'huge, queer and tawdry' but 'much admired by the public'

A song about Sally Sparrow! I'm not sure whether it's actually any cop; it does that thing that Scott Walker's Seventh Seal does and mainly just summarises the plot of 'Blink' to music. And the music is not massively original. And yet...

Skins got straight to the dark stuff this time out, didn't it? Not just the opening incident, which I suspect will define the whole series, but Thomas' home life, with a nice kid who wants to be a part of society being dragged down by his backwards-ass mother and the insular church she forces him to attend. All too common and tragic an experience for young immigrants, I fear. I love that they start the series here, with the character who's probably furthest from the experience of the average viewer - they don't even feel the need to lure the kids in with the sex and drugs romps first anymore.
Also: never mind the police, when the terrifying authority figures on TV start to look younger, you know you're getting old. Chris Addison? Really?

A double bill of Mad Men was slightly too much for me; I don't know how box set viewers cope. There looks to be a change of direction this season; with Sterling Cooper sold to perfidious Albion (its representatives verging on parody with their love of tea and pubs...oh, wait, I love tea and pubs, don't I?) Don et al have not just lost the agency, they have lost their agency in a wider sense. No longer the buccaneering capitalists of the first two seasons, now they are strangled by contradictory instructions from head office, their work suddenly all for nothing - just like life in a modern office. Which makes it easier to identify with them, but did any of us ever watch Mad Men to see your own situation echoed?
As to the sub-plot about Betty's dad, how did I never notice before that the senile old coot was a John McCain lookalike? Surely a plotline which missed its moment.

I gave up on Secret Diary of a Call Girl around the same time Belle de Jour herself (still pseudonymous at the time) admitted she wouldn't be watching if it weren't about her, but I still wanted to catch a little of Billie interviewing Dr Brooke Magnanti because...well, pictures tell you a little about someone, but not as much as seeing them move and talk. And at first I thought, she's not what I expected, but then I realised, of course she is. I had her down as a lot like several people I know, and if they were being interviewed on TV rather than in the sort of situations her book describes, then yes, they would probably come across like this too.

Just as everyone told me, the final episode of Dollhouse's first season was the best - but, in such a way that you couldn't have made the whole series like that. It needed the build, the weeks of routine assignments, even if they did make for fairly generic TV at the time. Some stories just can't be told best by every component being brilliant, which is a bit of an arse for both the storyteller and the audience - particularly if it means that lots of the audience don't persevere and the storyteller gets cut off after two seasons. The second of which, presumably, will take place in the gap between the penultimate episode of Season One and the finale - which itself then contained moments scattered around from prequel to glimpses of that interim. Babylon 5 tried something like this with 'The Deconstruction of Falling Stars', but even that started by flashing further forward than this, and then went on a linear drive into the far future; here Whedon has really circumscribed where else Dollhouse could have gone, even if he did leave a couple of points ambiguous. The premise, though, is terrifying; like a lot of SF fans I really enjoyed Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon books, but Dollhouse is a much more rigorous take on where personality transfer technology could leave humanity.

There are plenty of films with two actors playing the same character - usually an older or a younger version of the star. But I can't think of many with four plus actors in the same part. This week, I saw two, and in both cases one of the actors sharing was Heath Ledger.
I was interested in I'm Not There even before I eventually fell for Bob Dylan as a performer rather than just a songwriter. Because biopics bore me so easily - always the same few variations on the old arc - and because this was Todd Haynes, who already did the oblique approach so well with Bowie and Iggy and the rest in Velvet Goldmine. And the two films share more than a little: the transfer of power between different avatars of Dylan reminds me of the green jewel in the earlier film; there's a journalist out to unveil origins, though here it's not the backbone of the plot; above all, there's the question of whether music can change the world, and what happens to the musician if it can't. But the big difference is that Haynes clearly never felt betrayed by Dylan like he did by Bowie. He loves all his Dylans equally - even if, like most people, I was left a little cold by the Richard Gere outlaw Dylan. The others, though...I loved having Batman and the Joker both play the same part (see, Alan? 'The Killing Joke' did have some external resonance after all), then sharing it with the Virgin Queen. And did they know when they cast this, or Bright Star, that Ben Whishaw would be playing both Dylan and Keats, that old lit-crit cliche given (rather handsome) life. So much truer than the standard biopic, and probably not even that much less factual. Though I say that as someone who knows very little about Dylan's life - just enough to wince when he buys a motorcycle.
I'm Not There was planned that way. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus was not, but you'd never guess it. I have no idea what was changed in the script, but one can almost suspect that Terry Gilliam, so used to being shafted by whatever cosmic entity it is that likes messing with him, was filming in such an order that he could work around the loss of Ledger. Which would normally mean that instead Christopher Plummer would have died, or maybe Tom Waits, or the lad from Red Riding would have been eaten by foxes or something, but just this once the stupid obstacle in Gilliam's way was one that he could work around. There aren't half some queasy moments, scenes with Ledger's character that gain a whole new resonance - but always in such a way that it strengthens the film. ( spoilers ) among its many other flights of fancy. And such flights of fancy they are! I can't remember the last film I saw which was so visually rich, whether in its worlds of the imagination, or in its London. And it does have to take place in London, doesn't it? The grandest, most fabled city in the world - but also one with grabbing thugs spilling out of crappy pubs, and Homebases insisting you spend spend spend, and its perpetual building sites.
Ashes to Ashes fans should be aware that Shaz gets a small role, but the real revelation is Lily Cole. I knew she was pretty, but I'd never seen her move, or speak, and so I'd never realised she was beautiful, let alone that she could act. Which given that face, and that she's just gone up to Cambridge, seems terribly unfair, but then like the film is so intent on reminding us, the world is full of wonders.

I also saw Crank this week. There's not so much to say about that one; like Shoot 'Em Up it's the action movie distilled to its purest form and injected into your eyeball with a syringe made of guns - smarter than it lets on, while also being the best sort of big dumb fun. During its ITV transmission, there was also an ad for the ITV4 debut of Joss Whedon's Dollhouse - two hours earlier. Well done, ITV. Said trailer didn't do anything useful like inform me of a repeat, but I tracked one down and...well, when I first heard about Dollhouse I thought, hang on, isn't that basically Joe 90 - The Sexy Years? The first episode didn't convince me otherwise but, because it's Whedon, I'm persevering. Even though I realised a while back that if Buffy started now, I don't think I'd make it through the first season.