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Menaced by the pause

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In Swiss cinemas, there’s almost always an intermission roughly halfway during the film. Doesn’t matter if it’s a three-hour epic or a blink-and-it’s-over chit of a comedy. Doesn’t even matter if it’s the remastered 2001: A Space Odyssey and five minutes after the cinema’s intermission (2001 – now there’s a true popcorn flick!) there’s the roadshow version’s actual intermission.

Even though I would consider myself a cinephile, I don’t hate intermissions with a vengeance. Sometimes I like having a moment to pause and think about what I’ve just seen; sometimes my bladder is grateful for them.

And sometimes they break a movie’s back, much like this:

I greatly enjoyed the first 50-60 minutes of Roman Polanski’s Carnage. The film was expertly paced, the casting near perfect (although I would’ve loved to see James Gandolfini in it), the performances strong, with just the right lightness of touch. I’m notoriously tricky when it comes to comedy, but I was laughing along with the escalating situation. And then came the break.

For all I know, without the forced interruption I would have stayed in the film. I would have enjoyed it to the end. As it was, the impetus was gone, and what remained felt clichéd, trite, predictable. Oh ho, neuroses and hypocrisy under a thin veneer of civilisation! Tee hee, the lawyer collapses when his mobile phone ends up in the vase! Giggle, snort, the wife breaks down in a sobbing wreck when her beloved handbag is thrown across the room, spilling its innards all over the floor.

Thing is, all of this – the clichés, the lack of any depth – was there in the first half… but as the film built up momentum, it felt like all of this was exactly to the point. Having had five minutes of ice cream ad projected at the screen and then to pick up where we’d left, as if nothing had happened? Carnage had turned from witty, sharp, light-of-touch comedy to leaden sitcom. The remaining 25 minutes felt longer than the almost-hour we’d already seen. Yes, it was still expertly acted, but to such obvious, hackneyed effect. Perhaps an earlier break would’ve been better, giving the film more of a chance to build up momentum again. I don’t know, but as it was I had seen two thirds of a smart, funny film, only to turn against it in the remaining half hour.

It’s difficult not to think of this piece of Zen wisdom:

P.S.: It’s difficult not to love Christoph Waltz’ performance in this, though, while disagreeing with him 99.9%.

… with a pig?!

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So… Glad that’s over. I’m not going to spout overused terms such as Jumping the Shark, but if I hadn’t known that House M.D. was waaaaay past its prime before, I definitely would know after having watched the season 7 finale. One of the advantages of being 6-12 months behind the English speaking world due to watching series on Swiss TV is that I’d already heard all the clamouring, wailing, gnashing of teeth and general lamentations concerning the season ending, so I had lowered my expectations accordingly. Not quite enough, mind you – it’s painful watching the actors trying to make the material work. Lazy writing is one thing; lazy writing that spells all the show’s facile pop psychology out is just insulting to the intelligence of the audience.

From everything I’ve heard about the eighth (and final, right? Promise?) season, it sounds like the show remains moderately, patchily watchable, but at this point it’s difficult not to wish for the actors involved to find something better that isn’t written by an infinite number of computers programmed by monkeys (and shit-flinging ones at that) and possibly IT supported by outsourced Indian monkeys. (For the record: the computers work flawlessly, even if their output is dross.)

How do you follow up a depressingly shoddy episode of House? Why, with a Channel Four satire about the UK Prime Minister coerced into having sexual intercourse with a pig, that’s how! The first episode of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror sounded like crass satire in a one-sentence synopsis, and the reviews I’d read were tepid at best – so I was surprised to find “The National Anthem” well written, well acted and quite thought-provoking. While the premise is satirical, the episode plays it straight and with remarkable conviction at that – which made “The National Anthem” quite a bit more unsettling than a more leering, in-your-face approach would’ve achieved.

Though the entire media satire-meets-inappropriate sexual content thing did put me in mind of one of my favourite Monty Python sketches. So, to end this post on a more amusing note:

Farewell to Oz

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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?

Visiting with my Auntie Beeb

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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 ****?

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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…

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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!

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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.

You’re a mean one, Mr Kratos!

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It is strange that I should enjoy God of War III so much. I’m not a particular fan of hyper-violence – and with a game that features Zipper Tech, a subroutine that calculates innards spilling out of a disembowelled centaur, it’s fair to say that it’s a tad on the violent side. I’m also not the biggest fan of puerile sex scenes in any media – and banging Aphrodite (off-screen) by Quick Time Event while two of her bare-breasted attendants watch and get all hot and bothered in the process doesn’t strike me as a particularly mature depiction of human (or indeed mytho-divine) sexuality.

And yet, in spite of me slaying more Olympeans than I care to shake my blades at (come to think of it, most of them I killed by shaking my blades at them, repeatedly), none of my pinko liberal borderline-pacifist sentiments complain the way they do when I hear about how much Jack Bauer rules. It’s not that I fist-bump every time Kratos tears some satyr’s head off or impales a minotaur on his torn-off horns… but damn, if the game doesn’t make those things enjoyable! And even though I’m about the greatest story-whore there is when it comes to games (two fingers to you, ludologists!), I guess my enjoyment of God of War III comes down to gameplay, first and foremost. I don’t know how Sony Santa Monica did it, but the Ghost of Sparta (known as Krony-Poo to those friends of his who want to have a close look at their lungs) and his arsenal of mythological weapons of mass destruction control so well. For non-gamers, it may be difficult to understand just how much a game can pull you in with a reactive, easy-to-learn-hard-to-master set of controls – and the God of War series has always been extremely good at this.

While story isn’t the game’s main attraction, it is pretty well told – and eminently pretty, in a “Look at the shader effects on that flesh wound!” way – and Kratos’ butchers tour of ancient Greece features some memorable re-interpretations of the big names, from snide but doomed Hermes to bruddah Hercules who gets his face Gaspar Noéd in to poor doomed Hephaestus who only wanted to protect his daughter, Pandora. But the visual beauty of this game doesn’t come from the characters (although it’s impressive to see Kratos’ scars in realtime HD) or the cutting-edge (pun intended) blood and guts – it’s the amazing, epic scale that each of the games has managed to put onto the screen. From fighting the Colossus of Rhodes to the Steeds of Time to climbing around on Gaia’s ample back fighting harpies… and don’t even let me get started on the architecture! In effect, God of War III may dress up as splatter, but at its heart it’s scale-porn – it gets hot and bothered showing tiny little figures climbing around gigantic buildings and creatures. It’s what a model railway built by Peter Jackson would look like. And, pinko lefty liberal that I am, I eat it up like it’s going out of style… and if it means pulling the heads off another 99 hydras.

“Remember when?” is the lowest form of conversation…

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… nevertheless, though, remember when I did a semi-ironic, semi-appreciative post on Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life? And remember when I plugged Mark Kermode’s BBC Radio film reviews?

Well, those two threads got together, had some glasses of wine and cuddled up under the blankets… and now, months later, voilà!

Because, obviously, Kermode would never have reviewed Tree of Life if it hadn’t been for my blog. Ob-vi-ous-ly. (In any case, it’s not one of the funniest or most cutting reviews, but that’s because Kermode’s reaction to the film, while more negative than mine, is fundamentally respectful if baffled and at times frustrated with Malick’s riff on Genesis, the Book of Job and Walking With Dinosaurs.)