Doctor Who - Joy To The World

The Joy Of Rex

Doctor Who -
Joy To The World
UK/USA 2024
Airdate: 25th December 2024

Warning: Some big spoilers here.

It’s nice having a Doctor Who Christmas Special to look forward to again. Now, admittedly, last year’s show which returned it to the Christmas Day slot was... well... a bit of a disaster and, as it turned out, kind of a harbinger of what was probably the worst series of Doctor Who in quite some time. However, it’s nice to be able to report that this year’s special, Joy To The World, was a pretty good return to form for the show. One can only hope that this signals a better season than the last one... although it was written by Steven Moffat so my expectations were that it would at least be interesting at any rate.

The plot involves an attempt to grow a star seed through various doors in a Time Hotel, which specialises in lodging its guests in different periods. So we have The Doctor and his companions visiting various places like the 1940s in London, the early 1960s on the Orient Express and they even at one point, almost get eaten by a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Of course, once the star seed is finished it will go off and burn the planet to cinders to create a new star but, hey ho, that’s what The Doctor is here to stop.

So we have Ncuti Gatwa back as the main man and the beautiful Nicola Coughlan as new companion Joy. Gatwa is given a script he can do a good job with (including a companion saving scene which, I suspect, is inspired heavily by the scene between Tom Baker and Elisabeth Sladen in the Fourth Doctor story Ark In Space, reviewed here) and Coughlan is pretty good as his short lived companion (yep, all I’m saying is that she ends her story in a similar way to Kylie Minogue in the 2007 Doctor Who Christmas Special Voyage Of The Damned).

Also very good in this episode is another companion who The Doctor spends a year with, named Anita, played by Stephanie de Whalley, who has really nice chemistry with the current incarnation and, all I’m saying is that they should maybe pick her up as a regular companion at some point. Some of the most moving scenes in this special involve her and The Doctor. And then there’s Joel Fry, who I really think a lot of as an actor anyway and who brings his particular comic timing to the story too.

There was some great writing involved as well. Moffat is maybe not taking things as seriously as some long term fans might want him to but, he has a lovely moment where, after a year of not cracking the password code to get Joy out of trouble, The Doctor merely remembers the code his future self told him it was, creating a nice temporal paradox. And then there’s the wonderful line from The Doctor... “Pardon my French but, what the French is going on!” Which was quite brilliant and he used the new ‘curse term’ French later on in the episode too. Along with yet another infuriating reference to Mavity. I mean, when the heck are they going to tidy up that loose end which dates back to the three David Tennant specials from last year?

My favourite moment, however, was a visual reference. Not only was there a costumer’s shop in the Time Hotel which evoked the name of Mr. Benn, but the costume in the shop was the red suit of armour which was from my favourite episode of Mr. Benn from when I was a kid. Nicely done sir.

On the negative side... because you knew I’d have some negative comments, right? Well I didn’t like it too much that the woman on the train in 1962, who turned out to be a lesbian (or must be bisexual right, since she shacks up with Sean Connery in Dr. No the same year)... was Sylvia Trench from the first two Bond films. But what's so wrong about this character appearing here is... the James Bond books and films are already established as fictional works in the WHONIVERSE... so how can she appear as a real character too?

Similarly, although it didn’t bother me too much, I suspect there might be a few noses bent out of shape with The Doctor witnessing the arrival of the three kings at Bethlehem at the end of the story. What did bother me was the fact that, even though they were the best scenes in the show, The Doctor waited around for a whole year from 2024 to 2025 to catch up to the Time Hotel again. Well, honestly, since there is now another incarnation of The Doctor on Earth at exactly the same point, why didn’t he just go and borrow David Tennant’s TARDIS for a little while? This is kind of a sloppy continuity error, methinks.

Still, I did quite enjoy Joy To The World and it’s certainly one of the best episodes Ncuti Gatwa has been in so, yeah, this was a nice treat for a Christmas evening and I am just keeping my fingers crossed that it won’t be the last Christmas special ever. I’m kinda expecting the show to get cancelled any month now unless someone comes to its rescue.

In The Earth

Putting One’s
Foot In It

In The Earth
UK 2021
Directed by Ben Wheatley
Rooks Films

Warning: Some spoilers buried within.

"It’s a psychological problem with humans. They want to make stories out of everything." - Olivia

You know, I have a lot of time for Ben Wheatley and he always comes across well in interviews. But I do find him a little hit and miss in terms of my reception to his films. Sometimes I find his films absolutely unforgettable, astonishing and worthy of multiple viewings, such as Kill List (reviewed here) and Sightseers (reviewed here). Other times, well, I find certain films of his to be the opposite of that and I don’t ever plan on revisiting them again, such as High Rise (reviewed here) and Free Fire (reviewed here).

His new film, In The Earth is more leaning towards the former camp as far as I’m concerned... I absolutely loved the build up but I found the end to... not be as satisfying as I’d hoped although, when things were similarly left deliberately ambiguous in Kill List, I couldn’t get enough of it.

The story is set in the present day in the UK during a third lockdown of a pandemic... I mean, Wheatley doesn’t actually mention the coronavirus by name because it will obviously date it too much and the virus can be seen as just another part of the fiction in years to come... but it’s pretty obvious. And we have main protagonist Martin (played by the always brilliant Joel Fry) arriving at a Holiday Inn which is set up as a kind of base camp near where a doctor, Olivia (played by Hayley Squires) is supposed to be doing experimental research in the nearby forest, a couple of days out on foot. However, she’s gone missing and Martin is going to be guided to where she is supposed to be by a ranger, Alma (played by Ellora Torchia), a couple of days out on foot. During the process he learns about the ancient, local Earth spirit Parnagg Fegg, gashes his foot open on a piece of deliberately buried flint and also encounters a somewhat mad and dangerous character called Zach (played by Reece Shearsmith). And that’s all I want to say about the plot set up, because I think I want to avoid spoilers but, I can tell you, the film gets quite intense and intriguing as the story wears on.

Why? Well, the sound design for one thing. There’s the constant clatter of snapping twigs and weird bird call in the forest and, at one point early on in the proceedings it gets so in your face... well, in your ears... that I thought the director was doing this so he could use stealth to bring on the scares later on, when our ears get used to the audio mix. Well, as it happens, sound does play an important part in the film, not just in the way it does normally but also in terms of a plot point later in the story.

Secondly, there are the actors. They’re all absolutely amazing in this. If there’s one thing I’ve seen, even in the films he’s directed which I didn’t much care for, it’s that Ben Wheatley can bleed some beautiful performances out of his cast and this movie is certainly no exception to the rule. And there’s an actress in this, the aforementioned Ellora Torchia, who I’ve not seen before but, I can tell you, when she’s on the screen you can’t take your eyes off her. She has real presence in this movie, for sure.

For a film which is set bang up to date, being shot during the corona plague as well as using it as the ‘norm’ of the outside world from which the central characters are shielded somewhat, it also feels like it’s ‘of its time’... but while also simultaneously feeling like it’s somehow teleported itself from the 1970s. I mean, the opening shot of the title card positively screams 1970s folk horror and there are some other moments in the film which really harken back to my childhood years. Also, the way the story themes are  tackled... and I absolutely mean this as a compliment and I’m sure someone like Wheatley would take it as one... it made me think of Nigel Kneale and the way he would sometimes blend modern science with folklore and supernatural elements. There are certainly small hits of Professor Quatermass in here, I think... not to mention a  more than healthy homage to The Stone Tape (which wasn’t one of my favourites of the great Kneale’s work and I think Wheatley possibly does him one better here).

And talking of 70s... there’s a wonderful moment when Martin and Alma are in Zach’s tent and the walls of the tent are a deep red while the lighting of the characters and other objects is mostly a kind of strong, almost lime green. If this colour scheme here make you think of Mario Bava or even Dario Argento... well, yeah, it’s Ben Wheatley at the helm so I’m sure it’s supposed to.

The film features some nice surrealistic imagery and also a lot of ‘altered consciousness’ moments throughout too. One sequence, where one of the characters is trying to get past an ‘obstacle’ in a hazmat suit with a rope attached to her so she can be pulled back if need be (yeah, think The Midwich Cuckoos via Village Of The Damned, the director obviously likes his references) almost felt this was this film makers version of the famous ‘into the monolith’ sequence near the end of Kubrick’s 2001 - A Space Odyssey. I sat there watching it and thinking, yeah, if anybody is in the audience and they’re doing drugs, they’re going to have such an interesting time with this movie.

Finally, the film has a score by Clint Mansell and a) it's very good and b) Invada Records are currently saying there will be a CD release of it soon... which frankly, was the main thing which got me hooked into watching this one in the first place, the potential of a score CD in the works. If there’s a film coming out where the score isn’t available on a shiny disc and another one where a shiny disc is imminent, I’ll watch the movie that’s going to have the physical score release any day of the week.

Wheatley does a phenomenal job here and, frankly, I’ll probably grab the Blu Ray release of this one too at some point (and see if I like the ending better). That ending is, I can tell you now, growing on me a little as I revisit the film in my head while writing this review and, while it can be interpreted any number of ways, I believe, it’s also not leaving things as up in the air as they might have been. If the director had rolled his wonderful end credits sequence just a minute or two early, I feel I would have had a much more negative experience with the film. As it is, In The Earth is another of Ben Wheatley’s ‘great British movies’, as far as I’m concerned and, well, this one will get a recommendation from me to pretty much most people I know, if they’re into horror movies... and possibly a warning to those people I know who get freaked out by the genre, for sure.

Yesterday

Star Gent’s Better Lone Key,
Part Dub, Fanned

Yesterday
UK/Russia/China
2019 Directed Danny Boyle
UK cinema release print

I should have seen this movie a lot sooner than I did, catching it now just on the last week or so of its cinema run. I’ve been listening to songs by The Beatles for most of my life now (well, around three quarters of it) and since their music plays such a huge part in this movie, I really should have got there sooner. Truth be told, I was kinda put off by the idea that this film was a romantic comedy... nothing against them, just not too many modern ones (post 1950s) done right. You get the odd couple per decade or two that are something special and, luckily for me this time around, this one is pretty good. Also, I had a slight accident recently so the day I had scheduled to go and see this was a day when, frankly, I wouldn’t have recovered enough to be able to walk to the cinema anyway.

But I got there in the end and this film was worth the wait. I find Danny Boyle a bit hit and miss as a director so I don’t go and see everything he does but this does have an almost unique premise so it was always going to make my ‘to see’ list at some point.

If you don’t already know the plot, Yesterday tells the story of main protagonist Jack, played by Himesh Patel, who is a struggling song writer/performer who, in spite of his brilliantly optimistic manager Ellie, played so well here by Lily James who kind of steals every scene she’s in, can’t make it big performing his own songs enough to get any interest and give up his job at a local supermarket and nor can he see the thing dangling right in front of his face... that he and Ellie are obviously attracted to each other but that he’s very late to the party in this regard. Then, one night when he has decided to call it quits and is riding home on his bike, the world experiences a phenomenon which causes all of the electricity everywhere to black out for about a minute. Because of this, a double decker bus hits Jack on his bike and he is knocked unconscious, waking in hospital with two big front teeth gone and lots of injuries which eventually heal. Now, the interpretation of what’s just happened here is left to the audience... did something happen to the world or did something just happen to him? Is there a religious intervention happening or did physics just slam the door. Did he even survive the bus? That’s all left up to you but, not long after he’s integrated back into his everyday life, he discovers that things have changed.

And the most prominent change to drive the plot is, nobody has heard of The Beatles or any of their songs. So, after some thinking, Jack starts ‘writing’ the hits of The Beatles and it’s not too long before he is on the road to what promises to be phenomenal world success. However, The Beatles aren’t the only things missing from the world as Jack remembers it and, it turns out, things which were once missing from our world are also now back in place... in a kind of changed way (no, don’t want to elaborate on that because it’s a bit of a spoiler).

And the film is brilliant, with some nice performances in addition to the two leads supplied by such wonderful character actors as Joel Fry, Sanjeev Bhaskar, Kate McKinnon  and some guy I saw in a Bridget Jones’ movie called Ed Sheeran who... well, frankly, I had no idea who he was when I saw that one and I still don’t really know but I’m guessing he’s some kind of modern pop star or some such. I’ve seen his face around somewhere.

Boyle keeps things nicely paced and there are some great comic moments which work in spite of the straight-laced delivery of Patel in the lead... or more than likely, work because of it. There are also some really nice little shout outs to The Beatles and I gave a chuckle when, for instance, one of the ‘post it’ notes with the titles to the songs that Jack is trying to remember, in a blink and you’ll miss it quick shot, is Revolution 9. Anybody who knows The White Album would tell you that this is an impossible track to cover. Not to mention the moment when Jack decides to launch his new album with a rooftop concert. There’s also a nice use of Beatles needle-drop, when the worldwide phenomenon that, effectively and depending on your interpretation, resets the world is just taking place... here the director uses the end build up from the Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band track A Day In The Life to heighten the tension. I just wish Boyle had stuck with it because he really could have done with that sustained piano chord once Jack is hit by the bus.

There’s also a kind of sub plot in the movie when you worry just what is going to happen to Jack’s plan when two sinister looking people start following him around the world with the lurking realisation that... Jack might not be the only one who remembers The Beatles. The pay off to this build up is absolutely brilliant, it has to be said... the film was moving so fast that I actually didn’t see things coming. Which is always a good thing because movies are mostly so predictable these days.

My one minor criticism, if I had to have one, is Jack’s ‘final solution’ to the problem of the guilt he is suffering for finding fame from the back of the songs of The Beatles. It makes no sense whatsoever because nobody in the version of the world he has suddenly found himself in is getting hurt by his deception. On the contrary, people’s lives are richer for having these songs in their life. So, yeah... there’s no real logic to the end of the movie here but, hey, at least it made a heck of a lot more sense than Avengers - Endgame (reviewed here) so there’s that.

The other possible problem, for me, is that the songs that the film makers chose to use from The Beatles’ huge play list are, with the exception of All You Need Is Love, tracks I normally skip. All the truly great Beatles tracks (again, with the exception of the brilliant All You Need Is Love) such as Strawberry Fields Forever (mentioned but not used), Eleanor Rigby (almost used but alas, unremembered in terms of the lyrics by Jack), I Am The Walrus, Tomorrow Never Knows, I’m Only Sleeping, Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite, Magical Mystery Tour etc, from the 1966 - 1967 period where the group were at their absolute best, seem strangely absent.

Still, even so, Yesterday is a really great little movie and, frankly, Himesh Patel plays the role in such an interesting, throw away manor, while Lily James is... just wow... that I really didn’t worry too much that many of my favourites weren’t included. Lily James needs to be in more stuff, methinks. It’s a good little movie about a surreal premise where, as it should in real life (and hopefully always does), love wins the day and makes things right again. I’d grab this one again on Blu Ray, for sure.

Requiem

The Cello-ship Of The Thing

Requiem
Airdate: 2nd February -  9th March 2018
BBC 1 Six Episodes

I don’t often watch TV shows if I can help it...

There are a few special ones, sure... but, on the whole, they tend to divert too much time away from my blog for too little return in terms of reviews to be published. However, I do occasionally make an exception and, in this case, it was as a result of a review on the internet which highlighted that this was actually a horror show (a rare thing for modern day BBC)  and the reviewer seemed quite enthusiastic about it. He even singled out the musical score by Dominik Scherrer (with Natasha Khan) as being... well... more than something to write home about so, obviously, I needed to have a look at this one. In truth, it had sold me on the idea because I well remember some of the outstanding horror themed TV shows of the past such as the Quatermass serials, Sapphire & Steel and The Omega Factor and I just, somehow, assumed this one would be an echo to the kind of quality of writing and production that the various stations used to put into these things back in the day.

Alas... that’s not quite the case here.

Now, if you only watched the very first episode of Requiem, I can understand why you’d probably be put off from watching another. Episode One is particularly dreadful on a number of counts. For instance, the main character, internationally famous cello sensation Matilda Gray, played by Lydia Wilson, seems a bit inconsistent as a cellist when you compare what her hands are doing when they cut from a long shot to close up and back again. Not much continuity in tempo there, I can tell you. Also, when one of the characters slashes their throat right in front of Matilda, I found it a bit hard to swallow when I realised that the dead character’s eyes kept looking around in at least two of the shots. Seriously, if the actress couldn’t hold the pose then just don’t let the footage run that long.

Both of these things in themselves could be overlooked but the main problem here is that the ‘timing’ of the horror elements in this particular episode is appallingly ineffective. I would have thought they’d have saved the definitive presence of an unseen terror at least until the end of the first one, to be honest but, the abundant appearances of ‘ghostly spirits’ and badly timed set pieces does nothing to hold the atmosphere, it has to be said. Worse than that, the identity of the person who Matilda and her musical sidekick Hal Fine (as portrayed kind of interestingly by Joel Fry here) try to find when they take a ‘time out’ to investigate shenanigans which might make sense of the bizarre death I mentioned earlier, is pretty obvious to work out once you are about twenty minutes into the first episode. Blindingly obvious.

So why did I bother watching all six, you might ask?

Well, I very nearly didn’t but I was impressed that the identity of the person I mentioned above was not held until the last episode but was, in fact, revealed at the end of the first. That meant they had to be going somewhere else with the storyline and so I thought I might as well watch the next one to see what happens next.

Thankfully, the second episode is a heck of a lot better than the first and the ghostly shenanigans are pretty much put on hold until the end of the episode. This pretty much enables the writers and performers time to build up a certain amount of intrigue and atmosphere so, by the end of the second one, I was much more into the whole thing. Although, the series doesn’t quite sustain that standard right the way through to the end, it has to be said.

Now, there is some nice stuff in here such as some excellent sound design and the odd shot where the framing looks well designed to take advantage of the placement of the characters within their environment. However, there’s still a lot of bad stuff too.

For instance, the main protagonist is someone I found I could find no sympathy for at all. Most of the time she comes across as a selfish, entitled youngster who is used to always having her own way and seems intent to ignore the people around her who actually care about her and want her to succeed. Now that may, on reflection, have been the whole point of the way that character was written and played (going by something one of the characters reveals in the last episode) but, if that was the case, it certainly didn’t do me any favours. I was far more interested in the exploits of the local bar maid, played by Sian Reese-Williams and her developing relationship with Hal or the adventures of the local police sergeant played by Clare Calbraith, than I was the main protagonist. I really didn’t care what happened to Matilda by the end of the show and I guess that’s possibly a problem for this kind of story.

The other thing was that, for a TV show trying to be, presumably, a cutting edge horror tale which is broadcast after the watershed, I found the levels of nudity compared to their necessity in certain scenes preposterously low during the moments which were obviously written to exploit such things. The BBC iPlayer made a point of warning me that 'the following show' had ‘upsetting scenes’ and ‘sexual situations’ and... well I think that’s false advertising, to a certain degree. I can never figure out how you can take a series shots of a naked lady in a shower and still manage to not show much of her body. If you don’t want to show her body then... hey, that’s fair enough... but then why set the scene in a shower in the first place? It wasn’t necessary.

Similarly, I’m all for having sex scenes in a show but why the heck, when the bedsheets are flung back after an evening of frantic lovemaking, would you reveal that the heroine of the piece still has her bra on? How unreal and harmful to the pseudo-reality of the story is that? I mean who actually behaves this way in real life? Unbelievable.

So, yeah, there are some problems with the show but I did find that for four of the episodes... numbered two to five... I was sufficiently hooked and intrigued to say that I really enjoyed it a lot. And, yes, that original review I read was right... the music is pretty good and I would certainly grab a copy if a CD soundtrack was released of this one.

Unfortunately, I’d have to say that the series was unable to sustain the levels of intrigue for the sixth and final episode which is, if I’m honest, as much of a mess as the first one was. I quite liked that some things which seemed a little like loose ends were the writers trying to be subtle and allowing the audience to fill in the blanks by themselves but, one of the scenes towards the end actually undercuts the lack of bloodletting you know is coming by having a quick, abstract shot in flashback followed by, a short while after, a shot of four shallow graves including an arm sticking out with a watch that really does try and spell things out for the audience in the least engaging way possible. I mean, if you were going to allude to what the fate of some of the characters was going to be, withhold a certain event and then show us anyway, you might have been a lot better off just showing us what occurred in the first place.

Also, it has to be said that the final fate of the main protagonist, Matilda, is pretty obvious once you get to a certain point here and so the various epilogue scenes seemed quite redundant and you are just waiting for the writer and director to spell it all out again... just in case you hadn’t already worked it out (while I would have said that it was almost impossible not to figure it all out in advance). The show starts going ‘The Full Wheatley’ (Dennis, that is) from the second episode in so you can pretty much work out where all this is going. So what we have is an unsatisfying ending which wasn’t exactly unexpected and which will probably leave most fans of the horror genre a little unsatisfied, truth be told.

At the end of the day, I’m kind of half glad I watched this one because four of the six episodes were at least interesting but, in all honesty, I don’t think I could recommend this one to most people... especially if they are horror fans. There are a lot better genre exercises than this out there and, maybe this one is a little bit of a time suck that a lot of people wouldn’t need. Which is not, I promise you, what I was hoping to write about Requiem.