Cartoon – 1/3/11

"Jedi is so ten years ago. I'm going to put Firth-ist"

Cartoon – 28/2/11

"It's still better than RyanAir"

Film Review – S.W.A.T., Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, Love, Actually

The Politics of Celluliod

(originally published in Inform Magazine, December 2003)

It’s funny how the movie industry reflects the world of politics. It’s invariably the case that films strip the world of all subtlety and present things in as base and moronic a manner as possible. Take S.W.A.T. for example, a typically brainless action film where the vile bad guy terrorist, played by gorgeous pouting Olivier Martinez, just happens to be French.

Is this deliberate do you think? Is the US slowly realising that Middle Eastern chaps, the bad guys of choice of recent years, are not the most fashionable of targets at the moment? Even Hollywood may have realised that Iraq wasn’t a nation of seething terrorists and that countries which have actually been supporting things like 9/11, such as Saudi Arabia, are off-limits. Perhaps they’ve realised that the world isn’t quite as obvious as once hoped.

Except that bad guys are still needed, so why not use the French instead?

Okay they may not have done anything bad per se, and their opposition to the Iraq war may have turned out to be correct but, as the Simpsons has pointed out, no-one really likes the French. Where S.W.A.T. is positively insulting in its depiction of our Gallic cousins, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World does pretty much the same thing, only with a lot more restraint.

It’s hard to believe this film being made even five years ago. Back before the middle east became the breeding ground for evil geniuses it was hugely fashionable for the British to be the ones that the Steven Seagals of the world would beat the crap out of. Although it’s essentially made by antipodeans (writer/director Peter Weir and star Russell Crowe) and funded with US money, Master and Commander is the story of British derring-do on the high seas during the time of Nelson and featuring as the villains, you guessed it, the French. This time under Napoleon – the sort of bad guy who anyone can relate to.

However, this being a Peter Weir film – he who did The Truman Show and Gallipoli – there’s a lot more subtlety involved. The battle scenes are more Saving Private Ryan than any ‘war is fab’ nonsense, with the first encounter by Captain Crowe’s ship with the French frigate they spend the film chasing being a hellish fusilade of smoke and fire coming at them through an impenetrable fog. Once one of the ten-year old boys who serves as a very junior officer has his arm graphically amputated you know that this is going to be a fairly unflinching portrait of battle on the seas. For most of the film the French are unseen, a “phantom” presence across the water in a better and faster ship. It’s no wonder that the British crew turn on themselves, despite the inspirational presence of Crowe – if you’re going to get anyone to play a captain who can inspire a crew to go to hell in the pacific, then Crowe’s your man. An unlucky junior officer (a positively ancient 30 this time) is branded a Jonah by the crew and eventually hounded into suicide.

But these are minor setbacks and for the most part this is pure boy’s own adventure, with none of the painful soap opera characters that blight the otherwise very similar Hornblower TV series. Revelling in its realism the cast of characters are a quietly pleasing bunch, topped off by Paul Bettany’s beautifully drawn portrait of the ship’s doctor and Crowe’s best friend, the only anchor to Crowe’s heroic recklessness, down to smaller roles such as David Threlfall’s perpetually grumbling ship’s steward.

Another film which seems subtly influenced by world events is Richard Curtis’s sprawling directorial debut Love, Actually. In it Hugh Grant plays the sort of lovingly drawn senior politician the movies periodically throw up and make you wish that we could vote for them instead of the guys we actually get. Hugh Grant’s prime minster probably bears as much relation to reality as Russell Crowe’s naval captain, but he’s great to watch as he falls for his maid, played by Martine McCutcheon in full on ‘gor blimey’ Eliza Doolittle cock-er-ney mode.

It’s a shame that this isn’t the main thrust of the story, as a British version of the Michael Douglas film The American President might have been rather good. As it is, we have to put up with a lot of other plots, most of which stink the place up like you wouldn’t believe. Curtis’s idea of love seems to be a lot of porky middle-aged blokes like Colin Firth, Alan Rickman and Liam Neeson getting off with the youngest, skinniest supermodels around. Thankfully, there are some good bits away from these ‘main’ stories, with the best story of the lot featuring good ol’ Bill Nighy as a washed up rock star – essentially the same part he played in Still Crazy but without the grumbling backing band – getting an unlikely Christmas number one, not because the song is any good but because he behaves so outrageously to the likes of “Ant and/or Dec”.

But even amongst all the fluff of this fluffiest of films politics rears its head, as Hugh Grant, incensed by the lewd behaviour of Clinton-esque US president Billy Bob Thornton to McCutcheon, practically declares war, which gets the immediate support of the British people. Is Curtis trying to tell Tony Blair something do you think?

Cartoon – 26/2/11

"David Cameron wants us to go to Libya"

Cartoon – 25/2/11

"You need to be on drugs to understand him"

Cartoon – 24/2/11

Cartoon – 23/2/11

Film Review – Match Point

Spoilt and Temperamental

(Originally published on entertainmentwise.com, January 2006)

It starts like every other Woody Allen film you’ve ever known. White text on black card with the cast listed alphabetically. There the similarity ends. This is not a Woody Allen film as we know it captain.

For a start, Match Point is set in London and not Noo Yawk, the natural prairies of the greater spotted Woody (whose breeding patterns include rather young adopted daughters). And for another, there’s no laughs. For those aliens who preferred his earlier, funnier films this is as far removed as is possible to get.

And there’s another reason why this ain’t no Woody Allen film like we’ve ever seen before. He seems to be convinced that actors we would consider idiots telling us to get cheaper car insurance are worthy of being his stars. Match Point stars, and I can’t say this significantly enough, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers.

JRM, as I’m going to call him from now on as I can’t be arsed writing his full worthless name out, is not very good. He was the star of the crap Velvet Goldmine, ‘playing’ the Bowie part opposite Ewan McGregor’s Iggy. He was the star of the BBC’s wince-inducing adaptation of Gormenghast. He is in possession of a neat pair of cheekbones and lips and is otherwise completely untalented.

Being set in Britain, Match Point is notable for having quite a lot of fine British talent aboard, mostly doing near enough to fuck all to make no difference. If you look closely, you can see them all looking at JRM and thinking the same thing: how the hell did you get this?

Alexander Armstrong is the boss of a tennis club and it’s his job to introduce us to the void that is JRM. Paul Kaye is a wideboy estate agent who shows him his tiny new flat. Apparently JRM is a tennis pro. Okay, I can handle that. Oh, and he’s Irish. His new best mate and his family tells him he’s Irish, so he must be. Except JRM isn’t doing an Irish accent. He’s not even doing a posh Irish accent that we could mistake for British but which has the odd softened vowel a la Terry Wogan. Mind you I don’t think JRM is English either. He’s from some weird fossilised planet somewhere where the trees are actors.

Sadly, this film comes to us with a huge amount of good reviews in advance, mostly from our American cousins. No doubt they were well impressed by the normally moribund Woody Allen doing something different and opted to ignore the treelike leading actor not doing anything resembling an Irish accent. How are they supposed to know what it sounded like? Similarly with Allen, who probably wrote “Irish” in the script with not much idea of what it actually meant.

Anyway, let’s move on, although it’s hard to do as the movie is moving at a snail’s pace. Like all idiots abroad, Allen heads to the tourist spots, and makes his characters mentally sub-normal in order to facilitate this. “I’ve got to meet Chloe at the Tate Modern. There’s a new painter she wants to show me.”

Chloe is a lady who he quite likes. She likes him more. They marry. “I want you to make me pregnant.” His new brother-in-law has a girlfriend. “She’s spoilt and temperamental.” JRM likes her more than his wife, most likely ‘cos she’s played by Scarlett Johansson and therefore has lips equal to his (what is it with lips these days?). “You’ve got sensual lips,” says JRM with all the passion of a weekend in Cleethorpes.

That’s an hour of the film dealt with. Meanwhile, we fleetingly see Mark Gatiss saying not a word. And John Fortune has precisely one line as JRM’s chauffeur. No doubt they all signed on because it was a Woody Allen film and he is a bit of a hero, but I wonder if any of them would have signed on if they knew the rubbish they would be taking all too brief a part in.

JRM walks across the room as if it’s something he’s unfamiliar with and gets slightly better. He has to be a bit evil now, and it’s so much easier for him to do that than play any kind of normal human being. His affair with Scarlett ain’t going well so he decides to bump her off, as you do. Now it’s James Nesbitt’s turn to look a complete prat as it’s up to him to investigate the crime. Irish accents do actually exist in this universe.

Ewan Bremner helps him, possibly overloading the Celtic accents but, despite this huge amount of talent, Woody decides to disappoint us all and let JRM off, when we were all looking forward to a Braveheart-style hanging, drawing and quartering.

Rumour has it that Woody Allen’s next two films are going to be set in Britain as well. So that’s more London landmarks and hopelessly unreal posh people to look forward to. I haven’t had much of an opinion about immigrants before now, but is there any way of kicking this patronising git out now before he does any more damage?

Cartoon – 22/2/11

"We can't afford Dignitas so we're sending him for NHS Elderly Care"

TV Review – Outcasts

Kipling sucks

There Are Survivors

The BBC has been admiringly supportive of sci-fi of late, a marked contrast to the Michael Grade years when he famously put Doctor Who into Paul Merton’s Room 101. But Doctor Who aside, it’s remarkable how bleedin’ po-faced their efforts are. The last effort, Survivors, was all about the last remnants of a society destroyed by a fatal plague, so cheery was never going to be a big component. Instead it managed a remarkable series of soapy contrivances and twists to keep the so-called tension ramped up week after week. So predictable and repetitive was its formula that it became wearying viewing. And there was absolutely no humour to leaven the atmosphere.

However, I quite liked Surivivors, so I like to think that it is specifically to me that Outcasts is aimed. For it resembles Survivors in every way possible. Apart from the sense of fun.

A distant planet called Carpathia – tastefully named after the ship that failed to rescue most of the people on the Titanic. The planet must be distant as it takes bloody ages to get there. The distant Earth has been totalled for reasons unknown. A kid is looking at the sky, and quoting Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright. Only in post-apocalyptic futures do kids quote Kipling. Pre-apocalypse you’re lucky to get the Barney the Dinosaur song. Jessica Haines plays his mother and explains they’re waiting for a troubled transporter from Earth. But they’ve got plenty of problems to be going on with.

Over exceedingly tiny, HD-friendly credits – which frankly do not favour my old school non-flatscreen TV – Battlestar Galactica’s own Jamie Bamber strides across a landscape that looks suspiciously non-British. What, have the BBC abandoned the traditional Welsh quarry for a foreign one? In this era of austerity an’ all. Reassuringly, Bamber appears to be playing the sneering Max Beesley part, previously essayed in Survivors by Max Beesley.

He arrives at the one outpost of civilisation on the planet and doesn’t look at all happy to be there. Hermione Norris greets him and seems to share the sentiment. “Check the weapon in,” she orders, guns having been recently banned in this exceedingly small (relatively) part of the world. “Don’t tell me my job,” he gruffs back.

It’s not entirely clear what his job is. It seems to mostly consist of managing his awesome reputation. Everybody knows who he is and they regard him with a mixture of fear and slightly less begrudging fear. Even Haines, his wife, is scared of him. This doesn’t stop her spying on him for the ‘government’, AKA Liam Cunningham, in this remarkably slimmed-down version of governance. This spying seems to consist of her writing about his possible multiple personality disorder in a file. “You’d never betray me, right?” asks Bamber, two seconds before Haines leaves the room and four seconds before he finds the file.

Meanwhile, characters are assembling elsewhere, in handy ‘nice-to-meet-you’ chunks. There’s President Cunningham, who is not quite enough distracted by the incoming troubled transporter to stick his nose into everything that’s going on. There’s Norris, his second-in-command who sticks her nose into everything else. There’s also various members of the constabulary, who look like a fun bunch only if you’re seriously considering suicide.

Haines is a member of this bunch, and she shares exposition with another member played by Amy Mason, who is unfortunately named Fleur – considering she’s supposed to be a Scottish bad-ass. “Bet he was pleased with the weapons ban,” she enquires after Bamber.

“Nobody welcomes the expeditionaries back anymore,” counters Haines. Their convolutions are interrupted by a huge storm (“whiteout!”) which knocks out Haines slightly, then by a mysterious figure who knocks her out completely, confining her to a respirator for the rest of the episode. This figure may be a revenge-seeking Bamber. Oh, who are we kidding? It is. It looks like him and everything.

Fleur is heartbroken. “She can’t die!” She says it with such passionate longing, that we’re irresistibly led into thinking there was some love triangle going on. There wasn’t, but why should a director curb passion like that for the sake of not confusing the audience?

Cunningham and Norris are engaged in allegedly intense conversation about events. “I asked her to spy on her own husband,” avers Cunningham. You’d think they both would already know this.

“He was plotting to break away and destroy everything here.”

“She did love him and it was agony for her.”

“She was doing her duty.” There you have it folks. Sci-fi dialogue 101 and not even Cunningham and Norris can rescue that load of heaping manure. Hell, John Gielgud and Peggy Ashcroft would have struggled to sell that.

Hold on, here’s something that might lighten the mood. It’s a man walking a pig! At last, some comic relief. And he’s played by our old pal Daniel Mays from Ashes to Ashes, who turned out to be the devil, or something (sorry, never did quite work out what was going on at the end of that). He also once played Uday Hussein, so he’s bound to be a barrel of laughs. Turns out the pig is an illegal clone, but it’s the allegations against Bamber that most concern him. “He wouldn’t hurt her. He’s a crazy gun head now but he wasn’t always like that.” The mood has failed to be lightened – intentionally at least.

As part of the investigation, Norris uses a machine that can look at your thoughts on a young Irish wideboy character (“I take great offence at your outdated elitism”), who seems a bit out-of-date in this era of Big Fat Gypsy Weddings. She seems to like what she sees as she later beds him, which the show seems to suggest is the most outrageous thing of all in this world of survival-ism and the world going foom. The BBC really do have a problem with older women, don’t they?

Elsewhere Fleur and Mays have teamed up to find Bamber. “We’re gonna find the person that hurt Karina and we’re gonna take them down,” says Fleur, once more suggesting a lot more going on than is meant. They go to see Jack (Ashley Walters), who is either leader of an underground movement, or just a bit of a naughty boy. Apparently, Bamber, “is a leader to these people. You’d better back off.”

Bamber doesn’t back off. He goes to visit President Cunningham. “Surprised to see me?” Cunningham is rather, what with the troubled transport, but soon reattaches his patrician cool.

“What you were planning amounted to a coup.”

“Did you fall for my wife, like everyone else?” Bamber is sweating insanity, and also a need to share the sort of small twists that these sort of shows thrive on. “You couldn’t protect your family, so you thought you’d help yourself to mine.” Then he drops the big one. “They’re out there. You ordered their execution but I let them go.” Who they? What happened to Cunningham’s family? Did he really fall for Bamber’s wife? Aarggh, curse you for making me care about the answers to these questions.

Bamber breaks out by shooting someone, thereby seriously annoying Mays. He also forcibly  takes his Kipling-spouting kid – “Fearful symmetry is always the line I have trouble with” – unfortunately not killing him in the process. They go into the wilderness. “If we find a tiger here, will we start hunting them again?” Shut up about bloody Kipling!

Jack goes to meet him out in the not-very-wild. “The people aren’t ready for this.”

Bamber: “You aren’t ready for this. Tell everybody else I’m waiting.” Methinks he’s been reading a bit too much Ayn Rand, somewhat by way of Sarah Palin. “We can do whatever we like now.”

Jack returns home and immediately turns him in. “Crazy”. Mays and Fleur organise a posse to get him. This posse contains… themselves. With backpacks. They’ve got mind readers, cloned pigs but absolutely no transport of any kind? Not even Segues? When we went to the moon we took a car.

Bamber and son arrive at his dream place, a somewhat barren lake. “Is this the sea daddy?” The resemblance to The Road is intentionally coincidental. Bamber puts a reassuring hand on his shoulder. “No, it’s a lake.”

Mays and Fleur are still tortuously following, and arguing about things in general. One supposes there is some crackling sexual tension but we all know who she’s really got the hots for. “Me and Karina were holding hands as we left the transport.” They camp out.

“What’s that?”

“What?”

“That noise.” Rather than investigate they go to bed.

Fleur gets dragged out of bed. “This is bad.”

“Could it have been alien life?”

“Don’t be stupid.” It’ll be alien life then.

Meanwhile, we’re supposed to care what happens with the troubled transport that’s been slowly approaching all this time. The Captain is a face on a TV screen, and he spouts dialogue that’s meant to sound impressive but isn’t: “Our estimated entry interface is plus one hour.” The entry interface is on. “Executing standard de-orbit burn and roll.” Norris and Cunningham look heroically concerned, but you know this isn’t going to end well.

Fleur and Mays find Bamber and son. “It’s beautiful here isn’t it?” It isn’t. “We were going to build a new place here.” By ‘we’ he means the betraying missus, who dared accuse him of having well-researched mental problems.

Fleur isn’t terribly sympathetic. “She probably won’t recover, by the way.” Indeed, she’s spent the last half hour on a respirator, perfect training for a future career on Casualty.

Bamber finally leaps off the crazy cliff. “Do you really believe that human beings can live together in peace?” he sneers rhetorically.

Fleur shoots him dead. “Yes I do.”

There is a brief suggestion that Bamber may have killed his son but this disappointingly is not the case. “I was dreaming of tigers.” Shut up about bloody Kipling!

Back at base, the troubled transport is launching its sub-shuttles as the rest of it falls apart on de-orbit. Norris sheds a tear. Haines dies on the respirator. Cunningham strikes a note of optimism. “There are survivors.” One of these survivors is someone called Julius Berger, who is reputedly a bit of a bad egg.

“What would that mean?”

“I don’t know, but that would mean something.” Aren’t you glad people are being paid to write this?

Time to finish on a brief shot of the afore-feared Julius Berger, who is played by another US TV escapee, Eric Mabius-out-of-Ugly Betty. He looks suitably Max Beesley in the now enforced absence of Jamie Bamber. Why couldn’t they have saved the money and got Max Beesley?

More importantly, how much do you want to continue watching?

Like Survivors, Outcasts is TV junk food. Completely lacking in flavours like wit, good dialogue, interesting character development or believable plotting. But it’s got the more-ish quality of revealing the odd mystery or potentially interesting character now and then, so you’re left wanting more of this insubstantial dreck. And the question remains who exactly are the Outcasts here: it can’t be the characters as they’re clearly, well, survivors (without a capital letter). Maybe it’s the poor stars of American TV seduced over here by the idea of the BBC’s reputed talent for quality. And the money. Maybe not so poor.