NUTS4R2

Doctor Who - Spearhead From Space

2012-02-26T16:21:00.004Z

Things I Auton Know

Doctor Who - Spearhead From Space

UK 1970

BBC Region 2

Spearhead From Space is a little landmark of a Doctor Who story because it represents a lot of nice little facts that The Doctor’s audience of obsessive statisticians can collate and attempt to talk about interestingly at parties... and for statisticians I probably mean nerds.

For instance:

1. Spearhead From Space is the very first Doctor Who story to star Jon Pertwee as The Doctor.

2. Spearhead From Space is the first ever Doctor Who story to be shot and broadcast in colour.

3. Spearhead From Space is the first story to feature the alien villain The Nestene Consciousness and their harbingers of death, the plastic Autons!

4. The Autons and the Nestene Intelligence were the first villains to be featured when Russell T. Davies rebooted the show in his first episode, Rose, and have been in stories featuring the following incarnations of the Doctor... Jon Pertwee, Christopher Eccleston, David Tennant and Matt Smith. Indeed, they have become so embedded in recent years, since their initial two stories in the Pertwee era, that even the current companion Rory was turned into an Auton at one point and killed companion Amy Pond with the signature wrist opening “hand-gun” that is their primary attack when in their mannequin form.

The more interesting fact for me personally, though, is that it is also the earliest Doctor Who memory I have stuck in my head. That sequence where the shop window dummies come to life and start randomly killing people is lodged in my brain as a carry over from my 2 year old self. And I can guarantee you that when I saw it, I was watching it in black and white (there was no way we could afford a colour TV set in those days).

Revisiting it now as part of a DVD boxed set I got for Christmas, was something I was worried might be a bit of a let down after all these years. I’d recently rewatched a classic Pertwee era story The Claws Of Axos (reviewed here) and, though it was pretty good, I’d felt just a little less entertained than I’d been hoping for. This one though, I’m happy to report, is just brilliant and I was thoroughly enjoying the comedy element to the story which gave things a bit of a lift (perhaps a hangover from Troughton?) and I even managed to get through Jon Pertwee’s naked shower scene where he shows his tattoos without being too worried about where things were going.

The story is beyond simple and I won’t go into it really here... because the main story is actually secondary in some ways as to what this set of episodes needed to do. The shows makers had to set up a new Doctor, which they manage to do quite successfully by bringing back an old character from the Patrick Troughton days, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart (played by the irreplaceable Nicholas Courtney) and his United Nations Intelligence Taskforce (think alien-busters). Asides from The Brigadier, they also had to set up a new regular assistant for The Doctor, Liz Shaw (as played by Caroline John), who didn’t last very long as it happened... and they furthermore had to set up the concept that The Doctor had been robbed by the time lords of his ability to pilot the TARDIS and exiled to earth so the stories could all be made on a more manageable budget by the BBC.

This is, you have to admit, a pretty tall order to do, plus keep the momentum going on a “replace humans with evil plastic clones of death” story, I’m sure you’ll agree, but it’s a testament once again to those good old Doctor Who writers and directors that the story is nothing but thoroughly entertaining right from the word go. There’s always something sinister about seeing things that are supposed to be inanimate objects suddenly dancing to life and terrorising people that really gets under people’s skins and the fact that the Doctor Who writers of today are still using these creations who first appeared here, over 40 years ago, really says it all about the staying power of some of the top monsters in the Doctor Who canon.

If you’ve never seen a Jon Pertwee story before, and he was The Doctor who I grew up with, then Spearhead From Space is definitely a good show to jump on with. It’s entertaining and witty, slightly sexist but only so that sexism can be challenged by a strong(ish) new female companion and it has an iconic monster in it. All good stuff and the DVD is well worth picking up if you, or your children, are in the mood for a little of the “classic old days” of Doctor Who.

Quatermass And The Pit

2012-02-23T20:46:00.004Z

The Necropolis Xperiment

Quatermass And The Pit

aka Five Million Years To Earth

1967 UK Directed by Roy Ward Baker

Screening by The Flicker Club at The Vault.

Warning: Spoilers if you’ve never seen this movie but... it’s still worth reading the intro even if spoilers bother you because the location of the screening was just so interesting.

Last weekend I saw one of my favourite movies, featuring one of my favourite fictional characters, screening in what was probably the most unusual but appropriate place that this movie had ever been screened before...

In the Victorian period, getting rid of the dead was such a problem due to overcrowding in cemeterys that people would just dig corpses up, dump or toss them somewhere, and then bury their freshly deceased relative in the leftover plot. This was, to say the least, beyond unhygienic... not to mention deadly dangerous to those who had not yet shuffled of this mortal coil... and so a solution was needed. In 1854, the Victorians built the London Necropolis Railway, building this on big arched bridges to compensate from the fact that they were building this over a swamp. They built two stations in London, right next to each other, on this line: Waterloo Bridge Station (which is now, of course, known as Waterloo Station) and the other was Necropolis Station (or some such, my research here is a little hazy but I’m going by what one of the presenters to Quatermass And The Pit told the audience at the screening).

The dead would be stored (or piled up, if you like) under the arches of Necropolis Station, waiting for the “train of the dead” to whisk them away (in First Class, Second Class and Third Class accommodation for the dead, believe it or not) to the massive Brockwood Cemetery in Surrey. Groovy stuff!

And, of course, it was inside one of these very arches, where the dead would rest in what has to be the ultimate in train station waiting rooms, that we all sat and watched a screening of Quatermass And The Pit as part of The Flicker Club’s season of Hammer at The Vault (The Vault in the Old Vic Tunnels being an entertainment space underneath the former Necropolis Station). After two brilliant introductions by Stephen Jones and a gentleman whose name I can’t appear to find (think it could be Tim Wilson, but whoever it was he was brilliant) the screening began...

Now Quatermass has always been a hero to me. As a kid at the age of 8 or 9, I remember staying awake all night out of fear that Victor Caroon would come and get me after seeing the first movie remake of the first of Nigel Kneale’s four TV Quatermass serials. If you’ve never seen the movies or serials, or even heard of them before for that matter, I should probably give you a little background on them because, as one of the presenters at the screening quite rightly pointed out, without Professor Quatermass paving the way for science fiction/horror that was both truly excellent and immensely popular, you never would have got programmes like Doctor Who on television these days (Quatermass has, in fact, been referenced at least twice in the history of Doctor Who, once in a Sylvester McCoy episode set in the sixties with the daleks and, again, in the David Tennant story Planet Of The Dead, where a scientist is using “Bernards” as a unit of measurement).

I can tell you now that, when I was a little boy, my parents explained to me just how popular Quatermass was in its day. All the kids would be playing in the streets and then... time for Quatermass and the streets would empty and, believe it or not, the pubs would empty out all over Britain and, without exaggeration, the majority of the population of Great Britain would be tuned in to one or other of the three original Quatermass serials... The Quatermass Experiment (changed to The Quatermass Xperiment in its movie remake to exploit the fact that it was one of the first films in the UK to receive the X certificate), Quatermass 2 (the film was quite possibly one of the earliest... but certainly not the earliest, to denote a film by a roman numeral, as is the standard practice nowadays) and Quatermass And The Pit (which is frankly the scariest of the lot)... Kneale wrote a fourth serial which debuted in 1979 and also had a shortened movie version released in foreign cinemas (which included alternate footage and storyline to make sense of the sequences which were cut) but the character was never as popular as it was in the fifties (although the fourth serial, Quatermass aka The Quatermass Conclusion was still damned scary). I even heard that Battersea Power Station ran into trouble keeping Britain alight during at least one of the episodes of the original because so many people were switched on to it. My mum and dad also had a big rubber plant before I was born which they named Victor after the character who turns into an alien plant-like creature at the end of the first movie remake (I think the serial has a more complex ending to it... only two episodes survive of it that I’ve seen... although all the other serials are available)... including a dire remake of the original in 2005 starring Jason Flemyng and David Tennant.

The original serial of Quatermass and the Pit was obviously a lot longer than the subsequent Hammer remake and, therefore, a lot more atmospheric and spookier (in my opinion). It also starred Andre Morrel as the good professor and he did it so wonderfully, in my opinion, that to me he is the one actor who will forever be Quatermass in my mind. The movie version of this one starred Andrew Keir as the professor and Nigel Kneale, who hated Brian Donlevy from the previous two Hammer remakes, has gone on record many times to acknowledge that Keir was his absolute favourite actor in the role... so much so that when he scripted the radio serial The Quatermass Memoirs in 1995, Andrew Keir was brought back to play Quatermass some 28 years after his first time in the role.

Quatermass And The Pit, the movie version, does not, ironically, start off with builders unearthing a skull and then a large spaceship in a builder’s pit (and I have to say that it was a missed opportunity from Hammer to not include Michael Ripper from the original serial in their movie version, since Michael Ripper was in a good number of their movies, of course). Instead, it relocates the action to a tube station where another set of builders, including a blink and you’ll miss him appearance from young Gareth Thomas who would later lead the crew of The Liberator in Blake’s 7, discover the ancient skulls leading to archeologists discovering a “missing link” skeleton in the evolution of man and... well... a spaceship, which has been buried for millions of years. Since the majority of the action takes place in this station, it was particularly appropriate that we should be watching this movie while the odd train would rush noisily overhead as we watched.

The cast is fantastic, including performances by genre favourites and national treasures such as Barbara Shelley, Julian Glover and Sheila Steafal, while the script is... frankly... superb and features what was, at the time, a truly original idea...

You see, the action which takes place at Hobb’s End (Hob being an old name for the devil) has always been associated with scary and supernatural activity when any excavations or earth works have been conducted there in the hundreds and thousands of years that those particular activities have been recorded. This all, I promise, ties into the dead occupants of the spacecraft from Mars (as it turns out) who resemble giant grasshoppers and who have the power to unleash man’s race memory of a time millions of years ago when the martians adapted us genetically and left us to our own devices to interbreed etc. This race memory is still active and will cause us to purge our race, it turns out, once this ancient evil is unleashed. The spooky stuff really gets going when a guy with a specialised kind of drill tries to get into the front chamber of the spaceship with the drill and the sound vibrations start to... unleash something best left... erm... leashed. I should probably point out, at this juncture, that the guy who plays this character, Sladden, in the movie version is the same guy who played the original Victor Caroon in the 1953 TV serial of The Quatermass Experiment... another eerie connection to the past there then ;-)

The movie is very scary and hugely influential, even to this day, as you’ll find references to the Quatermass saga, and to this third story in particular, in a lot of modern movies and novels etc. The idea behind this one, you see, was not that the aliens were coming to get us or, indeed, coming to colonise us or harvest us for food... the premise on this one is much more chilling. It turns out, you see, the aliens were here all along and they were, and still are, us. Something which wows a lot of people when they see the serial or the movie version the first time around.

It’s a beautiful movie to look at too, shot in windscreen format and with some gorgeous colour schemes and camera work. It has to be said though, that in a scene depicting a “martian culling” which has been reconstructed from the brainwaves of one of the central characters, the special effects in the 1967 movie version are, quite surprisingly, not as effective as the ones in the original BBC serial from 1958... no seriously, I know that sounds daft, but they’re just not... they’re laughable, in fact. It doesn’t really matter, though, because the sheer audacity of the yarn on this one and the perfect performances and dialogue make for an absolutely rivetting movie... one which you’ll want to revisit more than once (I know I’ve seen it dozens of times by now). The ending is very deadpan and drab and basically features two shocked and tired characters in the wake of... well, an attack by the devil for all intents and purposes... you’ll have to see it to know more. This ending is very reminiscent in tone to the way quite a few of the Hammer movies from that specific period of their output ended and it suited their MO perfectly that the explanatory “afterword” scene from the original serial is not included (nor is it needed, truth be told) in this remake.

I would heavily recommend this... and indeed all the Quatermass serials and movies... to anyone interested in science fiction and horror as they always manage to be a perfect blending of the genres in an absolutely astonishingly gripping tale. Full marks for The Flicker Club for including this one in their screening.

It’s been rumoured recently that Hammer want to revive the Quatermass character and, while I’m all for doing another version of Quatermass And The Pit, I’m getting mixed feelings about this resurrection process because my understanding is they want to bring the Professor back for some new stories. Now I believe Kneale was very precious about his character when he was alive, and for good reason. I’m not sure if modern producers could pull off original stories featuring the character and, if they did, they would have to have a real humdinger of a story idea and an absolutely first class writer to see it through with anything like the dignity and aplomb that Kneale injected into the character. Still, it might make an interesting Xperiment and it would certainly revive interest in the Professor again, methinks... we shall see what we shall see.

Sleepy Eyes of Death 3: Full Circle Killing

2012-02-21T19:26:00.003Z

Circle Of Death

Sleepy Eyes of Death 3: Full Circle Killing

aka Nemuri Kyoshiro 3: Engetsugiri Japan 1964

Directed by Kimiyoshi Yasuda

Anime Eigo Region 1

There are both good and bad elements to this, the third in the Daiei series of Sleepy Eyes Of Death movies, but I certainly didn’t enjoy this one as much as the previous two entries in the series (which is strange since the same director helmed a couple of the better Zatoichi movies in my opinion).

The good elements are a story which is, perhaps, a little too formulaic and over familiar but certainly gets audience sympathies on the right side straight from the outset. Starting with a bastard heir to the shogunate going down to the underside of a bridge where the poor make their homes, simply so he can test one of the new swords in his growing collection to see if it is a good sword. Testing his sword means picking on some innocent, lowly villager and chopping his head off to test the sharpness. The villagers are outraged and scared but the son of the villager who is cut down swears vengeance on the character who will take peoples lives just to test a sword... unfortunately, this one is not only a bad swordsman and a bit of a slob, he’s also low in intelligence... as demonstrated in spades over the course of the film.

Meanwhile, the bastard heir's mother starts having all of the other heirs to the Shogun covertly eliminated so her son can inherit the title himself.

Enter, Nemuri Kyoshiro: The Sleepy Eyes Of Death, who at first seems to be unconcerned but, as you figure out soon enough, wishes to help the son of the slaughtered villager in his vengeance... more so when the despicable dealings of the main villain are apparent and his sword is a wanted collectors piece which this bad guy is trying to obtain by hook or by crook.

It isn't long before the son of the dead villager demonstrates his lack of intellect by kidnapping the little sister of the villain's girlfriend... however, he’s not a very good kidnapper and soon bonds with the girl and grows protective of her. Nemuri Kyoshiro returns the girl to her rightful home and a bond forms between him and the son of the dead villager who once again proves how stupid he is by trying to rescue Nemuri Kyoshiro after Kyoshiro has been drugged and captured by the enemy... thus necessitating Nemuri Kyoshiro to save both their skins in the ensuing chaos of his escape. After this, of course, the stakes are higher and the end game approaches...

This is all good stuff, of course but it has to be said that the storytelling is quite formulaic, variations on a theme of which have been used in many chambara including, of course, the Zatoichi and Lone Wolf And Cub movies... and there’s nothing wrong with this. However, I did find the direction and particularly the cinematography in terms of the framing of the shots and the general way in which the camera moves around the set quite pedestrian in style... more like a good, work-a-day director fulfilling his role rather than an artist fussing over the finer details. There’s one little sequence where the approach is a little more startling and it involves a fight you kind of don’t actually see properly because you’re stuck in the middle of it. It’s a sequence involving some steps... and it’s those steps... you know, THOSE steep steps which seem to be in every other Japanese movie made in the sixties and early seventies? Nemuri Kyoshiro is walking up them while a very large amount of assorted thugs with swords drawing are running down them towards him. Cut to first person and a rolling camera eye is used in a kind of hand held capacity to catch slashes of chaos unfolding... before cutting back to Nemuri Kyoshiro’s continued upwards journey while his antagonists lie dying or defeated below him. This is pretty interesting but I’m sure I’ve seen it before somewhere... maybe this director used it in one of his Zatoichi movies?

However, it has to be said, that other than that brief and intense sequence, the camerawork and general mise-en-scene are less than stunning in this third entry into the series. And I still don’t know anything about Nemuri Kyoshiro. He rarely mentions his past. It’s like you’re supposed to have read the novels before watching the movies.. so not much chance on catching up on those if there are no English translations available (yeah, I already checked... there’s one issue of a manga adaptation available and that seems to be it).

When all is said and done though, it’s still a rip roaring adventure in the Nemuri Kyoshiro series... it’s just not as sleek in the shooting and editing as I might have liked and, as such, it’s definitely my least favourite of the series so far... but still definitely worth a watch as you will be rooting for some of the characters as their plots and conspiracies lead towards a final stand off between Nemuri Kyoshiro and his opponents. Definitely don’t leave this one out if you’re a fan of this series of movies.

The Woman In Black

2012-02-19T12:45:00.005Z

The Shadows Know...

The Woman In Black 2012

UK/Canada/Sweden

Directed by James Watkins

Screening at UK cinemas.

Warning: There are some spoilers hidden in

the muddy text of this review, just waiting to be

unearthed from their brown, sludgy resting place...

Okay... there are some pretty heavy caveats before I start on this review properly... and I might as well get the rant over with from the start. I primarily was treating this screening of The Woman In Black as kind of a “window shopping” expedition to see if it’s worth picking up the US Region 1 edition when it comes out. Why? Because Hammer, a company who I have an interest in, have totally copped out and gone for the money on this one in the UK. The BBFC were willing to allow the release of The Woman In Black completely uncut with a 15 rating on it... instead, Hammer have chosen to shear the film of some 6 seconds worth of shots (a huge amount considering I find the slashing of even a single frame an abomination to any piece of finished art) so that they could gain a 12A rating on it and catch the children’s market who are going to go out and see this film for the central star, Daniel Radcliffe (he’s the guy who plays Harry Potter in the movie adaptations of those books).

Now there’s been some criticism of this decision around the net, as the film is quite (well kinda) scary in places and there is a fear that children seeing this kind of old-school ghost story will be traumatised by viewing this. Good for them, I say. This is not the reason why I personally think Hammer’s decision is an appalling move. On the contrary, I remember the Hammer films which used to scare me as a 6 or 7 year old and kept me up all night before school with cold sweats and I see grown men and women now who are just not able to watch a simple horror film out of fear and I realise that seeing really scary movies at a young age very much arms a person to cope with real life horrors should they occur in later life... and also allows them another artistic channel from which to receive art (i.e. the horror movie). So hoorah for a culture that allows kids to be frightened and learn how to face up to their fears... I’m all for that.

However... you should never cut a movie and you should certainly never cut a movie on the flimsy attraction of financial gain. Now I know Hammer have had a long history of cutting their films pre-release due to damnable interference from the censors but in those days it was make the cuts or don’t release the movie... simple as that. Here, though, it’s a different kettle of piranha fish we're dealing with. Hammer stand to make much more money from the childrens market on this one than if they’d have released the film with a 15 rating... it’s that simple and that reprehensible in practice. Since I know I wouldn’t blind buy an uncut Region 1 US edition of the film from overseas given Hammer’s recent track record, this was the only way I could find out if the film was worth picking up on its DVD release overseas (in its hopefully unmolested and unraped original cut)... by going to the shop window/highlights screenings in cinemas over here. Because this really isn’t the film you’re watching in cinemas in the UK, so you know, just a highlights compilation version of it missing 6 whole seconds. That’s 144 frames missing people!

Ok... secondly, I should probably tell you that I am not familiar with Susan Hill’s 1983 novel on which this film is based and nor am I familiar with the various radio, TV and stage adaptations which have done the rounds since then... if I was then I’d probably be much more critical of this new Hammer version because, from what I’ve heard, it messes with the original quite a lot, taking liberties with the material left, right and centre and ultimately completely changing the end to something that, in some people’s interpretation, could be seen as a rainbow sky, happy ending to the story. It’s an ending which solves a couple of plot details and ties them up in a nice bow to make them more palatable for an audience as opposed to leaving things worse and much darker for the main protagonist at the end. I’d particularly like to have seen the TV version though, because it was adapted by Nigel Kneale, creator of one of my fictional heroes Professor Quatermass.

But I digress here... I’m getting ahead of myself and making The Woman In Black sound like it’s a bad movie... it’s really not and I think a lot of the credit for this can be laid at the door of Jane Goldman, the crimson haired, chesty wife of Jonathan Ross who wrote the screenplay to this and a few other films in recent years which have proved to be well written. She’s really on top of things again with the writing of this one and, aided by some not half bad performances, the film shines... in its own way.

Now there’s no getting away from the fact that The Woman In Black is very much an old school ghost story and, as such, it relies on every tired shock and horror trick in the book to frighten you... shadows in corridors, screams and nursery time twinkle tunes, large shifts in sound volumes as innocent creatures or objects become wrought embodiments of living peril for a few seconds before... you know... you get your breath back. However, although this movie does, as I said, make use of every horror movie trick in the book, it does so with impeccable timing and a true sense of how to edit this kind of film exactly right to milk the scares and build tension in the audience. It’s very, very well done and, as such, the director should be applauded for his efforts here. Especially when one of those fright sequences is extended out for what must be twenty minutes... just before you start getting bored of seeing suspenseful supernatural shock after shock as Radcliffe’s character wanders the house and grounds a second night... he finally gives you a breather to start setting up the slow burn tension again for a later, similar sequence.

The performances are all fine too, even from the former Harry Potter star, who I’m sure will develop into a fine and much loved character actor by the time he reaches his twilight years. And there’s some beautiful camerawork throughout with a particularly good series of sequential establishing shots in the early stages of the film involving a car journey which makes strong use on cutting on motion and dovetailing these shots in a way which is risky but is edited skillfully enough to pull off the intent beautifully... as the shots work together to pull the audience into the mindset and proximity of the characters in the car as placed in their surrounding environment.

The end, as I’ve said earlier, is much different from the source material and is largely open to audience interpretation... not for the finality or closure of the main protagonists, you are left in absolutely no doubt as to their final fate, but in terms of whether you would interpret this movie as a happy or sad ending to events. The choice is yours and it’s very much an ending that tries to have its cake and eat it at the same time. If I was being unkind I might call it almost a cop out... but it’s not such a blunt instrument of an ending to a movie and it could have been worse. Fortunately, the movie ends with a small shot which is very much an iconic, classic hammer moment... and I think it’s a moment that’s going to haunt some of the younger audience members for a while.

So should you see it? Well yeah, why not? As long as you realise that this is not the final cut as originally delivered by the director... although I’m sure the subsequent tampering probably has his blessing and he may have even made the cuts himself for all I know. If you like ghost stories then you’ll probably like this one... there’s been a lot of variants of this around at the movie houses over the past few years but this is a more than competent effort in the genre and deserves to be seen by people, like myself, who enjoy a good ghost yarn... or, you know, wait for an uncut version from foreign shores with the DVD release... it’s all good.

A Dangerous Method

2012-02-18T10:20:00.004Z

Jung At Heart

A Dangerous Method 2011

UK/Germany/Canada/Switzerland

Directed by David Cronenberg

Screening at UK cinemas.

Warning: This review will certainly contain some dangerously

heavy spoilers... and probably a few Freudian Gym Slips too!

I’ve mostly enjoyed the movies of David Cronenberg and have followed his work with great interest. Although marginalised, perhaps rightly for a while, as a horror movie director and, on top of that, a “body-horror” director (a marginalisation of a marginalisation), he has come to be a little more well respected over the last few years with releases of movies which are not obsessed with the disintegration, metamorphosis or derangement of the human body but which fall into more “popular” concerns. As this happened, the mainstream audiences and critics seemed to have been happy to have embraced him almost instantly... it’s as if they needed an excuse to let him into their club.

I’ve never thought any less of Cronenberg for being a horror director. Frankly I’ve never thought of him as anything other than an auteur... a man holding a genuine artistic vision which he uses as his goal posts to plug in various talents such as Carol Spier (who’s not with him on this production), Denise Cronenberg and Howard Shore to help him to realise his vision on celluloid (or whatever today’s nasty digital equivalent of celluloid is called). As someone trying to talk about him (or write about him and his work) here, I find it problematic that he’s moved away from horror films because his stylistic traits are much easier to tag on something like eXistenZ or Videodrome where I can lazily just point out the obvious similarities in the amorphous, fleshy environments his characters populate. Take away little “critic crutches” like this and I really need to go back and watch his movies again and dig deeper than what seem to have become merely surface details... or maybe just another phase of his career as an artist. I don’t have time to do that here though so, don’t expect much insight into his leanings from me here on this one.

One thing, however, that I did realise about Cronenberg's output while watching this one in particular, which perhaps should have been obvious to me before now (and perhaps it was and I just forget... I’m in my forties now, I do that) is that, although he certainly has a very sharp eye for the details and look of his movies, he is very focussed on performance. He wants to take the actors away from their own comfort zone and to strip away their body props and trade tricks and force them to explore the depths that his characters are reaching... and his characters do usually go right into the depths of their own dark psyches, more often than not, with the obvious luxury (seeing as he’s done so many horror movies where such conclusions are not necessarily considered box office poison by the producers) of being able to leave his characters wallowing in their own darkness, or often dead from it, at the end of the movie.

A Dangerous Method is a case in point. Keira Knightley’s performance, especially at the start of the film, is phenomenal. Yeah, yeah, okay... it could be considered oscar bait posturing (play a character with a physical or mental impairment and they’ll love you for it and awards will be falling on you out of trees) but, frankly, I found her absolute paroxyms of “out of control” emotional outrages to be really quite naturalistic and, in some instances, almost disturbing to watch... which is all good. I honestly haven’t seen Knightley attempt anything half as hard as this kind of role in the past and I think it’s a credit to both Cronenberg and his actors that they will push themselves and dive into these depths for him.

The film tells the real life story of Jung (Michael Fassbender) and one of his patients, Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), and also his relationship with Sigmund Freud (played by Viggo Mortensen). Once Jung has ascertained the true nature of Sabina’s debilitating mental abberation, and pretty much cured her of this, the two embark on a sado-masochistic affair before Jung calls it off due to feelings of guilt about his wife. However, by the end of the movie and after his split with both Sabina and Freud, Jung is left alone and regretting ever leaving the woman he loved to this infinitely passionate degree for the rest of his life. Confronted by a married and pregnant Sabina towards the end of the movie, after having left her twice, he refers to her bump and says that “that should have been mine”. This movie proves without a shadow of a doubt that when it comes to the person you come alive for, whether you are already married or in a relationship or not, you choose to ignore the obvious passion of the person you are destined to be with at your peril.

It’s a very talky movie (which is fair enough since it’s based on both the play called The Talking Cure, as well as the book A Very Dangerous Method) but this is really not a problem... the screenplay is well written and interestingly, indeed, devastatingly (in Keira Knightley’s case) performed and will hold your attention if you are aware of the nature of the subject matter beforehand (I even found Vincent Kassel watchable in this... which is something that never really happens to me... maybe he’s an entertaining actor after all, I’m thinking). Basically, if you like pipes, sex, lots of smouldering (and that’s just in the male leads!) and a bit of “original” BDSM, then you are in for a treat with this one... and Keira Knightley goes topless too which is another good thing (and I’m guessing Mr. Freud might have applauded me for pointing that important fact out). Catch it while you can!

My 400th Blog Post

2012-02-15T21:16:00.003Z

You know, I still find it amazing that, a little under two years since I started writing this blog, I’ve already made it to 400 posts and, surprisingly, the majority of the reviews on here are quite sizeable at that. When I began this, I didn’t realise just how many “virtual friends” my blog would bring me, especially on Twitter where I promote each and every post... this means a lot to me. I’m not all that happy in my “day job” and my private life has been a bit shaky of late... but this blog is something I’m fairly invested in and I hope to be able to continue writing it as regularly as I have been doing over the last couple of years.

One of the more incredible things to happen to me over the last year was when I posted some cartoon artwork I did of Caroline Munro for my 300th post and she liked it enough to mention it on the front of her own official fan page for quite a while. That really gave me a lift and cheered me up no end for a long time. I’ve met Caroline in the flesh three times now, at her stall she sometimes sets up to do signings at various film fairs. In fact it wasn’t that long before I started this blog that I met her for the first time and I believe I even mentioned her in my very first post. Her website is here http://www.carolinemunro.org/ and it’s always worth checking out to see what she’s getting up to next.

The last time I met her was last month at the January Westminster Film Fair and, since she’d been so nice about the artwork I’d posted, I decided to go to a shop with some slightly modified (to suit the required aspect ratio) version of that artwork and get a canvass print done to give to her. I thought, at the very worst, she could hide it in the back of a shed or sell it to some mad crackpot like me and make some cash off of it. Secretly I hoped she’d hang it somewhere but I’m not known for my optimism (the older I get). So I got the artwork sorted and transferred and presented it to her in January and to my amazement, she seemed really happy to receive it... which made me happy (obviously). It’s amazing how little moments like this can sometimes cheer you on and keep you going when life sometimes gets a little harder.

Caroline also signed the page of her as “Miss November” in the recently produced Hammer Glamour calendar I was given by a friend at Christmas... was pretty thrilled by that. There’s a picture of her above holding my artwork... I still marvel at how young the “first lady of fantasy” still looks. I got a shot of myself with her too but... well, you lot won’t want to see my ugly mug plastered on this page, you’ll have to trust me on that one. The cartoon drawing top right is exposure enough. ;-)

I’ve had a few directors, producers, actors and company executives give me a few things to look at over the last couple of years and that’s been very rewarding too. I don’t always get around to doing everything I do in the timescale that I originally tell people I will... but I generally get there in the end and muddle through somehow. Still waiting for somebody to offer me cold, hard cash you can scratch a window with for something I’ve written but, maybe if I’m lucky, that may get thrown onto the table one day too... you never know.

If anyone’s got any “positive” ideas on how I can improve this blog (no, really, I mean positive ones!) then please feel free to either leave me a comment here or jump onto twitter and DM me. I’d like to do more film related design and artwork for the blog but, well I’m a designer in my day job so sometimes it’s a less than relaxing end to my day to carry on making all those tiny, detailed design decisions when my bed is waiting for me... will do my best though. And some more genuine exploratory articles which I have wrapped up in my head, as opposed to just reviews... although, to be fair to myself, I always have too many reviews to write up to ever really get around to sketching any article ideas out these days. I’ll have to se what i can come up with.

Ooh... and T-Shirts. What about T-Shirts? I had a fair amount of people looking at that artwork of Caroline Munro on my blog and was wondering if this is the kind of thing which people would like to buy on a T-Shirt. What do you reckon? Is this something you would like to see produced? Again, let me know... or, you know, head over to Caroline’s site and let her know. Maybe she could sell them from her website.

Anyway... that’s my 400th blog post done then. I seem to be watching a lot less movies these days (and barely repeat watching anything) because it takes me a while to write about each one... but “them’s the breaks” I guess. If you’re still reading this post here at the bitter end I’d like to thank you for your continued support and interest and say that, even though you’re probably an anonymous reader... I appreciate it each and every time you read one of my reviews or articles. Thanks for spending some of your valuable moments here from time to time. It makes doing the thing worthwhile.

All the best,

NUTS4R2

Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse

2012-02-14T19:48:00.005Z

Verbal Mabuse

Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse

(aka The Testament of Dr. Mabuse)
Germany 1933
Directed by Fritz Lang
Eureka Masters Of Cinema Region 2

Warning: Spoilers beamed directly

into your mind if you read any further!

Fritz Lang made Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse as a sequel to his silent classic, Dr. Mabuse Der Spieler (reviewed here), 11 years after the original film was released. It again “stars” Rudolf Klein-Rogge as Mabuse but to say this actor is the main lead of this second film would be pushing it a bit. I don’t know if the actor was actually incapacitated during filming but he is barely glimpsed and doesn’t really move from his bed in the few shots he’s in.

The character also, kind of, dies not very far into the movie... although he lives on in two guises... one as a ghostly version of himself with a brain that is visible above his grotesque, popping eyes... all done via crude but effective special effects. Thus, anyone who’s ever watched this movie without having had the benefit of seeing the original movie before-hand will be left unimpressed, I suspect, with Klein-Rogge. The absolute masterful power and strength of will of this actor, that pierced the screen of the original movie and pierced the audience with a wake up call burnt directly on to the retina is really not present in this one. Mabuse is just an inmate of an asylum where he was deposited after he went mad at the end of the first movie.

Even though the character dies, Mabuse is not dead in spirit... he uses his ghostly presence after death to invade the mind of the head of the sanitarium and uses his body to continue his crimes which, in this movie, consist of bringing down the entire government by himself...

Or, you could also take the tack that the head of the sanitarium has gone completely mad after reading Mabuse’s crazed and obsessive, compulsive scribblings and the ghostly presence of Mabuse is merely his own mind playing tricks on him... that he has gone completely insane and been inadvertently “inspired” by Mabuse and his writings of how to pull off “perfect” crimes... stepping into his shoes full-time after Mabuse has breathed his last.

There are still lingering shades of the German Expressionist style throughout this movie but, then again, I’m beginning to think it’s partially what defined Lang’s personal style at that particular period of his life. I remember taking a look at the Lang movie Rancho Notorious (1952) a couple o’ decades back and thinking that, although it was shot and released in colour... it all looked wrong or, to repeat my exact comment, it looked like it was a colour movie which had been lit for black and white. Perhaps it was the very striking areas of light and dark that were prevalent when I made that comment. Either way, long after German Expression is thought to have died off (or, in my opinion, fled Nazi Germany to find a new home in the 1940s Hollywood Film Noir style), here is Lang with some very interesting and almost surreal compositions... but supporting a movie which has a more naturalistic acting style and which, in some ways, continues the themes of the film he made directly before it, the Peter Lorre starrer M!

That is to say, that while the notorious criminal deeds and cliffhanger traps, such as two lovers locked in a room waiting for a time bomb to explode in an hour’s time, are reminiscent again and in some ways a toned down version of the antics of such characters as Fantômas and Irma Vep, the interest in police procedures and the science of detection is very much in evidence in this film (as it was in M).

The heroic figure of Inspector Lohmann, as played by Otto Wernicke, is an enjoyable performance but it’s been quite some time (over twenty years maybe) since I last watched M and I didn’t realise until I looked him up that the character of Inspector Lohmann, again as played by Otto Wernicke, is also in M... no wonder both movies look at the science of detection with an almost obsessive (for the time) bent... the film is a sequel to both Dr. Mabuse, Der Spieler AND M. So I’m going to have to grab a DVD copy of M now and watch that again. I do, in fact, have a painted comic book mini-series adaptation of M with a free flexi-disc (remember those) of Fritz Lang whistling In The Hall Of The Mountain King on it but... somehow I don’t think that’s going to quite cut it. I guess Criterion must do a decent version of it.... right?

Anyway, I have to say that, although the character of Mabuse himself was a bit of a cop-out in this one, the movie itself is an enjoyable romp through 1930s Germany and I was really quite into it. Definitely looking forward to the final installment of the Lang directed trilogy (other directors have tackled Mabuse since) entitled The Thousand Eyes of Doctor Mabuse (aka Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse) which was made 27 years after this one... especially since I know it has a pre-Goldfinger Gert Fröbe in it. I’ll let you know how that one goes down with me as soon as I can. Thanks for reading.

Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace 3D

2012-02-12T09:55:00.004Z

Death In Menace

Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace 3D

1999-2012 US

Directed by George Lucas

Screening at UK cinemas.

It’d be pretty impossible to relay to you my almost lifelong relationship with the Star Wars saga, which began when I saw the very first movie on its initial cinema run at the age of 9, way back in 1977. I could easily write a series of novel length reviews on the subject... which wouldn’t include the hundreds of drawings and articles I did for fun as a kid, and based on the first three films in the series (which I guess now has become, chronologically within the timelines of the story at least, the second trilogy) and which I collected in ring binders, one (or sometimes two) for each film.

It’s hard to explain how much of a cultural phenomenon Star Wars was back then to youngsters these days. They’ve never experienced it themselves... sure there have been huge blockbuster movies with bigger openings but their shelf life and the way in which they are consumed by the home video marketplace changes the impact of these films. When Star Wars came out it was in the days before home video and there was nothing like it at the cinema! Sure, there was a whole slew of bandwagon rip-off films that we all saw and enjoyed, including films which weren’t rip offs but needed the success of Star Wars to open up the marketplace to be able to make these films possible. So yeah, we had stuff like Battle Beyond The Stars, Star Trek The Motion Picture, The Black Hole and other similar films which either sought to recreate the thrills found in Lucas’ original movie or do their own thing in the zeitgeist created in its wake. But you have to understand that... until The Empire Strikes Back came out three years later... well, as I said... there was nothing like it.

What that meant to kids at school is... you went out on your playground breaks and lunch hours and you talked about Star Wars. You went home and maybe played in the street with the other kids... and you talked about Star Wars. You went on visits with your parents to family homes dotted around the country... and you talked about Star Wars. And you kept talking about Star Wars for 6 years solid (until the ewoks and the hammy acting in the third movie kind of put a crimp in it). Okay, so maybe some of the girls were talking about Grease but, trust me, when they weren’t talking about Grease they were talking about Star Wars.

When The Phantom Menace first came out in 1999, I remember staying up until four o’clock in the morning the first night the tickets went on sale in London because the demand for tickets was so great that within 5 seconds the computers overloaded and went down at the various box offices for the phone bookings... it took several days for them to get back up and for people to find out if they were successful in getting a ticket or whether they’d have to try and rebook. This was, of course, after Lucas had released those dreadfully dumbed down cuts for the 20th anniversary of the original trilogy... and gutted the heart of that original trilogy as you would a dead fish (I was so happy when the original prints were made available in a limited edition DVD as an “extra” for six months or so... finally the real movies had resurfaced).

So I’ve heard and read a lot of crap about The Phantom Menace over the years... including the criticisms of just the title when that was revealed while it was still being made. Frankly, people who don’t like The Phantom Menace must be half crazed to not realise what a great triumph it was. This was easily the best and the darkest of the prequel trilogy... but I remember a lot of the people who went to see it at the time were just not well versed enough in Star Wars lore to realise just how subtly dark it was. It’s right up their with my favourite Star Wars movie The Empire Strikes Back, a film which I find has a similar tone, and I couldn’t believe the criticisms people were hurling about at the time. Had these people just not seen the original trilogy, I asked myself at the time.

Let me set the record straight because, although George Lucas has let me down a lot over the years with both his treatment of the Star Wars and Young Indiana Jones franchises (the initial masterpiece episodes of which have been similarly recut to buggery), The Phantom Menace was not one of the problems. If you want to level criticism at a movie in the Star Wars canon which did let the side down appallingly it was the next chapter, Attack Of The Clones... but I’ll save that article until the 3D version of that turns up at the cinema (sometime next year I believe?).

Okay... despite the multitude of whining complaints at the time of the announcement, The Phantom Menace is a perfect title for a Star Wars film. Sure, it didn’t sound “cool” at first but, you know what? It’s a perfect title for a movie series which aspires to be the old Universal Flash Gordon serials (something the movies give away in almost every scene)... and if George Lucas had been able to afford to buy the rights to Flash Gordon when he was trying to get them in the mid-70s, there never would have been a Star Wars movie made. Typical Flash Gordon serial chapters include such awesome titling as: The Planet Of Peril, The Tunnel Of Terror, The Destroying Ray, The Black Sapphire Of Kalu, The Symbol Of Death, The Purple Death, Doom Of The Dictator... the list goes on. The Phantom Menace does not look out of place in that context does it? It was a big deal at the time though and I couldn’t figure out why people just couldn’t see the appropriateness of such a title.

Then, when the film came out... I was blown away. It was dark... really dark. Why then, were people coming out of the movie thinking it was an uplifting experience? This is where the bad stuff starts... you know, right from the outset, that Senator Palpatine is the bad guy right? I mean, ever since 1977 every kid who had read an article on the Star Wars stories knew the background story... from Emporer Palpatine (the clue is in the name guys... you know... Palpatine?) to Darth Vader’s fight with Obi Wan against a volcanic back drop where Darth fell in the lava... every kid knew that since 1977. And seriously... any kid who’d read Alan Dean Foster’s Splinter Of A Minds Eye back in 1978 had probably figured out by the time that Empire came out in 1980, that Yoda was referring to Princess Leia when he said... “No, there is another...” Since she had kinda Jedi powers in the 1978 novel (I understand the novel has been rewritten to conform for it’s reprints in later years... but I still have my original knocking about somewhere... can’t fool me!).

The Phantom Menace is all about politics (not a subject I understand myself) and it basically is all just about the way Palpatine (who is already a Sith) brings about the collapse of the Old Republic and manipulates Queen Amidala to move him into a position of power to rule the galaxy by bringing in a vote of no confidence against Terrance Stamp’s character. This was serious stuff and it hurt to watch it! I couldn’t believe some people only suspected Palpatine at the end of this movie. Seriously people? It’s that much of a jump from Senator Palpatine to Emporer Palpatine in people’s eyes? Holy moley. I hope people take time to re-evaluate this dark little corner of the Star Wars saga now it’s back in cinemas. I once saw a Steve Martin sketch where Paul Simon asked Steve Martin if he thought a downbeat song was more effective in an upbeat tempo and arrangement and that’s basically what The Phantom Menace is, to be sure... a very downbeat movie with an upbeat tempo and arrangement. Like I said... it was so dark it was almost painful to watch.

What wasn’t painful was... everything else asides from the politics. Jar Jar was maybe a little too "full on" but basically he performs the same function as someone like Mantan Moreland used to serve in the Sidney Toler Charlie Chan films... you either accept it or you don’t. If you can’t accept it... don’t rant about it and give everybody else a hard time. Not a fan of the character but not a hater of him either... and I do enjoy doing the odd Jar Jar Binks impression still... so bear that in mind if you ever find yourself in the pub with me.

My two favourite things in the movie, and thankfully Lucas has left them in tact, are as follows... Queen Amidala and the way she carries herself when she is in full Naboo Royalty make up really does, in this film, feel like an homage to the princess in Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress. Maybe not in intent... well yeah, certainly not in intent, she’s by no means a spoiled brat... but the way she moves and kinda intones her lines is amazing. Great job.

But the thing that really had me jumping out of my seat the first time I saw it... and it’s still (thankfully) in there... or the tone of this article would be a lot more negative, was the look and sound of the viewscreen communicator with which Amidala talks to the Viceroy on the Trade Federation ship at the start of the movie. It’s basically the dead spit in both visual and audio content of the ones used in at least one of the original Flash Gordon serials (which are also homaged in other ways such as screen wipes... which Kurosawa also used to use... and art deco “ray gun” designs). It absolutely knocked me for six when I first saw the movie and I wanted to leap up and shout at the audience... “Did you see/hear what he just did? Did you? It’s amazing!”... but I didn’t. I’m a shy retiring type of person... and wouldn’t do that in a cinema... possibly.

Okay... seeing this movie in converted 3D for the first time was... okay. It’s pretty much like every other converted for 3D movie you see... it’s just like looking through and old view master toy with moving bits (used to love that toy)... it’s totally unnecessary and, quite surprisingly in the case of this particular movie... really doesn’t add anything to the experience I’m sad (very sad) to say. I was so looking forward to this... and I really wasn’t disappointed because, hey, it’s The Phantom Menace on a bigger screen than usual... but honestly... bits of it are just not working in 3D. I was particularly unimpressed with the pod race, for example, which seemed to me to be playing more like it was just in 2D for pretty much the whole sequence.

Also... purists note... this version is not the same cut as the original theatrical release... it’s closer to the subsequent home video VHS and DVD releases in that it has that 5 or 6 seconds where Annakin stops dead and glares hard at Terrance Stamp. I’d always assumed that bit had been put in on the home video versions because Stamp's character was going to return as a villain in a later episode. The fact that he doesn’t makes this little moment a bit of an oddity and I don’t know why Lucas didn’t just take it back out. It’s become a bit of a red herring and nobody usually remembers it anyway.

And anyway... the audience is all too busy listening to John William’s kick ass score to be noticing subtleties like that. Talking of which... Williams’ style had changed by the time he’d come to write the score for the second trilogy. It didn’t quite sound like the original stuff... fortunately though, the score was still brilliant and does kind of still slot in place with the Star Wars sound... so you won’t hear anything bad about it from me (until we get to Attack Of The Clones and the electric guitar moment... shudder). If memory serves me correctly, Annakin’s theme is an inverted, slowed down version of The Imperial March... so it’s a nice score to get to grips with if you can and it still retains enough Korngoldian homage in it’s make-up to keep the magic going. Oddly enough, his new score to Spielberg’s TinTin movie sounds much more like an “old-school” Star Wars soundtrack than his stuff on the prequel trilogy does... but it’s Wiliams and it’s brilliant and it’s good enough for most Star Wars fans... I’m certainly not complaining.

Well... I’d like to be writing another 6 or 7 pages on this stuff but I really shouldn’t. It’s getting late, I’m getting tired and by now you’ve probably got the general gist of where I’m coming from. But just in case you haven’t... here’s a short summary...

Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace 3D... great film, underrated, 3Ds a bit rubbish but at least you get to see it at a cinema... don’t heistate for goodness sake... it’s The Phantom Menace! Go see it today!

Elisabeth Sladen - The Autobiography

2012-02-11T20:32:00.004Z

Good Bye Sarah Jane...

Elisabeth Sladen - The Autobiography

Aurum Press. ISBN: 978-1845134884

You know, from when I was a young ‘un, my earliest memories of Doctor Who are from the first Jon Pertwee serial Spearhead From Space. I was two years old.

His assistant in that story was Liz Shaw (played by Caroline John) but it wasn’t too long before Jo Grant (as played by Katy Manning) came into the series and I’d have to say that, with all my earliest memories of Doctor Who, come the ones of getting a Jo Grant badge from Selfridges at the time and assembling jigsaw puzzles with The Doctor, Jo and the Daleks on them. I was very little and this stuff used to keep my mind agog.

I remember when Lis Sladen started in the show during Jon Pertwee’s last haul and I remember her being there when he regenerated into Tom Baker and continuing her adventures and, in some ways, Sarah Jane never really left me over the years as one of those companions you just remember and who sticks in your mind as one the anchor points of the show. One of the things you’d look forward to while having to hear Basil Brush sing that damned Bulldog Basil song for the umpteenth time before the show started.

And when you think about it, it’s really not that surprising that Lis Sladen is one of those companions who endures the most, almost becoming a national treasure in the process. Since leaving the show she’s made loads of returns as the character. First there was the pilot film spin off for a TV show that never got picked up, K9 And Company, which I remember loving and I was always cross that they didn’t make any more of them at the time. This was where The Doctor sent her a new model of the Leeson voiced robotic dog and Sarah Jane and K9 go around solving mysteries together.

Then there was her reappearance opposite Pertwee’s Doctor in the anniversary special The Five Doctors, which carried on the continuity established in K9 And Company and also, briefly, reunited her with Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart from her UNIT days again. There was a long gap after that when anyone who is right and proper in the head would have assumed that this particular assistant would never see the light of day again but, when the new reincarnation of the series had hit its stride, spearheaded by Russel T. Davies, he brought Sarah Jane (and K9) back for the David Tennant episode School Reunion... and it was a big hit with audiences. This paved the way for more appearances in Doctor Who (the last two episodes of Catherine Tate’s regular run on the programme and, of course, a brief scene in the final David Tennant story... but more importantly, it spawned her own regular show, The Sarah Jane Adventures, some of the episodes of which are reviewed on this site (check out the index by title in the top right hand corner and scroll down to the TV section).

This show was a really great childrens TV programme (especially for us so-called adult children) and in some ways was more similar to the way the old Doctor Who stories were put together “back in the day”. It was a roaring success too, so when the news came that Elisabeth Sladen had died from cancer without a heck of a lot of warning during the shooting of Series Five, the fans (including myself) were somewhat shocked to say the least. It was like another link from my childhood had died for me... even though I’d never met her.

When her autobiography came out shortly after her death, it was a chance for me to find out more about the Doctor Who assistant that I’d always just relied on being there without really stopping to catch my breath and take a proper interest in her while she was alive. Having read her book now, I have to say that I wish I’d gotten in line just once at one of those fan signings because, frankly, she seems to have been quite a special lady.

The book is well written and fleshes out little bits of her life without ever really straying too far in the text from Doctor Who. Although her early life before Doctor Who, acting alongside her husband in various “actorly” engagements is certainly recounted, quite a lot of the book is given over to her time in the original TV shows. I guess this is what she thought most people would be interested in reading? But, to be honest, the whole lot will hold your attention once you make a start on it.

The lack of faith, or perhaps that should be financial and creative support, from the BBC in the show in the early days comes through clearly enough and it’s no real surprise (a lot of ex-Doctor’s have shared similar viewpoints), but there’s loads of interesting snippets of information here to keep most fans of her work and her most famous character engrossed. Her working relationship with Jon Pertwee was less bubbly than I’d expected (I have heard a few things about Pertwee over the years) but also not unfair and certainly she had some good times with him and his wife in later years. Her brilliant relationship with Tom Baker is also recounted and there’s some real nuggets of information about her time on the show which I suspect some people at the BBC in the old days may not have expected (or wanted) to come out... but I’m not going to tell you what those things are, you’ll have to read it yourself to find out.

I was glad to hear that she got on so well with Russel T. Davies... enough to email him about choices on what to wear for awards shows and the like... but I was a bit surprised at how little there is of her time working on The Sarah Jane Adventures in the book. I suspect there would have been more to come by way of interesting anecdotes if she’d have lived longer. The end of the book where she speculated as to where the show might be going in the future is poignant and sad to read when one realises that she had no idea she was dying. By the time I read the last little end piece by her husband and daughter, I was pretty much crying too many tears onto the page to be able to read the text properly. I must be getting old.

This was a much more emotional read than I’d expected and Elisabeth Sladen comes off as nothing but an absolute professional when it comes to her working life. An absolute gem of a book and something any longtime fan of Doctor Who, and of Sladen, will not want to miss out on. Definitely pick this one up if you want to be entertained and moved.

Sleepy Eyes of Death 2: Sword of Adventure

2012-02-10T18:54:00.005Z

Sworded Past

Sleepy Eyes of Death 2: Sword of Adventure

aka Nemuri Kyoshiro 2: Shôbu Japan 1964

Directed by Kenji Misumi

Anime Eigo Region 1

Wow... what a great little film. Kenji Misumi, who is perhaps better known for his work on some of the Zatoichi movies and also for a significant chunk of the original six movie Lone Wolf & Cub film series, takes the reigns for this, the second entry in Daiei’s series of Sleepy Eyes Of Death films... and I have to say that, in many (but perhaps not all) ways this second entry surpasses the first.

Nemuri Kyoshiro may be a self proclaimed nihilist (see my review of the first movie here), but I have to say that the deeds and actions of the character point to a much more honourable outlook on life in this one, as he’s often making choices based on a moral highground rather than letting everything go to hell in a handbasket, so to speak. One character even refers to him as being a “noble” person in this one and it would be hard to disagree with this observation.

For instance, Nemuri starts the film by trying to do a kind deed which backfires when an old man, who turns out to be the wandering fnancial adviser to the shogun, highlights Nemuri’s intention to the young boy he is trying to help. This all leads to a duel with the recent killer of the young boy's father (who now posesses the father’s dojo as an outcome), who Nemuri quickly dispatches, and hence the young lad, who was a poor boy seeking money on the streets, becomes the dojo owner... and all this within the first ten minutes of the movie.

Nemuri’s relationship with the old financial adviser blossoms and deepens as he finds himself defending the adviser against paid assassins seeking to “permanently overturn” the advice the old man has given to his shogun master. The chemistry between Nemuri and the old man is quite electrical, it has to be said... and this really helps the viewer accept the character as much more of a heroic figure as opposed to him just going through the motions somewhat, as I feel he kinda did in the last movie.

Which is strange actually because, no matter how much the audience is in sympathy with the plight of Nemuri in this one, we still learn next to nothing about his origins as a character or see anything (of significance to anything other than this specific story) relating to his past and the burden he carries with him. He patently refuses to answer any questions leading to what can only be described as an orphaned past and although you may feel that this stuff really ought to be getting tackled at this point, this in no way derogatises or makes meaningless the richness of the character or deflects audience sympathies away from him. Which is odd and also highlights the differences in the way in which the same story might be handled if, for instance, a European or American director was making this.

The film is not nearly as colourful as the previous entry in the series and there’s no extra depth designed into the shots... but this is not to say that there isn’t some interesting cinematography happening on this one... there is. A shot where Nemuri lowers himself simultaneous with a camera dolly in, for instance, so his head becomes framed within a smaller frame within the shot is quite interesting (pictured above at the end of the shot). And a scene towards the end of the film where Nemuri faces down a sizeable amount of samurai opponents has a nice moment where everybody is poised for 5 or 10 seconds waiting for the carnage to happen. The sequence takes place in a forest and in this calm before the storm the director has a thin vertical tree trunk splitting the action quite rigidly into two different sections... nice stuff.

I’m really getting into this series now and I can’t wait to kick back and watch the third DVD in the package... I just hope that Anime Eigo see fit to release a boxed set of the 9th to 12th films in the series soon. Talking of which, the subtitling options on these releases are superb. They’re basically following the titling styes of the old UK Artsmagic label... the difference being that the Artsmagic DVDs were really poor and muddy transfers from old video transfers by the looks of it (seriously, if you’ve got their UK Zatoichi editions or their slightly cut Lone Wolf and Cub films... upgrade to the superb Anime Eigo Region 1 editions... the difference is like apples and oranges). So on these ones, for example, you can have yellow or white subtitling for the dialogue, but you can also choose to have subtitling for little explanatory glossary notes which appear at the top of the screen to explain Japanese cultural phenomena as they come up in the conversation. Very cool (although maddeningly hard to follow sometimes as you’re trying to read both sets of subtitles before they clear again). These releases are well worth having for every fan of chambara cinema... grab them now so the sales are such that a third box set is on the cards!

Womble

2012-02-08T18:43:00.003Z

Class Action

Womble 2011 UK

Directed by Robert Pirouet

Womble, the latest short movie from Organised Chaos TV & FIlm (and produced by Michael Beddoes and Emily Smith) is a ten minute slice of classroom bound cat and mouse taking the form of an interview for a position at the school in which it is set. The film, directed by Robert Pirouet, features Ben Willibond and Will Smith (no, not that one!) as two men in an extended sequence of thrust and riposte as Smith asks a series of increasingly ridiculous questions with the intent of embarrassing and humiliating his interviewee as payback for what the former did to him at school many years before.

I was invited along to see the premiere of this but, at the last minute, had to decline the offer. Thankfully, I was given access to this movie via the internet so I could feed back my reactions to one of the producers.

Well, it’s certainly got a strong sense of humour about it and the writing is very direct and cuts to the jugular... it’s a ten minute short so it really needs to do this. Thankfully, the writing by both John Henry Falle and the director is artful enough in plotting a course through what could be seen as a bit of a tightrope walk between being too rapid for credibility and too slow for the way the short as a whole is paced.

The camera work is very clean and linear and the opening preamble, which is a rapidfire introduction to the general demeanour of Will Smith’s character, is followed by a couple of establishing shots which effectively get you into a position to digest a second and longer round of rapid fire with one or two more pauses to help you to recover your breath... before once again plummeting into a shot/cut/shot/cut rhythm focussing on the two lead actors as they perform a fun-filled battle of wits, Smith pouring on the questions and requests until it gets to a point where things take a refreshingly ridiculous turn.

The performances are all very good (there’s actually a cast of six players although most of the action of the film focusses on these two main players) with the two leads really giving their all to entertain and make credible the premise of the script. It’s not played in a naturalistic manner, to be sure, since it’s a comedy... but nor would you want it to be either. Comic timing is obviously something that these two guys know about and it’s a rare pleasure to see this duet going at it with a ferociousness that leaves the audience hanging on every word... very rare for me, in fact, because I rarely bother with comedies (if it’s not The Marx Brothers or Woody Allen then I’m afraid I’m a bit of an amateur in knowing how best to review this stuff... I wish I’d been able to see it with an audience, in fact).

The score, too, by Stephen Tait, is an extraordinary piece of composition considering its function within the overall scheme of things. Comedy is probably one of the easiest genres to screw up in terms of musical accompaniment, but Tait’s piece here is quite deftly handled... both supporting and lifting the emotional tone when required and then standing back a little and giving the dialogue and performance room to breathe when necessary. Nice job sir!

It has to be said that the “punchline” of the film, or pretty much the last word spoken, is a little obvious and can be seen coming from quite a way. However, this is all fine because, like a lot of films where this is also the case, it’s always a pleasure to see how the script and the performances are going to bring about this kind of ending and it does nothing to detract from the fact that the tone with which the last word is said (and, yeah, I’m so not going to reveal that here) could go either way... or, to put it another way, who out of these two characters is going to finish the movie with the upper hand.

Not totally my cup of tea in regards content and tone, this one but, with that caveat, I’d have to say that I did quite enjoy it and the obvious talent and skill both in front of and behind the camera really shows in such little details as the posters on the wall of the classroom and the design of the end credits. If you’re in to either short films or comedy... and definitely if you’re in to both, then it might be a good idea to check out this little gem if you can get some access to it. Remember the names on the cast list folks... I reckon they’re all going to go far.

Carnage (2011)

2012-02-06T19:17:00.003Z

Roman Quartet

Carnage 2011 UK

Directed by Roman Polanski

Screening at UK cinemas.

Okay... so here we have yet another movie called Carnage. As though we didn't already have enough movies called exactly the same thing. This one’s directed by Roman Polanski and co-written with him together with Yasmina Reza, who wrote the original play on which this movie is based, Le Dieu Du Carnage... which is possibly the title they should have gone for here (or at least an English translation of it, since it’s shot in the English language) instead of giving us a movie called the same name as many other movies called... well, you know... Carnage.

Now Roman Polanski has always been a director I’ve found a bit hit and miss. When he’s good he’s great, churning out some cool movies like Repulsion and The Ninth Gate. However... when he’s bad... you get junk like Frantic.

Roman Polanski isn’t much of a draw to get me into a movie these days, I have to say, but the four lead actors in Carnage are all particularly good at their craft with one name in particular, that of Christoph Waltz... who has been largely wasted in Hollywood roles like the lead villain in the recent disaster that was The Green Hornet since his stand out performance (a long way into a very long and distinguished career as an actor) in Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds.

Waltz is one of those actors who pretty much lights up the screen with his presence whenever he’s around. On top of this his three co-stars are Jodie Foster, John C. Reilly and Kate Winslet... so you know that no mater how bad the script is... you’re going to get some seriously interesting performances out of this people sharing the same scenes.

Luckily, in terms of dialogue at least, the writing fairly crackles, giving these four stalwart actors something really great to get their teeth into. It has to be pointed out though that, like a lot of movies based on plays, the piece does not greatly benefit from being translated into a work on film. Apart from an opening and closing sequence shot from the same angle, more or less, of a park, the whole movie is set in two rooms and two hallways from the same apartment, which is fine but, you really feel the confines of the camera trapped in the same sets in this one.

The four actors play parents of two children, one of whom has lost two teeth due to being hit in the mouth with a stick... which you see at the start in a small sequence that I expect was absent from the original play, which runs during the credits to Alexandre Desplat’s powerhouse score (which is only present in the opening and closing credits... there’s no room for music in the rest of the movie). The tone changes from pleasant and mannered to hostile and aggressive and lots of other things through the course of the play as one of the couples, played by Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz, keep trying to leave but constantly encounter excuses and distractions which force them to stay in the building... much like the darkly magical curse of social manners which force the inhabitants of the house in Bunuel’s The Exterminating Angel to remain when they are desperate to depart... just not quite as much fun.

The film could best be described as a comedy of manners perhaps, rather than an exploration of the psychology of the four people trapped in the artistic space of the movie/play, but there is a certain level of fakery going on due to the confines of the environment and the plastic way in which every individual character gets their moment in the spotlight... which I found a little more distracting than I might normally find in something which has started off as a theatre piece. To be fair to Polanski, there are not that many “theatre into movie adaptations” which really escape the confines of their original setting and I’m not for the moment saying that there neccessarily should be. This artifice presented in this kind of way may be exactly the tone Polanski was after... I just feel that movies like Educating Rita did the whole stage to screen relocation a heck of a lot better than this particular movie did.

I’m not knocking the film though... it’s short and sweet and there are some laughs to be had from it. It’s not something I’d recommend that many people to see, to be sure, but it’s not a bad movie either and, frankly, when you get four actors who are this good trapped in a series of rooms together... well... you almost owe it to yourself to go and see what they come up with. And, to be fair to all involved, there were some nice shot compositions towards the end, on occasion, where the perspective was deliberately screwed by the juxtaposition of large and small elements sharing the same horizontal space... just not enough of that stuff to really hold my interest in it... at least not as much as the acting.

So Roman Polanski’s latest is not as great as, perhaps, it could have been but, honestly, I don’t know what kind of tone he was after so bringing up the artifice of the basic building blocks of the source material may not be the fairest way to go. A slight film but a fairly pleasant way to spend 80 mins... and Christoph Waltz is always worth watching.

Shame

2012-02-05T11:39:00.003Z

Shame and Fortune

Shame 2011 UK

Directed by Steve McQueen

Screening at UK cinemas.

Warning: I don’t think there’s really much of anything to spoil in this one but t/read cautiously, just in case! The only spoilers will be the things I tell you which don't happen... as opposed to the things which do.

I guess it’s to be expected that a UK movie, made with UK actors and director, but shot in New York, should wait all this time to get released in its own country. It’s finally out over here, but this movie, which I wanted to see for reasons I’ll explain in a moment, was only playing late night performances at my local... and then only for a week. Way to get behind British movies Cineworld! Not!

Luckily, it’s still playing in London, so I took the trip in to see it.

Now... there were a couple of possible hooks to seeing this movie, but neither of the obvious ones were why I was in the audience for this particular shared experience.

Hook 1 would be the director, Steve McQueen. My only exposure to his work has been a short film which I’ve already forgotten the title of, which I saw playing as part of an art exhibition either at the Tate or the Hayward or the Royal Academy, probably over a decade ago. This is my first real exposure to his work though.

Hook 2 would be, for most people I guess, Michael Fassbender, who I would have to say is a hugely brilliant actor and who has been in a lot off stuff the last few years. He’s a stand up kind of guy (at least that’s how he seems from what I foolishly extrapolate from the myriad of screen roles he’s had) and it’s always a pleasure to see him on screen... however, that’s not why I was here either.

I was here because of my love for the Doctor Who episode Blink and the lead actress of that episode, Carey Mulligan, who has since gone on to conquer Hollywood in roles which I was mostly unaware of, largely because the Marketing campaigns for those movies failed to mention the one thing which was guaranteed to get those movies an audience... SALLY SPARROW FROM BLINK IS IN IT!

Ok... that’s done with. Now you know why I was there for the movie... so let’s get to the confusingly misleading publicity blurb and what the movie is really about.

The publicity blurb would have you believe that this movie is about some kind of voracious sexual addict. Not true. Maybe he seems like he’s got some kind of sexual addiction for audiences who, I don’t know... don’t have much of an interest in sex maybe? Honestly people, if this film is about a sexual addict then I must personally be a Sodom and Gomorrah resurrected upon the earth. Don’t believe the hype. This guy basically just has a healthy sex drive.

This film is more about, I believe, the isolation that this guy suffers from in terms of anything long term in his life. About the only proper relationship this guy has is a non-sexual, pals thing going with his boss at work... a married man who likes to go “on the pull” with Fassbender’s character, Brandon. You know the term “alone in a crowd”? Well, that’s what Brandon’s character is. He seems to be irresistible to the female sex and so he spends most nights in meaningless sexual escapades with multiple partners. Brandon is so isolated from the accoutrements of interpersonal relationships, in fact, that he won’t even take phone calls from his sister, Sissy (played by Carey Mulligan).

Sissy turns up at his apartment unannounced and moves in with him temporarily... which throws a spanner into the ordered workings of his day-to-day routine, especially when his boss ends up doing something/somebody at his apartment which “throws” Brandon emotionally. The film explores the way emotional context starts to screw up Brandons normal working week and it’s interesting to see that the only sexual encounter in which he can’t properly perform is one in which he’s spent a little time on a first date with a woman who starts to give him an emotional hit.

I’d like to tell you more about this movie but... it’s a movie where nothing much happens. This is not to any detriment of the film, I must add. I like movies where nothing much happens and this film in particular is both skillfully directed and uses the highest calibre of actors who turn in quite wonderful and raw performances. I always admire a film that can contain a slow, deliberate and specific atmosphere over a length of time without pushing at the edges of your credibility... and this film maintains that atmosphere in spades. It’s not exactly an intense film, as had been suggested to me by others, but it’s certainly puttering along at its own pace and it’s got some really nice framing in the shots... the visual space sliced up into sections quite often with only a small part of the widescreen being used for any action (if there is any action, like walking from one room to another, at all in a sequence). This is a very European style of filming (at least that’s how I perceive it) going back to Bergman and the like... the most leading proponent of modern US cinema I can think of who still uses that style of direction is Woody Allen, especially in his Bergman-heavy, referential seventies movies. In fact, I would go as far as to say that Shame is very much like an aurally muffled Woody Allen movie... but without the laughs. I hope McQueen himself would be okay with that analogy.

Ultimately though, for the kind of intensity the film hints at trying to play with (it really isn’t in any way a harrowing movie, people) it never really reaches the heights... or should that be depths... that it seems to be initially aiming for and the expected incest scene with Brandon’s sister, which is what I am assuming everyone else was also expecting to happen, never actually rears its head as a possibility in the film. This left me a bit perplexed and in the end I have to conclude that nothing much happens in this movie.

It’s a pleasant and competently made piece of nothing though... with a sure-footed and delicate sensibility from cast and crew and a nicely, almost clinically, melancholic soundtrack culled from a variety of sources and... woohoo, Carey Mulligan, fine actress that she is, gets her kit off! Bonus! Did you hear that Doctor Who fans? SALLY SPARROW IN THE NUDE! DON’T... BLINK!

Ultimately, though, this wouldn’t be a blind recommendation from me. It’s a solitude film for a Sunday afternoon and doesn’t really push any buttons which would go that extra mile into something truly astonishing... but maybe to assume it would want to is just me kind of missing the point. It’s a well crafted, well presented, delightfully performed examination of a man alone who finds solace in the explorations of his own sexuality. You’re either going to love it or just not be moved by it... I don’t think it has enough power in its frames to make anyone truly hate it... and what would be the point?

So there you go. Shame... a nice little film and definitely something you can put on the DVD player as a backdrop to your own thoughts. To see or not to see? That is the question... and I can’t answer it for you. It’s a film which is more about subjective response than ticking off objective boxes... and that’s not a bad thing either.

Sleepy Eyes of Death 1: The Chinese Jade

2012-02-03T19:26:00.004Z

Jade In China

Sleepy Eyes of Death 1: The Chinese Jade

aka Nemuri Kyoshiro 1: Sappocho Japan 1963

Directed by Tokuzô Tanaka

Anime Eigo Region 1

Okay, so Sleepy Eyes of Death is Japanese samurai character taken from a popular series of novels written by Renzaburô Shibata, some of which were originally published in serialised form like the old US pulps. The novels and short stories were so popular that already, in the 50s and not long after the stories first started appearing, a series of films were made by the famous Toho Studios which starred Koji Tsuruta as the main character, although that particular series only lasted for three movies before being cancelled, from 1956 to 1958.

However, Daiei Studios started off their own film series based on this character starting in 1963 with this one, The Chinese Jade and starring Ichikawa Raizo as Nemuri Kyoshiro for the first twelve films. Ichikawa Raizo was thought of as the Japanese James Dean but after dying at an appallingly early age, halfway through making the twelfth installment in the series in 1969 (he had to be replaced by a stand in for some of the shots), the appeal and high box office take of the series seemed to die with him. He was replaced by another actor for just two more installments and, from what I understand, Daiei Studios went bankrupt a couple of years after their young star's death.

A further series of four related TV movies were made about the character from 1989 to 1998, but I really don’t know enough about these to elaborate if these were any good.

This is my first exposure to the character right here with this first movie in the Ichikawa Raizo series as the label Anime Eigo, who are a really good US label for crisp and clear transfers of samurai movies with a reputation for thorough subtitling, have released the first 8 films in the series so far in two boxed editions. I’m well looking forward to wading into the rest of these in the coming weeks. I especially like the warning to potential viewers on the back of the box... “WARNING: Contains violence, nudity and nihilism.” The ronin* anti-hero of these films is, in fact, a self proclaimed nihilist... and he won’t be letting you forget that in a hurry, if this first movie in the series is anything to judge by.

The Chinese Jade starts off really well with the title character Nemuri Kyoshiro, The Sleepy Eyes of Death, walking in the night and being attacked by ninjas throwing shurikens at him which embed in the wall behind and let out fizzing, bright colours as fireworks attached to them go off. A colourful entrance which gives a nod to the bright lighting scheme later in the movie but which also demonstrates, as it is shown all the way through the film, that these must be the lamest ninjas in cinema history. I mean, c’mon! What group of ninjas herald their approach with brightly lit, sparkly weapons, all of which fail to hit “our hero” even though he’s not even trying to dodge them? Nemuri Kyoshiro further demonstrates how rubbish these particular ninjas are by, after giving them fair warning to not make him draw his sword, cutting all but one of them down with ease.

It soon becomes clear that, while Nemuri Kyoshiro usually hangs out in his “nest”, he also, as in this film, spends time living with various brothel girls who have all fallen for his charms. He makes his home with prostitutes and a loyal pickpocket who is kinda, it seems to me from this first one, being set up as his comic-relief side-kick. Affer a short while he becomes embroiled in a plot between two rival clans to gain possession of the stolen Chinese Jade statuette which contains a sensitive piece of paper which means the end of one of the clan's yearly stipend if it falls into the wrong hands.

Fans of the original Baby Cart (aka Lone Wolf and Cub) series of films from the next decade will recognise Ogami Itto himself, Tomisaburô Wakayama (credited here as Jyo Kenzaburo) playing the primary “heavy” who, with his bald head, looks like nothing less than a live action equivalent of The Hood from the original Thunderbirds TV show. Seriously, you’ll just be waiting for the guys eyes to light up!. He uses no weapons in battle, only his hand to hand combat skills which (obviously) allows him to be able to catch swords aimed at him in mid flight and remove them from his opponents hands before hitting them so hard that his punch sends them to their death, blood dribbling from their mouths. Hilarious!

The violence to gore ratio is interesting in this one because, although this director was used to directing some of the Zatoichi movies and then, later, some of the Lone Wolf and Cub TV show episodes, there is very little blood on screen here. We are about a year after the release of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo sequel Sanjuro, where the first noted instance of a spurting geyser of blood in relation to a samurai sword cut occurred in Japanese cinema. It’s not quite caught on in this movie but I’m sure that some of the later entries into this series of films will up the ante and feature all manner of highly inappropriate but lively and fun blood effects... just like the Zatoichi series of films did by the end of their run with Shintarô Katsu.

So yeah, there’s a bit of action in here, not least of which is continual “lame-ninja ass kicking” but the bold compositions of the shots and the way in which the camera holds and pans on those is what makes the film interesting. Striking diagonal plains split into three, for example, and the constant projection of depth in the shots by masking areas out with various supports and screens make for some stunning environments... not least of which is one of the villains' “under-river” lair (it's not exactly Ken Adam but it could have been a contender) which is lit with some beautiful and almost psychedelic colour schemes pitching great areas of green up against the odd patch of purple etc. This is the kind of stuff which just about predates the proliferation of these kinds of colour schemes in various giallo movies at the end of the decade and which may, or may not, have been influenced by Mario Bava’s early “credited” directing work. It’s powerful stuff and the lighting schemes employed in these kinds of movies are the things that will keep me coming back to these kinds of films in the future.

The film ends with Nemuri Kyoshiro, naturally, saving the day but the end sequences are quite restrained in that, instead of meeting a bloody death at the hands of the Sleepy Eyes Of Death’s “Full Moon Cut Technique”, one of the primary villains instead is beaten in combat and agrees to keep out of this particular affair in future... which makes me wonder if this was not directly inspired by a story from one of the novels as it’s not a traditional cinematic ending for this kind of movie... or maybe I’m looking at it from jaded Gaijin's eyes. I do know that the character will return in at least one more film in the series so I’m guessing this is taken directly from one of the books.

The only thing I would note as a particularly annoying element of the movie is the musical score by Taichirô Kosugi which, while occasionally wandering into the more appropriate realms of something Masaru Satô might score for a similar kind of movie, with a strong percussion and fast tempo, is actually a real hotchpotch of different styles, the most infuriatingly distracting of which is a slow sub-par, romantic Hollywood melodrama of the 50 theme which kinda grates against the incidents on screen and does nothing to enhance the mood of the imagery. Not a great, or in any way very consistent score, I must say.

Either way, if you’re into your chambera** and you enjoy the likes of the Zatoichi, Hanzo The Razor, Ogami Itto and Lady Snowblood series', then this one is probably something you should check out too. There’s a little less bloodletting in this one, but I suspect that will pick up later in the series. The character is thinly sketched also, with little of his past or explanation of his current position to be gleaned from the movie in anything more than half hinted fragments. That should hopefully get taken care of more as the series progresses, methinks.

*A ronin is the term for a masterless samurai.

** Chambara (also chanbara) is the Japanese term for sword

fighting movies and the term is often associated with samurai movies.

Chronicle

2012-02-02T20:43:00.004Z

Teenage Wasteland

Chronicle 2012 UK/USA

Directed by Josh Trant

Screening at UK cinemas.

Warning: It’s almost impossible for me to be able to talk about certain of the more interesting aspects of Chronicle without at least including some spoilers, which can’t be gleaned from the trailer. That being said, I will at least try not to give the ending away... although most people will be able to predict how this movie is going to end anyway... at least in the broad strokes.

Well then... it seems like every 1 in 10 new movie releases I go to these days is another hand-held, found footage, 1st person “shooter” and, yes, Chronicle is certainly and wholeheartedly another one of these. However, there are also some differences in the way that the format and presentation have been made more flexible, which are notable and worth giving credit for... this movie surprised me quite a bit, it has to be said.

The first time I saw the trailer about a bunch of teenage friends who accidentally acquire “super powers” with one of them filming their “stunts”, it looked kinda interesting but, subsequent viewings made me realise how irritating these teenage kids are in those particular clips they showed in the trailer. I’d almost changed my mind about going to see it at all but my cousin who, to be fair, had only seen the trailer the once, wanted to check it out and I certainly didn’t mind taking a look either... although I was fully intending to have to name this review “Chronic”.

However, as it turns out, Chronicle is a fairly well-crafted, pseudo-reality movie which follows the path of three teenagers thrown together under strange circumstances. These teenagers, while admittedly irritating for a while, kind of grow on you the more they bond with each other and grow in strength as they practice and hone their newly acquired mental abilities. There’s a definite sense of characters changing/progressing as their story transpires but, the more interesting stuff about this one, is the fact that although it’s fairly obvious (even from the trailer) that one of the characters goes a bit “dark side” on everybody, the background given to that character right from the outset means it’s really not a clear cut question of good versus evil here. It’s all very charcoal grey when it comes to pitching the tone of these kids and the movie certainly builds up the audience sympathy with the focus of the darker elements in the movie and, although the film isn’t exactly subtle in the way it goes about things, it gets a bit of respect from me here because it’s a little harder to do this with the “real footage” format than it would be in a more distanced form of shooting. I can’t, for instance, help but compare it to the film I saw last week, The Darkest Hour, which Chronicle walks all over in the character building stakes.

What’s more interesting, though, as I mentioned earlier, are the differences in the first person technique within this movie as opposed to pretty much everything else that has gone before it, starting with Cannibal Holocaust in 1980 and then right through the wave of these movies popping up at the cinema in the wake of the popularisation of the genre with The Blair Witch Project. They’re coming thick and fast now with two new REC movies coming up (at least one of which will retain this style of the original shooting I expect) and at least three movies I remember from the end of last year... Apollo 18, The Troll Hunter and Paranormal Activity 3, joining in the “audience as camera eye” fun.

The first difference between the use of hand held on this one is that there is absolutely no justification or explanation as to why you are watching what effectively amounts to somebody’s home movies. It just jumps you straight in at the deep end and after a while you realise that any camera’s views in any scenes, whether they belong to the main protagonists or not, are all artificially “mixed in” to the final edit to open up the total viewpoint of the storytelling when it’s needed. So a guy taking movies out his apartment window, security camera footage and so on, is all just edited together to give the audience a deeper and more easy to understand picture of what’s going on. Since the camera recording the earlier footage in the movie gets trashed, you may like to assume that either the police or the CIA or whoever, are collecting evidence as to what happened and have edited it into an understandable form... but there’s absolutely no indication or not as to whether this is the case and so, I feel, the lack of context is a bold move which will allow other film makers to play around without worrying too much about the “collective viewpoint” the audience is looking back from.

Another thing which is interesting is the fact that the kid who is really strong in his psychokinetic powers is able to use the camera as a free flying recording device which floats about on its own and can swoop and catch things almost without the kid trying to do anything. This is interesting because, what it means is that, in a “real footage” film we have a director who is able to take back the camera from the actor and give the shots some dynamism without actually breaking the rules of the movie, which are admittedly far from realistic but certainly “fair play” when it comes to pushing this particular brand of the art form forward. The story makes possible the more lax limitations on what the director can do with the camera... a perfect solution. Of course, there’s naturally a feeling of movie makers trying to have their cake and eat it here but, since this is a very rare exception to the limitations of the visual syntax without breaking the rules of engagement, so to speak, then I think it’s probably fair game and to be applauded in its own right.

Another great thing about this movie is its total lack of interest in providing any real closure on the reason these three friends have started to develop these “special powers” in the first place. Near the start of the film, after setting up two of the characters for a bit, the three main protagonists come together and investigate a mysterious, noisy hole in the ground which opens up into a cavern which contains this movies equivalent of Hitchcock’s MacGuffin... an alien-like structure which seems to house some kind of intelligence which attracts blood from “our heroes” noses and causes them all to pass out in pain. When they awaken, they are out of the hole and it’s a day or so later in terms of when we rejoin them. They have no idea how they got out of the hole and they have all inherited special powers which they are slowly getting used to. They return to the hole, only to find that it has been filled in and the area made off limits by the government... you never find out what the thing in the whole was. Not in this movie, anyway. The rest of the story deals with the way these three teens try to deal with the great power which has been thrust upon them and shows the wedge which drives them apart and leads to the wholesale slaughter and destruction of many innocents towards the end of the movie.

Getting to that predictable but chilling last battle is pretty cool though. First person shooter movies are usually shot on a small budget, by their nature, but examples like this and Cloverfield show that there’s room for big budget movies in this arena too... although in some ways that kinda scotches the chance of having a proportionally extra large profit returned on your original budget. There are some really great flying sequences in this movie and the scene from the end of the trailer where good guy/bad guy Andrew demonstrably crushes a car while talking directly into the camera is every bit as worrisome within the context of the movie as you would imagine it could be.

I do, of course, have a couple of minor quibbles too...

While the writers and director have felt under no obligation to tell you about the origins of the edited together version of the footage, they certainly get very heavy handed when they introduce the reasons for Andrew to be filming everything wherever he goes in the first place. Basically, he’s bullied at school and has a very abusive father who continually knocks the crap out of him... so he’s started filming these incidents and everything else, putting a layer between the real world and his camera eye. The point is long laboured but the movie makers really want you to invest in the concept that it’s a perfectly natural thing for a teenage boy to take his video camera with him wherever he goes. I can understand the reasons for this hard sell approach... without this basic concept being accepted/believed in by the audience, you just don’t have a movie... but I did feel like the point was being rammed down my throat a little bit in places.

The other thing which is a bit tired for me is that it’s exactly the character who is set up as being bullied and shy who goes bad and strikes out at the human race after he’s convinced himself of his God-like status. It all feels a little too clichéd after the negative lifestyle of the lad in question has been poured on that thick. It seems ot me it would have been more interesting if one of the other characters had turned into the bad guy, totally out of the blue and with an added shock value thrown in to boot. But I have to say, this really is just a minor quibble and in no way detracts from the sheer spectacle of what happens as the film progresses.

I don’t want to give away too much about the ending but it’s clear to see that the possibility of a franchise is in the works. The “hole in the ground” plot factor is mentioned again at the end to remind the audience of the, as yet, unsolved status of the initial cause of all this blood and thunder on screen. It’s a thread which is left deliberately dangling so future screenwriters can give it a yank if they feel they need that to be the way they go with any sequels. It’s not necessarily a bad thing but it did kinda smack of being a Hollywood, keep-the-kiddies-happy kind of ploy rather than a satisfying conclusion to the film in its own right.

This again, though, is a minor point.

Chronicle is a really interesting study of that old 1962 Spider-Man declaration... “with great power comes great responsibility” although, to be fair, in this movie it tends to read more as “with great power comes the inevitable ability to try to exploit it, use it for criminal purposes and just generally screw your own life up.”

Nevertheless, I’d have to give Chronicle a hard recommendation because it’s rare that these hand-held dramas turn out to also be big budget special effects extravaganzas... but mostly because, when all is said an done, Chronicle is an entertaining piece of movie making, that is if you can get past the vaguely aggravating teen-speak that keeps cropping up in abundance whenever any two characters are seen on screen at the same time. Catch it now before it flies out of your local cinema.

The Darkest Hour 3D

2012-01-28T21:49:00.003Z

Through An Hourglass Darkly

The Darkest Hour 3D 201 USA/Russia

Directed by Chris Gorak

Screening at UK cinemas.

Warning: Dark spoilers reside in this Farraday cage of a review.

Um... the trailer for this movie looked like a rip roaring, sci-fi alien invasion adventure... the only downside being that it was in 3D. I figured that if the producer was the guy behind the sadly inappropriately adapted but visually spectacular Nightwatch and Daywatch movies, however, then this would be worth my while checking out. So I plonked my money down, put on the dreaded 3D glasses and waited for the high octane action spectacle to start.

Hmmm... what can I say about this one then. Well, it got off to a good start in the opening credits when I found out the music was by Brian Tyler who did such a great job with another recent alien invasion movie Battle: Los Angeles. So I figured at least the music was in safe hands (it was more than competent enough for this movie, that’s for sure).

And... that’s pretty much most of the good stuff in this movie then.

No, come on, I’ll be a bit more charitable because I was sorta entertained by it... just don’t want to ever have to sit through it again.

Okay... so The Darkest Hour is an alien invasion movie co-production between the US and Russia which tells the “story” of a group of teens (although quite possibly these guys n’ gals are in their twenties... just like their IQs) trying to survive the alien infested streets of Russia after a deadly and devastating “invasion” night when, pretty much, invincible, invisible aliens starting wiping people out left, right and centre. They meet up with a few other survivors and attempt to avoid aliens and put up some small resistance while trying to get the Americans among the main protagonists to a waiting nuclear submarine that will take them back to their similarly devastated country so they can mount a resistance with not much in the way of anything that they can fight the aliens with (which doesn’t take massive team effort) effectively.

The film starts out setting up the American protagonists and they are, like almost all of the people you meet in this movie, either very dumb or not really worth knowing or a combination of both. As you go through the film it doesn’t take very long for it to sink in that there really is no real connection with these airheads... you really don’t care whether the aliens suck them up into fragments as they steal their living energy or not.

Now, I am being pretty harsh here but it’s not unfounded. I’ll go ahead and say that the special effects, not something I would normally mention (because I really don’t care about how good or bad the special effects in a movie are... they aren’t really important to the appreciation of a good film... which this isn’t) are actually quite competent and some of the suspense sequences actually do work very well.

The aliens are all fine too...with one or two inconsistencies in the internal logic of the film. For instance, when an alien touches you, you’re dead. You instantly get sucked in and crumbled into dust... unless you happen to be one of the main protagonists. If you are a main protagonist then the mere touch of an alien is not enough to crumble you... they can pull you around this way and that while your friends try to save you when this happens so as to string out the suspense, it turns out.

Okay... so did I mention this movie was dumb? I’ve not seen the Twilight movies or read the novels but I suspect that this movie is aimed at the same teenage audience and the producers of this movie must have taken that as a green light to wantonly disregard any signs of intelligent life in their audience and just make the rules up as they go along... happily contradicting themselves as they follow their movie dream. For instance, the kids hide out for the best part of a week in a small basement room until lack of “coincidentally stored” food in said room forces them back into the alien populated streets. Funny that they all have exactly the same hairstyles and a total lack of facial hair when they come out as when they went in then, isn’t it?

Another example of the extreme lack of intelligence this movie assumes in its audience is the fact that they are locking radios in Faraday cages so that the energy signal can’t be detected by the aliens. However, it seems perfectly reasonable, to the writers of this tripe, that a signal sending to the radio can get into the cage so “our heroes” can find out about the waiting submarine... an underwater shielded nuclear vessel being the only thing left on earth that can actually transmit anything after the aliens turned off all the electrics in the world on their arrival.

And that’s another thing... what about that? The aliens have wiped out all electrical devices like phones etc... except when one of the girls gets her power back on her phone at the end... she has a message waiting from her parents... um... no cell phones or radio masts or electronics of any kind, guys, remember. Script doctor! Is there a script doctor in the house?

I have to say that, while I wasn’t particularly entertained enough by this film to be rivetted by it, it was quite diverting for its short running time and a teenage audience may well get a bigger kick out of it than me. For all its inconsistencies in logic and its lack of grounded or even sympathetic characters though, I really wouldn’t want to be responsible for inflicting this on another audience member. I can’t really recommend this one and I can’t honestly say anything really good about it other than it has some competent scoring and it doesn’t get on your nerves too much, once you’ve calmed down about the inadvertent breaking of the laws of physics throughout the movie. Don’t bother with this one unless there’s absolutely nothing else to watch and lets hope that the people holding the purse strings trust this director with a better script sometime soon because, I dunno, I just got the feeling that half of the problems with this movie were not the directors fault. So fingers crossed for him.

Haywire

2012-01-27T20:58:00.004Z

Haywired For Sound

Haywire 2012 USA/Ireland

Directed by Steven Soderbergh

Screening at UK cinemas.

Warning: Ever so slight spoilers in

this one... not really spoilers as such.

Okay... so I’m always a bit undecided on Steven Soderbergh as a director. I remember seeing a programme covering the Cannes Film Festival which he won with Sex, Lies and Videotape and I also remember seeing the movie in question at the cinema a little while later and rating it highly (though it’s been years since I saw it). But for every Sex, Lies and Videotape he’s directed, he’s also made, what are for me, huge missteps in direction when it comes to film choices and many of his movies I’ve just plain refused to see.

For instance... if I want to see a Rat Pack film then I’ve got the original Ocean’s Eleven. Honestly, why would I want to see a remake of such when it doesn’t even feature Sammy Davis Jr dancing with trash can lids? Similarly, and perhaps more seriously... why in heck would you get it into your head to make an adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris when, frankly, the 1972 version by “the poet of cinema” Andrei Tarkovsky is the definitive last word on what that movie could ever be. Seriously... Tarkovsky’s Solaris is one of the greatest pieces of cinematic art ever made... leave it the heck alone and certainly don’t make a movie where the running time is almost half the length of the original... Solaris is the last movie you’d want to whittle down in the edit. Might as well remake Star Wars or The Third Man.

The few films I have seen by Soderbergh... Sex, Lies and Videotape, The Limey and Full Frontal... were all pretty great movies, especially The Limey, which is a major motion picture event in its own right.

Which brings me neatly on to Haywire because it wasn’t until I saw the credits roll at the start that I realised that this one was written by the same writer, Lem Dobbs, who had done such a fantastic job with The Limey. Now, Haywire is a different kind of film, to be sure... but it’s still quite a cool experience and Soderbergh really comes into his own again on this one by showing what a great eye he has for the way the shots are framed. Even during the action sequences which are, to be fair, really all that the movie comprises of, the shot set ups are beautiful to look at and would not been nearly as arresting in the hands of some of the other directors who are competent with the visual language of the action thriller.

Haywire follows the character of Mallory, played by Gina Carano, a hitwoman/secret agent kind o’ gal who has been set up by her ex-lover and former employee (played by Ewan McGregor) to take the terminal fall for... I dunno, something political I guess. Mallory has other ideas of course and as she does her one woman Jason-Bourne-goes-for-payback-time act to get back at McGregor and find out who’s at the top of the chain, she encounters such established actors as Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas and Michael Fassbender as she runs, jumps and shoots her way in and out of trouble.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about this movie is that it is a big, dumb action movie. There are definite allusions to a deeper intelligence in the script which works hand-in-hand with the overall miasma of the cloak and dagger of the subject matter to give this movie the appearance of being something a little more smart than it actually is... but this certainly doesn’t posess the ice cold, hard nosed intelligence of Adam Hall’s Quiller novels, or even something slightly less challenging by John Le Carre or Len Deighton. But it does filter the atmosphere and dialogue hits of those kinds of books (and movies) to pull the wool over the audiences eyes in terms of the actual simplicity of the story and this is what helps lend credence to the movie as a more intelligent level of thriller... when really it’s actually no more intelligent than something like The Transporter or Taken.

Now I’m not knocking either of those films (love ‘em both) but this movie still seems to have a certain “spy chill” in its make-up and a lot of this chill comes from having actors who can speak these kinds of lines without investing them with too much emotion. Everyone is just a little bit understated and muffled in their characters and this plays rather nicely against the scenes where Gina Carano is fighting for her survival and clawing her way through the chain of people.

The first half of the movie follows a fight sequence where Mallory grabs a guy and his car and starts to tell him all the things that have been happening recently and detailing her betrayal to this “civilian” so that he can talk to the police. The second half of the movie catches us back up to the present and then becomes a race to the finish line as Mallory lays a trap in her fathers house (played by Bill Paxton in a role in which he is a nice kinda guy for once) and springs it near the end of the movie.

Respect, also, to Soderbergh for treating the musical score of the movie with the gravitas it deserved and actually let it effectively carry some of the load. The score by someone I’d not heard of called David Holmes is really deft and jazzy and Soderbergh turns the sound effects right down during most of the action scenes to allow the music to breathe on its own and do its job. This was a really good and positive decision and I wish more directors were doing stuff like this. In fact the sound design in this one was impressive all round. Nice work!

I do have to say though that, despite the allusions to a more intelligent plot line lurking at the edges of the scenes, the film is really quite predictable in a lot of places... especially the action sequences. For instance, the opening sequences set in a diner are not so smart as the film tries it’s best to convince you that it’s not about to leap into a glossy action fight... but you pretty much know when one of the characters orders a coffee, just what he’s going to do with it (although the over-the-top, make believe lack of consequence to these kinds of actions in these kinds of movies ensure that this is no homage Gloria Grahame in Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat, at least in terms of cause and effect reactions... this movie’s more about people punching things, it has to be said... and there’s nothing wrong with that). Similarly, there’s a scene where you know that two “work colleagues” are suddenly going to burst into action and try to kill each other as soon as they get into their hotel room and little things like this did kinda make me wish the movie had more, actual surprises in it.

However, this didn’t cramp the style of the film one bit and I can honestly say that this is one of the better American made spy thrillers I’ve seen in a while. Plenty of action coupled with some startling acting make this one an unmissable cinema attraction at the moment. Definitely a strong recommendation from me... and Soderbergh is definitely still a major player in todays changeable cinematic landscape, I would say. Take a walk to your local fleapit and check this one out.

The Artist

2012-01-25T20:31:00.005Z

State Of The Artist!

The Artist 2011 France/Belgium

Directed by Michel Hazanavicius

Screening at UK cinemas.

Warning: There will be very slight

spoilers silently creeping into this review.

I really wasn’t sure whether I wanted to see The Artist but there’s been so much ballyhoo about it lately that I felt compelled to take a look. I’m a bit cynical when it comes to public reaction over what is, for all intents and purposes, a silent movie. I’ve watched a fair few silent movies and enjoyed most of them, so that really wasn’t a bother for me, although I was worried a carbon copy of the style of silent cinema would prove less entertaining than the public reaction would have me believe.

Also, I’m quite angry in some ways that the public are treating a silent movie as a novelty item... as if such a thing shouldn’t be allowed to exist within the modern cinema landscape... frankly it’s like people are throwing their hands up to cheer for something which they see as a circus performance to relieve them of the nagging boredom of yet another Hollywood blockbuster.

Another thing I’m quite angry about is that the majority of the audiences who have enjoyed this film would not normally be caught dead seeing a French (or any other non-English speaking country for that matter) film because they don’t like subtitles. Honestly, the amount of times I’ve been “warned” by cinema staff on the rare occasions we do get a foreign release that the film is not in English and has... pause to look both ways in case the next word shocks people... subtitles! My response to this is usually to sarcastically... or possibly just ironically... point out to the ticket seller that I am very glad indeed that the film in question has subtitles because I am not in any way multi or bi-lingual (or even bi-curious for that matter) and if the movie didn’t have those... well I wouldn’t be able to understand it now, would I? How grateful I am to the generous movie company for making subtitles available on their few (very few) foreign language movies.

By now the ticket seller has usually gone white in the face but at least they don’t pre-book specific seats anymore. You wanna see the look on a ticket seller’s face when they ask you where you want to sit and you reply that this is entirely dependent on the aspect ratio that the film is being projected in and could they please tell me what that is so I can make that kind of decision?

Anyway... I get angry with audiences who will only go and see a French film if it’s a silent film and doesn’t have subtitles. Perhaps the huge amount of American actors is enough to comfort them during their anxiety or maybe, just maybe, there’s so many US actors in it that they didn’t realise it was French... all I know is that, being a silent movie, the film has no subtitles but plenty of intertitles... so I really don’t understand modern audiences I guess. You still have to possess the increasingly rare and special commodity of being able to read so... what’s the difference?

What I do know, though, is that if The Artist has become the success it has due to audiences of this nature, it has to be said that, after watching it and being moved and entertained by the shenanigans of the characters/actors on screen... it truly deserves to be a success.

A big thing you need to understand about this movie though, is that it’s not trying to doggedly copy silent movies. It’s definitely more Planet Terror than Deathproof in terms of retrospective attitude, for example (and to push a comparison). Both those two halves of the movie phenomenon of Grindhouse were looking back referentially at 70s grindhouse cinema but Planet Terror elevated itself beyond that by looking back at it through a postmodern haze of nostalgia, whereas Deathproof pretty much became the thing it was trying to copy too well (and therefore ended up being the dull and less watchable half of that particular double-bill).

The Artist does the same thing as Planet Terror in that it doesn’t try to be the thing it’s trying to be a pastiche of so much... the film is not actually set during the silent period of cinema but starts just on the turn into talkies in 1927 (the year the first feature length talkie, arguably, The Jazz Singer was released) and goes through to about 1932 or 1933, which is when musicals really took off... which is actually an important detail for the ending of this particular movie. If anything, and it gets quite blatant during the early reels, the film is looking more like Singin’ In The Rain and then peeking backwards from there as a starting point than actually going back and researching the way certain things would have been in the twenties... at least that’s what I believe was happening (not that the film makers didn't do their research on this one... quite obviously they did). The similarities and gestures in the scenes outside the theatre where our leading man and woman meet for the first time, for example, look like the crowds and their reactions have been lifted right out of the aforementioned musical and plopped right on down in The Artist. People who know Singin’ In The Rain well, down to the smallest details, will spot a lot of this stuff happening throughout the movie.

There are, of course, loads of other references (Garbo and such like) but I also thought the leading man... who is presumably modelled here as some sort of cross between Douglas Fairbanks and Clark Gable, had very much the air of Gene Kelly playing Don Lockwood about him... and, to be sure, it also covers problems caused by the same dilemma... the effect of talking pictures on the silent movie stars, many of whom were big stars who were out of a job almost overnight because their voices didn’t fit, followed and aggravated a couple of years later by the notorious Wall Street Crash. This isn’t the specific reason here why George Valentin played by Jean Dujardin in this picture takes the downward spiral to possible suicide... here the main protagonist is as much to blame as his circumstances. I won’t spoil that one for you here though... or what the final outcome is.

This is not just a silent movie though, by any stretch. Much as you might think the movie is going to be something of a one trick pony, it really isn’t. There’s some nice playing around with the language of cinema, especially in the scene where George points a revolver at his head... at us, being the camera eye. I was just waiting for those four frames of red to be inserted like in Spellbound at this point... the fact that they weren’t, I feel, was a missed opportunity on the part of the director. I won’t tell you how this scene, which plays very near to the end of the film, winds up but I do find it interesting that the juxtaposition of two visuals which can use the same onomatopoeic reference is just one of many “tricks of the trade” that a French film will gladly use to confound an audience but which the American’s tend not to do so much in cinema these days... although, clever use of similar “pull-the-rug-from-under-the-audience” explorations used to get used every week on episodes of the TV show The Simpsons. This is good stuff people... and exactly what cinema is brilliant at.

There are two great sequences with sound in this movie too... one at the end which is an homage to Busby Berkeley but without the scale and the other a very clever sequence in the middle which is used to signal the beginning of the decline of the main character while the leading lady invests in the modern technology and begins to soar! Again it plays around with audience perceptions filtered into a viewpoint by everything that has gone before and then up-ended to achieve a surprise effect. Nice work!

This film is actually quite well crafted but, better than that, it’s quite witty and has a cute dog! A cute dog who runs to the rescue like a mini Rin Tin Tin in a sequence where the very essence of cinema is being used as an instrument of suicide... um... when someone is about to possibly burn to death from lighting up heaps of celluloid.

What really matters, at the end of the day though, is how this film made me feel.

Well I could say that it felt like I’d heard Kim Novak being raped if I was being unkind and I’m not about to turn this review into a debate about the very long history of reusing soundtracks in movies (maybe that’s another article). What I will say though is if you put a well known piece of music by Bernard Herrmann up against pretty much anything that any modern composer could write (and don’t get me wrong... the original score by Ludovic Bource is really good in this one), then Herrmann’s score is going to blow anything else away. So, yes, the love theme for Vertigo is very overpowering in its use in this movie towards the end and yes, it does fit in very well with the sequence being scored (which bears no resemblance to what the music was originally written for in any way shape or form) but this does seem to me to be a severe case of temp-trackitus I have to say. It’s like the director or producers lost confidence in the composer, whereas the composer has already proved that he has the talent and skill to score a scene like this... at least in my book he does. It wasn’t necessary to use it but, at the same time, Miss Novak’s comments about being raped by the music while watching The Artist are a little ignorant considering the historical precedents... and she certainly didn’t complain about it being used in 12 Monkeys, as far as I can recall?

So no... I didn’t really get to hear Kim Novak being raped... but I certainly did find myself sniffling all through the final reel and... well okay... pretty much bawling my eyes out. I think partly that’s to do with just getting old and becoming more emotional as the years go by... that’s my excuse anyway.

Despite the time setting and allusions to silent cinema... The Artist really harkens back to those brilliantly over-stylised 50s musicals (even though this movie is not a musical) and so this kind of feeling of having the tears welling up in your eyes while your heart swells up in your chest is not entirely unexpected in this instance. Although it feels a bit hokey and fake in some ways, it’s hokey and fake in all the right places and underplays what is a genuinely well crafted, or at least consistently crafted, piece of movie-making. This one’s a definite recommendation from me and, honestly... who else but the French can make a perfect film about the process of making American movies. Get yourself to a movie house before it goes!

Top 30 CD Soundtrack Releases of 2011

2012-01-22T10:39:00.007Z

2011 Merry Go Sound

Okay. So last year I was getting a lot of hassle from people to write an end of year, best movies list which I didn’t do because... basically... I was ashamed of having to exist these days on a diet of mostly US Hollywoodland releases when it comes to the first run stuff because my local multiplex, even though it has 15 screens, is too dumbed down to show non-English language movies (I have to catch up with any outstanding foreign releases on DVD and hope that the financial risk is good).

So, in it’s stead, I decided to write a review of the top 20 soundtrack CD releases of 2010 (read it here), something I felt more qualified to be able to write about, in the hopes that it would be enough to fob people off and distract them enough from the fact that I hadn’t done a “top movies” list.

Now then... this year I was all shameless and actually did do a proper best movies list (read it here) and so I thought I’d done my duty. Not so, apparently, because now I’m being asked what my favourite score CD releases of the year were. Doh!

Okay... I buy hundreds of these things every year and, with all the small boutique labels giving us restored “Holy Grail” type restored score classics on a regular basis in very small, buy-it-in-the-three-hour-window-it’s-available limited edition runs... well, lets just say that last year was a real humdinger for score releases. So much so, in fact, that I really couldn’t narrow it down to just 20.

However, I don’t always get time to listen to the stuff I buy more than once these days (I’m going to try to sort out that problem sometime soon although, apparently, my classic ipod is filled up with over a months worth non-stop listening of scores... something like 36 days of music end to end in there at the moment... thank you 160gb!), so please bear in mind that these entries are not going to be detailed. Also, just because a score is ranked higher than another, just means that “for the moment” I like that score slightly more than the other one... and that could change when I get back into listening to the other.

I’m not, for example, suggesting that The Chemical Brothers’ excellent score for Hanna is in any way, shape or form a greater score than, say, Ron Goodwin’s score for Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines... it’s just what I’m listening to more at the moment.

Also, be aware that these are CD releases for 2011... that doesn’t mean to say the film came out in 2011 and it perhaps says something about the state of modern film scoring (which is actually more to do with the state of modern film making than anything the actual composers are doing) that so few of my favourite score releases from last year were from films that were actually released last year.

The one thing that surprised me about this list was the fact that there was only one Italian release and no Japanese releases on it this year. Oh well... I’m sure they’ll sneak back in "big time" next year. Here, then, is my top 30... for better or worse. Please feel free to share your favourite scores lists in the comments section.

30. Green Lantern by James Newton Howard (Sony)

Okay... so this was a much maligned and underrated score to a much maligned and underrated movie. A movie which, perhaps, suffered at the hands of modern audiences from having a fairly simplistic plotline. The soundtrack is very modern, however, and I think a lot of score fans might be pleasantly surprised by this one if they gave it some time in their CD player or ipod as a stand-alone experience. It perhaps didn’t help that the US release of this was only marketed as a CD-R whilst the UK release was a properly pressed CD from Sony.

29 Mimic by Marco Beltrami

(The Deluxe Edition Varese Sarabande Club)

Okay... this is a heavily expanded and remastered edition of a score I didn’t know much about, from a film I’ve completely forgotten but remember thinking was okay when it was first shown on TV. It was such an “in demand” score that I decided to give it a go based on the posted sound samples because I half expected it would sell its entire limited CD run very quickly (which it did). It was a good call because it’s a classic piece of “semi-melodic-with-some-dark-atonal-textures-thrown-in” modern day horror scoring. Definitely worth picking up in this expanded form if you can still get a hold of one.

28. It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World by Ernest Gold (La-La Land)

Ernest Gold’s vinyl re-recording of the score has been remastered and released at least twice on CD in recent history... but this new two disc edition from La-La Land is the one that gets it right by finally including the cues as they were originally recorded for the film. It’s always worth shelling out for this score just once, if only for the overture song and the main title music that accompanied the late, great Saul Bass’ incredible title designs.

27. Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines

by Ron Goodwin (Intrada Special Collection)

The first CD release of this fine score is given the full and proper two disc Intrada treatment. That opening title song is worth it alone with its very long intro which includes a bad orchestra trying to play Alfred Newman’s classic 20th Century Fox logo ident music. Put it on the speakers... it’ll go up-tiddly-up-up and it’ll go down-tiddly-down-down.

26.River Of No Return by Lionel Newman,

Leigh Harline, Cyril J. Mockridge paired on one CD with

NIAGARA by Sol Kaplan (Intrada Special Collection)

Okay. I’ll come clean. If River Of No Return was released on its own I wouldn’t have bought it... but I just love the score they’ve paired it with.... Niagara. One of my favourite Marilyn Monroe films and the song” Kiss” from this is woven into the score with a firm hand by composer Sol Kaplan. It’s rare for films by composers such as Kaplan and Harline to get a release in the modern soundtrack market place. Golden age composers don’t get a lot of attention these days, unfortunately, so it’s good to have stuff by less bankable composers such as Harline and Kaplan represented on the odd CD like this one.

25. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

by Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross (Null)

Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross made a name for themselves with a score I’ve not heard, to a movie I’ve not seen, called The Social Network. I was a bit defensive about the US adaptation of the first novel in the Millennium Trilogy but it really wasn’t a bad version of the book... And the score is pretty interesting, it has to be said. A very special friend bought me this for my Birthday and I’m really glad she did. Starting off with their noisy cover version of Led Zeppelin’s Immigrant Song, the score has a dark but lyrical electronic sound and it’s quite rare for composers in the medium to actually produce electronic music which holds its own against traditional compositional and performance techniques. Reznor and Ross really do this very well here though and it’s going to get a lot of listens from me, I can tell that already. It’s a much more appropriate musical support than the pleasant but clichéd score on the original Swedish movie and the record company have produced this generous three disc edition which is a lot more than most would. So... much applause for this particular record label on this one.

24. X-Men: First Class by Henry Jackman (Sony)

Ok, so apart from completely and blatantly contradicting various incidents from both the third X-Men movie and also the Wolverine movie, this film was actually pretty good. The music works really well and was amazingly popular with people. The driven ostinato that underscores Magneto is one of the most stand-out tracks of the year, in its various forms.

23. Humanoids From The Deep by James Horner

and Christopher Lennertz (Buysoundtrax)

Woohoo! James Horner’s schlocky horror score for the Roger Corman produced “when fish people attack and rape our women” movie gets it’s first “official” release. This is from the days when we all thought Horner was an original! Not only that, it also has some score cuts from the remake, scored by Christopher Lennertz.

22. Project Moon Base/Open Secret

by Herschel Burke Gilbert (Monstrous Movie Music)

Oh come one. It’s rare enough to get a score release from such an obscure composer. The fact that there are two of his scores on here and one of them happens to be a 1953 scifi movie scored with an orchestra augmented by an electric string quartet and a theremin is just the icing on the cake. What’s not to like about releases of this nature?

21. The Monster That Challenged The World

by Heinz Roemheld (Monstrous Movie Music)

And here we have another rare 50s scifi B-movie score... and it’s by Heinz Roemheld. Serously people, as far as I can make out, this is the only original Roemheld score to ever get a CD release to date... which is kinda criminal when you think he wrote the original opening title music to the first Buster Crabbe Flash Gordon serial (uncredited) and some great stock music for Werewolf of London (also uncredited!). Anything with big sounds to score monsters gets a big tick in my book.

20. It! The Terror From Beyond Space

by Paul Sawtell & Bert Shefter (Monstrous Movie Music)

And talking of big sounds to score monsters with... Paul Sawtell & Bert Shefter are better known for their scores for movies like Voyage To The Bottom of the Sea, The Fly, Jack The Giant Killer and Five Weeks In A Balloon. Here they score big again, bringing you their killer notes from beyond the far reaches of space and into your ears. Fear them!

19. Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Shadows

by Hans Zimmer (Watertower)

This score builds on and plays around with the style and melodies which Zimmer created for the previous film. Heady stuff. Perhaps not quite such a brilliantly consistent listen as the first album, this score is still pretty interesting and it’s good to hear those little violin wisps wandering around the foreground of the tracks. Could have done without the additional bad cover version of Morricone’s excellent Two Mules For Sister Sara theme in it though.

18. The Satanic Rites of Dracula

by John Cavacas (Buysoundtrax)

Okay, so it’s probably a toss up as to whether the score to Hammer’s Dracula AD 1972 is more funkier than The Satanic Rites Of Dracula or not. I’d probably argue the former but this album is a lot more consistent in tone than the score to the previous film... even with the inclusion on the disc of some unused cues. Buysoundtrax is not a label I like dealing with due to orders that get consistently lost and absolutely abysmal customer service... however, in their defence, they do get some good, long sought after scores on the market and I try to order their stuff from other dealers now if I want to buy their product.

17. Thor by Patrick Doyle (Disney)

Patrick Doyle has never really been a blip on my radar before... until I heard this score both in the movie (which was pretty good) and then as a stand-alone CD experience (which was even better). Almost Korngoldian in its approach, this one will certainly get the goosebumps rising in certain passages. The score to Thor makes you go “cor”!

16. Hanna by The Chemical Brothers (Sony)

Again, I’ve never heard of The Chemical Brothers before but, hmmm, you know when I said earlier how hard it is to do a decent electronic score? Well these guys (?) have really got a handle in electronic music too. This one really gets under yer ear flaps. Very melodic and poppy but strangely listenable.

15. The Alfred Hitchcock Hour Volumes 1 & 2

by Bernard Herrmann (Varese Sarabande CD Club)

Woah! Right here is one amazing release... except it’s not. These are two separate multi-CD releases so I kinda cheated there I’m afraid. Didn’t want to call the article 31 best score releases of 2011, okay? I never thought I’d get any more previously unreleased Herrmann for Hitchcock releases in my lifetime. This is an amazing find and is, as to be expected, the very definition of Herrmannesque. At times dark, broody and rumblingly repetitive and at other times absolutely beautifully moving, these two limited edition sets should not be missed.

14. Metropolis by Gottfried Huppertz (Capricio)

Well, this is technically a re-recording of Gottfried Huppertz original score to Fritz Lang’s silent masterpiece Metropolis (they used to send the scores out to the orchestras or piano transcripts of them to the cinemas showing these things). What’s that you say? A rerecording on a list of movie scores? Well... yes and no. Actually no. You see, this recording is the one which now accompanies the DVD so it can be heard closer to the original vision of the film would have been... and not with some fly-by-night VHS or DVD label running classical music over it instead. Also, it’s a very important artefact of film history because the score was used a great deal in working out how to put the jigsaw puzzle of the full print of Metropolis back together again after all these years. It’s a not half bad album either! This is now, and ever shall be, the score to Metropolis.

13. Battle: Los Angeles by Brian Tyler (Varese Sarabande)

I’m beginning to really warm to Brian Tyler now. I first started taking him seriously when he stood in for the late Jerry Goldsmith by composing a score, utilising one of Goldsmith’s original themes, for Stallone’s fourth Rambo movie. Battle: Los Angeles is actually a nice little alien invasion movie and Tylers score is surprisingly melodic and, for a modern movie, uses a surprising amount of “martial percussion” in its make-up. A really great little listen.

12. Masada by Jerry Goldsmith and Morton Stevens (Intrada Special Collection)

The theme from Masada was a long held and very popular staple of Jerry Goldsmith’s concert days. The main title is a rousing piece of music which is completely addictive to the ear. This two disc restoration of the original mini series score also includes a good deal of Morton Steven’s score from the same mini series. This music really rocks!

11. House of Usher by Les Baxter (Intrada Special Collection)

I never thought this would see the light of day. Most of these old Corman scores are totally lost but they are so often requested that some companies have been releasing the few cues they do have from various films and putting them out like that anyway. House of Usher is a classic Baxter score for a Poe movie and really gets the atmosphere. This was a must buy!

10. Gremlins by Jerry Goldsmith (Film Score Monthly)

After decades of just having four small cues of score available from this classic Joe Dante movie, Film Score Monthly bring us a definitive 2 disc edition of the whole score. Utilising his own violin motif he wrote for the “Gremlin-on-the-side-of-the-plane” remake in Twilight Zone The Movie, Goldsmith’s score will move you but also keep you in stitches. There are some witty and inventive cues in this score. An absolute classic.

9. Doctor Who Series Six by Murray Gold (Silva Screen)

Continuing his tradition of being one of the most popular composers on the UK scene, Murray Gold’s seventh collection of scores from the well loved TV show is another generous double disc helping and the Bond-like action cue from the opening of the second episode (track 5) is so good that I’m convinced this guy should get to score at least one Bond movie before he dies.

8. 1941 by John Williams (La-La Land)

Again, a long overdue expansion of a timeless classic. 1941 may not have made much of a splash at the box office but the score is typical Williams ear candy and, frankly, once you get that march in your head, it’s not going away again without a fight!

7. The Black Hole by John Barry (Intrada/Disney)

Not only a properly expanded release but also the first ever non-bootleg CD of John Barry’s amazing score to this underrated Disney movie. The overture is Barry’s homage to the Korngoldian resurgence in film scoring popularised by John Williams’ score for Star Wars and the rest is... classic Barry. Sinister and driven and an absolutely beautiful score.

6. Devil - Fernando Velázquez (Varese Sarabande Club Edition)

This score to the M. Night Shyamalan produced horror story about some people stuck in a lift with the devil was overlooked by audiences... but it was quite a nice little horror movie. The score was very strong and I’m really glad it’s got a release (albeit in a limited edition which sold out very quickly) a couple of years down the line. Really good atonal horror fest music that I find myself playing more and more.

5. The Egyptian - Alfred Newman and Bernard Herrmann

(The Deluxe Edition Varese Sarabande Club)

Well... what can one say about this incredible score co-composed by two of the greatest names in the industry. So many previous releases of this have been out in the past but this limited two disc edition is the first time the whole score has been made available... and it’s an incredible piece by two great writing talents. A necessary foundation stone to any soundtrack library.

4. Casino Royale - Burt Bacharach (Kritzerland)

Woohoo. This umpteenth reissue and remaster of Bacharach’s classic comedy Bond score is slightly expanded but, more importantly, its really well mixed this time around and has never sounded better. No wonder it sold out so quickly. Not only that but this is the first release ever... can you believe it... to feature that groovy end title song on it... “Have no fear Bond is here!” My only caveat is that there’s apparently an even more expanded two disc edition coming out from Quartet Records in February. Looks like I’ll be splashing the Bacharach cash once again then.

3. The Great Train Robbery

(aka The First Great Train Robbery) - Jerry Goldsmith (Intrada)

This is the third time on CD and, frankly, this is the expansion and remaster where the label in question got it right and did a much better job than all the previous labels who have worked with these masters. This is a seriously great “Englishified” Jerry Goldsmith score and I can guarantee you I’ll be playing it for years and years. It is so cool!

2. Lo Strano Vizio Della Signora Wardh

(aka The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh) - Nora Orlandi (Quartet)

A track from this score to one of my favourite giallo movies was featured in Kill Bill Volume 2... but for some reason everybody assumed it was tracked in from a spaghetti western. Whatever... all I know is that this is a great album and I’m so pleased it’s finally got a legitimate, if limited, release. Groovy in places but... very, very haunting in others. A great piece of work from the only female composer featured on this year’s list.

1. Bernard Herrmann at 20th Century Fox Box (Varese Sarabande Club Edition)

Blimey... this really was a massive release... and a complete, and very expensive, surprise. This was released on 27th December and has 14 discs worth of numerous Bernard Herrmann scores, some of which have never been released, some of which are expanded and all of them remastered. Plus a 100+ pages accompanying booklet. At $230 (including postage to the UK) I couldn’t really afford to buy this... but I went ahead anyway and scrimped and saved on other things because Bernard Herrmann is my absolute favourite composer and they only made 1000 of these things which sold out very quickly. I was further alarmed that customs charged me a whopping extra £36 on top of that but every time I hear how great classic scores like The Ghost And Mrs. Muir and Garden Of Evil sound in this set, I just can’t bring myself to regret this purchase. An absolutely brilliant end to the year and it easily takes my number one spot.

Honourable Mentions

HM1. The Music of Battlestar Galactica For Solo Piano (Buysoundtrax)

Some solo piano transcripts (transcribed by the composer himself and played expertly by Joohyun Park) of a selection of Bear McCreary’s score for the recent TV show of Battlestar Galactica is a really great two disc set. Because it’s not been used as a score in its own right, I couldn’t include it in the main list... but it’s well worth getting your ears around if you like the music from the TV show.

HM2. The Golden Child (La-La Land)

This three disc set includes the score to the movie by Michel Colombier but that’s not the reason to buy this album. The reason to get hold of this one before it sells out (think it’s still available) is because it also includes the full rejected score by John Barry... and what a classic Barry score it is. Absolutely brilliant listening experience for any Barry fan. It’s really worth shelling out for.

Doc Savage - The Desert Demons

2012-01-19T19:55:00.004Z

Savage Pulps!

Doc Savage - The Desert Demons

2011. By Kenneth Robeson (Will Murray)

Altus Press. ISBN: 9781618270016

Warning: No real spoilers... but this does get kind of rambly

while I place Doc Savage in context with the rest of my life!

1975 was a really great year for me in terms of movies.

My film education was slowly coming along and getting more focussed the older I got. I was barely one year old when my parents took me to see Hello Dolly at the cinema back in 1969 (these were the dark days before home video remember). I apparently slept through the majority of it but loved it when I saw it again, less than a decade later. I'm told I liked Dumbo a lot better, which I believe I saw at around the same age.

After that my diet of young teeny kid movies relied on Fred Astaire and John Wayne movies on TV, followed by James Bond re-release double bills at the cinema, mixed with the odd fantasy film like Battle For The Planet Of The Apes or The Golden Voyage Of Sinbad (my first exposure as a five year old to Caroline Munro on screen, although I’d often noticed her photograph on the Lambs Navy Rum posters which littered the tube stations I was already travelling through, often, from the age of around 18 months onwards - possibly a lot earlier... but that’s another story).

Then another thing happened which increased my craving for fantasy films... in 1973, or possibly 1974, the BBC showed the entire Flash Gordon (1934) serial on a Saturday or Sunday sliced into two big parts, sandwiching a screening of a Hoppalong Cassidy film... I think this was the first time that the BBC had showed the “Buster” Crabbe starring serial in any form and it most certainly wouldn’t be the last... over the years the three Flash Gordon serials and the Buck Rogers serial would be shown fairly regularly in their proper episodic format and would be a staple of early evening or early morning holiday time viewing in our household. I just ate those things up. Here, there really was a fast moving sci-fi adventure yarn which mirrored, in many ways, the old DC comics which had taught me how to read and get ahead of other kids way before I ever got to Nursery School. Yes, they were simplistic but then, so were the comics I was reading and the Flash Gordon serials blew me away. From that moment on, my love of film and the moving image really took off but... in 1975... there was one more thing that really cemented the deal for me and made sure that I payed no attention to anything else but movies, comics, books and TV shows for the rest of my life.

One afternoon, I was watching a lightweight film review programme presented by Chris Kelly called Clapperboard. On it they showed a clip from a new movie in which a blond haired man, who I instantly recognised as Ron Ely from the Tarzan TV show which aired on Saturday mornings, was doing battle in his study with what looked liked luminous green snakes made up out of laser light (I didn’t know they were green right then as we only had a black and white telly... for years I’d assumed Thunderbird 2 was red!). The green light-snakes had attacked him and were impervious to his wasted shotgun blast... they just reformed themselves before my amazed eyes. I was hooked... and begged my parents to take me to see it as a special family outing (knowing full well the cinema was a long trip for a carless family... all the way over to Enfield by bus or train... which is where I eventually made my home in later years... but again, that’s another story). I desperately needed to see this movie, which Chris Kelly had identified as Doc Savage: The Man Of Bronze.

It was a good call... Doc Savage was my hero from that day on. I didn’t know, or indeed care, that the movie was actually not taking itself very seriously and shot through with a rich vein of camp humour... I thought it was deadly serious (as deadly serious as I took those Adam West Batman shows on TV) and, frankly, the cliffhanger serial-style escapes and homages to the pulp adventure yarns which had inspired it was enough to sell me on that kind of movie for life. I’ll always love the “Doc Savages” of this world and, as it turned out, it was a really good choice for a family cinema trip because my mum and dad absolutely loved it too (yeah, we still watch it once in a while... possibly one of the most fun movies ever made).

Of course Star Wars was only just around the corner... which would leave it’s own rich, postmodernistic, eclectic legacy burned into my retina but, while I waited for “The Joy Of SFX” to whip me up in its droid-like arms and ride me off into the twin sunset, the biggest things in my life were Doc Savage... and the Marvel comics adaptation of Logan’s Run (a movie I wouldn’t have been allowed in a cinema to see at the time).

So naturally I gravitated to the source novels for the movie I’d just been to. I’d seen them around as a kid with all the John Carter and Conan collections in places like the dedicated sci-fi novel and comic shop Dark They Were And Golden Eyed (my favourite shop which closed in the late 70s/early 80s and one which seems to have left a memorable mark on a lot of kids my age at the time). The UK Corgi editions of just three of the novels in the series, The Man Of Bronze, The Thousand Headed Man and Meteor Menace were what I started on first (they were expensive items at 35p each in the mid seventies)... before I discovered that Lester Dent (writing under the house pen name of Kenneth Robeson) had written almost all of around 180 of them in the 30s and 40s which had been slowly bleeding out in reprint form from Bantam in the US since the 60s. In those days, these things were just starting to get quite hard to find but you could often discover hidden treasure in the odd second hand bookshop and, to this day, I still occasionally find one peeking out at me from a dusty wall... although they are extremely hard to come by now. I’ve put together a little library of between 80 or 90 of them so far I think... always on the lookout.

Last year, and I didn’t find out about this until a couple of months ago, there was a brand new written Doc Savage novel by longtime fan and professional writer Will Murray.. again writing under the series’ pseudonym Kenneth Robeson. As soon as I found that little gem out, I immediately leapt into action and asked someone to get it for me as a Christmas present (hey... who wants socks?). I was pretty sure this would be a pretty good homage to the original pulps as Murray had written a small series of seven Doc Savage novels (again, under the original author’s pseudonym Kenneth Robeson) in the 90s and I remember thinking just how good they were and almost indistinguishable in style from the original novels.

So when Christmas came and I found the said literary tome was delivered up to my eager hands, I knew it was going to be the second book I read this holiday (after the latest Patricia Cornwell masterpiece of course). So, after a gap of almost two decades since he’d penned the last one, the question I was asking myself was... would Will Murray be able to fashion a genuinely Robeson-like Doc Savage experience as he had done in the early 90s or not?

Well, I have to say that the answer to that is... yes and no.

There’s no doubt that the language and general flavour of this particular Doc Savage adventure is pitch perfect... it IS a Doc Savage adventure and definitely belongs alongside anything the late Lester Dent created. It’s not particularly philosophical writing. It’s clever in its use of both sticking with while occasionally pulling a surprise out of the standard, adventuresome formula of the original works... but it doesn’t necessarily let on in any way that it’s actually self aware of that... if you understand what I mean. It’s clear that Murray is an absolute expert on the Doc Savage franchise and the writing style... the kind of words Doc and his crew would use, the general language of the time it is set in and the deceptively simpler attitudes to their times that the various characters express are all woven from the exact same cloth as those original pulp magazines from the 30s and 40s.

Above all, the story is high on action and adventure and very strong on the mystery element to keep the reader enthralled at every page turn. Of course, if you’ve read as many of the Doc Savage novels as I have then there will certainly be less surprises in this for you as the cookie-cutter plot and details are all sketched-in exactly as you would expect them to be... but for this kind of nvoel that’s a compliment and is not to its detriment. And it has the same “based-on-science”, “Scooby Doo” revelatory ending as all the earlier novels in the series (although I was a little uncomfortable as to the leap of faith I had to make concerning the geographical origins of the books titular characters, it should be pointed out). However, having said all that, there are some things about it which made me like it a lot less than Murray’s earlier efforts.

It’s too long for starters. Now that would normally not be anything to complain about but, it seems to me, that Murray has packed all the action of a genuine Doc Savage plotline into a much longer page count... which means that, although by modern standards of writing, it’s a blisteringly paced action adventure... the pacing is a little more luxurious than in an original Doc Savage adventure. Stupefying cliffhangers or startling (and, honestly, some not so startling) revelations are there at the end of each and every chapter... but in the old days the chapters were only the equivalent length of a few of these pages long, while here they are 9 to 10 pages long... which slows them down a little in comparison. It’s almost like reading a Doc Savage adventure which was written for a slightly slower venue, like a movie or a TV show... and then transcribed into a novel. That’s just the one and only very weak criticism I have with the writing though... so I’m not getting, in any way, bent out of shape on that one.

My other criticisms are reserved for the marketing on this one. The logotype of the words Doc Savage is not what I wanted to see on a Doc Savage novel. It’s not the original pulp cover logo... although to be fair to the designers on this one, you can see how it could certainly be interpreted as a modernisation or variation on those original logos if you wanted to be kind. Nor is it the more well known logo which was used on the Bantam novel reprints and the movie version of the character... which is really what I needed to be seeing on the front of “a Doc Savage novel”. This new logo really annoyed me.

It didn’t annoy me half as much as the new series’ tag line, however. Apparently, this is the first novel in the series of “THE ALL-NEW WILD ADVENTURES OF...” Doc Savage... and frankly that’s a copy line which betrays absolutely no knowledge or familiarity of the character and his long history at all. In fact, the last thing Clerk Savage Jr is... and I’m sure his cousin Pat, who returns in this novel also, would agree with me... is wild. In fact, he’s one of the least feral or “savage” characters I’ve ever read. Don’t get me wrong... the books are all damn good fun to read... but Doc is not really that fun a person in terms of his boy scout personality. He doesn’t need to be, though. He has his five aids around to supply the comic relief when it’s called for and... yes... long time Doc readers will be pleased to hear that Monk and Ham are arguing incessantly all the way through the novel. Good show, Murray!

So, yeah... didn’t like the design or marketing tag line on the front of this novel one little bit. What I did love though, is the style of the cover painting which perfectly evokes one of those old James Bama covers from the Bantam reprints. It’s funny how those original cover images seem to have been chasing me my whole life since 1975. I remember when I finally managed to get hold of some of those West German/French/American co-produced 1950s TV shows of Flash Gordon (the ones which look way cheaper than the 1930s serials and were genuinely not that great?), I got the strongest feeling like I really recognised Steve Holland, the actor playing Flash Gordon in these shows, from somewhere before, but I couldn’t remember where from. Then the revelation I had a decade or so ago, when the penny dropped and I found out that Steve Holland went on to become James Bama’s model for the cover paintings to those Doc Savage paperbacks and, sure enough, when I looked at my books... there was a painted Flash Gordon dressed as Doc Savage looking back at me... funny old world. While artist Joe DeVito’s cover painting doesn’t look anything like Steve Holland, to be sure, it still manages to retain the essence of those classic covers... and so I’m really pleased about that.

Another thing I’m really pleased about is Will Murray’s foreshadowing the next adventure in his novel just like Lester Dent used to do in the pulps. Here’s an example lifted from the last page of The Desert Demons...

“Little did they dream that awaiting them back in New York was a new challenge just as baffling and deadly as the deadly desert demons had been.

Two men would be strolling down Seventh Avenue, unknown to one another: one of high station, the other a lowly tramp. As they passed, not many feet apart, weird death would strike them down.

Thus would begin Horror In Gold!”

Now this little teaser worked into somewhere on the last page of the story would more often than not be edited out on the original Bantam paperback reprints because, for reasons unknown to me, the reprints were not released in the original order of their first publication... nothing like, in fact. That Will Murray now continues this tradition started by Lester Dent, the original Kenneth Robeson, pleases me no end. He’s really got a handle on this.

All in all I’d have to say that, asides from my slight gripes, I’m really pleased that the Doc Savage series is starting up again (at least in book terms... when can we have a proper 1930s set movie version of Death In Silver or Brand Of The Werewolf please?) and there’s nobody I’d want writing these things other than Will Murray... because he’s one of those writers who doesn’t mind bending his style to fit in with the person he’s evoking and he plain just “gets it”. If you were ever a fan of Doc Savage then you can rest assured that this series is in very good hands. Can’t wait to get the “just published” next Doc Savage adventure - Horror In Gold - so I can put it on the pile marked up for summer holiday reading...

If you like pulps... buy this book and support this character before he disappears again!

NUTS4R2s THRIZZLING TRIVIA TREATS..

Doc Savage and his band of trusty assistants, The Amazing Five, had an oath that I have tried my best to abide by over the years. This is how it goes...

“Let me strive every moment of my life to make myself better and better, to the best of my ability, that all may profit by it.

Let me think of the right and lend all my assistance to those who need it, with no regard for anything but justice.

Let me take what comes with a smile, without loss of courage. Let me be considerate of my country, of my fellow citizens and my associates in everything I say and do.

Let me do right to all, and wrong no man.”

Sherlock: The Reichenbach Fall

2012-01-16T20:37:00.005Z

Reichenbach To Basics

Sherlock: The Reichenbach Fall

Airdate: January 15th 2012. UK. BBC1

Warning: If you’re not already familiar with the broad sweeps

of the original Holmes story on which this one is based...

you can be pretty sure this review is gonna have some

massive spoilers... not to mention one hell of a rant!

Hmmmmm. The Reichenbach Fall, based on Holmes story The Final Problem, which ended with the death of both the title character and his arch nemesis, is not the worst episode in the new series of Sherlock. I am firm in my resolve that last week's was the worst. However, it has to be said, that this episode was also not that great and, although this is partially due to obvious writing in a lot of places... the real blame has to be placed at the last 15 seconds or so of the episode, where the BBC (or at least the writers working for them) proved themselves totally gutless by completely copping out in exactly the same way that Guy Ritchie did in his recent (and still showng at a cinema near you) big screen adaptation partially based on the same story, Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Shadows (read my review here).

To address the former problem first... the actual detecting and total lack of the element of surprise was, I believe, due to clumsy writing which made pretty much most of the episode totally predictable. Shortly after an envelope filled with something that looks like thick powder is brought into play as an element of the so-called mystery, for example, a victim’s room is shown to contain a copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. As soon as this was glanced on screen I told the people I was sitting with that the envelope obviously contained bread crumbs and that, if the writing continued to be this obvious, then I wouldn’t be surprised if something to do with ginger-bread turns up in a minute.

This, of course, proved to be the case and there really wasn’t a sense of surprise in the episode at all, I’m afraid. I could predict, just from the pacing, when exactly Mrs. Hudson was going to drop into the narrative and how non-existent Moriarty might seem to be sometime soon. To be fair, I assumed about ten minutes into it that Moriarty had not yet appeared on screen at all in either the first or second series but was just a man posing as Moriarty on his behalf... a paid avatar, if you like. When the plot began to look like it was following that prediction too, I must admit I flung my hands up in the air.

However, to give credit where credit’s due, aside from the obvious plot turns, the directing and editing were back to being on form after the “slow-horror” burn of last weeks episode. While I didn’t enjoy all of the little visual representations and metaphors intended to show us the inner workings of Holmes’ mercurial mind quite as much as usual, the information overload, quick-fire delivery of small notions and concepts was a welcome return to the style on display in the majority of the episodes of the two series’ so far.

And, naturally, the acting was superb as I have come to expect from this series. Cumberbatch, Freeman and Gatiss were all great but I’d have to give a special shout out to Rupert Graves who has been consistently playing the most likeable characterisation of Inspector Lestrade since Dennis Hoey’s excellent “why-if-it-isn’t-mister-’olmes” version from the Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce versions of the war era. Extra credit, really, has to go to Andrew Scott who is absolutely riveting playing Holmes nemesis Moriarty. It’s true that he plays him in much the same way as he might play a certain Gallifreyan timelord (can we have Moriarty as the next Doctor Who please?) but he certainly isn’t a boring interpretation and is pretty much the only person you are watching when he’s on screen. Completely into this interpretation of the character.

But all this falls down, I’m afraid, and pales into insignificance when it comes to the last 15-30 seconds of the episode... the last in the series until Series 3 airs. This is why...

When Arthur Conan Doyle wrote The Final Problem, he ended it with both Sherlock Holmes and James Moriarty plunging to their death in the Reichenbach Falls. And that was it. Game Over. Sherlock Holmes was dead... let that be an end to it.

Why? Well Conan Doyle wanted to write other stuff so he killed his popular character, thinking that would do the trick with his adoring public I suspect. And so Holmes was dead for ten years. Ten long years of real time (and an absence of around 4 years I think, in terms of story timeline... don’t hold me to that one though... I’m not a rabid Holmes fan) barring the writing of the story The Hound Of The Baskervilles after 8 of those years... a story Conan Doyle wrote as being set before the events of Reichanbach. But that wasn’t good enough for his public... they wanted Holmes back properly and so, eventually, Conan Doyle gave him a miracle escape and started writing more stories of the logic-bound sleuth.

And that’s what should have happened in last night’s episode and it’s also what should have happened in the recent Guy Ritchie movie. Unfortunately the new movie proved to worrying a prospect, I suspect, for the film company to risk the non-literary section of the general public thinking the character was “done in” and then wait three years for the next movie without self-hyping it enough. So in the last minute or so of the movie, Holmes makes an unexplained (as yet) return to the narrative... unmasking his deception to the audience while still keeping his fellow characters “out of the loop” at this juncture.

Okay... so it was gutless and annoying and frankly, I’d have expected more fight from the British director (who may have even made the decision to do this himself for all I know) but I certainly didn’t expect Stephen Moffat and co at the BBC not to at least leave Holmes dead for the short year between series'. Honestly... it’s an absolute insult to the general public that they are “writing down” to us in this way, especially when the previous series and the opening episode of this one were so much more intelligently considered. It’s not good enough and when I realised Watson’s graveyard goodbye to Holmes was going on way more than the duration of the shot called for, I said to my dad, who was watching it with me, “Oh no! They’re going to screw it up again aren’t they!” True enough, there was Holmes observing Watson at his “cemetery plot” and I was dismayed that, even after priming the audience sufficiently that Holmes was up to something with Molly and having a “random cyclist” (probably Molly again) hit Watson (presumably drugging him?) just as he’s running to the un-named corpse on the pavement, the audience would be more than prepared for Holmes miraculous return in the next series. But no... the powers that be obviously didn’t want to take that risk (nor the risk that people would not want another series apparently) because they managed to find a way to leave the show on a cliff-hanger, of sorts, again. Yep! They managed to turn Reichenbach Falls into a cliffhanger ending! Doh!

Now everyone wants to know how Holmes pulled off such a trick and they’re gagging for an explanation I expect. I’m sorry... but that was not a clever move. It was too cheap and easy and I don’t think I forgive the BBC for that one. Don’t get me wrong, I love cliffhangers... but this was just not needed and neither, in my book, was it a welcome ending. We needed to see Holmes die and we needed to feel its permanence. Now, all the drama that could have been wrung out of the first episode of Series 3 on this element (not to mention the humour of the situation which, to be fair, they’ll still manage to get in I guess) has been wasted. This was not a good way to end it and, as you can probably guess by now, I was more annoyed by this one than I was by the Series 1 finale.

Okay... not giving up on the show yet. I’ll happily be there at the start of Series 3 because, no matter how valid (or invalid, depending on your point of view) my criticisms are of this series, it’s still pretty much the best written and presented show on British television at the moment... I’ll grudgingly restate that. And the music’s pretty cool too. But they really need to get their game on if they want to hold my interest next time around. Really hope they do.

Doctor Who - The Dominators

2012-01-14T21:21:00.006Z

The Domination Game

Doctor Who - The Dominators

UK 1968

BBC Region 2

Every time I watch a Doctor Who story starring my favourite incarnation of The Doctor, The Second TV Doctor as portrayed by Patrick Troughton, I marvel at just how perfect a piece of science fiction TV the show was “back in the day”. The five part story The Dominators is just such an experience and, although it’s true that, like a lot of the Troughton stories, it’s pretty simplistic in its overall make up... I ended up enjoying this one much more than I’d been expecting as I tucked myself away with it on Christmas Eve 2011.

There’s a lot of shoddy technical work on this one, as would be expected from a story of this era... the most obvious one being that a lot of the long shots are shot on a rocky landscape on location but the majority of the close up work is done on a set against a backdrop of that same location... these two things do not match or blend well... or in any way, in fact, and I’ve just found out since rewatching it for the first time in a over a decade, that Patrick Troughton was not around for any of the actual location shoots and the footage of him in longshot is all done with a double (although apparently not a very convincing one although... I’m pleased to say I didn’t actually notice that myself).

The story does have a sense of action taking place on a larger scale, even though it’s actually only set in two places on an alien world where the Dominators of the title are drilling into the core of the planet to generate enough radiation when the planet explodes to power their waiting fleet. There are only two menacing (and vaguely stupid looking, due to their enourmous shoulder pads) Dominators in fact, and they tend to argue with each other quite a lot and get all shouty... but they do have an iconic alien robot race with them called The Quarks who were supposed to be a new merchandising opportunity from the BBC along the lines of the popularity of The Daleks. Alas... it’s easy to see why The Quarks failed to have the desired effect because, no matter how iconic they are, they really do only need to be knocked over by someone to get themselves into difficulty and they look quite frail due to the way they’ve been designed. The Quarks didn’t appear in their own right on TV again apart from a brief cameo in the last Troughton story The War Game (reviewed here), although they were briefly considered for a return engagement in the classic story The Five Doctors... before being replaced with a new and deadly creation. I do remember that they did appear fairly regularly in the Doctor Who comic strip during the Troughton era... so they did get around at least that much.

The story is a true delight to watch with the chemistry between The Doctor and his two companions Jamie and Zoe being the absolute best it ever got on the show... also, the team split up often so that two strands of story can be told simultaneously. The clifhanger endings to the first four episodes aren’t great but they are serviceable and the acting is convincing enough to keep you watching.

One thing that made me laugh was the introduction of children’s favourite Brian Cant as the practical miilitary advisor to a pacifistic race who are facing the destruction of their planet. His plan of “waiting to see what happens” doesn’t amount to much and he might have had a better go at it by singing some of his Playaway songs at the enemy rather than attempt to support his lack of strategy by speaking loudly and getting himself killed on his first meeting with one of the Dominators. He does look confident though... you have to give him credit for that. Unfortunately, just when you think that Brian can... you realise that he just plain can’t.

The story feels a bit padded with various characters rushing to and from the main city centre and this kind of business did remind me of some of the Flash Gordon serials I used to love as a kid. Keep everyone moving between the two settings and nobody will notice that you’re unneccesarily dragging things out to fill up air time. It’s all pretty bearable though and there’s enough nice stuff in the script which make all the to-ing and fro-ing much easier to swallow. The final sequences do though, it has to be said, feel like they’ve been lifted from the Hartnell story The Dalek Invasion of Earth (later remade as the movie Daleks – Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D.) in that The Doctor and his companions and new friends dig a tunnel into the side of the tunnel being drilled so they can grab the bomb before it detonates and send it back to The Dominators to destroy them in a move that more modern incarnations of The Doctor may very well not have approved of.

And that’s pretty much all I have to say about The Dominators. If you like classic Doctor Who then this is definitely one of the better ones and, as far as I’m concerned, anything with Troughton in it is worth a watch. Check it out if you’re in the mood for a switch-your-brain-off serial.

Dr. Mabuse Der Spieler

2012-01-13T19:58:00.005Z

Used and Mabused

Dr. Mabuse Der Spieler

(aka Dr. Mabuse The Gambler)

Germany 1922

Directed by Fritz Lang

Eureka Masters Of Cinema Region 2

Warning: Beware der spieler spoilers!

Unwarning: Actually, it’s really spoiler light...

but I had to get that last line in somehow!

Dr. Mabuse Der Spieler is a German Expressionist, crime/gangster style of picture made in 1922 by the same husband and wife team of Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou who would, a few years later, bring to the screen one of cinema’s most cherished triumphs of early cinema... Metropolis (reviewed here). Based on a novel by Norbert Jacques, the sinister Dr. Mabuse (played by Rudolf Klein-Rogge, who would later play Rotwang in Metropolis... in fact, a fair few of the actors who are in that later film turn up in this one) is a larger than life criminal genius who is so obviously informed and inspired by the likes of Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu and the protagonists of Feuillade’s serials such as Irma Vep in Les Vampires and, more obviously and blatantly (we’re almost into full-on rip off mode here, but not quite), the main protagonist of the Fantômas serials (and books and movies).

The reason I appreciate characters like Mabuse is because I like to follow a character over a long story arc and see different interpretations of them over a period of time... the Dr. Mabuse timeline is a really drawn out one and it appeals to me that Fritz Lang, who directed the first three Mabuse outings (if you count Dr. Mabuse Der Spieler as a single film... four outings if you don’t), came back to the character twice, each time after quite lengthy absences from the screen. This first one is, for example, the only Dr. Mabuse silent film, since it was made in 1922, but Lang made a sequel to this (starring the same lead actor!) in 1933 called The Testament of Dr. Mabuse and then, in 1960, a third outing called The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse... this has got to be a pretty long courtship with a character in directing circles I reckon.

Since then, Mabuse stories have been crafted by a number of different directors including the famous French new wave director Claude Chabrol in Mabuse’s last screen outing to date, Dr. M (actually, I seem to remember really suffering through that film back in the hey day of video rentals and regretting renting it a lot).

Even so... for a character that can have a director like Lang going back to him after many years... as if he’d been haunted by his own partial creation... well, there had to be something special about him and so I have found the proposition of the Mabuse films irresistible over the years but have never had the time to research them. That’s why Eureka Masters Of Cinema’s recent boxed edition of Lang’s Mabuse films, which I was lucky enough to get for Christmas (amongst other cinematic and bookish treasures), is such a great release.

The first film is nearly five hours long and I watched it in one sitting (with the odd short breaks for answering the phone)... if I’d have known that the two main segments (comprising of numerous chapters each) were both originally shown a month apart in cinemas, I would probably have had more of a break between the two sittings, to be totally truthful. As it was though, my stamina was good and while the film can be quite wearing in places, especially if you’re used to watching Feuillade’s Les Vampires, Judex and Fantômas film serials, the power present within the images and the sheer strength of Rudolf Klein-Rogge expressive performance as a powerful master criminal were more than enough to hold my interest.

The movie starts off strong with Mabuse shuffling a deck of cards depicting different disguised versions of himself. He cuts the cards and draws one to find the disguise he will be wearing for that evening’s entertainment and then berates his cocaine addled assistant for not being more attentive of his needs. From there on in we are subjected to a cat and mouse game between Dr. Mabuse, psychiatrist by day and criminal genius by night, and an inspector of police who eventually turns out to be the other main protagonist of this film... as all the other characters you thought were the key characters, including the young romantic lead and his dashing young lady (who is in Mabuse’s pay in order to fleece the guy out of large amounts of money), are systematically mentally abused and killed off until there aren’t all that many people left by the end of the film, if truth be told.

Dr. Mabuse, you see, possesses uncanny powers of mental control on people from a distance, using the power of his mind to force them into losing big at the gambling tables in various underground gambling establishments. However, for all its lengthy running time, there’s really not that much more to the story than that... the pacing is fairly slow (while somehow seeming quite brisk without anything much happening) but I say that not to the detraction of its imagery and the atmosphere of a criminal underworld fleecing bored thrill seekers who are mostly too narcissistic to notice they are being cunningly leached of their finances by the criminal genius who is Mabuse is thick and permeable.

Little details, like the currency counterfeiting factory Mabuse runs being populated by blind money counters (so they can’t see what they are working on and be tempted to steal it) and the strange, Bond-like machinations the Mabuse character uses to ensure he is not rumbled in any of his disguises as Dr. Mabuse make for, a certain compelling viewing. And there’s a brilliant little sequence at the end, while Mabuse is being haunted in his mind by the ghosts of those he has lead to their destruction, where his money printing presses are transformed into what I can only describe as mechanical demons from hell... in the way that they only could be in an expressionist film. It’s very similar in style to Lang’s later transformation scene in Metropolis where the machines metamorphosise into Moloch. It was worth watching, for me, for just for this one surrealistic vision.

So... this is definitely going to be a split recommendation here. Ultimately I really enjoyed watching this one and am looking forward to sitting down with the first sequel sometime soon and I would certainly say that it’s one to watch if you are a fan of Silent Cinema... especially the German Expressionist stuff like Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (who Mabuse bears more than just a vague resemblance to) but I can understand that a lot of people may get bored after a while with such a long production if they are not used to this kind of stuff. In some ways it can be seen as a pale and ghostly reflection of the Fantômas character which so obviously inspired it but, then again, it’s Fritz Lang so it’s done with a certain sense of... almost iconic creativity and visual splendour and, as I intimated before, if you’re a fan of early cinema... chances are you’ll love it as much as I did.

Sherlock: The Hounds of Baskerville

2012-01-10T20:17:00.005Z

Coffee Grown Hound?

Sherlock: Hound of the Baskervilles

Airdate: January 8th 2012. UK. BBC1

Warning: Spoilers will stalk you

through the textual mires of this review.

Okay then... every series of a TV show has to have one episode which is a bit weaker than the rest, just as every show has an episode that is absolutely astonishing. Well, last week’s opening salvo for (mini) Series 2 of BBC’s Sherlock was probably the “absolutely astonishing” episode and I can only hope that The Hounds of Baskerville (based on classic Sherlock Holmes story The Hound of the Baskervilles) was the weak link in this current series.

Why? Well, firstly, because it just was all too obvious in its make up... far more obvious than I would have expected this normally clever series to be and secondly, the editing and visual style of this one wasn’t a patch on last weeks episode, nor indeed a patch on any of the previous episodes so far... which is odd since it was the same director as last week’s utterly enthralling instalment.

Perhaps I’m being a little unkind though. Mark Gatiss wrote this one and you can just tell he was having a good time with it and I’ve grown to acquire a certain amount of respect for the man. I saw his excellent, if highly personalised, A History Of Horror a year or so ago and it was actually pretty good. You can just tell that he would be the obvious choice to pen an adaptation of what is probably the mock-spookiest of the Sherlock Holmes stories (or at least the most spookily famous) and he certainly didn’t let the side down in terms of the atmosphere of this particular episode.

I think my main disappointment, in terms of the writing, lies solely in the fact that it tipped its hat very early on as to the exact nature of the solution of this case. Holmes takes the case only after Henry Knight has repeated a sentence and this is highlighted quite blatantly and almost embarrassingly... from that point on you know that the final solution lies in the fact that Henry Knight has been “brainwashed and pre-programmed” somehow (how could it not be with that kind of sign posting)... so the pleasure inherent in this kind of episode is ultimately in how entertaining the process of solving the riddle becomes for the main protagonists because, let’s face it, we’re already half way there on the answer ourselves.

And it is quite entertaining, to be fair to the people involved. The relationship between Holmes and Watson is pushed in a way that shows up Holmes’ weaknesses as opposed to his strengths in a much more heavy handed, or perhaps I should say “direct” way than we are used to... but there’s always a danger that if you tear down your idol too much then your audience will lose interest in him and it’s a bit of a tightrope act getting the balance on that one right (the Robert Downey Jr/Guy Ritchie film franchise currently spooling out in cinemas is playing the same dangerous game with its central character but is doing much less better at it than this excellent TV incarnation of the title role). Still... this episode managed to do this in an amusing manner without tipping the relationship over the edge and injecting a little tension into the proceedings too... so the writing was actually quite skillful in this area (as were the excellent performances I’ve greedily come to expect from Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman).

The “out-of-its time” horror element was, perhaps, just what was needed for this episode to work but there were times, it has to be said, when I thought I’d slipped into an old 70s episode of the classic TV series The Omega Factor rather than watching something made fresh-for-the-box... not that I didn’t enjoy The Omega Factor of course... I loved it and wish somebody would remake it past the point it got cancelled. I just found it odd how close this episode came to that perhaps?

I guess what I really missed in this week's story was the clever and witty editing style that was present in the last episode in abundance. The way the syntax of the shot and its transition was both supporting and in turn controlled by the on-screen action. Contrarily, this was a more langerous and elegantly paced episode, I felt, rather than the cleverly constructed headlong rush of a visual and aural assault on the senses... but no matter. I guess this was the style that was deemed appropriate to this episode and, to be fair, if you’re going for a horror atmosphere then slow and ponderous is what you need to be doing... it’s not a teen slasher flick, after all.

All in all, I guess you can say I was taken by surprise at being a little underwhelmed and under-challenged by the episode in a way but, it has to be pointed out that it certainly wasn’t lazy writing. The little mistake from Holmes when it turned out that the sugar in the coffee was not, indeed, the source of the drug-induced hallucinations induced in some of the characters was certainly a welcome respite for the audience who were expecting just that. Although, pyrotechnically I was a little annoyed that a landmine going off (a device which is mostly intended to cripple and not kill) turned out to be a lot more violently explosive than one would suspect from such a booby trap. More like an over-the-top 70s TV car explosion than the real thing I suspect.

Nevertheless, I have to stress that, although I was personally disappointed with this one, I was only let down by it in terms of a comparison with other episodes of the two series so far... when you compare this episode to the majority of the rubbish which is being written for television, then this interpretation of the classic pulp tale is still head and shoulders above mostly everything else which is showing up on TV at the moment. As far as I’m concerned, Sherlock is one of the few programmes of recent years that could truly be considered “essential viewing” and this weeks episode did nothing to discourage me from that statement. The Hounds of Baskerville is definitely worth a look.

Interview With James Devereaux

2012-01-05T18:38:00.003Z

The Devereaux You Know

You know, since I started promoting my blog on Twitter (which was pretty much on day one of my blog) the most surprising and positive thing I’ve got from being on a platform like that is the amount of friendships, virtual or otherwise, I’ve made. This is because the way Twitter works is that, unlike Facebook, it’s about connecting people up via their common interests and so you end up talking... or tweeting... with like minded people who are interested in exploring the same kinds of things which interest you.

One of the people who has supported me and my blog on Twitter for quite a while now and who is responsible for reminding me that performers are also an important part of the process of a film or play (sometimes these concepts fall out of fashion), is the actor James Devereaux. If you’re a regular reader of my blog you may remember him from here, here, and here. The Twitterati will also know him from The Great Acting Blog which he posts here.

I asked him if he’d be available for an interview for my blog and, though he always seems to be beyond busy, he graciously gave me some of his time to answer some questions I had. This is actually the first interview I’ve conducted and I wasn’t quite sure what kinds of questions to ask, to be honest. Please let me know if I got it wrong (or right, for that matter) and suggestions for any improvements to my role as interrogater in my comments section at the bottom of the post. Please be aware that there is frank language throughout the following interview. Thanks for reading...

NUTS4R2: How long have you been in the acting business and roughly how long was it from when you first realised that this was something you wanted to do before getting your first professional gig?

JAMES DEVEREAUX: Oh goodness! My decision to become an actor was very conscious, it was something I thought about for a long time... I didn't "fall" into it as many actors say they do. I was very excited by the idea of becoming an actor. I couldn't understand why everyone else wasn't doing it. But it was a long time from making my decision to pursue acting to when I first worked, several years.

NUTS4R2: Oh, okay. So during those years, was it always what you were driven to or did you look at any other possible career paths?

JAMES DEVEREAUX: No, I never looked at other career paths. Once I made my decision, that was it - and I vowed never to walk away from it, whatever happens. I hear so many stories from people who set out to become actors, then quit and do something else and make up some bullshit reason. That's bullshit to me.

NUTS4R2: You’ve said on your blog that a defining moment of realisation about your goals came when you saw Brando. Who else kept you interested in that kind of pursuit?

JAMES DEVEREAUX: Well, like many British people, my formative cinematic experiences are with American films (I never went to the theatre). So, many of my favourites at that time were American. There was De Niro of course, Pacino, and Jack Nicholson. Not only did I like the intensity of their work, I also thought they were cool. British actors just weren't cool to me at that time, but I didn't know anything, the more experienced I become as an actor, the broader my appreciation becomes, and now guys like Charles Laughton, Dirk Bogarde and Michael Gambon are masters to me.

Later I discovered European cinema, and it was people like Jean Gabin and Alain Delon. Michel Piccoli is a very important actor to me, because he was the first film star I came across who spoke about actors as artists, he speaks about the work very seriously. Simon Callow is a major influence on my thinking as well, believe it or not. I discovered Laughton through Callow, and also through him I came to understand that an actor can speak out and define his work... be an individual, creative artist.

NUTS4R2: It’s funny you cite the US actors first. When I think of Nicholson I think of his amazing performance in Five Easy Pieces and not his later stuff. Looking at your list, a lot of the American “thesps” seem to have become almost a caricature or parody of themselves over the last decade or so. Is this something which comes with the recognition and fame aspect of acting do you think?

JAMES DEVEREAUX: Well, firstly, Nicholson's performance in Five Easy Pieces is a masterpiece of acting. However, I'm not so sure they become parodies of themselves or caricature. I'm not sure what you're refering to there. There are different cinematic forms, and it's the actor's job to fit himself into the different forms presented to him. So, the demands of, say, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, are not going to be the same as Batman. The demands of Taxi Driver are not going to be the same as Meet The Fockers. Acting is an art form like any other, but it's not afforded the freedom that other forms are, like filmmaking or writing. This is largely because acting doesn't have intellectual champions, interpreting the work. There is no proper criticism of acting available. Much of that work is left to directors, but, usually, a director's notion of acting is flawed - Bresson the obvious example.

NUTS4R2: Okay. You’ve written and directed some wonderful shorts and also worked with Rouzbeh Rashidi of the Experimental Cinema Group, out of Ireland, so you obviously know adjacent areas of your craft well. What would be your primary influences as and actor and then the same question as a writer/director?

JAMES DEVEREAUX: Well, my acting influences shift as my focus on different aspects of the work shift. At the moment De Niro's performance in Casino, and Jean Gabin's performance in Touche Pas Au Grisbi would be performances I'm thinking a lot about, they may even be aesthetically perfect. In fact, yes, I think they are. Also, Harold Pinter influences my acting a lot, even though he was primarily a playwright. There are many many filmmakers who influence my writing and directing (and my acting). I favour a certain disciplined and austere kind of filmmaking; Bresson, Melville, Antonino, Aki Kaurismaki, Hal Hartley, Jim Jarmusch, David Mamet, Claude Chabrol and more recently Ozu, all have impacted me directly. Then there are other filmmakers I love like Kieslowski or Mike Leigh or Cassavetes but I don't think they have influenced my choices when making my short films.

As a writer: Harold Pinter - I own all his plays and refer to them constantly. It's probably worth pointing out that whatever writing and directing I've done, I view as part of my acting work, it's not separate to me. I plan to do a lot more filmmaking, but will hopefully show that this is still acting.

NUTS4R2: Right. A lot of the people who you mention as an influence on your writing and directing do have a kind of stripped down visual aesthetic which, dare I say, allows greater accessibility to the more complex issues and attitudes they’re dealing with? Do you prefer, then, talking about complex and sometimes highly emotive issues in a more head-on style or would you see your work more as celebrating the smaller moments? Or am I just trying to type you to a specific aesthetic which isn’t necessarily your intent?

JAMES DEVEREAUX: Well, I never have ideas. I never have themes. I never do research. I never bring what I know to my work. I work purely from my imagination... I just make it up, and play. I have total confidence in my imagination. When I write, it is the same, with perhaps a little bit of re-shaping and cleaning up as we go along. It is the same on the occasions when I direct. I let the material suggest things to me, rather then bring ideas to the material. Just make it up, that's what it's all about. It's true I favour a pared back aesthetic ( eg - in acting, stillness is very powerful... if an actor moves unnecessarily, it trivialises the work) but this largely stems from my nature, and the things I like influencing me unconsciously. I think economy, precision and discipline are extremely beautiful in art, and austerity is particularly beautiful in cinema.

NUTS4R2: You recently said to me that you really don’t mind watching bad acting but that you really dislike “phony” acting. I have a little idea of what you mean but humour me and tell me (and my readers) what the difference is between the two?

JAMES DEVEREAUX: It's a question of intentions: an actor can give a bad performance because he lacks talent but he is honestly trying to express the scene for the audience, Cassavetes would sometimes deliberately hire this kind of actor for certain roles. Then there is phoney acting, where the actor has no want of talent, but perverts the scene in order to show off thier skills, for example; they may squeeze out some crocodile tears - it's phoney and this actor is only doing it to be admired, basically they see the production as a personal showcase.

NUTS4R2: I see. Yeah, there’s a lot of that first kind about in independent cinema and sometimes it’s to be applauded (I always do) but I know there are some audiences who find that lack of skill to be a hurdle to their experiencing the movie in the way the director would prefer them to. I guess the second kind you describe is where I see a lot of the US actors you mention earlier as playing from these days. Do you think the phonies are encouraged towards that behaviour by the directors and producers they meet on a day to day basis? I’m assuming that’s the last state you’d want to end up in yourself... actually, I can see how either option would be bad for you as an artist. When the big acting money starts rolling your way (as I know it will when you conquer Hollywood and Sundance), would you find it hard to steer yourself away from taking certain kinds of roles and taking risks do you think?

JAMES DEVEREAUX: Our entire culture, from our birth, encourages us to be phonies. The teacher tells you you need 70% to pass the test. But you think the test is bullshit. What are you to do? What most 12 year olds do is hide their doubts away and set about getting the 70% in order to progress. And that pattern is repeated throughout our lives: behave and we'll give you the doggy choc. Acting is the same. Most acting training is about pleasing the teacher, not about doing great work, and I've seen the same thing in the rehearsal room. The actors' work becomes about making the director like them. This phoniness is also what's encouraging young filmmakers to use non-actors, because non-actors have an unpoisoned approach to the work at hand. By the way, American acting is particularly awful these days, there appears to have been no legacy handed on from the Brando-DeNiro generation, that kind of rigor has just died out. Sad. Having said all that, how can you criticise a culture as fabulously successful as America's? I could tell you the coffee in Starbucks tastes like shit, but so what?

I'm not sure about risks... it's not something I've thought much about. I suppose whether something is a risk or not at any given time, depends on what my interests are at the time. That's generally how I make my decisions - whether the thing energizes me or not. I don't really have goals which are about conquering existing institutions, I'm much more interested in creating something new. I love the mythology of the French New Wave, I would love to be a part of a sweeping new aesthetic like that. That's exciting to me.

NUTS4R2: You’ve implied recently that preparation for a role without any research involved (i.e. for Rashidi) is possibly more gruelling in some ways than doing a lot of research for a role. Can you talk a little about that?

JAMES DEVEREAUX: The challenge is different. When working from a locked text and with proper rehearsals, the challenge in performance is about delivering something very precise when under pressure. However, without a script or any preparation you haven't got to worry so much about precise results, nobody knows what the results are supposed to be... but you have got to worry about creating the framework around your improvisation as you're going along, otherwise you won't give the director anything usable. If you're working from a script, the script is the framework, and so that task has been done for you by the writer. So, working without a script is a slightly different task.

NUTS4R2: I guess that’s the difference between working for, say Stephen Spielberg... and working for Mike Leigh. It seems to me that Spielberg would be the easier director to work for in terms of chugging along on a comfortable daily groove but Mike Leigh would need you to be absolutely creatively performing full on at 24 frames per second. Would you say working in a more improvisational piece, although it is harder, is more satisfying and gives you more of the result you would like from your performance?

JAMES DEVEREAUX: Well, I'm not saying the improvisational form is harder, it just asks slightly different questions. What becomes pleasing is bringing your principles to the work at hand, and employing them, regardless of the situation. For example, I worked on a play earlier this year, and the script was extremely poor, almost unactable. But I applied whatever I've learned about acting to it, and this lead to a result I was very pleased with. It was never going to be my best work, because of the nature of the material I was working on, but that's not the point. In February however, I'm going back to Ireland to finish work on Rouzbeh Rashidi's new feature film HE - it's exactly the kind of work I want to do, it's important to me, and it's extremely demanding... so it's about employing my principles to meet those demands and not coming up short for the film. It is exhilarating. And that's what it's all about in the end.

NUTS4R2: That’s great. I look forward to seeing what you guys come up with. Let me know where and when I can see a copy and thanks so much for taking time out to be interviewed. I appreciate it man!

Red Mist

2012-01-03T20:19:00.002Z

Not To Be Mist

Red Mist 2011. By Patricia Cornwell. Little Brown Jug. ISBN: 9781408702321

Ok... and so it’s the Christmas season once again and in my home that means one very important ritual once all the present opening and well wishing is done. Like every year for the best part of a decade and a half, my first book I read after every Christmas is the brand new Scarpetta novel by the Queen of Crime Fiction (at least that’s how I think of her), Patricia Cornwell.

This is another startlingly intense read and, once again, Ms Cornwell proves to us that she has created one of the most addictive pulp fiction characters of recent years... and I don’t mean to be disrespectful or to do the lady in question a disservice by that comment. I have absolutely the highest respect for pulp fiction and think it’s the most important kind of literature there is in the last couple of centuries. Kay Scarpetta follows in a long line of characters who is practically infallible (although Cornwell possibly wouldn’t want me saying that) and almost invincible in the face of evil. These characters are our heroes who we hold a light up to and say, yeah, these are the people we aspire to be like... fictional or not. As far as I’m concerned, Scarpetta joined the ranks of Sherlock Holmes, C. Auguste Dupin, Nero Wolfe, John Carter of Mars, The Shadow, Doc Savage and their ilk long ago and she is the shining hero of our generation. I count myself lucky to be alive as and when these stories are being written.

Red Mist is another corker of a story and, like Port Mortuary (reviewed here), it shares a somewhat shorter timeline than many of the Scarpetta novels I remember. Although not compressed into pretty much a 24 hour period like the former novel, the action does take place in only a few days on this one and, like Cornwell often does with her crackling and unbelievably well written prose, it seems to speed up and gather intensity like a snowball being rolled down a hill as it hurtles at pretty much breakneck pace towards the end of the novel.

This one’s very much focussed on Scarpetta as opposed to her supporting regulars but the usual cast are certainly all present and correct and there for her when they’re needed, with the addition of a semi-regular character who’s been absent from the novels for a while. My only real problem with this was that Lucy Farinelli, who I’ve been reading about since she was a little girl come to stay with “Auntie Kay”, was not in it as much as I would have liked (or expected given the characters this novel deals with... don’t want to give away too many spoilers here). Never mind... she can’t be the main show all the time and I’m always greatful that she turns up at all after her miraculous “cancer cure by gunshot wound to the head” from a number of years ago.

The novel picks up from the threads left over from the previous novel but, to be fair, I think you could jump right on into this one without having read Port Mortuary at all. So you could definitely use this one as a starting point if you so desired... although why you’d want to and not read the 18 other excellent Scarpetta novels that preceded this one I don’t know. Just start at the beginning if you’ve not already read her... this writer is phenomenally entertaining and informative... I don’t really understand all the “real life” science facts she peppers her books with but I’ve read enough of these to be scared of ever committing any kind of crime... it’s too easy to get caught (not that I’ve ever really been tempted to commit any crime to be honest... I like to humour myself that I have more sense than that).

Ok... short review again (hmm... a lot of the shorter reviews lately) but only because, frankly, the book is so perfect that it’s hard to be able to find much to criticise in it. This is first class reading and I’m pleased to recommend it to anybody who likes to read about unusual murders and their solutions... as always with Scarpetta, the mystery lies not with what was done but with how it was possibly accomplished or what unusual feature is drawing it to everybody’s attention. Another in a series of first rate crime novels by Patricia Cornwell and definitely worth your time. If anyone is still writing “page turners” in this century it’s Cornwell. In all good bookshops now.

Sherlock: A Scandal In Belgravia

2012-01-02T11:13:00.004Z

Belgravian Rhapsody

Sherlock: A Scandal In Belgravia

Airdate: January 1st 2012. UK. BBC1

Warning: You might easily be able to deduce

the presence of spoilers in this review.

As much as I bemoan Steven Moffat’s current involvement in Doctor Who as being, well, a bit hit and miss compared to the Russel T. Davies era, I have to say that his updating of the Sherlock Holmes stories just keeps getting better and better. This series two opening story lifted/updated from A Scandal In Bohemia, the only tale to feature “the lady” Irene Adler (who was really the only person who outwitted Holmes), is absolutely brilliant and shows off British TV and creativity at its best. As the episode carried on, with very specific stopping points which seemed to indicate the end of where a shorter episode might finish but then just carried on like a three act drama, I was getting more and more impressed with it.

The cast were all good, of course, but that’s to be expected. Irene Adler has been revamped by Moffat into a high class dominatrix with all the wonderful flair for drama these ladies have in them in real life... although they don’t all tend to make the gazillions of cash Moffat seems to think they do, to be sure. There’s a certain amount of mismatch between the character and her real life counterparts it seems to me but, then again, Moffat knows how to exaggerate his playing pieces and make them interesting... this is Sherlock Holmes after all... a character who really couldn’t exist so easily in real life.

Ok... so character depth aside... it has to be said that this incarnation of Irene Adler is one of the best ever concoctions in my opinion. A more addictive and seductive version of the character has probably not been written, it seems to me. She’s well matched in her witty dialogue by Holmes, of course, but this is not the only standout element of this particular episode.

Starting up from that awful cliffhanger ending from the end of the last block of three episodes, there’s something of a whimper of a start as Moriarty leaves our heroes Holmes and Watson alive, in order to solve the puzzle of a particular piece of code for him, it turns out. However, the momentum of this episode gathers as it dazzles the viewer with brilliant visual and audio techniques that rush the episode along at a blistering pace.

Screen wipes are used, for example, to disappear prospective cases as Holmes walks in front of them... only to be taken back and used to reappear a set of clients when Holmes hears something that catches his attention (in a case which is one of many puntastic titles referring to actual Conan Doyle titles... in this case The Greek Interpreter becomes The Geek Interpreter). Other scenes place Sherlock right at the crime scene even though he’s not actually there... interpenetrating objects and spacial juxtapositions from cross cut scenes into each other, like having Irene Adler sitting on a sofa in a field as Sherlock talks her through a case. This is very much an extension of the kind of thing Soderbergh was doing in his movie The Limey, where two characters have a conversation shown at three different cross-cut locations which makes perfect sense “in the moment” until you realise the practicalities of this don’t actually work. They tend to work in Sherlock because transitions between plains of reality are surreally blended to herald their arrival as a visual metaphor in a much more blatant manner than many directors would push. And it all hangs together very well here.

The use of typography to indicate “silent information” which was used the most in the very first episode of the last series, is used even more in this episode so that it’s on people’s radar more in time for a scene which demonstrates that Holmes is completely unable to “read” the naked Irene Adler when he first meets her. This is a really great sequence, not just because it shows this basic fact but because it simultaneously sets up Irene Adler as a powerhouse of a character and a worthwhile opponent for Holmes... also, obviously, because it’s got a hot, naked Irene Adler in it... but primarily for the way in which it sets the character up.

The story has a little twist in its tail right at the end which you almost guess is coming and which you almost wish the writer hadn’t done. The ending gives the viewer hope that Adler might return as a major character in a future episode and, although I would certainly welcome that, it would take some fairly nifty writing since, as far as I remember, the character only ever appeared in one story (although I believe she is referenced in a few).

Frankly, though, this episode was a real tour-de-force of British television and was so much better even than the three episodes of the last series. This may well have been the best hour and a half of television that I watch all year... which is a bit worrying but, no matter, at least I have a new benchmark now.

My Week With Marilyn

2011-12-31T15:07:00.005Z

Marilyn Haste, Repent At Leisure!

My Week With Marilyn 2011 UK/US

Directed by Simon Curtis

Screening at

UK cinemas.

Funny how a little scrap of knowledge you pick up just before you start writing your review can dispel your main criticism of the subject matter. Doesn’t matter, still going to be a very short review and, in some ways, my enlightenment as to the source of the film I saw means I have even less to say about it than I did have when intending to put pen to paper, or in this case, intending to press fleshy fingertips against the cool, hard plastic keys of my Macbook.

The two brief points I was originally intending to make were that My Week With Marilyn is a pretty good film, well worth a watch and I was also going to go on to say, having read the diary it’s based on some years in the past (The Prince, The Showgirl and Me), that it didn’t quite make my Best Films of 2011 list because it was also a poor adaptation of the source.

However, now I’ve found out that My Week With Marilyn was based on, not one, but two accounts by the same writer (Colin Clark, played in the movie by Eddie Redmayne), I’d have to plead ignorance now as to whether this is a good adaptation or not as I haven’t read the other book.

What I can say, however, is that the movie has a very strong and positively star studded cast, even for the little walk on parts, and that everyone is extremely strong in their roles and this makes for a vastly entertaining movie which is well shot, pacily edited, has a nice jaunty score and doesn’t outstay its welcome in any way shape or form. There’s less emphasis given on the character of famous Sykes actor Richard Wattis than I would have expected from the book I read all those years ago, but ultimately it’s not a problem for me now I know the writers and producers were working from a dual source.

Special mention must go to Michelle Williams who really does successfully capture the flirtiness, confusion, insecurity and general sense of tragedy that was Marilyn Monroe a few years before her death. The performance (and script) are exactly as I have come to think of her from various written accounts through the years and it’s easy to see how she could have accidentally topped herself when she was in this state (if that is indeed what actually happened to her).

This is a really slick production and represents the time period in a bright and nostalgic way (as opposed to going with a more gritty, realistic approach) but the romanticisation of this period didn’t bother me in this one because it’s a quick effective way to bring the period to life and, also, because to someone who is perpetually in the limelight and roaming from interview to film set to camera flash, maybe the reality of the situation did seem somewhat altered by the reflection that a person’s choice of profession engenders.

The idea that Marilyn was a personae projected by Marilyn is very blatantly highlighted in this movie and the realisation of the character becoming lost in her own “legend” while still having very lucid moments of not being that image, really is not a bad thing to call to the attention of the audience of this film. It might even lead some of its viewers to explore the life of the titular character and some of the other famous names that come up... after following in his footsteps for so long as the “new Laurence Olivier”, I bet it was a real blast for Kenneth Brannagh to actually find himself playing the man in question.

I gave this one an honourable mention in my Best Films of 2011 list and would happily suggest that anyone who’s even remotely interested in the people captured in this roaring snapshot of a movie should check this one out... it’s rare that anyone playing Marilyn comes out on top as anything more than a caricature of the bottled screen presence of Norma Jean. This movie does things a little better than most.

Best Films of 2011

2011-12-30T10:55:00.005Z

Twelve Eleven

Okay, so there’s a few things you have to know before diving into my top 12 movies of 2011. I hope you take time to read this intro before skipping to the movies but... either way, thanks for reading.

First thing I’ve decided is that, much to my horror, we are now living in a digital age. I would much prefer to see movies in the cinema on their first run but the sad fact of the matter is that in the UK, some movies maybe screen once or twice only at a festival or two (if that) and then go straight to DVD. Since my number 2 pick was something I needed to desperately include, I’ve gone ahead and included films (only that one as it happens) which pretty much premier on DVD. As I said, I would much rather see these things at the cinema... but the opportunity never arose. Which is a shame, frankly, because though Ive not seen Lucky McKee’s The Woman, I’m guessing that if it had got a local cinema release it would have made this list. As it is, I won’t get to see this movie until next year now.

The second thing which I really hate is that, over the last few years, my diet of film in terms of first run cinema has relied pretty much on what my local cinema decides to show... and unfortunately that means a lot of non-English language movies are not screened anywhere near me... and when they are they often only last a week or so. My local multiplex actually has 15 screens so you’d think the greedy people in charge of the programming might at least free up one or two screens for foreign product. Not so and, unfortunately, this is probably going to be reflected in my list.

The third thing to remember is that... all end of year lists are going to be different to each other and list articles in general are dangerous territory because it’s rare two people agree on everything. Please don’t moan that I left out your favourite film of the year... there could be so many reasons I did this ranging from “I hated it” to “I didn’t get the opportunity to see it.” My apologies if this list is not for you but don’t feel left out... anyone can go create their own blog and pontificate from there. Or better yet, please post your own lists in the comments section below the article for all to see!

Please note that I also live in the UK, so while films like the Besson movie listed were released in their own countries prior to 2011, they’re new to this country.

Okay then... so now the pre-amble is out of the way, here’s my Twelve Best Films of 2011 list in reverse order with a brief introductory note for each one, followed by a link to my full review from earlier in the year. There are twelve for no other reason than, these were all obvious choices for me and deserved inclusion. Hope you like!

12. 127 Hours

Directed by Danny Boyle

UK/USA

I’m not exactly the biggest fan of movies depicting true events but the combination of the camerawork, dynamic editing and a standout performance from James Franco really pulled me in on this one. Not sure I’d watch it again but this was definitely one of the more interesting films of the year. My full review is here... http://nuts4r2.blogspot.com/2011/02/529-days-later.html

11. The Adjustment Bureau

Directed by George Nolfi

USA

Loosely based on a well loved short story by my favourite writer Philip K. Dick, this movie is SO NOT the cross between The Bourne Identity and Inception that the marketing people wanted you to believe it was. This film is great and romantic and full of whimsy... which is why, if you’re going to sell it like some kind of action movie, the audience that you attract will not give good word of mouth. Badly marketed but a great movie! My full review of it is here... http://nuts4r2.blogspot.com/2011/04/djust-ment-to-say-i-love-you.html

10. Sucker Punch

Directed by Zack Snyder

USA

Another badly received movie, Sucker Punch is a visual and aural feast. This has giant samurais with machine guns and a dragon chasing a World War Two bomber plane... seriously people, if you haven’t seen this then you are missing out on the spectacle of cinema. My full review is right here... http://nuts4r2.blogspot.com/2011/04/sucker-punch.html

9. Battle: Los Angeles aka Battle: LA

Directed by Jonathan Liebesman

Okay, so it’s big and dumb and a bit of an “invite the guys around for beers” kinda movie, but the Saving Private Ryan meets War Of The Worlds stylistic “mash up” works really well. It’s patriotic tosh... but it’s very well made patriotic tosh and it has another cool performance by the wonderful Aaron Eckhart in it. Worth a watch if you like first person shooter games and lots of explosions. My full review here... http://nuts4r2.blogspot.com/2011/04/battle-los-angeles.html

8. Paranormal Activity 3

Directed by Henry Joost & Ariel Schulman

I love the Paranormal Activity movies. The first one wasn’t that scary but I could appreciate it on a technical level and the second US movie (I’ve not seen the Japanese sequel as yet) really worked well for me with its skewed timelines and it did get me quite jumpy. This third movie is a prequel and, though not quite as good as the second one, still “scared me up good”. Looking forward to seeing where they go with this franchise next. My full review can be found here... http://nuts4r2.blogspot.com/2011/10/paranormal-activity-3.html

7. The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec

Directed by Luc Besson

France

It’s always good to see Bessson directing again and, although this one is nowhere near his best, it also sees him reteaming with his old composer Eric Serra for the first time in a long while (and it’s a really good score too). Definitely worth a look for the on-screen presence of the lead actress and for the wonderful antics of the mummys at the end of the movie. My full review of it is here... http://nuts4r2.blogspot.com/2011/05/extraordinary-adventures-of-adele-blanc.html

6. Tron Legacy

Directed by Joseph Kosinski

I think this movie may have come out in the last few days of 2010 but, never mind, it was playing at cinemas well into 2011. A surprise sequel bridging the gap of the decades since I’d seen the first movie in the cinema, this has a great visual style and a surprisingly addictive and kick ass score by someone called, of all things, Daft Punk. Once again, a film to remind us of the pure spectacle of cinema. My full review can be found here... http://nuts4r2.blogspot.com/2011/01/twice-tron-time.html

5. Kill List

Directed by Ben Wheatley

Both brutal and inscrutable, it’s been three and a half months since I saw Kill List and I still haven’t figured out what it was about. All I know is that it started off very simple and got pretty enigmatic in that The Wicker Man kind of way by the time the movie finished. Great performances all around and one to ponder over if you’re in a head scratching mood. I need to see it a second time. My full review here... http://nuts4r2.blogspot.com/2011/09/kill-list.html

4. Troll Hunter (aka Trolljegeren)

Directed by André Øvredal

Norway

Another in the increasingly easy to find first-person-shooter documentary style movies, Troll Hunter manages to mix in a lot of laughs with the horror and make for a pretty unique experience. It’s a real fine line of moods to handle and still retain suspension of disbelief but the director handles it pretty beautifully. My review for this one is here... http://nuts4r2.blogspot.com/2011/09/troll-hunter-aka-trolljegeren.html

3. Melancholia

Directed by Lars Von Trier

Denmark/Sweden/France/Germany

Gorgeously lit depression, despair and fear as the end of the world looms closer for the characters. Von Triers visual poetry still manages to slowly pull the rug from under you in the final reel.

My review is right here.. http://nuts4r2.blogspot.com/2011/10/melancholia.html

2. Rubber

Directed by Quentin Dupieux

France

Quentin Dupieux’s tribute to the cult of “no reason” is made manifest by a homicidal rubber tyre that becomes self aware. No words can truly describe just how delightfully surreal this movie gets... so grab a copy and take a look at it yourself. For my full review, click here...

http://nuts4r2.blogspot.com/2011/05/rubber.html

1. Amer

Directed by Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani

France/Belgium

A french surrealist masterpiece with only a few words of dialogue in its whole running time, Amer uses the techniques of Italian Giallo cinema and uses actual music tracked in from the scores of various gialli and Italian cop movies. A visual and aural treat, you won’t know what hit you. This is easily the best film of the year and my only regret is that I saw it on my birthday in early January... after that I’d already seen the greatest film I’d see all year, which was kinda sad but I’m happy that great movies like this can still get made and find a small audience. My review of this splendid masterpiece is right here... http://nuts4r2.blogspot.com/2011/01/i-amer-camera.html

So there you have it. Those are my personal favourites of the year, with honourable mentions for My Week With Marilyn and The Adventures of TinTin: The Secret of the Unicorn. As I said above, please feel free to post your own Best of 2011 lists in the comments section of this post. I’d be happy to read them.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (US)

2011-12-28T19:14:00.005Z

Larsson around!

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo 2011 US

Directed by David Fincher

Screening at UK cinemas.

Warning: Some spoilers about this film

and the Millenium Trilogy in general.

If you’ve read any of my reviews to the previous “native” adaptations of Stieg Larrsson’s phenomenal Millenium Trilogy books, you’ll know how ultimately disappointed I was with the productions... so much so, in fact, that rather than just go with my usual MO and completely ignore the US remake of a film, I decided to give these ones a go in the hopes that they would be more of an adaptation of the original novels and less a remake of their predecessors. I have to say, however, that I was both equally pleased and disappointed by this latest movie by David Fincher.

Now I know a little about adaptation and cinematic shortcuts to facilitate an appreciation of the problems involved when working from a specific piece of source material but, at the same time, when those compromises involve changing the content on which the work of art is based, I have no respect for the artist involved with such a travesty (which is why Lord Of The Rings needs a remake by someone who will do it properly pronto!). So I’ll make this quick with a review conclusion for those of you who have not read the original novel on which this movie is based... The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is an entertaining enough mystery movie which won’t annoy you half as much as it would if you’d have read the original tome.

Now then, there’s good and bad about this new adaptation of the novel but the one wholly positive thing I will say in favour of this US version is that it’s not a remake of the original film (at least as much as I’ve seen of that original version... I’ve only seen the theatrical cuts and not the initial TV editions as yet). This is very much Fincher and the screenwriter going back to the original novel and taking that as something to build from. This is a much more faithful version of the novel than the Swedish version... which really surprised me. Lots of stuff which was missing in the originals was here for me including... Mikael Blomkvist’s sexual arrangements with Erica Berger (although his sexual encounters with a prominent suspect in the case he is working were not included), Lisbeth Salander’s Modesty Blaise-like adventures in embezzlement which lead to the death of Blomkvist’s professional enemy and the misunderstanding/betrayal between her and Blomkvist which leads to her not wanting him as part of her life (a crucial point which was missing from the original movie trilogy and which very much leads to a misunderstood conclusion at the end of the third with audiences who have not read the books) are all present and correct in this version and Fincher is to be applauded by the way that these are all fit into the running time of the movie... although it has to be said the editing is tight. No time for anything other than standard “cause and effect” Hollywoodland editing in service of that preposterous pseudo Holy Grail “the story” I’m afraid.

However, as much as this production team has chosen to include some pretty important points which were conspicuous in their absence from the original versions... it has to be said that there are also some glaring ommissions and negative points in this one too.

Surprisingly, from a film by the likes of Fincher who cut his teeth on the grim and gritty Alien 3 and who has a reputation for making what I could only call “designer bleak” (like Se7en), this seems to me to be a very much dumbed down or softened version of events as depicted in the novel. Blomkvists six month jail sentence, for instance, doesn’t happen in this version... he just gets a hefty fine which kind of changes the tone of certain sequences. Both Salander’s “current” and Berger’s “past” interest in a BDSM lifestyle is also very much absent in anything other than the title sequence (which I’ll have a moan about in a minute). The references to Kalle Blomquist which say everything about how Blomkvist is perceived by the media is also completely excised. Granted the US and UK audiences aren’t as likely to “get” the reference but that’s what cinema is partly here to do, isn’t it? Entertain, educate and illuminate? After all... we “got it” in the books, didn’t we?

The casting in this version doesn’t really seem to be right to me either. Rooney Mara as Salander is probably the most representative of the characters as they are in the novels. She’s no Noomi Rapace but she has a certain quality of her own which she manages to bring to the role in a raw, Salanderish way... so that’s a good, positive thing. But all the other characters, it seems to me, seemed much better served by their Swedish predecessors than as they, at least, look in this version (with the possible exception of Figuerola... we’ll see if Fincher can get himself a stunner of a “muscle-babe” for the third film).

Daniel Craig is, of course, a really excellent actor but, for me, he plays Blomkvist as much too self assured and confident than he is in the books... almost like he’s playing James Bond in a way... which is certainly credible on screen but disturbingly unlike the original character. He’s no cardboard cutout either, and Craig is enough of an actor to play this role... I just don’t believe him as Blomkvist, which is a shame. On the other hand, if you’re not familiar with the original novels then this shouldn’t be a problem for you. However, I did feel that Craig was bringing a certain unnecessary amount of baggage from his 007 role with him when, an actor of this calibre really should have been able to nail the character as slightly more vulnerable. It might have been his direction on set though so I really can’t blame him too much and he does make a convincing on-screen presence.

However, I’m thinking that having the latest 007 in their film must have gone to the producer’s heads on this one. The opening title sequence of this movie is pure James Bond and would certainly not look or sound out of place on any of the recent Bond pictures with it’s curious mixture of heavy rock, fetish wear and girly silhouettes. Where it would look out of place, however, is on a movie like... err.. well this... and it does too. What an inappropriate title sequence for The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo! I can’t deny that it’s clever and well designed but... why? It’s just at odds with the atmosphere of both the novel and the movie too (as it happens) and completely killed the mood of the pre-credits sequence while totally failing to set the tone of the movie to come (in much the same way that the “cool and groovy song” over the titles of Hammer’s Moon Zero Two totally fails to set the viewer up for what they are to expect from the film)... that’s a total fail as I’m concerned.

If pushed, I’d have to say that this version of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is a little more faithful to the novel (although I’d prefer a cross-bred version where the mutually exclusive ommissions were reinstated from the two movies) and possibly a little more entertaining in content... but the atmosphere of the original version is a better match for the subject matter.

Truth be told, though, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is unique in that it’s the only part of the trilogy which can be viewed as a stand-alone story... which makes it very hard to speculate on the success of the next two films in the series. Certainly, if The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest manages to totally miss the story threads represented by Figuerola and Berger as the Swedish original does... I’m really not going to be very happy. All I can say is that I’ll continue to watch the progress of this series with interest and see if the director manages to continue to be as respectful of the source material as this one is... Blomkvist’s prison sentence and sexual exploits notwithstanding.

For reviews of the original Millennium Trilogy movies... please check them out here...

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

The Girl Who Played With Fire

The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest

Doctor Who: The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe

2011-12-26T15:47:00.004Z

It’s In The Trees! It’s coming...

Doctor Who: The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe

Airdate: December 25th 2011. UK. BBC1

Warning: Little spoilers which will grow on you and turn into bigger spoilers as you follow them through the word forest of this review...

Oh good grief. You know, whenever I don’t like a movie or a show I find it much easier to find enough things to say about it (read “complain about it” methinks) to turn it into a sizeable article. So fair warning up front kiddies... this is going to be one short review!

Okay... so I was fairly easy on last years Christmas special (compared to most of the comments I was getting back about it from friends and family) but I did acknowledge that, while it wasn’t the worst one they’d done... it certainly was in that same league of some of the more dissapointing episodes. Now I don’t get the time or opportunity on Christmas Day to watch Doctor Who but I usually end up watching it with the family on Boxing Day.

So, post-party last night, I trod fairly tentatively on Twitter expecting the usual round of Doctor Who spoilers and was susrprised that nobody had found anything passionate or interesting to say about it. In fact, once the episode had started, I couldn’t find any comments about that eposode at all, even after it had finished. This was somewhat unusual and from what I would guess is... it wasn’t that well liked.

This suspicion was further compounded when I rang a friend who had seen it this morning and he reported back to me that... it was “alright” but not great and it made a mockery of its own timelines somewhat. Okay then, thought I, I can handle another bad Doctor Who episode at Christmas... after all, I figured... I had survived watching all the episodes of Torchwood: Miracle Day without actually causing myself physical harm to distract me from the pain of bad scripting... and Doctor Who should at least have some good scoring on it to distract me. So I inevitably took the plunge today and watched The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe... and here’s what I thought of it.

Well... I must say, that was a really brilliant and heartwarming episode which was everything like a Christmas special should be. It was solidly written, had some good performances and was really nicely lit... most of it seemed to have been lit or designed with blue (TARDIS blue?) in mind which is not usually a good look when pitching against flesh tones but, hey, it worked really well here I thought (although you wouldn't be able to tell from the images above).

The Doctor was without his regular companions until the last couple of minutes and this worked in Matt Smith’s favour as he didn’t have the distraction of the red-headed firebrand who is Amy Pond to draw the eye away from The Doctor. Matt Smith is an absolutely brilliant actor and without Amy around The Doctor takes full command of the screen.

The story starts during the Second World War as one of the lead characters is “widowed” by the seeming death of her husband... although it has to be said that, because you don’t actually see his final fate, you don’t actually believe he’s dead and the story does kind of tip its hat at that point I’m afraid... still, knowing how it’s all going to end right from the start has never hurt these stories much before and, as anything, it’s about the journey of getting to that conclusion that counts. This journey is mostly set in a forest of the future on one of the two Androzani planets featured in Peter Davison’s final story as The Fifth Doctor, The Caves Of Androzani. I don’t want to spoil too much of what happens but there are references to Narnia and Tolkien and some nice comical work featuring Bill Bailey as the Captain of a “military unit” which all make watching this one a treat.

The timeline isn’t actually screwed up in this one (which makes a change)... and makes perfect sense when the final fate of the World War 2 pilot is revealed. This does, of course, make the title of the piece something of a misnomer... but let’s be charitable. It’s all for the sake of a cheap parody of an episode title and... it is Christmas after all.

My only real grumble with this one is when Murray Gold’s score (partially new and partially tracked in from pieces written for previous episodes... as is the standard practice for modern Doctor Who scoring, it seems) had what sounded very much like a two second musical sting from one of the first two ALIEN movies tracked in to highlight a jump when The Doctor and one of his Christmas companions start their walk in the forest. I don’t know if it was an original Jerry Goldsmith sting from ALIEN or one of Jimmy Horner’s “carbon copies” from ALIENS... but it did pop me out of the story somewhat, hearing a familiar piece of scoring (like all those old cues from the show always do) and I wondered why they actually needed that specific sting in there rather than one written by the always excellent Mr. Gold. Perhaps it was to musically highlight an ALIEN reference that I just didn’t get... but somehow I don’t think so.

Either way, musical anomolies aside, this has got to be one of the best Christmas specials since... well, since The Next Doctor and it’s definitely one I look forward to watching this time next year when the, hopefully reoccurring DVD set of the next series, is released. Talking of which... just what is happening with the next series? There was no trailer for one like in recent years. Do we get one next year or not? About time Auntie Beeb made an announcement, don’t you think?

Merry Christmas

2011-12-24T18:48:00.002Z

A very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all my blog & twitter readers, followers, commenters and lurkers.

I'll be back in a few days (possibly a week if I over celebrate Christmas) with the new Doctor Who review and possibly a years best movies listing (why the heck not... I was moaned at for not having one last year).

Lotsa more reviews coming in the New Year.

Thanks so much for stopping by and reading. It really means a lot to me.

All the best and see you soonest.

NUTS4R2

Zombies of Mora Tau

2011-12-24T09:33:00.003Z

Mora The Same!

Zombies of Mora Tau

US 1957

Directed by Edward L. Cahn

Sony Region 1

Ok... so onto another movie produced by Sam Katzman. These movies are, admittedly, B-movie fodder to be thrust onto an unsuspecting public but, like the previous two movies I saw produced by this guy, there’s always something which serves by way of a redeeming feature. In this one it’s a certain special effect which... well, let me not get ahead of myself here.

Zombies of Mora Tau is Katzman’s attempt to catch on to the burgeoning voodoo zombie craze of the time (still over a decade before Romero’s seminal classic Night Of The Living Dead) and it’s basically the story of a group of... hmmm... “entrepreneurs” who go after a legendary batch of lost diamonds off the coast of Africa... only to find that these diamonds are guarded by murderous, undead sailors of decades past who will not rest until, apparently, the diamonds are thrown into the sea... even though they are pretty much recovered from the sea in the first place by our gang of cutthroat protagonists.

The acting is pretty wooden on this one and the script is quite dire (no surprise there then) but the photography on this one is a fairly crisp black and white and has some nicely competent shot compositions. And that’s not the only good stuff in this movie. Mischa Bakaleinikoff, who also provided musical composition for Katzman classic The Giant Claw delivers a strikingly appropriate score for the kind of movie this is and one of the small sailor roles is played by Ray “Crash” Corrigan! Remember him from such serial’s as the classic Undersea Kingdom?

That being said though, this is a trashy movie after all, and fans of clumsy, trash cinema should find all their buttons pushed in this little opus. The rivalry between the wife of “the boss” and the pure of heart girl who is visiting her gran (who has been on the island the best part of her life to try to bring peace to her walking dead husband - no, not making this up people) is pretty clichéd and hard to swallow and the ridiculous effect at the end, when the diamonds are thrown back into the sea which enables the only zombie who happens to be in shot wink out of existence suddenly, leaving his clothing to fall to the ground, definitely hit a funny bone with one of the people I was watching this with.

Talking of special effects though, I have to give this movie respect for going the length with the idea that they wanted some underwater zombies in it. I always thought underwater zombies were a “relatively” new thing introduced by dodgy Italian zombie movies and people like Lucio Fulci in the 1970s, but here they are in 1957. What’s really great about the underwater sequences in this one however, is the inventiveness of the effects work. Main pretty boy diamond smuggler protagonist goes down to the bottom of the sea in his deep sea diving suit with bubbles galore coming up from his helmet... but when he gets to the bottom and the zombies come to attack him... well they don’t have a diving suit, obviously, as they’re dead already (and slow enough with it) and so the underwater sequences are shot on a set where everyone is just moving around in slow motion to fake being underwater. But what really impressed me is how the special effects crew have hit on the idea to have a soap bubble blowing machine fitted to the helmet of “our hero’s” diving helmet. This gives the rough idea (very rough but it’s such a genius idea that I’m more than prepared to let it slide) of air bubbles rising to the surface as the actors sloooowly prance around the pseudo-bottom-of-the-ocean. Great stuff.

All in all, I’d have to say that Zombies of Mora Tau is not the greatest of movies but it does have a lot of charm, especially when you’ve got such terrible lines being spoken with such conviction by the actors... and, for me, the sheer inventiveness of some of the “make do and mend” style solutions to various effects problems lend it a certain charm that will lead me back to watching this again some day... maybe on a double-bill with the much superior Val Lewton produced zombie remake of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, I Walked With A Zombie. That would be a nice companion film for this one I reckon.

Battlestar Galactica: The Plan

2011-12-23T19:33:00.006Z

Cylon Night

Battlestar Galactica: The Plan

US 2009

Directed by Edward James Olmos

Universal Region 2

Warning: The prophets say that there are going to be big, generalised spoilers covering the first couple of seasons of the recent Battlestar Galactica TV show... so say we all.

You know, I really don’t watch much television when it comes down to it. Sure I watch "a" television, but most of the things I watch on that are movies on DVD. However, when the rebooted Battlestar Galactica TV mini series showed up in Britain a while ago, I made a point of watching it... even though I wasn’t expecting much as a fan of the original movie and TV show from when I used to watch it as a ten year old.

I think what got to me mostly was the absolutely kick ass score which was on that new original mini series (and subsequent full series) plus the combination of clever acting and that damn moving camera-that-catches-things style of shooting which programmes like Firefly also used to utilise to great effect. The added paranoia element created by the fact that the upper echelon of the cylons now look exactly like humans (albeit the same twelve models) was the final “page turner” on a TV show which, while I admittedly watched all the subsequent series on DVD, was one of the best to air on television when it came out and, frankly, hasn’t had much to compete with for that title as far as I can tell (although that’s a bit of a sweeping statement considering, as I said, I don’t really watch much made-for-TV fair).

Anyway, the saga of the new Battlestar Galactica was absolutely riveting and even the final episode, which really trowelled the religious angle on and played up to the overt spiritual thread running through the show “big time”, was no dampener on a series that had been at times nail biting and OMG in equal parts since the end of the first season. So it might possibly come as some surprise, given my background with the show, that the so called “prequel” special directed by the actor who plays Colonel Adama (but whom I’ll always think of as Gaff from Blade Runner... hence the term “skin job” in Battlestar Galactica, presumably) is something which I’ve only just got around to watching. All I’m going to say on that particular count is... £3 is better than paying £20 and leave it at that. Amazon are getting their stock in a lot cheaper these days. ;-)

So anyway... “How good can a prequel/cash-in be?” I thought to myself as I sat down to watch. Well, the answer is... simply... very good!

And it absolutely blew my expectations of it out of the water right from the start. It turns out, you see, that it’s not really a prequel after all but actually an alternate view of some of the previous parts of the series, but told from the point of view of the cylons who are hiding among the humans both on the Galactica itself and on Caprica. To be precise, it covers the mini series and onwards up to a point somewhere in season 2 and, because of this, it’s able to start with a bang showing an alternate perspective of the invasion/destruction of the human colonies by the cylons... all set to Bear McCreary’s rocking soundtrack which is, as always, absolutely fantastic but, in this instance I felt, sadly dialled down too much in the mix.

Nevertheless, the whole of the first 20 minutes is absolutely fantastic and I was mightily surprised to find that this episode also had naked ladies running around in it which is certainly not something I’d expect to see in an episode of Battlestar Galactica. Woo hoo! Battlestar Erotica anyone? Sadly, none of the main characters bare all for their art here but seriously, my mind was blown that they would allow this kind of thing on a TV show of such huge primetime popularity in the first place. Naked Galacticans!

Nudity and explosions aside, however, the episode tells the story behind the scenes from the cylons as they go through with a campaign to rid themselves of the humans... Boomer’s sabotage of the water, Boomer's assassination attempt on Adama etc and as the episode/tv movie progresses, you realise that the leader of this particular cylon cell, played again by Dean Stockwell, is seeing the absolute utter failure of any of his cylons to carry out their missions successfully and it’s actually a study of the way in which most of the cylons are corrupted by their contact with the humans and the way in which they begin to empathise with them... apart from one notable scene where Dean Stockwell does something that I don’t want to spoil for anyone here. Lets just say that anyone familiar with both John Carpenter’s original Assault On Precinct 13 and Battlestar Galactica: The Plan will know what I’m talking about. Raspberry ripple anyone?

The Plan is a curious beast because, although it’s set chronologically amongst the mini series and the two series that succeed it, there’s absolutely no way you want to watch this one until you’ve seen all of the episodes of the regular TV show. This movie does, right from the start, for instance, reveal/remind you of the identities of “the final five” cylon models who are a little more special than the rest of them... something you are so not going to want to know until its revealed within the original show itself. That being said though, if you do take the time to wade through all those original episodes, The Plan is a really cool addendum to those early days which you will surely appreciate if you’ve been following the show from its inception. It’s very much a supporting piece as opposed to a stand alone but that in no way detracts from the artistry and sense of compelling fascination you get from watching it... it’s a seriously kick-ass little TV movie and it gives me renewed hope that the franchise could, just possibly, successfully continue past the realms of it’s original shelf life... although bearing in mind the events of the last episode of the actual series... it’s very hard to do a direct sequel, obviously. Plus the Caprica TV series/prequel got cancelled fairly quickly from what I remember... so maybe not.

However, to sum up... if you’ve not seen the original shows (The Mini Series, The Full Series and Razor) then leave this one until you have taken a look at them (and please do, it’s seriously one of the best TV shows ever), but if you’re already up on all that stuff, take a look at Battlestar Galactica: The Plan... it’s seriously good viewing.

Doctor Who: The Claws Of Axos

2011-12-20T19:59:00.005Z

It’s Beginning To

Look A Lot Like Axos

Doctor Who: The Claws Of Axos

UK 1971

BBC Region 2

It’s been a while since I last saw the Doctor Who story The Claws Of Axos... I’ve not seen it since I was three years old in fact and did not, therefore, have much memory of it... other than the much reprinted photographs of the iconic creatures created for this story, of course. Seeing it again for the first time in 40 years taught me two things...

Thing One is that you certainly don’t have to have modern, tricksy writing, kick ass orchestral scores and increasingly long story arcs to be left with a fun, entertaining and attention grabbing science fiction story... these old episodes had some pretty good stuff going for them such as the relationship which had developed between the characters like The Doctor, his playful companion Jo Grant and their banter with other series regulars such as the U.N.I.T personnel headed up by The Brigadier and their long standing villain, who had been introduced in the Pertwee era, The Master.

Thing Two is that you really do have to beware of Greeks bearing gifts... or to be more precise... you really do have to beware of impossibly beautiful golden beings who are really hideous, red, energy sucking spaghetti monsters in disguise... bearing gifts.

That said, this is a pretty standard and simplistic piece of scriptwriting retelling the story of the Trojan Horse... but this time that Trojan Horse is a substance known as Axonite which is given to humanity as a gift in the hopes that it will be spread around the earth quickly through various representatives of different countries to enable the Axons to steal the energy from our planet. The success of this plan is challenged slightly when you throw in the political angle of a British Government who want to control the distribution of the Axonite themselves.

As I intimated earlier, pretty simplistic writing... but when you factor in the performances of the actors involved in selling this little story and the way in which their characters react to any given situation... then you have something which can be quite gripping at times.

Yes, it’s true the special effects on these ones, for the most part, were worse in places than many of the black and white stories that preceded the Pertwee era (and this tradition continued into later Doctor’s eras in an ever increasing trend for terrible effects work) but every now and again they got it right. Case in point, when a spaghetti Axon wipes out a fleeing soldier with its tendril and the soldier disappears in a wisp of smoke, I found it surprisingly hard (if not impossible) to perceive just how the “trick” in that particular trick shot was done.

It’s a shame the rest of the action and effects were a bit less solid though. When a jeep is blown up, for example, not only does it not blow up where the grenade was (hey, two charges from one grenade... impressive) but it also happens to be speeding down a hill when it’s doing it... that is to say, the jeep’s valuable engine must have been taken out and so the effects crew presumably had to push it down a hill to make it look like it was going fairly fast.

But, as I’m sure most of you readers will know, special effects do not a good story make! Roger Delgado’s performance as the original version of The Master still puts all future incarnations of the character to shame and his vibrant, evil and above all self-assured personality is easily as good, if not more believable, than even Derek Jacobi and John Simm’s incarnations of the role.

And, as I said earlier, the relationship between the characters is not all that simplistic. I don’t recall Jon Pertwee being this grumpy in the role before but certainly, for the vast majority of this story, he definitely plays the role as an “angry Doctor” who might well put William Hartnell’s original “grumpy old man” personae to shame. When The Doctor pretends to team up with The Master to escape the threat of the Axons and leave the earth to it’s fate so he can trick them into getting caught in a time-loop, you almost believe that The Doctor has turned into the villain of the piece... certainly his constant companions fall for it hook, line and sinker.

There are some nice one liners in the script and they’re not all reserved for The Doctor and his companions. Periphery characters who are only in it for the duration of this story (often to provide a body count of victims for the alien menace on hand) also get some interesting bits of dialogue and the whole thing comes across as a real ensemble piece. It keeps you watching when elements of the storyline become a bit tiresome and over padded.

So there you have it. The Claws of Axos... an iconic monster but not exactly a great story. That being said, however, it was certainly a pleasant change from some of the other stuff I’ve been watching lately and hugely enjoyable in contrast to some of the more earnest fare of modern television writing. Check this one out if you like a flamboyant Doctor and some iconic monsters puttering around.

Hugo

2011-12-18T15:18:00.005Z

Halt! Hugo’s There!

Hugo 2011 US

Directed by Martin Scorcese

Screening at UK cinemas.

You know, when I first heard that Martin Scorcese was making a movie called The Invention of Hugo Cabret I was kinda looking forward to it because I love films that are titled with an adjective followed by a noun and then followed again by the name of a character. So, The Something Something Of Somebody Someone is always a good candidate to go on my “to watch” list and I’ve had some good experiences with movies that have had that kind of structure to their titles... Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain, for example or The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec are the movies which are immediately springing to mind in that context.

So when I then learned, subsequent to this, that the movie would be a children’s film and that it had been changed to the one word title of Hugo (I might say “dumbed down” for the woeful UK and US markets but I’ll try to be nice here), I kinda lost interest in seeing the whole thing. I’ve never been a fan of the name Hugo at any rate and if I’d ever been in a position to have had any offspring in my life, Hugo would be one of the last names I would call them.

However... a few weeks ago, when this movie came out, word of mouth was staggeringly good on the movie and, to boot, I discovered that special effects pioneer and fantasy storyteller Georges Méliès was going to be one of the characters in it. I still resisted for a little while but that good word of mouth kept coming in on it and so, last night, I resignedly walked to my local cinema to judge the film for myself, 3D glasses tucked firmly in my pocket so the cinema wouldn’t con me by charging for another pair on top of their bizarre, extra £1.50 “3D movie tax” they seem to have come up with to further make 3D movies an experience I and most of my friends would rather ignore and pretend didn’t exist.

The movie opens strong with a metaphor of Paris as a well maintained machine ticking over in a visual metaphor that I’d seen somewhere before in early silent cinema... although I can’t remember if these shots were an homage to a French or Russian movie (yeah, well, I’m getting old). We then go into a typically long “around-the-houses-Scorcese-special” of a tracking shot (or a series of shots made to look like a single shot to be more precise) and I have to point out here that when Scorcese does those things and you happen to be viewing it in 3D... watch out, you’re stomach is gonna turn over!

As the scene is set we find ourselves in a visually rich world created by some beautiful design and photography and coloured with some spellbinding acting performances which... I have to admit... left me a little bored and looking at my watch for the first half of the movie. By this point I could fully appreciate the beauty of the film and the inventiveness of it... but I wasn’t really pulled in like I’d hoped for after those initial reports had come in. However, all that changed for me by the second half of the movie when the two main child protagonists are researching early cinema (the film is set in the 1930s) and they come across both a book on film history which features the work of the aforementioned Georges Méliès and, also, the writer of the book who is a passionate cineaste... just the right kind to fire up the imagination.

From here on, Scorcese uses the film as beautiful propaganda for the restoration of old film... which is great news and something we all should be supporting. The passion and verve with which he explores both the work of Méliès (wonderfully played by Ben Kingsley) and his relationship to early film history is an absolute joy to watch and the emotional story with which all this information is pulled together is truly moving... there’s a warm, beating heart in this movie amidst all the Judex and Fantômas posters after all, I found.

This second half of the movie really pulled me in and reminded me that sometimes lost treasures can be found. As the cineaste in the movie started off with the one surviving Georges Méliès movie but, after putting out a search, came back with over 80 found movies which were then lovingly restored, I couldn’t help but think of recent discoveries and restorations in film and TV which are a close parallel. The very recent, more or less complete restoration of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis for example (reviewed by me here) or last weeks revelation of the discovery of two old episodes of sixties Doctor Who were what sprang to mind.

This film is less like most other Scorcese films I’ve seen but it’s obvious that, as always, his heart was pumping pure silver nitrate through his veins when he shot this magnificent homage to the pioneers of early cinema (he even gives himself a marvellous little cameo as a photographer recording the day Méliès and his wife opened their own studio) and the way the story of the orphaned Hugo Cabret dovetails into this “grand tale of movie making” is something which, it has to be said, made the 3D effects towards the end of the movie go a little wonky, I’m afraid. Yeah, that’s right! I was tearing up and crying so much by the end that the 3D effect had gone all blurry to me. It’s rare to get a warm film like this in the current climate of cinema and so Hugo is definitely one I’d recommend going to see. Wouldn’t necessarily recommend it to children and certainly it does take a little longer than I’d anticipated to get going... but once it does it’s like an emotional steamroller is slowly thundering over your heart. Absolutely beautiful movie and can’t wait to grab the DVD when it hits the shelves.

One last thing though... before I finish this short review... if you go and see the movie and are moved by what you see, please check out this site here, The Film Foundation, for an opportunity to read about Scorcese’s good work in preserving classic film. If you’re feeling particularly helpful and inclined to the arts, why not take a minute to donate something to this very worthy cause... after all, humanity is nothing without the art it creates and defines itself with and the “art of film” is something which has been popular for such a short space of time, relatively, but which needs assistance more than many other art forms. Take a look at the site if you get a minute... if you’re into movies you’ll find it really interesting and will be glad you took a look, if only to play with their cool restoration slider bar on the front page. And go see Hugo... it’s heart warming!

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

2011-12-17T14:36:00.005Z

Holmes Is Where The Heart Is

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows 2011 US

Directed by Guy Ritchie

Screening at UK cinemas.

Warning: Elementary logic should lead you to deduce the presence of spoilers lurking in the shadows of this review.

Ok then. Since I’m really not a lover of gangster pictures (seen enough gangsters in my school days to ever really feel the need to watch glamourised renditions of these hooligans) I’d never seen a Guy Ritchie movie until his first take on Sherlock Holmes a few years back.

Now I’ve always loved the Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce versions of Holmes and Watson at the cinema (even though Bruce’s Watson is far from accurate to the original material) and so the prospect of seeing Holmes modernised into an action hero was less than appealing at the time and I was in two minds whether to see it or not until an old friend expressed an interest in going and dragged me into London with her to check it out.

As it happens, I really enjoyed myself with that first movie. Holmes hadn’t been made into the complete buffoon I’d feared and the introduction of action sequences that I’d worried about so much (forgetting that Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation actually was into bare knuckle boxing at one point in his career) was cleverly underpinned with a bullet-time like series of slow motion sequences which showcased Holmes’ keen speculative intellect in fighting intelligently before the shots were replayed at normal speed to show multiple facet’s of Holmes in what turned out to be an intriguing and hugely entertaining series of set pieces.

Added to this were the shining acting talents of Robert Downey Jr, Jude Law and their various co-stars... not to mention Hans Zimmer’s gorgeous score which still gets regular spins in my CD player. Frankly, that first Guy Ritchie Holmes’ movie was damn good.

Which is why I was, perhaps, just a little disappointed with Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Shadows, being Ritchie’s second foray into the world of pulp fiction’s greatest super sleuth and also my second Guy Ritchie movie. But, having said that, I do find myself wondering just why I felt this one didn’t live up to the blood and thunder of the first movie.

Certainly, this one in set on a larger scale with only a small portion of it set in England and I did enjoy the sense of Victorian London that Ritchie managed to squeeze into every frame of the first film. This feels conspicuously absent in parts of this one. And it’s not like this international road-trip of a movie doesn’t hang together as well as it should either... all the threads come together and make perfect sense as the film builds up to Holmes’ famous “last stand” at the Reichenbach Falls... and we all know how that one ends. Actually, this is one sequence where I think Ritchie (or at least the suits pushing the buttons in Hollywoodland) let the movie down a bit as this movie leaves viewers in no doubt as to the final outcome of that infamous fight and it would have perhaps have been a stronger ending if the producers had been brave enough to have left Holmes for dead (as he was for a time before Doyle resurrected the character some years later) for a while and followed up in the next movie in the series... rather than bring Holmes back at the end of this one. Missed opportunity I feel... and more than a little gutless.

Hmmm... well since I can’t seem to adequately explain why this one didn’t quite pass muster with me, I can only assume that this is one of those handful of Hollywood blockbusters which actually takes a little while to grow on you and I suspect that, when the time comes to pick up the DVD (and I will), I’ll enjoy it much more on the second viewing than I did the first.

So let me tell you about the good things this movie’s got going for it.

Well, for one thing... Guy Ritchie has a marvellous, extended, slow motion escape/chase sequence about three quarters of the way through the movie and though I’m not exactly a fan of slow motion in movies (except when a true artist like Dario Argento uses it at the end of Four Flies On Grey Velvet, for example) this sequence was a bit of a tour-de-force and it was a pleasure to watch the way various actions and details had been cinematically “enhanced”, pushing at the visual language of the form in a rather attractive manner. The acting performances were, once again, all top notch although I did feel that the chemistry between Holmes and Watson was a little less brighter than in the last movie. Also, Eddie Marsden’s brilliant portrayal of Inspector Lestrade is sidelined to what amounts to a little cameo role at the end of the movie and Stephen Fry’s inclusion as Mycroft Holmes is immensely watchable but, not necessarily a very faithful rendition of the character (again, I blame that one on the writers myself).

Jared Harris’ performance as Moriarty was an absolute casting coup and I found myself very impressed by the way the high intellect of the character was combined within the animally magnetic personae of this bear of a man. Such a perfect choice and pitch perfect performance as Moriarty, culminating with a speculative slow-motion “pre-fight” fight sequence in which both the minds of Holmes and the nefarious Napoleon of crime were equally engaged... the “telepathic” communication between the two (yeah, you changed the rules there didn’t you Ritchie... I saw!) forcing Holmes to quickly tip the scales and sacrifice himself to stop Moriarty dead.

On the other hand, Noomi Rapace (who played Lisbeth Salander in the original adaptation of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and its sequels), while being unbelievably brilliant in her performance and also being in possession of one of the most distinctive and beautiful faces of any actresses working in her profession, was a little bit wasted in a role which tended to sideline her talents a little too much. Which is a shame and a mistake on the writers/producer’s parts because, frankly, when she’s on screen she absolutely lights it up and she’s the one you are watching when the other actors are speaking their lines. Absolutely great screen presence.

Another downer in this one is the fact that, while I appreciated the humour at Holmes expense in the original movie, the character is treated somewhat more as a joke in this one. Holmes’ fire is somewhat subdued by his treatment at the hands and attitudes of the other characters this time around and I could have done with a few more scenes of him asserting his intellectual rigor over scenes of him fannying around in ladies dresses and suffering the indignity of riding a mule instead of a horse.

Talking of which... Zimmer’s score is, once more, an excellent contribution to the movie as a whole (and I’m sure once I hear it out of the context of its place in the sound mix of the actual film I’ll appreciate it even more) but I was surprised and dismayed to hear him doing a reorchestrated cover version of Ennio Morricone’s musical score to the film Two Mules For Sister Sara during the “Holmes rides a mule” sequence instead of coming up with something of his own. A possible case of temp-trackitus I expect. That being said, of course, it was a more than competent cover (of a much better original) and does nothing to detract from the rest of his brilliant score.

And that’s about it for this one. An entertaining but somewhat less satisfying confection of a movie than the previous film, this one is still worth a watch if you’re a fan of that original outing and the spectacle of some of Guy Ritchie and his team’s mise-en-scene and editing style is surely worth a look if you get the chance. I’m not the biggest fan of this one... yet. I do, however, think it will probably strike me as a better movie when the DVD comes out and I’ve had time to let the first impressions sink in a bit better. Nevertheless, a fine film to view as part of this year’s Christmas viewing... if one has nothing better to do.