Month: Nov 2007

(A Matter of) Life (and Death) on Mars

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Okay, that pseudo-clever title has already pretty much taken it out of me… Last night we watched the final episode of Life on Mars. There was definitely some good material in there, some very atmospheric bits – but on the whole, it struck me as a cop-out. They didn’t seem to have the courage to go with the ambiguity they’d evoked and instead ended on what felt like a reprise of the season 1 finale.

***Spoilers to follow! Don’t say I didn’t warn you!*** 

Sam’s decision to go back to, or stay in, 1973 by means of (real? dreamed? imaginary?) suicide was sold to us as the right decision, but that just doesn’t gel with Sam’s ambivalence (to say it mildly) about the past he was stuck in. He comes out of the coma (or not – there were hints either way, but nothing that suggests the writers really thought about it) and no longer feels at home in the 21st century? That’s okay: it makes sense, since he’s been in this other reality for so long, and it’s interesting for the character. But don’t try to tell us that the best of all possible solutions is for him to choose the immature, made-for-TV Boys’ Adventure that is Hunting with Hunt. Don’t dangle ambiguity in front of us and then say, “But it’s all okay, because 2007 means boring meetings about grey areas, but 1973 means driving too fast, beating up suspects and feeling good and manly about it!”

The sad thing is, the ending could have been much, much worse. It could have been much more hackneyed. But it gave in to the infatuation with Gene Hunt, as did Sam. And I guess that in the end, I felt that there could have been more to the series than “DI Tyler, or How I stopped worrying and learned to love that misogynist, racist, homophobic dinosaur Gene Hunt (and you can, too!)”.

Ah well. This means that now we can get started on Battlestar Galactica season 3. Yay!

What is it with men and toys?

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Honestly. You can’t take John Locke anywhere. Get to a nice, cosy place wired with plastic explosive, show him a set of buttons, and off he goes! A computer tells him to “Enter 77” (that’s also the episode title) in case of a hostile incursion, and he goes and does it. Never mind that this sort of thing usually activates the defense mechanism, and we’ve seen what the island’s defense systems do to people – especially people who decide to drive around the island while under the influence…

Still, the episode was very enjoyable. For one thing, it’s always fun to see Sawyer getting clobbered by Hurley in one way or another, and the ping-pong bet was nice. And while it still feels like they’re making the main plot up as they go along, it was focused and intriguing enough to keep me going. Mikhail Bakunin is an interesting addition to the Others, and Sayid is quickly turning into the Iraqi McGyver… but in a good way! (Plausibility has long been maimed and killed by the island’s smoke monster, which is okay with me – if I want realism, I don’t watch Lost. I watch Grey’s Anatomy instead…)

Kate and Sayid, forcing the writers at gunpoint to make sense for a change

The first rule of Fight Club

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So, I’ve been rewatching Fight Club. (Best way to listen to commentary tracks? Work out while you’re listening to them. You’ll feel like a fit couch potato.) I still think it’s a very funny, very clever and extremely well made movie. But one thing about it tends to annoy me… and that’s many of its male fans.

So many guys I know who like the film buy into Tyler Durden’s fashionable nihilism and reactionary chic. They see the film as a critique of a society that brings forth the silly, ridiculous “Let’s all grouphug and cry into each other’s t-shirts!” self-help groups and subscribe to the “You are not beautiful, unique snowflakes” existentialism that Tyler preaches.

Bob. Bob had bitch tits.

But, essentially, is there much of a difference between the fight clubs and the self-help groups? Aren’t both basically places where people come together, feel sorry for themselves and their lot in life (perhaps even with justification) and then make each other feel better by either hugging each other or beating each other? Aren’t both simply schemes to make you think “Yeah, there’s others out there who feel like me?” The guys who join Tyler’s clubs are losers, and they think that beating each other up and being about as nihilist as a Nine Inch Nails t-shirt turns them into men.

“We’re still men.”

“Yes. Men is what we are.”

The only real difference (apart from the blood and snot vs. tears and snot, depending which brand of self-help group you prefer), it would seem to me, lies in the ideological veneer that covers either. But those guys who think, “Yeah, that Tyler is cool, we’re not beautiful and unique snowflakes, consumerism sucks, and I’d quite like to beat someone’s face into a pulp, because that’ll make me a man” – I’d say that a lot of Tyler Durden’s joke is on them. If you have to beat someone up, or be beaten up, to feel like a man, if you have to demolish coffee shops in order to feel you’ve got a sizeable penis, then good luck finding new teeth.

Rock bottom, and lovin’ it!

The man who loved fish (but did they love him back?)

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Okay, today’s going to be short on words by me – and long on irony/hypocrisy/YouTube videos! (Well, I did say I loved YouTube, I don’t just hate it…) I’ve been looking at my book of Sandman dustcovers, and I remembered how much I like Dave McKean’s work. Not all of it – I was less than keen (yes, I did misspell that as ‘kean’ first) on Mirrormask, for instance – but much of it is beautiful and disturbing to me. Most of all his illustrations for Neil Gaiman’s Mr. Punch, probably.

The man himself - Mr Punch

So this is where I shut up and give you two YouTube videos. One is by McKean himself, and it combines my love of his work and of Shakespeare’s writing; the other is by Jan Svankmajer, an obvious influence on McKean. Don’t watch the latter if you’re easily freaked out – or if you like your animation quick and frantic.

The beginning of Svankmajer’s Alice: 

I hope you enjoyed these as much as I do…

And another evocative McKean work…

I hate/love YouTube

Matt2 Comments

Okay, time for a short rant. Hey, it means you get a break from me writing gushing love letters to HBO series and mouthing off about films that you’ve either seen yourself or don’t really care about to begin with. (Come to think of it – why are you reading this blog? Chances are I got you to do so by means of emotional blackmail. I’m evil.)

Anyway, here’s my rant. I’ve been working on a project for work for which we solicited short YouTube application videos from people around the world. So far, so good. This afternoon, though, I would gladly have torn YT digital limb from limb. According to human nature, most people are submitting their videos right this fucking minute (I told you it was going to be a rant!), because the deadline is tomorrow. And I have to write back to all of them: “Hi, I received your video, thanks!/Hi, I received your invitation. Where’s your video?/Hi, do you really want to submit that? You might have a better chance posting two minutes of black!” (Okay, I don’t do the latter.)

Okay, rant point no. 1: YouTube has flood control, which means that you can only post four messages and then you have to wait for 10 minutes or so. Not great fun when you’re supposed to be getting back to 50 applicants. However, I get it, YT wants to avoid members getting spammed, and flood control can help with this.

Rant point no. 2, and infinitely greater than the previous one: This afternoon at work, YouTube reacted to 95% of my attempts to send a message by swallowing the said message and pretending I hadn’t written it. No “Your mail has been sent off”. No telltale traces in the “Sent” box. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. It was roughly like writing a letter, shredding it, writing another letter, shredding it, until it’s no longer fun and you’d rather shove your fingertips in the shredder’s slot.

Yes, I know YouTube is a free service. I also know that without it we couldn’t have done any of this. But this is my blog, so I get to stamp my little feet every now and then and run around screaming “YouTube sucks dead giraffes’ genitalia!” Or something.

This rant was brought to you by “Ritalin? We don’t need no stinking Ritalin!”

Today is a good day to watch others die (or is it?)

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Yup, Sunday. It’s Six Feet Under day.

Today’s episode – the first one in season 5 – feels like it continues straight from the end of season 4, emotionally, even if enough time must have passed for George to have undergone ECT treatment and Rico to have started dating again. (He doesn’t seem to be very good at it…) There’s the same mix of tentative hope and deep sadness, the former perhaps most in David and Keith’s decision to try for surrogacy, the latter especially in the aftermath of George’s illness and Ruth’s fears of what her life will be like, tied to a sick person. Her hold on her life has always been precarious, but now she seems to lose against her fears.

David and Keith

What else is there? Billy’s rapidly becoming much more likeable than bitchy Claire (although she didn’t necessarily deserve the hard slap her mother gave her for something very minor). The Death of the Week(tm) was one of the uglier ones in the series, uglier even than the Elevator of Doom at the end of season 4. (Definitely the kind of thing that could put anyone off psychotherapy…) And Rachel Griffiths once again shows what a great actress she is.

Brenda and Nate

On a slightly different note: we watched Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly yesterday. Can’t say I like it as much as Once Upon a Time in the West. It’s a much lighter, fluffier piece, and it forgoes the pathos of the later movie. But, like Once Upon a Time…, it’s got a great final showdown – and the music, like many of Morricone’s works, is iconic. It even survives being played by a ukulele orchestra. Don’t believe me? See for yourselves:

On the internet, the imaginative nerd is king

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Okay. If I am predictable, then today’s blog entry will be about Fight Club. And it is, after a fashion.

The internet is a weird, wonderful and sometimes rather frightening place. YouTube is a perfect example of this.

There’s this guy who re-enacts scenes from films. With himself in every role. And the strange thing is, he does it quite well. So, here’s his take on a famous scene from Fight Club (where the multiple-roles-played-by-the-same-actor thing works fairly well, if you think about it):

And if you’re not weirded out enough… Here’s perhaps the strangest thing he’s done. Check out this scene from Pan’s Labyrinth, through the looking glass:

P.S.: His name is Brandon Hardesty. His name is Brandon Hardesty. His name is Brandon Hardesty.

It’s all backwards

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Chinese boxes? Fuggedaboutit!

Last evening’s session on film analysis went well, and the students enjoyed it too. It made me want to do an entire course on the subject. It also made me want to watch all three movies again.

Of the three, Memento is the one that startled me most when I first saw it. It’s intricately structured and plotted, but beyond this it’s beautifully presented, with a sparse melancholy and occasional absurd humour that strengthen it into something more than a well made puzzle.

It’s also got a fantastic, disorienting first scene that acted as the perfect hook for me. I got the impression that it also did so for the students yesterday; they seemed quite frustrated at me stopping the film after roughly seven and a half minutes. Well, guys, it’s in the department DVD library, I think – and if it isn’t, just pester one of the staff members ’till they get it. After all, someone also got the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre for the department, which justifies many an additional purchase, I think (Perhaps they could get Crossroads, that Britney Spears movie, scripted by Shonda Rhimes of Grey’s Anatomy fame.)

I liked the effects of reverse chronology in storytelling, if done well. Memento definitely makes good use of having two narrative strands, one in normal chronological sequence, the other one reversed, putting us in Leonard’s shoes: we never know what went before, just like he can’t remember. It’s a structural strategy that’s also highly effective, and moving, in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and in Harold Pinter’s play Betrayal. (I’ve just read that there’s a Seinfeld episode, “The Betrayal”, that has the same structure and makes multiple references to Pinter – gotta see that one!) The focus is shifted from “What happens next?” to “Why did this happen?” I wouldn’t necessarily want my Die Hard or Aliens told in reverse chronology, of course, but every so often I get tired of “What happens next?” – mainly because what happens next isn’t all that exciting.

P.S.: It’ll be interesting to see what sort of visitors the tag list will bring in. Welcome, one and all! Even Britney Spears fans! And aliens, I guess.

Those who can’t, teach…

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I’m about to be off and teach a two-hour colloquium on film studies. I’ve never studied the subject, but somehow the person who asked me to teach the session thought that a) having  a PhD in English and American Literature, b) being a film nut (and having 400+ DVDs to prove it) and c) having an opinion on everything qualifies me for this.

Hurm, as a certain psycho superhero might say.

Anyway, since I have to make a few last notes, I’m going to have to make this short. I’ll be analysing extracts from three films with them: The Talented Mr Ripley, Fight Club and Memento. Having re-watched the beginning of those three films, I was reminded again why I liked them so much in the first place. Ripley got a bad rap with some critics, but I still find it one of Anthony Minghella’s, Matt Damon’s and Jude Law’s finest movies. And for those who think the film lacks tension, I thought I could put a highly spoilerish excerpt in the blog. Those who haven’t seen the film yet, don’t click on the clip lest you do so at your own peril!

However, I don’t want to leave you with murder and mayhem (or soap – sorry, wrong movie…!), so here’s another, more peaceful clip from the same film. Dunno what it is about the song, but I always get an urge to snap my fingers and tap my feet when I hear it. Enjoy!

What’s in the box?!

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I’ve thought before that Al Swearengen would make a good shrink (if shrinks took to stabbing their more annoying patients or slashing their throats, that is). I now think that the Indian head in a box he’s got might do an even better job; at the very least, it’s doing a great job of calming down Swingen’s temper. Or perhaps it’s gleets that do that to you.

A man and his head

I have to admit though that I wasn’t too keen on “Childish Things”, last night’s episode of Deadwood. There was something off about the writing and some of the acting – somehow it felt more like someone trying to imitate the Deadwood style and not quite managing. I wonder whether that’s also down to the director, Tim van Patten, who’s done quite a lot of Sopranos but no Deadwood. Added to which he directed some of the weaker episodes of the late, great HBO mobster series.

Still, there was a lot to like or even love about “Childish Things”. There was the gripping scene between Francis Wolcott and Joanie Stubbs in the darkened front room of the now defunct Chez Amis. (One of the things that make Wolcott so fascinating is that you really never know what he’ll do next. He doesn’t seem to know himself, and there’s this subtle trace of sadness at his own ignorance in him.) There was the priceless scene where Dan finds out about Al’s favourite rotting head-in-a-box. There was the moving scene where Charlie Utter confesses to Wild Bill’s grave just how worried he is about Calamity Jane. And there was Ellsworth sweet proposal to Alma Garrett.

But damn, boy, Bullock and his wife ought to go and see a marriage counsellor real soon. Who knows, perhaps Al and his amazing head could give the two of them a good talking to…

P.S.: No points for those who guessed what film the title quote is from. Anyway, perhaps you specifically need an Indian head to get the positive effects; Gwyneth Paltrow’s may have more of a “Must shoot the smug bastard several times and then go bonkers!” effect on people. Or at least on Brad.

What’s that? Jennifer Aniston?