alexsarll: (Default)
I haven't been up to a huge amount lately; judging by today's sun the time of hibernation may be ending, but there's been a lot more reading and DVDs than antics. Spot of furniture construction for [livejournal.com profile] xandratheblue (sometimes I wonder if I may have overdone the John Steed-style 'pose as feckless incompetent' bit, people do get very surprised when I'm practical), comedy then pub on Sunday (Michael Legge especially good as the bewildered MC, Steve Hall from Klang talking more about his swimsuit area than I might have wished, but still excellent). I've watched a lot of films, but more on them later in the week, I think. Two series finished and one promising new show started, so let's keep this one televisual.

My hopes for BBC One's new space colonisation drama Outcasts were not high; I'd heard bad things about how the makers didn't like it being considered science fiction, and as a rule that just means someone is making very bad science fiction. Imagine my surprise when it turns out to be the hardest SF I've seen on TV...possibly ever. And that's hard in both senses; the set-up is not that far off Firefly, but this is a lot less jaunty and swashbuckling. This is about the hard slog of the early days, the muttered references to how bad things were on Earth, the realisation that humanity is down to a few thousand people and even they can't live peacefully together. A good cast - Liam Cunningham, Hermione Norris, Keats from Ashes to Ashes and Apollo from BSG - but not all of them make it to the end of the episode. I like it when shows kill off major characters unexpectedly, it helps to maintain the sense of jeopardy.

Primeval used to be good at that too. This series, not so much, even though the protagonists have suddenly developed a quite uncanny ability to go on missions without adequate back-up, then drop their guns. Since ITV attempted to cancel their one good programme - for showing up everything else they produce, I assumed - it has got visibly cheaper, not in terms of the monster CGI (still great) but in terms of what seems a hurriedness to the writing, and a weird emptiness of the sets. They've saved a ton on extras, but ended up with something that feels a bit too much like Bugs, if anyone remembers that. But if nothing else, it's the only TV drama I've spotted which has any interest in demonstrating the evils of PFI.

But for really getting through the main cast, since Oz ended there has been nothing to equal Spartacus: Blood and Sand. I'm not surprised they're following it up with a prequel, because there really aren't many characters left to follow into the future except Spartacus himself, and Andy Whitfield is too ill to resume that role, poor bastard. And of course prequels have their own problems, because you know who's going to make it. So this may turn out to have been essentially a one-off - but what a one-off. Looking back, even in the earlier, sillier episodes the big theme was there, and that theme was the real trickledown effect. Not the happy, fluffy right-wing fantasy where we all get rich off the very rich's spending - the real version, where the moment's whim of someone higher up than you can up-end (or simply end) your whole life. Again and again, person A suffers simply because B has just had a row with C. And especially when B literally owns A, that can be fatal. Even when they don't, a catastrophic cascade can still result - but the indignities and worse, the difficulty of love or friendship, of being unfree are powerfully drawn. And where the corny old film of Spartacus used this haunting horror of slavery to praise the American Dream, to show how much better things are nowadays, the TV show is made in darker, wiser times. It knows that, unless there happen to be a couple of oligarchs watching, the audience are slaves too.
alexsarll: (Default)
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.
alexsarll: (Default)
If you're in the mood for something between Flashman and Indiana Jones, I can strongly recommend Peter Hopkirk's Foreign Devils on the Silk Road. For instance:
"He spent three years at Oxford and the British Museum studying classical and oriental archaeology and languages, but omitted Chinese - a gap in his linguistic armoury which was to cost him dear some twenty years later at the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas near Tun-huang."
It's all inconveniently dead camels, monasteries falling into ravines in earthquakes and races with dastardly Germans as Edwardian archaeologists descend on Chinese Turkestan in search of ancient cities lost in the shifting sands of the Taklamakan desert. Which is right next to the Gobi desert, and I'm not sure how exactly you tell where one desert stops and another begins, but the main difference seems to be that the Gobi was considered a bit of a girls' desert in comparison.
There's even a mountain range called Kun Lun, only two apostrophes off the home of Iron Fist - and in this neck of the woods, apostrophes seem to wander quite a bit.

Yesterday, after the Tubewalks, I went to see the Scoop's puppet-laden, song-and-dance take on the story of Jason & the Argonauts, which was played fairly panto-style, and ended in an audience participation dancealong to 'Walking on Sunshine'. They told the audience to stick around for the sequel, Medea, promising it would be "fun". I wonder how many families did that, and of those, how many had any idea what happens in Medea and how many expected more jolly adventures? We'd already seen the harrowing tale of desertion and infanticide on Thursday (Ben says most everything I'd want to about it here), and the idea of having the same cast do both in a double-bill is some flowering of evil genius.
After getting home from that, I'd watched Entourage and We Are Klang on their late showings*, which made for a late start on Friday, in spite of/because of which I had a really productive day. Started with His Girl Friday, because it was too long since I'd seen a Cary Grant film, and what a strange mixture of screwball comedy and film noir it is, with police corruption, corrupt electioneering and suicide all subjugated to the sparring will they/won't they couple. Then finished off a Kate Bush biography of which I'd read two chapters years ago (the writer wasn't great, but even beyond that I suspect she's another of those musicians where the life she lives could never be as exciting as the life implied by the world of her songs). Then sorted out the books on the landing and considered the death of Keith Waterhouse; he wrote a book and a play which I love, and seems to have been basically brilliant fun, so why did I never especially like him qua him, instead just liking those two works in isolation?).
And then, out to Proud. I'd always been fairly certain that Proud would be a dreadful venue, but I seriously underestimated just how bad. It's full of similar tossers to fashionable West End clubs (and similar drinks prices), but here some of said tossers are in Smiths t-shirts, just to remind us how bankrupt the whole concept of 'indie' is these days. 18 Carat Love Affair were clearly getting the same sound mix as all the other bands they put on when they're booking electro-indie by the yard; vocals down (because certainly nobody wants to hear the lyrics of the average electro-indie act), bass up (keep 'em dancing). The bass suited 18CLA, the inaudible vox less so. Once they were done, we fled to [livejournal.com profile] brain_opera's party which, like any good party, was deeply strange and went on far too late.
On Saturday there were two more birthdays; this was when I started to feel I was maybe overdoing it.

*Not content with pushing Entourage later and later, this week ITV aren't showing it at all; it's being bumped for Katy Brand's new series and forgettable Tom Cruise flick The Last Samurai. They really are intent on rendering themselves entirely worthless as a channel, aren't they?
alexsarll: (magneto)
I've not been to a zoo since I was a tiny, and dimly remember them as a bit of a dispiriting experience. But having finally visited London Zoo, the vast majority of the animals there seemed reassuringly happy, or at worst indolent rather than stressed; animals from the park next door were also showing a vote of confidence, with their heron coming to hang out with the zoo's penguins (whose most prolific egg-layer is called Stuart), and pigeons sat in the okapis' feed trough. They also have what could easily feel like an excessive amount of monkeys, if monkeys weren't so awesome (especially the tamarin which made an escape effort it hadn't really thought through). Plus butterflies! Burrowing owls! And an ibis, which I recognised because it had the same shaped-head as Thoth. Much the same sort of set-up as they used in the new series of Primeval, in fact, except that here the animal-looking-like-an-Egyptian-god thing seemed to be a bit more of an effort to re-angle the series towards dinosaurs-as-source-of-myths - presumably a focus group told them that they needed a bit of mysticism in with the (pseudo)science. It's a shame, they seem to be retooling too many things at once and not really getting any of them right yet; the chemistry's off with Steven gone, the new young male lead is astonishingly blank, and Cutter's new hair is just wrong. I fear the Curse of ITV could have claimed their last decent terrestrial show.
(Not entirely convinced by the Skins finale either. Super Hans as a parent? Dear heavens)

In top North London news, "Much-missed Islington venue The Garage is to be re-opened after a not inconsiderable refurb in June this year, as part of MAMA Group and HMV's previously reported joint venture, which is operating under the Mean Fiddler name in corporate terms, but which brings the HMV brand into the live space as far as the sign above the door is concerned." Let's hope it won't have lost all its old charm in the branding frenzy - that used to be one of my favourite venues. Or two if you count Upstairs.

Oh, and anyone who's somehow managed not to watch The Wire yet and wants to see what all the fuss is about - it starts on BBC2 tonight. I thought that the model of pay TV shows turning up on terrestrial a bit later was dead in the age of the DVD box set, but apparently not; there's an episode per week-night for the next three months.
alexsarll: (Default)
I note that there was again a new moon on Monday, but what with the torrential rain, I completely missed it. Sorry, Duran Duran.

Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire by Iain Sinclair )
And what are the odds on reading two books in a row where a minor character is trying a Pierre Menard-style rewrite of works by Joseph Conrad?

Got stuck into some free DVDs from the old regime last night. I'm sure I caught some as a child, but only on Monday night did I sit down to watch Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes. Everyone says the performance is pretty much definitive, and I'm not going to argue - cadaverous, inhuman, brilliant - but here's what intrigues me: having messed up and thought Casebook was the first series, I started there, with 'The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax' in which Holmes has a bit of an off day. More of an off day, in fact, than in the original story, and it gets to him more. The first episode of the first series was in fact 'A Scandal in Bohemia'. Now, simply because of the name and the brevity this was the first of the original stories which I read, but it is deeply unusual in that Holmes has a seriously off day. ITV was, in those days, still capable of producing decent dramas, but is this a precursor of the nasty tendency now to need to 'humanise' your leads right from the start? Which is not just an ITV thing - consider how the very first House saw him break his resolution never to speak to the patients (one reason I abandoned that show so promptly - others include hypochondria, and Hugh Laurie's accent).
Nonetheless, considerably truer to Doyle's writings than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, which I also attempted, where a bunch of Australians and Yanks plus one token bumbling Brit get trapped on a plateau with dinosaurs who really make you realise how far CGI has come in the past decade, plus all manner of other nonsense - the first episode has lascivious Roman-style lizardmen who would have been right at home in Edgar Rice Burroughs or Robert E Howard, but are really not Doyle's kind of thing. Passably entertaining nonsense which is itself demonstrably superior to the sappy, try-hard gloop that is Kyle XY, one of the worst SF series of which I have ever had the misfortune to see five minutes. And to put that into context, I managed a whole episode of Merlin. If anyone wants the first season DVD of Kyle XY, it's yours, though I will judge you for that.

Theory: anyone who has seen or indeed owned a lava lamp would be significantly less disturbed by the bubbling chaos of Azathoth, Nyogha and their ilk than people of Lovecraft's generation.
alexsarll: (crest)
Look, it's not that I mind them messing with the Matter of Britain. Every generation re-casts the myth in its own image, it was always that way. That's why I don't object to stuff like the inexplicably multiracial court; when Britain changes so does Camelot, and if you disagree with that then bear in mind you just lost Lancelot.
There was a miniseries a few years back, also called Merlin, which starred Sam Neill; even before it rather ingeniously reconciled itself to the mainstream of the story, I was barely bothered about the inconsistencies because it was good TV. Neill was a younger, more action Merlin than I was used to, but he was still charismatic, wise - and he still had a good script. The basic idea here - Merlin has to work with an Arthur who's a prat, in spite of them hating each other - yeah, I can see that working. If the writers could write, if the Arthur had something to him (cf Excelsor in No Heroics for a similar idea done right, and that was on sodding ITV), and if the Merlin were more than just a whinging telekinetic who seems to have escaped from a particularly self-pitying X-Men storyline. Why does he have to be younger than Arthur? Never mind how much of the myth you just messed up for no apparent reason, is it just that you can't conceive of a story with a central cross-generational friendship, even though you've just introduced exactly such an element with Gaius? Even though Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, not exactly niche entertainments, managed exactly that with characters who are, no offence, blatant riffs on Merlin?
And as for thinking Eve Myles could carry an episode as an enigmatic force when she's barely bearable as Ms Audience Identification in Torchwood...

Every iteration of Arthur says something about its generation. I don't like what this one says about mine.
alexsarll: (Default)
It's remarkably civilised of ITV to put all their halfway-watchable shows in the same 90 minute block. Secret Diary of a Call Girl was always borderline, and now they're deviating from the book even more, not just normalising Belle but embroiling her in lamely generic plots about proteges and politicians - plus, the director seems increasingly inept at hiding the use of body doubles. Nonetheless, it's better than anything else ITV squeeze out, or would be if tomorrow it weren't followed by the debut of No Heroics. I haven't seen it yet, but it stars Nathan Barley and James Lance and is set in a pub for off-duty superheroes where the drinks include V For Vodka and Shazamstell, and thus even with ITV's reverse Midas touch in the equation, it basically can't fail. Then after that, Entourage, which is still ludicrous fluff, and still utterly wonderful. No need to check the rest of the schedules! And no need to bother with ITV1 at all, thank heavens.

How can people say there are no good band names left in a world with Adebisi Shank? If you don't agree, you presumably haven't seen Oz, and if you haven't seen Oz, that's between you and your conscience.

As much as I love Saint Etienne, neither of the times I've seen them before convinced me. But context counts for a lot; they're the sound of London on a good day, of the retro-futuristic spirit that gave the city things like the South Bank. So walking down from Bloomsbury and through the Thames Festival, with its gay Aztecs and giant butterflies and Lithuanian folk-dancers, and the show being in the Queen Elizabeth Hall (where Sarah incites quite the most polite insurrection I've ever seen, encouraging dancing in the aisles)...it helps them make sense live like they do on record. And well done Heavenly for managing to turn the foyer into a plausibly clubby space, too.
It was a strange weekend; even more than usual I was beset by the mutterings of whichever church father it was who lamented "Oh, that we had spent but one day in this world thoroughly well." Not that I think his idea of time well spent would have much in common with mine, but that line haunts me nonetheless. And this in spite of participating in a sitcom read-through accompanied by experimental booze science, getting some sewing done which I'd been putting off for months, a wonderful birthday dinner for a dear friend on Saturday...not such a wasted weekend as all that, but at my back I always hear, &c. There's a thought - the Marvell expert was out on Saturday, maybe it was his fault.
Oh, and sun dogs! Perfect examples, on the very day when I'd been reading the chapter of The Cloud-Spotter's Guide about them. While admiring which I was accosted by two antipodeans who wanted to borrow my mobile in exactly the sort of scenario which could have been a scam - but wasn't, thus restoring some fragment of my faith in humanity.

Speaking of faith in humanity - I enjoyed John Scalzi's future war novel Old Man's War, but thus far I like the sequel The Ghost Brigades even better. Partly this is because it answers some niggling questions I had about the setting - questions which weren't explicitly set up as mysteries and could simply have been inconsistencies. But more than that for its sheer ruthlessness, its recognition that when faced with a populous and implacable galaxy, humanity's greatest resource is that we are utter bastards. Of course, this is also why in reality, and even in my very favourite fiction, I would much rather we were just used as attack dogs in a galactic civilisation run by something halfway civilised, because the idea of trusting us to run the show is terrifying. But for the odd pulp thrill, Humans Versus The Galaxy has its charms.
(You might not expect a segue from that to the Lib Dem conference. But when Nick Clegg, name notwithstanding, says "most people, most of the time, will do the right thing"...I wonder whether he's grown up with the same human race I have, and even more than with his plans for tax cuts, I fear that his party is just too far away from anything I believe nowadays for me to vote for them in good conscience. On the other hand, he's dead right about the zombies and the Andrex puppy)
alexsarll: (bernard)
Finally saw Daniel Kitson last night, after having been raved at about him by at least three mostly separate sets of comedy chums for, what, a couple of years now? It was a self-confessedly shambolic preview of his new show, 66a Church Road, and one which will probably bear scant resemblance to the finished product, but yes, he is very funny. I am, however, more mystified than ever as to how come so many girls I know have crushes on the guy.
I went to see him at Battersea Arts Centre, of which I've similarly been long aware - but that utilitarian name never filled me with enthusiasm. I hadn't expected something so grand, murals of burning skies behind a grand staircase down which people sweep to the strains of Mono because someone who works there knows exactly what incidental music sets their space off to its best advantage. I'm now kicking myself that I never went to see The Masque of the Red Death while it was there - but that's London for you, isn't it? The man who is tired of London is tired of life, but look at that the other way round and it's a reminder that in London, you always end up missing out on something.

I know I'm not the first to say this, but who would ever have thought that a Doctor-free, Donna-heavy Doctor Who episode, and one flashing back to her debut in The Worst Who Story Ever at that, could be as good as 'Turn Left'? I still worry, though - the over-egged ending was its weakest moment, and while the Next Week trailer was arresting...well, on paper and even on clips, 'Doomsday' looked arresting, and look what a pig's ear that was.
I worry even more about the point that Lawrence Miles made - we watch this bleak vision of what would happen in a world without the Doctor, and we forget that there's another parallel without a Doctor, one all too close to home.

'Freebooter' and 'freelancer' are pretty much synonyms, aren't they? So why does 'freebooter' sound so much more dashing when boots are, in and of themselves, far less exciting than lances?
(This thought occasioned by doing the Salisbury quiz for the third time, with the third totally different team. And less than spectacular results, but that's by the by)

I've liked most shows I've seen James Lance in, and ditto Nicolas "Nathan Barley" Burns. They've worked together before, to great effect, as support in the Stephen Fry PR-com Absolute Power. So surely I ought to be glad that they're reunited in a sitcom about a bar for off-duty superheroes, particularly given what a rich source of comedy such settings have proved in comics?
Well, I would be, but it's on ITV. And given the near-infallibility of ITV's reverse Midas touch lately, that pretty much guarantees that it will make My Hero look like JLI.
alexsarll: (crest)
Public Enemy were heroes to most, but they never meant sh1t to me me - most of my heroes ain't appeared on no list of Farrakhan supporters. But those who disagree may be interested to learn that The Bomb Squad have got into dubstep.

[livejournal.com profile] burkesworks has already posted his thoughts on the David Peace South Bank Show, and as regards his opinion of Martin Amis' strengths, of ITV in general and of the second half of this programme in particular, I agree. It was especially galling that while there was some discussion of Peace's work prior to The Damned Utd (the little of which I've encountered I found pretty unimpressive), so little was made of his having published another novel since, the astonishing Tokyo Year Zero. Instead, we got some old fool of an ex-player who seemed to be under the misapprehension that he could write, talking about how no non-player could understand the allegedly unique experience of being dropped from a football team. Which for starters plays into the horrid underestimation of a little thing called 'imagination' - but he then described it, badly, in terms which would apply equally to being sacked from any job one likes, or indeed to being dumped*.
Where I'd disagree is in the association of Peace with the 'angry young men' and working class realism. When I heard Peace read from GB84, that was what I thought of too - and that's why I filed him under Of No Further Interest until the praise for The Damned Utd from people whose recommendations I respect got overwhelming. What interests me in The Damned Utd and Tokyo Year Zero isn't that sort of writer, it's one burrows into the guts the past like James Ellroy. If there's a comparison to be made with a Northern writer, I'd go for Tony Harrison - they've a similar gift for marrying the rhythms of everyday speech with something deeper, rhythmic, primal. But even ahead of that, when I hear Peace say "there is no such thing as non-fiction" and talk about his working method of immersion in the past, I think of Marguerite Yourcenar or the Alan Moore of Voice of the Fire, writers who channel the dead in a manner which breaks down those silly little genre barriers which separated art from sorcery for a time. Peace even talked about how he'd initially wanted to interweave Brian Clough's story with an "occult history of Leeds United" - and how I wish he had, beyond those enigmatic little moments of cursing which divide the sections of The Damned Utd. Moments which a typically underinformed Melvyn Bragg inevitably failed to mention at this point in the interview, remnants though they must be of that earlier incarnation of the book.
I remain convinced, mind, that David Peace could one day write the definitive book on Gordon Brown.
(In other Northern literary news: Paul Morley on John Cooper Clarke. Bit rushed, and I could understand maybe one word in ten of Mark E Smith's contributions, but still well worth a listen; I loved Morley's description of JCC as "the missing link between Diana Ross and Charles Baudelaire". But how sad that a man who once hung with Nico and the Honey Monster is now reduced to working with Reverend & the Makers and the Arctic Monkeys)

*Until he started in on this little rant, I was unclear whether he had been a player or a fan. Not only is it a pretty academic point as far as I'm concerned, but many of the fans seem a bit confused on the point themselves: wearing exact replicas of their idols' tops even down to having the idol's name on; referring to the team's performance as though they'd contributed...I'm still not entirely sure that this fellow wasn't similarly deluded, even by the standards of the field he really didn't seem very bright.
alexsarll: (death bears)
I used to respect Tom Hodgkinson; once the Idler was the best magazine going, and How To Be Idle remains (for the most part) a valuable work of political philosophy mis-filed as humour. Alas, of late he has become one of the tinfoil hat brigade, retailing tired cliches about mobile 'phones as enslavers and the like. And he really doesn't like Facebook. Shockingly, a major company has shareholders who are a bit right-wing! Not homophobes or religious nuts like run half the public transport in Britain, mind - but a utopian who's all in favour of life-extension and the Singularity. Which is a bad thing, apparently. No, don't ask me how. Oh, and apparently it's really, like Big Brother, man! that Facebook's privacy policy says "You understand and acknowledge that, even after removal, copies of user content may remain viewable in cached and archived pages or if other users have copied or stored your user content." Because obviously if Facebook kept a record of anyone who'd ctrlC'd any of your content, and deleted that when you deleted the original, that would be in no way Big Brother-esque, would it?
Tosser.

ITV are really going for the big push, aren't they? OK, so their best show, Entourage, shows no sign of returning from its baffling mid-season hiatus, but that's an import. Their best home-grown, and the best thing they have on terrestrial, is Primeval, which restarted on Saturday. Kingdom is probably the weakest Stephen Fry offering in some time, but it's still Stephen Fry and thus better than almost anything on ITV; that came back Sunday. Royal dramedy The Palace looks like it might be half-decent, but it's scheduled opposite City of Vice (Henry Fielding fights crime - WITH WIGS!), so I shall probably never know. Oh, and there was Moving Wallpaper, wasn't there? That should have been good. I loved the idea of making a new soap, and then having a sitcom set behind the scenes of the soap, even before I knew Ben Miller was starring in it. They've also got a couple of Absolute Power alumni, and therein lies their problem - media in-jokes only appeal to a niche audience, and Absolute Power does them much better, even in the episodes written by Smug Slug*. The show has been infected with that terrible ITVitis (the disease which atrophies human acting and scripting ability even in the gifted). On top of which, they've absolutely blown it by showing Moving Wallpaper right before the soap whose production it shows/undermines, on the same channel. Echo Beach belongs on ITV1, channel of choice for the undiscriminating cudlip. The sly dig at it should not be interfering with their evening of cathode ray grazing - it should be tucked away on ITV2. Same slot, so people who want the pair reflecting on each other can still have the experience - but you should have to work for it, if only in the sense of changing channel.
Not that ITV are the only people launching inept sitcoms, of course. Consider Never Better on C4, with Guy from Green Wing once again playing a less amusing variation on the same character. But for heavens' sake don't consider it for very long, life is short and there is so much better stuff you could be watching. Or indeed, appearing in; his Green Wing brother Martin has been openly retconned into Primeval, which somehow evades ITVitis and continues to kick arse. Motorbike chases with velociraptors in a shopping centre? 'Sound of Thunder' time travel messes used to mess with the lead's head *and* sex up the set-up? Hannah S Club with a gun? I'm sold.

Have been listening to A Cellarful of Motown volume 3 a fair bit lately. It's volume 3 of a label rarities compilation and it doesn't have a single dud on it; how many labels can say that, and how many volumes would it take Motown before they started scraping the barrel? Which is not to say I love them all equally - 'Uptight' aside I never really got Stevie Wonder, and Carolyn Crawford's 'Too Young Too Long' is a bit reminiscent of the song at the end of Brass Eye's Paedogeddon - but not one track sucks. I find myself especially drawn to 'Loving You (Is Hurting Me)' but that may just be because it's credited to the Fantastic Four, so I picture it soundtracking another of those painful Reed/Sue/Namor love triangle scenes.

An interesting if grouchy piece on Marvel and DC notes that both companies, as corporate entities, place a vanishingly small amount of their emphasis on the ongoing publication of comics (against which, part of me is thrilled to see DC describe itself as the home of "such popular characters as Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and The Sandman". Gaiman's boy in with the Trinity already...). And the scorn directed at the concept of an Ant-Man film is definitely misplaced when you recall that Edgar Wright has been named in connection with the project. But this ties in with something I was thinking about before christmas, except I see it as cause for rejoicing if only the message could be filtered up the line. To wit:
It doesn't matter what happens in the comics.
Corporate superhero properties have, as a rule, been reined in by a fear of hurting the brand. The theory goes that if little Tommy sees the new Batman film, and he then picks up a Batman comic at the drugstore/newsagent, it should to some degree tally with what he saw on screen. So Batman has to be Bruce Wayne (this has already nixed one of Grant Morrison's rumoured plans for the forthcoming Final Crisis).
Except drugstores and newsagents don't carry comics anymore, or if they do it's one of the reprint titles with 'classic' material. So it doesn't matter what's happening in the comics in the comic shops. Because if little Tommy goes in there, the retailer would be a mug to sell him the latest issue of the monthly. Give him one of the trades of the classics. If he says 'goddamn' a lot, give him All-Star Batman. If he's blatantly a goth, Arkham Asylum. I'm hard-pressed to think exactly what sort of little Tommy you'd need to think that giving him the monthly would be a remotely wise idea. So in the monthly, just let Grant Morrison do whatever the Hell the little voices are telling him, and everyone's happy!

Live Free Or Die Hard (fvck the UK title) is basically the same plot as Die Hard With A Vengeance + The Interweb, isn't it? Not that I'm complaining. And Die Harder is a great film overall, but definitely has the least compelling villain.

*He tries to pass for human by the name 'Mark Lawson', but does it really fool anyone?
alexsarll: (crest)
I'm find myself surprisingly upset (and surprisingly surprised, given the state of him) by the news of Boris Yeltsin's death. Perhaps because, for all that incompetence during his administration helped pave the way for the oligarchs and Putin, his reign was nonetheless one of those brief glimmers of hope which seem to be all the grace that Russia is ever afforded.

A second watchable ITV drama in one year? Who'dathunkit, eh? Clearly Kingdom was only saved from utter inconsequentiality by the presence of Stephen Fry, but with him it became almost powerful, his long-suffering kindliness turning what seemed meant as Sunday evening fluff into something strangely melancholy.

The second season of The Wire, meanwhile, seems intent on making the first look like an ITV drama. Working with the assumption that viewers are now au fait with Baltimore's police and drug dealers, they keep us on our toes by throwing in another facet of the city - the dockers. And because we've all managed to face the decay of the inner city for 12 hours without ending it all, they turn up the misery with the bleakness of container yards and rotting harbours. It's still brilliant, obviously, but dear heavens it's dismal. The changes are encapsulated perfectly in the theme tune; it's still 'Way Down In The Hole', but now in Tom Waits' original rather than the Blind Boys Of Alabama version. It's still the same show, but everything's a bit different.
Oh, and just to further confuse any viewers who've made it through the police, gang and dock slang, one character asks another whether he prefers Ultimate or 'regular' Spider-Man. This programme really does tackle all the big questions.
In fact, once I've checked up on the rest of you, I think I might watch another episode. This will involve turning on the TV and DVD player, and thus I will "take control of technology", just as I should according to the organisers of TV Turnoff Week, which begins today. They're worried about technology taking control of them; I can only suggest that if they have been enslaved by their own consumer electronics, they must be buying really bad brands.

Today's also St George's Day, of course. I'm ambivalent here; I think of myself as British before English, and separate bank holidays seem like a step towards the break-up of the Union. Also, I prefer dragons to christians. And yet, any additional bank holiday would be welcome given our niggardly allowance compared to the rest of Europe. Perhaps honour a national hero who deserved it, who was born here and died here on this very day, and have Shakespeare Day instead?
alexsarll: (captain)
It's not often that I enjoy a club where I barely know any of the music, but it's lovely when it does work. Computer Blue used to be one, all those strange electronic sounds forming an alternate track of pop history which at the time was a total closed book to me. And Nashville-on-Thames last night was another. I recognised the Johnny Cash song and 'Walking After Midnight', and that was it. But the great thing about country is the stories; if you don't know the song then you don't know the ending, so you get a new drama every four minutes. The live band were great too; The Blazing Zoos are travel/music journalist Andrew Mueller, two of Jesus Jones and two other blokes gone country, with a repertoire ranging from the self-referential ("Always wanted to write a country song but I never had a girl who done me wrong, no I never had the material 'til now") to the outlandish - as I say, I'm no expert, but I'm guessing there aren't many country songs about Albania.

I taped the first Primeval, but I was pretty sure I'd abandon it before the end of the episode. Unusually, I was wrong. I'm not saying it was the best thing I've ever seen, but unusually for a modern ITV programme, it didn't seem to have been aimed at an audience of retards. Ben Miller aside (and oh, how he has fallen) the actors were actually *acting*! The script only occasionally collapsed into imbecility! The effects weren't risible! And while I was initially sceptical about the creatures they were using, turns out that even the improbable winged one was real - so extra props to them for using obscurities rather than the usual suspects. Scenes which could have been hammered home were instead left to speak for themselves - cf the dinosaur-obsessed kid terrified by a real dinosaur, a well-made point you could equally play out with vikings, knights or pirates. The anomaly and the Permian were done vastly better than I'd expected (and comics readers - is it just me or does the anomaly look a lot like Wildstorm's Snowflake?) - oh, and Hannah S Club, of whom I'd never taken much notice before, appears to have become incredibly hot. I approve, and shall be continuing with this (although I'm still glad that it's only running six episodes, rather than 13 - not least so as Who clashes won't be an issue).

Is the Olympics really not enough sports-related waste and misery for one decade in one country?

December 2017

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