Author: Matt

Housing crisis

MattLeave a comment

If it weren’t for that meddling Hugh Laurie… Seriously, I find few things in TV land as annoying as writerly laziness – and House, M.D. has become one of the laziest shows in that respect. We’re now almost at the end of season 7 in Switzerland, and when they’re not paying attention I’m sure I keep catching the series regulars avoid each others’ looks in embarrassment. Laurie still does a good (though no longer great) job, as does Robert Sean Leonard, but you have to feel sorry for the likes of Chase, Foreman, Taub and the other hapless sidekicks.

House has rarely been a terribly original show, and part of its appeal was its utterly formulaic structure. Once you’ve seen half a dozen of episodes, you know what expects you: weird symptoms manifest themselves, the team makes a first diagnosis and starts treatment, the patient gets worse, more treatment, more escalation, the apparent solution followed by a major crisis, then House – usually while talking to Wilson – has an epiphany based on some more or less feeble pun or metaphor emerging from the conversation he’s just had and solves the case. Patient saved, in 49 out of 50 cases, otherwise cue patient’s poignant death accompanied by some melancholy singer-songwriter droning on about love and loss and dead puppies.

It’s not that the show is samey; it’s that the bits where the show could at least be somewhat different from week to week, the soap opera/comedy bits, have become really, really inept. I’ve stopped counting the moments where House says something offensive, inappropriate or weird and we get reaction shots from the other characters that could be out of a cheapo ’80s sitcom. It doesn’t help that the episode “Bombshells”, which tries (though not all that successfully) to mix up the format, does a scene parodying sitcom clichés when the actual show in business-as-usual mode delivers lazy versions of those same clichés.

At this point, as much as it pains me to say it, I am seriously thinking that House, M.D. should’ve been put down like an old, sick dog. Let Laurie move on to something where he can make better use of his talents. I’m happy if Leonard tags along. But now, giving us Olivia Wilde to look at simply isn’t enough to keep things very interesting. Sorry, Gregory – I’m just not that into you anymore.

P.S.: Is it just me, or is this music video quite possibly one of the weirdest things to result from the series?

Farewell to Oz

MattLeave a comment

We managed to finish two long works recently – first Don Quixote (I’m convinced that most people didn’t read past page 150, since almost every single reference you read or hear is to what happens in the first fifth of the novel), and then Oz, the HBO prison (melo)drama.

The series is a prototype for so many later HBO gems, The Sopranos and The Wire just two of them. It pioneered the network’s trademark adult style, with lashings of violence and sex. Its characters were often nuanced, always ambiguous, its cast of characters portrayed by actors who give it their all. I don’t regret watching the whole series, and there were very strong moments throughout.

All of which is building up to faint praise, to be quite honest. The series’ grasp exceeded its reach – which in itself isn’t that much of a problem, but what really rankles is how Oz seems to think itself more astute, more perceptive on the evils of the American penal system than it really is. It is too infatuated with its own running commentary and social critique, and it displays the tendency towards hysteria in its storylines and presentation that Spike Lee is prone to. It’s easy enough to forgive this in Lee’s films of the late ’80s and early ’90s, but to find the same tricks used over and over in a series in the late ’90s and early 21st century… well, it makes the series look hokey.

More than that, though, Oz could have been much stronger and held up much better to its successors if it had been two or three seasons rather than the full six seasons it lasted. Its social critique started off as hit-and-miss, often facile rather than perceptive, and this only increased as the series went on. By the time we got to the last couple of seasons, many storylines were thin and fraying at the edges; what kept us watching wasn’t the commentary on prison and how it often achieves an effect that is the opposite of what is intended, but the soap opera. Would Beecher find happiness in his relationship with charming sociopath Keller? Would McManus finally manage to have an adult relationship and not turn into a dick towards a woman he clearly likes? Would Schillinger finally accept that no one knows how to pronounce his name correctly? And as with daytime soaps, the episodic plots were sordid, tacky, maudlin: Rebadow takes up playing the lottery because his son is dying of leucaemia! Alvarez’ wife is divorcing him and fucking his brother! Did I care? Yes – but in a distanced, not particularly involved way.

The final season was a mess of barely begun, half finished ideas and storylines. Dead characters from past seasons were brought back to add their voice to Augustus Hill’s – and then that idea was dropped. New characters were introduced for no apparent reason, almost as if the producers were pretending that Oz wasn’t coming to an end. There were powerful moments – Cyril’s almost-execution – but others were as silly as the series’ worst excesses. (Kirk and Hoyt believing they’re possessed by the devil – WTF?!) The prison production of Macbeth (and the running gag of replacing the actors because they keep dying off) was forgotten for most of the season, even if it was used effectively to stage one character’s death.

All things considered, though, this is one Oz I’m unlikely to revisit. I’ve seen Six Feet Under three times (and am gearing up for a fourth). Same with The Wire, The Sopranos, Deadwood – even Carnivale and Rome. I’m unlikely to go back to Oz Penitentiary any time soon, though. I guess what we had here was a failure to communicate, eh?

The times, they are a-changin’…

MattLeave a comment

… and the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is changing with them – but it seems that time is catching up with the League.

When I first read it I wasn’t terribly fond of Alan Moore’s Black Dossier, a source book-cum-smorgasboard of literary pastiche continuing the ongoing tales of some of literature’s strangest, least likely heroes. What I liked best about the first two volumes of the League’s adventures was how Moore combined exciting tales with fascinating characterisation, bringing to the fore the undercurrents of Victorian genre fiction in smart ways: the sexism, the racism, the sense that an Empire was slowly rotting from the inside. I enjoyed how Moore could bring out humanity in his monsters and vice versa. While I appreciated the achievement of Black Dossier a lot more when re-reading it, it’s still mainly a show of Moore’s considerable skills at parody and pastiche. What it isn’t is a strong story.

The first issue of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume III: Century was a lot more centred on telling a story, but it was clearly a first part. Having been a Moore fan since my first trip into his mindscape (From Hell was my starting point, and what a wild ride it was) I trusted that the grand old man of Northampton knew what he was doing, but it was difficult to discern where this was going: the issue was self-contained, but in terms of story it was relatively thin, being more interested in doing a retelling of Brecht and Weill’s Three Penny Opera in the world of the League than in giving us a plot to care about – which was most likely exactly that Moore had intended, in homage to Brecht’s literary politics (or should that be political literariness?).

Moore and his League artist Kevin O’Neill are notoriously late with their work; the second issue, 1969 (AKA “Paint It Black”, although I haven’t actually seen that title anywhere in the comic itself) was originally scheduled for spring 2010 but finally came out in August 2011. And while it’s as much of a middle part as 1910 (or “What Keeps Mankind Alive”) was a beginning, it’s easier to discern where the writer is taking this storyline. Arguably, this is the Empire Strikes Back of Century, and it ends with Moore’s dark equivalent (darker even if you take in the appendix) of Han frozen in Carbonite. It’s quite surprising how an artist who in an interview boiled down his Lost Girls to “Make love, not war!” (I’m sure Moore was fully aware this was an oversimplification) presents such an ominous version of the Age of Aquarius. This is not the Summer of Love so much as a wicked, clever Nicolas Roeg-inspired romp that spirals out of control and ends in madness, mayhem – and a certain unexpected character vanishing into a wall at Kings Cross Station. That’s right, Moore brings a certain someone from a much beloved franchise into his storyline and gives him a prominence that proves surprisingly effective.

What’s next for the League? 1969‘s epilogue, set in a punk club in the ’70s, with Mina out of sight and literally out of mind, Alan Quatermain back on the drugs that almost killed him and Orlando (female once again, although far from feminine) giving up on his erstwhile friend and lover, suggests that the third issue – to come out next year, if Moore, O’Neill and the gods of publishing prove kind – won’t start in a happy place. The issue’s title, “Let It Come Down”, doesn’t exactly sound optimistic, does it?

And now, guys and gals, make sure to pray to your 2nd century imaginary sock-puppet hoax of a snake god that the book comes out while we still remember what happened before, okay?

The past is a foreign country…

Matt1 Comment

… they do things better there.

Or at least Paul Abbott did. I’ve obliquely alluded to my dissatisfaction with his recent BBC miniseries Exile before – very obliquely, so much so that I was hardly able to find the reference – and out of the recent spate of BBC drama it was the weakest. In spite of a good cast and great first episode, it was predictable, lazily characterised and didn’t do anything we hadn’t seen before. This was especially disappointing because eight years ago Paul Abbott had written another BBC miniseries, also starring John Simm, and that one was smart, exciting and kept me guessing pretty much throughout. It was called State of Play, and yes, if that title rings a bell, it’s because Hollywood turned it into a movie remake.

I’m currently re-watching State of Play and can attest that it stands up well even at a second viewing, where Exile didn’t even survive a first viewing intact. It’s got a great, varied cast both of old hands and fresh faces (and bringing together John Simm and Philip Glenister years before Life on Mars), and it was directed with pace and style by a certain David Yates who would later bring out the gloomiest in the halls of Hogwarts.

The series isn’t perfect – I can’t remember how it ends, but I do remember that the ending fell somewhat flat when we first watched it a few years ago. (I also remember a number of episodes of Cracker that started much better than they ended, while I’m at it.) But in terms of zippy, clever entertainment produced UK talent at the top of their game, it’s well worth watching. And hey, it’s got Polly Walker, Kelly McDonald, James McAvoy, Bill Nighy… Definitely something for most tastes – plus, at least Amazon.co.uk is selling it for £4. At this rate you need a very good excuse not to give it a try, eh?

This advertising was brought to you by a guy who wants the Beeb to do as well as they’ve shown they can, over and over. Because, as much as I like HBO, every now and then I bet those Brit actors are quite happy to head home, visit their families, have a cuppa with their ageing mum and use their original accents.

P.S.: I can’t say anything about the film version’s quality, but at least they decided to stay stylish when they replaced the editor-in-chief played by Bill Nighy with the Queen of British acting herself, Helen Mirren. (Isn’t it time for her and Judi Dench to star in a buddy cop comedy or in anything, really, since their last co-operation seems to have been a Peter Hall Midsummer Night’s Dream?)

Funny how? What’s funny about it?

Matt3 Comments

I like Ian McEwan. Atonement is one of my favourite novels of the last ten years. Enduring Love has stayed with me, as has On Chesil Beach. I even enjoyed Saturday, which was given not so much a panning as a resounding “Hmm” after Atonement was loved by pretty much all the critics.

I just don’t think he’s a particularly funny guy.

Back when his Amsterdam received the Booker Prize in 1998, I remember many people saying that they were making up for not giving him the year before, for Enduring Love. Obviously Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things was more than deserving, but there was definitely something that felt off about giving McEwan the Booker for Amsterdam – a book both slight (more a novella than a novel) and, at least in my opinion, not particularly good.

Amsterdam feels a bit like one of those Roald Dahl stories for adults – people who aren’t particularly nice getting themselves into shitty situations and digging themselves in further the more they try to extricate themselves, doing damage to themselves and to those around them who are usually as unpleasant as they are. There was even a nasty twist in the tale that felt very Dahlish. The thing was, though: Dahl’s stories, while nasty, are also funny. McEwan’s attempt at a joke felt too elaborate, overwritten, and simply not particularly amusing. It felt snide, smug and not a little self-satisfied… and essentially forgettable.

Fast forward twelve years, and it feels like McEwan’s pulled another Amsterdam – though one that dresses itself in topicality. Solar is about a physicist, ageing, fattening, roundly unpleasant but with enough of the hypocritical charm that Brits of a certain class seem to have to bed a number of fairly attractive women. For better or for worse, he ends up occupying himself with climate change and trying to make his name in the growing eco-business. Oh yes, he also frames an innocent man for murder, goes on an Arctic expedition, steals a dead man’s research and generally makes the reader – well, at least this reader – wish that he’d get eaten by a polar bear.

I’ve read articles that described Solar as “laugh-out loud funny”. A friend at work read and loved the novel. And, as I mentioned above, I generally like McEwan a lot. He’s a smart, usually subtle writer – not necessarily original, but great at his craft. But again: when McEwan aims for satirical humour, his writing falls flat for me. Solar displays his craft – McEwan can turn an elegant phrase – but it feels as smug as Amsterdam. The targets of his satire are obvious, his humour considerably less clever than it seems to consider itself; there’s an unpleasant feeling of the novel going, “Did you see that? Wasn’t that funny? Wasn’t that clever?” Solar is neither sharp and nasty enough to be good satire, to my mind, nor does it have an interesting plot or characters to keep me going. I finished it, of course, since a novel almost has to throw up all over my Criterion DVDs to make me put it aside without finishing it, but this overlong, heavy-handed, one-note joke of a novel overstayed its welcome roughly 20 pages in. Perhaps I don’t have enough of a sense of humour, or perhaps I should avoid Mr McEwan’s humoristic writing like the plague, but one Amsterdam was enough for me… and at least that one was only about a third of Solar‘s length.

On the more positive side, though: I recently re-read Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled and didn’t like it any more the second time around – but I’m warming a lot more to his Never Let Me Go. Part of me wishes I’d been able to read it unspoiled, but even knowing what I do about the novel’s plot I’m enjoying it a lot, much more than either some of Ishiguro’s earlier work or McEwan’s attempts at amusing me. Here’s hoping that this doesn’t mean my next read afterwards has to be another failure!

P.S.: I wasn’t amused to find the old, worn out crisp/biscuit-eating anecdote in Solar, but I did like the meta-absurdity in which it’s developed in the novel – and I was happy to see Douglas Adams (R.I.P.) referenced.

When is a still not a still?

MattLeave a comment

Jim Emerson recently posted about cinematoGIFs, animated stills (that’ll do in your brain!) that try to capture the essence of a scene. The results are evocative and almost hypnotic… I challenge anyone to make such a not-quite-still out of a Michael Bay movie, though!

Edit: Not sure whether these actually work embedded in a WordPress post. When you click on them – or follow the original link above – you should be able to see them in their full, animated glory, though!

Make sure to check out the rest of them!

Visiting with my Auntie Beeb

Matt1 Comment

The casts the BBC gets for its dramas are amazing. Look at The Hour: Ben Whishaw, Romola Garai, Dominic West, Anna Chancellor, Juliet Stevenson. Look at Page Eight: Bill Nighy, Michael Gambon, Ralph Fiennes, Rachel Weisz. It’s as if the good old British Broadcasting Company had some dirt on all of those people, saucy negatives from last year’s Christmas party when everyone got sloshed and made an ass of themselves.

The production values are equally great; especially in HD (yes, the city where we live finally seems to have updated its telecom cables to glass fibres!), these series look gorgeous and crisp. Perhaps not quite on par with the best that HBO has to offer, but that may be British understatement versus trans-American grandiosity. Also, look at the writers and directors: veterans of such quality drama as Cracker, State of Play, the guy who adapted The Hours and The Reader to the great pleasure of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Let me stress that I greatly enjoyed watching both The Hour and Page Eight. They’re quality entertainment, and you could do a lot worse than to check these out. It’s a shame, though, that compared to everything else about recent BBC drama, the acting, directing and production values, the writing is decidedly weaker. There are a lot of nice exchanges in The Hour, and I’ve liked Page Eight‘s dialogues more than some of the David Hare I’ve seen on stage, but apart from the dialogues the writing in both of these is relatively lazy. They rely on clichés (of plotting as well as characterisation) without twisting them into something more interesting, and in striving for relevance both dramas go for facile analogy. Obviously, in some ways the Suez crisis and Anthony Eden’s stance may lend itself to parallels to more recent adventures in the Arab world that Britain, in an effort to be (or at least appear) Great again, got involved in, but the parallels evoked by The Hour are hamfisted and not a little smug – and most definitely not as clever as the writers seem to think… and that is ignoring some of the more tin-eared anachronisms in the writing. (I am by no means a stickler for 100% historical accuracy, but some effort should be put in maintaining the illusion of past times.)

Page Eight was perhaps not as guilty of clumsy allegorisation, but that’s only because it wasn’t set in the past. Its parallels to recent and current events weren’t subtextual (albeit in 96-point, bolded, underlined and italicised font, as in The Hour), but they were no more incisive or illuminating for that. As soon as Hare strayed from character drama into politics, his script felt like so many Guardian editorials mashed up into a one-and-a-half hour statement on Britain’s behaviour during and after the WMD affair. Do I think they had a point in their indictment of how Blair and his government behaved? Absolutely. Do I think they added anything worthwhile to the discussion? Not really. Other cribbing from recent events (such as Rachel Weisz’s brother, a clear Rachel Corrie stand-in) were as blunt but unproductive – and that’s not even getting started on the ill-advised Spring-Autumn romance that the script develops between Weisz’ and Nighy’s characters, that the film only barely pulls off without major embarrassment because of the acting of its two leads.

So, Auntie Beeb, in case you’re reading this (yeah, right…): next time round, keep the great actors – but put some money aside for better scripts. Don’t be too self-congratulatory, don’t be too clumsily eager to go for relevance, if you risk ending up trite and obvious. Don’t think you’re smarter than you are, because you risk yourself looking dumb and your audience feeling patronised. Check out other recent British TV drama, such as Low Winter Sun. Tell your authors not to write opinion pieces on modern politics thinly veiled as drama. You’re there 90% of the way – now make the effort and get the plots and writing right as well.

(… writes the guy who doesn’t even pay a licence fee in the UK.)

Who are you “Oh aye, laddie”-ing, you ****ing ****?

MattLeave a comment

If The West Wing occupies one end of the galaxy of TV shows on politics, The Thick of It is pretty much at the opposite end. The two shows share a couple of things, not least of which their complete insistence on being about words first and foremost – but if The West Wing maintains a fundamental idealism about politics, The Thick of It is the horrific Mr Hyde to its Dr Jekyll.

It is also one of the most witheringly foul-mouthed, funniest comedies I’ve seen in a long time.

Watching an episode of each series side by side, it’s difficult not to come down with a case of TV whiplash: the BBC series practically squelches with cynicism towards British politics, the political establishment and the individuals who make it up. Whenever there is a moment where a character’s fundamental decency comes through for a moment, it’s soon covered with generous lashings of craven baseness, selfishness, cowardice and stupidity. I’ve rarely seen anything as misanthropic, and as sweary, as this series.

The strange thing is: usually I would avoid any such programme like the plague. I tend to find genuine cynicism facile and tedious, I’m way too much of a pinko liberal do-gooder wannabe, and swearing for the sake of it bores me. Yet The Thick of It‘s Malcolm Tucker, one of the most memorable television creations… well… ever – he elevates swearing to an art form. Watching him have a go at someone makes me dream of an operatic duet between Peter Capaldi’s Tucker and Ian McShane’s Al Swearengen. It’d be fucking Verdi. People used to say that David Mamet (God bless his little converted-to-the Tea Party socks…) uses swearing as if it were a jazz riff – well, working from that, Malcolm Tucker is Charlie Parker. He knows when to improvise like a nightingale on speed and when to go for the kick-in-the-nuts simplicity of the oldest put-down in the book.

In fact, I was so dazzled by his verbal-vulgar dexteriarrhea that it took me several episodes to realise that he isn’t smarter than everyone else in the series – he’s simply a potty-mouth virtuoso with the instincts of a shark.

Even with Malcolm Tucker as its main asset, the series is not flawless. Any individual episode is basically identical to any other episode – the plot details change, but they don’t matter. It wouldn’t work in 40-minute instalments – the episodes are short enough for the audience not to register that everything’s caught in an eternal loop. (Ironically, In the Loop is the title of the series’ movie spin-off, and that one works pretty well at way over 40 minutes.) The series knows, though, why it works and it plays to its strengths, at least for the first season. (I’ve yet to watch, or even obtain, any season beyond that. I saw and enjoyed one episode from season 3 on a long cross-Atlantic flight and vastly enjoyed it, almost choking on the god-awful British Airways food trying not to laugh too loudly.)

It’s best, though, to end this with a few choice words from the Master himself.

When in Rome…

MattLeave a comment

For all the amazing places I’ve visited vicariously through cinema, last week that was spent in actual, real Rome made me realise that I haven’t seen all that many films set in the Eternal City, in spite of its obvious cinematic qualities. I’ve seen Antonioni’s Roma, Città Aperta, and I’ve watched Matt Damon trying to figure out whether he wanted to be Jude Law or whether he simply wanted him in The Talented Mr Ripley – but other than that, cinematic Rome has passed me by. (Televisionary Rome, on the other hand…) Having recently walked past the house where Frederico Fellini and Giulietta Massina lived for the last years of their lives, I am resolved to check out La Dolce Vita and Roma, at least. Film Four, couldn’t you throw a Fellini retrospective our way?

However, I did spend a couple of weeks earlier this year exploring the place – albeit neither in films nor in the real world, but in Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, a game that carries the DNA of both Dan Brown and Umberto Eco according to some critics (I’m afraid that Eco, other than The Name of the Rose and some essays, has passed me by so far – another omission I’m hoping to correct). It’s set in Renaissance Rome, and it’s a near perfect example of how video games, in terms of technology but accordingly also in terms of ambition of what can be depicted in games, have developed in the last couple of years. Obviously seeing the real Pantheon or Colosseum or Campidoglio isn’t the same as seeing them in the game – and indeed, when I fired up Brotherhood this morning to check out the locations with Rome fresh in my memory, I did find them all to look considerably smaller in comparison – but letting you explore places that feel alive and that are inaccessible to you otherwise is something that games are doing better and better.

What games cannot do, though, and won’t for a long, long time, is deliver that perfect Granita di Caffe con Panna. Time for Nintendo to make a deal with Nespresso, methinks!

P.S.: In Brotherhood, the Colosseum and the Pantheon are probably my favourites. In actual Rome, it’s the wonderful Caravaggios (can he lay eggs?), the restaurants and that perfect tagliolini cacio e pepe at Le mani in pasta in the Trastevere part of the city. Molto delicioso!

Catch this!

Matt1 Comment

Okay, this’ll be a very short one – I’m in Delhi for the week (work, I’m afraid, and without my better – and certainly better-looking – half) and don’t have all that much time for non-work blogging, but I just saw this and needed to share my excitement with the world. I’d heard that Steven Soderbergh was going to quit filmmaking, but it seems that one of his last gifts to cinemaphiles is what looks to be like the lovechild of Traffic and Outbreak – with Gwyneth Paltrow as the monkey. So, without much further ado, get infected.