Birthday present update: As well as penetrating nearly halfway into Surface Detail, I've now listened to all those Eurythmics CDs and watched all the DVDs I hadn't already seen, as well as Doctor Who series 5, which I had.
I'd love to write a detailed, considered appreciation both of that series (the best since... erm, actually, possibly ever, to my mind, thanks to the thoughtful brilliance of both showrunner and lead actor), and of season 2 of the excellent True Blood as well. I'm still hoping I might manage to in the New Year... but since Christmas has all but engulfed me in its tinselly, tentacular embrace, it's much quicker and easier laying into something rubbish.
While I'm obviously grateful to my parents for buying it for me when asked and thus expanding my collection of adaptations of the Robin Hood legend, the 2010 Robin Hood film certainly fits the bill. It's a stupid, formulaic period action-adventure achieving nothing notable or original except to ignore completely every single facet of the source material in favour of telling a completely different story about another character entirely. (OK, so there's a thirty-second sequence halfway through where "Robin" and his pals -- including, for no apparent reason, their village friar -- prevent a wagon from taking away the village's taxes in grain. They wear hoods during it. AND THAT'S IT.)
Utterly derivative though the plot is, the historical absurdity of everything in the film after about the halfway point is simply staggering. SPOILERS (highlight to read): Robin is, supposedly, the son of a stonemason who wrote a prototype Magna Carta some 40 years early and persuaded an army of barons to sign up to it before it was rejected (presumably by Henry II, although the film doesn't really go into that) and he was executed. His son -- now a yeoman archer who's discovered that he can effortlessly imitate a knight, thus bringing him into direct contact with his old man's aristocratic contacts -- ends up leading a popular uprising (again consisting mostly of barons), who blackmail the treacherous King John into apparently supporting the revived charter before they all go off to fight a completely nonexistent French invasion. Including, stupidly, Marian. Who apparently dies so Russell Crowe can do some emoting, but is fine again at the end.
The film has the occasional good idea -- Robin as a traumatised ex-crusader, Marian as a middle-aged widow -- but without exception they're good ideas first used in other adaptations, and aren't wielded with any kind of deftness or even consistency. Some commentators have claimed to find allegorical support for the cretinous US Tea Party movement in the film's presentation of unjust taxation under the Plantagenets, but I honestly think they give it credit for far more in the way of basic coherence than it achieves. Its chief political message appears to be that the French are basically evil, and you shouldn't trust Kings who have pointy black beards either.
Even as someone who actually quite liked Ridley Scott's unpopular earlier Crusade-based epic, Kingdom of Heaven, I was just appalled by this one.
Showing posts with label film. Show all posts
Showing posts with label film. Show all posts
18 December 2010
24 September 2009
Intelligence Update
I'm predictably late in blogging the fact, but I feel we -- where "we" means cinema audiences -- have been almost unprecedentedly privileged this summer in having the opportunity to see two new pieces of intelligent, well-made SF drama.
I'm talking, of course, of Moon and District 9: set respectively in a cramped mining station on a relatively near-future Moon, and in a boderline-alternative history where South Africa became home to a population of extraterrestrial refugees in the late 1980s. Neither creates an original SF premise -- indeed, both are rather derivative, in ways I'll explore shortly -- but they do what the best of SF cinema does, using familiar tropes as springboards for clever, thought-provoking human stories with real intellectual significance.
Of the two, I prefer Moon, although I wouldn't argue with those who point out that District 9's the more important film. Moon is unexpectedly written and directed by Duncan Jones -- a man who evidently now rejects the only other fact I and the rest of the world knew about him, that his father had given him the name Zowie Bowie[1] -- and stars Sam Rockwell, who I only remember as Zaphod in the regrettable film version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
I went in without notably high expectations, and emerged raving. Moon is low-key, non-blockbustery SF drama reminiscent of the best examples of the genre before Star Wars ruined it for adults: Dark Star, for instance, Silent Running, or even the monolithic 2001: A Space Odyssey. (It also reminded me of Solaris, which is odd as I've somehow managed never to see either film version, or indeed read the novel.) Well-imagined, claustrophobic sets complement a small cast; although there's plentiful well-written dialogue, the central revelations are conveyed through almost-silent visual sequences. Although the special effects are excellent (and must have been very demanding to achieve), the script is such that most of the time I didn't even notice they were there.
Moon is definitely a film whose plot you want to avoid having spoiled, so I'm putting the rest of my comments in white (highlight the text to read it). Rockwell's role, whereby he needed to portray the clone protagonist and his clone antagonist / ally as essentially the same person after different life-experiences, must have been a daunting one, and he pulls it off brilliantly well. The other iterations of the character, in their brief appearances, are also distinguished in subtle shades. Purely from this point of view (and leaving aside the effects work which must have been involved in creating, for instance, the scene where Sam plays table-tennis against himself), the film's a tour de force.
It's also, of course, a clever meditation on the nature of human identity and where it resides -- while the Sam clones are unquestionably entitled to the same rights as the original Sam, and their callous exploitation at the hands of Lunar Industries is an atrocity, it's also clear that each of them is his own person, sharing a base personality and many memories but with a unique identity.
The one element of the film which doesn't quite fit the rest is the one which reminded me of Solaris: the soon-to-be-dying Sam's visions of the original Sam's daughter, appearing as the teenager she now is, despite being as far as he knows a toddler. This adds an odd, but appealing, edge of mysticism to an otherwise hard-edged piece of humanist storytelling.
Oh, and I loved the way Kevin Spacey's A.I. character subverted expectations by turning out noble in the end. I'm desperately hoping someone's going to get me the DVD for Christmas.
District 9 is a very different animal. You couldn't accuse it of being low-key, although the early exploration, through documentary and found footage, of its only slightly alternative world gives a pleasingly bleak and deceptively low-budget feel. The aliens are a generic underclass (the middle-class human characters being a significant though unremarked mixture of white and black), and our view of the slum from which they variously beg for drugs, thieve from humans, set fire to stuff and scrabble for a living on rubbish heaps, would dehumanise them quite effectively without the deliberately alienating insectoid design.
I'll spoiler-protect this one, too, although I think it needs it less -- if only because it's obvious from about 20 minutes in (if not before) that there's only one direction in which the story can go.
I was disappointed when this storytelling device was abandoned -- from the early scenes I'd been anticipating something more in the style of Cloverfield (except better, obviously -- perhaps I mean more like The Office, only with aliens). In fact the film falls broadly into three chapters, only the first of which uses the faux-documentary effect. The second is rather tedious gross-out body-horror (a genre I have little time for, to be honest, so I probably wasn't its best audience), and the third a less-dumb-than-usual action-movie climax.
I've had an interesting discussion with Not Invented Here about how these disparate styles are unified by the protagonist's journey. In the opening scenes Wikus van der Merwe is a corporate lackey, his worldview as objectifying as that of the documentary cameras. As a likeable and rather wet hero who acts as a willing instrument of fascism because it's his job and he doesn't want to fuck it up, he's one of the most effectively shocking portrayals of evil I've seen in film. Later, he descends into poverty as one of the underclass and becomes radicalised by the experience -- and as N.I.H. points out, the appropriation of these other SF subgenres, body-horror and schwarzeneggerish action, mirror that in metaphor rather nicely.
However, I felt that these three elements were insufficiently well married together, and in particular that they resulted in distressingly incoherent worldbuilding. The objectified, frankly disgusting aliens of the first third are humanised for us, not through subtle revelations, but through subtitling their dialogue to make it clear that their thought-processes are exactly like ours, and by giving one of them a cute big-eyed spielbergsque lobster-child. It's a copout, and compromises the integrity of the first part. Some of the differences can be rationalised by the fact that Wikus's alien friend and his son are clearly of the officer caste in the aliens' hive-system, but even so it's very tricky to reconcile the grim, shit-smeared arrival of the aliens in the opening montage (in which Close Encounters of the Third Kind is cleverly evoked in order to be scoffed at) with the disneyesque departure of their representatives at the end.
Nor does the central mcguffin have any logic behind it -- no matter how biological the enineering of the aliens' technology may allegedly be (and it all looks mechanical or electronic to me), it makes no sense that exposure to their fuel would mutate a human into one of them. As a method of alienating the protagonist, it's rather less sensible than the plan of the Nigerian gangster characters to take on the aliens' characteristics by eating their body-parts.
These elements felt as if they needed more thought -- which, in what was overall such a thoughtful film, seemed to me a bit of a letdown. Unlike Moon, which felt damn near perfect, I didn't feel it hung together completely as a narrative.
When District 9's most obviously about apartheid, and more generally about the casual subjugation of individuals whom society views as less than human, it's quite devastating. As Not Invented Here's also said, the significance of such a film coming out of South Africa itself (albeit with international money) can't be underestimated. It's just a shame that the film as a whole doesn't, or so I felt, follow through on that initial promise.
I'll still be getting it on DVD, I suspect.
I'm talking, of course, of Moon and District 9: set respectively in a cramped mining station on a relatively near-future Moon, and in a boderline-alternative history where South Africa became home to a population of extraterrestrial refugees in the late 1980s. Neither creates an original SF premise -- indeed, both are rather derivative, in ways I'll explore shortly -- but they do what the best of SF cinema does, using familiar tropes as springboards for clever, thought-provoking human stories with real intellectual significance.
Of the two, I prefer Moon, although I wouldn't argue with those who point out that District 9's the more important film. Moon is unexpectedly written and directed by Duncan Jones -- a man who evidently now rejects the only other fact I and the rest of the world knew about him, that his father had given him the name Zowie Bowie[1] -- and stars Sam Rockwell, who I only remember as Zaphod in the regrettable film version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
I went in without notably high expectations, and emerged raving. Moon is low-key, non-blockbustery SF drama reminiscent of the best examples of the genre before Star Wars ruined it for adults: Dark Star, for instance, Silent Running, or even the monolithic 2001: A Space Odyssey. (It also reminded me of Solaris, which is odd as I've somehow managed never to see either film version, or indeed read the novel.) Well-imagined, claustrophobic sets complement a small cast; although there's plentiful well-written dialogue, the central revelations are conveyed through almost-silent visual sequences. Although the special effects are excellent (and must have been very demanding to achieve), the script is such that most of the time I didn't even notice they were there.
Moon is definitely a film whose plot you want to avoid having spoiled, so I'm putting the rest of my comments in white (highlight the text to read it). Rockwell's role, whereby he needed to portray the clone protagonist and his clone antagonist / ally as essentially the same person after different life-experiences, must have been a daunting one, and he pulls it off brilliantly well. The other iterations of the character, in their brief appearances, are also distinguished in subtle shades. Purely from this point of view (and leaving aside the effects work which must have been involved in creating, for instance, the scene where Sam plays table-tennis against himself), the film's a tour de force.
It's also, of course, a clever meditation on the nature of human identity and where it resides -- while the Sam clones are unquestionably entitled to the same rights as the original Sam, and their callous exploitation at the hands of Lunar Industries is an atrocity, it's also clear that each of them is his own person, sharing a base personality and many memories but with a unique identity.
The one element of the film which doesn't quite fit the rest is the one which reminded me of Solaris: the soon-to-be-dying Sam's visions of the original Sam's daughter, appearing as the teenager she now is, despite being as far as he knows a toddler. This adds an odd, but appealing, edge of mysticism to an otherwise hard-edged piece of humanist storytelling.
Oh, and I loved the way Kevin Spacey's A.I. character subverted expectations by turning out noble in the end. I'm desperately hoping someone's going to get me the DVD for Christmas.
District 9 is a very different animal. You couldn't accuse it of being low-key, although the early exploration, through documentary and found footage, of its only slightly alternative world gives a pleasingly bleak and deceptively low-budget feel. The aliens are a generic underclass (the middle-class human characters being a significant though unremarked mixture of white and black), and our view of the slum from which they variously beg for drugs, thieve from humans, set fire to stuff and scrabble for a living on rubbish heaps, would dehumanise them quite effectively without the deliberately alienating insectoid design.
I'll spoiler-protect this one, too, although I think it needs it less -- if only because it's obvious from about 20 minutes in (if not before) that there's only one direction in which the story can go.
I was disappointed when this storytelling device was abandoned -- from the early scenes I'd been anticipating something more in the style of Cloverfield (except better, obviously -- perhaps I mean more like The Office, only with aliens). In fact the film falls broadly into three chapters, only the first of which uses the faux-documentary effect. The second is rather tedious gross-out body-horror (a genre I have little time for, to be honest, so I probably wasn't its best audience), and the third a less-dumb-than-usual action-movie climax.
I've had an interesting discussion with Not Invented Here about how these disparate styles are unified by the protagonist's journey. In the opening scenes Wikus van der Merwe is a corporate lackey, his worldview as objectifying as that of the documentary cameras. As a likeable and rather wet hero who acts as a willing instrument of fascism because it's his job and he doesn't want to fuck it up, he's one of the most effectively shocking portrayals of evil I've seen in film. Later, he descends into poverty as one of the underclass and becomes radicalised by the experience -- and as N.I.H. points out, the appropriation of these other SF subgenres, body-horror and schwarzeneggerish action, mirror that in metaphor rather nicely.
However, I felt that these three elements were insufficiently well married together, and in particular that they resulted in distressingly incoherent worldbuilding. The objectified, frankly disgusting aliens of the first third are humanised for us, not through subtle revelations, but through subtitling their dialogue to make it clear that their thought-processes are exactly like ours, and by giving one of them a cute big-eyed spielbergsque lobster-child. It's a copout, and compromises the integrity of the first part. Some of the differences can be rationalised by the fact that Wikus's alien friend and his son are clearly of the officer caste in the aliens' hive-system, but even so it's very tricky to reconcile the grim, shit-smeared arrival of the aliens in the opening montage (in which Close Encounters of the Third Kind is cleverly evoked in order to be scoffed at) with the disneyesque departure of their representatives at the end.
Nor does the central mcguffin have any logic behind it -- no matter how biological the enineering of the aliens' technology may allegedly be (and it all looks mechanical or electronic to me), it makes no sense that exposure to their fuel would mutate a human into one of them. As a method of alienating the protagonist, it's rather less sensible than the plan of the Nigerian gangster characters to take on the aliens' characteristics by eating their body-parts.
These elements felt as if they needed more thought -- which, in what was overall such a thoughtful film, seemed to me a bit of a letdown. Unlike Moon, which felt damn near perfect, I didn't feel it hung together completely as a narrative.
When District 9's most obviously about apartheid, and more generally about the casual subjugation of individuals whom society views as less than human, it's quite devastating. As Not Invented Here's also said, the significance of such a film coming out of South Africa itself (albeit with international money) can't be underestimated. It's just a shame that the film as a whole doesn't, or so I felt, follow through on that initial promise.
I'll still be getting it on DVD, I suspect.
[1] There's a "Moon Unit" joke in there somewhere, but I don't think I've got the willpower.
03 June 2009
I am Jack's Irritating Adolescent Self-Absorption
Up until last Sunday, I'd somehow managed to spend every second of the ten years since its original release not watching Fight Club.
This was, as it turns out, the right decision.
After all the praise I'd heard, I couldn't believe what a pile of faux-radical, pseudo-intellectual drivel it was. To be sure it's well made and well acted and the like -- and I did enjoy the animated Ikea catalogue sequence -- but almost everything about the story itself rubbed me up the wrong way.
[SPOILERS follow, just in case someone's reading who's somehow also managed to preserve their Fight Club virginity yet also cares.]
The intellectual elitism of enlightened Tyler Durden saving the humble working man from his ignorant drudgery was so extreme as to border on the gnostic, while the film's message remained astonishingly dumb. As for the meretriciousness of multi-billionaire Brad Pitt informing us in a film funded by Rupert Murdoch's multinational Fox corporation that -- astonishingly -- people are not defined by their material possessions, while the media control what we see and hear... well, I think you can guess my likely reaction. (Plus did you know soap was made from, like, fat? Eww, gross, dude!)
I also object profoundly to the idea that men have been emasculated by society and can only reclaim their manhood by beating the hell out of one another and blowing stuff up. (Although I admit to having rather less of a problem with the shagging Helena Bonham-Carter part.)
It's true that Tyler Durden is, explicitly, barking mad, so it's possible that the film didn't intend to endorse this worldview of his. (Strictly of his alter ego's, as Tyler himself spends the film, in his intellectually shackled middle-class way, wriggling against it.) It wasn't sufficiently clear about what it did endorse, though, for me to have any confidence that this wasn't what it was doing. Certainly casting the charismatic Pitt in the Keyser Söze / Malcolm Crowe role didn't give me any confidence that his apparent position as a Nietzschean ubermensch was being especially problematised.
Factor in the cheap plays on the audience's disgust (the filthy house, the human-fat soap) and the asinine twist (which is about as difficult to see coming as Godzilla in East Anglia), and you have a film which rises above the handicap of its very decent acting and production values to stand proudly as appalling rubbish.
I'm sorry, I just hated it. It's put me right off the idea of ever reading any Chuck Palahniuk.
This was, as it turns out, the right decision.
After all the praise I'd heard, I couldn't believe what a pile of faux-radical, pseudo-intellectual drivel it was. To be sure it's well made and well acted and the like -- and I did enjoy the animated Ikea catalogue sequence -- but almost everything about the story itself rubbed me up the wrong way.
[SPOILERS follow, just in case someone's reading who's somehow also managed to preserve their Fight Club virginity yet also cares.]
The intellectual elitism of enlightened Tyler Durden saving the humble working man from his ignorant drudgery was so extreme as to border on the gnostic, while the film's message remained astonishingly dumb. As for the meretriciousness of multi-billionaire Brad Pitt informing us in a film funded by Rupert Murdoch's multinational Fox corporation that -- astonishingly -- people are not defined by their material possessions, while the media control what we see and hear... well, I think you can guess my likely reaction. (Plus did you know soap was made from, like, fat? Eww, gross, dude!)
I also object profoundly to the idea that men have been emasculated by society and can only reclaim their manhood by beating the hell out of one another and blowing stuff up. (Although I admit to having rather less of a problem with the shagging Helena Bonham-Carter part.)
It's true that Tyler Durden is, explicitly, barking mad, so it's possible that the film didn't intend to endorse this worldview of his. (Strictly of his alter ego's, as Tyler himself spends the film, in his intellectually shackled middle-class way, wriggling against it.) It wasn't sufficiently clear about what it did endorse, though, for me to have any confidence that this wasn't what it was doing. Certainly casting the charismatic Pitt in the Keyser Söze / Malcolm Crowe role didn't give me any confidence that his apparent position as a Nietzschean ubermensch was being especially problematised.
Factor in the cheap plays on the audience's disgust (the filthy house, the human-fat soap) and the asinine twist (which is about as difficult to see coming as Godzilla in East Anglia), and you have a film which rises above the handicap of its very decent acting and production values to stand proudly as appalling rubbish.
I'm sorry, I just hated it. It's put me right off the idea of ever reading any Chuck Palahniuk.
08 August 2008
Bat Mehen
This week, for reasons of paranomasia and other forms of borderline insanity, I've been mainly writing puns about Egyptian gods. (I'll explain later...) If you feel I should have been writing about vampires instead, well, I'm not disagreeing.
Apologies again to those of you who've already seen this on one mailing list or another, but the only way to keep this blog going while I'm quite so busy is to run "The Best of PPH" while I'm on sabbatical. So...
I saw The Dark Knight on Wednesday. I thought it was great -- very enjoyable, with some brilliant acting. Some spoilers follow...
I didn't believe for a moment that they'd killed Jim Gordon. But at least it provided an opportunity to quote Brian Blessed.
Heath Ledger is, obviously, brilliant, playing the Joker as a shambling, demented individual with no social skills. He somehow manages to have tremendous charisma without any charm whatsoever, and makes the atrocities he sees as practical jokes seem like a convincing, almost rational response to the world around him. It's a more impressive performance than Jack Nicholson's, and that's not to denigrate the former. Where Nicholson's Joker made hideous things seem funny, Ledger's never lets you forget that they're hideous. But also funny. But hideous.
I've no quarrel with anyone else's acting, mind you, but even before his death it was always going to be Ledger who stole the show. I spent ages trying to remember who Maggie Gyllenhaal was, and why I didn't remember her from the first film.
The plot, however, goes somewhat to cock in the last third, with the Joker and Harvey Dent both spiralling out of control in different directions simultaneously. The film feels overlong, and really everything after the Joker escapes, maims Dent and kills Rachel could have been a 20-minute coda focussing on the Joker, with the Dent's revenge plot held in reserve for a future film.
Given the screentime the scarred Dent got, though, I was disappointed that more wasn't done with his duality as Two-Face. Admittedly this would also have been difficult to handle without disappearing into the realms of comic-strip psychology, but if they were going to put Two-Face into a realistic reimagining of Batman (and let's face it, Batman Begins is the most realistic film that could conceivably be made about a billionaire dressing up as a giant bat to fight a league of assassins and a drug-dealing psychiatrist with a bag over his head), I feel they ought to have done it properly.
Of course this isn't helped at all by the fact that Two-Face looks nothing like a horrifically scarred burn victim and everything like a genre movie special-effect, thus demolishing the carefully-constructed edifice of a realistic Gotham City where the villains really are tragically insane people, rather than cartoon characters. Gah.
Generally though, bloody good film. I could just have done with editing out most of the post-Two-Face Dent stuff and keeping it -- with entirely different design work -- for the next film.
(As it is, I'm wondering who they will have as the villain, assuming there is a third film. Two-Face is dead within the fiction, and they couldn't possibly recast Ledger's Joker. Catwoman's been ruined too comprehensively within recent memory by Halle Berry, and most of the other well-known Batman villains head off into the realm of the fantastical or obviously ludicrous. I'm wondering if the Mad Hatter could possibly work...)
Apologies again to those of you who've already seen this on one mailing list or another, but the only way to keep this blog going while I'm quite so busy is to run "The Best of PPH" while I'm on sabbatical. So...
I saw The Dark Knight on Wednesday. I thought it was great -- very enjoyable, with some brilliant acting. Some spoilers follow...
I didn't believe for a moment that they'd killed Jim Gordon. But at least it provided an opportunity to quote Brian Blessed.
Heath Ledger is, obviously, brilliant, playing the Joker as a shambling, demented individual with no social skills. He somehow manages to have tremendous charisma without any charm whatsoever, and makes the atrocities he sees as practical jokes seem like a convincing, almost rational response to the world around him. It's a more impressive performance than Jack Nicholson's, and that's not to denigrate the former. Where Nicholson's Joker made hideous things seem funny, Ledger's never lets you forget that they're hideous. But also funny. But hideous.
I've no quarrel with anyone else's acting, mind you, but even before his death it was always going to be Ledger who stole the show. I spent ages trying to remember who Maggie Gyllenhaal was, and why I didn't remember her from the first film.
The plot, however, goes somewhat to cock in the last third, with the Joker and Harvey Dent both spiralling out of control in different directions simultaneously. The film feels overlong, and really everything after the Joker escapes, maims Dent and kills Rachel could have been a 20-minute coda focussing on the Joker, with the Dent's revenge plot held in reserve for a future film.
Given the screentime the scarred Dent got, though, I was disappointed that more wasn't done with his duality as Two-Face. Admittedly this would also have been difficult to handle without disappearing into the realms of comic-strip psychology, but if they were going to put Two-Face into a realistic reimagining of Batman (and let's face it, Batman Begins is the most realistic film that could conceivably be made about a billionaire dressing up as a giant bat to fight a league of assassins and a drug-dealing psychiatrist with a bag over his head), I feel they ought to have done it properly.
Of course this isn't helped at all by the fact that Two-Face looks nothing like a horrifically scarred burn victim and everything like a genre movie special-effect, thus demolishing the carefully-constructed edifice of a realistic Gotham City where the villains really are tragically insane people, rather than cartoon characters. Gah.
Generally though, bloody good film. I could just have done with editing out most of the post-Two-Face Dent stuff and keeping it -- with entirely different design work -- for the next film.
(As it is, I'm wondering who they will have as the villain, assuming there is a third film. Two-Face is dead within the fiction, and they couldn't possibly recast Ledger's Joker. Catwoman's been ruined too comprehensively within recent memory by Halle Berry, and most of the other well-known Batman villains head off into the realm of the fantastical or obviously ludicrous. I'm wondering if the Mad Hatter could possibly work...)
21 February 2008
Goodness, has it really?
As long as that? Blimey.
I'm actually having grave trouble writing anything at all at the moment, not just posting here. Possible reasons for this might include:
This is why I'm rather glad I've managed to spend today writing a column for Surefish (and on only three coffees, too), even if it does retread some rather familiar ground for anyone who's heard me witter on about my thesis. It isn't this one about TV's Heroes, which as it happens has just gone up today -- some editorial rescheduling at Surefish has meant that that one's been waiting in the pipeline a little while. (I didn't really need to write the next column today at all, in fact, but since I seemed to be making actual progress with it I thought I ought to press on.)
So what else have I been doing recently? Well, consuming various bits of culture, pop- and otherwise, in diverse media. There'll be too many to list, but they include:
I also, last weekend, met up with a cluster of friends whom I love a great deal and get far too sentimental about, together with assorted partners and a baby, to eat food, drink too much and talk random nonsense. Sadly B. was working at the weekend and couldn't come. The whole thing was thoroughly lovely, though, and put me in a far mellower mood after the weekend than I was at the end of last week. Or, unfortunately, this one.
I've also been listening to the Walkman I acquired at (though not for) Christmas. Now I've got over the "My god, it's the soundtrack to my life!" response which comes from stalking about the place with non-diegetic music sounding in your ears, I'm finding it's a good way of consuming the CDs of random audio drama I have lying about the place, as well as discovering quite how limited my music collection is. Recommended.
I'm actually having grave trouble writing anything at all at the moment, not just posting here. Possible reasons for this might include:
- natural idleness
- extended post-Christmas lassitude
- busyness at work
- mild depression
- my caffeine dependency reaching the point where coffee no longer has any actual stimulant effect.
This is why I'm rather glad I've managed to spend today writing a column for Surefish (and on only three coffees, too), even if it does retread some rather familiar ground for anyone who's heard me witter on about my thesis. It isn't this one about TV's Heroes, which as it happens has just gone up today -- some editorial rescheduling at Surefish has meant that that one's been waiting in the pipeline a little while. (I didn't really need to write the next column today at all, in fact, but since I seemed to be making actual progress with it I thought I ought to press on.)
So what else have I been doing recently? Well, consuming various bits of culture, pop- and otherwise, in diverse media. There'll be too many to list, but they include:
- Alan Moore's brilliant and hilarious The Black Dossier -- the latest in his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series -- which is about multiple characters from different fictional universes, including that of Dracula, spying in post-Big-Brother Britain in the 1950s.
- Kim Newman's clever and mildly disturbing Andy Warhol's Dracula -- a a follow-up, though not a particularly recent one, to his Anno Dracula series -- about multiple characters from different fictional universes, including that of Dracula, hanging out with Andy Warhol in New York in the 1970s.
- Paul Magrs' very fine and splendid Something Borrowed -- the sequel to the equally fine and splendid Never the Bride -- about multiple characters from different fictional universes, including that of Dracula, meeting up at a B&B in Whitby in the present day.
- Newtons Sleep, the sixth (or seventh, or eighth, depending how you're counting) Faction Paradox novel and the first from new publishers Random Static. Which is just great, and which I should probably also say more about here soon.
- Iain M. Banks's Matter, which is fun so far, although if you've read the previous Culture novels it's rather noticeably more of the same. Still, there's a lot of incredibly detailed and imaginative worldbuilding, which it's always worth reading Banks-the-S.F.-writer for.
- Cloverfield, which is very clever and interestingly done, but not actually all that entertaining to watch, which is a bit of an oversight. It's rather lucky that they do keep the monster offscreen for most of the time, because when you actually see it it's a bit rubbish. (It also gave me terrible motion sickness, which has been happening more recently. I suspect this is the current cinematic trend towards low-tech verisimilitude, rather than my advancing age, but if it carries on I'm going to have to take travel-sickness pills before going to the cinema, which is silly.)
- Penelope. Christina Ricci -- whom the plot requires to be repulsively ugly -- is sexier as a pig-faced woman than I'd have imagined possible.
- Ashes to Ashes. That Keeley Hawes really isn't John Simm, is she?
- Torchwood, which, while more consistent this season, will have to do an awful lot of arse-gearing before I start feeling it's actually worth my while watching it. (That said, and presumably just to keep me paying attention, the episode Adam was blindingly good.)
I also, last weekend, met up with a cluster of friends whom I love a great deal and get far too sentimental about, together with assorted partners and a baby, to eat food, drink too much and talk random nonsense. Sadly B. was working at the weekend and couldn't come. The whole thing was thoroughly lovely, though, and put me in a far mellower mood after the weekend than I was at the end of last week. Or, unfortunately, this one.
I've also been listening to the Walkman I acquired at (though not for) Christmas. Now I've got over the "My god, it's the soundtrack to my life!" response which comes from stalking about the place with non-diegetic music sounding in your ears, I'm finding it's a good way of consuming the CDs of random audio drama I have lying about the place, as well as discovering quite how limited my music collection is. Recommended.
06 January 2008
6 / 366
Happy New Year, belatedly, to whoever's reading this. Hope you have a splendid time in 2008, and that it brings you everything you might conceivably desire. (Unless you're a U.S. Republican, in which case I'm sorry, but no.)
"2008" in a mirror looks very much like "BOOS". We'll be in a better position to assess the numerological significance of this later in the year.
Since I last posted here, I've flitted around the country like a moth in bloody great Doc Martens, visiting various relatives, in-laws and friends for Christmas and New Year, then spent a week or so recovering from same.
I'm very pleased with various presents, and most weightily with the Compact Oxford English Dictionary, a four-way joint birthday-Christmas gift from my and B.'s parents. It's basically the full twelve volumes of the O.E.D. scrunched up small enough to fit into a single book, plus a magnifying glass. It's enormous and splendid, and has already told me that I was lied to long ago about the etymology of "marmalade". Hurrah.
Very happy also to have got Paul Magrs' Something Borrowed and Twin Freaks, Kim Newman's Andy Warhol's Dracula plus various other books and DVDs of Casino Royale, The Fountain (which I've still not seen, though I love Π) and the outstanding Children of Men. I've also obtained, though non-christmatically, a shiny new Sony MP3man which I need to learn to use, and the utterly splendid League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Black Dossier... bringing to three the number of sequels to successful modern multitextual crossovers of nineteenth-century novel characters which I've acquired in the past fortnight.
Last night B. and I went to see The Golden Compass, which I wish had spent a tenth as much effort getting its script right as it evidently did on its (mostly superlative) special effects. The very obvious attempts to emulate successful recent movies (the spoken introduction telling us about the last remainingRing alethiometer; the rubbish stardust-visionary effect when Lyra uses the same; the casting of Christopher Lee as a sinister old man and the last-minute recasting of Ian-McKellen-by-the-numbers as Iorek Byrnison), together with the deliberate ironing-out of anything contentious Philip Pullman might have had to say about religion, have turned his remarkable visionary parable into a thoroughly generic children's fantasy film.
I particularly enjoyed the visuals accompanying that opening narration, where the contrast between worlds was shown by first presenting the Radcliffe Camera surrounded by modern office-blocks to show our world rooted in reality, and then dissolving into the whimsical fantasy world by replacing these with the buildings which are actually bloody there. I can only imagine the derision with which the Oxford audiences would have reacted to that one.
Thanks to the maniacity of December I've fallen badly behind on writing and on updating this blog. I've rather signally failed to stick to my resolution for 2007 of reading a book a week and blogging about them -- the last time I wrote about what I'd been reading it was early November, and even then I left a couple out. I'll try to rectify this in the next few weeks.
Meanwhile, I'm back to work tomorrow, for the first time this year. Hurrah for Bank Holidays which fall on my working days and prevent me having to take unmanageable amounts of leave.
Enjoy the year. I'll try to blog again before the end of it.
"2008" in a mirror looks very much like "BOOS". We'll be in a better position to assess the numerological significance of this later in the year.
Since I last posted here, I've flitted around the country like a moth in bloody great Doc Martens, visiting various relatives, in-laws and friends for Christmas and New Year, then spent a week or so recovering from same.
I'm very pleased with various presents, and most weightily with the Compact Oxford English Dictionary, a four-way joint birthday-Christmas gift from my and B.'s parents. It's basically the full twelve volumes of the O.E.D. scrunched up small enough to fit into a single book, plus a magnifying glass. It's enormous and splendid, and has already told me that I was lied to long ago about the etymology of "marmalade". Hurrah.
Very happy also to have got Paul Magrs' Something Borrowed and Twin Freaks, Kim Newman's Andy Warhol's Dracula plus various other books and DVDs of Casino Royale, The Fountain (which I've still not seen, though I love Π) and the outstanding Children of Men. I've also obtained, though non-christmatically, a shiny new Sony MP3man which I need to learn to use, and the utterly splendid League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Black Dossier... bringing to three the number of sequels to successful modern multitextual crossovers of nineteenth-century novel characters which I've acquired in the past fortnight.
Last night B. and I went to see The Golden Compass, which I wish had spent a tenth as much effort getting its script right as it evidently did on its (mostly superlative) special effects. The very obvious attempts to emulate successful recent movies (the spoken introduction telling us about the last remaining
I particularly enjoyed the visuals accompanying that opening narration, where the contrast between worlds was shown by first presenting the Radcliffe Camera surrounded by modern office-blocks to show our world rooted in reality, and then dissolving into the whimsical fantasy world by replacing these with the buildings which are actually bloody there. I can only imagine the derision with which the Oxford audiences would have reacted to that one.
Thanks to the maniacity of December I've fallen badly behind on writing and on updating this blog. I've rather signally failed to stick to my resolution for 2007 of reading a book a week and blogging about them -- the last time I wrote about what I'd been reading it was early November, and even then I left a couple out. I'll try to rectify this in the next few weeks.
Meanwhile, I'm back to work tomorrow, for the first time this year. Hurrah for Bank Holidays which fall on my working days and prevent me having to take unmanageable amounts of leave.
Enjoy the year. I'll try to blog again before the end of it.
27 April 2007
Forget Snakes on a Plane...
Kim Newman's history of the Hammer horror film in this month's Fortean Times mentions a "tragically unmade" project entitled Zeppelin vs Pterodactyls.
05 January 2007
Festivity and Christmas Spirit
Well, my last substantial post here was on 21 December. Since then the final panicked stages of Advent have been followed by Christmas, which -- being technically not over until tomorrow -- has also incorporated New Year.
During this time I've:
I should also mention the generous and exciting gift of a digital camera from my parents, although that happened during our visit before Christmas. I'm currently trying to un-bloat the contents of my hard drive so I can download the software and start transferring actual photos. I'll probably post some here, although I may be required to start a Flickr account at some point soon.
During this time I've:
- Wrapped my Christmas presents and distributed them to various relatives, friends and a wife.
- Had people round for pre-Christmas drinks, with much mulling of wine, cracking of nuts and mincing of pies.
- Spent a lovely Christmas Day here in Bristol, starting with a generous Christmas breakfast and punctuated by a pleasant trip across the city to exchange presents with our goddaughter and family.
- Jointly prepared a vast and decadent Christmas dinner with B., then found that (very likely due to the aftermath of that bout of food poisoning, or just possibly the generous breakfast) we both had insufficient appetite to do justice to it.
- Packed in a hurry then headed to B.'s parents for Boxing Day lunch, followed by four days' stay with said in-laws.
- Received a gratifying number of Christmas presents, including The Prisoner scriptbook volume two from B., The Absolute League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volume 2 from her parents, Revolver and Rubber Soul from her granny, Inferno and Genesis of the Daleks on DVD from her big sister and a Dalek T-shirt from her little sister (plus respective boyfriends).
- Returned to Bristol to unpack, comfort the cats and watch Godzilla (one of my presents to B., the other being King Kong. We both enjoy gigantic monsters tearing cities apart.)
- Picked up my brother and sister-in-law's delayed presents from the post office, including the splendid-looking two-DVD edition of Dune.
- Watched somewhere in the region of seven hours of Doctor Who and its spinoffs, which I may be writing about on Parrinium Mines at some point.
- Spent New Year's Eve in a pub with Bath Festivity and some very nice single malt whiskies to hand.
- Gone back to work, which has admittedly been a rather less celebratory experience.
I should also mention the generous and exciting gift of a digital camera from my parents, although that happened during our visit before Christmas. I'm currently trying to un-bloat the contents of my hard drive so I can download the software and start transferring actual photos. I'll probably post some here, although I may be required to start a Flickr account at some point soon.
08 December 2006
Traditional Yuletide Celebrations
The lead article in this month's Fortean Times reminds me, oddly enough, of our recent discussion of shared themes in The Wicker Man and The Prisoner. There J-P suggests that both Summerisle and the Village represent countercultures become mainstream, rebellion becoming authority -- a familiar idea to anyone with a passing interest in Soviet history.
FT's article on Hitler's attempts to replace the German Christmas with an all-Aryan patriotic winter festival, with rituals based loosely on the Norse winter festivities, reminds me that the Nazis, like the Summerisle family, had a yen for neo-pagan reconstructionism. It may be that Summerisle's attempts to replicate "the old religion", and the twentieth-century totalitarian states of which the Village is a microcosm, might not have seemed that far apart to scriptwriters who'd been paying attention during the 1930s.
(I don't have any further conclusions to draw from that, I just thought it was interesting.)
FT's editorial, taking its cue from the lead article, concerns recent campaigns by groups such as the Christian-Muslim Forum to counter the insidious liberal-secular conspiracy to "abolish Christmas" for fear of offending other faiths. By a weird coincidence, it arrived the same day as both The Guardian and Andrew Rilstone ran lengthy articles refuting the idea that any such conspiracy exists, and pointing out that the "evidence" for it is, by and large, absolute bollocks. Both pieces are worth reading.
I've sent a letter to the editors expressing surprise that Fortean Times, of all publications, is unable to spot an urban myth when it sees one.
FT's article on Hitler's attempts to replace the German Christmas with an all-Aryan patriotic winter festival, with rituals based loosely on the Norse winter festivities, reminds me that the Nazis, like the Summerisle family, had a yen for neo-pagan reconstructionism. It may be that Summerisle's attempts to replicate "the old religion", and the twentieth-century totalitarian states of which the Village is a microcosm, might not have seemed that far apart to scriptwriters who'd been paying attention during the 1930s.
(I don't have any further conclusions to draw from that, I just thought it was interesting.)
FT's editorial, taking its cue from the lead article, concerns recent campaigns by groups such as the Christian-Muslim Forum to counter the insidious liberal-secular conspiracy to "abolish Christmas" for fear of offending other faiths. By a weird coincidence, it arrived the same day as both The Guardian and Andrew Rilstone ran lengthy articles refuting the idea that any such conspiracy exists, and pointing out that the "evidence" for it is, by and large, absolute bollocks. Both pieces are worth reading.
I've sent a letter to the editors expressing surprise that Fortean Times, of all publications, is unable to spot an urban myth when it sees one.
03 December 2006
I Am Not a Number, I Am the Green Man
Yesterday I finished reading the first volume of the Prisoner script book (a birthday present from B.), and watched the director's cut of The Wicker Man (part of the three-disc DVD boxed set, a birthday present from J-P[1]).
Both are really very splendid. It's fascinating to see how the original scripts for the first eight Prisoner episodes changed -- usually for the better, though sometimes not -- generally at the instigation of Patrick McGoohan, who had some very definite ideas about the sorts of thing his character would and wouldn't do[2]. Robert Fairclough's editorial apparatus is somewhat erratic and poorly-formatted, but the actual material is well worth any Prisoner fan's time.
The Wicker Man director's cut is also (mostly) an improvement -- not that the original is in any way shabby, but the extra time gives more opportunity for the tension to mount, and the pre-credits sequence set before Sergeant Howie comes to Summerisle makes more sense of some of the later revelations. It's a phenomenally fine film, as I mentioned here last year when I first got around to experiencing it.
However, reading the T.V. scripts and watching the film so close together made me aware of how extensive the similarities are between the two works' underlying conceptions. In that earlier entryI noted in passing their shared evocation of paranoia, but the parallels seem to go rather deeper than that.
[NB: What follows includes SPOILERS for a 33-year-old film and a 38-year-old television series. If you've somehow managed to avoid learning about the plot of either during your life so far, and you still think you might want to watch them one day, then I suggest you go and look at some kittens.]
Both The Prisoner and The Wicker Man are set in isolated microcultures. Both set a single righteous man against the community as a whole. In each the central character is a representative of authority -- Number 6 is a covert government agent, Sgt Howie a police officer. Each protagonist is pious, self-righteous and unlikeable as well as genuinely heroic, while their antagonists are charismatic and seductive as well as sinister. Like the film, many episodes of the T.V. series centre around a deception played out as a trap for the hero, in which the entire community is complicit, including the apparently innocent victim acting as bait. In both, pageantry, ritual, processions and music play a significant part.
(Also, of course, both villages are populated by middle-aged British character actors of the 1960s and 70s -- including John Sharp and the ever-hammy Aubrey Morris -- but that's perhaps of rather less interest.)
The Wicker Man was made five years after The Prisoner, but belongs identifiably to the same era. It's possible that the TV series was an influence on the film, but if so Anthony Shaffer and Robin Hardy don't discuss the fact. What's more the script clearly has a lot in common with Shaffer's other work (especially Sleuth) and that of his brother.
I suspect the similarities help to explain why The Wicker Man, like The Prisoner, immediately grabbed my imagination and gave it a good shaking the moment I first saw it. (Quite why these patterns fit the inside of my head so well is another matter.) What's currently interesting me, though, is whether these similarities translate to shared themes at a deeper level.
Clearly the two works belong to different genres and media: The Wicker Man has a horror film's freedom, even in the 70s, to deal overtly with matters of sex and religion, while The Prisoner has its own genre-based concerns of dystopian politics and social satire.
There's little in The Wicker Man to suggest that Sgt Howie's justifiable paranoia has anything of the Cold War about it. The Summerisle villagers are feudal rather than communist, religious rather than secular and reconstructionist rather than revolutionary. What Howie finds awaiting him is a version of the culture which (supposedly) preceded Western christendom, not that which threatened to succeed it.
On one level, however, Lord Summerisle and his subjects, however enthusiastic about their island's past, are clearly nothing but a bunch of hippies. Howie's appalled reaction is in many ways that of a conservative member of the establishment faced with the licentiousness and disrespect for convention of the younger generation. This is particularly obvious when he interrupts the multiple couplings on the village green, but is equally apparent in his appalled reaction to discovering that the island's schoolchildren are not being taught christian values. In the 1970s, neo-paganism was already part of the counterculture.
Number 6's Village, too, is seen in these terms more often than one might expect. Though natural rebels against the Village's totalitarianism, hippyish characters are shown as being part of its apparatus in A Change of Mind; in the original script for The General, "a fair proportion" of the brainwashed students are said to be "long haired and bearded"[3]; and even in the final episode, Fall Out, where the scruffy, flower-adorned, hip-talking Number 48 appears as an archetypal rebel, his revolt is ultimately subsumed into the Prisoner's paradoxical reassertion of the authoritarian status quo.
One of establishment shibboleths of the time, of course, was precisely that the Soviets were infiltrating Western society through its rebellious youth subcultures. Odd bedfellows though they may have been, Summerisle's neo-pagans and A Change of Mind's Maoist-seeming "Social Group" would have been seen by some as aspects of the same deliberate erosion of traditional (but not too traditional) British values.
More interesting, however, are the themes of faith and sacrifice. While The Prisoner's Village has obvious cultish overtones, the one nod towards making its inhabitants religious is in their obscure use of a salute apparently used by the early church. Where Sgt Howie is explicitly a pious, judgmental, conservative christian, Number 6 is the secular model, espousing similar values without ever commenting on their provenance. Indeed, some explicit references to religion were excised from the script for The Chimes of Big Ben, apparently at the request of the devout McGoohan.
The boundaries between Number 6 and the actor who played him are often difficult to discern, which has led some critics to attempt interpretions of the series as religious allegory. These are rare, though, and tend to be no more convincing than those of secularist critics who see the oppressive Village as representing organised religion.
The ritual with which The Wicker Man culminates sees Howie becoming, in theory "king for a day", allowing him to stand as a sacrifice to propitiate the gods and restore the fruitfulness of the island's crops. The Prisoner's Village shows no interest in agriculture, choosing to replace it with technology. Nevertheless, its rulers never seem to last for very long.
For the most part, each episode of The Prisoner features a different Number 2. Some of them are seen retiring peaceably, or handing over the reins to their predecessors: others, however, are evidently punished for their failure. Of the two who do come back, Colin Gordon's character ends A., B. and C. convinced that he is about to be hauled over the coals by Number 1, before returning for a lucky escape from death in The General[4]. Leo McKern's Number 2 survives The Chimes of Big Ben without mishap, but the events of Once Upon a Time culminate uniquely in his death.
Lord Summerisle's trick, of course, lies in persuading the villagers to sacrifice Howie instead of the true king, his lordship himself: the sacrifice's "kingship" is an entirely notional one. In this respect, the Prisoner episode which comes closest to embodying the same ideas is the election episode, Free for All. At the end of this story, Number 6 has been elected to the position of Number 2, his opponent and predecessor having conceded defeat. A triumphal procession leads him to the Green Dome, where he finally attempts to take charge of the Village.
It's a trick, of course.
Thanks to the Village, Number 6 has become both a king and a fool. He represents the law, being both a covert agent of the British government and the rightfully-elected head of state of the Village. Given his attitude to intimacy, he may even be a virgin. He hasn't, of course, come to the Village of his own free will (although the eventual revelation of Number 1's identity in Fall Out may cast doubt even on that), but in other respects Lord Summerisle would consider him the perfect sacrifice for the continued smooth operation of the Village.
Number 6 isn't burned alive. Instead he's beaten up, more brutally than usual, with his arms held spreadeagled in a crucifix position, before his formerly compliant aide (who seemed, like Rowan Morrison, to be an innocent in all of this) takes the reins of office and returns him ignominiously to his home-from-home. Despite experiencing not-infrequent birth imagery, and being declared dead at least once, Number 6 is never given a death scene of his own.
However, the point about sacrificial godkings -- not that this would have been of much comfort to the late Sgt Howie -- is that their death is seen as a precursor to rebirth. As Miss Rose explains to him, the "life force" of the dead lives on in the form of animals, trees and -- as they hope will happen in Howie's case -- in crops. In the light of this, the fact that McKern's Number 2 is resurrected by technology in Fall Out begins to look rather less like the christian allegory some have painted it as, and more like an S.F. recapitulation of just this type of ritual.
McGoohan's Number 6 and McKern's Number 2 aren't the same person, of course. But Fall Out is, in some readings, a strongly psychoanalytical text, and it certainly presents both men as archetypes of rebellion. Might they -- and Number 48, the Butler, and for that matter anybody else in the Village up to and including "Rover" -- not be aspects of the same person, just as Number 1 is?
If The Prisoner is interested in ancient pagan models of sacrifice and rebirth, then it's evidently in a far less overt way than The Wicker Man. On the other hand, the recurrence of remarkably similar patterns, in a ritual context, suggests that at the very least there's some subconscious referencing going on[5].
Both The Prisoner and The Wicker Man are enormously dense texts, with complex, sometimes apparently contradictory things to say about their subject matter, both overt and hidden. The idea that they might be able to illuminate each other may, I admit, turn out to be slightly mad. Still, I'm reasonably convined that they have more in common than would appear on the face of things.
[1] Lots of people at the party asked me, "Is that the new one?" No, it bloody isn't.
[2] The most egregious example is the nonsensical ending of the otherwise excellent episode Dance of the Dead, which would have ended with Number 6 embracing his Observer, waltzing with the dead-eyed, historically-costumed Villagers in a ritual masque... were it not for McGoohan's insistence that he was only going to dance with Mrs McGoohan. This man was considered for the part of James Bond.
[3] Fairclough's marginal note explains: "A reference to the emerging 'hippy' look that youth culture was beginning to adopt in the mid 1960s. Such a period-specific look was dropped when the scene went before the cameras." It's a shame that nobody thought to do the same when "The General" itself was revealed to be a light-bulb flashing, tape-spooling, punch-card-regurgitating giant metal box of a computer.
[4] Originally these two episodes were intended to be shown together in reverse order, with Gordon's Number 2 barely surviving the events of The General and then spending A., B. and C. on borrowed time. The script of The General was amended to allow him to live.
[5] Not, obviously, to The Wicker Man itself -- but quite possibly to Robert Graves' The White Goddess or James Frazer's The Golden Bough.
Both are really very splendid. It's fascinating to see how the original scripts for the first eight Prisoner episodes changed -- usually for the better, though sometimes not -- generally at the instigation of Patrick McGoohan, who had some very definite ideas about the sorts of thing his character would and wouldn't do[2]. Robert Fairclough's editorial apparatus is somewhat erratic and poorly-formatted, but the actual material is well worth any Prisoner fan's time.
The Wicker Man director's cut is also (mostly) an improvement -- not that the original is in any way shabby, but the extra time gives more opportunity for the tension to mount, and the pre-credits sequence set before Sergeant Howie comes to Summerisle makes more sense of some of the later revelations. It's a phenomenally fine film, as I mentioned here last year when I first got around to experiencing it.
However, reading the T.V. scripts and watching the film so close together made me aware of how extensive the similarities are between the two works' underlying conceptions. In that earlier entryI noted in passing their shared evocation of paranoia, but the parallels seem to go rather deeper than that.
[NB: What follows includes SPOILERS for a 33-year-old film and a 38-year-old television series. If you've somehow managed to avoid learning about the plot of either during your life so far, and you still think you might want to watch them one day, then I suggest you go and look at some kittens.]
Both The Prisoner and The Wicker Man are set in isolated microcultures. Both set a single righteous man against the community as a whole. In each the central character is a representative of authority -- Number 6 is a covert government agent, Sgt Howie a police officer. Each protagonist is pious, self-righteous and unlikeable as well as genuinely heroic, while their antagonists are charismatic and seductive as well as sinister. Like the film, many episodes of the T.V. series centre around a deception played out as a trap for the hero, in which the entire community is complicit, including the apparently innocent victim acting as bait. In both, pageantry, ritual, processions and music play a significant part.
(Also, of course, both villages are populated by middle-aged British character actors of the 1960s and 70s -- including John Sharp and the ever-hammy Aubrey Morris -- but that's perhaps of rather less interest.)
The Wicker Man was made five years after The Prisoner, but belongs identifiably to the same era. It's possible that the TV series was an influence on the film, but if so Anthony Shaffer and Robin Hardy don't discuss the fact. What's more the script clearly has a lot in common with Shaffer's other work (especially Sleuth) and that of his brother.
I suspect the similarities help to explain why The Wicker Man, like The Prisoner, immediately grabbed my imagination and gave it a good shaking the moment I first saw it. (Quite why these patterns fit the inside of my head so well is another matter.) What's currently interesting me, though, is whether these similarities translate to shared themes at a deeper level.
Clearly the two works belong to different genres and media: The Wicker Man has a horror film's freedom, even in the 70s, to deal overtly with matters of sex and religion, while The Prisoner has its own genre-based concerns of dystopian politics and social satire.
There's little in The Wicker Man to suggest that Sgt Howie's justifiable paranoia has anything of the Cold War about it. The Summerisle villagers are feudal rather than communist, religious rather than secular and reconstructionist rather than revolutionary. What Howie finds awaiting him is a version of the culture which (supposedly) preceded Western christendom, not that which threatened to succeed it.
On one level, however, Lord Summerisle and his subjects, however enthusiastic about their island's past, are clearly nothing but a bunch of hippies. Howie's appalled reaction is in many ways that of a conservative member of the establishment faced with the licentiousness and disrespect for convention of the younger generation. This is particularly obvious when he interrupts the multiple couplings on the village green, but is equally apparent in his appalled reaction to discovering that the island's schoolchildren are not being taught christian values. In the 1970s, neo-paganism was already part of the counterculture.
Number 6's Village, too, is seen in these terms more often than one might expect. Though natural rebels against the Village's totalitarianism, hippyish characters are shown as being part of its apparatus in A Change of Mind; in the original script for The General, "a fair proportion" of the brainwashed students are said to be "long haired and bearded"[3]; and even in the final episode, Fall Out, where the scruffy, flower-adorned, hip-talking Number 48 appears as an archetypal rebel, his revolt is ultimately subsumed into the Prisoner's paradoxical reassertion of the authoritarian status quo.
One of establishment shibboleths of the time, of course, was precisely that the Soviets were infiltrating Western society through its rebellious youth subcultures. Odd bedfellows though they may have been, Summerisle's neo-pagans and A Change of Mind's Maoist-seeming "Social Group" would have been seen by some as aspects of the same deliberate erosion of traditional (but not too traditional) British values.
More interesting, however, are the themes of faith and sacrifice. While The Prisoner's Village has obvious cultish overtones, the one nod towards making its inhabitants religious is in their obscure use of a salute apparently used by the early church. Where Sgt Howie is explicitly a pious, judgmental, conservative christian, Number 6 is the secular model, espousing similar values without ever commenting on their provenance. Indeed, some explicit references to religion were excised from the script for The Chimes of Big Ben, apparently at the request of the devout McGoohan.
The boundaries between Number 6 and the actor who played him are often difficult to discern, which has led some critics to attempt interpretions of the series as religious allegory. These are rare, though, and tend to be no more convincing than those of secularist critics who see the oppressive Village as representing organised religion.
The ritual with which The Wicker Man culminates sees Howie becoming, in theory "king for a day", allowing him to stand as a sacrifice to propitiate the gods and restore the fruitfulness of the island's crops. The Prisoner's Village shows no interest in agriculture, choosing to replace it with technology. Nevertheless, its rulers never seem to last for very long.
For the most part, each episode of The Prisoner features a different Number 2. Some of them are seen retiring peaceably, or handing over the reins to their predecessors: others, however, are evidently punished for their failure. Of the two who do come back, Colin Gordon's character ends A., B. and C. convinced that he is about to be hauled over the coals by Number 1, before returning for a lucky escape from death in The General[4]. Leo McKern's Number 2 survives The Chimes of Big Ben without mishap, but the events of Once Upon a Time culminate uniquely in his death.
Lord Summerisle's trick, of course, lies in persuading the villagers to sacrifice Howie instead of the true king, his lordship himself: the sacrifice's "kingship" is an entirely notional one. In this respect, the Prisoner episode which comes closest to embodying the same ideas is the election episode, Free for All. At the end of this story, Number 6 has been elected to the position of Number 2, his opponent and predecessor having conceded defeat. A triumphal procession leads him to the Green Dome, where he finally attempts to take charge of the Village.
It's a trick, of course.
Thanks to the Village, Number 6 has become both a king and a fool. He represents the law, being both a covert agent of the British government and the rightfully-elected head of state of the Village. Given his attitude to intimacy, he may even be a virgin. He hasn't, of course, come to the Village of his own free will (although the eventual revelation of Number 1's identity in Fall Out may cast doubt even on that), but in other respects Lord Summerisle would consider him the perfect sacrifice for the continued smooth operation of the Village.
Number 6 isn't burned alive. Instead he's beaten up, more brutally than usual, with his arms held spreadeagled in a crucifix position, before his formerly compliant aide (who seemed, like Rowan Morrison, to be an innocent in all of this) takes the reins of office and returns him ignominiously to his home-from-home. Despite experiencing not-infrequent birth imagery, and being declared dead at least once, Number 6 is never given a death scene of his own.
However, the point about sacrificial godkings -- not that this would have been of much comfort to the late Sgt Howie -- is that their death is seen as a precursor to rebirth. As Miss Rose explains to him, the "life force" of the dead lives on in the form of animals, trees and -- as they hope will happen in Howie's case -- in crops. In the light of this, the fact that McKern's Number 2 is resurrected by technology in Fall Out begins to look rather less like the christian allegory some have painted it as, and more like an S.F. recapitulation of just this type of ritual.
McGoohan's Number 6 and McKern's Number 2 aren't the same person, of course. But Fall Out is, in some readings, a strongly psychoanalytical text, and it certainly presents both men as archetypes of rebellion. Might they -- and Number 48, the Butler, and for that matter anybody else in the Village up to and including "Rover" -- not be aspects of the same person, just as Number 1 is?
If The Prisoner is interested in ancient pagan models of sacrifice and rebirth, then it's evidently in a far less overt way than The Wicker Man. On the other hand, the recurrence of remarkably similar patterns, in a ritual context, suggests that at the very least there's some subconscious referencing going on[5].
Both The Prisoner and The Wicker Man are enormously dense texts, with complex, sometimes apparently contradictory things to say about their subject matter, both overt and hidden. The idea that they might be able to illuminate each other may, I admit, turn out to be slightly mad. Still, I'm reasonably convined that they have more in common than would appear on the face of things.
[1] Lots of people at the party asked me, "Is that the new one?" No, it bloody isn't.
[2] The most egregious example is the nonsensical ending of the otherwise excellent episode Dance of the Dead, which would have ended with Number 6 embracing his Observer, waltzing with the dead-eyed, historically-costumed Villagers in a ritual masque... were it not for McGoohan's insistence that he was only going to dance with Mrs McGoohan. This man was considered for the part of James Bond.
[3] Fairclough's marginal note explains: "A reference to the emerging 'hippy' look that youth culture was beginning to adopt in the mid 1960s. Such a period-specific look was dropped when the scene went before the cameras." It's a shame that nobody thought to do the same when "The General" itself was revealed to be a light-bulb flashing, tape-spooling, punch-card-regurgitating giant metal box of a computer.
[4] Originally these two episodes were intended to be shown together in reverse order, with Gordon's Number 2 barely surviving the events of The General and then spending A., B. and C. on borrowed time. The script of The General was amended to allow him to live.
[5] Not, obviously, to The Wicker Man itself -- but quite possibly to Robert Graves' The White Goddess or James Frazer's The Golden Bough.
08 November 2006
Middle of the Road
Well, I've now more or less recovered from my 35th birthday party at the weekend, which celebrated the halfway point in my biblically mandated lifespan with appropriate gravity. I'm still rather pleased with the grim and forbidding invitation I designed for the occasion, so I've webbed it here for those of you who haven't seen it already.
In practice, of course, the day was happy, fun and thoroughly enjoyable. Lunch at Zerodegrees (in my case caramelised pear and gorgonzola pizza, accompanied by black lager and pale ale) was followed by a cake which B. had bought and iced for the occasion. We then led a party to Bristol Zoo to observe the various fine animals on display there.
It was the first time I'd visited the new Monkey Jungle, where red-ruffed lemurs scamper freely around the visitors' paths and handrails without intervening bars or glass. The lions, penguins and gorillas were as entertaining as ever, although for some reason the capybara were nowhere to be seen.
In the evening we went on to the Portwall Tavern, which had kindly reserved us all space and got a chef in specially to provide Pieminister pies. They sold us Doombar, Barnstormer and various other beers that I was having too good a time to pay sufficently close attention to.
B. had kindly ensured that it wouldn't matter if I got drunk and embarrassed myself by assembling an activity that would provide a whole different order of embarrassment: a pub quiz based on my life, which she'd compiled by consulting friends, relatives and, apparently, pretty much everyone I'd ever met.
Subjects ranged from my first words and reaction to the birth of my baby brother, to my recent writing and participation in mailing-list controversies. The final round looked like this (click for enlarged image):
and involved identifying the contents of my DVD and video shelves.
My wife's devotion, and her creativity, never cease to amaze me. I'm so very lucky to have her.
It was lovely to see the nearly 40 people from different eras and aspects of my life, including university contemporaries, fellow authors, sisters-in-law, friends' children including my goddaughter, and various teenage and childhood companions, including some who've known me getting on for three decades now.
Too many of these are people I don't see nearly often enough these days, so it was wonderful to catch up with so many of them. People drifted in and out during the different phases of the day, but still there were only a few who I didn't manage to chat to properly.
Thanks to the extreme generosity of family and friends, I now have altogether more new books than I'm likely to get around to reading, which is just the way I like it. Titles I was particularly happy to be given included:
Other rather splendid things from generous people included the DVDs of Mirrormask (from B. again) and the 3-disc edition of The Wicker Man, a case of fair trade wine and a similar number of bottles of exciting beer, and (from goddaughter E. and family) the adoption papers for a two-toed sloth.
It was the kind of weekend which leaves you replete, slightly hungover, full of love for humanity in general and your friends in particular, and mildly dazed by the sensory overload of it all. In short, utterly lovely.
It's just a shame I can't justify having another one until I'm halfway to 80.
In practice, of course, the day was happy, fun and thoroughly enjoyable. Lunch at Zerodegrees (in my case caramelised pear and gorgonzola pizza, accompanied by black lager and pale ale) was followed by a cake which B. had bought and iced for the occasion. We then led a party to Bristol Zoo to observe the various fine animals on display there.
It was the first time I'd visited the new Monkey Jungle, where red-ruffed lemurs scamper freely around the visitors' paths and handrails without intervening bars or glass. The lions, penguins and gorillas were as entertaining as ever, although for some reason the capybara were nowhere to be seen.
In the evening we went on to the Portwall Tavern, which had kindly reserved us all space and got a chef in specially to provide Pieminister pies. They sold us Doombar, Barnstormer and various other beers that I was having too good a time to pay sufficently close attention to.
B. had kindly ensured that it wouldn't matter if I got drunk and embarrassed myself by assembling an activity that would provide a whole different order of embarrassment: a pub quiz based on my life, which she'd compiled by consulting friends, relatives and, apparently, pretty much everyone I'd ever met.
Subjects ranged from my first words and reaction to the birth of my baby brother, to my recent writing and participation in mailing-list controversies. The final round looked like this (click for enlarged image):
and involved identifying the contents of my DVD and video shelves.
My wife's devotion, and her creativity, never cease to amaze me. I'm so very lucky to have her.
It was lovely to see the nearly 40 people from different eras and aspects of my life, including university contemporaries, fellow authors, sisters-in-law, friends' children including my goddaughter, and various teenage and childhood companions, including some who've known me getting on for three decades now.
Too many of these are people I don't see nearly often enough these days, so it was wonderful to catch up with so many of them. People drifted in and out during the different phases of the day, but still there were only a few who I didn't manage to chat to properly.
Thanks to the extreme generosity of family and friends, I now have altogether more new books than I'm likely to get around to reading, which is just the way I like it. Titles I was particularly happy to be given included:
- The Prisoner Scripts Volume 1 from B.;
- Fragile Things and Watching the English from the aforementioned baby brother and his wife;
- Persian Fire, Collapse and (tokenistically) Promethea Book 5 and King Rat from my parents-in-law;
- Never the Bride and Accelerando from other relatives, again through the magic of book tokens;
- and River of Gods, Iron Council, 100% and Dying Planet from various friends.
Other rather splendid things from generous people included the DVDs of Mirrormask (from B. again) and the 3-disc edition of The Wicker Man, a case of fair trade wine and a similar number of bottles of exciting beer, and (from goddaughter E. and family) the adoption papers for a two-toed sloth.
It was the kind of weekend which leaves you replete, slightly hungover, full of love for humanity in general and your friends in particular, and mildly dazed by the sensory overload of it all. In short, utterly lovely.
It's just a shame I can't justify having another one until I'm halfway to 80.
26 October 2006
How Cod Rot
I've been meaning for a while to do a full-scale media update here, giving my opinions on Ada or Ardor (which I finally finished), Children of Men (which B. and I went to see a couple of weeks ago), The Netherlands National Circus (who we took goddaughter E. to see the other weekend), Robin Hood (which, after three episodes, I've now seen as much of as I'll ever need to, thanks), and the like.
But I've got stuff to write. Specifically, this novel proposal I'm working on, and an article on Philip K. Dick (obviously) for Movement magazine. So it'll have to wait, or if we're unlucky possibly never happen.
I can't, though, let the first two episodes of the first ever Doctor Who spinoff series in T.V. form go past without some form of comment. Those of you who frequent the same mailing lists as me may have seen this in part already -- and those of you who, through digital disenfranchisement, haven't yet seen the episodes in question may wish to avert your eyes for fear of spoilers -- but...
For the first two episodes of a new SF series, I thought Torchwood was pretty damn good. Not up to the standard of Ultraviolet -- which to me has become the quality bar which all telefantasy, British or otherwise, should aim to match [1] -- but pretty damn good nonetheless.
I enjoyed the way that the early structure of the first episode, Everything Changes, closely echoed that of Rose before heading off in its own quite different direction after the halfway mark. I also enjoyed they way Captain Jack's words to Gwen in the second episode, Day One, echoed the Doctor's to Rose in that same episode -- except that Jack tells Gwen to go home and live her normal life in parallel with working at Torchwood. It was a nice way of establishing the similarities and differences from the parent programme.
The direct Who continuity, on the other hand -- references to recent alien invasions and to the Cybermen, and indeed the guest appearance of the Doctor's missing hand -- seemed annoyingly superfluous (and, as Andrew suggests, rather out of place). I'm assuming at this stage, from the coy references to "the right kind of Doctor" and the like, that Torchwood itself, rather than the parent series, won't see any direct payoff to these elements. This seems to be shortchanging Torchwood, which really needs to develop as its own entity.
Russell Davies' writing on Everything Changes was good, better than Chris Chibnall's on Day One (unfortunate, given that Chibnall seems to have written four episodes of the season and RTD just the one). There were some sharp dialogue and good jokes in both, though. The degree of horror is a big improvement on the sanitised kiddie-violence seen in New Who. I also welcome the shagging (not least because the character involved in most of it was rather cute), but feel that this element needs to become less self-consciously adult in order not to seem adolescent.
I also greatly enjoyed the twist at the end of the first episode -- coming out of nowhere but making perfect sense, as all the best twists do. I was less happy that it wrote out one of the supposed regular characters -- not just because it leaves the cast down one attractive woman, but also because I found her more interesting than any of the others except Jack [2].
I had a problem with Gwen in particular. The character's a waterfall -- nice to look at, but awfully wet. Eve Myles puts in the same performance as she did for Gwyneth the psychic maid in The Unquiet Dead, which doesn't work -- Gwen needs to be a lot more hard-edged (and it's difficult enough as it is to manage that in a lilting Welsh accent). As a viewpoint character she's going to need an awful lot of slapping into shape.
Toshiko, who first appeared (as a medic, at least purportedly -- now the character's a computer genius for no obvious reason) in Aliens of London, has yet to be as interesting as she was in those five minutes. Owen is obnoxious (and a borderline-rapist, but that's causing all kinds of "discussion" on various fansites and I don't want to go there), which is at least interesting, but the character has yet to do anything to layer that characteristic into three-dimensionality. Ianto is a little baffling -- the character seems to be written as Alfred to Jack's Batman, but the actor isn't playing him that way. The pterodactyl's great, though.
I wasn't keen on the suggestion that none of these people apart from Gwen have lives outside work -- it makes them much less interesting at a stroke. Given that we've already seen that what Owen and Suzie get up to outside Torchwood is as interesting as what happens within it, I'm hoping that this is going to be gradually exposed as a polite fiction (although that would make nonsense of Day One's already rather feeble "humanising the alien-hunters" theme).
Jack himself is, as ever, very very cool. I liked the way the first episode was themed around resurrection, and that his experiences in that area are shown to have changed him. (It may be awkward later on to have a hero who can't die, mind you, but that's superhero fiction for you.)
That said... I'm not so keen on the Angelic broody angst he was displaying. It's possibly true that "gung-ho omnisexual action hero" isn't a three-dimensional enough concept for a central character rather than a hero's foil... but I'd rather see him still acting gung-ho with hidden depths of despair (as per Christopher Eccleston's Doctor) than simply becoming more subdued, as he appears to have done. The whole appeal of the character is that he's larger than life, and his newfound status as a magical vessel of life should enhance that (as it did, rather halfheartedly, when he snogged the alien-sex-parasite-girl). I'd like to see more of that going on as the series progresses.
Overall... yes, it's very derivative, never more so than during the aerial shots of Jack brooding on rooftops while in the background Cardiff does its sporting best to look like Los Angeles. I did enjoy it massively, though... and if it follows the trajectories of a good many first seasons of telefantasy shows, it could end up being rather excellent. Watch this space [3].
[1] I'm told that there are personal reasons why Joe Ahearne, Ultraviolet's writer-director, has never written or directed Doctor Who (or indeed Torchwood) after directing several of the best episodes of Season One. I can't help wishing that the show-runners would sort them out, whatever they are, because he's surely needed.
[2] Come to think of it, this was one of the elements which recalled Ultraviolet rather strongly, along with the more obvious "policeperson becomes involved with supernatural covert ops group" plotline. If a late episode doesn't involve Jack being forced to revive Suzie with the technology he himself has interdicted, I shall be very surprised.
[3] Or rather, watch Parrinium Mines, where I'm crossposting this and where any further reviews of Torchwood probably ought to go.
But I've got stuff to write. Specifically, this novel proposal I'm working on, and an article on Philip K. Dick (obviously) for Movement magazine. So it'll have to wait, or if we're unlucky possibly never happen.
I can't, though, let the first two episodes of the first ever Doctor Who spinoff series in T.V. form go past without some form of comment. Those of you who frequent the same mailing lists as me may have seen this in part already -- and those of you who, through digital disenfranchisement, haven't yet seen the episodes in question may wish to avert your eyes for fear of spoilers -- but...
For the first two episodes of a new SF series, I thought Torchwood was pretty damn good. Not up to the standard of Ultraviolet -- which to me has become the quality bar which all telefantasy, British or otherwise, should aim to match [1] -- but pretty damn good nonetheless.
I enjoyed the way that the early structure of the first episode, Everything Changes, closely echoed that of Rose before heading off in its own quite different direction after the halfway mark. I also enjoyed they way Captain Jack's words to Gwen in the second episode, Day One, echoed the Doctor's to Rose in that same episode -- except that Jack tells Gwen to go home and live her normal life in parallel with working at Torchwood. It was a nice way of establishing the similarities and differences from the parent programme.
The direct Who continuity, on the other hand -- references to recent alien invasions and to the Cybermen, and indeed the guest appearance of the Doctor's missing hand -- seemed annoyingly superfluous (and, as Andrew suggests, rather out of place). I'm assuming at this stage, from the coy references to "the right kind of Doctor" and the like, that Torchwood itself, rather than the parent series, won't see any direct payoff to these elements. This seems to be shortchanging Torchwood, which really needs to develop as its own entity.
Russell Davies' writing on Everything Changes was good, better than Chris Chibnall's on Day One (unfortunate, given that Chibnall seems to have written four episodes of the season and RTD just the one). There were some sharp dialogue and good jokes in both, though. The degree of horror is a big improvement on the sanitised kiddie-violence seen in New Who. I also welcome the shagging (not least because the character involved in most of it was rather cute), but feel that this element needs to become less self-consciously adult in order not to seem adolescent.
I also greatly enjoyed the twist at the end of the first episode -- coming out of nowhere but making perfect sense, as all the best twists do. I was less happy that it wrote out one of the supposed regular characters -- not just because it leaves the cast down one attractive woman, but also because I found her more interesting than any of the others except Jack [2].
I had a problem with Gwen in particular. The character's a waterfall -- nice to look at, but awfully wet. Eve Myles puts in the same performance as she did for Gwyneth the psychic maid in The Unquiet Dead, which doesn't work -- Gwen needs to be a lot more hard-edged (and it's difficult enough as it is to manage that in a lilting Welsh accent). As a viewpoint character she's going to need an awful lot of slapping into shape.
Toshiko, who first appeared (as a medic, at least purportedly -- now the character's a computer genius for no obvious reason) in Aliens of London, has yet to be as interesting as she was in those five minutes. Owen is obnoxious (and a borderline-rapist, but that's causing all kinds of "discussion" on various fansites and I don't want to go there), which is at least interesting, but the character has yet to do anything to layer that characteristic into three-dimensionality. Ianto is a little baffling -- the character seems to be written as Alfred to Jack's Batman, but the actor isn't playing him that way. The pterodactyl's great, though.
I wasn't keen on the suggestion that none of these people apart from Gwen have lives outside work -- it makes them much less interesting at a stroke. Given that we've already seen that what Owen and Suzie get up to outside Torchwood is as interesting as what happens within it, I'm hoping that this is going to be gradually exposed as a polite fiction (although that would make nonsense of Day One's already rather feeble "humanising the alien-hunters" theme).
Jack himself is, as ever, very very cool. I liked the way the first episode was themed around resurrection, and that his experiences in that area are shown to have changed him. (It may be awkward later on to have a hero who can't die, mind you, but that's superhero fiction for you.)
That said... I'm not so keen on the Angelic broody angst he was displaying. It's possibly true that "gung-ho omnisexual action hero" isn't a three-dimensional enough concept for a central character rather than a hero's foil... but I'd rather see him still acting gung-ho with hidden depths of despair (as per Christopher Eccleston's Doctor) than simply becoming more subdued, as he appears to have done. The whole appeal of the character is that he's larger than life, and his newfound status as a magical vessel of life should enhance that (as it did, rather halfheartedly, when he snogged the alien-sex-parasite-girl). I'd like to see more of that going on as the series progresses.
Overall... yes, it's very derivative, never more so than during the aerial shots of Jack brooding on rooftops while in the background Cardiff does its sporting best to look like Los Angeles. I did enjoy it massively, though... and if it follows the trajectories of a good many first seasons of telefantasy shows, it could end up being rather excellent. Watch this space [3].
[1] I'm told that there are personal reasons why Joe Ahearne, Ultraviolet's writer-director, has never written or directed Doctor Who (or indeed Torchwood) after directing several of the best episodes of Season One. I can't help wishing that the show-runners would sort them out, whatever they are, because he's surely needed.
[2] Come to think of it, this was one of the elements which recalled Ultraviolet rather strongly, along with the more obvious "policeperson becomes involved with supernatural covert ops group" plotline. If a late episode doesn't involve Jack being forced to revive Suzie with the technology he himself has interdicted, I shall be very surprised.
[3] Or rather, watch Parrinium Mines, where I'm crossposting this and where any further reviews of Torchwood probably ought to go.
20 September 2006
My Top 5 DVDs of All Time
I wrote the following as a sample for a job I didn't get. It's the sort of thing many people seem to post on their blogs, so I thought I might as well offer it up for your edification.
It is, admittedly, somewhat constrained by the limited number of DVDs I've actually watched, and in particular bothered with the extras for.
My Top 5 DVDs of All Time
(in 50 words each)
Firefly: The Complete Series (4-disc boxed set)
Tragically cancelled before its time, Joss ‘Buffy’ Whedon’s space-opera Western was the cleverest, funniest, most stylish TV sci-fi in years. Experience all 14 episodes along with featurettes, deleted scenes, an outtakes reel that’s actually funny, and commentaries from actors and crew so witty, warm and articulate you’ll hate them. Glorious.
I Claudius (5-disc boxed set)
Roll over Rome – Derek Jacobi stars as the Emperor Claudius in ten hours of the greatest BBC drama ever made. Where else would you see Blackadder’s Nursie as a poisoner, or Christopher Biggins playing Nero? Features include documentaries, actors’ favourite scenes and an interactive genealogy of that nice Caesar family.
Jam (2-disc set)
Christopher Morris’ unnerving sketch comedy of dead babies and psychotic doctors comes complete with its fuzzier late-night remix, Jaaaaam. Each episode plays in yet another alternative format, such as a ‘ffwd version’ or ‘quadrilateral lava lamp version’. If you missed the day Kilroy lost his mind, then welcome… in Jam.
Minority Report (2-disc set)
Tom Cruise stars as a ‘pre-crime’ cop on the run, after being fingered as a future murderer. The extras disc goes overboard with design sketches, storyboards, biographies and no fewer than 17 featurettes, with menus in the film’s own hands-on interactive graphics style. The movie’s not at all bad, either.
Doctor Who: The Beginning (3-disc boxed set)
Sinister, giggling William Hartnell abducts two of his granddaughter’s teachers in his time-machine, in Doctor Who the way it was meant to be. These first three stories bring us cavemen, insanity and eerie machine-people called ‘Daleks’. The best of many bonuses brings long-deleted historical story Marco Polo to partial life.
It is, admittedly, somewhat constrained by the limited number of DVDs I've actually watched, and in particular bothered with the extras for.
My Top 5 DVDs of All Time
(in 50 words each)
Firefly: The Complete Series (4-disc boxed set)
Tragically cancelled before its time, Joss ‘Buffy’ Whedon’s space-opera Western was the cleverest, funniest, most stylish TV sci-fi in years. Experience all 14 episodes along with featurettes, deleted scenes, an outtakes reel that’s actually funny, and commentaries from actors and crew so witty, warm and articulate you’ll hate them. Glorious.
I Claudius (5-disc boxed set)
Roll over Rome – Derek Jacobi stars as the Emperor Claudius in ten hours of the greatest BBC drama ever made. Where else would you see Blackadder’s Nursie as a poisoner, or Christopher Biggins playing Nero? Features include documentaries, actors’ favourite scenes and an interactive genealogy of that nice Caesar family.
Jam (2-disc set)
Christopher Morris’ unnerving sketch comedy of dead babies and psychotic doctors comes complete with its fuzzier late-night remix, Jaaaaam. Each episode plays in yet another alternative format, such as a ‘ffwd version’ or ‘quadrilateral lava lamp version’. If you missed the day Kilroy lost his mind, then welcome… in Jam.
Minority Report (2-disc set)
Tom Cruise stars as a ‘pre-crime’ cop on the run, after being fingered as a future murderer. The extras disc goes overboard with design sketches, storyboards, biographies and no fewer than 17 featurettes, with menus in the film’s own hands-on interactive graphics style. The movie’s not at all bad, either.
Doctor Who: The Beginning (3-disc boxed set)
Sinister, giggling William Hartnell abducts two of his granddaughter’s teachers in his time-machine, in Doctor Who the way it was meant to be. These first three stories bring us cavemen, insanity and eerie machine-people called ‘Daleks’. The best of many bonuses brings long-deleted historical story Marco Polo to partial life.
12 September 2006
Words and Pictures
Quick roundup of books and other media I've been experiencing in the last couple of weeks...
Books
I've now finished Pete Rollins' book How (Not) to Speak of God, which I'd recommend highly to anyone with a sincere interest in christian mysticism and how it relates to a contemporary urban context. I wouldn't go so far as to say it's changed my life, but it's furthered some of the changes which were taking place there anyway.
I also finished James Chapman's Inside the Tardis: The Worlds of Doctor Who, which was more of a disappointment. Chapman's forays into television history are very interesting (he's gleaned a lot of information about Doctor Who from the BBC archives, as well as biographical and other material relating to the main players in its development), but his criticism is rather pedestrian. It's not tainted by fan politics in the way I felt Kim Newman's was, but the comments on the individual stories rarely rise above the level of received opinion. I'd have preferred to read a full-length history of the TV programme, without the kind of commentary I can read by the bucketload on the web.
I'm still working my way through Something More and Ada or Ardor. Good though they both are (particular in the case of the Nabokov), I am rather hoping that I finish one of them soon, so I can move onto something a bit more lively.
TV
B. and I have been watching the first season of Frasier, after she found the videos going cheap on eBay. Despite the distracting laughter track (not present on the British broadcast unless I'm very much mistaken) I've been enjoying it a lot. There are occasional juddery episodes this season as the scriptwriters commit the Friends error of thinking that we care about the characters when they're not making jokes, but it remains by far the best U.S. sitcom I've ever seen.
The remarkable thing is how appalling the whole concept sounds on paper. It's a spinoff from Cheers, you see, with this neurotic psychiatrist -- and his brother, who's also a psychiatrist, and even more neurotic than he is! And their father's crusty and cantankerous, but keeps the family together with his homespun blue-collar wisdom. Plus there's a comedy English nurse! And a funny dog!
It ought to be absolutely dismal. Somehow, though, it ended up with scalpel-sharp, witty, character-driven scripts and some brilliant comedy performances.
Kelsey Grammar is uneven as Frasier himself -- good when the material's subtle, but pretty terrible when it requires him to ham it up. But Jane Leeves completely salvages Daphne by playing her entirely straight, as a working-class Mancunian whose naturalism anchors even the weirdest things the character's required to say and do. And David Hyde Pearce is incapable of opening his mouth as Niles -- in fact, it's rare to see him twitch a muscle -- without being chest-hurtingly hilarious. Even Moose the dog as Eddie the dog is impressively well-trained.
Film
The less said about M Night Shyamalan's The Lady in the Water the better, really. I actually rather enjoyed The Village and (until the last ten minutes) Signs, despite their being clearly not in the same class as The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable... but dear, oh dear.
The plot's arbitrary and free-associating (Shyamalan seriously seems to think that, because it's fantasy, he can make it up as he goes along, rather than having to state his ground-rules early on and stick to them), the characters are cardboard cutouts (and as for casting himself as the tortured, neglected genius whose writing will one day usher in a new era of peace and enlightenment...) and the ending abandons Shyamalan's trademark "Ooh, that's clever" (or, in the case of Signs, "Good grief, does he really think that's clever?") in favour of a resounding "Er... so is that it?".
There are two good ideas in the film: the monster that can lie completely flat and has grass growing from its back, and the bodybuilder (played by a thoroughly wasted Rico from Six Feet Under) who's developing only one side of his body. The former is swiftly abandoned in favour of generic evil-dog action, the latter is a throwaway with no relevance to the plot or anything else.
Very much not recommended.
What else? ...Oh yes, I watched Pitch Black for the first time the other day, and was favourably impressed.
It has a reputation as a rather dire no-brain action flick, which I don't think is warranted at all. Vin Diesel is intrinsically ridiculous, it's true, but his character has more than the standard one dimension, and some of the others even aspire to three. The cinematography's clever and textured, and the setting appears to have been worked out by someone with both a modicum of intelligence and an interest in serious S.F. (This may be explained, if Wikipedia's any guide, by the story being loosely based on Asimov's short story "Nightfall".)
There's even a positive Islamic character, whose journey of faith we're meant to sympathise with. It's difficult to imagine that happening in a big-budget action film these days.
So... surprisingly better than I expected. Although not good enough to give me any inclination towards watching the sequel.
Books
I've now finished Pete Rollins' book How (Not) to Speak of God, which I'd recommend highly to anyone with a sincere interest in christian mysticism and how it relates to a contemporary urban context. I wouldn't go so far as to say it's changed my life, but it's furthered some of the changes which were taking place there anyway.
I also finished James Chapman's Inside the Tardis: The Worlds of Doctor Who, which was more of a disappointment. Chapman's forays into television history are very interesting (he's gleaned a lot of information about Doctor Who from the BBC archives, as well as biographical and other material relating to the main players in its development), but his criticism is rather pedestrian. It's not tainted by fan politics in the way I felt Kim Newman's was, but the comments on the individual stories rarely rise above the level of received opinion. I'd have preferred to read a full-length history of the TV programme, without the kind of commentary I can read by the bucketload on the web.
I'm still working my way through Something More and Ada or Ardor. Good though they both are (particular in the case of the Nabokov), I am rather hoping that I finish one of them soon, so I can move onto something a bit more lively.
TV
B. and I have been watching the first season of Frasier, after she found the videos going cheap on eBay. Despite the distracting laughter track (not present on the British broadcast unless I'm very much mistaken) I've been enjoying it a lot. There are occasional juddery episodes this season as the scriptwriters commit the Friends error of thinking that we care about the characters when they're not making jokes, but it remains by far the best U.S. sitcom I've ever seen.
The remarkable thing is how appalling the whole concept sounds on paper. It's a spinoff from Cheers, you see, with this neurotic psychiatrist -- and his brother, who's also a psychiatrist, and even more neurotic than he is! And their father's crusty and cantankerous, but keeps the family together with his homespun blue-collar wisdom. Plus there's a comedy English nurse! And a funny dog!
It ought to be absolutely dismal. Somehow, though, it ended up with scalpel-sharp, witty, character-driven scripts and some brilliant comedy performances.
Kelsey Grammar is uneven as Frasier himself -- good when the material's subtle, but pretty terrible when it requires him to ham it up. But Jane Leeves completely salvages Daphne by playing her entirely straight, as a working-class Mancunian whose naturalism anchors even the weirdest things the character's required to say and do. And David Hyde Pearce is incapable of opening his mouth as Niles -- in fact, it's rare to see him twitch a muscle -- without being chest-hurtingly hilarious. Even Moose the dog as Eddie the dog is impressively well-trained.
Film
The less said about M Night Shyamalan's The Lady in the Water the better, really. I actually rather enjoyed The Village and (until the last ten minutes) Signs, despite their being clearly not in the same class as The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable... but dear, oh dear.
The plot's arbitrary and free-associating (Shyamalan seriously seems to think that, because it's fantasy, he can make it up as he goes along, rather than having to state his ground-rules early on and stick to them), the characters are cardboard cutouts (and as for casting himself as the tortured, neglected genius whose writing will one day usher in a new era of peace and enlightenment...) and the ending abandons Shyamalan's trademark "Ooh, that's clever" (or, in the case of Signs, "Good grief, does he really think that's clever?") in favour of a resounding "Er... so is that it?".
There are two good ideas in the film: the monster that can lie completely flat and has grass growing from its back, and the bodybuilder (played by a thoroughly wasted Rico from Six Feet Under) who's developing only one side of his body. The former is swiftly abandoned in favour of generic evil-dog action, the latter is a throwaway with no relevance to the plot or anything else.
Very much not recommended.
What else? ...Oh yes, I watched Pitch Black for the first time the other day, and was favourably impressed.
It has a reputation as a rather dire no-brain action flick, which I don't think is warranted at all. Vin Diesel is intrinsically ridiculous, it's true, but his character has more than the standard one dimension, and some of the others even aspire to three. The cinematography's clever and textured, and the setting appears to have been worked out by someone with both a modicum of intelligence and an interest in serious S.F. (This may be explained, if Wikipedia's any guide, by the story being loosely based on Asimov's short story "Nightfall".)
There's even a positive Islamic character, whose journey of faith we're meant to sympathise with. It's difficult to imagine that happening in a big-budget action film these days.
So... surprisingly better than I expected. Although not good enough to give me any inclination towards watching the sequel.
08 August 2006
Warning: Potential Double-Entendre Overload
And that other piece of information for which you've presumably all spent the week agog with anticipation:
My newspaper article should, God willing, appear next Saturday (12 August) in The Guardian -- specifically its listings supplement, The Guide. It's about one of my perennial obsessions, Philip K. Dick, the film of whose novel A Scanner Darkly is due out in the U.K. on Friday 18 August. I'm very pleased, both with the piece and -- as you might imagine -- with the fact of its publication.
My newspaper article should, God willing, appear next Saturday (12 August) in The Guardian -- specifically its listings supplement, The Guide. It's about one of my perennial obsessions, Philip K. Dick, the film of whose novel A Scanner Darkly is due out in the U.K. on Friday 18 August. I'm very pleased, both with the piece and -- as you might imagine -- with the fact of its publication.
28 July 2006
Reviewing Random Bits of Media Tat
I've not yet blogged a summary of the epic Buffy the Vampire Slayer rewatch, and now the experience has receded from my head rather.
It seems to have taken us around nine months, from rather earlier than this post to shortly before this one. It's been fascinating, watching seven years of televisual evolution compressed into that short a time. As the aesthetic of the show shifts and changes there's often a sense that the plot is being made up as they go along (notably with Angel's swiftly-undone death at the end of Season Two), but still there are character stories (such as Willow's sexual development and the Buffy-Spike romance) which show every sign of having been planned years in advance.
The episodes do show a certain tendency to settle into formula as time passes, and the plot emphasis shifts seismically from the individual episode to the season-long story arc. Nevertheless, Season Seven remains as good as (the admittedly rather patchy) Season One. Both are mindblowingly excellent in certain episodes (e.g. Angel and Conversations with Dead People), but distinctly ropy in others (Teacher's Pet, First Date). Both have strong character-driven climaxes which explore the personal consequences of Buffy's calling... although thinking on it, that's true for all the other seasons as well.
It's true that, in that final year, some of the regular characters are sidelined in favour of newcomers like Andrew and Kennedy... but introducing new faces and making us care about them has been a staple of the series from very early on. (And the only one who's actively annoying is Molly, whose brutal murder by Caleb is just retribution for her atrocious attempt at a cockney accent.)
Certainly I see no sign that the series went into decline after Season Three -- as stated on fansites passim with regard to this and, oddly, every other series ever. It's true that there's a sustained peak between Seasons Two and Four, and in particular from Halloween (The One With The Halloween Costumes) to Restless (The One Where They're All Asleep), but the only sustained trough is in Season Six, with the unfortunate treatment of Willow's magic addiction compounded by the dismal Doublemeat Palace. And that same season offers not only the greatest episode ever in Once More, with Feeling, but also the surprisingly brave Normal Again.
So pfah.
* * *
After Buffy, we worked our way very much more quickly through Ultraviolet, which at a beautifully contained six episodes is exactly one twenty-fourth of Buffy's length.
It's just as marvellous, although in quite different ways: where Buffy has extravagant wit, linguistic creativity and supernatural spectacle, Ultraviolet relies on insinuation, misdirection and double meaning. The dialogue may sound mundane in comparison, but almost everything anybody says has multiple meanings depending on the context in which you understand it. Even its vampires (who are smarter, more organised and deadlier than the ones in Buffy, although also more morally ambivalent) exist in a dual context, being seen both as the mirror-defying supernatural impossibilities they traditionally are, and as a scientific phenomenon susceptible to rational investigation.
One strength the series do share is in crafting a strong and sympathetic ensemble of characters with whose conflicts and predicaments we constantly identify. The climax of the final episode, where all four members of the shadowy vampire-killing hit-squad, together with a vampire and his potential victim, act out their individual concerns and tensions in concert through the same simple sequence of events, is a masterwork of ambiguity and shifting perspective.
Having recently seen more of writer-director Joe Ahearne's directing work in various Doctor Who episodes, I also found myself recognising distinctive tricks like the superimposition of faces in partially reflective glass, the almost subliminal use of religious paraphernalia and a peculiar way of lighting faces in semi-darkness which gives them a halo-like luminosity. Now I'm desperate to see what Ahearne could do with a Who script of his own.
* * *
Superman Returns, on the other hand, was a disappointment -- especially coming from Brian Singer, who made such an excellent job of directing the first two X-Men films.
Much has been made of its rather slavish adulation of the 1970s Superman movies, but mostly I just thought it went on too bloody long. Honestly, it could stand to lose a good 45 minutes -- it would tighten up the action sequences enormously and would allow the excision of all the small-cute-child / father-son-bonding business which Hollywood is under the impression it does so well.
The only thing there really should have been more of was Kevin Spacey camping it up as Lex Luthor, but unfortunately we'd already seen all of his best moments in the trailer. Given that the astonishing "bullet bounces from Superman's eye" sequence was also in there, this did leave the film itself with remarkably little to offer for its two-and-a-half-hour duration.
Given the extent to which Singer plays on the parallels between Superman and God (and / or Jesus) -- showing him floating above the world listening to humanity's cries of help, and later falling from the skies in that cruciform pose characteristic of Hollywood heroes who are in the process of sacrificing themselves -- I'd even have welcomed some theological debate, just to liven things up. How does Superman choose which situations He should intervene in, and when He should let nature take its course? Why are the Americans His chosen people? How exactly can He justify buggering off to Krypton for five years and abandoning us to Luthor and, implicitly, 9/11?
Mostly this kind of thing makes me groan in films, but in this particular case it would have livened it up no end.
* * *
And speaking of spurious S.F. theology... B. and I have just started watching Battlestar Galactica on D.V.D. Prior to borrowing the three-hour miniseries from the local vicar last month, I hadn't seen any Galactica since 1980, when it was only just beginning to be regarded as a camp classic rather than a dreadful load of old balls.
So I'm very much behind the curve here, I know... but having watched the miniseries and the first episode proper, this new series is looking really rather good. Military-grade hard-S.F. space-opera has never been my thing in books, but Babylon 5 gave me an appreciation of its potential on T.V., especially when combined with grown-up politics. Beginning the whole story with a crippling defeat for the good guys is a bold move, and seems to be paying off very well.
I imagine a whole season of such grimness will become rather unrelenting -- as indeed the miniseries was -- but I'm actually really enjoying a fictional universe which takes itself as seriously as this. Great stuff.
It seems to have taken us around nine months, from rather earlier than this post to shortly before this one. It's been fascinating, watching seven years of televisual evolution compressed into that short a time. As the aesthetic of the show shifts and changes there's often a sense that the plot is being made up as they go along (notably with Angel's swiftly-undone death at the end of Season Two), but still there are character stories (such as Willow's sexual development and the Buffy-Spike romance) which show every sign of having been planned years in advance.
The episodes do show a certain tendency to settle into formula as time passes, and the plot emphasis shifts seismically from the individual episode to the season-long story arc. Nevertheless, Season Seven remains as good as (the admittedly rather patchy) Season One. Both are mindblowingly excellent in certain episodes (e.g. Angel and Conversations with Dead People), but distinctly ropy in others (Teacher's Pet, First Date). Both have strong character-driven climaxes which explore the personal consequences of Buffy's calling... although thinking on it, that's true for all the other seasons as well.
It's true that, in that final year, some of the regular characters are sidelined in favour of newcomers like Andrew and Kennedy... but introducing new faces and making us care about them has been a staple of the series from very early on. (And the only one who's actively annoying is Molly, whose brutal murder by Caleb is just retribution for her atrocious attempt at a cockney accent.)
Certainly I see no sign that the series went into decline after Season Three -- as stated on fansites passim with regard to this and, oddly, every other series ever. It's true that there's a sustained peak between Seasons Two and Four, and in particular from Halloween (The One With The Halloween Costumes) to Restless (The One Where They're All Asleep), but the only sustained trough is in Season Six, with the unfortunate treatment of Willow's magic addiction compounded by the dismal Doublemeat Palace. And that same season offers not only the greatest episode ever in Once More, with Feeling, but also the surprisingly brave Normal Again.
So pfah.
* * *
After Buffy, we worked our way very much more quickly through Ultraviolet, which at a beautifully contained six episodes is exactly one twenty-fourth of Buffy's length.
It's just as marvellous, although in quite different ways: where Buffy has extravagant wit, linguistic creativity and supernatural spectacle, Ultraviolet relies on insinuation, misdirection and double meaning. The dialogue may sound mundane in comparison, but almost everything anybody says has multiple meanings depending on the context in which you understand it. Even its vampires (who are smarter, more organised and deadlier than the ones in Buffy, although also more morally ambivalent) exist in a dual context, being seen both as the mirror-defying supernatural impossibilities they traditionally are, and as a scientific phenomenon susceptible to rational investigation.
One strength the series do share is in crafting a strong and sympathetic ensemble of characters with whose conflicts and predicaments we constantly identify. The climax of the final episode, where all four members of the shadowy vampire-killing hit-squad, together with a vampire and his potential victim, act out their individual concerns and tensions in concert through the same simple sequence of events, is a masterwork of ambiguity and shifting perspective.
Having recently seen more of writer-director Joe Ahearne's directing work in various Doctor Who episodes, I also found myself recognising distinctive tricks like the superimposition of faces in partially reflective glass, the almost subliminal use of religious paraphernalia and a peculiar way of lighting faces in semi-darkness which gives them a halo-like luminosity. Now I'm desperate to see what Ahearne could do with a Who script of his own.
* * *
Superman Returns, on the other hand, was a disappointment -- especially coming from Brian Singer, who made such an excellent job of directing the first two X-Men films.
Much has been made of its rather slavish adulation of the 1970s Superman movies, but mostly I just thought it went on too bloody long. Honestly, it could stand to lose a good 45 minutes -- it would tighten up the action sequences enormously and would allow the excision of all the small-cute-child / father-son-bonding business which Hollywood is under the impression it does so well.
The only thing there really should have been more of was Kevin Spacey camping it up as Lex Luthor, but unfortunately we'd already seen all of his best moments in the trailer. Given that the astonishing "bullet bounces from Superman's eye" sequence was also in there, this did leave the film itself with remarkably little to offer for its two-and-a-half-hour duration.
Given the extent to which Singer plays on the parallels between Superman and God (and / or Jesus) -- showing him floating above the world listening to humanity's cries of help, and later falling from the skies in that cruciform pose characteristic of Hollywood heroes who are in the process of sacrificing themselves -- I'd even have welcomed some theological debate, just to liven things up. How does Superman choose which situations He should intervene in, and when He should let nature take its course? Why are the Americans His chosen people? How exactly can He justify buggering off to Krypton for five years and abandoning us to Luthor and, implicitly, 9/11?
Mostly this kind of thing makes me groan in films, but in this particular case it would have livened it up no end.
* * *
And speaking of spurious S.F. theology... B. and I have just started watching Battlestar Galactica on D.V.D. Prior to borrowing the three-hour miniseries from the local vicar last month, I hadn't seen any Galactica since 1980, when it was only just beginning to be regarded as a camp classic rather than a dreadful load of old balls.
So I'm very much behind the curve here, I know... but having watched the miniseries and the first episode proper, this new series is looking really rather good. Military-grade hard-S.F. space-opera has never been my thing in books, but Babylon 5 gave me an appreciation of its potential on T.V., especially when combined with grown-up politics. Beginning the whole story with a crippling defeat for the good guys is a bold move, and seems to be paying off very well.
I imagine a whole season of such grimness will become rather unrelenting -- as indeed the miniseries was -- but I'm actually really enjoying a fictional universe which takes itself as seriously as this. Great stuff.
01 June 2006
Spiceworld: The Movie
On Monday night I watched David Lynch's Dune for the first time in roughly twenty years. I'd forgotten how bloody good it was.
Wikipedia tells me that Dune made huge losses, and my Encyclopedia of Science Fiction opines moreover that "seldom has a big-budget genre film been so execrated by fans and film critics alike", adding that "its narrative is confused to the point of incoherence" [p357]. Which is odd.
If anything, I thought the film erred on the side of telling us too much -- the access we were given to the characters' secret thoughts in voiceover (an odd approach in itself, when shared across quite so many characters as this) was overdone, to the extent that I wondered if it might have been a late afterthought following studio panic. Very likely Frank Herbert's novel is more coherent (certainly it has the space to be, being over 600 pages long as opposed to just over two hours), but I had no problem following the complex, factionalised politics, the deep and complex history or the technological innnovations.
As for the occasional impressionistic storytelling... well, it's a David Lynch film. Compared with Mulholland Drive or Firewalk with Me it's a masterpiece of lucidity.
What really impressed me, though -- and I know this is exactly what you'd all expect me to say -- was the worldbuilding. In this Lynch is assured, deft and totally coherent, creating a faceted, intricately-etched galactic society where the numerous factions (each with their own cultures, costumes, histories, technologies and in some cases languages) relate to one another as parts of a convincing, utterly vivid whole. He's helped in this, presumably, by the deep and detailed background of the novel -- but he transforms it into something wholly visual, told through architecture and landscape and costume and colour and artwork and (inevitably, this being Lynch) body morphology.
It's a full-immersion world, one which takes you in and, for the space of two hours, allows you to walk around inside somebody else's imagination. There are moments (the personal forcefields, the Spacer Guild control room) when the special effects in retrospect look rather... well, improvable, but the magnificent visual imagination of the film persuades the eye to accept them at face value. The set pieces -- the Sandworm scenes particularly -- can only be described as Star Wars with brains.
(The film's also, as I've only now realised, an enormous visual influence on Babylon 5, and in particular the culture of the Centauri. The palaces, the uniforms, the bald prophetesses -- even the visual content of the latter's prophecies -- are lifted pretty much entire. Well, I suppose Lynch wasn't using them any more, and it does make the culture in question far more convincing than just another set of generic aliens.)
It's the only work of media SF which has truly managed to convince me that long historical millennia have elapsed since everything I was familiar with passed away. That's a magnificent trick to pull off. (The one point on which it sadly falls down is that almost every member of this galactic society -- even those called things like "Shaddam" and "Yueh" -- is noticeably white, whereas the world they live as part of is clearly derived at a great distance from Arabic-Islamic culture.)
In the face of the sheer intelligent spectacle of the film, the achievements of the cast become largely irrelevant -- fortunately, as many of them aren't all that good. It's entertaining to see young Sting ogling young Kyle McLachlan, though, and even more so to see a slightly pre-Next Generation Patrick Stewart with long flowing hair... at the back.
When I first saw Dune I would have been thirteen: I have the January 1985 reprint of the book (with an image from the movie on the front), which I must have bought after watching it for the first time. I can't remember now how far I managed to get into it -- not very far, I imagine, despite how much the film had thrilled me. To the thirteen-year-old me it seemed dull and wordy, and for years I was convinced that this was actually the case.
Seeing the film again -- and having so many of my adult SF-reader buttons pressed by it -- has convinced me to give it another try. I may even seek out the Sci-Fi Channel miniseries and see how it measures up.
I may not go as far as reading all the prequels, though.
Wikipedia tells me that Dune made huge losses, and my Encyclopedia of Science Fiction opines moreover that "seldom has a big-budget genre film been so execrated by fans and film critics alike", adding that "its narrative is confused to the point of incoherence" [p357]. Which is odd.
If anything, I thought the film erred on the side of telling us too much -- the access we were given to the characters' secret thoughts in voiceover (an odd approach in itself, when shared across quite so many characters as this) was overdone, to the extent that I wondered if it might have been a late afterthought following studio panic. Very likely Frank Herbert's novel is more coherent (certainly it has the space to be, being over 600 pages long as opposed to just over two hours), but I had no problem following the complex, factionalised politics, the deep and complex history or the technological innnovations.
As for the occasional impressionistic storytelling... well, it's a David Lynch film. Compared with Mulholland Drive or Firewalk with Me it's a masterpiece of lucidity.
What really impressed me, though -- and I know this is exactly what you'd all expect me to say -- was the worldbuilding. In this Lynch is assured, deft and totally coherent, creating a faceted, intricately-etched galactic society where the numerous factions (each with their own cultures, costumes, histories, technologies and in some cases languages) relate to one another as parts of a convincing, utterly vivid whole. He's helped in this, presumably, by the deep and detailed background of the novel -- but he transforms it into something wholly visual, told through architecture and landscape and costume and colour and artwork and (inevitably, this being Lynch) body morphology.
It's a full-immersion world, one which takes you in and, for the space of two hours, allows you to walk around inside somebody else's imagination. There are moments (the personal forcefields, the Spacer Guild control room) when the special effects in retrospect look rather... well, improvable, but the magnificent visual imagination of the film persuades the eye to accept them at face value. The set pieces -- the Sandworm scenes particularly -- can only be described as Star Wars with brains.
(The film's also, as I've only now realised, an enormous visual influence on Babylon 5, and in particular the culture of the Centauri. The palaces, the uniforms, the bald prophetesses -- even the visual content of the latter's prophecies -- are lifted pretty much entire. Well, I suppose Lynch wasn't using them any more, and it does make the culture in question far more convincing than just another set of generic aliens.)
It's the only work of media SF which has truly managed to convince me that long historical millennia have elapsed since everything I was familiar with passed away. That's a magnificent trick to pull off. (The one point on which it sadly falls down is that almost every member of this galactic society -- even those called things like "Shaddam" and "Yueh" -- is noticeably white, whereas the world they live as part of is clearly derived at a great distance from Arabic-Islamic culture.)
In the face of the sheer intelligent spectacle of the film, the achievements of the cast become largely irrelevant -- fortunately, as many of them aren't all that good. It's entertaining to see young Sting ogling young Kyle McLachlan, though, and even more so to see a slightly pre-Next Generation Patrick Stewart with long flowing hair... at the back.
When I first saw Dune I would have been thirteen: I have the January 1985 reprint of the book (with an image from the movie on the front), which I must have bought after watching it for the first time. I can't remember now how far I managed to get into it -- not very far, I imagine, despite how much the film had thrilled me. To the thirteen-year-old me it seemed dull and wordy, and for years I was convinced that this was actually the case.
Seeing the film again -- and having so many of my adult SF-reader buttons pressed by it -- has convinced me to give it another try. I may even seek out the Sci-Fi Channel miniseries and see how it measures up.
I may not go as far as reading all the prequels, though.
13 March 2006
Masks and Machines
I've made a smallish update to the website today, adding to the A Life Worth Living pages my rejected story submissions for Big Finish's most recent follow-up volume, Something Changed. There are plot spoilers for the book, but as it's been out a while now I'm assuming that that shouldn't be a huge problem for anybody, given the appropriate amount of warning.
While I fully respect the editor Simon Guerrier's judgement about which submissions were going to fit into the volume and which wouldn't, I do feel slightly wistful reading these again, as any of the three would have been huge fun to write. Ah, well.
You can read the first chapter of Something Changed online at the Big Finish site.
B. and I went to see Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean's stunning Mirrormask at the Watershed on Saturday. It's a mindblowingly good film -- if you've ever marvelled at the visual texture and general bloody weirdness of McKean's art, then seeing it translated into a fully realised animated world with actors walking around in it is unmissable. Gaiman's schizoid fairy-tale of a script was equally magnificent, although I'm not entirely sure about the ending.
[SPOILERS follow -- highlight the whitespace to read:]
During her time in the otherworld, Helena has been watching the Shadow Princess living her life for her: arguing with her father, dating unsuitable boys, burning her artwork and generally acting out. Helena's trapped sensation as she gazes out at this, helpless to intervene, is a powerful metaphor for the the tiny trace of rationality left in our psyches during our years of hormone-fuelled teenage excess -- which in Helena's case we know to be exacerbated by her mother's illness.
Unfortunately, the metaphor is de-clawed, and the plot rendered somewhat nonsensical, by the revelation at the end that only a night has passed while Helena has been in the otherworld, and that her mother is recovering fine from her operation. I couldn't help feeling that a more fitting, more emotionally honest and generally more Gaimanesque ending would have had Helena returning to a world where her mother's operation had been a failure, and where the Princess's actions had consequences for Helena to deal with.
[SPOILERS finish.]
Still a marvellous film, though, and one I'd recommend to more or less everybody likely to be reading this.
While I fully respect the editor Simon Guerrier's judgement about which submissions were going to fit into the volume and which wouldn't, I do feel slightly wistful reading these again, as any of the three would have been huge fun to write. Ah, well.
You can read the first chapter of Something Changed online at the Big Finish site.
B. and I went to see Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean's stunning Mirrormask at the Watershed on Saturday. It's a mindblowingly good film -- if you've ever marvelled at the visual texture and general bloody weirdness of McKean's art, then seeing it translated into a fully realised animated world with actors walking around in it is unmissable. Gaiman's schizoid fairy-tale of a script was equally magnificent, although I'm not entirely sure about the ending.
[SPOILERS follow -- highlight the whitespace to read:]
During her time in the otherworld, Helena has been watching the Shadow Princess living her life for her: arguing with her father, dating unsuitable boys, burning her artwork and generally acting out. Helena's trapped sensation as she gazes out at this, helpless to intervene, is a powerful metaphor for the the tiny trace of rationality left in our psyches during our years of hormone-fuelled teenage excess -- which in Helena's case we know to be exacerbated by her mother's illness.
Unfortunately, the metaphor is de-clawed, and the plot rendered somewhat nonsensical, by the revelation at the end that only a night has passed while Helena has been in the otherworld, and that her mother is recovering fine from her operation. I couldn't help feeling that a more fitting, more emotionally honest and generally more Gaimanesque ending would have had Helena returning to a world where her mother's operation had been a failure, and where the Princess's actions had consequences for Helena to deal with.
[SPOILERS finish.]
Still a marvellous film, though, and one I'd recommend to more or less everybody likely to be reading this.
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