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The golden age of the silver screen
Jan. 7th, 2011 01:44 pmDavid Niven starred in my favourite film ever, and though I don't remember much about his autobiography The Moon's a Balloon, I do retain a sensation - as with some marvellous party - that it was utterly wonderful. So over Christmas I've been dipping into Bring on the Empty Horses, his selection of brief memoirs and pen portraits of other Hollywood greats. And make no mistake, Niven is a terrible name-dropper - but he lived a life where the names were worth dropping. So we get him playing a round of golf with Clark Gable and Douglas Bader, or escorting a pissed F Scott Fitzgerald off the set (where a cricket game has been set up like baseball because William Wyler's a pillock), or being literally thrown to the sharks by Errol Flynn. He was there when Humphrey Bogart's kids met Noel Coward, he got roped in when Frank Sinatra wanted to take Kruschev's wife to Disneyland himself, and he had the misfortune to be sat next to Spencer Tracy at Jimmy Stewart's stag night. He's not the greatest prose stylist who ever lived, but he's OK, and with material like that, OK is all you really need. And with perfect timing, just as I was finishing it off my free Lovefilm trial sent me The Bishop's Wife, in which Niven - normally one of the most charming men who ever lived - has the twin handicaps of playing an overworked stuffed shirt of a bishop, and having Cary Grant - the most charming man who ever lived - playing opposite him as a rather unconventional angel. The whole thing comes across like a Wings of Desire for a simpler - if not altogether naive - age. And given it's all about Christmas miracles, it turned up just in time - if I'd watched it any later than yesterday the Yule Goblins might have got me.
In the evening,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
xandratheblue brought over a film which was somewhat different: Zombie Strippers!. But for all the deiberate, gleeful trashiness of the film, it's also surprisingly smart. Robert Englund, for instance, plays one Ian Essko, and his strip club has rhinoceros iconography. His partner is called Madame Blavatsky. Each of the strippers represents a different approach, drawn from the history of Western philosophy, to trying times. The zombie virus affects women less rapidly than men - so the patrons of the strip club get dehumanised much more drastically than the women, who in the short term seem empowered. Certainly it is not quite as clever as it thinks it is, but it's a lot cleverer than the middlebrow drivel which normally wins film or book prizes for addressing these issues. Also, it has more breasts and headshots.
Spartacus: Blood and Sand is another hybrid of carnage and smarts, in rather different proportions. Like all the best American TV of recent years, it's about America - and because of the way the past few decades went, that means it's about the world. A world where the poor are enlisted as allies, betrayed, and then when they protest, enslaved and sent out to die. The rich don't even enjoy their power because they're so busy jockeying for position amongst each other. But John Hannah and Lucy Lawless own this show, and they're playing the squeezed middle - trying to edge their way up the ladder even as they get sort-of-rich on the suffering of the real poor. Well, at least they can still afford (on credit, of course) a few little luxuries, like slaves to deal with the foreplay before they start screwing. Because while yes, there is some sand, like I said on Facebook a better title would have been Spartacus: Blood, Nudity and Swearing. The foul language is inventive in almost the same way as Deadwood or The Thick of It - albeit also occasionally ludicrous. Something one can say for the violence too, done in an OTT, stylised fashion with fountains of bright red blood that would be risible if 300 hadn't paved the way. You can tell this didn't cost as much as HBO's Rome, say, but it works, mostly. And this in spite of what could have been a major problem - to wit, none of the gladiators can act. Well, Spartacus himself just about manages it, but I think the rest are wrestlers or Gladiators in the modern sense or something. However, they all look suitably tough and get more than sufficiently bloody when they get in the arena (or scrap outside it), so they'll do. Oh, and also, Spartacus isn't actually called that, but so far he keeps getting stopped by something or other whenever he's about to tell us his real name. I bet the season finale reveal is that it's Trevor, or possibly Biggus Dickus. All of this is from Starz, the US cable network that's co-producing the next series of Torchwood. If they handle all of their output like this, it could be spectacular.
(Update: some details about that Torchwood just came through - and interestingly, they play into Lawrence Miles' theory about Jack-style immortality somehow becoming a cancer on reality. Which I'm sure is entirely coincidental, and I'm equally sure Miles won't see that way)
In the evening,
xandratheblue brought over a film which was somewhat different: Zombie Strippers!. But for all the deiberate, gleeful trashiness of the film, it's also surprisingly smart. Robert Englund, for instance, plays one Ian Essko, and his strip club has rhinoceros iconography. His partner is called Madame Blavatsky. Each of the strippers represents a different approach, drawn from the history of Western philosophy, to trying times. The zombie virus affects women less rapidly than men - so the patrons of the strip club get dehumanised much more drastically than the women, who in the short term seem empowered. Certainly it is not quite as clever as it thinks it is, but it's a lot cleverer than the middlebrow drivel which normally wins film or book prizes for addressing these issues. Also, it has more breasts and headshots. Spartacus: Blood and Sand is another hybrid of carnage and smarts, in rather different proportions. Like all the best American TV of recent years, it's about America - and because of the way the past few decades went, that means it's about the world. A world where the poor are enlisted as allies, betrayed, and then when they protest, enslaved and sent out to die. The rich don't even enjoy their power because they're so busy jockeying for position amongst each other. But John Hannah and Lucy Lawless own this show, and they're playing the squeezed middle - trying to edge their way up the ladder even as they get sort-of-rich on the suffering of the real poor. Well, at least they can still afford (on credit, of course) a few little luxuries, like slaves to deal with the foreplay before they start screwing. Because while yes, there is some sand, like I said on Facebook a better title would have been Spartacus: Blood, Nudity and Swearing. The foul language is inventive in almost the same way as Deadwood or The Thick of It - albeit also occasionally ludicrous. Something one can say for the violence too, done in an OTT, stylised fashion with fountains of bright red blood that would be risible if 300 hadn't paved the way. You can tell this didn't cost as much as HBO's Rome, say, but it works, mostly. And this in spite of what could have been a major problem - to wit, none of the gladiators can act. Well, Spartacus himself just about manages it, but I think the rest are wrestlers or Gladiators in the modern sense or something. However, they all look suitably tough and get more than sufficiently bloody when they get in the arena (or scrap outside it), so they'll do. Oh, and also, Spartacus isn't actually called that, but so far he keeps getting stopped by something or other whenever he's about to tell us his real name. I bet the season finale reveal is that it's Trevor, or possibly Biggus Dickus. All of this is from Starz, the US cable network that's co-producing the next series of Torchwood. If they handle all of their output like this, it could be spectacular.
(Update: some details about that Torchwood just came through - and interestingly, they play into Lawrence Miles' theory about Jack-style immortality somehow becoming a cancer on reality. Which I'm sure is entirely coincidental, and I'm equally sure Miles won't see that way)
