every choice he made that stopped him from making something as wholly empty as this. Though Jennifer Aniston looks right at home in such uninspiring fare, Aaron Eckhart is wasted as a man dealing with that romance genre staple: the loss of his wife. Judy Greer, John Carroll Lynch, and Martin Sheen look like they’re praying for someone to rescue them from this openly manipulative farrago. Tricky to get stories about traumatic grief right. This didn’t even try. It makes Nights in Rodanthe look like Gone With The Wind.

7. Obsessed

Somehow a guy who directed episodes of The Wire and Deadwood thought it would be nice to launch his film career by directing a Hallmark Channel movie about evil temps written by the guy who wrote Star Trek V. The nicest thing that can be said about it is that it seems to have been made with a post-racial America in mind. The sympathetic protagonists are African-American and the evil antagonist is Caucasian: a fact that generates no discussion about race or the exploitation of black people in contemporary America. Sadly, I doubt that the filmmakers thought we had progressed beyond the point where this wasn’t worth commenting on: they just didn’t really know what to say, and so ignored the narrative minefield. That left us with a neutered Fatal Attraction clone with flat performances, ugly lighting, and ten minutes of an otherwise unused Beyonce beating up Ali Larter in the signposted finale.

6. My Sister’s Keeper

All I’ve experienced of Jodi Picoult’s work is her terrible run on Wonder Woman, where she revealed absolute ignorance of everything that made the character exciting. This syrupy and insincere adaptation of her novel doesn’t make the idea of reading her books any more appealing. A terrific cast — plus Cameron Diaz in full-on squawk mode — battle with a mountain of disease-of-the-week cliches, all served up in an unconventionally fractured narrative that could be considered avant-garde. I suspect it’s actually just that Nick Cassavetes didn’t really know what he was doing. Yet another shitty movie cynically treating emotional turmoil as grist to the mawkish mill. It gets added evilness points for misrepresenting scientific endeavour as morally compromised by inventing a fantasy scenario designed to scare incurious people into distrusting doctors.

5. The Boat That Rocked

Richard Curtis seems to think that English history is a Lego set that he can use to construct any old fantasy about our cultural past that he likes and no one will mind. When garbling historical events for obvious comedic effect in Blackadder, the result was a superb sitcom. Here it is just another exercise in using the devalued Cool Brittannia brand to hide the fact that England is painfully uncool, and making respectable actors put on drainpipe trousers and do the Twist on the deck of a boat for no reason is like watching the Queen trying to crunk. Curtis also seems to have forgotten how to tell a story: the meandering digressions featured here do not count as narrative. Pointless, needlessly hectic, overlong, unamusing and shoddily filmed, The Boat That Rocked almost represented the nadir of Britain’s film output in 2009. Almost.

4. All About Steve

The Year of Bullock was not a 100% financial success, but it was a total washout. This baffling movie represented the lowpoint of her Trilogy of Awful, and stands as a true curio. Why was this film made? The judgement of everyone involved must be called into question, because it honestly feels like no one knew what was going on at any point during its development and production. Was it an attempt at Farrelly-Brothers-style gross-out comedy? A celebration of the outsider? A denunciation of the outsider? A pro-life pastiche? A remake of Twister? All that is certain is that Bullock is insufferable here, stalking an embarrassed-looking Bradley Cooper across America while his colleagues enable her for no easily-identifiable reason. No one behaves like a human being until the sentimental finale where the grinding tone change paints protagonist Mary Horowitz as an admirable hero and everyone who has previously resented her falls into line to praise her. It’s utterly incomprehensible and nigh-unwatchable.

3. Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li

Steven E. DeSouza’s original Street Fighter movie is treated like cinematic dog-doo by game fans and non-fans alike, but hopefully it will be revisited in the wake of this franchise revamp and seen as the light and entertaining diversion it actually is. Because this new Street Fighter movie sure isn’t light, and it sure isn’t entertaining. While the game features exaggerated movements, fantasy elements and imaginatively rendered characters, writer Justin Marks and director Andrzej Bartkowiak make the mistake of treating the game to a Batman Begins / Casino Royale-style revamp that strips every appealing element from the source material and leaving a tedious revenge plot against an unscrupulous entrepreneur in its place. Easily the most boring action movie of the year, it also features one of the worst performances, from oily Chris Klein. To be honest, he’s almost bad enough to earn a recommendation. His oleaginous demeanour and hilarious tough-guy mannerisms are the most entertaining things to be found here.

2. X-Men Origins: Wolverine

Arguably the worst, most misguided and compromised big budget summer action movie ever made. To fanboys it represents yet another slap in the face from Tom Rothman, yet again mangling the things about a franchise that make that franchise appealing in the first place, as well as cutting budgets, altering the shooting script, and overriding director Gavin Hood. However, it’s not just nerd-preciousness that powers this rage against the money-making machine. Nothing in this cynical enterprise works, from the set design to the dialogue to the hideous effects to the casting (not counting Ryan Reynolds or Taylor Kitsch). The broad-strokes narrative desperately tries to match up Marvel’s Origin story with the beginning of the X-Men trilogy, but manages to taint all of the movies with its half-arsed stink. I can’t remember ever feeling so cheated by a superhero movie, or so horrified at how brazenly my love of these characters was being manipulated by a man who does not care a jot about their history.

1. Lesbian Vampire Killers

Someone shoe-horned everything that is wrong and miserable about British culture into one movie for the convenience of those of us who cringe at the thought of lad-mags, shoddy horror comedies that are neither funny nor scary, piss-poor “gentle” sitcoms (i.e. they contain no jokes), and traditional British directorial ineptitude. Horne and Corden — who are to Morecambe and Wise as dysentery is to tasty dessert toppings — mug their way through a joke-free and plagiaristic “romp” in which very nearly all women are sexually voracious and scantily-clad gay hotties who appear to be filled with what could be semen, considering how they explode in a shower of white goop when they are “amusingly” killed by the horny protagonists. It doesn’t even have the courtesy to be outrageously tasteless like the horror comedies it emulates so ineptly. It’s just tacky, stupid, gormless, tedious, misogynistic, and puerile. It also single-handedly negates all of the good will generated by British movies made by BBC Films and Film4, dragging the British Film Industry back in time to a period when Carry On films represented our most visible contribution to the world of cinema. If it could be deported, I’d do it in a heartbeat. Worst film of the year? Fuck that. Worst film of the decade, more like.

More to come, hopefully, including Best Actor and Actress, Worst Actor and Actress, and “awards” for directors, writers, and a cinematographer that I dissed last year.

Stringer Bell and Sasha Fierce in: Futile Attraction

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In the 80s and 90s Michael Douglas was the go-to guy to play men harassed, used, abused and manipulated by women, as seen in the White-Men-Under-Attack trilogy of Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct and Disclosure. After his screen avatar’s bad luck was purged by David Fincher in The Game his screen appearances have become sporadic. The next generation demands a new macho hero who can be hunted by the kinds of obsessive, dangerous women that only exist in movies. In Obsessed, the man attempting — and failing — to fill Douglas’ shoes is Idris Elba, who plays executive Derek Charles with a relentless and tiring intensity the movie doesn’t warrant. Happily married to his former assistant Sharon (Beyoncé Knowles), Charles is stalked at work by a temp assistant, Lisa (Ali Larter). At first she merely seems infatuated with Elba, but after he rebuffs a couple of aggressive approaches she becomes crazed, interpreting his rebuffs as evidence of his love for her, prompting her to insinuate herself into his life a la Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction and Jessica Walters in Play Misty For Me.

Those movies showed the male protagonist’s culpability, with the message being “Mess around, and you will suffer for it.” Here writer David Loughery and director Steve Shill seem to be saying “Guys, there are some crazy women out there, and they’ll fuck up your life for no reason.” This doesn’t even pass muster as a morality play. It’s just another movie stating that there is no such thing as the Other any more. No matter how well you live your life, people are going to hunt you down, drug you with Rohypnol, rub up against you while you are in a fugue state, and listlessly kidnap your child, though “relocate” seems to be a more accurate description for what she does, as the nefarious Lisa merely moves Derek and Sharon’s son from his crib to their car.

The worst that happens to Derek is that he is accused of having an affair. The evidence for this is entirely provided by Lisa, and yet despite the flimsy nature of it (for example, listing him as an emergency contact number, or writing about the imaginary affair in a diary), at least two women automatically believe he is in the wrong. In one of the stupider scenes of the year, a police detective (Christine Lahti) investigating a suicide attempt by Lisa interrogates Derek in the crowded waiting room of a hospital with Sharon sitting next to him. As the scene descends into incomprehensible histrionic chaos, we see Elba desperately trying to prove his innocence while both women irrationally dismiss his pleas. The movie seems to be saying that it just doesn’t pay to be honourable, because women will always distrust their man.

It’s tempting to think Obsessed is intentionally trying to trade in the most witless and offensive gender stereotypes possible, as some kind of poorly signposted satire on gender politics. The male characters (including Jerry O’Connell and Bruce McGill) are either flamboyant homosexuals mincing around the office or leering sexist pigs whose idea of small talk is to discuss how sexy women love to extort money from them with their feminine wiles. Still, at least gender politics are addressed, albeit ineptly. The potentially inflammatory racial implications of having the only black characters in the film threatened by a predatory and insane white woman are ignored altogether. Apparently, this was to avoid repeating the themes of Loughery’s previous movie Lakeview Terrace, which featured a racist black cop menacing a white family.

It quickly becomes clear the filmmakers are only interested in cranking out the least provocative thriller possible. With a blameless hero victimised by a villain who has no recognisable human qualities, even the dependable nightmare scenario of being framed and losing everything is diluted by the vast amount of contrivance needed to place our hero in jeopardy. We’re merely expected to wait — unmoved and unoffended by the mild PG-13 thrills — for the villain to get her comeuppance, which comes in a protracted and absurd finale, when Sharon returns home to find Lisa in bed. The poorly choreographed catfight that follows is violent but bloodless, and finally provides Knowles with something to do other than chide Elba. After mouthing some unconvincing threats and killing Larter, Knowles is comforted by her husband, and the last shot is of her, not the man who has been onscreen for most of the film. I’m not the only person confused by this shift in focus. Did Knowles — who co-produced the movie with her father Mathew – sign on just so she could film a long fight scene? Why would that appeal to her? Did she hate the third season of Heroes even more than I did? This mystery is the only aspect of the movie that invites further reflection.

Obsessed is as dreary and toothless a thriller as you’re ever going to see. Unimaginatively plotted by Loughery — the man who wrote Star Trek V: The Final Frontier — the viewer waits for anything shocking or interesting to happen and gets little more than some one-note shouting from Elba and some lazy misogyny. All that’s left for the viewers to occupy themselves is mockery of the risible dialogue (“I’ll take up that slack. That is one smoking hot piece of ass!”) and direction. TV director Shill has worked on almost every notable show of the past ten years, including The Wire and Deadwood. However, he started out with EastEnders, Emmerdale, and The Bill, and it is these uncinematic melodramas that provide the closest link to his work here. Overlit, poorly blocked, and littered with even more establishing shots than in Tommy Wiseau’s notorious bad movie classic The Room, Shill fails to transform Loughery’s script into even a passable movie. Apparently the working title for Obsessed was Oh No She Didn’t. It’s a pity they went with the straight-to-DVD-esque title it now has. If they’d retained the original title, at least the laughs elicited by this dismal failure might have seemed intentional.

End Of Season Review: In Treatment

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When new TV shows are announced, it’s inevitable that, for someone like myself, it’s the flashy stuff that catches my attention, because basically I’m a twelve-year old nerd in an adult’s body. Sad, but true. This TV season it was Fringe and Dollhouse that caught my attention, even when they turned out to be of variable quality. The year before, it was Journeyman, and next year it will be Flash Forward that I spend most time anticipating. Every other new show will be extraneous. Everyone is telling me that Glee is great and must be seen, but it’s like High School Musical for adults, right? So, it’s the American Britannia High? Even if there was ten Jane Lynch clones in it I’d still not be too bothered.

Of course, this means I miss the real gems. Much as I liked Fringe and Dollhouse (and loved Journeyman), with all of their crazy sci fi speculative craziness, they will only occasionally give me as much satisfaction as, say, the whole second season of Mad Men. The rest of the time, I’ll wince and hope the next episode is better. It’s a sickness. I’ve not even watched Breaking Bad yet, despite the involvement of X-Files hotshot Vince Gilligan, just because a teacher making drugs doesn’t interest me as much as a show featuring a big transgenic monster, even though that episode of Fringe was almost unwatchably stupid and boring, and Breaking Bad is apparently better than sex in a Ferrari, according to its many fans.


I’m my own worst enemy, because this bias stopped me from watching the first season of In Treatment, which struck me as a potentially tedious and earnest drama which would also require a huge investment of time. With the season running over nine weeks, and each week featuring five instalments of around twenty-two minutes in length, it was like watching nine two-hour movies featuring the same characters, the same structure, and surely the same dialogue. Descriptions of the show mentioned how it was the most realistic depiction of psychotherapy yet shown in TV or film, which suggested that development in the characters would be incremental, just like in real life. Why would I spend that much time with these people?

Sometimes I love being proved wrong. Canyon persuasively argued its case, and convinced me to give it a try (which is more than I have done for her new favourite thing in the world, So You Think You Can Dance [It is genius and you are watching the first performance show. Adam Shankman and L'il C 4-eva! -- Canyon]). After a few episodes, during which time I adjusted to the format (one-on-one conversations between therapist Dr. Paul Weston, played by Gabriel Byrne, and his patients), it became apparent that In Treatment was the most intense kind of long-form storytelling on TV right now, and if you’re interested in “The Golden Age of TV”, and how newly confident TV writers and directors have become so adept at creating and sustaining this relatively new form of extended narrative, you have to try it out. Based closely on an Israeli show called Be’Tipul, which ran for two seasons, the show has been described as a series of vignettes or short stories that just happen to be linked by the main character, but really they are “TV as novel” just like shows that run for a longer period (such as The Wire and The Shield), but in a more concentrated dose.


Paul’s patients are protagonists in their own way, and we care about the outcomes of their therapy, but more than that the show is an intricately detailed character study of one man, either by reflection – we see who he is through his reactions to his patients – or by action, i.e. how he breaks the boundaries of his role as therapist, and how he treats his family and therapist Dr. Gina Toll (played brilliantly by Dianne Wiest). By the end of the first season, it became clear that, though we had been following five stories, we had learned the most about one man, someone who had lost sight of what he was supposed to be doing and had thrown his life into disarray by committing the same mistake his patients had: not listening to good advice from those who care about them.

Both Canyon and I fell deeply in love with the show after rushing through the first season at a rate we’ve not done since we watched all of The Shield in a few weeks. Nevertheless, I was concerned about the second season, which was no longer run by Rodrigo Garcia, the man who had done such a good job of adapting the original series for a new audience. This change of leadership struck us as an odd move, thinking it was perhaps brought on by the low viewing figures and minimal press coverage; other than the odd rave here and there, what little attention it got was to point out how boring therapy is and silly it was, with plenty of whining about the amount of episodes. God, it must be SO HARD being a TV critic.

Turns out that making a series of thirty-five to forty-five episodes, with a shooting schedule of two days per episode (with no time to rehearse), takes its toll. In this interview with new showrunner Warren Leight, he tells of the deep fatigue everyone working on the show feels, with Garcia dropping out after one season, and Byrne and Leight both ready to move on as well. Sad though that is, I can completely understand.

And when I say sad, I mean really sad. This season was a marked improvement over the already impressive first, and that terrible burden of thirty-five episodes, that so upset the poor TV critics, was just too small. Could the show come back? Though each episode of In Treatment is based on a corresponding episode of Be’Tipul, the writers and directors and cast seem to have fallen into a consistent groove, rattling out incredibly complex and honest drama at an amazing rate. If HBO were willing to spend more money on development time, letting the writers construct a new set of patients and motivations for Paul, and giving the cast and crew longer to rehearse, there is no reason this show cannot continue indefinitely. Fans are talking about how the show could carry on with a new therapist, perhaps Wiest’s Toll. Anything to get it back for at least another year.


Luckily, as the chances of the show returning are slim, this season did provide some measure of closure, though it stretches the definition of the term somewhat. As therapy is rarely able to completely fix a person, the show could not have each patient walk out with all of their problems solved. At best we got to see that some characters were willing to continue their therapy after a breakthrough, and others left before that could happen. Unsurprisingly, after spending the most time with Paul, and seeing him deal with divorce, lawsuits, estrangement from his family, and the death of his father, we got the sense that he was nowhere near happiness, only getting to the point where he wants to continue being a therapist after a crisis of confidence. A nice set-up for a new season, and a nice way to end it if that doesn’t happen.

So why do I love it so much? Mostly for the same reasons that everyone does. The performances are truly magnificent (especially considering there are no rehearsals), the writing is perceptive and complex (and is apparently sometimes amended on set as the actors make certain choices), and the direction is a feat of engineering (different directors are expected to keep different “days” visually and tonally distinct even though the show is set almost entirely in a single room). Technically the show is a marvel, and the performers are repeatedly giving their best work ever. All of the characters in Paul’s circle are brought to life with incredible detail, but Byrne in particular deserves most of the praise. His personification of this complex, infuriating, and defiantly sympathetic character is one of the great acting feats of our age. This is not hyperbole; his commitment to emotional truth is revelatory.


I also love that the show is constructed with such meticulous care, even though the tight schedule demands that scripts are sometimes altered at the last minute. Despite that, the arc of the season, with Paul losing sight of what it means to be a therapist, and slowly coming to a realisation of what he can offer, is far more fascinating than some end-of-second-act crisis. While the first season showed him wrecking his life over a futile desire, and perhaps taking the life of one of his most combative patients, the second season showed the aftermath, and his slow climb back to a semblance of normalcy. Threatened with the loss of his practice, horribly lonely now his wife has left him, and increasingly frustrated with his antagonistic patients, Byrne brilliantly portrays his weariness in each session.

That’s to be expected. What is even more pleasing is how each patient connects to the other patients, and to Paul. As his father lies terminally ill in hospital, the patients remind Paul of his own familial strife throughout.


Mia (Hope Davis) dislikes her mother and loves her father, while yearning for a child of her own and, possibly, a relationship with Paul.


April (Allison Pill) is dying of cancer, and unwilling to accept the help of her mother after years of caring for her autistic brother.


Oliver (Aaron Shaw) is a young boy whose parents, Luke and Bess (Russell Hornsby and Sherri Saum), are acrimoniously divorcing, and feels responsible for their break-up.


Walter (John Mahoney) is a CEO on the verge of losing his job, and who is too attached to his daughter at the cost of his relationship with his sons.

At first the connections between them are slight, but over the course of the season they become more pronounced. April’s nihilistic attitude, refusing to treat her cancer, reflects Walter’s late-season suicide attempt (both triggered by their dread of burdening their loved ones), which in turn recalls Oliver’s guilt over the events occurring around him. Oliver, Luke and Paul all have fractious relationships with their fathers, while Mia seems to have a loving relationship with her father that turns out to be a lie, and Walter feels he has somehow failed his daughter. Mia and Paul both hide from the truth of their childhood, constructing fantasies about which parent was the most supportive, in order to blot out uncomfortable truths.


Bess and Mia are faced with the conflict between motherhood and career, though while Mia opts for career and ends up regretting it, Bess opts for motherhood and regrets that just as much. Paul loses a father, and Gina and Walter are both grieving for lost loved ones to varying degrees. Paul and April have given up on their futures due to circumstances beyond their control (a potentially ruinous lawsuit and lymphoma respectively). Luke, Mia and Walter all want families around them in order to prove a point, because that is the way things are done. Luke is trying to negate the neglect he felt from his own father, Mia thinks other people will make her happy as that seems to be the way of things, and Walter goes along with it as that is just the way things were when he was younger.


All of these connecting issues are secondary to Paul and his relationships, and how he manages, at the last minute, to use those experiences to help his patients. After telling Gina that he thinks he can do no good for others as he himself is so screwed up, she gives him the advice to act as if he believes he is helping them all. In the final week, Paul uses his experiences to bring some form of peace to all of his patients. Mia, whose relationship with her father has been so close that she cannot let any other man get close, despairs of ever finding intimacy, and when Paul tells her that her confessional sessions with him are perfect examples of her capacity for intimacy, he’s telling himself as well, and reassuring himself that he is not necessarily alone, which generates the later realisation that he needs to cultivate more non-work relationships. April is unable to imagine a future for herself, and Paul’s advice is given from the natural perspective of someone who has lived longer and seen how possibility can arise. He also symbolically stops her from using her brother’s needs as a barrier to living life, by giving her his father’s hat to use instead of the itchy one, given to her by her brother, that she had previously been using.


In the previous weeks of the show, Paul’s father dies before Paul is able to reconcile with him after years of neglect, an error that haunts him until the end of the season, especially as his separation from his own younger son is troubling him. Using this pain as a touchstone, Paul tells Luke to do everything in his power to never lose touch with Oliver, and Oliver is reassured that his father really loves him and always will. As both man and boy respect Paul’s judgement, you get the very real sense that they will take his words to heart. Walter is given similar advice about reconnecting with his sons, even though he is adamant that it is too late for him.


Of course, as he heals these people, they heal him. April tells him that Sophie, his suicidal patient from the first season, has written about him on the Internet, and is proof that he has been able to save a life. By keeping in contact with Oliver, Paul finds a new connection, one he can keep and monitor from a perspective of wisdom and not emotional irrationality, as he does with his own children. The advice that he gives both Mia and Walter, about not giving up treatment even though it seems like it is too late to help them (because of Mia’s perimenopause and Walter’s old age), applies to himself as well, giving him the awareness that what he does has merit, and that the parts of his life that are lacking are easily filled, especially once the lawsuit against him is dropped.


This satisfying cross-cutting complexity is good enough to make this one of the best shows on TV right now. Only Lost matches it for storytelling ambition. It’s no coincidence that both shows feature some of the most detailed characters in modern fiction, spending hours revealing enormous amounts of back-story. Lost‘s use of this device is for story reasons that are not entirely clear right now (other than to have some great characters in the show, obviously), but what makes In Treatment so special is that without distractions (smoke monsters, time travel, the unbelievable hottness of Sawyer and Juliet), the show can concentrate on doing just one thing; illuminating the human condition. That remarkable format means it is done in enough detail that it speaks to all of us.

On top of that are incredible individual moments: Walter’s final tearful breakthrough; Paul’s confrontations with Alex’s father, played by Glynn Turman; Mia’s defiant resistance to any possibility of change, and her epiphany in her final episode; Paul’s eruption at the breathtaking selfishness of Luke and Bess; Oliver contentedly eating the sandwich Paul has made for him; and all of April’s fourth session, a masterclass in acting and writing that left me shaking with emotion when it was over. By the time the final week aired, I was sobbing at the end of almost every episode, especially Oliver’s final appearance.


All of this could make the show sound like a worthy slog, but it does manage some light moments too. In the final episode, it was especially pleasing to hear Paul’s rant about how much he hates his chair, which must have been added by Leight as a nod to Byrne’s real hatred of the prop he has been using. I also love that he is just about the least funny character on TV, occasionally cracking out some dreadful pun to lighten the mood (the only person who seems to enjoy his jokes is Gina, who is similarly nerdy). Nevertheless, the show deals with such bleak subject matter that the tone couldn’t sustain wisecracking from the characters. It’s not something you miss, though I appreciate that this might be a deal-breaker for some.

Right now the show is not watched by many in the US, and the UK is currently not showing it. Hopefully someone will buy it soon. It’s on region 1 DVD, so US readers can hire it or buy it, and when it eventually gets shown in the UK, hopefully it will be on BBC Four and that format (one episode each weeknight) will be retained. If so, ignore the critics who label the show boring (it’s actually horribly addictive), and don’t be put off by the big commitment (you’ll be gutted when it finishes). It’s more rewarding than any other show in recent memory, and more moving. It’s the kind of intelligent, daring, and compassionate experience that makes you glad to be alive. Good TV can help you pass the time. Excellent TV can change the way you see the world. In Treatment is so perceptive, and so profound, it might actually change the way you see yourself. Do yourself a favour and hunt it down immediately.

Lost: The Beginning of the End

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One problem with being in the UK is having to wait to see episodes of Lost without having the experience ruined utterly by accidentally stumbling across spoilers, but the other is, what can anyone write about when nearly a week has passed since an episode aired? The Lost fanbase has picked over every last scrap and easter egg and ambiguous line of dialogue until there is very little left to be said. It might have been easier if I’d tackled that excellent first episode a little closer to when I actually saw it, but after a week of writing about the show, even I had overdosed on it, and I love it, so I can only imagine how horrible it might have been to anyone who doesn’t share my obnoxious passion. Anyway, I’m going to try to find something to talk about, if only because not talking about it after getting as excited as I did seems a little odd.

What I did like is that the reasons I had for loving Lost turned up in force during the episode, and afterwards. Seems as good a place as any to start.

Reason 10: Awesome Character Actors

The first new character introduced in this episode is played by Lance “Intensity” Reddick, who looks like an angry Woody Strode. I already wonder if any other new character can eclipse him even though he’s only been onscreen for a couple of minutes. The moment he asked Hurley if anyone was left alive on the island, my blood ran cold. His expression was purest diabolical evil.


I’ve not watched much of The Wire, but his stony glare caught my attention. I hope he gets a lot of screentime as Matthew Abaddon, because next to Jacob and his shack (see below), he is the scariest thing on the show, and could possibly be this season’s Juliet/Desmond. Sadly, the episode also featured the arrival of Daniel Faraday (will there be a Tesla at some point?), played by the singularly annoying Jeremy Davies.


I’ve not seen everything he’s been in, but his performances in Saving Private Ryan and Solaris very nearly ruined both movies. In particular, why Soderbergh let him use more acting tics than those employed by every student of Lee Strasberg combined just perplexes me. So no, I’m as unhappy about his arrival on the show as I was when Michelle “Snarl” Rodriguez visited. Let’s hope a trigger-happy Sawyer makes up for ridding us of the lovely Tom by offing Faraday too.

ETA: The showrunners were nice enough to give Marsha Thomason another chance to appear on the show after her ignominious death last season. She’s on a magic island that doesn’t like it when people die, so she gets a few minutes of pointless exposition before dying for proper good no comebacks.


I felt bad for her getting murdered like that. In a crappy Lost documentary made for Sky and presented by the dire Iain Lee, she went on about how great it was being on the show and how welcome everyone made her feel. It was probably filmed after she did the murder scene (complete with glurgy death noises), but still, it was sad. So yay! Four more minutes grappling with Kate! And maybe an appearance in next week’s rescuer flashback episode. Better than a knife in the back, I suppose.

Reason 9: Beautiful Hawaii

A throwaway shot of the castaways relaxing after contacting the boat:


Stunning.

Reason 8: Echoes

The most distant callback of the episode came towards the end, when Kate and Jack hang out in the fuselage of Oceanic 815 and discuss their initial arrival on the island. It’s a clear imitation of a shot from the first season that I would be able to find if I knew which episode it was in, but now all I can do is ask that you trust my dodgy memory.


It reminded me of Kate’s terror as she was chased by Smokey, and how she conquered the fear by counting to five. That was revisited with Hurley’s reaction to his visions on and off the island, where he counts to five until they disappear. I wonder if this amazing technique works? I also liked the opening shot of the pile of fruit.


It reminded me of the visual collage of green and yellow images spotted at intervals during the Room 23 brainwashing tape. There was also the moment where the castaways split into two groups, just like the first season when the survivors split between the caves and the beach. At least this time one of the two groups will be able to live in relative luxury in the Barracks (though how will Locke get the group through the sonic fence?).


Shame that it meant Kate and Sawyer went their separate ways, but considering Jack has been declaring his love for Kate and is now attempting to shoot people who have annoyed him, perhaps it’s a good thing he’s gone for a while. I don’t want anything bad to happen to my boy Sawyer. Look at his bottomless islandy sadness in that picture! His scene with Hurley, trying to get through to him and help him through his grief, choked me up.

Reason 7: Easter Eggs

The best visual Easter Egg of the episode (other than Christian Shephard’s appearance in Jacob’s shack) was Charlie’s underwater appearance.


At first I thought it was someone in scuba gear, but it’s obviously a hoodie. And the note on his hand is a brilliant touch. There were many other touches, like the reoccurence of H and O (like some kind of sci-fi version of Sesame Street), which of course are the 8th and 15th leters of the alphabet, not to mention the appearances of Hurley’s former fast food boss Randy Nations, and Ana-Lucia’s former partner Mike Walton. However, my favourite return appearance was Hurley’s Camaro, last seen being fixed by Cheech Marin in Tricia Tanaka Is Dead.


Many thanks to Lostpedia’s trivia section for these finds. Even though my love for Lost is vast, even I’m not devoted enough to have spotted all of these things.

Reason 6: ZOMG Michael Giacchino

As usual, his work was stunning, but special praise for the cannonball scene, where a euphoric Hurley leaps into the ocean in celebration of the coming rescue.


Giacchino’s brilliant reprise of themes from the first season brought tears to my eyes, especially knowing that Hurley’s joy was going to be short-lived. Heather Havrilevsky of Salon has carped that the show is needlessly dour, and maintains the episode should have allowed the castaways to enjoy their moment of relief instead of rushing headlong into misery (funny that the show is now being slated by critics for not taking its time after years of them moaning that events were progressing too slowly).


Even off-island the Oceanic Six are miserable and drinking what looks like posh vodka with their cornflakes and orange juice. It’s not the first time she’s complained about the tone of the show. Her particular beef is that Lost is depressing and offers no relief from this atmosphere of misery, and perhaps she has a point, but complaining about the characters leaving the island and still being depressed and having miserable lives misses the point.


Yes, they get off the island and still have problems, but then the story isn’t over when they leave. They haven’t had closure yet. When the series is over, and whatever is drawing the Oceanic Six back to the island is resolved, then they might get some peace. To make things worse, she claims to have a plan to save the show (save your energy, it’s doing fine), and just to prove she hasn’t been paying attention, complains that the helicopter doesn’t land on the island. You mean the helicopter that is being buffeted in mid-air and won’t even try to land because the last copter that flew over the island crashed?


Does she not remember the entire episode that revolved around that crash? Or Creepy Ethan Rom’s comment to Juliet that the trip to the island is “bumpy”? Of course not, because as with all of the doubters, she’s confused the show with Heroes, another long-form nerd favourite, and assumed no one is paying attention to these details. If she gave the show enough credit she would realise that whereas Lost takes care to avoid narrative errors, Heroes is riddled with mistakes. To those of us paying attention, Lost isn’t perfect, but it tries hard enough to more than earn our patience and trust. So yet another critic misses the point of the show. (Man, I’ve got to stop criticising the critics, or I’m going to end up sounding like Sexman.)

In conclusion, yay Michael Giacchino!

Reason 5: Awesome acting

The episode totally belonged to Jorge Garcia. His happy moments with Bernard were endearing, which is what he is reliably good at, but his ever-darkening demeanour through the rest of the episode worked brilliantly.


Desolated by the death of his friend (and begging to be committed in the flash-forwards), he was enormously convincing, and by the time we got to his decision to leave with Locke, he was firing on all cylinders. When the show started, who knew he would be able to pull a performance like this off? And yet here he is, carrying an unusually emotional (for Lost) season opener, which is usually the province of Matthew Fox.

That said, Foxy managed to get a lot of flash-forward time as well, but his finest moment was when Locke appeared and got a fist in the teeth for his troubles. As Jeff Jensen said in his episode review, it’s a bit much that Jack would try to kill Locke in front of everyone, even if he was really attached to Naomi (which he wasn’t, as far as I could tell), but he did a great job of expressing that frustration with Locke, and looked totally homicidal in this shot.


He looks like a proper bad ass there, though he should be glad Locke only used a knife on Naomi. The last two times he sabotaged their departure from the island, he used C4. He’s mellowing, perhaps.

ETA: In all my talk of the acting on this show, I realised I have said nothing about Naveen Andrews. I love Sayid! He doesn’t get enough to do. Here he is looking very sad as Hurley tells Claire about Charlie’s sacrifice.


He has pain on his face. It is similar to the pain I suffer seeing this fascinating character given so little to do. Hopefully he is one of the Oceanic Six, so we can get to see him do stuff off-island. It’s not like he’s going to get any more flashbacks.

Reason 4: The quirky mystery

Not much in the way of esoteric phenomena this week, although the question of how much of all this is happening in Hurley’s head looms large. Is it a manipulation of his vision, or is it a ghost? Whatever is happening there, it scared the hell out of us. It’s not just that Christian Shephard is chillaxing in Jacob’s shack, or that someone with a creepy eye is in there too; it’s the incredible and unearthly mobility of the shack itself.


When Hurley ran away from the shack and it reappeared in front of him, I had a little freak-out inside my brain. It’s bad enough that the island has a haunted house on it, but you can’t get away from it? ::covers eyes::

Reason 3: The WTF moments

Biggest Holy Shit! moment of the night had to be the reappearance of Charlie. Even though his face had been spotted in the season premiere trailers, thus lessening the impact of seeing him again, having Charlie take the place of Dave in Hurley’s head was still a masterstroke.


Looking pretty good now that he’s had a haircut and a proper wash, Charlie acted as a figment of Hurley’s imagination, or a ghost, or an emissary from the island. Even though he could be wished away, it’s obvious that Hurley is never going to get any rest until he resolves some unfinished business. What pleased me most about this how much it resembled a stock Stephen King plot; the reunion of people united by adversity early in life.


Though the show has an obvious debt to The Stand, it also now feels like a homage to It and Dreamcatcher (the book, not the wonderfully bad film). When an alarmingly well scrubbed-up Jack visits the institution (see above for the surprising change in appearance, possibly due to losing weight as a result of doing stunts in a leather jumpsuit for Speed Racer), Hurley says that “It” wants them back on the island, which makes Jack leave in disgust. Referring to the force compelling Hurley (and later, Jack) in that way is probably nothing more than a way to avoid revealing something important at too early a stage, but it’s the same kind of narrative device that King used in those books. I was very pleased by this, even if it wasn’t intentional (though I’ll bet it was, what with the showrunners being such big King fans).

Reason 2: The fanbase

Not much to say here, other than it was business as usual. In both the US and the UK a lot of the reaction on the internet from the non-fans has been predictably sour, but AICN and the AV Club were enthusiastic, with talkbacks that grew in length at a massive rate. Jeff Jensen was in fine fettle as well. ::sigh:: It was just like old times.

Reason 1: Locke and Linus

Locke was markedly subdued this episode, even though he managed to rally a number of survivors into following him to the Barracks, quite an achievement considering most of the castaways looked disgusted at him for being a big knife-throwing ass. Ben, on the other hand, was on great form, panicking over the fate of Alex, and gloating over Jack’s gullibility in the face of Kate’s deceptions.


Best of all was his oleaginous request to be allowed to go to the Barracks with Locke. Was this because he actually fears Jack now? Or the rescuers? Or was it yet another ploy to undermine Jack’s hold over the survivors? Whatever his reasoning, it was a hilarious moment. I will say this, though. With Locke getting smacked down by Jack and Ben being knocked about by Danielle for daring to care for her daughter, my boys sure are suffering at the hands of their fellow islanders.


Though Locke will probably return to that state after a short period of saviour-like prestige and power, Ben’s retribution will most likely be terrible to behold. Once back at the Barracks, who knows what he will do.

This week! Rescuers! Possibly more quality Abaddon time! Brian K. Vaughan and Drew Goddard script! Jeff Fahey as Frank Lapidus (which, according to Wikipedia, is a Jewish family name meaning “torches” or “candles”)! Ken Leung! Herc from AICN has seen it and reckons the fans will go crazy over it. Needless to say, I can’t wait.

Movie Face/Off! Biblical Horror Edition (Round Two)

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I blame the Reaping trailer. From the first moment I set eyes on its finely edited, momentum-packed, locusty goodness I was sold. Also, I’m one of the few who doesn’t think Hilary Swank is a punchline to a joke, and have a thing for bibli-horror, so it was a no-brainer. Even though reports were coming in of less-than-10% ratings on Rotten Tomatoes, and people leaving the cinema wailing and gnashing their teeth at the awfulness, and the direction being handled by long-time moviemaking failure Stephen Hopkins, still I held out hope. What, I ask you, is wrong with my brain that compromises my judgement so completely? Is there a medical condition out there that explains why fast-editing gets past my internal censor? I should ignore trailers for life. They’re responsible for so many wasted hours.

Last week we wasted two on The Reapening. Many apologies to Canyon who was wise enough to stop me from seeing the damn thing at the cinema, but unable to stop me hiring it via Amazon. Tellingly, it was the first brand new DVD I’ve ever put at the top of my rental list that didn’t indicate any waiting time. Even The Number 23 has a Short Wait marker. This should have been a warning. In my defence, I will say I thought the negative reviews were easily ignored. Horror movies are notoriously ill-served by critics eager to distance themselves from a genre they think is beneath contempt. So we watched The Repeapening immediately. And verily it did suck, enough to bring down the walls of Jericho and scourge the city of Sodom even unto the ending of the world, amen!

Swank plays a professional miracle-debunker, zipping around the world in a effort to disprove the existence of God, like Richard Dawkins crossed with Indiana Jones but 100% less exciting than that, though admittedly 100% more attractive. Considering the amount of Swankbum close-ups, I think Stephen Hopkins agrees. She is approached by David Morrissey, all rumpled and tortured after the death of his only child, whose hometown of Haven is being plagued by, well, plagues. Biblical plagues! Right up Swank’s alley.

She enlists the help of her colleague Idris Elba, wearing an egregious handlebar moustache, at which point I placed my bets as to when he would die. Because it’s the rule in movies that the black sidekick dies before the end, usually to signify the raising of the stakes or the evil of the antagonist. It’s so common that I unconsciously make predictions even while feeling nauseated by the whole insane cliched horseshit of it all. I plumped for one hour in, and settled back as the team leaves to go meet Morrissey back at his town, way down in Louisiana.

Morrissey, famed for undergoing auto-erotic asphyxiation during sex in Basic Instinct 2: Kink Addiction, is one of those actors that is obviously talented, but is most famous for appearing in films where there is no evidence of such. It’s very frustrating. There is also the problem that he looks a bit like a smug potato, something that The Nesbitt also has trouble with.

Here he is charming the pants off Swank with his erudition and earthy, Southern swagger. It’s a serviceable performance, hamstrung by the decision to use his dialect training to improve his Elvis impression, and we spent the entire movie finishing every one of his lines with an impassioned, “Uh huh huh!” This joke refused to get old, despite my efforts. He tells her of a murder of a boy in his town, and the young sister who may have committed the murder and then turned the river to blood (AnnaSophia Robb, who does sinister child-staring very well). He’s pissed because, while investigating it, he ruined his best pair of Blue Suede Shoes. Uh huh huh.

With barely any delay, our team of Mythbusters get to work testing the bloody river for the presence of sciencey stuff. Biblical scientists (those who tally biblical tales with verifiable historical events) were consulted for the film, which accounts for one of the few good moments of the film, where Swank is confronted by a bunch of scared yokels whose cows are tipping themselves (by dying horribly). After listening to their theories of plagues and whatnot, she snaps and reels off the ten plagues that hit Egypt after the Old Testament God got pissed off at something the Egyptians did. Exploring their sexuality, or getting body piercings, or exercising their free will, or something equally heinous and plague-worthy. All ten plagues are accounted for by science: bacterial contamination of the Nile killed all the frogs, which created an increase in flies, which coincided with a terrible sandstorm, and more spreading of illness, and the poorly fed firstborn children of the area couldn’t fend off the disease, and thus died (there was more, but I can’t remember the ten plagues now. Baldness? Giant rabbits? My biblical knowledge is very basic). It’s a very convincing argument, and the yokels immediately ignore it. Except Morrissey, who is all shook up by her brilliance.

Or so it seems! The town really is being hit with a series of biblical plagues, usually heralded by an appearance of the weird girl. Even if she was the meanest girl in town, why is this godly place being hit with the same plagues visited upon the godless Egyptians? It makes no sense, something that anyone with a suspicious mind would spot. So someone at some point says, “The Devil likes to borrow God’s tricks,” which is great misdirection, and totally fools everyone, oh yes (except for me who had totally spoiled for the finale for myself months earlier).

I know what you’re thinking. “Why is Swank so anti-religion? There must be a very serious reason, because a natural belief in rationality and an interest in scientific objectivity just isn’t good enough.” The film responds thusly. She is phone-stalked by a priest from her past; Father Costigan, a name nowhere near as likeable as Bugenhagen. He’s played by Stephen Rea, obviously killing time until Neil Jordan gets in touch. This was bad news for Canyon, who reacts to the appearance of Rea in much the same way I do when Thewlis and Schreiber show up.

During his various conversations with Swank, we slowly (and I do mean slowly) find out that Swank was a nun whose husband and son were killed in the Sudan by superstitious villagers suffering from the effects of a severe drought. Those crazy primitives! Beyond the offensiveness of the stereotype, it paints the scientific sceptic as someone hitting back at religion as vengeance. God (literally) forbid she might just be an unbeliever. Who’d sympathise with one of those? I’m sure it fulfils some McKee doctrine rather too literally, and ticks a box from a script meeting, having the heroine face the demons from her past, but it bugged me, especially as she is shown to have tried to commit suicide, which is ripped off heartily from Carl Schultz’s far-superior The Seventh Sign. Anyway, her scepticism soon fades in the face of her many many dream sequences, mainly of her family being killed, though with the occasional kitchen mishap involving eggs filled with blood and kettles that don’t just boil, but boil in italics with multiple exclamation marks after it!!!! She reacts badly to this, as you would.

See her pain? This scene made me wish I was watching Poltergeist. You know, the bit with the crawling steak, and the maggots, and the torn-up face. That was proper horror. The trouble with this scene is that a fairly important moment happens before this one. Morrissey decides Swank is probably feeling lonesome tonight. Cue much rutting, though at least this time we don’t have to witness Morrissey’s twitching buttocks and neck-harness enhanced O-face, a la BI2:RA. Despite this wonderful omission, the scene is filmed in such a way that you can’t tell if it’s actually happening, or if it is, is Swank in control of herself?

(I don’t have a screen capture of the sex scene, for decency’s sake, but I do have a picture of Idris Elba, topless. You can’t see his back, which has a huge tattoo on it. He’s a Christian in the movie, so I guess the tattoo is probably Jesus, but I was convinced it was Bob Marley. Hopkins has lit the scene so badly you can’t tell what’s going on. This is nothing new.)

Re: Swank’s possible loss of control, I don’t mean, “Phwoar, I’d do Morrissey as well, cor!” Until that moment she appears to be a hard-headed woman, but suddenly she’s all swoopy hair and sweaty back with the potato man. If you know what happens at the end (hint: it involves evil pregnancy, as lots of bibli-horror movies do), this dramatic plot-swerve comes across as obviously paving the way for the big reveal, and if you don’t know the ending it’s needlessly creepy and unerotic, perhaps not as much as the rape scene in Rosemary’s Baby, but similar in tone if not extent. Either way, it’s ambiguous, because as soon as that ends, she’s in the kitchen, and things are going bump, and the ghostly mysterious child returns, and then she’s in the Sudan. Was the sex a dream a la Rosemary’s Baby? Or is Stephen Hopkins a really shitty director with an appallingly bad track record? Oh, I answered my own question there. Never mind.

By this time there are more plagues, including a lice infestation among the children. This spells T-R-O-U-B-L-E for our intrepid scientists, and B-O-R-E-D-O-M for the audience. A series of plagues hitting a small Louisiana town should be fun, right? Well, perhaps it’s the presence of Hopkins behind the camera, or budgetary constraints (it’s made by Joel Silver and Robert Zemeckis’ medium budget horror factory Dark Castle), or maybe plagues just ain’t what they used to be, but it goes nowhere real fast. We ended up entertaining ourselves by inventing alternate endings. Our favourite involved the Lice King, who lives in the sewers and send his lice soldiers out to rummage around in hair. Here is Canyon’s sketch of the mighty and fearsome Lice King:



And yes, that ending would have been better. At around this point (where we were both surfing the net or washing the dishes in terror), Stephen Rea phones Swank to blurt out a ton of exposition about an ancient cult that sacrifices every child except its firstborn. Oh my God, more sacrifice! Swank’s backstory has matched up with the A-plot! But what’s this? More exposition tumbles out of Rea, heralding his imminent death, of course. There’s an unnecessarily complicated prophecy involving second born children and a chosen one who will become the Anti-Christ! So it must be the young girl, right? She was a second born. But God doesn’t actually seem to be targeting her. And there’s supposed to be an angel involved. Whuh? That doesn’t make… Oh, look, a big effects sequence involving billions of super-deadly locusts!

Swank regains her faith in about four seconds flat after getting the call from Rea (who then dies, for no real reason), and surmises the mysterious child is going to be killed by her crazy hillbilly family, and while looking for her gets caught up in the 7th plague, known as The Enlocusting. Actually, this is apparently what The Reaping is, perhaps because locusts eat/reap crops, though I doubt they can kill people, which is what they do here. Are they poisonous? Do they fly into your lungs eww? Maybe I missed something from my vantage point in the kitchen. Ignoring our sudden compulsion to switch the movie off and watch A Bug’s Life instead, we stuck around to see, oh teh noes! Idris Elba killed in mysterious circumstances! At an hour and twenty, so I lost the bet with myself. This movie is obviously full of surprises.

Like the first big shock of the finale; it wasn’t just the hillbillies that are evil, it’s the whole damn town! And the kid is not evil, but sent by God to trigger the plagues, or something. And David Morrissey, while not actually being the devil in disguise, might as well be, that pig. And Swank is the angel, because she was once a nun. God unleashes his final horrifying plague; the CGI Fireballing! The townsfolk are rent asunder in a shitload of digital flames, and Morrissey tries to mess with Swank, but God says nuh uh bitch and hits him with all of his fancily rendered wrath. Booyah, potato man! God obviously likes his spuds roasted.

With everyone else in the film now dead, Swank drives off with the holy child, which would have made a tolerable end, but then the child reveals that The Shagging that happened mid-film got Swank pregnant. That virile bastard! Turns out it counts as her second child and his second child, and basically, thanks to the risible rules the movie has written for itself, the kid is the Anti-Christ. All along she was a puppet on a string, and woooo big shock ending. It’s totally superfluous and adds nothing to the movie. In fact, it just complicates matters greatly. Very silly stuff, but of course the film has to portray sex and pregnancy as being the end of the world. That’s what this shit always does.

Needless to say, I hated it. The able cast is wasted utterly, obviously trying desperately to breathe life into a movie edited into flatness in post. I really do have a big problem with the continuing employment of Stephen Hopkins. Again and again he pummels good or indifferent material into empty, momentum-free film-chaff. With The Repeapeninging Hopkins proves yet again he has no idea how to pace a movie or create atmosphere; it’s one of the least effective horror movies I’ve ever seen. Nothing in it works, which is surprising as it borrows plots from far better movies: Rosemary’s Baby, Exorcist III, The Seventh Sign, etc. Yes, the script (which he is not responsible for) is horribly derivative and silly without his help, but that doesn’t change the fact that everything he touches turns to grey paste. Only the first season of 24 and The Life and Death of Peter Sellers rise above his usual level, and they’re for TV. Perhaps he should stay there.

Right, I’m in the middle of inventing a hugely complicated scoring system to see which Fightbot will triumph in this Face/Off, but until then, see how many Elvis references you can find in this post. It should give me time to work out my film algebra.

Lost Island is getting more crowded

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My beloved Lost, IMO the greatest TV show in the history of the medium (that isn’t created by Joss Whedon), is adding more cast members than you can shake a stick at, even if that stick has Biblical markings on it. Until today, the ones announced were Ken Leung, Lance “Intensity” Reddick, Rebecca Mader (presumably in the role that fandom wanted to go to Kristen Bell), and the Solaris-wrecking Jeremy Davies (no hyperlink for him. That’s punishment for that awful mannered performance, Davies!).

As of today, Jeff Jensen reports that Jeff Fahey is going to be landing soon. Or is he landing? From the photo included in the article, he could conceivably be everyone’s favourite angry time-traveller / universe-jumper / ghost / imagination figment Jacob. Or maybe Jensen wants us to think that! [Cue traditional Lost-inspired mental moebius-loop of second-guessing and paranoia.] Logic suggests he is in charge of The Boat, so capitalised because one of the special powers of Lost Island is to make everything near it go all portentous.

Weird that I spent this weekend thinking about Old Man Fahey and The Lawnmower Man*, the closest he’s ever come to a big mainstream hit. He’s a good enough actor to not be stuck in the straight-to-DVD hell he’s been in. Not that he’s Sir Anthony Hopkins of Hammingtonshire, but he’s not Kevin Sorbo either. It mystifies me.

* We were watching a Brett Leonard movie yesterday, one that I will hopefully come back to in the near future.