Stake Land

Make No Mistake!

Stake Land US 2011

Directed by Jim Mickle

Playing at cinemas now.

This one’s pretty much spoiler-free... as opposed to having free spoilers.

Jim Mickle’s independent horror movie Stake Land is a really interesting genre piece which, while not actually giving us anything new to established vampire cinema (asides, perhaps, from the nice touch of collecting fangs from your victims to keep a tally of undead kills), certainly pulls no punches in delivering good old vampire thrills and chills which other movies might gloss over to some extent or bulk up in a more commercially wrapped offering. Co-written by the director and one of the main leads, Nick Damici, Stake Land takes us into a scenario which is usually the exclusive bailiwick of the vampire’s illegitimate cousin of a genre, "the zombie movie" in that it takes us into a setting where the earth has been overrun by hordes of the undead and the few humans left alive have formed into little communities and outposts to survive their situation.

Like most undead movies, this vampire flick makes absolutely no attempt to explain why earth has come to be plunged into such a dire set of circumstances... content to let the action play out in an alternative universe which you have to invest in from the very start. Like the recent film Zombieland, which also uses a post-undead road trip format for its story to hang on, it also tells it’s story from the narrative viewpoint of a teenage boy who has been picked up by, in this case, a tough as nails vampire-killer named Mister (played by the aforementioned Nick Damici) including voice-over dialogue which reminded me at first of the Sissy Spacek narrative on Badlands... but there the similarity ends. Zombieland is a fun movie with a few scares and the usual predilection for zombie-killing body count sequences. Stake Land is not exactly shy of vampire-killing but it’s a lot more heavier on the scares and it has a lot more going for it than that.

For starters, it’s a lot more grittier than your standard undead-creatures-overrun-the-earth movie and right from the outset contains scenes which a major studio might have backed off from... for instance when one of our main protagonists is lured from his home and returns to see his family has been eaten and a vampire chowing down on a babe in arms... the bloody toddler carcass is left to drop to the floor as he sees the returning teenage boy. And it also doesn’t shy away from letting the audience make connections and skip scenes a less independently financed movie might want to stop and elaborate on. For instance, during the first ten minutes or so of the movie, we are led up to a mentor using a live vampire to train the young newbie in the necessary art of lethal defence and offence... as this sequence starts though, we just skip to the next part of the movie and are left to assume that it all went fine. This is fair enough and there’s plenty of vampire combat later to more than make up for the ommission in the early parts of the movie.

The movie also feels gritty through its cinematography. Lots of hand-held camerawork going on in this one but also an interesting amount of busy texture and constant filming of objects and details in the foreground of a shot to overshadow the actual action within the frame at any one time and this gives everything a sort of added sense of realism or at least depth to the shots... in much the same way that Roger Corman would leave the doors in his interiors open with a view of another room to give his shots an added richness they might otherwise be lacking. I’m not saying that this is why the director of Stake Land does this with his shot compositions... just that it’s what it reminded me of.

While this movie does suffer from the use of a lot of genre clichés, including a pregnant woman to slow the main protagonists down when they’re trying to run from a vampire attack... this movie more than makes up for it in the places its willing to go to in order to make all its points and I was particularly impressed with the decision on the writers’ parts to examine other effects on society that a vampire holocaust might bring. I don’t want to spoil things for readers who might not have seen the movie yet but lets just say that the robust and super-fast, super-strong vampires in this movie are not the only dangerous perils in this brave new world of survival and hardship. There’s worse things than vampires in them thar hills folks.

Stake Land can be a gruelling watch but it is at times tempered and sometimes adrenalised by a nice, homespun Americana-fiddle-de-do score by Jeff Grace which, at times gets a little minimalist and Glass-like but more than anything reminded me quite strongly of Greg Edmonson’s similar scoring for Joss Whedon’s TV show Firefly. It’s pretty good... I’m not sure I’d buy it as a stand-alone listen but it’s certainly quite effective as a supporting voice to the film and helps keep everything nicely tacked together. It’s all very listenable within the context of the movie.

There’s one grump I had with this film (there’s gotta be one right?) and that was this. The movie doesn’t exactly draw attention to the fact that a vampire will react to sunlight like a piece of overdone toast left on for too long... it certainly doesn’t downplay it either... so why is that first, live (um...undead) vampire training session we don’t really get to see set in broad daylight. I think the answer to that question is possibly that they made the decision to go with that useful part of the vampire myth after they’d shot those scenes... and that they probably left as much as they thought they could get away with in the movie (ie. practically nothing) without people realising they’d just violated a major piece of vampire legend in much the same way that the makers of Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein did when they accidentally let Bela Lugosi’s Dracula cast a reflection in a mirror in that movie. If this is the case then my earlier statements about the paring down of certain scenes are less valid and less complimentary to the film-makers... so I’ll not worry too much about that one... continuity being the hobgoblin of small minds and other clichéd but useful quotes which directors and producers often use to help justify their own stupidity.

In summation then, Stake Land is a wonderful gem of a movie which should sit well with most horror movie fans (if not necessarily vampire fans). While I personally won’t be spending any time in Stake Land again in the forseeable future (unless they do a sequel) there’s certainly a lot to recommend in it and there’s a certain mean-spiritedness to the villains of the movie which, although the violence and gore are not excessive, make for a harrowing time at some points in terms of suspense and there's also some nicely unexpected turns of events that people used to a solid diet of blockbuster cinema might find a little more refreshing than their standard fare. Definitely worth a gander if horror cinema is your thing.

Ping Pong

Ping... Ping a Pong!

Ping Pong Japan 2002

Directed by Fumihiko Sori

ICA Region 2

I don’t really do sport on screen. There are few which I can bother to give a try... although there’s a couple there I do actually quite like. Kon Ichikawa’s 1965 Olympic documentary behemoth Tokyo Olympiad is one which really hit’s the mark. Similarly, if you can forget the Nazi connections for a few hours, Leni Riefenstahl’s 1938 movie Olympia, which documents in a rather discriminatory way the 1935 Berlin Olympics is another serious contender for an interesting piece of cinema based on sport. Maybe a couple of the Rocky movies are worth crossing the street for too.

Other than those though, off hand, I have to resort to what I call “reel” sports movies... so my list would continue, in no particular order, Shaolin Soccer, Virile Games, Rollerball and Deathrace 2000. I think Battle Royale would have to come in there somewhere too.

I remember seeing Ping Pong at the cinema back in 2002 with a friend though... and I also seem to recall being pretty much blown away by it. It then receded into the background for me until I recently walked into a branch of Fopp records and was blown away all over again... by the £4 price tag. Knowing a bargain when I saw one, I scooped up the movie in question ready to serve up an ace when I got it home to my DVD player. It didn’t disappoint... again.

Ping Pong is based on a manga by Taiyo Matsumoto and, to be fair, it’s a standard sports movie filled with the usual clichés (queue training montage with Rockyesque music)... but it’s also a kick-ass study of the, apparently, very serious world of competitive table-tennis. It’s also the story of two boys, Peco and Smile, and the way they bond with each other from when they are little kids.

Peco is the arrogant, I can kill anyone at this sport, character who you will come to root for... even though his posturing and “talking up” of his prowess of the game will probably start to grate and get on your nerves after a while. Smile is the quiet one, so called because he doesn’t ever smile (Peco only ever saw that happen once). Peco takes Smile under his wing as a kid and teaches him how to play table tennis so he’ll fit in better at school. It’s all very touching.

Cut to present day and Peco loses a match in an important tournament at high school, as does Smile (even though it’s been established that he’s secretly a better player than Peco). Peco loses it completely and gives up but Smile gets more serious about the sport. We then get to the point in the movie where it catches up to the opening sequence where we assume Peco, who has thrown himself into a river, has committed suicide. Quite the opposite in fact, though. Peco has decided to live and “get his game back on”... now things start to get serious as both Peco and Smile take on coaches who train them up, capitalising on their natural talent and making them formidable opponents as they take on an array of blatantly over the top Ping Pong villains... none of whom turn out to be really bad guys after all.

But, of course, if you know anything about how these kinds of movies work then you know that both Smile and Peco are going to beat out all the opposition and come to terms with their various problems and then... end up having to play each other in the finals! How can this be? Who will win? Well... I’m not going to tell you because I’d have to put a big spoiler warning up at the front end and my poor fingers would complain of all the extra typing.

What I will say is that Ping Pong is a gripping drama which manages to wow you with a great freeze frame shot early on in the movie and with minimal Ping Pong playing seen during the first two thirds of the film... the director wisely keeps the action shots in close so you can’t really see much and saves all the really great game play for the last parts of the story. This is a smart move but don’t let this fool you, this is a corker of a movie and the dynamic shots of tension and release aren’t relegated to the actual gaming. This is a film shot by a man who really knows how to pace films... when to slow down and let the characters breathe (there’s some great moments with Smile's coach Butterfly Joe) and when to hit the turbo button again... which usually starts and ends with the stream of arrogant jibes coming from Peco’s mouth.

The table tennis sequences, when they come, are quite stunning but they are not the kind of surreal, larger than life sequences in the style of something like, for instance, Shaolin Soccer, which are deliberately over the top (obviously) and they are much more grounded in reality... "this is a film about a serious sport" is what seems to be the prevalent attitude. This doesn’t stop the director sneaking in a quite “out there” sequence where the game in progress is suddenly shot on a white background with only the two players present... as they both are enjoying the game so much that they enter a kind of Table Tennis Nirvana I guess. It’s good stuff.

Something which the director does find a solution for without any kind of cliché is the painful game between Peco and Smile. Everything hangs on what happens in this match but you are aware at just how much is at stake between these two players at this point. The reveal of the ultimate winner is accomplished with a subtlety and finesse which make for the perfect possible ending to the film.

If you like sports films in general then Ping Pong is one of the better ones to capture a sport on film but please remember, like the very best sports films, it features a sport but it isn’t about that sport... it’s all about relationships between various people... and that’s what make these kinds of movies watchable and give them some heart. Definitely worth a watch out of all of them I’d say and... lets face it... when was the last time you saw a movie about Table Tennis?

Point Blank (À Bout Portant)

Blank Noir

Point Blank (À Bout Portant) France 2010

Directed by Fred Cavayé

Now playing at UK cinemas

Warning: This review contains spoilers fired at point blank range into your mind. No more warning shots!

Well that was an exciting movie. New(ish) French crime thriller À Bout Portant, cunningly retitled Point Blank for the UK and US markets (presumably because they think the audience is so dumb or stupid that we can’t remember films with Lee Marvin or adaptations of Richard Stark novels), is a very fast paced and quite edgy action piece which, quite frankly, really doesn’t have much right to be.

Here’s why...

It’s a cliché ridden plotline dealing with a cover up between very dirty, very powerful cops who murdered someone important and are trying to kill off the surviving “denizen of the underworld” scapegoat, a remorseless thug one can almost but not quite sympathise with, in the hopes that everything can remain pinned on him. The main protagonist and his wife (oh, and a “good copper” who won’t last very long in the duration of the movie) are pretty much the only two people you can really sympathise with in this one. The husband Samuel, played by Gilles Lellouche, works in hospital and is studying to become a nurse. When he saves the life of the dying underworld scapegoat Hugo, his extremely pregnant wife is kidnapped by the brother of the aforementioned Hugo and he is forced to smuggle Hugo out of hospital... or the wife gets it! He then becomes embroiled in a “caper” where nothing goes as planned but certainly goes just as badly as the audience expects and... well, I don’t want to give too much away but lets just say that he finds himself doing lots of questionable stuff, as does his wife, to avoid being killed in the crossfire between the corrupt police unit and Hugo.

So yeah... pretty cliché ridden. So why does this not fail as a movie?

Quite simply the acting and directing and editing on this are superb. It’s a very slick, highly polished piece of “designer grittiness” which moves so fast that you really don’t have time to consider its place in cinematic history as you watch it. Lellouche runs around the thing both looking and acting like a very young Robert De Niro and the scenes of violence are nasty enough to distract you from the cold hard light of day realisation that you are watching a less than original storyline.

As you can probably tell... I loved it (for a single viewing), and if a movie which doesn’t hold any surprises or unusual twists of originality can hold my attention and not let me get bored, then that’s saying a lot in my book. The film is populated by a cast of a lot of familiar faces from recent French cinema... none of whom I could quite place at the time but they all play their roles with a certain French relish. I think one of the reasons why this works as a film is that the audience is left in no uncertain terms as to the innocence of Samuel and his wife Nadia (played by Elena Anaya who is another familiar face from such films as Van Helsing and Talk To Her and who is soon to be thrust back into the spotlight in the upcoming Almodover movie The Skin I Live In) and therefore you have someone very clear to root for, especially in contrast with the rest of the characters.

Pretty much nobody else in the film in a really major role is in any way sympathetic. The police unit are way more ruthless, underhanded and just genuinely despicable in contrast to the criminal element in the film... mostly represented by Hugo, played by Roschdy Zem. Even Hugo, who we are kind of asked to sympathise with... as emphasised by a small sequence at the end of the film set 8 years after the main text, is really just a very brutal thug. He doesn’t set the train of events that play out in this movie into motion - he is after all hired to be killed and framed for the murder committed by the corrupt police - but he does go out of his way to put a finish to things and his unlikely and uneasy “partnership” with Samuel is tenuous until Samuel realises that the only hope of getting his wife back and somehow clearing himself of murders committed by the police when they start gunning for Samuel too, is to trust Hugo. Unfortunately Hugo tortures and kills his way to the end game of the shaky plotline and so I personally found it a bit hard to sympathise with him in light of his actions and growing number of questionable judgement calls throughout the film. Samuel is the “straight arrow” character which stops the audience completely backing away from Hugo... since the odds are so overwhelmingly unlikely that any of our main protagonists will survive, we go along with this uneasy alliance in the hopes that the hardened criminal will lead “our hero” to return to the increasingly unlikely status quo of his former life.

There have been complaints, or at least criticisms, levelled at the movie for having an end sequence that both tries to have its cake and eat it at the same time... well yeah, there is a certain sense of that, it’s true, but personally I didn’t find it so hard to swallow (not as hard to swallow as the very last sequence of Conspiracy Theory, for example) and I think the alternative of this would have left the audience emerging from the screenings with less hope for their fellow man. Not necessarily a bad thing, promoting thought is good, but at the same time I can’t really find myself standing in too much judgement of the ending. It worked okay for me.

Point Blank is a bloody and action paced little thriller with a slightly early seventies French cop movie feel to it (at least in tone if not in editing style) which deserves to find a solid audience. I don’t really do cop movies these days so I won’t be picking this one up on DVD. I would, however, recommend it as an exciting and fairly intense outing to the cinema... so get yourself down to see it before it vanishes in the gunsmoke!

NUTS4R2’s Astonishing Trivia Treats: We don’t need another movie called Point Blank, we already have a famous one directed by John Boorman and starring the late, great Lee Marvin. However, in my soupçon of research for this article I found that the French don’t need another movie called À Bout Portant... they already have one. it’s what they call the Lee Marvin version of The Killers. That Lee Marvin geezah was such a title-hog!

Meeting Daddy

Wrongdezvous!

Meeting Daddy UK 2011

Directed by Rebecca Rycroft

Warning: This review has spoilers. If you think you are going to get an opportunity to actually watch this film then avoid this article... and come back and read it afterwards... all readers welcome ;-).

Meeting Daddy is a short film produced by Michael Beddoes and both written and directed by an emerging talent known as Rebecca Rycroft... and that’s probably as far as I’m going to get now with any regular readers of this blog without people sharpening sticks and hurling them in my general direction. This, after I’ve quite clearly stated on this blog on more than one occasion that... “I don’t really do shorts.”

I know someone’s going to comment or tweet that so before I even get started on this review proper, let me just say the reasons I am now going to review another short movie on my blog. They are as follows:

1. It was actually quite a good movie and has excellent production values which put it firmly in the professional arena and “up there” in the same ballpark as some of the other shorts I’ve been reviewing recently.

2. Ever since I watched two really excellent shorts by Leilani Holmes I’ve realised that the short film format is actually a richer vein of celluloid virtue to mine than I’d given it credit for... so it’s time to let the shorts back in my life again after falling out with them big-time in the early 90s.

3. The producer, Michael Beddoes, invited me to the screening via Twitter and I was flattered that either something I’d written on this blog or something that I’d tweeted had somehow joggled him to invite me. Plus, on top of that, there was a reception for the screening in a pub after and the drinks were free... so the very least I could do after getting a free drink is write a review of this movie so he can see what I thought of it... and also see if said gentleman will want to invite me to another sometime (mine’s an orange juice guv’nor!).

So onto the film itself then.

Meeting Daddy starts with a credit sequence with an almost Hal Hartley sounding score which then turns out to be a pop song (Hysyteric by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs) as we see a young girl in her early teens on a journey by bus and foot, with her earphhones jammed in and listening to her ipod. She is obviously... you know... meeting daddy... but the journey itself is probably one of the more interesting aspects of this film... more so than the destination perhaps because the component elements of that end result are all hinted at in this sequence. Two things really... or at least the two things I got out of it at any rate. One is generational difference and the other is the community in alienation.

When she gets to a café and meets with her father it transpires that the two are estranged, the father has left the family some years previous after having slept with a family friend. The father is jaded, perhaps a little cynical and less in touch with his offspring's needs and, indeed, the young and colourful world in which his daughter lives than she was possibly expecting. Similarly, her request for money to do a media course at College is met with a dull thud of rejection which perhaps demonstrates this gap between their lives which the daughter has thought special enough to bridge in person and ask her father for the money.

But, like I said, the early indications of this dynamic is heavily foreshadowed during that opening journey through the credits. Everything is bright colours which reflect the young world that this girl comes from. Her clothes are brightly coloured and she is even wearing a scarf with two bobble ends that hang down in front of her and firmly give off an echo of the double-pigtails that seems to have become synonymous with young, cute and naive. Even the world she inhabits is a world of London buses where the red is so much “redder than red” that it threatens to pop off the screen. This is all good stuff.

While waiting at the bus shelter she sees a father interacting with his child and she almost interacts with them... but then the moment is lost and this further shows the degrees of alienation between the world she has, perhaps, retreated to since her father left and this plays out in the remainder of the film where the father and daughter are talking but not really saying much of anything to each other... at least not what they’re thinking, which you can also hear in vivid detail by two voice-overs on the soundtrack.

As the opening credits sequence ends and the girl switches off her ipod, we discover that the song on what we thought was a non-diagetic soundtrack is in fact from a diagetic source. The on-screen source is the music from the girls earphones and this is perhaps a little indication of the importance of technology to the people in this film, since this is how people really communicate with each other in this century isn’t it... through technology?

I remember reading a couple of decades ago, long before emails and the influence of the internet on our world were anything we could even imagine, that one of the symptoms of a post-modern society is the dwindling of communication between people and their communities as the reach of technology expands. In those days they were just talking about things like phones and crystal sets and the invention of the newspaper etc but this course mankind is on seems even more relevant now than it ever was. Most people would rather, it seems, talk to people on an email or even a mobile phone than actually get together with them and talk face to face... people are seeing less and less of each other and this leads to communities alienated from each other by the very technology that brings them together in their virtual world.

This is pushed home like a blunt instrument in the last minute or so of the film. A subtly wielded blunt instrument, to be sure, because the film looks fantastic and is well edited, well directed and ultimately has a couple of flawless performances form the two lead actors playing the girl and her father - Clementine Starling and Ben Willbond. A blunt instrument none the less as the father and daughter have stopped communicating that well in person (although they seem to have done pretty well in the past via email... it’s an email summons from the daughter that has brought them to where they are now) and when the father sees a text come in on his mobile phone, he starts paying more attention to that than his daughter. Similarly, as she sees him do this, the daughter jams her earphones back into her ears and our non-diegetic soundtrack returns with a passion as the end credits roll and leave the father and daughter in a place where they can only really communicate in the spaces and safe havens between the technology... and not in the world of the face-to-face, up close and personal environment where such communication would be better existing... and I think it’s this gap between these two generations which best highlights the message of the film. There is comedy to be found within the running commentary inside the brains of these people, in the spaces between the worlds where their mouths take over their communication for them... but ultimately they are not being honest in any way with each other and this is a point made, almost chillingly in hindsight now I’ve had a few hours to reflect on this movie, by the moment when they both reach for their technology and begin to ignore each other.

There is a certain truth running at 24 frames per second in that last shot which perhaps, sadly as I’m very much a Twitter user, is a commentary on the world we all live in and is something which perhaps we could all do with being reminded of at certain times in our life when the technology takes over... I would probably be best running into a park with a megaphone and telling people about this movie there rather than in the more disaffecting venue of an electronic blog space but I choose not to and, frankly, I’ve never exactly been a great social animal when it comes to participating in communicative events. But that’s just me.

I think, ultimately, the stealth with which these concepts are put across in Meeting Daddy and which you aren’t even necessarily aware of when you first see the film until you reflect a little after, are a great strength of this movie. If this movie were a bottle of pills I’d probably recommend a prescription of this and similar pills to be taken by everyone on a regular basis... as a sad reminder of the uncommunicative nature of man in the 21st Century.

That is to say... Meeting Daddy is a sharp little film and it deserves to find an audience in whichever venue it turns up in. An intelligently written and subtly made film by a director who it may be worth keeping an eye on in future. Take a look if you get the offer!

Charlie Chan: The Untold Story

A Proper Charlie

Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honourable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History by Yunte Huang

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Co.

Language English

ISBN: 0393069621

A friend of mine sent me this book for my birthday and I’m well pleased to have it and have read it. I’ve always liked Charlie Chan... ever since my first experiences at a very young age with the old Hanna Barbara cartoon, The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan (with Charlie voiced by Keye Luke... no stranger to the world of Charlie Chan as he played Number One Son Lee Chan opposite Warner Oland, Roland Winters and Peter Lorre in one of the Mr. Moto films). This lay the seeds so that later, in the early eighties, I was able to appreciate the old 1930s and 1940s Warner Oland and Sidney Toler movies that BBC2 used to screen at 5.40pm on a Thursday evening.

Since then I’ve obviously read the six (only six were written!) original Earl Der Biggers novels and acquired as many of those old movies as I’ve been able to get. I’ve also managed to grab the movies featuring two of Charlie Chan’s spiritual cousins, Mr. Moto and Mr. Wong, who doubtless made it into movie versions riding the back of the success of the Charlie Chan series.

In this book, the writer traces the lineage of the character and concentrates not so much on Charlie Chan himself, but with the history of the Chinese in Hawaii and Honolulu (Charlies stomping ground) and more specifically with legendary police officer Chang Apana who was said to be the real life inspiration for Charlie Chan and was known as such by his contemporaries... and still is to this day.

Now I’m not a great one for history books but this one is pretty entertaining and readable and I’m very glad to have read this little peak into Chinese culture and its racial tensions. Details of a post-Chang Apana murder case scandal which was very much racially manipulated to get the “incorrect” but “right” verdict fair made my blood boil (as I hope it would any modern reader) and the delightful story of a distinguished Naval Captain meeting his untimely death by being killed by the celebratory cannon fire meant to salute and welcome him in his honour as his ship pulled into harbour, although ultimately tragic, was the source of much mirth for this reader.

I think the links between Earl Der Biggers character and Chang Apana are kind of tentative though, to be honest. He’d already written the first three of the six novels before meeting and getting to know Chang Apana and, though a case is made that the newspaper article of a heroic arrest made by a Chinese Police Officer in Hawaii that inspired the inclusion of Bigger’s Charlie Chan character in the novel The House Without A Key may well have been, in fact probably was, an arrest carried out by Chang Apana... I personally don’t see this as validation that the claim that Chang Apana was the real life basis for Charlie is a correct one. However, when Biggers and Apana were finally introduced, it’s quite clear that Biggers was more than happy to let that idea stand and even perpetuate it himself. Good publicity, after all, is money in the bank.

This book is a great little, almost random, summary of Chinese people in American culture and this also includes lightly touching on other fictional characters such as Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu (who had also been played by Warner Oland a few times on screen). I’ve read the Fu Manchu novels myself and think they’re brilliant pulps (along the lines of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories) and I’m glad I now know that the English (very much English and staying put in his own country thank you very much, more tea guv’nor?) author Arthur Henry Sarsfield Ward, better known as Sax Rohmer, died ironically of one of the first strains of Asian flu on these shores. That has a nice circularity to it.

The downside of this book for me is the persistent racial element. The writer Yunte Hunag is a Chinese lecturer living in America and he seems to have written this book coming from a place which admires the exploits of the fictional detective and his perceived ancestry while being torn by the undeniable racial stereotype which the character falls in. This is okay and since I’ve never been racially oppressed (as far as I can remember) it’s really not my right to judge anyone who has been oppressed in this way but, as I was reading, I got the feeling that the writer was kinda ramming this down my throat a little and getting very assertive about the acceptance in popular culture of this kind of racial stereotype. This book seems like it’s been written as a defence of the Chinese race when, to someone like me, no defence is or would ever be needed for any race or species living on the planet. So I was possibly feeling a little perplexed at the constant reminders throughout the book and the constant necessity to compare racist slurs against Chinese folk with racial slurs against other races which the reader may find more popular or accessible (?) and come to an understanding of them as they compare to various intimations about the Chinese race.

Now I, and I would hope this is the case with most people, just tend to see Charlie Chan as an entertaining, Chinese hero... a keeper of the peace who polices his beat with a well aimed aphorism and less often the unsophisticated thuggery which gun play might bring. And that’s enough for me. It’s no more complicated than that. Yes, I can see that my “simplistic entertainment” view of Charlie (which to be fair to myself, is the purpose he was created for) doesn’t allow me to see or respond at the racial stereotypical characteristics embedded in our subconsciousness by such broad and possibly offensive portrayals such as these... and I take on board that this is probably Hunag’s precise point, that we’ve all been programmed by such characterisations from birth without realising it. By the same token, though, I would have never have even thought that there was any implied racial slur ingrained in these character portrayals unless I’d read this book and had them pointed out to me... and then again, that’s probably also something which Hunag wants me to realise. But it does rather delve too deep into a character and a stupid gaijin like myself would rather be entertained by a character and writer I admire rather than ponder the historical subtext of racial antagonism that such a character, almost certainly inadvertently on the part of Earl Der Biggers, conjures up in the minds of some. Maybe I’m just too simplistic a person to bother with such things. And maybe I should be more bothered in the future but, seriously, a persons race or skin colour is an unacceptable thing to base an opinion of a person on and so I just tend not to look at people in a racist manner. Thank goodness. At least not so far as I am aware.

Don’t get me wrong, Yunte Hunag is not completely gung ho about this slant on the character and he is trying to make the reader aware of this subtext while clearly loving the subject of his novel as much as any Charlie Chan fan in the world. I did, however, find it the one tiresome element to an otherwise absolutely excellent historical portrayal of the effects of America on Chinese culture.

Whichever way you cut it though, this is a great book and should definitely be on the “to read” pile if you’re a fan of the great, literary detective... even if it doesn’t cover the movies so much as the real life careers of Chang Apana and, to a certain extent, Earl Der Biggers. Definitely a resounding recommendation on this one!

Happy-Go-Lucky

Poppy-Go-Happy

Happy-Go-Lucky UK 2008

Directed by Mike Leigh

Momentum Pictures Region 2

There’s something very unusual about Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky... in that it actually does what it says on the tin and is a genuinely upbeat and cheerful little movie. And upbeat and cheerful are two words that I mostly wouldn’t associate with the incredible artistic talent of Mike Leigh because, as brilliant and amazing as his movies usually are, they do tend to ultimately err on the side of depression and the misery of despair. But that’s usually okay because they are smart, interesting little filmic gems and they are never boring.

This particular film, however, has a main protagonist who is almost totally committed to being light and fluffy 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and this character, brilliantly played by Sally Hawkins (who you will fall in love with by the end of the movie) is a poster girl for the genuinely happy faction of our society... I’ve met a few of them and they're mostly a myth because, my experience of excessively, shove-their-good-humour-down-your-throat people in general seems to be that after the first sign things are not going to go quite right, they generally crack under pressure and lie in a coma until things hopefully go away... not a good way to attempt to deal with problems.

But Sally Hawkins is, apart from a couple of little, mostly fleeting moments throughout the running time of this movie, deliriously happy from start to finish... almost unbearably so in some cases in fact. The first main scene after a credits sequence where we see her character, Poppy, riding her bike in London, is a sequence in a bookshop with a miserably unwelcoming shop keeper who is unimpressed by Poppy’s up and up, talky-friendly nature but we see that this really doesn’t bother Poppy in the slightest... and then she discovers her bike has been stolen but instead of getting overtly distressed about this and shouting or swearing or generally being affected by her plight, she just stands their unbelieving making upbeat comments about her current situation... Mike Leigh is smart, he sets this character up just right so we can take a measure of her and see exactly the kind of person she is... but then he does a very strange thing for him.

Once the character has been well established in the audiences mind with a few scenes demonstrating Poppy’s unshakeable devotion to this enviable mindset, Mike Leigh does what you would normally expect a director of his calibre to do... that is he throws Poppy into a series of encounters with people who are a damn sight less than happy and waits to see how she gets on with them. Like the diametrically opposed driving instructor Scott, played by British treasure and Leigh regular Eddie Marsan who is both intensely irritated by, but strangely drawn to, Poppy’s personality... and who shouts quite a bit at her. Or Poppy’s pregnant sister who seems to be well set up but instead tries to project her own unhappiness and insecurity onto others... like Poppy who is having none of it.

But the strange thing is that, where you would expect Mike Leigh to ensure that Poppy gets burdened by all these people and slip into a depression as you would expect her to in any other of his films, in this one Poppy stays strangely on top of things and the only time you really see her in anything like a contemplative mood about the true trouble and strife of this world comes at one, for me, key point in the movie which I shall call Poppy’s “Man with a Sack” sequence... after Federico Fellini.

To explain that last remark... Federico Fellini’s absolute masterpiece Nights of Cabiria originally featured a very key sequence which producer Dino De Laurentis thought was rubbish and slowed the movie down, so he cut it out and absconded with it for the original release and didn’t return it to Fellini until many decades later after Fellini had pleaded that he return the scene so his film students could see the film properly. This was restored to the movie and it is this version of the film which plays on modern home video cassette and DVD presentations of this key work. I can’t believe that De Laurentis cut this scene out as, for me, this is the key sequence of the movie. It’s the point in the narrative where Cabiria is able to see that her life as a prostitute is actually going to get her nowhere but old and poor and used up and it is this moment of self-aware clarity that gives the character the impetus for her course for the rest of the movie. I can’t imagine what this film must have played like at cinemas in its original release prints but the jump in Cabiria’s attitude with this sequence missing must have seemed quite an odd mis-step on Fellini’s part to audiences, who wouldn’t have known about De Laurentis’ villainous role on this occasion.

So for me, a “man with a sack” sequence is a key sequence in a film where a character becomes aware of the true nature of his or her plight and adjust their attitude as a consequence. And in Happy-Go-Lucky, this kind of scene occurs when Poppy hears a noise and goes to investigate a large, dangerous looking tramp who talks in mostly nonsensical repeat words and half-finished sentences which convey an emotion without clarification or direction of that emotion. It would be safe to say that the poor tramp, astonishingly portrayed by a guy named Stanley Townsend, is in a bad way emotionally and certainly, in terms of audience perception, represents a serious threat to Poppy... he’s a big, aggressive looking guy. This is a person, however, who causes Poppy to become more reflective about things and when the tramp, for the umpteenth time, asks in his deep, gravelly voice... “ya know?”... Poppy confirms that she does, indeed, know.

But this is the point where this Mike Leigh film continues to go in a diametrically opposite way to a regular Mike Leigh film as Poppy contemplates this, remains ultimately unaffected and carries on being her Happy-Go-Lucky self. She processes the emotions and reconstitutes them as her usual currency of happy, positive vibes and the strength of the character is that she can rise above the pitfalls and traps of life and confidently dismiss them in the spirit of “oh well” and continue her attempt to bring mirth and jollity to the world.

She’s a very strong character and a lovable one, it has to be said, but on my second watch of this movie (I first caught it in cinemas back on its original release), I found that I wasn’t quite responding to her in quite the same way. She began to wind me up a little and it’s obvious she was winding up some of the other, more downbeat characters in the film and I realised we’d seen this kind of character before from Mike Leigh... just not in such a happy incarnation. My favourite movie by this director is the excellent Naked, starring the unbelievably talented David Thewlis as the irrepressible Johnny. Now you can’t exactly say that this guy is the happiest person in the world but he is a person who tends to prod and probe at people and things with an enthusiasm which winds people up and gets him into trouble... in fact, towards the end of the movie the character takes a lot of punishment due to the fact that he just can’t leave things alone. He wants to know how things tick... he’s like Holden Caulfield on acid and I realised when I was watching Happy-Go-Lucky that Poppy is just a lighter, happier, non-threatening variation of this initial Johnny character. She teases and pushes and explores people because she just can’t help herself... there is no choice. So in some ways, Poppy is not entirely a departure for Mike Leigh... just a departure in a single sustained tone.

Like all Mike Leigh films, Happy-Go-Lucky is a little bit of a masterpiece and deserves your attention... it is also filled with quite addictive characters which will ultimately encourage repeat viewings on DVD... at least in my household. One thing’s for sure though... if you watch this one it might take you a while to get the phrase “en-ra-ha” out of your head. Take a peek and see if I'm not right!

X-Men: First Class

X-Rated Entertainment

X-Men: First Class US 2011

Directed by Matthew Vaughn

Playing at cinemas now.

Warning: There be some mild/light spoilers here that probably won’t pack as much punch as an adamantium right hook but certainly may be a little more than you want to know before going into the movie.

I’ve had kind of a hit and miss reaction to the X-Men all my life. My first experience with them was with a few reprints I had in a British annual in the early seventies which reprinted old Marvel comics called Fantastic annual. It basically reprinted almost exclusively Avengers and X-Men comics from what I remember in my hazy recollections of a dim and distant past. In fact, I believe these reprints were from the very early sixties and possibly one of them was even a reproduction of the first issue, which originally debuted in 1963. I didn’t mind this original line-up of Professor X, Marvel Girl, Cyclops, Angel, Iceman and Beast... in fact out of all the line-ups that came after, these are probably about the only X-Men I could probably handle reading today. And, of course, to me they were never the X-Men... they were always known by the title which they’d originally gone under in their early days. Much like The Amazing Spiderman, The Fantastic Four, The Mighty Thor, The Incredible Hulk and The Invincible Iron Man, these guys were... and always shall be in my mind... The Uncanny X-Men.

So when a desperate sea-change hit the title with the Giant-Sized X-Men of 1975, one last bid to actually sell these comics before total cancellation - which, given the success of the line-up introduced in this issue and their continued popularity in the medium, may surprise some people - I was never really that interested. Most of the original line-up had been dropped and Weapon-X had been rechristened Wolverine and... really... I was just as oblivious to these guys' existence as I had been to anything but those early reprints I used to read and I stayed that way, pretty much, until the first of the big budget X-Men movies hit our screens back in 2000. And to be honest I wasn’t much interested in seeing them on film either but I went to take a look anyway.

I was glad I did because that first X-Men movie was the first movie to actually take a Marvel comics character, or a set of characters in this case, and actually make a genuinely entertaining and fairly credible and coherent movie out of them. This was nothing like going to see a double bill of Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger featured with Spiderman and the Dragon’s Challenge! And when the money came in from this first one and the X-Men became a franchise... it turned out that the second movie was as good, if not even better than the first movie. The director Bryan Singer did a really good job on these two movies and had set up everything for a brilliant third installment.

Alas, a brilliant third installment was not in the cards. Singer was kinda... well not exactly fired from the franchise due to personal differences with one of the “suits with money” is my understanding but he certainly felt discouraged enough with the ensuing “lead swinging” that he eventually left to work on a superhero project for a rival company (both character-wise and studio wise... DC and Warner Bros) and another director was brought on board. The end result of all this shilly-shallying around was unfortunate... we ended up with both a really terrible dud of a third X-Men movie and... surprisingly... a not so hot Superman sequel too.

After that, everyone had thought the X-Men "juggernaut" (see what I did there?) had come to a halt but we got a little surprise with a prequel in the form of Wolverine: X-Men Origins with Hugh Jackman reprising his role as the titular character. Now Wolverine wasn’t a great movie but it was certainly several notches up on the washability level than that third X-Men film and even though it basically had the feel of an early eighties B-movie exploitation flick to a degree, albeit with a tidy sum of money thrown at it, it didn’t completely let down the franchise in the way its predecessor did (my review of that one is here if you’re at all interested).

But seriously, did we really need a fifth X-Men movie (or a Wolverine movie for that matter). Well the answer, honestly, is no! We did not. Conceptually it’s just a money making exercise trying to capture those original two lightning strikes that Singer gave the studio back at the start of the 21st Century (wow... I keep forgetting we’re all living in the 21st Century now... where’s my rocket pack?). But then follow that up with another question and you have yourself a different perspective on things.

So then, Question Number Two is... Do I mind there being yet another sequel, or in this case prequel, to the X-Men movies? And the answer to that one has to be... well, no I don’t mind as long as it’s any good. But what are the chances of that after the last big screw up on the series. A lot of people are going to be put off showing up in cinemas on account of that third movie (they have, apparently... it’s not made its money back yet... it’ll probably get there and it came in at Number One in the charts but... a disappointing Number One box office take by all accounts).

And of course, the inevitable question arising from those last two questions is this? Is it any good?

Well that’s why I write reviews like this and waffle on for a page or so before I even get to the point of writing the damned thing is my answer to that. Or to put it another way...

Yes. It’s good. it’s very, very good. But allow me to be a little more articulate in my annunciation of said conclusion...

Actually... I’ll use a tactic I’ve adopted a couple of times just recently and tell you one thing it isn’t first. It’s not a bloody reboot!

Nor is it a remake or in any way a re-imagining of the initial series... and don’t let anyone tell you it is. This one here is definitely a prequel and... not only that... but it’s a prequel in the very best sense. It’s a prequel that actually works with everything that’s been established within the chronology of the previous movies and without resorting to any George Lucas-like jiggery pokery and wild leaps of the imagination. This one is the real deal and the only retro-fitting which had to be done on this one was to set it in the sixties (during the Cuban missile crisis, in fact... which is a part of the plot) and sell that period with a certain amount of style and verisimilitude... and get it accepted by an audience that might get turned off by a period piece.

The movie starts off with the World War 2 concentration camp opening sequence of the original X-Men movie reshot (but using the late Michael Kamen’s score from that sequence from that movie) but this time you stay with the very young Erik Lehnsherr for a while and see what shaped his life choices before cutting to the very young Charles Xavier and his first encounter with Raven, aka the future Mystique. Then we skip right into the sixties and we have Charles played by James MacAvoy... who surprised me by being quite brilliant in a genre film and Erik as played by Michael Fassbender... who has more than enough screen presence to carry the whole movie on this one... except he doesn’t have to because, well I could go on but everyone on this movie was brilliant.

Fassbender starts off as pretty much a hit man, hellbent on a quest for vengeance against Kevin Bacon’s evil bad-guy and joins up almost accidentally with Xavier when Xavier rescues him at the tail end of a mission for which he’s been recruited by the CIA. The two join up with the aforementioned CIA and some other mutants and start the equivalent of Xavier’s future school to train up a group of mutants for a dangerous mission... a dangerous mission which should gain Erik access to the target of his revenge fuelled killing spree.

Frankly, for a movie with something like a 12A rated certificate, X-Men: First Class certainly doesn’t pull its punches, too often, although the revelation of a female version of Angel looks like it’s had a little censorial tinkering, for example. There are scenes of implied sexuality and more than implied violence that had my eyebrows raised at their inclusion in a family orientated movie. The scene towards the end of the movie which involves the very slow manipulation of a Nazi coin, for instance, may have been a bit out of place for the rating... but I should worry. I’m not complaining and I love on-screen violence and sexuality (and I also love off-screen sexuality so can have my cake and eat it... if I get lucky) but I do think parents contemplating taking their children to see this one should take a look at the movie first.

There’s a lot to like in this movie including some shrewd iconic references to films like From Russia With Love (if I’m not mistaken about a certain helicopter arriving at a certain kind of Manor House) and possibly a little nod to Doris Day in Caprice? There’s also a couple of great cameos from folks from previous installments... namely Hugh Jackman as Wolverine/Logan and Rebecca Romijn as Mystique. “What?” I hear you ask. “In a prequel?” Yeah, I’d be worried too... but I wasn’t because I didn’t know they were coming and as it turns out, Jackman’s appearance makes a perfect punchline to the first of two unusually lengthy montage sequences... the first is a series of Mutant spotting trips undertaken by Charles & Erik and the second is a get-a-handle-on-yer-powers training sequence. And then, the Rebecca Romijn as Mystique cameo is really cleverly done... and it involves sexuality so I’m all for it anyway.

One cameo which was missing and which felt bad to have been left out was Stan Lee. This must be the first Marvel film in the last ten or eleven years in which he hasn’t had a little appearance and that makes me sad. Apparently Twentieth Century Fox didn’t ask him to do one for this movie. He seems to roll with it though. On a Q&A panel I saw on the internet with him he jokingly said that it’s a ploy on the part of Fox to get everyone to think they’ve missed Stan’s cameo... and then go buy another ticket to see it again and try to spot him. Stan’s still "the Man" when it comes to being a true figurehead for the comics industry. A real trooper and I can’t wait to see his favourite cameo appearance in the upcoming The Amazing Spiderman later in the year.

But that’s not what I’m here to discuss... let me get back to it before I lose the plot completely.

X-Men: First Class has a real good sense of pacing and never once feels like its 132 minute running time. It explores the universe of the characters it deals with in an imaginative and satisfying way but also holds some stuff back while alluding to them in a way that leaves you intrigued rather than bored. More than enough material for a sequel and I’d really want to see one (although the box office return on this one so far makes this less likely than I’d hope for). Heck... it even has genre favourite Michael Ironside in it... although he seems to have been thrown away to very near the bottom of the credits and just credited as M. Ironside (what up with that?) but hey, he’s in it.

Also, the musical score by Henry Jackman is minimalist but quite driven and pounding and reminded me of Bernard Herrmann's technique of using small cells of melody repeated over and over for effect. This is not necessarily a bad thing and minimalist genius Philip Glass has made a decent living out of writing this kind of repeat style for decades now so I’m certainly not complaining. You’ll either love it or hate it in terms of the scoring I reckon.

X-Men: First Class definitely gets a solid and frankly, surprising recommendation from me but I do, however, feel compelled to give you final few readers who have actually made it to the end of this unexpectedly long article a final word of warning which may aid you if you see the film. If you are planning on sitting through every last second of the end credits on this one so you can watch the post-credits tag sequence which most of the other Marvel movies (the X-Men franchise included) usually have on them, then you’ll be disappointed. By all means watch the credits but don’t expect any added extras on this one... you’ll have to wait for the DVD for the bonuses this time around.

Doctor Who: A Good Man Goes To War

Unchained Melody

Doctor Who: A Good Man Goes To War

Airdate: June 4th 2011. UK. BBC1

Warning: I kinda already spoiled this on Twitter when I figured out who River Song definitely was last night and tweeted it this morning... if you even think like this review is even going to be possible to write without spoilers now that I've actually seen the episode then think again... not only will you know everything but I’m going to give in to some cold, hard speculation so you might get the ending of the other half of the series spoiled too for you if you haven’t already figured things out. Fair warning and here I go...

Ok... a long, long time ago, I think last year when I first started writing this blog... I’m sure I mentioned that Moffett liked watery names such as River and Pond and expressed that they could be one and the same person or perhaps somehow related... well that has now come to pass.

In what is probably the best and most postmodernistically (is that even a word?) referential episode of the so called "sixth series" so far, all was revealed... it was a bit like a big chocolatey dessert served up as a little treat for the fans. Now I’m sure if you’ve not been following the show thus far for the last seven weeks (let alone since the first appearance of River Song in the Tennant/Tate years of the show) then you’ll probably have found this episode mostly as dull as dishwater... even with the great one liners. It’s almost like it's a little bit of an episode which is there to just answer questions for regular viewers and tie up everything in one big package which is clearly labelled, “For Fans Only... Have A Merry Christmas, Love Steven Moffett.” So it’s much like the fifth of the sixth of Kevin Smith’s Jay and Silent Bob movies, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back... so self referential that if you don’t appreciate or at least know of the foundations on which it is built... the whole thing will fall over for you like an unsteady house of cards. But if you’re in on the joke... well... I was really happy with this one.

So what we have here is a very fast paced, blink and you’ll miss another surprisingly consistent dose of all round episode seven goodness... and when I say surprisingly, believe me nobody is more surprised than I that Moffett could deliver such an entertaining slice of the Doctor Who cake after what I see as a mostly poor performance last season. Yeah, I moaned and whined a lot about it last year and doubtless I’ll moan and whinge a lot more later in the year if he lets me down again... but this one was just great. I’m going to have me a mini River Song season next year when all the DVDs are out.

Okay, so the Doctor raises an army in this one, wipes out petty much a whole fleet of cybermen to demonstrate the non-emptiness of a threat and generally gets as close to being a warrior as we’re ever likely to see him. This episode is full of drama as we see Moffett push the Doctor into places he’s not really been before... well... I say that... not really been in a long time may be a little more accurate but what the hell. I only finished watching it a half an hour ago so I’m still caught up in things (glad I didn’t have that second glass of wine now).

On the way to the final revelation, which picks up from the set-up of Amy having been a replicant version of herself with her mind beamed into her fleshy husk (see the previous episode, reviewed here), we see the Doctor raise an army against... um... some shady people aligned with some Headless Monks (the shady people are a bit UNIT like and I’m wondering if they’re anything to do with the plot lines established in The Death of the Doctor episode of The Sarah Jane Adventures last year - reviewed here) and pretty much become a very un-Doctor-like warrior figure... calling in debts from various races and with the appearance of some rather whimsical and utterly delightful creations such as a Sontaran Warrior-turned-Nurse and a warrior Silurian and her human lesbian lover who has been hobnobbing around London in the 1880s... particularly the Whitechapel area because we meet her just after she’s despatched Jack the Ripper as it happens (oh well... there’s another potential historical figure The Doctor won’t get to meet now unless there are some pretty grim continuity errors). She would have been awesome giving Leila and The Doctor a helping hand against that giant rat in The Talons Of Weng Chian methinks.

Added to the mix of action and adventure are some really funny lines and references to past episodes (those bloody laser cannon spitfires are back again) and it’s all wrapped together in a little bundle which has the final revelation (or not if you’ve been concentrating throughout the series) of River Song’s identity. So last spoiler warning right now for all who haven’t seen the episode yet... here are the facts and also a little bit of speculation.

1. River Song meets The Doctor and pretty much dies - Silence In The Library and Forest Of The Dead.

2. River meets grown Amy but doesn’t really say "Hi" or anything much to Amy on meeting her as I recall. Anyone else remember that... kept thinking, this is not the first time she’s met Amy... wonder how longs she’s known her and why is she’s staying quiet? Anyone else remember that? Now we know for sure. And by the way... it’s River who doesn’t give up on Amy and rescues her from the angels in that one! - The Time Of Angels reviewed here and Flesh and Stone reviewed here.

3. Amy is replaced by replicant Amy pre-Series Six.

4. After a few more adventures with the Matt Smith incarnation of The Doctor, River shoots at a little girl in a spacesuit after that little girl kills an older version of The Doctor. SPECULATION: The little girl is Amy and Rory’s daughter Melody Pond (the name you see written in the first couple of minutes of the latest episode and which gives you the answer right from the start... after all, how can River Song know about the events at Demon’s Run when she’s not technically there at that age in her timeline unless she’s heard of things from her mother?)... trained by the ones we shall call, for the time being, “the bad guys” to be a weapon to kill The Doctor. Which she does but somehow gets damaged (we’ll find out later in the year, don’t sweat it) and regenerates to heal (because she was conceived in the TARDIS so has timey-wimey DNA) and probably regenerates into a slightly older looking version of herself... like the River we all know and love? - The Impossible Astronaut reviewed here and Day Of The Moon reviewed here.

5. And then tonight... Amy has given birth to her and Rory’s daughter Melody Pond... who it transpires is young River Song and is a bit timelord in her make-up due to being conceived on the TARDIS (I think I’ve got that right) and is substituted for a replicant Melody/River and kidnapped by “the bad guys” and... SPECULATION: is trained as the perfect weapon and kills The Doctor (which I’ve no doubt he’ll get out of at some point later in the year). She then goes to prison and carries on seeing The Doctor whenever she can. And, of course, she is trained to be a very good killing machine, hence the Dalek begging for mercy in the last episode from last series called The Big Bang... and reviewed here.

And there you go. All wrapped up in a nice little bundle. The Doctor goes off to rescue young Melody while older, wiser River stays to comfort her mum and dad, Amy and Rory, at the end of this episode.

And, of course, being as it’s Moffett, this all raises a whole load of other perfectly reasonable questions with which Moffett can tease us with for a while... but we can easily see the light at the end of the tunnel on this one now so I’m feeling a little more relaxed about the whole thing. Especially seeing that the next episode after the mid-season break will be called Let’s Kill Hitler and especially since we had such a great little teaser trailer for the next half a series in the form of a cold, skeletal hand clutching a sonic screwdriver. Way to treat us to some iconic Doctor Who imagery which I suspect is going to stay with a lot of the little kiddies (and possibly some of us much older kiddies) watching this show for quite some time.

And that’s me done with the current show for a while.. obviously... and I’ll miss reviewing the show live on a Saturday night until the next half a series starts later on in the year. However, please stay tuned if you’re Doctor Who fans because I’m really not done with The Doctor just yet. First up I’ll be reviewing legendary sci-fi/fantasy writer Michael Moorcock’s take on the good Doctor with a little look at his novel Doctor Who: The Coming of the Terraphiles. Then at some point soonish I hope to be viewing and reviewing the Doctor Who classics The Claws of Axos and The Dominators. And I might also get to work on a little time-line illustration project at some point soon on one of the characters who has been featuring regularly on the series at various points over the last three or four years... I wonder who that could be then?

Thanks, as always, for reading. It’s always very much appreciated and I’m very grateful to my readers for taking the time to stop here.