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

Not only for length, and permanence, but because here, unlike Facebook, there's no risk of a spoiler popping up on someone else's page and causing upset. I was a latecomer - I think I watched the whole thing over almost exactly a year. And maybe it's because I didn't live with the characters for as long as a lot of people, but while I liked it, that widespread temptation to give it The Wire's pedestal? I don't see it. Not least because fundamentally it's one plotline from Babylon 5 with all the aliens removed so as not to trouble the viewing public, who may have been able to handle Battlestar Galactica but that was just humans and robots. ( spoilers follow, obviously )

Lots of films I put off writing up, from the tail end of my Lovefilm trial (like some sort of hippy judge, I always acquit) and elsewhere. Like Berlin Express, a flagwaver about Nazi plotting in the rubble of postwar Berlin. Our Heroes include representatives of the four Allied powers, and the Good Germans - can they all work together to deal with the threat? Of course they can, leading to an ending which I think would have been outdated by the film's 1948 release, and is bleakly hilarious now, where the American and the Russian say friendly farewells in front of their respective compatriots. So with hindsight we know that the heroic Yank nutritionist is going to be ruined by McCarthy, and the stolid but brave Russian will die in Stalin's terror. Oh, and there's a traitor, too. I wouldn't spoiler it but, well, which allied power was best at collaborating with the Nazis? Exactly. They did use the real ruins of Berlin for sets, though, which combined with the voiceover makes some sections practically bombing p0rn. A curiosity rather than a classic.

Unlike Arsenic and Old Lace, which may be the perfect screwball comedy. Well, not quite perfect - the thuggish brother who supposedly looks like Boris Karloff was in fact Raymond Massey, because Karloff was too busy playing the part on Broadway to be in the film. The fool - now most everyone who saw him will have gone to dust, while the rest of the cast are immortal, most particularly Cary Grant who was never more devil-may-care, impossibly elegant even while falling over chairs and otherwise acting the chump. Though even when he disappears for long stretches, the rest of the cast can carry things just fine.

Another brilliant comedy: I'm not sure if The Other Guys even got a cinema release in the UK, in spite of being the fourth full-length Will Ferrell/Adam McKay collaboration, which one would have thought to be Kind Of A Big Deal. If you've seen the others - Anchorman, Talladega Nights, Step Brothers - then yes, this is more of the same. Which is to say, a lot smarter than it looks - an action comedy which is genuinely furious about bank bailouts turning into more bonuses for venal incompetents, which uses its end credits to explain what a Ponzi scheme is and why we've all suffered. The supporting cast is excellent - Samuel L Jackson, Michael Keaton, Steve Coogan, a rather underused Anne Heche - plus the Rock, who plays much the same role he did in Get Smart. Poor sod seems to be such an obvious action hero that he can only get jobs as the joke action hero in the background of films about the other guys overshadowed by the macho cliche.

'Macho cliche' brings us nicely on to Predators, which does exactly what you'd expect and no more. It must be hard being Walton Goggins, though - whoever he plays, it's a joy seeing his character suffer, and a lot of it is just his face. That can't make for easy nights out.

And finally, Pieces of April, one of those almost parodically indie US films about a quirky girl and her family who don't understand. I was only really watching because Stephin Merritt did the soundtrack, but it was pleasant to be reminded what Katie Holmes was like before the Thetans got her, and it does have a minor role for Clay Davis from The Wire - as a domesticated schmuck, which is a bit tricky to process.

Another Britpop OD at Nuisance on Friday, then on Saturday a pre-Solstice trip to the Heath to catch Sunday's sunrise - an experience captured in alarming stop-motion form here, minus only the encounter with a group of louts who were apparently accompanied by Effie from Skins, and who asked us if we were a hen party, or on heroin. Interesting point on which to be uncertain, I felt. A wonderful time, equal parts mystical and ludicrous (and nicely counterpointed by catching the post-Solstice sunset from Greenwich Park's hill yesterday). The only problem was that after, when we wanted breakfast, it was Sunday so none of the cafes were open. We ended up in McDonalds, with which I don't have as much of a problem as some - except it wasn't doing fries. Or vegeburgers. Or milkshakes. And if a McDonalds doesn't do fries, vegeburgers or milkshakes, then what exactly is the point of it?

After that all-nighter, Sunday was inevitably a bit of a write-off. Read the paper and some C-list superhero comics from the library, ate, and finally watched Gone Baby Gone. Initially I thought that like so many much-praised films it was going to be a middlebrow let-down, because the opening montage-with-voiceover is a bit trite, a bit pat, a bit Hollywood - which is especially frustrating when the DVD includes an extended alternative with no such problem, at the cost of only a few extra minutes. But even before I knew this, I was soon won over. Casey Affleck really does make a very good Everyman lead, because he looks like someone you know - you don't know who, but someone. Michelle Monaghan, as his partner in both senses, combines a little of Liv Tyler and something of Zooey Deschamel without being as distractingly luminous as either. The rest of the cast is dotted with people who - like the writer of the book on which it's based - have done time on The Wire (and seeing Omar as a cop is especially startling). And the story works both as a nicely ambiguous thriller, and a meditation on society's obsession with child abduction cases, and indeed with children in general. I think Ben Affleck's move behind the camera may have been a very smart one.

Needless to say, I am still reeling from 'The Pandorica Opens'. Speaking as someone who watched Tom Baker's classic The Talons of Weng-Chiang the day before, I can still quite happily say that 'Pandorica' was top-notch Doctor Who. Something which may or may not hold true once we've seen how it's resolved, of course - but if Who has taught us anything, it's the importance of hope. ( questions and speculations )
I had problems flicker through my mind while I was watching, but unlike a Rusty episode where they loom larger afterwards, these ones go away with a little thought. How dense was the Doctor being not to realise what "the most dangerous thing in the galaxy" was? Well, we've seen already that this incarnation has massive gaps when it comes to self-awareness, most dangerously at the climax of 'The Beast Below'. What were sensible races like the Earth Reptiles and Draconians, or space cops the Judoon, doing allied with Daleks and Cybermen? No more nonsensical than the UK and USA allying with Stalin.
And didn't River Song as Cleopatra look like Kate Bush?

The new Indelicates album is available for download on a 'pay what you want' basis. Which, for those of you who've never heard them before and need enticing, does include 'free'. Given it's the best album of the year so far, and I'd be very surprised if it weren't still the best come December, I think that's a pretty good deal. Hell, even if you can't spare the time to check out a whole album on my say so, just try one track: I would link to the beautiful, bereft acoustic version of 'Savages' except that's album-exclusive, so just for a change I'll recommend the disgusted Weimar cabaret stomp of 'Be Afraid Of Your Parents' instead.

Dean Spanley is an utterly charming film which I think will be loved by anyone who owned a dog as a child, especially if he was one of the Seven Great Dogs. Sam Neill, excellent even by his own standards, is an Edwardian clergyman who, when plied with Tokay, reminisces about his past life as a dog; Peter O'Toole, more cadaverous and cantankerous than ever, is the narrator's father. That narrator being Jeremy Northam, who makes for an excellent straight man and stops the whole enterprise capsizing into silliness, because this is a strange tale but emphatically not a silly one. It's based on a story by the great Lord Dunsany - though not one I know, so I can't speak to its fidelity or otherwise except to say that it definitely feels like Dunsany.

This lengthy David Simon interview - mainly about his new show Treme but of interest to any fans of his work - makes me realise how much I miss good lengthy pieces from the days when the Guardian's Saturday mag was slightly less flimsy. Compare and contrast this Jonathan Ross interview from the weekend, and note how much of the conversation is skimmed over, sketched in, especially when Ross talks about comics. This would not have been abtruse stuff - he's a smart man who realises he's evangelising to a general audience - but there's no space for it. What we mainly get, even while the paper tries to distance itself from the tabloid agenda, is a reprise of the Mail-defined talking points. Yes, from another angle, but wouldn't moving beyond them have been even better?

Not a Books of the Year post (though if you're asking, probably Charlie Stross' Wireless, Glen David Gold's Sunnyside and the Luke Haines memoir). Just some recent reads, for my own benefit as much as anything:

The Wire - Truth Be Told is exactly the sort of book which is described as 'essential' while being nothing of the sort. For all its supposed difficulty, The Wire is not The Invisibles; everything you need to know is there on the screen. But that a book like this, a programme guide-cum-companion, can now be a respectable hardback says so much about how geek culture is now mainstream - it's not just that our shows are now prime time TV, it's that even other shows are now appreciated in the way our shows used to be. The quality varies; David Simon's introduction, predictably, is amazing, while some of the other contributions are pedestrian but not unpleasant, magazine-standard stuff. One detail which irritated me was the parochialism; in that intro, Simon talks about the venality of network TV, how the shows service the advertising and not vice versa, and holds up HBO as a rare exception to the model, without ever hinting that over here, we've had something like the subscription cable model for decades - it's called the license fee, and it powers the only TV empire comparable to HBO in the quality of its output. Come to think of it, why don't the BBC make more of that too?
Elsewhere, Simon and Ed Burns interview Melvin Williams, who played the Deacon in the show, and in real life was something of a Stringer Bell figure, a legendarily smart drug kingpin. Williams appears to be under the impression that in 'England' smack is legal, and junkies can get it for less than a dollar, so drug gangs have no margin. I can only assume this to be a confused understanding of methadone prescriptions, but still, what the Hell? And neither Simon nor Burns picks him up on it.

I've never read any Ian Rankin before, though I enjoyed BBC4's Reichenbach Falls which was based on a story of his. So when I heard he was going to be writing some Hellblazer, I was moderately excited. Except in the event the story in question, Dark Entries, wasn't published in the comic, instead being used to launch the new Vertigo Crime series of compact hardback gra phic novels. Which was a questionable decision because it's considerably less 'crime' than a lot of Constantine stories, being instead a reality TV satire which then becomes outright supernatural - there's none of the grimy backstreet dealing one expects from Constantine, the overlap between the mob and infernal underworlds. Clearly the branding was just because Rankin is known to crime fans. Although if they're aiming mainly at Rankin fans, why in the back is there an ad claiming "Before John Constantine, There Was John Rebus", even though Constantine made his debut two years before Rebus?
But, that's all a matter of format and editorial. It's not Rankin's fault. Judge him on the story, considered as a Hellblazer run. Any good?
No. About on a par with Paul Jenkins, the worst extended run in the comic's history. The satire on reality TV (essentially the set-up is Big Brother in a fake haunted house) would be clunking even if it weren't so dated. The twist is crashingly obvious. The characterisation is unremarkable. Any urge I had to read Rankin's fiction just vanished, particularly since I already have two unread books by another Scottish crime writer, Denise Mina, who did a much better run on Constantine a couple of years back.

I read Alan Campbell's Scar Night a while back, and was impressed; I think I characterised it as China Mieville meets His Dark Materials albeit not quite *that* good. Since then, I have only really thought of Alan Campbell when I'm trying to add an Alan Moore tag to an entry and always get Campbell suggested first, but I finally got around to the sequel, Iron Angel. And it's not dire, but...one of the main things reviews of Scar Night said was, this is too good to be anyone's first book. Reading Iron Angel, with its clumsinesses of pacing, its occasional lapses of characterisation and its baffling lapses into clumsy moralising, makes me wonder if he actually wrote this first and then went back and filled in the backstory. The biggest problem, though, is that the first book's greatest strength was the city of Deepgate itself - a crumbling theocracy suspended by immense chains over a vast abyss. Without spoiling too much, Deepgate is barely in this book, and the other locations - the desert, a poison forest, even Hell itself - just don't feel quite so richly realised. I'll still read the third and final volume sometime (the cliffhanger on which the second part ends is rather impressive), but I can wait.

Why must reality spoil my fun? Right, you know that berk in the ads saying "with free texts for life, I'd start a superband?" - even aside from how few texts it really takes to start a band, he looks so slappable that you're pretty damn sure any band he starts would suck, aren't you? Last night I finally formulated exactly what manner of suck - I thought it would be Coldplay meets the Chilli Peppers, and they'd do at least one Bob Marley cover. Except once I got home I saw that he's now a TV ad as well as a poster, so now you can hear his 'superband' and they're not even that interesting, just ditchwater-dull indie. Bah humbug.

Whatever David Simon made after The Wire was probably always destined to be a disappointment because frankly, where do you go from there? Usain Bolt's one thing, but in the arts it's pretty hard to beat your own world record. Generation Kill is, by any sane standards, very good. But The Wire means David Simon is now judged by insane standards. Clearly I am going to keep watching GK, and I have every expectation that it will grow on me. But on some level I can't help feeling that I've seen it before. The invasion of Iraq is not an unexamined, forgotten story in the way the decline of America's inner cities is, and a lot of the analyses of the US Marines (the system's inefficiencies mean that even those with the best intentions find themselves frustrated) seem familiar from Baltimore PD. So far, the closest thing to a McNulty seems to be Ziggy from Season 2, and against The Wire's studied impenetrability, having a reporter embedded with the unit seems a little easy, even if he is played by Tobias Beecher from Oz.

True Blood, on the other hand, is better than its creator's last work, Six Feet Under, because True Blood isn't under the misapprehension that it's smart. Honest trash I can handle, it's middlebrow self-satisfaction that gets my back up. The basic concept - with a blood substitute synthesized, vampires can come out of hiding - is not terribly original, some of the characters are pretty annoying, and so far Anna Paquin's psychic powers seem to vary more in accord with plot demands than any internal logic. It could all easily go a bit Heroes if the bad bits start to outweigh the good. But, so far, I'm inclined to keep watching. Just so long as it doesn't go all hugging'n'learning like 6FU.

What Darwin Didn't Know has now, alas, fallen off iPlayer, but if it comes round again as BBC4 documentaries tend to, it's well worth a look. I've been a fan of Armand Marie Leroi since his book and series on mutants, but even aside from his spookily charismatic presenting this is quite a powerful show. That title is a cunning bait for creationists, even more so for the people who maybe haven't fallen for the whole lie but who (as with global warming) have been misled by the airtime the morons and liars still get into believing that maybe there remain doubts. And Leroi goes into unsparing detail about everything Darwin didn't know, guessed, got wrong. Except - Darwin admitted as much himself. And then we go through the history of the theory of evolution up to the present day, drawing in figures familiar (Mendel, Crick & Watson) and less so who filled in the gaps, revised the details, pushed the theory forward. Exactly as Darwin hoped would happen. Because The Origin of Species is not an alternative to the Bible, because the scientific method (done right, at least) is not about clinging to a different, slightly less old book as an equally infallible account of life. The argument between creationism and evolution is not simply a choice of two prophets, two books - it's about totally different approaches, a truth which claims to be definitive versus one which knows it's always provisional and is forever, yes, evolving.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is the book I remember least - except for the ending, of course. Because it's basically Part One of the two-part series finale, isn't it? And the film's not even that - it's Part One of a three-part finale because they're splitting Deathly Hallows in two. Which is why I was surprised by how brilliant the film was, although I shouldn't be, because unlike the books they do consistently get better each time. The camerawork, the lighting, the locations all contribute to a sense of a widening world, but also a darkening one; the book is pared back mercilessly but sensitively, revealing its core. There's also, bafflingly, a sudden jump in the levels of innuendo, which I would say was just the effect of watching a film with curiousbadger except I've seen people who didn't say the same. Little things outside the director's control play into it, too - Luna Lovegood so effortlessly able to steal any scene she's in, or the lad who plays Draco being at that awkward stage of ageing where boyish good looks have yet to become adult handsomeness and the golden boy temporarily looks lumpish.
Also, have I ever mentioned that in spite of everything, I have even more of a crush on Bellatrix than I do on most Helena Bonham-Carter characters?

Lenny Henry talks about his love for A Matter of Life and Death. The programme is probably of more interest to Lenny Henry fans who don't yet know the film than to fans of the film who aren't that bothered about Lenny Henry. I used to like him, years back in the Delbert Wilkins days, and I suppose he still has the Neil Gaiman association, but it still seems slightly odd that we have the same favourite film. Though he is, after all, British, so nothing like as surprising as the show's revelation was that Martin Scorsese is also a massive P&P fan.

UK Drug Policy Commission's report shows signs of the Commission having seen The Wire, calls for 'smarter' drug policing with a focus on harm reduction; Home Office sticks fingers in ears, sings 'na na na I'm not listening'.

The Isle of Lewis, within two days, had its first Sunday sailing of the ferry, and then its first gay wedding. Less than ten days later, a mini-tornado wreaks havoc on the island. If the god-botherers don't capitalise on this, they're even more stupid than I thought.

Monday's really been 'bent cop night' on TV these past few weeks, with the increasingly enigmatic Ashes to Ashes and The Shield both entering their endgames. And I realise I've written less about The Shield than usual. In part this is because it's the last series, so it's all too convoluted to explain now to anyone not already initiated. But beyond that, a large part of my Shield evangelism was about trying to encourage people who were hungry for more after The Wire to check out the second best cop show of the 21st century. And I wasn't the only person with that idea, except because most people (yes, even the ones who like good TV) are total dicks. So they had to go that little bit further and say that The Shield was *better* than The Wire, because you could come up with the cure for cancer and there'd still be some snotty-nosed little twunt who felt that their own inherent cool meant they had to start the backlash. I'm getting annoyed just looking for the sort of stuff I mean, so here's a representative example, although I've definitely seen worse. Generally they come from the perspective of a teenage boy reading nineties comics, who assume that Nastier necessarily equals More Real necessarily equals Better. The cops in The Wire are, for the most part, trying to do the right thing, whereas the cops in The Shield are utter gits, so the latter must be more Real and True, right? Well, if you're a kneejerk hippy dipshit, then yes, sure.
But beyond that, just like the '9/11 Truth' numpties are clinging to an inverted version of the neocon myths they despise, desperately hanging on to the notion that The USA Is In Control, even if they call the USA the villain of the piece, rather than admitting the far scarier truth that nobody's driving, so people who think The Shield is the real story don't realise how much they're buying in to their enemy's worldview. I've said before that The Shield's worldview is straight out of de Sade - the triumphs of vice and the misfortunes of virtue. The good cops mean well, but mess up; the bad cops leave a trail of blood behind them, but they put villains away. That's a bad cop's excuse, right there. Take the specific example of Antwon Mitchell from Season 4, a gangster turned peacemaker whom the dodgy cops correctly suspect of actually using his community work as a front to build a supergang. That's taken straight from the Rampart scandal, whose Crash Team directly inspired the show's Strike Team. Except the real Antwon was a guy called Alex Sanchez, who really was trying to bring peace to the streets, and got harassed, framed and eventually deported by cops who (depending how conspiracy-minded you want to get) either couldn't believe any ex-gangbanger would change, or wanted to keep the kids in poor neighbourhoods divided (subscribing to the cock-up theory of history, I would myself favour the former explanation).
More generally, the show makes the bent cops of the Strike Team so charismatic that you're always praying for them to get away with their outrages. Well, most of them - redneck Shane and his even more stupid wife are and always have been in dire need of a lead shower. Oh, and if you're one of the people who think The Wire lost its plausibility with the final season's plotline - just wait until you see the ludicrous twists and turns of The Shield's final season. It's a caper movie with more gunfire.
Which is not to say it's a bad season, or a bad show. I'm backlashing against the backlash a little here, trying to re-establish the correct order of things. But yes, if you like The Wire you should watch The Shield. It's a damn good show. Just not a truer, or better, show than The Wire.

Since I made it back from Devon and a resurgent cold it's been a delightful haze of parties and pubs (and thank you all for a lovely birthday, it made entering the rather characterless age of 31 a pleasure rather than a puzzle). I love these inbetween days - one of my presents was Intermission, a compilation of solo Go-Betweens tracks from the period of their split, and as well as being lovely anyway, the name and the cold sun outside make it a good fit for right now.

My reservations about that BBC4 series on fantasy have been strengthened now that I've made a start on ER Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros, a book to which The Lord of the Rings was compared at its launch. It's at once recognisable as part of the same tradition, and a bizarre vision of an alternate track fantasy could have taken. Not so much in the style - although it makes Tolkien look like a dirty realist at times* - as in how it lays out the toolbox. Eddison does much what Tolkien did to people Middle Earth - he takes the names of spirits from folklore, and then ascribes them to human-like races in his imagined world. But after sixty years of Tolkien-derived fantasy, we're used to elves and dwarves and goblins. Eddison, on the other hand, calls his races witches and demons and imps, and from those names we don't expect solid, human-like races, even if the demons do make the concession of having little horns. There are also the foliots, whose name baffled me entirely until I then also started the deranged encyclopaedia that is The Anatomy of Melancholy and learned accidentally and almost at once that they are visitors to forlorn houses who make strange noises in the night. Except here they're not, they're a rather sappy bunch who live on an island and remind me faintly of the Dutch.

Have fulfilled the first of my definite plans for the life of leisure, with a one-sitting reread of All-Star Superman. Which is at times even more perfect than I remember - I especially like how fractal it gets, with lines like "I always write the Superman headlines before they happen" encompassing the whole - but I remain uncomfortably certain that the Bizarro story didn't need to cover two issues.

Finally got round to seeing The Last King of Scotland, and while I was almost as impressed as I expected to be - the central performances are stunning, Forrest Whitaker possibly even excelling his turn in The Shield (whose first series is a tenner on DVD in the HMV sale, and strongly recommended to anyone feeling a Wire-shaped gap in their viewing) - the ending left a little of a nasty taste in my mouth. Clearly the film is massively engaged with the idea of white exceptionalism, but it still seemed to fall slightly into it at the last.

*'"I like not the dirty face of the Ambassador," said Lord Zigg. "His nose sitteth flat on the face of him as it were a dab of clay, and I can see pat up his nostrils a summer day's journey into his head. If's upper lip bespeak him not a rare spouter of rank fustian, perdition catch me. Were it a finger's breadth longer, a might tuck it into his collar to keep his chin warm of a winter's night."
"I like not the smell of the Ambassador," said Lord Brandoch Daha. And he called for censers and sprinklers of lavender and rose water to purify the chamber, and let open the crystal windows that the breezes of heaven might enter and make all sweet.'

Just when I think I can forgive the inability to kill off characters and the 'ah - but is it?' moral reversals and the need to have even Hiro, who used to understand what was going on, act like a total div - they compound the total misuse of Jamie Hector aka Marlo from The Wire (sapped of all the menace we know he can exude as easy as breathing, even though he's meant to be a fear-vampire supervillain) by bringing in Bubs as a man who creates black holes. No. Just no. Maybe I didn't get my comics today, maybe No Heroics is finished with no word yet on whether it'll be back, but while we teeter on the brink of a recession I could be watching Carnivale; as America prepares to make the most important choice of a generation I could be watching John Adams; with no particular topical relevance, but with considerably more entertainment value than Heroes nonetheless, I could be catching up with last night's Dead Set. I do not need to be wasting my time with this network dreck.

In other news: twoi - when twee meets Oi!