The Angriest

Babble On, part 7: "The Parliament of Dreams"

2012-01-24T16:41:00.000-08:00

In "The Parliament of Dreams", religious festivals take over the station, Commander Sinclair reconnects with an ex-girlfriend, and Ambassador G'Kar goes on the run from an assassination contract. G'Kar also gets a new ambassadorial aide, Na'Toth (Caitlin Brown). Delenn finally gets one of her own - Lennier (Bill Mumy).

This episode is very much a mixed bag: for every element that works, there's one that doesn't. In the interests of fairness I flipped a coin to see which I would talk about first. Heads came up, so: the positive points, and then the negatives.

Caitlin Brown is excellent as Na'Toth. She's funny, interesting and an excellent co-star for Andreas Katsulas' G'Kar. She replaces Ko'Dath, after actress Mary Woronov found the make-up procedure too difficult to continue with.
The G'Kar storyline is great. It's not going to win any awards for originality, but it's well played and consistently amusing and engaging.
Michael O'Hare is continuing to impress me as Sinclair. I remember thinking he was the worst actor in the cast the first time around. Now all I'm seeing is very subtle and naturalistic acting. I think he stands out because so many of the actors in make-up are aggressively theatrical (Londo, G'Kar, Vir, Na'Toth, Delenn, etc).

Now for the negatives:

The idea of a station-wide festival celebrating religious diversity is a good one, but it's very disappointing to see the series fall into the hoary old cliche of all alien civilizations having monocultures. The Minbari has one religion, as do the Centauri, and as do - we are led to assume - all the other races. At the end Sinclair reveals the demonstration of human religion - a long procession of differing faiths (include some pretty obscure ones I found hard to believe would be on an intergalactic space station). For some reason this struck me as oddly racist. I say oddly because we're talking about fictional species' here, but there is a definite tone of "Look at the aliens and their silly religions - now look at all the diversity and wonderful variety in human religion". I think it was supposed to feel a bit profound. Instead it felt very slightly offensive.
The romantic subplot between Sinclair and ex-girlfriend Catherine Sakai is woeful. Both actors work the best they can with what they have, but what they have is a bundle of cliches. It's a really tedious collection of scenes that are leading me to pin down one of Straczynski's main failings as a writer: he can't write ordinary conversations to save his life.
Maybe it's the characterisation, maybe it's the actor, but Lennier always comes across like a deer caught in headlights. I seem to recall this slightly stunned performance style continues for the whole series.

Despite the above-mentioned faults, I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy "The Parliament of Dreams". When it works, it's fine. When it doesn't, I just waited for the next bit that worked. So that's two good episodes out of five so far: the quality ratio just leaped from 25 per cent to 40.

The runners-up of 2011

2012-01-12T15:39:00.000-08:00

While I posted my ten favourite films of 2011 a week or two ago, they were by no means the only films I liked. Here are another 11 films I saw last year that are definitely worth your attention. As with last time, some of these were produced and released overseas in 2010, but were only released here in Australia in January and February 2011.

127 Hours
Danny Boyle's adaptation of the real-life mishap that left hiker Aron Ralston trapped underneath a rockfall for more than five days is a visceral, genuinely harrowing experience. In many ways it's like Gaspar Noe's Irreversible, a film that while brilliantly conceived and staged is so deeply upsetting to watch that you're likely to only ever watch it once. At least Boyle, along with star James Franco, manages to inject a little levity into the movie from time to time. This is another gem from Britain's most versatile filmmaker.

Don't Go Breaking My Heart
Johnnie To's Life Without Principle made my top 10 for the year. He's such a busy filmmaker these days that he also directed this, a romantic comedy based around the global financial crisis and a love triangle between an analyst, her manager, and a neighbouring architect. There are two surprising things about this film that lift it heads and shoulders above other Chinese-language romcoms: firstly, not until the last scene was I completely certain how the love triangle would resolve itself; secondly, this is the first movie I have ever seen that made my cry about a frog.

Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol
The fourth Mission: Impossible film is a delightful action film. It's slickly produced, well-paced and contains all of the requisite jumping, falling, running (oh, the running) and fighting audiences should expect. Tom Cruise is very relaxed in this film - this is the most appealing he's been in some years. A good support cast includes Simon Pegg, Jeremy Renner and Michael Nyqvist. Brad Bird makes his live-action directorial debut, after years of providing some of the best feature animation the USA has made (The Iron Giant, The Incredibles). In short, for M:I fans: much better than #2, on a par with #3, still not as good as #1.

The Princess of Montpensier
Bertrand Tavernier is a wonderful French director, particularly when he tackles these kinds of swashbuckling period pieces. I adored his 1994 action film D'Artagnan's Daughter, starring Sophie Marceau as the titular heroine. I think The Princess of Montpensier is probably a better film. Set during the French Catholic/Protestant wars, it places a young woman at the centre of a complicated web of lovers as well as the intrigue of the French court. It's beautifully costumed as well, which always counts for a lot in these kinds of period films.

Source Code
Duncan Jones follows up his astounding Moon with another intelligent, well-paced and well-acted science fiction film. He's two for two at the moment, and depending on what he makes next he may soon be joining Christopher Nolan as one of the world's finest directors of genre cinema. I don't really want to go into the plot of this film - like Moon, the less you know going in, the more satisfying the viewing experience will be.

Super
Writer/director James Gunn is behind this low-budget, idiosyncratic superhero movie. It works very much as a companion piece to Matthew Vaughn's Kick-ass, only while Kick-ass had an annoying tendency to shift from "what if someone in the real world became a superhero?" to being an actual superhero movie, Super takes its offbeat premise to its logical - and deeply uncomfortable - conclusion. The film's cast is great, particularly Rainn Wilson (The Office) as Frank D'Arbo aka the Crimson Bolt, Kevin Bacon as a laconic drug kingpin and Ellen Page as the Crimson Bolt's overenthusiastic sidekick Bolty. This is one of the funniest comedies of 2011, and is all the more effective for how suddenly the laughter can stop.

Super 8
A superb and effective tribute to the Amblin family films of the 1980s, produced by Steven Spielberg and directed by J.J. Abrams. It didn't make my top 10 because, for all the talent involved, this isn't really much more than an effective pastiche - but what an excellent pastiche it is. Strong teenage performances, an interesting story and some of the most beautiful imagery to grace cinema screens last year - particularly during the climax.

Tower Heist
A superb heist movie (the clue is in the title, I suppose) masquerading as a comedy. This is Hollywood popcorn entertainment at its best, and to be honest this shouldn't feel as outstanding a film as it does. This should be what counts as average. That said, if you're looking for a slick, breezy movie with appealing characters and a few twists and turns, Tower Heist fits the bill perfectly.

Usagi Drop
Daikichi, a twentysomething office worker, attends his grandfather's funeral. There he discovers that his elderly relative has left behind a six year-old illegitimate daugher. While the rest of the family debate whether or not to put the young girl up for adoption, Daikichi impulsively decides to take the young girl under his wing and raise her himself. This is a very light, gentle comedy with appealing performances and a lot of heart. It is a very sentimental film, which may turn off a lot of viewers, but if you like these sorts of heartwarming movies or are a fan of the manga it's adapted from, definitely check it out.

Winnie the Pooh
Walt Disney Animation's latest feature came and went with nary a trace this year. Given it's a new Winnie the Pooh movie (Disney's fifth theatrical feature based around the character), it's not a surprise that this one didn't capture the attention of audiences. It's also ridiculously short - barely more than an hour long including fairly lengthy closing credits. The hand-drawn animation is beautiful, however, and it captures the tone of Milne's original works better than any Disney Pooh since the original shorts.

Blog Space Nine, part #1: "The Homecoming" Trilogy

2012-01-05T17:02:00.000-08:00

During a post-Christmas sale I managed to pick up a cheap copy of Season 2 of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which happens to be my favourite Star Trek television series. In the mid-1990s there was one of those ridiculous science fiction fan rifts between fans of DS9 and fans of Babylon 5. It's not entirely unsurprising: both series started at about the same time in 1993 and both were set on space stations filled with various alien cultures and strange visitors. Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski even managed to stir up his end of fandom with continuing accusations that Paramount deliberately created DS9 to take the shine and appeal off his own series. This is not, by the way, an accusation I agree with, but I will openly admit I haven't seen the series outline, bible or proposal for either show. I will say that I always found Straczynski's accusation that Paramount stole his shapeshifter storyline rather odd, as if shapeshifters had never been seen on screen before.

What occured to me, however, while I watched DS9's Season 2 premiere, was that this was the exact season that ran opposite Season 1 of Babylon 5 (there was a one-year gap between "The Gathering" and "Midnight on the Firing Line"). Given the apparent animosity running between each of the series' fans at the time, I wondered if it was worth watching DS9 at the same time as Babylon 5 to compare them with two decades of hindsight. I haven't seen either season since I watched them both in 1994.

It turns out that, for the first three episodes at least, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine wipes the floor with Babylon 5. It knocks it to the floor in one punch. It rules the chess board. Pick your metaphor.

I have always vastly preferred the political complexity of DS9 to the relatively naive politics of Babylon 5. In the latter, a group of alien civilizations convene on a space station in an attempt to hold galactic peace together. In the former, the focus begins less on the entire galaxy and more on the fate of a single planet. Bajor was for decades violently occupied by the militaristic Cardassian Union. As the series begins, Cardassia has finally withdrawn from the planet, and the Bajorans are free to rebuild their society with the assistance of the United Federation of Planets. At the time there was a thinly-drawn analogue between Bajor and Palestine. In 2012 it's hard not to draw comparisons to Afghanistan or Iraq. As Season 2 begins, Bajor's provisional government is beginning to fall apart and extremist groups are beginning to assemble to agitate for severe forms of nationalism and to expel all non-Bajorans from the planet as well as the nearby station Deep Space Nine (originally a Cardassian mining centre called Terok Nor).

There is an immediate complexity to this story, which was Star Trek's first-ever three-parter ("The Homecoming", "The Circle" and "The Siege" - and to be fair it's only first if you don't count The Next Generation's "The Best of Both Worlds" parts 1 and 2 and "Family" as a single story). It's been given enormous room to breathe: 126 minutes instead of the standard 42.

Part of the complexity comes in the story features more than two sides, and only one which genuinely comes across as actually villainous (the Cardassians). Each group has different and conflicting agendas: the existing provisional government wishes to continue receiving the support of Starfleet; the agitators of the Circle want to take control of Bajor's destiny without the aid of Starfleet; Kai Winn (the Bajorans' equivalent of a Pope) wants to make sure she's on the side of whoever forms the legitimate government; Starfleet wants to obey the wishes of whoever winds up in control of Bajor; the Cardassians want their old territory back; Commander Sisko wants to stay on Deep Space Nine and stop what he sees as an illegitimate extremist group; and recently freed political prisoner Lee Nalas, who remains Bajor's single-greatest hope for a unified peace, wants nothing but to escape and be left alone.

Over this complex political intrigue lie DS9's regular cast, who are without exception interesting, multi-faceted and well-performed characters. DS9 may not feature Star Trek's best lead actors (they would be Patrick Stewart and Leonard Nimoy, in my opinion), but it absolutely features the strongest ensemble cast of all five TV incarnations. I'm a particular fan of Armin Shimerman as Quark, who takes a one-dimensional and fairly tedious money-hungry species called the Ferengi and with the support of some excellent writers gives them a fleshed-out, fascinating and distinct culture.

Perhaps it's unfair to compare Season 2 of DS9 with Season 1 of Babylon 5, since it gives the Star Trek team a full year's head-start to iron out creative kinks and push their series into high gear. On the other hand, these were the episodes that ran against each other (more or less: the DS9 episode that ran against Babylon 5's "Midnight on the Firing Line" was actually "Armageddon Game"). Seeing them both again 18 years after their original broadcast just cements my original opinion: there is no comparing these shows. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is far and away the American science fiction space station drama of choice.

Fantastic Voyage (1967)

2012-01-04T14:22:00.000-08:00

There's a fantastic logical flaw in Fantastic Voyage that never occured to me the first time I watched it. A team of five are miniaturised in a submarine and injected into the body of a critically ill Russian defector. They have 60 minutes to reach his brain and remove a life-threatening blood clot. At 61 minutes they will return to normal size. It's a relatively silly premise, riddled with scientific inaccuracies and laugh-out-loud errors, but it's written and performed with integrity so it's fairly easy to go with.

The logical error in the film spoils the climax, so I'll put it under a cut for you.

During the climax the submarine is destroyed and one of the crew dies. The survivors have to make it out of the body on their own steam. They achieve this, and the credits roll as the crew - back to normal size - are congratulated on their success in saving the patient

I like to think that somewhere there's a deleted scene where in the next room the Russian defector's head explodes like a ripe melon as a nuclear submarine the size of a bus returns to normal size inside it.

I think there's an easy trick with these kinds of early Hollywood science fiction blockbusters, and that trick is to 'go with it'. Submarines left inside the brain and ignored? Go with it. Tapping into the lungs to replenish an oxygen supply when you're the size of a blood cell? Go with it. Miniaturising people in the first place? Go with it. This in mind, Fantastic Voyage is quite an engaging adventure film. I've read that 20th Century Fox is trying to remake it in 3D with lavish computer-generated effects and James Cameron acting as producer. I really hope they don't. Science fiction films this old don't work well with a contemporary mindset.

Stargate (1994)

2012-01-03T17:46:00.000-08:00

Stargate is one of those films that seemed extraordinarily popular at the time, but now seems half-forgotten. In many ways it's now perceived as a sort of prologue to the far more prolific, long-running television franchise that it inspired. It's a curiosity; the sort of film that one views with an air of "oh, this is where it started", and with an odd sense that it's Kurt Russell playing Richard Dean Anderson's part rather than the other way around. This is a pity, because while Stargate is by no means a classic film it remains vastly superior to the rather tepid TV dramas that followed it.

The film trades on the 1970s craze, typified by Erich Von Daniken, for aliens building the Egyptian pyramids. A mysterious ring is uncovered in Giza in the late 1920s, and 70 years later the US military develops a means to activate it, open a portal halfway across the universe and send a team to an distant planet. There they discover a lost colony of primitive humans and a powerful alien despot with designs to destroy the human race.

The plot is relatively simplistic and uncomplicated, but where Stargate actively excels is in its mise-en-scene. Director Roland Emmerich successfully generates a very engaging sense of wonder about this strange new planet. It feels awe-inspiring and mysterious. The top-notch production design by Patrick Tatopoulos is a major factor in this. He takes ancient Egyptian architecture, fashion and mythology, and develops it into a strongly visual universe. It's precisely this sense of awe that the TV series Stargate SG-1 lost: by visiting world after world on a weekly schedule any air of mystery was completely destroyed.

Stars Kurt Russell and James Spader give strong, direct performances. Jaye Davison plays the villainous Ra. It's one of only two screen performances he ever gave (the other was his astonishing turn in The Crying Game), and he makes for an excellent antagonist. Few actors have such a naturally strong presence on screen, which makes it such a pity that he never acted again.

This film has a lot of flaws - most of Emmerich's films have - but there is still an undeniable appeal about Stargate that has me coming back to watch it again and again. Science fiction should fill us with awe and wonder, and it's a shame that - on screen at least - it so rarely manages to do that.

2011: 10 Favourite Films

2011-12-31T22:11:00.000-08:00

This is not a "year's best" list as such. Rather, this is a "year's favourites". Unless you see close to every film released in a given year, it's almost impossible to gather a list of best films. This list is instead the films I liked the most out of the 2011 films I saw. You may note that several films in this list were produced in 2010, and were released internationally in that year as well. In Australia a lot of these films were released in January and February 2011, hence their appearance here - for Australian viewers they were 2011 films.

10. The Adventures Of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn
The narrative structure isn't perfect (a flashback sequence goes on way too long, and the three climaxes really needed to be condensed into two), but The Adventures of Tintin is overall a gloriously fun adventure film. It boasts great performance capture animation, strong performances and ridiculously funny dialogue by Steven Moffat, Joe Cornish and Edgar Wright. The action scenes are also great, which isn't too much of a surprise - for the director of Indiana Jones, Tintin is like playing a home game.

9. Being Elmo
It's not too hard for a film to make its audience cry - it's a lot harder to bring them to tears through sheer happiness. Being Elmo is a remarkable and uplifting documentary about creativity, achieving goals and living one's dreams - and then helping others to do the same. The fact that it's about a guy who plays a furry red puppet is almost beside the point.

8. Life Without Principle
Hong Kong director Johnnie To is in the middle of a tremendously active period, with two films released in 2011 (this and Don't Go Breaking My Heart) and another two coming in 2012. This ensemble drama weaves multiple storylines to explore Hong Kong's cultural obsession with money and wealth. Like much of To's output, the pleasure of Life Without Principle is in the ease with which the tone and genre shifts from drama to comedy to thriller and back. It's by far To's best film, but it does demonstrate a master filmmaker firing on all cylinders.

7. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part II
The eighth and final instalment of the Harry Potter saga is the last piece of an exceptional achievement in popular filmmaking, and director David Yates makes sure the franchise goes out on a high note. The film is helped to no end by the previous part going through all the tedious adolescent doubt and self-pity, leaving nothing left here but the lengthy and thrilling climax.

6. Rango
To my mind, the best animated film produced in 2011. If Rango fails to win the Oscar come February, an injustice will have occured. It's funny, tightly written, resonant and well performed. I particularly loved Timonthy Olyphant's cameo performance towards the film's climax.

5. Black Swan
An inventive modern-day take on Roman Polanski's Repulsion. Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis both give knockout performance in this tightly wound, deeply paranoid thriller. Darren Aronofsky continues to prove himself as one of America's most gifted narrative filmmakers.

4. Thor
A populist, breezy action film, filled with inventive production design and appealing performances. Of all of Marvel's key superheroes Thor was always going to be the hardest character to adapt to the screen, and under Kenneth Branagh's excellent direction, he is adapted brilliantly. I strongly suspect Chris Hemsworth is going to be a major star in the coming years.

3. Rise of the Planet of the Apes
Probably the film I was least looking forward to seeing at the start of 2011. This film, which is somewhere between a remake and a prequel, is the best Apes film since the 1968 original. Andy Serkis is the star of the film here, giving yet another outstanding turn via performance capture. His work, and the work of the computer animators who embellished it, is one of the best male performances of the year.

2. True Grit
One of the films produced in 2010 that didn't hit Australian cinemas until 2011, and as such is one of 2011's best. I'm very hot and cold with the Coen brothers: sometimes their films will knock me sideways with their quality, and other times I'll simply be left cold by them. True Grit is one of their best; a no-nonsense western with heart, a quality script and great performances (particularly Jeff Bridges and newcomer Hailee Steinfeld).

1. Tangled
It feels like cheating to make a 2010 film my top pick for 2011, but that's the vagarities of international releases for you. Tangled is great: it's funny, it's inventive, and it combines quality CGI with traditional Disney design work and aesthetics. It's the first computer-generated film by Walt Disney Animation Studios that can actually hold its own against the hand-animated classics of the 20th century.

Greyfriar's Bobby (1961)

2011-12-20T17:31:00.000-08:00

Greyfriar's Bobby was a Skye Terrier that, upon the death of his master John "Jock" Gray in 1858, guarded the policeman's grave site at Greyfriar's Cemetary for the following 14 years. The dog is something of a local Scottish legend, inspiring a bronze statue by Edinburgh's George IV Bridge, a popular novel by Eleanor Atkinson and this 1961 feature film from Walt Disney.

It is likely that Greyfriar's Bobby was a hoax, established by 19th century Edinburgh shop owners trying to drum up some extra tourism. The truth has never been one to stand in the way of a good story, however, and so Bobby remains widely loved, and his statue remains a popular Edinburgh tourist attraction.

The Walt Disney film, shot on location in Scotland and in London's Shepperton Studios, is typically heartwarming Disney fare. The original story has been changed somewhat from the original legend - Jock has become an old shepherd wracked with pneumonia, for example - but the basic story remains. Like a lot of Disney live-action films of the period, local actors are widely used. It's nice to see a film set in Scotland with actual Scottish actors speaking with actual Scottish accents. The cast includes Gordon Jackson (The Professionals), Alex Mackenzie (who also appeared in Disney's Kidnapped), Oscar winner Donald Crisp (How Green Was My Valley) and Laurence Naismith (Camelot). Don Chaffey directs with his usual no-nonsense skill: he was never a particularly distinctive director but his many films were generally very entertaining.

Greyfriar's Bobby combines a couple of Walt Disney's personal obsessions: he had a strong love for animals, something that is evident in many of the films and shorts he produced. He was also particularly fascinated with Great Britain, and this interest led to him producing all manner of Anglophile productions: Mary Poppins, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, Rob Roy and Dr Syn: Alias the Scarecrow. Greyfriar's Bobby is not as good as any of those films I have just listed, but it's warm and well intentioned. In many respects it could act as the archetypal Walt Disney feature from the 1950s or 1960s: it's suitable for all ages, it's not too scary but not too saccharine, it's cast with a range of talented "oh where have I seen them before?" character actors and has a cute dog for a star.

Babble On, part 6: "Infection"

2011-12-13T13:39:00.000-08:00

An old acquaintance of Dr Franklin's arrives on the station with a mysterious set of alien artefacts, the investigation of which leads to quite possibly the worst episode of Babylon 5 so far.

I don't have too much to say about "Infection", the fourth episode of Babylon 5's first season, other than that it's a pretty awful episode. It feels rather like filler, or one of those off-the-cuff scripts written to demonstrate to a network how your proposed TV series is going to progress.

My thoughts, in dot points:

Going by the production codes, it looks like "Infection" was the first episode of Babylon 5 to be shot, which wouldn't be a surprise. There's a scrappy quality to the episode that makes it look like the cast and crew don't quite know what they're doing yet.
"Infection" deals with body horror, a staple of science fiction. There are alien artefacts that slowly transform an unwilling human into some kind of alien monster. It's a trope that most commonly used in Doctor Who, and it's not a surprise to see Babylon 5 tackle the idea so quickly.
This episode is the first to give the spotlight to Dr Franklin, played by Richard Biggs. He's not very convincing - I can't work out if he's simply not a very interesting actor or (and I suspect this might be the case) that the character himself is very, very dull.
The series gets its first celebrity guest star in the form of The Man from UNCLE's David McCallum. It's a bit of a throwaway role, and certainly doesn't stretch him, but it's always fun to see a cult TV star in someone else's show.
Bill Mumy has been listed in the opening credits for four episodes now and hasn't turned up.
As I noted above, this episode really isn't very good. I've read online (OK, Wikipedia) that "Infection" is widely considered the worst episode of the entire five seasons. If that's true I'm happy - it means the worst is behind me.

The series is running one out of four so far.

Homemade Rage #3: Clare and the Reasons, Nerina Pallot,

2011-12-11T21:00:00.000-08:00

Another instalment of Homemade Rage, another three songs I like that you may not have heard of before. First up: Clare and the Reasons combine a lead singer with a beautiful voice and some lovely orchestral-style strings. This is "Alphabet City", which is a song I absolutely adore.

I first heard Nerina Pallot on a free CD from HMV while travelling in the UK. I've been a pretty big fan of her music ever since. I'm not sure how her career's gone in the UK; in Australia it was only her song "Everybody's Going to War" that seemed to get any airplay or notice. This is "Real Late Starter", from her third album The Graduate.

Finally, this is the John Barry Orchestra playing his main theme to Dances with Wolves. I'm a big fan of the late John Barry, particularly his many James Bond film themes, but this score to Kevin Costner's western is easily my favourite of his numerous scores.

Babble On, part 5: "Born to the Purple"

2011-12-07T14:22:00.000-08:00

Londo is in love, and his infatuation threatens a crucial negotiation with the Narn Regime. His newfound love, however, may not be what he thinks she is. Meanwhile Garibaldi works to track down a rogue signal in the station's communications network.

Only three episodes into the series and we already have a second episode based around Centauri Ambassador Londo Mollari. I'm not certain whether this episode was shifted in the running order, the production team were infatuated with the chatacter, or if it was simply a coincidence. The problem is that while "Midnight on the Firing Line" had a relative amount of depth and character, "Born to the Purple" deals in stereotype and caricature.

Some observations:

It is interesting that Londo has ridiculously big hair, while his assistant Vir has ridiculous hair about half the length, and his newfound girlfriend has a shaved head spare a tiny ponytail. It suggests a lot about status and patriarchy in Centauri society, and it's interesting that it isn't mentioned or discussed in the episode.
G'Kar gets an aide of his own here, but I'm pretty sure she's only in the one episode because she's not the aide I remember him having. This is good, because the aide in this episode is a bit rubbish.
It seems a little convenient that Londo not only has a set of computer files that could bring down the republic, but that he keeps it on his desktop computer on a neutral space station with his civilization's arch-enemies on board. Maybe he's just a little stupid.
Garibaldi is striking me as a relatively silly name for a character.
There is a distinct 1980s vibe to this episode, particularly in the climax. This isn't a good thing. Bonus points to the episode for ending on a bit of a downer, though.
Not including "The Gathering", Babylon 5 is currently scoring one good episode out of three.

Any Given Sunday (1999)

2011-12-07T03:49:00.000-08:00

Another old review that I've posted elsewhere some time ago, but it's worth posting again here because it's such a criminally underseen and underrated film.

ANY GIVEN SUNDAY

1999. Directed by Oliver Stone. Starring Al Pacino, Jamie Foxx, Dennis Quaid, Cameron Diaz, LL Cool J and Charlton Heston.

I’ve said this to people many, many times, but it is worth constantly celebrating: 1999 was the greatest year for American cinema in our lifetime. There were simply too many brilliant films released that year. It was actually impossible to keep up. It was the year of American Beauty, Fight Club, The Matrix, Being John Malkovich, The Sixth Sense, Boys Don’t Cry and Man on the Moon. It included great animated films such as Toy Story 2, Tarzan, South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut and The Iron Giant. It also included this: Any Given Sunday, an epic two-and-a-half hour love letter to American football from writer/director Oliver Stone.

It seemed such a lightweight film. This was the creative force behind Salvador, Platoon (both 1986), Wall Street (1987), JFK (1991) and Nixon (1995). A movie about professional football seemed ridiculous, almost comedic. The first time I saw it I was amazed to find it one of the best films he’s ever directed.

The star of the film is, perversely enough, the editing. It’s a masterpiece of rapid cutting, both pictures and music. It never stays still for long. The frantic pace and adrenalin-filled panic of live sports have never been more effectively portrayed on screen. It’s also a film full of memories, primarily of protagonist and Miami football coach Tony D’Amato (Al Pacino). Stone uses archival footage, cross-fades and montages to beautifully evoke the sense of being haunted by the past. Tony is a man whose best years seem behind him – something the club’s new owner (Cameron Diaz) seems only too eager to drive home – and is realising that he’s possibly lost the entirety of a normal life obsessing for decades over a football team. It’s a typical performance for Pacino, in that it’s bold and theatrical. Pacino’s past has always unashamedly been on the stage, and he’s only grown larger and larger than life as his career’s gone on. He’s sometimes accused of over-acting. Here the performance perfectly matches the part.

While it’s Pacino’s story that forms the film’s core, an ensemble of other storylines spiral around it. There’s Cameron Diaz’s hard-nosed team owner, who’s inherited the business from her dead father and is struggling to emerge from his shadow. There’s Dennis Quaid as an ageing quarterback sidelined by a back injury. There’s LL Cool J as an endorsement focused player. Lawrence Taylor plays another player facing permanent disability or even death if he gets injured in the field any more, but with one more tackle he can earn his million dollar bonus.

Finally there’s Jamie Foxx in a great performance as rising football star Willie Beamen, dragged from the bench to stand in while Quaid recovers. Prior to this film Foxx was best known as a comedian on TV’s In Living Color. His performance is one of those sudden revelations – a comedic performer who demonstrates sudden and previously unthought-of dramatic skills. Some years later he would win the Best Actor Oscar for his performance in Ray. Back here in 1999, you can see that the talent is already there.

Any Given Sunday is a love letter to professional football. There’s something inherently dramatic about the sport, more so than baseball or basketball. It has inspired so many decent film dramas over the years. It’s an emotional sport, and an adrenalin-charged one. It seems to automatically generate drama.

I think one of Oliver Stone’s great strengths as a director is the passion he brings to his subject matter. Any Given Sunday is as passionate about football as JFK was about the assassination of John F Kennedy and Platoon was about Stone’s own Vietnam War experience. It’s a stronger film because of it. It feels like an epic. During one key scene, Pacino and Foxx have a conversation that turns into a furious argument. On Pacino’s television plays Ben Hur (amusingly, Any Given Sunday actually features Ben Hur’s star, Charlton Heston, in cameo). As the argument increases and the volume ramps up, Stone keeps cutting back to Ben Hur. He gets it. Any Given Sunday is an epic too. To these characters it’s just as high stakes a drama.

More than that, it’s just plain brilliant.

Babble On, part 4: "Soul Hunter"

2011-12-05T13:42:00.000-08:00

The Soul Hunter (W. Morgan Shepard)

Commander Sinclair recovers a severely damaged spacecraft from Babylon 5's jump gate, but when Ambassador Delenn sees who the survivor is she immediately demands the alien be killed. Panic begins to spread on the station out of fear this new arrival - the mysterious 'soul hunter' - has arrived to steal the soul of one of the station's inhabitants.

Any hopes that I had completely misjudged Babylon 5 are shattered by "Soul Hunter". This was apparently the first episode of the series produced, and it shows. The episode is weakly written and clumsy, and several of the actors (particularly Claudia Christian) feel like they haven't quite worked out how they're going to portray their characters.

My general thoughts on this episode are as follows:

Not in this episode, but no less silly: Martin Sheen

The core concept of the soul hunters - an alien race who collect the souls of the dying - chafes badly against the very science fictional framework of the series. It's a difficult line to tread, I think: combining elements of the supernatural or spirituality with science fiction is about the hardest thing to achieve. In that sense perhaps I should applaud Straczynski for the attempt. The problem is that over on another channel, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was combining elements of spirituality, the supernatural and science fiction with exceptional skill. As it stands, this episode felt 10 years out of date when it aired.
Speaking of Star Trek, it's interesting that after such excellent prosthetics work in the pilot and "Midnight on the Firing Line" we suddenly get the Soul Hunters, a species designed almost as a parody of bad Star Trek 'bumpy face' make-up. After the conclusion of Babylon 5's fifth season they returned to these guys in the TV movie River of Souls, and they somehow convinced Martin Sheen to guest star. He doesn't look any less silly.
On the other hand, "Soul Hunter" also introduces a fantastic fence in the alien sector who is basically an enormous talking preying mantis. He looks ridiculous, and sort of wobbles around like an extra from a Toho giant monster movie, but you have to applaud the attempt. Science fiction TV needs more hilarious giant insects.
The bottom line is that this is a dodgy, poorly made hour of television. I wouldn't recommend it, except for the keenest fans of ridiculous looking alien make-up.

Babble On, part 3: "Midnight on the Firing Line"

2011-12-04T17:53:00.000-08:00

Londo (Peter Jurasik) vs. G'Kar (Andreas Katsulas).

An unprovoked attack on a Centauri colony by the Narn Regime leads to a threat of war between the two civilizations. Raiders are striking cargo ships near Babylon 5. The station receives its new telepath.

Produced and broadcast about a year after the 90-minute pilot, "Midnight on the Firing Line" is Babylon 5's first proper episode, and it represents an astonishing jump in quality.

The show feels tighter, better written and performed, and nuanced where the pilot had been fairly heavy-handed and stereotypical. It also smartly chooses to focus on its two strongest characters, alien ambassadors Londo Mollari and G'Kar.

My observations on this episode are:

The monologue during the opening credits, delivered by Michael O'Hare as Commander Sinclair, is laughable. It sounds like bad teenage poetry in places. It's not O'Hare's fault that it sounds so awful - this is pretty much Straczynski's dialogue at its worst. Sadly we're stuck with this opening sequence for another 21 episodes.
Londo gets an aide named Vir (Stephen Furst), who I remember becoming a lot more engaging as the series went on. Here he is deeply irritating.
The station's got a new first officer, Claudia Christian as Susan Ivanova. I'm not a fan. The character's dialogue is stilted, and Christian's deadpan delivery doesn't compensate for it. Unlike Vir, I don't remember becoming more interested in Ivanova as the series went on.
There's a new telepath too, Talia Winters (Andrea Thompson). I like her a lot more than Lyta Alexander (Patricia Tallman) from the pilot. She feels a lot more natural on screen, whereas Tallman felt very awkward.
We get a nice monologue from Londo: I'm rapidly finding my favourite bit of the series is whenever a character gets 90 seconds to just talk about themselves. Maybe it's bad TV - after all, we're always taught to show and not tell, but despite the theatrical feel of it I do like it when these characters tell rather than show.
There's some nice foreshadowing going on. It's another key strength of the show.

"Midnight on the Firing Line" gets a lot more right than "The Gathering" did. It's grabbed my interest. After the pilot I was doubting my commitment to stick with re-watching the series, but for now I'm enthusiastically back on board.

Babble On, part 2: "The Gathering"

2011-12-01T14:39:00.000-08:00

Michael O'Hare as Babylon 5 commander Jeffrey Sinclair.

Babylon 5's feature length pilot, "The Gathering", is a staggeringly uneven production. Every element that works seems matched with one that doesn't. The result is a viewing experience that lurches from good to bad like a listing galleon. I do remember being rather impressed with it back in 1993; a science fiction television drama, made in the USA, filled with spaceships, aliens and intrigue, and it wasn't Star Trek. (Don't get me wrong - I adore Star Trek. It was just lovely to get some variety.)

I think it's important to acknowledge how great a year 1993 was for American television. Science fiction fans had pretty much been living on a solid diet of Star Trek: The Next Generation for five years, with odd short-lived distractions such as Alien Nation. 1993 saw a positive explosion of science fiction TV with the debut of not only Babylon 5, but also Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, The X Files, Lois & Clark and SeaQuest DSV, plus short-lived entries such as Time Trax and The Adventures of Brisco County Jr. Beyond science fiction, 1993 also saw the debuts of Homicide: Life of the Street, NYPD Blue, Frasier, Animaniacs, Dr Quinn: Medicine Woman and Diagnosis Murder. Now the quality of these shows varied considerably, but it's difficult to argue with the fact that 1993 was a fairly auspicious year for American TV.

One of the main selling points of Babylon 5 was its story arc: episodes were not self-contained, but rather each formed part of a larger, continuing narrative. This is often held up as something unique about Babylon 5, or at least groundbreaking, and this is partially true. American TV drama had featured story arcs since Hill Street Blues in 1981, and 1993 witnessed an explosion of arc-based television dramas with Deep Space Nine, The X Files, Homicide and NYPD Blue all including one form of continuing story or another. Where Babylon 5 marked itself as particularly distinct was that the series was formed around a pre-planned five-year storyline. Knowing where the series would be not only in the first season but several seasons beyond allowed the series to work in foreshadowing to an extent not seen in TV before or since. How tightly this five-season arc was actually planned has always been open to debate (I personally feel it was significantly looser than the series' producers may have suggested at the time) but it remains a significant achievement and one of Babylon 5's most appealing aspects.

So asides from some intriguing foreshadowing, what does "The Gathering" give us? I'm going to give my observations of each episode in dot points, beginning here:

The producers have taken the bold choice of rendering all of the space sequences with computer-generated images (CGI). At the time this seemed wonderfully exciting. 18 years later, it's fairly apparent that they may have jumped the gun a little. The CGI works to tell the story required, and I've never been one to let substandard visuals ruin a decent story, but it does mean that - in visual terms - Babylon 5 has aged a lot faster than contemporaries such as Deep Space Nine (which continued to use physical models for its first few seasons).
The production values of the pilot appear stretched to the limit: there are two ways to look at this. One view would be to believe the production team bit off more than they could chew, and that the pilot (and subsequent series) is strained beyond reasonable limits: costumes look a bit tatty, the sets look disturbingly wobbly, and so on. The alternate view - one I share - is that Babylon 5 is a series with a massive amount of ambition, and that's one of its core strengths. I note (but don't necessarily criticise) that the series is garishly colourful.
The pilot is also exceptionally good at world-building: interesting detail in the background of each scene, aliens that look genuinely alien and which avoid the "bumpy head" syndrome that plagued Star Trek in the 1990s. There are five main civilizations in the series (including humans), and each is given a very different look and identity.
By contrast, the central plot of the episode - a new ambassador to the station is almost killed in an assassination attempt, and the crew of Babylon 5 must hunt down the one responsible - is riddled with cliche and stereotype. It's functional, and helps to give the pilot a framework around which the universe can be explored, but it's very disappointing and not particularly rewatchable.
The acting varies wildly from one member of the cast to the other. There are two stand-outs, and they will remain the stand-outs for all five seasons: Peter Jurasik and Andreas Katsulas. Both have been given very theatricalised characters, and play them very effectively. Beyond them the acting wavers, either functional but unexceptional (Mira Furlan as Delenn, Michael O'Hare as Sinclair) to downright amateurish (Tamlyn Tomita as Takashima).
The script is about as uneven in quality as the acting. Lines that are intended to be funny fall flat with me: I'm not sure if it's because they're simply not funny, or if my sense of humour varies from Straczynski's. Other lines are just horribly cliched.
One aspect of Straczynski's writing that absolutely deserves acclaim is his writing of monologues. Twice this pilot characters are given lengthy monologues to deliver, and in both cases both writer and actor have knocked one out of the park. As Centauri ambassador Londo Mollari, Peter Jurasik gets to deliver a wonderful speech about the slow downfall of his republic. As station Commander Jeffrey Sinclair, Michael O'Hare tells his girlfriend of "the Battle of the Line", a crucial conflict that will inform major parts of the series to come. I have a lot of issues with how J. Michael Straczynski writes, but monologues like these are fine with me.

I've tried to pretend I have never seen this episode before, and then asked myself if I would watch the first season (which followed about a year after the pilot). I think the answer is yes. "The Gathering" is a very shaky, uneven and regularly frustrating watch, but at the end I did feel intrigued enough to continue revisiting the series.

Babble On, part 1.

2011-11-30T18:44:00.001-08:00

Of all the science fiction television that graced our screens in the 1990s, one of the most popular was easily J. Michael Straczynski's Babylon 5. Even at a glance it's not difficult to see why: it was a grand space opera featuring alien civilizations, intergalactic war, space combat and so on, but it also featured a pre-planned five-year story arc. I think it was Straczynski himself who described the series' aim as "a novel for television". Spaceships, story arcs, constant little Easter eggs that only science fiction aficionados or dedicated viewers would notice - Babylon 5 remains to my mind the most strategically directed show for hardcore science fiction fans ever produced.

And I hated the thing. Other science fiction fans around me loved it to bits, and I just couldn't see the appeal. Years of being treated like something of a nerd pariah (I'm being serious - getting told to your face "well it must be because you've got no taste" isn't very nice) led me to exaggerate my opinions to a ridiculous degree. I went from not really engaging with the series to disliking the series to actively trying to tear it to pieces whenever it came up in conversation. There was also the problem that the five year arc, as it played out on screen, is in my opinion a staggering disappointment. Actually it's more than that. It honestly felt like a slap in the face to any viewer dedicated enough to watch through the first 3 1/2 years of the show.

Recent events dropped a copy of Babylon 5's pilot and first season into my lap, and this led me to thinking: is the series really as bad as I remembered it? After all, I've only seen each episode once. I saw some of them more than 15 years ago. I had never rewatched them, knowing what was coming in the story, and able to recognise any foreshadowing or clever worldbuilding that might be hidden in the series.

Everything deserves a second chance, so over the next few months I'm going to start reviewing Babylon 5 right here. I'm trying my best to watch it with an open mind. I'm watching it with a particular eye to point out what's good, and what doesn't work. I don't intend to be brutal, but I do intend to be brutally fair - and that works both ways. If I like something, despite my preconceived opinions of the series as a whole, I'm damn well going to credit it.

Homemade Rage #2: S.H.E., Mercury Rev, Irene Cara

2011-08-27T19:39:00.000-07:00

S.H.E. is a Taiwanese girl group. It's very difficult to engage with Chinese language pop music, because there's so much of it out there and even if you do find a song you like it's fiendishly difficult to ever actually find it again or find the relevant CD. This one I like. It's got a slightly rockier edge than most Asian pop, but is still unashamedly poppy and infectious.

Mercury Rev are one of those bands so pitch-perfect and talented that I'm at a total loss as to why they aren't more popular. I saw these guys live when they supported the Finn Brothers on an Australian tour and they blew the main act out of the water.

"Flashdance", by Irene Cara. I haven't managed to get this song out of my head all week and it's driving me crazy.

Homemade Rage #1: Armstrong, Europe, Ruby

2011-08-20T07:37:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the wonderful capacity of Youtube videos to be embedded in other web pages, I can do this: little collected groups of pop music videos I've selected for you to watch and listen to. I'm thinking of doing three videos each time, which seems nicely manageable and can fill 10-15 minutes of your day. This time around I've embedded tracks from Craig Armstrong, Europe and Ruby. I hope you like them.

Craig Armstrong is a phenomenal musician and composer - his music has backed an increasing number of Hollywood movies. This track, "Wake Up in New York", was from his second studio album As If To Nothing, and features vocals by Evan Dando. It's just a beautiful song, wonderfully performed.

I loved the rock band Europe when I was about 12 years old. I am not ashamed. This is actually a rather surprising 2008 acoustic version of "The Final Countdown", their biggest hit. Yes, this does mean that Europe are still around - who'd have guessed?

This third and final video is "Tiny Meat", by Ruby. The band only recorded two studio albums, but I loved them both. I think this is easily their best song. I can't actually remember when I first heard these guys - most likely it was via my brother, who is a lot more knowledgeable about popular music than I'll ever be.

Five Films: Tilda Swinton

2011-08-18T16:30:00.000-07:00

One of my favourite actors in the world is Scottish actor Tilda Swinton. She has carved herself a strong niche playing slightly unusual, somewhat androgynous characters, and her immense talent has been rewarded with acclaim and prizes around the world – including an Academy Award in 2008. These days she balances her time between big Hollywood blockbusters (she’s the White Witch in The Chronicles of Narnia, for example) and small independent features, as well as running a variety of strange and exciting film festivals (my personal favourite is the one held in a hall in the Scottish highlands where everyone watches the films in beanbags while Swinton bakes them cupcakes). Here are five of my favourite Tilda Swinton movies.

Edward II

Swinton played the female lead of Queen Isabella in this transgressive, post-modern and fairly challenging adaptation of the Christopher Marlowe play. The film (released in 1991) was directed by Derek Jarman, who regularly cast Swinton in his projects. It’s very, very much a ‘love it or hate it’ kind of a film – as Jarman’s work always was. I know a lot of people who couldn’t engage with it because it seemed too theatrical and silly. I’ve always found it a somewhat unique, startling movie experience. It’s not something I imagine seeing many times in the future, but I remain very appreciative of it – and Tilda Swinton is great in it.

Orlando

By contrast, this 1992 fantasy film is something I don’t expect I shall ever tire of rewatching. Swinton plays the title character in Sally Potter’s adaptation of the Virginia Woolf novel. The film’s story follows the lovestruck young gentleman Orlando as he ceases to age, spontaneously changes gender and then lives through 400 years of history from the court of Elizabeth I (played marvellously by Quentin Crisp) to the 20^th century. This is honestly one of my all-time favourite films and I never tire of it. No other film has taken such advantage of Tilda Swinton’s androgynous looks and intense screen presence.

The War Zone

Swinton plays the mother of a shockingly broken family in this 1999 drama directed by Tim Roth. It’s a very different kind of film to Edward II and Orlando: gritty, realistic, emotionally raw and quite difficult to sit through. The film also boasts a potentially career-best performance by Ray Winstone. Given the sheer quality of this film it’s a pity Roth doesn’t direct more often.

Constantine

Francis Lawrence’s 2005 comic book adaptation Constantine has a lot of faults, but ultimately I enjoy it a lot. One of the film’s best assets is its range of talented supporting actors including Djimon Hounsou as Papa Midnite, Peter Stormare as the Devil and Tilda Swinton as the Archangel Gabriel. Swinton is very stylish here, revisiting the androgynous look that dominated so many of her earlier roles: here it’s put to use to give Gabriel a wonderfully creepy, unearthly persona.

Michael Clayton

Swinton plays corporate executive Karen Crowder in this 2007 drama from writer/director Tony Gilroy. It’s the role that won her an Academy Award, and it’s a performance that sits within an exceptionally well-written, characterised and performed film. This is one of those rare pitch-perfect motion pictures. I love the dark, unsettled tone of the film. I love Tony Gilroy’s sense of pace, which becomes quite slow and menacing. It has its eye tightly on its characters, who are three-dimensional, fallible and ambiguous. It has a great musical score by James Newton Howard. It even opens with one of the best movie monologues of the last decade.

Mathilda, by Mary Shelley

2011-07-25T16:16:00.000-07:00

Mary Shelley is one of the most famous female authors of all time, despite having only written one novel: Frankenstein. Right? Right? Of course not. In truth Shelley wrote a bunch of stuff, very little of which has managed to receive a fraction of the fame and attention that her most famous novel got. One of these obscure works is Mathilda, a novella that Shelley completed in 1820 but which did not see print until 1959.

Why the 139 year wait between completion and publication? It is a book about, among other things, incest and suicide. Shelley submitted the manuscript to her father and publisher William Godwin, and he was so scandalised by its contents that not only did he refuse to publish it, he also refused to return the manuscript to Mary. We can all be thankful he wasn’t scandalised enough to throw the manuscript into a fire.

Godwin’s reaction is not too surprising. Mathilda tells the story of a young woman who seems to be quite a lot like Mary Shelley, whose dead mother seems quite a lot like Mary Shelley’s dead mother, and whose father – who seems quite a lot like William Godwin – admits to a passionate romantic and sexual longing for his own daughter. The book is, in essence, either a masterstroke of progressive fiction or the world’s all-time creepiest real-life slash fiction story.

I lean towards the former. I often find it difficult to pin down the appeal Mary Shelley has for me as an author. On a line by line basis she’s quite an awkward and clumsy writer. She lacks – for me, at any rate – the flow and style of her contemporaries. That said, there is something about her narratives and her characters that really appeals to me. Shelley’s fiction seems to exist within an excessively emotional world, where people aren’t simply sad but rather tortured, and they don’t simply love but rather become romantically obsessed. I also find the nested first-person narratives of Frankenstein to be the work of a quite astounding storytelling talent. Mathilda doesn’t have anywhere near the narrative complexity of Frankenstein, but on the other hand it is a much shorter work.

It’s a fast read, and a memorable one. I didn’t find it quite matched the quality of her other works such as Frankenstein or The Last Man, but it does provide a fresh insight into one of England’s most famous yet least read authors. Mary Shelley wasn’t just talented: I think she was brave, progressive and critically underrated. Melville House has published a very nice paperback edition of Mathilda as part of its novella range, but the book is also available for free from Project Gutenberg.

The many deaths of Sean Bean

2011-07-17T14:47:00.000-07:00

Sean Bean sure does die a lot onscreen. This Youtube video comes with a violence warning - I'd also say it comes with a spoiler warning, but to be honest the man dies so often onscreen that seeing his name in the opening credits may arguably be considered a major spoiler.

Brightest Day Aftermath: The Search for Swamp Thing #1

2011-06-22T21:16:00.000-07:00

You have to love DC and their hilariously unwieldy titles. Brightest Day Aftermath: The Search for Swamp Thing picks up some of the pieces left by the 24-issue series Brightest Day, which itself picked up many of the pieces left by the eight-part miniseries Darkest Knight, which was itself spun off from several years' worth of plot developments in Green Lantern. With me so far? (And comic companies wonder why their titles don't sell like they used to...)

The basic premise of this three-issue miniseries is actually pretty simple: Swamp Thing, a green elemental creature with magical powers that has been missing for many years, appears to have returned to Earth. Rather than the old benevolent Swamp Thing, this new incarnation appears to be destructive and potentially very dangerous. English magician John Constantine heads off on Swamp Thing's trail, hoping to track down his former friend and find out what has gone wrong. On his way he begins to encounter a group of superheroes including Batman and fellow magician (and, it turns out, ex-girlfriend) Zatanna.

On its own merits, Brightest Day Aftermath: The Search for Swamp Thing (maybe I should save time and just call it BDA:TSFST, but even that's a mouthful) is a relatively enjoyable and harmless bit of superhero-based entertainment. The art by Marco Castiello and Vincenzo Acunzo is fairly nice to look at. The script by Jonathan Vankin is serviceable but not exceptional.

Of course for most long-time readers of DC Comics, opinions about the comic itself will likely take second place to what this miniseries represents. While the characters of Constantine and Swamp Thing originated in the DC Universe alongside Batman, Wonder Woman, Superman et al, they've spent the vast majority of their fictional lives living in the mature-readers offshoot line DC Vertigo. Constantine's own title Hellblazer has been in pretty much continuous publication as a Vertigo title, while Swamp Thing has come and gone through a series of relaunches and spin-offs, some successful and others rather dire.

The point is that these characters are now a very long way away from their DC Universe origins, and to suddenly finding themselves rubbing shoulders with Batman causes a sort of literary whiplash that hurts the brain and deafens the senses. It's a stupid idea. Constantine in particular is a character who thrives in a mature-readers environment: he's allowed to swear, he's allowed to be the amoral, self-centred, highly destructive bastard that he is. Now he can't even say bastard. While he returns here, DC are thankfully keeping his Vertigo series running, so it's not like we can't read the proper Constantine - it just makes it so inexplicable that DC need to kickstart an all-ages version at the same time.

Based on this first issue, the all-ages version isn't very good either. For one thing he says 'bloody' an awful lot - obviously it's one of the few words of his vocabulary he's still allowed to say. For another, this character so well defined over the decades as a Scouser now speaks like a Cockney. It's like Vankin backed up a truck and unloaded a metric tonne of Guy Ritchie movies over him. He even calls someone a 'geezer'. Pick up a copy in your nearest comic shop and read a few of Constantine's lines using Jason Statham's voice in your head. Go on, give it a try. You won't get that voice out of your head for the rest of the comic.

Of course in September Swamp Thing gets his own DC Universe title, while Constantine joins the hilariously bizarre Justice League Dark alongside Madame Xanadu and Shade the Changing Man. I'm all for DC mixing up their superhero line and making a big line-wide relaunch - I'm just not sure it's worth them pillaging their own Vertigo line in the process.

If you're a big fan of Constantine or Swamp Thing, you're probably going to pick this comic up anyway just to see what they've done with it. If you're not, I'm honestly not sure there's anything here worth having a look at.

Giant-Size Atom #1

2011-06-19T19:33:00.000-07:00

This is, I suppose, a short review in the form of a complaint. Recently DC Comics has been making a lot of noise about their line-wide relaunch/reboot this September. It's been a pretty effective promotional campaign, because it got me into a comic shop for the first time in over a year with an interest in buying a few superhero comics.

Of course, it's often hard when you want to simply buy a single issue of a comic book to find one that's going to be self-contained. It's a serialised medium, and so finding a single comic book with a beginning, middle and end is often rather tricky.

In the end I went with Giant-Size Atom #1. I've always liked the Atom (aka Ray Palmer), and this purported to be an extra-length 'one-shot' guest-starring Hawkman, who I also rather like. (A one-shot is, rather obviously, a single issue self-contained comic book with a beginning, middle and end.) The comic was written by Jeff Lemiere, whose previous work I have not read but whose solid reputation has preceded him.

But oh DC, what have you done? It turns out that, despite the cover claiming to be issue #1, and a little note calling it a one-shot, Giant-Size Atom #1 is nothing of the sort. Basically Lemiere was hired some months ago to write a back-up feature for another DC title, Adventure Comics. After six out of ten instalments had been published, DC cancelled the back-up feature. So this is, rather than a self-contained 46-page team-up between the Atom and Hawkman, the last four instalments of a ten-part story published together but masquerading as its own thing.

At first I figured Lemiere was using a cool in-media-res opening, and that after a page or two the story would flash back and tell me what was going on. No such luck: as a result, and because it was advertised on its own cover as a self-contained story, Giant-Size Atom #1 has to be one of the worst superhero comics I've bought in recent years. It's hard to blame Lemiere, and it's unfair to blame his artists Mahmud Asrar and John Dell - who do a pretty slick job. Instead the blame has to lie with DC Comics, its publishers and its editors, who allowed this blatant case of cheap false advertising onto the comic book shelves. I assume that, at a total story length of 107 pages, this Atom adventure could easily have been published as a collected trade paperback. Instead they have tried to double-dip, and for this Atom fan, it means they've definitely lost a sale.

Oscar predictions: Part II

2011-02-24T17:31:00.001-08:00

Animated Feature Film

How to Train Your Dragon, Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois

The Illusionist, Sylvain Chomet

Toy Story 3, Lee Unkrich

Toy Story 3 is entering this race as the presumptive winner, so strong is the critical reception to this film (it even gained a Best Picture nomination – only the second animated feature to do so). It’s coincidentally the one nominee out of the three that I haven’t seen. I can’t help but feel a little bit of Pixar fatigue however – they’ve won every year from the past three, and despite their high and consistent quality I can’t help but feel they’re not always offering me anything new any more. My pick to win is easily Sylvain Chomet’s The Illusionist, which was subtle, beautiful, funny and melancholic.

What’s going to win: Toy Story 3

What I want to win: The Illusionist

Art Direction

Alice in Wonderland (Production Design: Robert Stromberg; Set Decoration: Karen O'Hara)

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 (Production Design: Stuart Craig; Set Decoration: Stephenie McMillan)

Inception (Production Design: Guy Hendrix Dyas; Set Decoration: Larry Dias and Doug Mowat)

The King's Speech (Production Design: Eve Stewart; Set Decoration: Judy Farr)

True Grit (Production Design: Jess Gonchor; Set Decoration: Nancy Haigh)

More often than not this category goes to the nominee with the most vivid and obvious production design (The Lord of the Rings, Avatar, Moulin Rouge, and so on). Based on that theory the most obvious winner would seem to be Alice in Wonderland. That said, my personal favourite of the five is Inception, which looked sensational.

What’s going to win: Alice in Wonderland

What I want to win: Inception

Cinematography

Black Swan, Matthew Libatique

Inception, Wally Pfister

The King's Speech, Danny Cohen

The Social Network, Jeff Cronenweth

True Grit, Roger Deakins

What an outstanding selection of nominees in this category! It’s likely been fairly hard for voters to pick an immediate winner out of this list, based on the quality of the photography in at least four of the five films (I don’t remember even noticing the photography of The King’s Speech). While Wally Pfister and Matthew Libatique would both be worthy winners, I think the momentum here is with Roger Deakins’ wonderful work on True Grit. Given he’s one of the best cinematographers working today, it’s shocking that Deakins has yet to win an Oscar. This is his year – and it’s a good thing too.

Who’s going to win: Roger Deakins

Who I want to win: Roger Deakins

Costume Design

Alice in Wonderland, Colleen Atwood

I Am Love, Antonella Cannarozzi

The King's Speech, Jenny Beavan

The Tempest, Sandy Powell

True Grit, Mary Zophres

My initial thought was that this was going to boil down to Colleen Atwood’s Alice in Wonderland designs versus Sandy Powell’s The Tempest designs. On reflection, however, I think that Mary Zophres may steal the prize for her work on True Grit. I’m still hoping for Atwood to win – her designs for Alice’s dresses alone deserve recognition.

Who’s going to win: Mary Zophres

Who I want to win: Colleen Atwood

Oscar predictions: Part I

2011-02-24T15:41:00.000-08:00

I have had a long-standing interest in the Academy Awards. They rarely give their awards to the most deserving candidates - they rarely nominate all of the most deserving candidates - but as an annual window into the world of how Hollywood thinks they're very addictive to watch. It's like a bitchy circus, with lots of insincere marketing, cynical "Oscar-bait" performances every December, and horribly unattractive ball gowns. Here are the first of my predictions for Sunday night's Academy awards, this time focusing on the four acting categories.

Actor in a Leading Role

Javier Bardem in Biutiful

Jeff Bridges in True Grit

Jesse Eisenberg in The Social Network

Colin Firth in The King's Speech

James Franco in 127 Hours

In this category I have only seen two of the nominees (Bridges and Firth). That said, I agree with most people that this award is almost certainly going to Colin Firth for his performance in The King’s Speech. I’m quite happy with that too, since I thought it was a career-best performance for him.

Who’s going to win: Colin Firth

Who I want to win: Colin Firth

Actor in a Supporting Role

Christian Bale in The Fighter

John Hawkes in Winter's Bone

Jeremy Renner in The Town

Mark Ruffalo in The Kids Are All Right

Geoffrey Rush in The King's Speech

Christian Bale has the momentum in this category, however if The King’s Speech overwhelms the awards this year – as many are suggesting it might – then there’s a reasonable chance Geoffrey Rush might be honoured instead. In this category I have seen three of the nominees (Hawkes, Renner and Rush), and to be honest I think John Hawkes gave by far the best performance. It was so good it was spine-tingling: frightening, sympathetic, textured and haunting.

Who’s going to win: Christian Bale

Who I want to win: John Hawkes

Actress in a Leading Role

Annette Bening in The Kids Are All Right

Nicole Kidman in Rabbit Hole

Jennifer Lawrence in Winter's Bone

Natalie Portman in Black Swan

Michelle Williams in Blue Valentine

I have no real ability to comment on this category first-hand, since I’ve only seen Jennifer Lawrence’s performance out of the five nominees. The momentum here is with Natalie Portman, but I’ve got a gut feeling that the award is going to go to Annette Bening, who’s been nominated four times now without a win. In terms of who I’d like to see win, I’d be very happy to see Jennifer Lawrence get the prize for her breakout performance in Winter’s Bone – it was the best female performance I saw last year.

Who’s going to win: Annette Bening

Who I want to win: Jennifer Lawrence

Actress in a Supporting Role

Amy Adams in The Fighter

Helena Bonham Carter in The King's Speech

Melissa Leo in The Fighter

Hailee Steinfeld in True Grit

Jacki Weaver in Animal Kingdom

A month or so back I’d have absolutely picked Melissa Leo for this award, given the overwhelming amount of positive press she was getting. Then she started aggressively campaigning for the award herself, which historically has never gone well with Academy voters (it was personal campaigning that pretty much stopped Sean Astin’s chances of a Return of the King Best Supporting Actor nomination in its tracks). That likely leaves either Helena Bonham Carter or Hailee Steinfeld to win this category, and I think the older members of the Academy are going to skew this in Bonham Carter’s direction. I’d personally go for Steinfeld, although it is patently ridiculous that her central role in True Grit was nominated for Supporting Actress.

Who’s going to win: Helena Bonham Carter

Who I want to win: Hailee Steinfeld

Random link.

2011-02-06T12:01:00.000-08:00

BBC Radio's Interview program has interviewed American science fiction author Ursula K. LeGuin. You can download the podcast from the BBC here. (Link goes directly to the mp3 file.)

Not proud of the BBC

2011-02-03T19:12:00.000-08:00

The BBC's motoring show Top Gear found itself in hot water again this week, after a string of racial slurs were presented about the Mexican people on the programme. The Mexican ambassador to the United Kingdom lodged a complaint to the BBC, several British MPs condemned the remarks, and everyone has essentially been waiting for the public on-air apology.

I have no idea if there will be an on-air apology by Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond or James May, but I'm going to hazard a guess there won't be. The BBC's press office has released a written apology for the remarks. It's quite interesting reading.

While the BBC admits the comments were 'rude' and 'mischevious', they essentially dismissed them as harmless. The apology states 'Our own comedians make jokes about the British being terrible cooks and terrible romantics, and we in turn make jokes about the Italians being disorganised and over dramatic, the French being arrogant and the Germans being over-organised.

The apology also notes that racial stereotypes fall within BBC comedy guidelines, so long as the audience expects it. So basically as far as the BBC is concerned, racism is OK so long as everyone agrees the programme is racist - or maybe I'm misinterpreting.

The truth is that knowing Top Gear is a regularly mean-spirited, racist show and keeping it on the air year in year out simply demonstrates a deep moral bankruptcy within the United Kingdom's public-funded broadcaster. If the BBC can't cancel the series despite complaint after complaint, replace one or all of the hosts, or even so much as demand they actually apologise for their own bigotry themselves, I'm not sure what right they have to be a public-funded broadcaster any more - unless you figure that since there are some racists in Britain, and they need TV shows to like too.

I know what some of you are thinking: isn't this a bit over-the-top, suggesting the BBC cancel the show just because of a few light-hearted jabs at Mexico? Didn't Warner Bros do far worse with Speedy Gonzales? Well yes, they did, and those cartoons were made 50 years ago or more. You'd think we'd know better now. No, wait a moment: we do know better now. And the offence for me is not Top Gear being a bigoted program (and it is) that isn't half as funny as it once was (it's not), headlined by the BBC's highest paid and most deeply unlikeable TV personality (he is), and peppered week in, week out with sexism, racism, class prejudice and all-round misothropy (it is). The problem is that the BBC is actively claimed all of that is OK: it's just for laughs, and if you can't laugh at a racist joke you just don't have a sense of humour.

I love the BBC. It's the home of Doctor Who, Blue Peter, Monty Python's Flying Circus, Radio 4, Blake's 7, David Attenborough, all those adaptations of classic novels, Life on Mars, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, I Claudius, The Forsyth Saga, Paul Temple. And so on and so on, for decade after decade of the best television and radio ever made. I love the BBC.

Today I love it just a little bit less.

(Source: BBC News)

Odds'n'Sods

2011-02-02T21:03:00.000-08:00

Two random links to get you through your afternoon:

The Hollywood Reporter profiles and interviews director David Fincher (Seven, Fight Club, The Social Network). Check it out here.
Blake's 7 themed Lego. Check that one out here.

The Omega Factor

2011-01-31T01:26:00.000-08:00

The Omega Factor was an unusual drama for the BBC: a paranormal thriller produced by BBC Scotland, it sparked a sudden controversy upon release before being essentially buried by the broadcaster for more than two decades. It has only been since a recent DVD release that modern audiences have had the opportunity to discover it.

The series was created by George Gallacio, a former production manager for Doctor Who who had moved to Edinburgh to take up a permanent position there as a staff producer. Gallacio was initially commissioned to produce the second season of The Standard, a 13-part newspaper drama that had been launched in 1978 with great fanfare. With that series facing flagging ratings, however, Gallacio was ordered to abandon pre-production for that show and instead develop a new drama series himself.

Gallacio took inspiration from the current craze for all things supernatural, particularly Arthur Koestler's The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe. Koestler's book detailed experiments in telepathy, levitation and other apparent psychic phenomena. The idea of a government organization devoted to investigating such phenomena seemed a logical idea for a television drama. BBC Scotland's Head of Drama Roderick Graham agreed, and commissioned a 13-part series based on Gallacio's notes.

Having experienced the problems making science fiction on a standard BBC budget when working on Doctor Who, Gallacio persuaded Graham to reduce the new series' episode order from 13 to 10 - but with the original budget still intact. This provided Gallacio with a little extra money each episode to afford the innovative new series.

Gallacio quickly hired a writer, Jack Gerson, who drafted the producer's notes into a 50-minute pilot episode. Gerson, a Glasgow-based scriptwriter who had written for Z Cars and Sutherland's Law, based his script around journalist Tom Crane. Crane's latent psychic abilities led him into contact with Department 7, a shady government agency tasked with investigating the supernatural and psychic phenomena. Gerson titled the series The Undiscovered Country, after a quote from Shakespeare's Hamlet. In early 1979 this was changed to The Omega Factor, after a concept expressed in the series' pilot episode.

With a truncated production schedule leading into production, Gallacio was forced to hire a large number of writers to develop scripts concurrently. Early scripts distributed around BBC Scotland were met with ambivalence - some producers and department heads liking the idea, others finding the scripts to be unrealistic.

In the leading role of Tom Crane, Gallacio cast 31 year-old actor James Hazeldine. As Crane's investigative partner Dr Anne Reynolds he cast actress Louise Jameson. Jameson had recently resigned from her role as Leela in Doctor Who after two seasons, and was keen to make a break from that character. As Department 7 scientist Roy Martindale, Gallacio cast stage actor John Carlisle.

Location recording began in Edinburgh in February 1979. The director of the series pilot was Paddy Russell, one of the BBC's first female director and an experienced hand at directing science fiction (she had directed Doctor who on several occassions, including the Tom Baker classic "Pyramids of Mars"). The exterior scenes for the series were shot using outside broadcast video cameras, rather than 16mm film as was the norm. This gave the series a distinctive and cohesive look, unlike other BBC dramas made at the time. In the mid-1980s the BBC would abandon combining film and video on the same programme altogether - The Omega Factor was at the forefront of this change. Studio scenes were shot in the BBC Scotland studios in Glasgow.

The series premiered at 8:10pm on 13 June 1979 to some acclaim. Much praise came from Scottish TV critics over how the series refused to exaggerate its Scottish setting, which was then a regular problem with TV dramas shot in Edinburgh and Glasgow. Audiences were solid, if not sensational.

Trouble began with the broadcast of the series' fifth episode, "Powers of Darkness". Immediately after its transmission the BBC received a string of complaints, most notably from Mary Whitehouse - General Secretary of the National Viewers and Listener's Association. The NVLA was a lobby group of concerned television viewers, who pressured British television networks to maintain what they saw as socially reasonable standards of morals and public decency. Mary Whitehouse, who had made headlines in the mid-1970s for her crusade against violence in Doctor Who, was incensed with The Omega Factor. "I want to complain about The Omega Factor being shown in prime time," she would write, "It contained scenes of hypnosis, the supernatural, and a man apparently burning to death. It is one of the most disturbing things I have seen on television." Roderick Graham personally replied to Whitehouse, noting her objections but arguing that the episode was simply "good hocus pocus".

Two weeks later the NVLA's attacks on the series returned, this time over scenes where a possessed woman murdered her husband with a bread knife. This time there was a major problem: the BBC's own Guidance Notes on Violence, which dictated permissable levels of televised violence, specifically mentioned that television dramas were to avoid violent acts that would be easily copied - such as the possessed woman's use of a bread knife. Soon after The Omega Factor's first scene had concluded, Roderick Graham again wrote to the Whitehouse and the NVLA. In his letter he admitted that the BBC's own standards had been breached, and that "the point has been forcibly made to those who were responsible for the programme".

With less than outstanding ratings, and accusations of excessive violence hanging over its head, The Omega Factor had no chance for a second season - despite the open-ended conclusion of the final episode. Never repeated and never released on home video, the series remained locked in obscurity until it was finally released onto DVD in 2006. Gallacio returned to London, where he was offered a choice of producing either Doctor Who or a character drama titled MacKenzie. Gallacio chose the latter, with the reins of Doctor Who passing to what would become the original series' final producer, John Nathan Turner.

Watching The Omega Factor today, it is sometimes difficult to determine what the fuss was all about. Viewed in its historical context, it is stunning - inventive and dramatic, it's quite simply one of the finest supernatural thrillers ever made for television. Granted it has an unusually slow pace, which I find tends to make modern viewers a little impatient with it, but the ideas are strong and the performances by Hazeldine and Jameson are top-notch. Ultimately the series is a little like watching The X Files, only 20 years too early and made by the BBC. If you get the chance, and you're a fan of BBC science fiction, absolutely track it down. It's one of my all-time favourites.

Five Films: Michelle Yeoh

2011-01-26T14:50:00.000-08:00

This week’s Five Films segment is dedicated to Michelle Yeoh. She was born in Malaysia, raised in Great Britain and then introduced to movie audiences via Hong Kong. She originally trained as a ballerina, but a spinal injury led to her shifting to choreography, then modelling, and finally to acting. She will next be seen playing Aung San Suu Kyi in Luc Besson’s biographical drama The Lady, but she’s got an enormous back catalogue of films that are well worth checking out. Here, below, are my five favourites.

Police Story 3: Supercop (1992)

Yeoh featured in six films before retiring from acting in 1988. It was only after she divorced her husband, Dickson Poon, that she returned to the screen opposite Jackie Chan in Police Story 3. She is extraordinary in this film, going toe-to-toe with Chan in terms of energy, screen presence and ridiculously dangerous stunts. Her final stunt in the film – riding a motorcycle off a ramp and onto the roof of a moving train – was so impressive that it led Chan to add an even more dangerous stunt for himself (hanging off a rope ladder tied to a flying helicopter) to keep his reputation intact as Hong Kong’s most reckless and talented stunt artist.

The Heroic Trio (1993)

Following the enormous success of Police Story 3, Yeoh co-starred in The Heroic Trio. It’s a wonderfully inventive and enjoyable action film directed by Johnnie To. Yeoh stars opposite Maggie Cheung and Anita Mui as one of three superheroes. A sequel was produced, The Executioners, which had a darker, post-apocalyptic style. It’s nowhere near as good as the original, which was one of the first Hong Kong action films I ever saw and remains a personal favourite.

Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)

Just as Yeoh managed to be Jackie Chan’s equal in Police Story 3, here she manages to be the first female lead in a James Bond movie to truly look, act and feel like an equal to the British secret agent – rather than a mere sidekick or love interest. The motorcycle vs. helicopter chase sequence is potentially the best action sequence James Bond has ever had. For a while there were plans to spin Yeoh’s character off into her own franchise, but sadly they never came to fruition. No ‘Bond girl’ has been better – before or since.

Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (2000)

Yeoh returns to her Asian cinema roots in this exceptional Taiwanese wuxia epic. As master swordswoman and kung fu artist Yu Shu Lien, Yeoh dominates the screen. Her on-screen chemistry with Chow Yun-Fat also helps create one of the most understated and dignified love affairs in movie history. This isn’t simply Yeoh’s best movie – it’s one of the greatest motion pictures of all time.

Sunshine (2007)

This is a very different role for Yeoh, a relatively meek botanist in Danny Boyle’s widely underrated science fiction thriller. This film boasts a wonderful ensemble cast, as well as a great visual aesthetic and a fairly clever screenplay. It’s not necessarily the best film to watch for Michelle Yeoh, since she’s only playing a smaller supporting character, but I do think it’s a must-see for science fiction fans. Danny Boyle is such a ridiculously versatile and talented director.

Arthur of the Britons: "Arthur is Dead" (1972)

2011-01-20T15:37:00.000-08:00

Arthur of the Britons was one of those strange TV shows that I saw as a child during the school holidays in the mid-1980s. It was a half-hour British adventure series, and seemed like no other version of the King Arthur legend I had encountered. It seemed rougher, smaller and dirty. Camelot didn’t seem to exist, and Arthur and his knights seemed to live in a wooden fort.

I didn’t realise at the time that the series wasn’t a new one. Arthur of the Britons was produced for two seasons between 1972 and 1973 by HTV, one of Great Britain’s regional television stations. The series was set in the Dark Ages: the Romans had withdrawn from Britain, and Arthur was Celtic tribal leader defending his territory against Saxon invaders. Even 38 years later it feels like a completely fresh take on the Arthurian legend, creating the sort of “the real Arthur” mystique that the 2005 Jerry Bruckheimer film could only dream of. In many ways it foreshadows another HTV production, Robin of Sherwood, which took the well-worn Robin Hood legend and created something new out of it for the 1980s.

The series starred Oliver Tobias as Arthur, alongside Jack Watson as his adoptive father Llud and Michael Gothard as his right-hand man Kai. As far as I can find out Arthur was Tobias’ biggest role, although he did appear in a number of films and TV dramas (including the aforementioned Robin of Sherwood). Jack Watson was a mainstay of British film and television, having appeared in Peeping Tom (1960), This Sporting Life (1963), The McKenzie Break (1970) and The Wild Geese (1978). His final performance was in the hit 1986 miniseries Edge of Darkness. Meanwhile Michael Gothard is probably best known for playing Emile Leopold Locque in For Your Eyes Only (1981), as well as appearances in The Devils (1971) and The Three Musketeers (1973).

The first episode of Arthur of the Britons is titled “Arthur is Dead”, which suggests perhaps the shortest-lived television series ever. Instead it’s a tale of rivalry and power plays as the apparent death of Arthur leads the various Celtic warlords to make their bids to rule in the face of a Saxon incursion.

The episode begins with Arthur and Kai racing each other on horseback. It’s a surprising scene, primarily because it lacks a musical score. This gives the episode an unexpectedly contemporary feel, which is something that keeps returning sporadically through the episode. It’s an odd start to the series, possibly even more so when viewed in 2010, because while some elements – like the lack of music – feel highly contemporary, other elements feel as dated as you would expect.

“Arthur is Dead” continues with Arthur telling the assembled warlords that whoever can roll away a boulder and take a sword trapped underneath it will lead the Celts against the Saxons. The secret is, of course, to work together in rolling the boulder away – a symbolic act to demonstrate that only through cooperation will the Saxons be defeated for good. It’s a clever re-purposing of the Arthurian “sword in the stone” legends: immediately recognisable yet wonderfully down-to-earth at the same time.

The warlords include among them Brian Blessed as Mark of Cornwall, a loud, bellowing sort of warrior chieftain. This should come as no great surprise, since Blessed has made a career precisely out of these sorts of shouting, over-the-top roles. He’s either a national treasure or a notorious ham - possibly both – but whatever he is, he makes me smile every time I see his name in the credits. He shouted his way through Doctor Who (“Mindwarp”, 1986), Blake’s 7 (“Cygnus Alpha”, 1978), Flash Gordon (1980), The Black Adder (1983), High Road to China (1983), Henry V (1989) and numerous other films and TV programmes.

Mark of Cornwall is a fairly abrasive and disgruntled sort of person, and shouts his way gleefully through the episode.

It was about halfway through the episode that three other things occurred.

The first was the surprising amount of handheld camera work. As with the lack of music at the beginning, it gives the episode a fairly rough, contemporary quality that I wasn’t expecting.

The second was that Arthur of the Britons seems a very cheaply made series. The costumes are not elaborate, and the whole thing is shot on location in what looks like a hastily assembled wooden play fort in the middle of a field. British television rarely led the world in technical quality, but I suppose for an ITV production shot on film I was expecting something just a little less scrappy.

The third thing, and this is something that dogs all films and TV series of this genre and period, is that it’s all just a little bit too much like Monty Python and the Holy Grail. That film did such an accurate job of sending up the exact sort of cheap medieval adventure that Arthur of the Britons represents that it’s subsequently difficult to take Arthur seriously. The situation isn’t helped any time any character earnestly says Arthur’s name, since it immediately sent my mind tumbling through a string of inappropriate Monty Python quotations.

The climax of the episode is, for a 1970s children’s drama, unexpectedly violent, as the combined Celtic forces fend off a small Saxon invasion. The episode even manages to include some unexpected plot twists and turns.

When re-viewing childhood favourites, there’s always a risk of disappointment: things that seemed entertaining and dramatic when you were eight suddenly turn out to be trite and disappointing when you are thirty. It’s a relief that Arthur of the Britons, while by no means a television classic, retains a marvellous amount of appeal. It’s an entertaining diversion for a Sunday afternoon; best viewed one episode at a time when you’ve got a half-hour free.

The Greatest Show Time: Perfect Blue and Paprika

2011-01-19T18:21:00.000-08:00

This was originally written and presented as a reading at Aussiecon 4 in September 2010. Writer/director Satoshi Kon had recently died, and I felt like commemorating him in some way.

‘It’s the greatest show time!’ announces a clown as they impossibly squeeze out of a tiny automobile. A circus ring seems like an incongruous place to begin a science fiction film, but before long we are following a middle-aged police officer from circus to corridor to train and beyond, without explanation or logical sense. We are in a dream, and that dreams is being subtly controlled and manipulated by a machine: the DC Mini.

It sounds quite a lot like Christopher Nolan’s 2010 mega-hit Inception, in which surveillance experts use technology to enter other people’s dream-states and steal their ideas. This, however, is Satoshi Kon’s Paprika, an animated film from Japan that pre-dates Nolan’s work by four years and is – arguably – the superior film.

Satoshi Kon died in August 2010, aged 46, after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. Anime (Japanese animation) has lost one of its most distinct and talented voices. There is a rarefied group of anime directors considered at the top of the industry, whose films represent the pinnacle of artistry, passion and talent in an industry overflowing with films, TV serials and original animated videos (OAVs). The group is topped, without serious question, by Hayao Miyazaki (My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away) and includes Katsuhiro Otomo (Akira) and Mamoru Oshii (Ghost in the Shell). It also, to my mind, included Satoshi Kon, whose string of animated feature films and series demonstrated a medium at its absolute best.

This is a tragedy for the world of animation. Animation has lost a Mizoguchi, or a Hitchcock, or a Bresson. While the greatest tragedy is obviously for Kon himself, his family, and his friends, there is also the mourning of a creative talent – and a sad regret surrounding all the potential future films we will never have the opportunity to see.

Kon started his career as an artist and a writer. His early work included art and scripting duties for Katsuhiro Otomo (Akira). Kon provided art of Otomo’s manga World Apartment Horror, and subsequently worked as set designer on the OAV Roujin Z, and wrote the script to the “Magnetic Rose” segment of Otomo’s Memories. It was not until 1997 that he made his directorial debut, Perfect Blue – which I shall discuss in more detail below.

Kon’s second feature, Millennium Actress, was released four years later in 2001. It depicted a documentary filmmaker shooting a film about an elderly actress in which reality and dream start to blur and collide.

His 2003 feature Tokyo Godfathers was a far more conventional work than either Perfect Blue or Millennium Actress. It was a loose riff on the classic western Three Godfathers, relocated to Tokyo and based around a trio of homeless people.

In 2004 Kon directed his only anime TV project, the trippy 13-part series Paranoia Agent. While working excellently as a surreal series in its own right, Paranoia Agent also acted a bit like a creative ‘clearing house’ for Kon, allowing him to burn through all of the fantastical imagery and dreamlike sequences he had developed but abandoned for Perfect Blue and Millennium Actress.

The last of Kon’s works to be released was Paprika (2006), yet another exploration of dream worlds and surrealistic imagery.

Kon’s works present us with a unique brand of screen fantasy, which straddles an uneasy boundary between stark realism and visual surreality. Kon once described his artistic process in the following way: ‘When I draw myself, I am quite naturally interested in whatever’s around me, so that there’s a feeling of starting from a realistic point of view, with which fantasy is then mixed, and finally finishing with pure fantasy.’[1] In the same promotional interview, Kon said that ‘the most important influence on me wasn’t a single film but the works of Terry Gilliam. Despite being fantasy, his depictions are quite bitter, his narration also throws “curve balls”, and rather than covering every point in detail, he takes the staging off in a completely different point and plucks out a single, vivid theme. I especially like Time Bandits, Brazil and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.’[2]

There is an immediate similarity between the fantasy of Satoshi Kon and the fantasy of Terry Gilliam, although Kon’s choice of the word ‘bitter’ to describe the tone of Gilliam’s films strikes me as a little inaccurate. To me it feels more like a sort of weary melancholia – a sense that the fantasy we are experiencing has become a little worn and exhausted around its edges. Gilliam’s films are not, despite regular moments of levity or comedy, particularly cheery affairs. The same can be said of Kon’s.

Despite all of this talk of surrealism, fantasy and dreams, there is actually an unusual degree of realism to Kon’s films. The characters don’t often feel like anime archetypes. They have depth and nuance. They are designed and drawn in a much more realistic and seemingly conservative way. Much of the realistic edge to Kon’s work can be fairly easily drawn back to Katsuhiro Otomo, his former employer and mentor. There is a strong correlation between the visual styles of the two artists, and in the unexpectedly deep and flawed characters that both men tend to play with. While Otomo’s characters tend to play second fiddle to grand visual spectacle – the mechanical wonders of Steamboy, or the biological terrors of Akira, for example – Kon’s characters are generally the focus of his works. If there is spectacle, it comes from the dreamlike worlds within his characters rather than expressions of science fiction and fantasy without.

There is also a well-identified shōjo element to Kon’s works (shōjo being a style of manga and anime aimed at teenage girls). His anime expresses, on the whole, a sort of undercurrent of shōjo culture: femininity, vulnerability, and a focus on relationships over physical action. More often than not his works are based around female protagonists.

When asked about his preference for writing about women, Kon said ‘It’s because female characters are easier to write. With a male character I can only see the bad aspects. Because I am a man I know very well what a male character is thinking… on the other hand, if you write a female protagonist, because it’s the opposite sex and I don’t know them the way I know a male, I can project my obsession onto the characters and expand the aspects I want to describe.’[3]

Reading of Kon’s death led me to revisit his films in my mind. I found myself wanting to talk about his career, and to celebrate those memorable works that he has left behind for past audiences to recall and future ones to discover. In particular I want to focus on his first and final films, Perfect Blue and Paprika. They not only provide an insight into Kon as a filmmaker, but they also act as interesting companion works to each other.

It is difficult to imagine too many films more expressive about paranoia and mental illness than Perfect Blue. It is at once a gripping thriller and a disturbing nightmare journey. It is an adaptation of a novel by Yoshikazu Takeuchi, in which a young woman named Mima Kirigoe switches careers from wholesome pop starlet to sexualised TV actress, and subsequently slides into a miasma of fear and paranoia as she begins to lose her grip on reality.

The film entered production as a 90-minute live action film that would be cheaply produced and released direct to home video. The 1995 production schedule was delayed, however, followed the devastating Kobe earthquake. When preparing to remount the production later that year, the producers elected to transfer the film to animation. ‘Perfect Blue dealt with a subject never before addressed by anime,’ claimed the film’s production notes, ‘and it was agreed to employ the best names currently working in the industry. A new system of production would be adopted that did not fall prey to the constraints of traditional animation. It was felt that anime had not adopted the eclectic nature of manga and was in danger of confining itself to the same characters and subject matter.’[4]

Perfect Blue certainly achieved its aim in presenting something different to the usual run of anime features. It’s a present-day psychological thriller, a genre typically suited to live-action. By making the innovative move of producing the film via animation, the filmmakers have shifted the story one step closer towards hallucination and dream from the outset. Had Perfect Blue been produced in live action (and there was ultimately a live-action version, directed by Toshiki Sato in 2002) any shift into nightmare imagery or hallucinations would have been signposted to the audience. We would not have experienced the hallucination as much as simply witnessed a visual effect. By presenting the realistic elements of the story through an abstracted medium such as anime, the shift from reality to unreality is smoothed over and is subsequently much more immersive.

This blurring of reality and nightmare is part of what makes Perfect Blue such a disturbing viewing experience – something that wasn’t lost on its cast and crew. While promoting the film, voice actress Junko Iwao said ‘when I got the storyboards and the script, to tell you the truth, I had some mixed feelings about it. I had made up my mind to accept the role at the time of the audition, but I was a little concerned about the violent scenes. Because I didn’t have any experience acting violent scenes in the past… I think I feel exactly the same as Mima feels in the story.’[5]

With a close eye on the film’s small budget, Kon went out of his way to limit the amount of animation used in the film. Perfect Blue was ultimately based on 30,000 drawings. As Dani Cavallaro pointed out in her book Anime Intersections, ‘to grasp the full significance of this figure by comparative means, it is worth noting that Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke, also released in 1997, incorporated over 144,000 cels. Katsuhiro Otomo’s Steamboy (2004), as we shall see, encompasses no less than 180,000 drawings.’[6]

When the producers and financiers of Perfect Blue saw Kon’s work-in-progress, it became obvious that they were producing something a lot more significant than a direct-to-video work. Partway through the production process the decision was made to release Perfect Blue into cinemas. Kon was initially ambivalent about the idea. Speaking to Midnight Eye in 2001, he recalled: ‘As its creator I was actually a bit hesitant about Perfect Blue getting shown in theatres. But it was, and as a result the film was invited to a number of film festivals and seen by many different audiences. I also got to visit many countries, so I was happy with it after all. The film was much more appreciated by those audiences than I’d imagined, so I was quite perplexed at the same time.’[7]

Perfect Blue’s spiralling sense of paranoia and nightmare is interesting because it is framed so tightly in televisual terms. Mima’s predicament is kicked off by her shifting from singing to acting for television. The second hallucinatory Mima, is first encountered via the Internet on a computer monitor. Scenes are deliberately framed in a 4:3 ratio – the dimensions of a pre-digital television.

It’s an interesting touch: this is basically a film about being watched, and it’s visually framed in a way that reflects the fact that we the audience are the ones doing the watching.

Perfect Blue is an outstanding film for a first-time director. It is really quite a distinct anime production, since both its realist aesthetic and its psychological subject matter make it seem more closely aligned with live-action filmmakers such as Hitchcock and De Palma than other anime filmmakers such as Otomo or Oshii.

Fast forward nine years, past Millennium Actress, Paranoia Agent and Tokyo Godfathers, and we come upon Paprika, Satoshi Kon’s final film production. Once again it’s a film that deals with the subconscious and the unreal. Its treatment of this kind of subject matter, however, is very different. It’s a much more colourful and vibrant movie. Scenes set within the movie’s dream environments shift and jump with reckless abandon. At times it’s a film in the form of a riot, sometimes serious, sometimes funny, sometimes scary, but always bright, always vivid. Perhaps this is what provoked the Village Voice’s Rob Nelson to claim Paprika ‘isn't a movie that's meant to be understood so much as simply experienced—or maybe dreamed.’[8]

One thing about Paprika that I’ve convinced of is that it’s a film that is, quite frankly, the work of someone deeply in love with the medium of film itself.

The film is based on the novel by Yasutaka Tsutsui, who made a career out of writing mysteries and science fiction. Paprika was published in 1993, and Satoshi Kon was keen to make it into a film as soon as he read it.

After an abortive attempt to secure the rights in 1998, Kon wound up meeting Tsutsui at an interview for the anime magazine Animage. It turns out Tsutsui was a fan of Millennium Actress, the two got to talking, and a deal was struck for Kon to finally make the Paprika adaptation he’d always dreamed of.

While working on the film, Kon said ‘When I met Tsutsui-san and got his blessing to make it into a film, it was as if something came true that I had in my mind for a long time. The visualization of the film goes beyond the initial concept. It's a film that demanded to be made in this era. It's something I had to make, a personal commitment.’[9]

Kon adapted the novel fairly loosely, which is something that made Tsutsui quite happy. ‘If Kon didn’t do as he pleased,’ Tsutsui said in an interview, ‘I don’t think the story would have taken advantage of the anime format. Regurgitating the novel is boring. I’m glad he felt free to do as he saw fit.’

Much of the film was storyboarded as they went along – Kon had no idea what the climax would be like when they had started animating the opening sequence. It was a process of deliberately freeing the production up. Nothing was cemented down, no minds had been made up, therefore any ideas remained possible. The result is a string of amazing dream sequences, displaying a wonderful sense of flair and imagination.

Paprika is more than a simple flight of fancy, however: it is arguably the most effective and realistic (although that seems an odd word to use) depiction of dreamlike states ever committed to cinema. In many ways the realist imagery of live-action cinema runs directly counter to the free-flowing and imaginary environments of dreams. As a result, no matter how imaginative the settings or elaborate the visual effects of such films as Inception, Dreamscape and The Cell, as products of a fundamentally realist medium they are never going to ultimately approach the shifting, often inexplicable worlds of an unconscious mind. By working within the medium of animation, Kon is released from that realism. His production and design team can create whatever imagery they like, and it can move, change and surround the viewer in a much more dreamlike manner than live action ever could.

Some of the dream sequences are an absolute goldmine for movie buffs. Kon presents references to and riffs off of From Russia With Love, Akira Kurosawa, Tarzan, Roman Holiday, Busby Berkeley and so on. As with Perfect Blue, this is something that for me really makes Satoshi Kon stand out from his contemporaries. He’s an anime writer/director who’s embracing and playing with live-action American cinema. A really interesting fusion of screen cultures results from that, and you can see it all through his body of work.

Paprika may not ultimately be Kon’s final film, since he was working on a new project at the time of his death (The Dream Machine, which will reportedly be released in 2011). However, if we take Perfect Blue and Paprika as the beginning and effective end point of Kon’s directorial career, we find ourselves with a remarkable pair of films. Together they bookend a three-fold contribution to cinema: a contribution to anime, a contribution to Japanese cinema, and finally a contribution to an ongoing dialogue between the screen cultures of two different countries – Japan and the USA. These are two films, both animated, both concerned almost entirely with worlds that are imagined and unreal, but one of them frightening and nightmarish and the other exhilarating and colourful. Kon approaches the same territory from different directions.

Satoshi Kon leaves behind a strong legacy, not only as a writer and director of immense creativity and talent but also as an artist who by-and-large focused on a highly specific subject matter. Dreams interested Kon, and he expressed that interest in a variety of ways. Each of his texts – Perfect Blue and Paprika, but also Millennium Actress and Paranoia Agent, played with ideas of dream, nightmare, imagination and the unreal in inventive and visually dramatic ways.

Japanese animation is poorer with his passing, but remains rich thanks to the wonderful films Kon leaves behind.

[1] “Interview with Satoshi Kon”, Perfect Blue official website, 1998.

[2] Perfect Blue official website, 1998.

[3] Tom Mes, 11 February 2001.

[4] Perfect Blue production notes, quoted in Dani Cavallaro, Anime Intersections: Tradition and Innovation in Theme and Technique, McFarland Publishing, 2007.

[5] Quoted in “Interview with Junko Iwao”, Perfect Blue DVD, Manga Entertainment.

[6] Dani Cavallaro, 2007.

[7] Tom Mes, “Interview: Satoshi Kon”, Midnight Eye, 11 February 2001.

[8] Rob Nelson, “Kon’s cure for cinema”, Village Voice, 15 May 2007.

[9] Jason Gray, “Interview: Satoshi Kon”, Midnight Eye, 20 November 2006.

Urine controlled videogames

2011-01-18T17:41:00.000-08:00

You can forget all the motion-controlled games being thrown around at the moment, whether it's the Wii, the Xbox 360 Kinect or Playstation Move. Sega are already onto the next big thing: urine!

It sounds like I'm joking, but in four Tokyo arcades this month Sega are trialling a series of urinal-installed videogames. The idea is that as you play them, you will also see digital advertising on the game screen.

There's Graffiti Eraser, which is pretty obvious - spray over certain areas of the urinal to wipe away the picture. There's Mannekin Pis, where the aim is to urinate as much as possible to get the high score. There's even Splashing Battle, which measures the strength of your urine against that of the last guy to use the toilet.

Obviously at the moment they’re not only experimental but also only for male players. There’s more information about these very-real videogames over at CNNGo.

Five Films: Mark Hamill

2011-01-18T14:29:00.000-08:00

For the second Five Films column, let’s take a look at Mark Hamill. Best known as Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars saga, he’s been appearing in various films and TV productions for over 40 years now. And remember: if you liked Hamill in any films not mentioned below, make sure you speak up in the comments below.

Wizards (1977)

Hamill is an exceptional voice artist, and it was a side to his career that he was developing all the way back here in the 1970s. Hamill plays Sean, the leader of the elves, in this inventive animated fantasy from writer/director Ralph Bakshi. This isn’t my favourite Bakshi film (that would still be The Lord of the Rings), but it’s still highly enjoyable.

The Big Red One (1980)

Mark Hamill plays one of a squadron of young American soldiers during World War II, and its amazing to see the contrast in character between this and The Empire Strikes Back, which came out the same year. This is a superb war film, written and directed by Samuel Fuller and partially based on his own war experiences. It’s far more realistic than most war films that preceded it, and very emotionally effective. Lee Marvin plays the squad leader in a typically talented fashion. In 2004 a restored cut of the film was released, which repaired the many cuts made by the studio against Fuller’s wishes. The full restored version is easily the best one.

Return of the Jedi (1983)

Of course Hamill played Luke Skywalker in Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back before he played the role for a third time here, and of course both Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back are better movies. On the other hand, Hamill gives the best performance here, and I think the character of Luke is at his most interesting here too. I like the fact that, once Han Solo is rescued at the end of the first act, Luke essentially becomes the star of his own film opposite Darth Vader, while the rest of the cast run around with the Muppets on Endor in almost completely unrelated movie.

Slipstream (1989)

Steven Lisberger’s follow-up to Tron, and to my mind a far superior film. Mark Hamill plays a hard-edged bounty hunter on the trail of a mysterious fugitive (played by Bob Peck). It’s a nice little post-apocalyptic science fiction film which got widely overlooked by a lot of people when it was released. Nowadays there isn’t even a proper DVD available, just a bargain-bin edition made from an old VHS master.

Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (1993)

Of all of the animated characters that Mark Hamill has voiced, it’s as the Joker in Batman that he’s made the biggest impact. For a lot of people, Hamill’s performance makes him the best Joker of all time. I’m not sure I entirely agree (Heath Ledger was awfully good), but I appreciate the sentiment. Hamill does a wonderful combination of funny and scary. Interestingly, he was the second choice: an earlier take with Tim Curry as the Joker was dropped because the producers found it not funny enough and too frightening for children by far.

Q*Bert (1982)

2011-01-17T14:49:00.000-08:00

There is a purity to early videogames that ensures their continued popularity, either on a small-scale level of cult appeal, or with a much larger pop culture cache. These games were programmed on computers that are by today’s standards ridiculously limited, yet the limitations provided a structure within which some of the most enjoyable gaming experiences ever were successfully created.

This isn’t an attempt to claim that all early videogames are enjoyable. Truth be told, a lot of them are dreadful – either dull retreads and ripoffs of other more successful titles, or quite simply straight-out bad games.

When all of the elements are well designed, and one of these early titles has a unique and iconic look, memorable and original gameplay, and challenging and interesting design, then generally that game is going to be remembered and re-played for years to come.

I have a lot of favourites from the early days of videogames: Frogger, Galaga and Ms Pac-Man immediately come to mind. Another favourite is Q*Bert, a strange-looking but wonderfully addictive American arcade game from 1982.

Q*Bert is, like all good early videogames, pretty simply to play. There’s a pyramid of cubes, and you control a round orange character (also named Q*Bert) as he jumps from the top of one cube to the next. As he jumps onto each cube, the top changes colour, and once all of them have changed the game moves on to the next level.

Of course there are obstacles in Q*Bert’s way: balls fall down from the top of the screen to the bottom, bouncing from cube to cube, and an array of monsters move around in pursuit of Q*Bert as he goes. It’s a classic game mechanic: to stay alive you need to stay out of everything’s way, but at the same time to progress through the game you need to keep moving all over the screen. Juggling the instincts to reach every cube and to stay well out of danger is what makes Q*Bert (and games like it) so challenging to play.

The creation of Q*Bert may be credited to three men, all employees of the Gottlieb Company, a pinball manufacturer owned by Columbia Pictures (and, by the time Q*Bert was released, the Coca-Cola Company). The three creators were: Warren Davis, who designed and programmed the title; Jeff Lee, who designed the artwork and graphics; and David Thiel, who composed the games music and designed its iconic speech-like sound effects.

In 1982 the videogame phenomenon was in full swing (and, unbeknownst to the industry, just over a year away from its first major crash). The Gottlieb Company was founded in 1927 as a pinball manufacturer, an industry they continued to work in until the company closed down in 1996. In 1977 the company was taken over by Columbia Pictures, as part of the studio’s attempts to expand beyond the movie business. By the time Q*Bert was in production, Columbia had itself been taken over by the Coca-Cola Company.

The Gottlieb Company took to the videogames industry a little too tentatively and a little too late. Before the industry temporarily crashed in 1984 they managed to get six games into the market, and only two of those – Reactor and Q*Bert – were particularly successful. By late 1983 Coca-Cola relocated their videogame division to a company named Mylstar, which primarily made Laserdisc-based titles.

As part of their foray into videogames development, Gottlieb went about poaching programmers wherever they could find them. One programmer was Warren Davis, who was at the time an employee of IBM. Keen to jump into the games industry, Davis took up a position at Gottlieb alongside programmers such as Tim Skelly and Kan Yabumoto. He was originally assigned to program a game titled Protector.

One of Gottlieb’s artists at the time was Jeff Lee. In playing around on one of the computers, he had managed to generated a tessellated pattern out of thin diamonds, which – when coloured – managed to create a fairly convincing illusion of being three-dimensional cubes. Lee would later write that ‘being a fan of the great Dutch artist M.C. Escher, the master of optical illusions, I constructed a stack of triad-based cubes. Admiring my derivative handiwork, it struck me, there’s a game in here somewhere’.¹

While walking through the office, Warren Davis noticed Lee’s cube artwork and commented in much the same fashion – it was an interesting graphic, and logically there would be some way to transform it into a game of some kind. Davis’ first suggestion was to reduce the number of cubes down into a triangular pattern, creating a three-dimension pyramid. As Davis later said: ‘Then I thought of balls bouncing down the pyramid. This was really a thought of convenience, since every time a ball landed it had two choices of which way to bounce. Two choices means one bit and that meant in one byte I could determine a ball’s path.’²

At this stage there still wasn’t a game concept. However, the cube-based visual design looked exciting, and Davis’ quickly programmed set of cascading balls had promise. Gottlieb shelved Protector and assigned Lee and Davis to start working on how to combine their two ideas into a playable game.

Production on the untitled project started in April 1982 in a Gottlieb office in Bensenville. The game was developed in 8088 assembly language, re-using a lot of the code from Tim Skelly’s game Reactor, which was also in production at Gottlieb.

At the time Lee had been working on a completely unrelated game concept, which he had named Snots and Boogers. The game was to centre on an odd-looking orange creature, with a tube for a nose and two short legs. The original idea had been for the character to shoot balls of mucus from its nose. Lee suggested to Davis that the character could be adapted to work on their cube game. Davis agreed, but insisted on dropping the mucus-shooting elements. He was keen to develop a game that didn’t rely on the industry’s already over-used mechanic of shooting things.

The game was slowly taking shape: the play area was well established, the balls dropped down the pyramid in seemingly random order, and now a playable character could jump from cube to cube dodging the balls. Davis would later recollect a night when Ron Waxman, Gottlieb’s Vice-President of Engineering, wandered into his office to see what he was working on ‘There was never really a master plan,’ Davis said, ‘I would implement something and then start to think, “OK, what should we put in next?” Out of nowhere, the voice of Waxman behind me says, “What if the squares change colour when he lands on them?” This struck me as a particularly brilliant idea, and that is the moment when Q*Bert actually became a game.’³

Halfway through development the team was relocated from Bensenville to Gottlieb’s pinball plant in Northlake, Illinois. There the game was developed using then-state of the art IBM PCs, whose disk drives could accommodate an unthinkable 1 megabyte of data per disc.

The game’s unusual sound effects came from programmer David Thiel, who had been tasked with manipulating a sound chip to simulate human speech – one noise at a time. Gottlieb had plans to use the synthesised speech in their pinball machines, and Thiel was finding the meticulous task to be stretching his patience. Thiel later said: ‘Being very frustrated with this, I said “Well, screw it. What if I just stick random numbers in the chip instead of all this highly authored stuff, what happens?” It sounded alien. It sounded like somebody should be able to understand it, but of course you couldn’t understand it because it was gibberish. By that time, Warren had Q*Bert bouncing around on the cubes, and I said, “Have I got something for you”.’⁴

One unusual addition to the game was the inclusion of a pinball hammer inside the videogame’s cabinet. When the player dropped the Q*Bert character off the edge of the pyramid, the computer would trigger the hammer to bang into the bottom of the cabinet. It was an amusing illusion, creating the idea that somehow Q*Bert had physically fallen down inside the machine. It was also arguably the first case of a force-feedback mechanic in a videogame.

Production on the game started to wind down in October 1982, with only a few tasks left to complete – including deciding on a name for the final product.

Naming the game proved to be one of the most difficult tasks. The game had entered development under Jeff Lee’s title of Snots and Boogers, before rapidly being dubbed “the Cube Game” for several months.

Gottlieb’s Vice-President of Marketing Howie Rubin suggested naming the game after the string of punctuation marks that popped up in a comic-style speech balloon each time the player’s character died on screen. The problem with that idea was fairly obvious: how would you actually pronounce a string of random symbols?

After a company-wide request for title submissions, one staff member came up with the idea of naming the player character Hubert. This was rapidly combined in a development meeting with the word ‘cube’ to form Cubert, and subsequently to Qbert. Warren Davis said ‘somehow the asterisk got stuck in there and we all knew we had found it. It felt right.’⁵

As was common practice at the time, the game went through final testing by being quietly placed inside an actual videogame arcade. The designers could then watch children and teenagers playing the game, and determine if any changes need to be made to the gameplay or the difficulty.

At first the game wasn’t particularly successful. A lot of players had difficulty with the diagonal layout of the game, which differed from the more square, ‘up-down-left-right’ mechanic. One bone of contention regarding the design was the player’s ability to direct Q*Bert off the pyramid – at which point he or she lost a life. Davis admitted the problem himself, saying that ‘some people would put their quarter in, jump off the pyramid three times in a row, and not even realise why the game was over.’⁶ The producers at Gottlieb were intent on removing the problem, but Davis refused to compromise – he liked the extra risk it created for the players.

One compromise Davis was forced to agree to was to slow the game down. Players testing it in the arcades found it ran at a breakneck pace, and struggled to master the game. Davis argued to keep the speed as it was, but was forced to change it. Within a few weeks of release, and largely due to the lower speed, players who took the time to learn the game’s patterns and layout were able to ‘camp’ on the machine on a single quarter for hours at a time.

Proof of Q*Bert’s success came from how quickly its design was emulated and reworked by other videogame publishers and developers. By 1983 games such as Boing (First Star Software), Frostbite (Activision) and Quick Step (Imagic) were taking the Q*Bert formula and applying their own distinctive spin.

Q*Bert also joined Pac-Man as an unlikely licensing property. Pretty soon the character was appearing on school lunchboxes and backpacks, and even featured in his own short-lived Saturday morning cartoon.

Gottlieb didn’t hesitate to license Q*Bert to Parker Brothers for home consoles, although technical restraints prevented most of them from accurately replicating the arcade version. The Atari 2600 edition missed a lot of elements. The entire bottom row of cubes was omitted, as were several of the enemies, the level intermissions and the two-player mode. The Atari 5200 version was more complete, but suffered as a result of that system’s poor joystick quality. Other versions were released for the Intellivision and Colecovision, both in 1983.

Like most arcade games, it is the original arcade version that continues to prove the most enjoyable and addictive. Played either on a rare surviving arcade unit, or via emulation software such as MAME, Q*Bert continues to challenge, entertain and impress after almost 30 years.

It is a slightly odd game in a modern context, however, because unlike pretty much all of its contemporaries Q*Bert has never been reworked or re-imagined for new consoles or platforms. Namco still produce new versions of Pac-Man. Frogger still gets an underwhelming 3D version every couple of years. Q*Bert seems oddly consigned to semi-obscurity. For those who never encountered it in the 1980s, it’s an unheard-of oddity. For those who did, it’s often a lifelong favourite.

¹Jeff Lee, History of Q*Bert (no longer online, quoted in Steven L. Kent, The Ultimate History of Video Games, Prima Publishing, 2001.

²Van Burnham, Supercade: A Visual History of the Videogame Age 1971-1984, MIT Press, 2001.

³Burnham, 2001.

⁴Steven L. Kent, The Ultimate History of Video Games, Prima Publishing, 2001.

⁵Burnham, 2001.

⁶Burnham, 2001.

Pale Rider (1985)

2011-01-16T12:32:00.000-08:00

This is an old review I wrote back in 2009, but it's a good movie and deserves being talked about again. Hope you enjoy it.

A small community of Californian gold miners find themselves persecuted by a rich local banker with a jealous eye towards their claim. There’s a violent raid one morning. A teenage girl’s pet dog is killed. After burying her pet, the girl prays for God to send a “spirit of vengeance” to avenge her loss and drive away the banker and his men. The next day, a solitary rider arrives in town – a nameless preacher who unites the embattled community and inspires them to fight back.

I have an enormous love for westerns that I don’t often talk about. I love the mystique of this big, dusty, ridiculously fictionalised vision of American history. I think it’s sad that an equivalent bushranger genre didn’t take off here in Australia, because it probably would have been just as fun.

I love grim men in broad-brimmed hats, riding horses and training revolvers on one another. I love – when they’re shot like a western should be – beautiful North American vistas. I’ve never particularly wanted to visit the USA for its people, but I’ve always wanted to visit just to look at the landscape they live on.

Pale Rider, released in 1985, was Clint Eastwood’s first western in nine years. He hadn’t appeared in once since The Outlaw Josey Wales, back in 1976. Pale Rider also marked Eastwood 30^th year performing in the genre that had made him a household name, first in the US television series Rawhide and then in Sergio Leone’s much acclaimed “spaghetti” westerns (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollar’s More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly).

It was the Eastwood westerns, first via Sergio Leone’s films and then in ones by Ted Post, Don Siegel and Eastwood himself, that spearheaded a progression in the genre. The western was able to become a much darker and more cynical experience. The lines between the hero and the villain were allowed to blur, and sometimes be removed entirely.

Eastwood represents probably the final major paradigm shift for the western. By the end of the 1970s the genre was shifting into pastiche and parody. Movies such as Blazing Saddles (1974) and Silverado (1985) fed on the western’s tropes and popular images without contributing anything new of their own. In essence the western had started to eat itself – consuming past tropes with a knowing wink, but not leaving anything new on the table bar a sort of post-modern self-awareness. More recent productions such as Kevin Costner’s Open Range (2003) and David Milch’s television drama Deadwood have merely extended the road Eastwood and Leone were already carving.

It’s perhaps surprising that after waiting almost ten years to return to the western, Eastwood chose such a traditional and largely by-the-numbers story. The miners under threat, the rich banker threatening them and the deadly gunslingers hired from out of town are all very familiar elements, and for the most part the film unfolds precisely as you would expect it to. In fact it’s remarkable how much the movie apes George Stevens’ Shane (1953). It’s a curious sort of pseudo-homage, close enough for you to notice but not quite precise enough to seem deliberate. The western is a relatively formulaic genre – it could all be an enormous coincidence.

At the centre of the film is Eastwood’s grizzled preacher, full of angry silences and ominous pauses. Like most of Eastwood’s performances, it’s a marvellous exercise in restraint. It can be argued that since A Fistful of Dollars Eastwood has been pretty much playing the same character, and it’s definitely the one he plays here. The preacher is a sparse, lean character stripped of all superfluous elements – including a name. ‘Who are you, really?’ the preacher is asked shortly before the film’s climax. ‘It doesn’t really matter, does it?’ Eastwood replies, before riding off to do what he does best.

That said, it is somewhat surprising that in Pale Rider it takes Eastwood a full 73 minutes to fire a gun. He doesn’t have to. He’s dragging the full weight of a 30 year legacy behind him. By the time the final bloody shootout occurs, his audience has been waiting almost a decade to see him engage in a gunfight again.

Pale Rider also evokes Eastwood’s own 1973 western High Plains Drifter in that it edges the unreal. It doesn’t edge very closely to it, but it adds an unexpected wrinkle to the picture. Several times during the film people take their eyes off the preacher for a moment, only to glance back and find him gone. It’s done in a way that feels one step beyond the usual fast-footed and stealthy protagonist. It feels unbelievable, even supernatural. On top of that there’s the preacher’s convenient arrival in town immediately after the grieving Meagen (Sydney Penny) wishes for a Book of Revelations-style avenging angel to come and defeat the villainous Coy LaHood (Richard Dysart) once and for all.

When the preacher learns that LaHood has called in a rogue sheriff from out of town, he remarks that he’s heard of the man before. When the sheriff learns of the preacher, he’s reminded of a man he killed some years previously. When the two meet face to face, the sheriff recognises the preacher with terror – yet we’re never told who or what he is.

The horror and western genres fit together wonderfully, and in many respects it’s a bit of a shame that this angle wasn’t pursued further.

Pale Rider was Eastwood’s second last western – he followed it some years later with the widely acclaimed Unforgiven. In many ways I think Unforgiven has overshadowed it. There in the shadow it remains, lost between the classic Eastwood westerns of earlier decades and the final definitive statement that Unforgiven represents.

Want to read scripts to The King's Speech and The Social Network?

2011-01-14T14:54:00.000-08:00

One of the cool things about Oscar season is that the studios often widely distribute copies of eligible screenplays, in the hope that Academy members might nominate and vote for them. The result is heaven for any aspiring script writers. Two scripts have recently been put up by Deadline Hollywood, so click here for a PDF of David Seidler's script of The King's Speech, and click here for an insightful interview with The Social Network's Aaron Sorkin, as well as a PDF of his script.

Tell-All, by Chuck Palahniuk (2010)

2011-01-13T14:59:00.000-08:00

Chuck Palahniuk is a terrifyingly talented author. He has a remarkable gift for odd turns of phrase, describing people, events and places in ways that the reader would never have previously imagined, but which fit perfectly. He’s laugh-out-loud funny when he needs to be, and frighteningly confronting when he wants to be. His first published novel, Fight Club, was a well-deserved cult hit and spawned an even better motion picture from screenwriter Jim Uhls and director David Fincher. Follow-up novels such as Survivor, Choke and Invisible Monsters continued to cement his reputation as one of America’s best novelists. He’s an author with whom you can make some easy comparisons – the deceptive simplicity of Stephen King, the highly evocative phrasing of Bret Easton Ellis – but also one who stands up as a very original writer. Nobody else writes exactly like Palahniuk. Ten novels into his career and he has effectively created his own niche genre.

Tell-All, published in 2010, is Palahniuk’s latest novel. Like several of his recent books it’s comparatively short, running for roughly 180 pages or so in a B-format paperback. It is a satirical pastiche, tracking the attempted career comeback of an aging movie star through the eyes of her long-standing (and long-suffering) personal assistant. When a young man arrives with an eye to woo and exploit the movie star, it’s up to her assistant to see him off and protect her employer – whom the manipulative assistant clearly sees as her own life’s work.

It’s saddening when you’re a die-hard fan of an author, and that author disappoints you. Tell-All is probably Palahniuk’s least successful work, creatively speaking. It’s not a lazy book, although several of his narrative and prose techniques feel like they are running a little thin. It is easy to recognize the intention of the work, why he chooses to write particularly things in a particular style. One technique that is very successful is the film’s constant name-dropping of actors, producers, directors, famous restaurants and luxury brand names. All of them are highlighted throughout the book in bold text, showing off how ridiculous it all is and how heavily Hollywood relies on networks and social hierarchies to determine status. In a longer book the technique would probably wear thin, but at 180 pages it’s extraordinarily effective.

Palahniuk also employs a lot of screenplay and film-making techniques. Our narrator describes how scenes would look, actively signposts flashbacks and describes how and why the camera would move around each scene to pinpoint important moments of foreshadowing or narrative. This technique feels a little over-used, and combined with Palahniuk’s trademark inventive descriptions weighs the novel down like a pudding with too many ingredients. The narrative is a bit shaky as well, spending a full half of the book on exposition before the plot – which is comparatively slight – finally begins to move along.

If read by someone completely new to Chuck Palahniuk Tell-All might be able to impress, since the best elements of the author’s writing are still in strong evidence. If read by someone who is a fan of his work, as I am, those elements aren’t enough to escape the book’s shortfalls. Palahniuk has written far, far better books than this before, and I’m sure he will again. Tell-All is a significant disappointment.

Five Films: David Morse

2011-01-12T16:18:00.000-08:00

In these occasional columns, I’m going to pick an actor I like and recommend five of their films to you. They might be a major star; they might be a supporting player. I’m starting with one of those exceptional supporting performers: American actor David Morse.

There’s something distinctly watchable about David Morse. I’m not entirely sure what it is. He is one of those actors who seems to effortlessly capture my attention when he’s on-screen. He doesn’t steal scenes. He’s never showy. He very rarely gets the opportunity to play a lead role. Instead he’s one of those immensely strong, wonderfully talented supporting actors who lifts the quality of any film or television episode he’s in.

I think I first noticed him in Michael Bay’s 1996 action film The Rock, where he plays second-in-command to Ed Harris. After that he just seemed to crop up everywhere, impressing me each time – not by playing a striking, unique character, but simply by doing an exceptional job of playing interesting yet everyday people. That’s a hard thing to do, playing an everyday person. Leonardo Di Caprio (whom I admire immensely) tried it and failed miserably in Titanic. David Morse nails that kind of character every time.

The Rock (1996)

Morse plays Major Tom Baxter, second-in-command to Ed Harris’ General Hummel during the General’s forced takeover of Alcatraz Island. The Rock is a ridiculous, over-the-top amusement park ride, full of Michael Bay’s trademark wide-angle photography and excessively “epic” look. While Nicolas Cage and Sean Connery tend to over-play their roles to suit the screenplay and the direction, Morse and Harris oddly (and impressively) take their characters in the opposite direction. It creates an odd action film where the villain and his henchman are more sensitively portrayed and interesting to watch than the heroes.

Contact (1997)

At first it might seem David Morse has too small a part to play in Contact – playing father to Jodie Foster’s Eleanor Arroway in a few early flashbacks. His character defines her character, however, making his presence in the film more important than anyone else bar the protagonist. Morse also gets one other scene, quite late in the film, which I will not elaborate upon in case you haven’t seen the film. It’s an appearance that is not only surprising, but unexpectedly satisfying – and much, much more interesting than the less impressive or original climax many science fiction fans seemed to be looking for at the time. I adore Contact: I think it’s one of 1997’s absolute best films.

The Green Mile (1999)

First and foremost, it must be noted that The Green Mile is overly long. So long, in fact, that when Tom Hanks hit his final line of dialogue at the 181 minute mark – ‘Some days, the Green Mile seems so long…’ – I spontaneously broke into raucous laughter in the cinema. I got mean looks from fellow viewers about that. Despite its length, however, there’s some wonderful filmmaking and acting going on here. I underappreciated The Green Mile in 1999, partly because it was surrounded by better movies that year (Fight Club, American Beauty, The Insider, The Matrix, take your pick) and partly because it seemed a rehash by director Frank Darabont of work in his superior, earlier film The Shawshank Redemption. Despite its length, it turns out to be a good film. Morse gives a classic sort of supporting performance here, in the sort of part that has helped defined his career.

Dancer in the Dark (2000)

This is a weird choice, because I positively loathe Dancer in the Dark. It’s a musical, except the songs aren’t particularly good (many are actively tedious to hear) and the visual aesthetic has a sort of cheap, videotaped look to it that makes it as hard on the eye as it is on the ear. The film does have an unexpectedly strong performance by pop star Bjork in the lead role, and a ruthlessly upsetting climax. It also has David Morse in a very strong performance as Bill Houston, a local policeman. You’ll love or hate Dancer in the Dark once you’ve seen it, but you won’t forget it. It’s the only film ever reviewed in the history of Australian critics David Stratton and Margaret Pomeranz where Margaret gave the film five stars and David gave it none. I lean towards David’s point of view, but have good friends whose tastes I respect who would lean positively to Margaret.

Double Vision (2002)

Morse became the first non-Asian actor to ever receive a Golden Horse nomination for this film, a Chinese language thriller produced in Taiwan and co-starring the immensely talented Tony Leung Ka-Fai. It’s also one of the rare occasions where I’ve seen Morse play one of the lead roles, in this case an American FBI agent sent to Taiwan to help track down a serial killer.

Away: Shuffle Dungeon (2008)

2011-01-11T14:15:00.000-08:00

Videogames are not always the most original of mediums. I suppose the same may be said of pretty much every creative medium: just as you’re always going to discover derivative videogames, you’re also going to be able to easily find derivative films and novels. For some reason they seem to stand out more obviously to me in games. Maybe it’s the gameplay – how many substandard platform games were released for the SNES and Megadrive, each with their own cute animal-based mascot, each desperately attempting to replicate the success of Mario or Sonic? How many bland first-person shooters get released every year? Games are a highly commercial medium, arguably even more so than film and television, and that commercialism tends to bring with it an element of cynicism too.

Most derivative games are not very interesting or memorable. Unless you bring something new and interesting to the table, the best result you can hope for is that gamers buy and play your game while waiting for the next ‘big thing’ to grab their attention.

Sometimes a derivative game can be a little inventive. They might find a fresh angle on an existing type of game. The classic example of this is Sonic the Hedgehog: Sega were deliberately aiming to develop their own platform game to rival Super Mario Bros, but they developed it by looking for contrasts. Sonic is blindindly fast while Mario is careful and measured. He’s spiky and ‘cool’, while Mario remains rounded and ‘safe’. Despite being a derivative work (and pretty much every platform game ever developed is a derivative work of Super Mario Bros), Sonic the Hedgehog finds a new angle and becomes a new game.

Other games might draw elements from several preceding works, blending them together in the attempt to generate something new. Sure you’ve seen all of the individual elements before, but you have never seen them re-assembled in such a fashion. This is a risky strategy to take, since very often disparate game elements don’t actually work that well together. On the other hand, quite often something genuinely fresh and entertaining can result from it. I always liked Ridge Racer Type 4, which introduced a light narrative element to an arcade-style racing game. The core gameplay from previous Ridge Racer titles remained, but now there was a little story to work through as well. It was a great touch – I still play Type 4 from time to time, certainly more often than I do any of the subsequent Ridge Racer titles.

The latest ‘blended’ genre game that I’ve played is Away: Shuffle Dungeon. It’s an action-based role-playing game (RPG) for the Nintendo DS, high on arcade-style play and narrative but low on menus and strategy. It’s one of the most shameless constructions I’ve seen in ages, since pretty much every part of its design and look can be drawn back to a pre-existing title. Despite this, it’s very enjoyable to play.

You control a boy named Sword, who washed ashore some time ago on the beach near Webb Village. He doesn’t remember where he came from, but he’s made his home in Webb and befriended all of the other villagers. The villager, however, is cursed by a mysterious magical entity known as the Away. Once a year the Away steals one of the villagers, who vanishes without a trace and never returns.

At the game’s opening, the Away comes from Sword. As his body rises into the mysterious light of the Away, a girl from the village – who is in love with Sword – begs it not to take him. She promises she’ll do anything if it spares Sword’s life. So the Away takes the girl instead, and the entire village as well: people, homes and buildings included.

Starting out on his own in an empty field, Sword must track down magical portals into a series of cave-based dungeons. At the end of each dungeon he can rescue a villager and bring them back to begin reconstruction of the village.

There are basically two game areas to play in. The first are the dungeons, which are two-dimensional levels viewed from a top-down perspective. The player guides sword through a series of little mazes, each littered with monsters, switches, sliding doors and treasure chests. It is, for all intents and purposes, The Legend of Zelda. In many ways it is a shameless appropriation of Nintendo’s classic action RPG. Away: Shuffle Dungeon does bring one new element to the table, and it’s one that completely vitalises the dungeons sections of the game. As the title suggests, they are ‘shuffle’ dungeons. Each dungeon level – there are usually three or four in each dungeon – is split across the DS’ two screens. At certain intervals, one half or the other will rumble, shake and then spin out of view, replaced by an entirely new section of dungeon with a completely different layout. Navigating the dungeons thus becomes a strategic act. Treasure chests might be sealed by a sliding door, which requires the flicking of a switch, but you can only access the switch by crossing down into the other screen and back up again. Cross screens and a three-second countdown might begin for the first screen to shuffle out of view. Get caught on a screen when it shuffles and you lose health and find yourself thrown back to the beginning of the level.

Away: Shuffle Dungeon takes a pre-existing and popular game form and adds something innovative. It repurposes The Legend of Zelda and transforms it into a new experience. It’s a very arcade-like experience, since the constant shifting from one screen to the other brings a level of constant tension and ‘twitch’ gameplay that simply doesn’t exist in Nintendo’s Zelda titles. It is also far more simplistic, which is either a plus or a minus depending on what sort of game you feel like playing at the time.

You are assisted in your dungeon forays by ‘fupongs’, round blob-like creatures that can cast offensive and defensive spells. Different colours of fupong cast different types of spell. Up to six of them can trail behind you at a time, leading to one of the game’s major failings: you can’t select what spell you’re about to cast. The order of spells you cast is determined by the order of fupong walking behind you, so if you want to cast a shielding spell and the shielding fupong is fourth in line, you are going to need to burn through three fireballs or lightning bolts before you reach it. It’s an irritating problem, and mars an otherwise enjoyable dungeon-hacking experience.

Reach the bottom of many of the dungeons and you’re thrown into a three-dimensional boss fight, with Sword facing up against a variety of large monsters. Here the gameplay is stolen from the latter Legend of ZeldaOcarina of Time. Each monster has a glowing red spot on its chest. Work out the sequence of its attacks, weave between them and hit the red spot. Repeat the process until the monster falls down. It’s not a particularly imaginative process. To be honest I think the game would have been much better served by keeping all of the boss fights in two dimensions just like the dungeons. The switch feels forced. A similar problem cropped up in Sega’s Nintendo DS title Sonic Rush: the levels were in 2D and the boss fights were in 3D, and the shift jarred with me every time. titles, typified by the Nintendo 64’s

The second major game area is Webb Village. As Sword rescues each villager, their home and shop are rebuilt. Sword can purchase items from the shops as they are restored, leading to that classic trope of the dungeon-hacking game: the village where you spend the money earned from hacking at monsters to purchase more efficient tools for hacking monsters.

In terms of visual look and design, however, Webb Village is derivative of a completely different Nintendo title. It is, for all intents and purposes, Animal Crossing. The weird barrel-style three-dimensional perspective is identical, the cliff-like boundaries are identical, and the character designs are, while not animals, highly reminiscent. There’s also a strong hint of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker about Webb’s population. It’s an effective enough look, and completely suits the slightly humorous, light-hearted tone of the characters, but it’s jaw-droppingly blatant.

Between the two game areas there is a very enjoyable videogame. The games it copies from are good games, and the fresh elements it brings (particularly the shuffling dungeon levels) are striking and effective. This game didn’t grab too much attention when it was released – it came out in October 2008 in Japan and the USA, and April 2009 in Europe – but it’s a nicely understated gem.

The game was developed by Mistwalker, the Japanese development studio founded by Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi after he resigned from Square. Mistwalker have struggled to release a break-out game since they were established in 2004. They produced two high-profile RPGs for the Xbox 360. Blue Dragon, with its character designs by Akira Toriyama, looked like Dragon Quest and played in a bit too simplistic a fashion. Lost Odyssey looked and played like Final Fantasy, but did manage to include a slightly strange and intriguing series of text-based short stories as part of the experience. At present Sakaguchi is developing The Last Story, another Final Fantasy-esque RPG – this time for the Nintendo Wii.

The character designs are by Naoto Oshima, which was a surprise to learn. As I mentioned before they seem highly derivative, yet Oshima is one of the most prolific character and game designers in Japan. He originally worked for Sega, where he designed the Sonic the Hedgehog character. You can also find his name attached to design roles on the likes of Phantasy Star, NIGHTS Into Dreams and Burning Rangers. Oshima left Sega to help found the Artoon development studio, who co-produced Away with Mistwalker.

The game’s pleasant musical score is the work of Nobuo Uematsu, who famously scored most games in the Final Fantasy saga.

So as I mentioned, Away: Shuffle Dungeon is a very enjoyable game. The problem comes when you take a look at the development team. This was a collaboration between the producer of Final Fantasy and the designer of Sonic the Hedgehog. While the game is fun to play and a pleasant distraction, it simply doesn’t measure up against the heritage of its creators. Derivative games are released every week, and as players we’ve grown to accept that and enjoy the ones that are good, but the problem I’m left with in Away is that it’s the work of developers who should know better. More than that, they should design better. They have demonstrated a capability to come up with interesting ideas, and vivid characters, and memorable, enduring gaming experiences. With all of that in mind, Away is left feeling shockingly mediocre.

It’s a shame: with a less derivative look and feel, I think Away: Shuffle Dungeon could have been something really special.

Close to Home (2005)

2011-01-10T14:14:00.000-08:00

To use some random sports metaphors, Close to Home is a knockout. It hits the ball out the park. It scores a century without losing a wicket. To speak in plainer terms, it is a sensational work of low budget cinema. Shot on a shoestring in Jerusalem and released in 2005, it demonstrates complexity, heart, nuance, character and vitality. I watched it for the first time in a cinema I used to manage, as part of a program of low budget features including Primer, Keane and Down to the Bone (all of which were and still are exceptional movies). I watched it the second time over the New Year break on DVD, and my appreciation for the film only increased.

Close to Home follows two 18 year-old women undertaking their Israeli national service by patrolling the streets of Jerusalem as part of the Magav, or Israel Border Police. Smadar is cocky and rebellious. Mirit is shy and withdrawn. They don’t like each other much, but are forced to patrol together. Their patrol essentially entails stopping each Arab who tries to pass them on the street and to record the details from their identity card. It’s a tedious job, and the film goes a good length to show how dull it must be. It’s also a relatively racist and offensive job, and the film makes certain we recognise that as well. Finally, there might even be an argument that while morally repugnant it is also perhaps a necessary job.

This isn’t a film about answers, or social justice, or political opinions. It takes a very difficult and complicated backdrop, and then places into it a pair of wonderfully realised, beautifully performed young women.

Close to Home was written and directed by Valit Belu and Dalia Hager, and was extensively drawn from Belu’s personal experience in the Magav. That doesn’t come as a surprise, since where Close to Home excels is in the smaller details. It is a very grounded, realistic film that offers a genuine insight into life in 21^st century Israel. In many respects it is for films like this that cinema exists: for a viewer in Australia, or the United Kingdom, or the USA, Close to Home offers as much an insight into a different world as The King’s Speech, or Gladiator. Or even Star Wars. And the emotional strength of the film is that, unlike Death Stars and Jedis, the people and situations in Close to Home are real. These sorts of people really exist. The Magav is a real part of the Israeli armed forces. Random searches and interrogations are a daily part of life for many Palestinians.

Smadar Sayar plays Smadar. I always find it slightly bizarre when an actor plays a character with an identical name. She performs her role with a strong blend of bravado and resentment. She doesn’t want to do what she is doing, but she’s painfully aware that she is trapped doing it for the next two years. Her solution to the situation is to break and bend whatever rules she can, to skive off and work her way around the system.

Naama Schendar, who bears a striking resemblance to fellow Israeli actress Natalie Portman, plays Mirit. Mirit of course hates her national service as much as Smadar does, except that her reaction is to knuckle down and obey the rules, hide from her fellow officers, and quietly pressure her well-connected father to find her transfer to a less unpleasant range of duties.

It’s easy to describe the characters and the story outline and make Close to Home come across as a bundle of clichés. This is ultimately a film best experienced by watching it. The genius is not in the broad storyline or characters but in the nuance and realism. It’s a small scale story about ordinary people, and as a result we can identify with them so much more strongly.

It should also be noted that this is a feature film written and directed by women, and is almost overwhelmingly populated with women. It passes the much-mentioned “Bechdel test” with flying colours, but more than that it passes it through emotional depth and strong, gripping drama. It’s a film that’s worth something.

Making a film based around the Israeli policing of Arabic residents is inevitably going to court controversy and debate. The Soda Pictures DVD of the film that I watched contained an Al Jazeera TV question-and-answer session with the two writer/directors in which two members of the audience started angrily debating the film without the filmmakers’ participation. I feel relatively ill-equipped to pitch in too heavily with my own opinions. Based on Close to Home, Jerusalem appears to be pretty difficult city in which to live: stressful and terrifying for Jews and cruel and degrading for Muslims. I found the film did an exceptional job of not taking sides. It is a Jewish story about two Jewish women, and so the focus is – to my mind – fairly focused on them. The Muslim experience, however, lurks in the background. It rises again and again through a string of anonymous day workers, forced to stop and be questioned, searched, undressed and sometimes harassed, all because of their ethnicity and religion.

Close to Home is like a checklist for quality. Strong realism, powerful emotion, well-rendered characters, conflict, depth, challenging material, strong production values on a limited budget: this film seems to get everything right.