This is the week the TV viewing starts up again - new Torchwood on Wednesday, and tonight, Dancing on Ice. That new title sequence is too much, and the opening piece... has no one on the production team seen This Is Spinal Tap? Some might have doubted it was possible for this show to get any camper, but they've pulled out all the stops and made it happen. But anyway, more ice dancing fun ahoy over the next couple of months, and this time I actually recognise more than three of the non-pro participants (nearly half of them, in fact!).
Books read so far this month:
Babylon, Viktor Pelevin.
An advertising executive takes a variety of drugs and experiences a number of contradictory revelations about the nature of reality/commerce/television. More mind-expanding than anything its hero swallows. You have to get about seven chapters in before it really grabs you, but then the big ideas start landing. That's around the point when Che Guevara dictates a lecture on advertising and metaphysics through the hero's ouija printer. It might be worth mentioning at this point that the author is a Buddhist (Zen, presumably). Probably my first choice of belief system if I ever lapse out of atheism.
Labyrinths, Jorge Luis Borges.
Seminal mind-bending short stories. Still reading through this - to be honest, I'm just marking time until the next Who reference book arrives. Borges is, like Pelevin, good for a big idea, although in some cases pop culture has caught up with him to unfortunate effect. For instance, it's hard to read "The Garden of Forking Paths" without being reminded of Choose Your Own Adventure books - yes, pre-1960 the idea of a novel that presented all the outcomes of the protagonist's choices simultaneously was fantastic, but by the mid-1980s the shops were stuffed full of 'em. Still, where pulp leads, mainstream culture will eventually "innovate", and in the mainstream this sort of thing is still considered edgy and experimental. Just consider the film Sliding Doors, and it wasn't so long ago that someone - was it Kim Newman? - wrote a novel in which you made the hero's decisions for him and followed the consequence in numbered paragraphs elsewhere in the book. How they all gasped. But I digress - nice to be reminded that Borges started it all.
Meanwhile there are Christmas books waiting in the wings, probably to come after that Who reference book. Can't get enough of 'em.
On the stereo: They Might Be Giants' first two albums. Rediscovering songs I'd heard on other people's tapes, and discovering new favourites. Their accordion licks inspire me to practise on the melodica. The rest of this year may see me exploring TMBG's more recent output.
DVDs: Currently renting Gangsters, a 1970s BBC series starring Ahmed Khalil (he gets top billing on the screen, oh yes he does) and Maurice Colbourne, written by Philip Martin. So far I've seen the pilot and first two episodes. Reason for renting: the repeated mentions in About Time, vol 6, off the back of the writer's two Doctor Who stories. Apparently this gritty urban drama of crime and race relations becomes increasingly self-aware until you get the writer appearing as himself on-screen and the characters leaving the set at the end. I'll have me some of that, I thought to myself. So far it's relatively straight-up, although the cliffhanger format shows early signs of cheekiness.
Sunday, January 13, 2008
Wednesday, January 09, 2008
2007: final thoughts
Blimey, I'm married! Ha ha ha ha ha, ha ha ha ha ha! Yes, that'd have to be the defining feature of 2007 - that this was the year I got married. Also the year my radiant wife The Lovely Jo did in the Punto, and we had to get an older, sturdier car instead. Alas, the Punto, that so valiantly drove us through two-foot-high floodwaters for the sake of a party not more than three months before. Let us speak of it no more - I was only going to duff it up with a sledgehammer myself one day. What else? The year of our first visit to the Edinburgh Fringe. Perhaps there may be a second.
Best read (illustrated)
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier finally arrived, after much delay, hype and anticipation. Horrible versions of James Bond, Bulldog Drummond and Mrs "Avengers" Peel chase our heroes out of post-Big Brother 1950s Britain, a purloined dossier in their hands. An entertaining read, and rather more varied in tone than previous volumes, but shockingly not the year's best comic book. That honour really belongs to Bryan Talbot's Alice in Sunderland. In all honesty I'd probably rate Battle Pope and the latest Ex Machina above Black Dossier as well, but I don't think it'd slip below fourth place.
Best read (just the words)
Well, to come clean, I haven't read nearly as much fiction as usual this past year. The main reason for this is About Time, the enormous multi-volume Who reference work. It's just so in-depth, it took forever to plough through it all, yet I felt compelled to finish it once I'd started. Well worth it, and even a contender for the best read of the year, but really that title ought to go to a novel.
Another reason for reading less in 2007 is that, with an eye towards the Big Push to New Zealand, I decided to stop buying/asking for hardback novels (so I'll be mopping up the latest works of several favourite authors in 2008 when they come out in paperback). However, I didn't go without, for 2007 was the Year Of Two Adam Roberts Novels. For this alone he deserves my thanks. Both were released in paperback, and although Land of the Headless was entertaining and intelligent, I think on balance Splinter is the better novel.
Best listen
A tough call this year, because I actually spent more time getting rid of old music than acquiring new music. Stand-out acquisition of the year was probably Alturas de Macchu Picchu by Los Jaivas, which stayed on the MP3 player for a good long time and went very nicely with the Norwegian fjords. Mmm, South American prog. (Nearly finished with prog rock now, nearly, honest.) Although if I were to include Christmas acquisitions here, I might mention the work of They Might Be Giants. Possibly something for 2008. Most disappointing listen: that Paul Hartnoll album.
Best viddy (TV)
Shockingly, not Doctor Who (although the Human Nature/Family of Blood two-parter would be the hot contender for second place, with Blink in third). The laurels must go to Heroes, which certainly had more good episodes than average, and no really bad episodes, although I can't really pick out a single best episode to mount the rostrum. It wasn't really that kind of series. Well, maybe the one with the hostage situation at the Bennett's house - that'd certainly be hard to beat. Jekyll must take fourth place after these fine specimens.
Doctor Who can provide the most disappointing TV viddy of the year, sadly, and that'd be Evolution of the Daleks. Any bigger letdowns I saw last year I wasn't intending to watch, so this is the one that counts.
Big discovery of the year: The Mighty Boosh. I just don't know how I could have not been watching this show before, since it looks practically tailor-made for me. If I were to allow pre-2007 DVDs into this category, I might name a couple of first season episodes as best TV viddy of the year, but that'd be cheating slightly. Plus it'd still take second place to the War of the Worlds musical DVD.
Best viddy (film)
Gahhh, I want to say Stardust, but I see I named Mirrormask top film the previous year, and I don't really want to give it to Neil Gaiman two years running. Dammit, can't think of any better contenders. Stardust it is.
Most utterly, rankly disappointing film viddy of the year: The Science of Sleep. I just don't know where to begin. Having missed it at the cinema, I rented it. It was the film-baby of Michel Gondry, he who made Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - all the endorsement I needed! But it was just bloody miserable. Wretched is the word I'm looking for. Let us never mention it again.
Best read (illustrated)
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier finally arrived, after much delay, hype and anticipation. Horrible versions of James Bond, Bulldog Drummond and Mrs "Avengers" Peel chase our heroes out of post-Big Brother 1950s Britain, a purloined dossier in their hands. An entertaining read, and rather more varied in tone than previous volumes, but shockingly not the year's best comic book. That honour really belongs to Bryan Talbot's Alice in Sunderland. In all honesty I'd probably rate Battle Pope and the latest Ex Machina above Black Dossier as well, but I don't think it'd slip below fourth place.
Best read (just the words)
Well, to come clean, I haven't read nearly as much fiction as usual this past year. The main reason for this is About Time, the enormous multi-volume Who reference work. It's just so in-depth, it took forever to plough through it all, yet I felt compelled to finish it once I'd started. Well worth it, and even a contender for the best read of the year, but really that title ought to go to a novel.
Another reason for reading less in 2007 is that, with an eye towards the Big Push to New Zealand, I decided to stop buying/asking for hardback novels (so I'll be mopping up the latest works of several favourite authors in 2008 when they come out in paperback). However, I didn't go without, for 2007 was the Year Of Two Adam Roberts Novels. For this alone he deserves my thanks. Both were released in paperback, and although Land of the Headless was entertaining and intelligent, I think on balance Splinter is the better novel.
Best listen
A tough call this year, because I actually spent more time getting rid of old music than acquiring new music. Stand-out acquisition of the year was probably Alturas de Macchu Picchu by Los Jaivas, which stayed on the MP3 player for a good long time and went very nicely with the Norwegian fjords. Mmm, South American prog. (Nearly finished with prog rock now, nearly, honest.) Although if I were to include Christmas acquisitions here, I might mention the work of They Might Be Giants. Possibly something for 2008. Most disappointing listen: that Paul Hartnoll album.
Best viddy (TV)
Shockingly, not Doctor Who (although the Human Nature/Family of Blood two-parter would be the hot contender for second place, with Blink in third). The laurels must go to Heroes, which certainly had more good episodes than average, and no really bad episodes, although I can't really pick out a single best episode to mount the rostrum. It wasn't really that kind of series. Well, maybe the one with the hostage situation at the Bennett's house - that'd certainly be hard to beat. Jekyll must take fourth place after these fine specimens.
Doctor Who can provide the most disappointing TV viddy of the year, sadly, and that'd be Evolution of the Daleks. Any bigger letdowns I saw last year I wasn't intending to watch, so this is the one that counts.
Big discovery of the year: The Mighty Boosh. I just don't know how I could have not been watching this show before, since it looks practically tailor-made for me. If I were to allow pre-2007 DVDs into this category, I might name a couple of first season episodes as best TV viddy of the year, but that'd be cheating slightly. Plus it'd still take second place to the War of the Worlds musical DVD.
Best viddy (film)
Gahhh, I want to say Stardust, but I see I named Mirrormask top film the previous year, and I don't really want to give it to Neil Gaiman two years running. Dammit, can't think of any better contenders. Stardust it is.
Most utterly, rankly disappointing film viddy of the year: The Science of Sleep. I just don't know where to begin. Having missed it at the cinema, I rented it. It was the film-baby of Michel Gondry, he who made Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - all the endorsement I needed! But it was just bloody miserable. Wretched is the word I'm looking for. Let us never mention it again.
Tuesday, January 01, 2008
2007 late round-up: films
Let the belated blogs continue. (Even a week and a half off work hasn't allowed enough time to catch up on the backlog of material...) There are four fantasy films we've seen post-wedding that I think merit some online waffling, and I propose to start with the most recent, and the most tenuous.
Transformers
I'm cheating slightly by including this one, having seen it with work colleagues earlier in the year, but we saw a relative's DVD copy over the holiday, and this time I felt an urge to write up my observations.
Perhaps it's stretching it a bit for me to class this film as fantasy, but I don't think it entirely qualifies as science fiction either: a magic cube of unknown origin creates living machines that magically disguise themselves as domestic terrestrial objects. I'm using "magic" here as shorthand for "complete absence of even an attempt at explanation". Of course it's not really SF, nor really fantasy, but just a narrative advert for a range of toys, as was the cartoon series that preceded it. The plot, such as it is, isn't, but we all know and admit that the film doesn't need a plot, because the entire point is to watch giant transforming robots beating the stuff out of each other. This spectacle is provided in abundance.
All right, it's a fetish film. Techno fetishism, but more specifically ordnance fetishism. The Transformers are described as weapons systems, and this they are, with all manner of cannons and handguns magically appearing on the ends of their arms. Caught in the middle of their giant robot war are the jets, armoured vehicles and portable weapons of the US Army, and incidentally the soldiers who operate them. Sure, there's one attempt to objectify the female lead, but it's fairly ham-fisted and soon pushed aside to make room for the big, loud, visually confusing, pornographic grindings of metal on heavily armed metal. Is this still a promotional device for a range of toys, or has it become a "get-'em-young" recruiting drive for the military?
Stardust
Excellent, excellent, excellent. I couldn't find fault with this slightly tongue-in-cheek fairy tale. A friend compared it to The Princess Bride (in favour of TPB), but I think it benefits from not having Columbo giving framing narration. It's also nice to have such a British fantasy blockbuster - the cast, bar the big name guest stars, is crammed full with Brit comedy performers, and when we compared notes afterwards we found we'd all been playing Name That Face throughout. Well, y'know, when we weren't laughing or cooing. Probably my choice for Film Of The Year.
Beowulf
Like Stardust, it has Neil Gaiman's hands on it. Unlike Stardust, it's presented entirely in CGI. The technology's advanced enough that you can make things like hair and water look realistic, but not so realistic that it doesn't still look like a computer game. And really, the only obvious reasons for using CGI here are a) Grendel, b) Grendel Mk II, the dragon, and c) to give Ray Winstone the physique of a thirty-year-old athlete. They might just as easily have cast someone else in the lead (or swallowed their preconceptions and run with a chunky older Beowulf, and why not?), CG'd just the two monsters (optionally three, if you feel you need to actually see Grendel's mum in non-Jolie form, but let's face it, you can get away with as much as they did here just by suggesting it) and made it as a live action film. I mean, if the idea was to make it look as realistic as possible...
There's an amusing sequence when Beowulf strips off for the night and prepares to fight Grendel naked. (And yes, it turns out, he does this in the Old English source text.) Suddenly all you can think about is Austin Powers, as objects strategically interpose themselves between your line of sight and Beowulf's groin. And then Grendel bursts in, and suddenly the possibility of seeing Beowulf's computerised balls isn't so funny. (Although bouncy Yoda does spring to mind at times during the fight.) Yes, the action sequences are good, both of them, but the rest of the film drags somewhat. These are the moments at which you're left to admire how much Anthony Hopkins' character looks like Anthony Hopkins, which only leads you to ponder why you're not looking at Hopkins in the flesh. Ditto most of the cast. It just draws attention to the fact that they've felt obliged to "improve" Ray Winstone.
I dunno... it's good, but somewhat lacklustre.
The Golden Compass
Or, as it used to be called in book form, Northern Lights, part one of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. Here it makes strange sense that they changed the title, because the film-makers have cut the story short, and it doesn't actually feature any Northern Lights except briefly in a slide show near the start. Perhaps, as with the second Lord of the Rings film, the exciting ending's had to be bumped to allow more time for the effects people to do the big climactic effect justice. In both cases, the film ends with a lull in the story as the characters journey towards the ending.
The film makes more sense than the stage show and feels less rushed, but I have the same problem with the story (which suggests to me that this may be down to Pullman after all, and perhaps I needn't read the book). To wit: our heroine makes allies by ambling from set-piece adventure to set-piece adventure, meeting one single defined representative of a race or species, who then pledges the faceless mass of their kin to help her in the final set-piece adventure, when a bunch of Cossacks with dogs appears from nowhere on an icy plain and is surprised by the equally abrupt appearance of the heroine's allies. There's no sense that this means anything, there's no sense that Lyra's progressing at all, she just wanders around collecting groups until she arrives at the secret polar laboratory and returns to the plot.
On the other hand, the blending of live action and CGI is very nice (which only shows up Beowulf all the more) and there's some good acting on display. On balance I'd probably take this over Narnia. I doubt, though, that it's destined for the greatness of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Transformers
I'm cheating slightly by including this one, having seen it with work colleagues earlier in the year, but we saw a relative's DVD copy over the holiday, and this time I felt an urge to write up my observations.
Perhaps it's stretching it a bit for me to class this film as fantasy, but I don't think it entirely qualifies as science fiction either: a magic cube of unknown origin creates living machines that magically disguise themselves as domestic terrestrial objects. I'm using "magic" here as shorthand for "complete absence of even an attempt at explanation". Of course it's not really SF, nor really fantasy, but just a narrative advert for a range of toys, as was the cartoon series that preceded it. The plot, such as it is, isn't, but we all know and admit that the film doesn't need a plot, because the entire point is to watch giant transforming robots beating the stuff out of each other. This spectacle is provided in abundance.
All right, it's a fetish film. Techno fetishism, but more specifically ordnance fetishism. The Transformers are described as weapons systems, and this they are, with all manner of cannons and handguns magically appearing on the ends of their arms. Caught in the middle of their giant robot war are the jets, armoured vehicles and portable weapons of the US Army, and incidentally the soldiers who operate them. Sure, there's one attempt to objectify the female lead, but it's fairly ham-fisted and soon pushed aside to make room for the big, loud, visually confusing, pornographic grindings of metal on heavily armed metal. Is this still a promotional device for a range of toys, or has it become a "get-'em-young" recruiting drive for the military?
Stardust
Excellent, excellent, excellent. I couldn't find fault with this slightly tongue-in-cheek fairy tale. A friend compared it to The Princess Bride (in favour of TPB), but I think it benefits from not having Columbo giving framing narration. It's also nice to have such a British fantasy blockbuster - the cast, bar the big name guest stars, is crammed full with Brit comedy performers, and when we compared notes afterwards we found we'd all been playing Name That Face throughout. Well, y'know, when we weren't laughing or cooing. Probably my choice for Film Of The Year.
Beowulf
Like Stardust, it has Neil Gaiman's hands on it. Unlike Stardust, it's presented entirely in CGI. The technology's advanced enough that you can make things like hair and water look realistic, but not so realistic that it doesn't still look like a computer game. And really, the only obvious reasons for using CGI here are a) Grendel, b) Grendel Mk II, the dragon, and c) to give Ray Winstone the physique of a thirty-year-old athlete. They might just as easily have cast someone else in the lead (or swallowed their preconceptions and run with a chunky older Beowulf, and why not?), CG'd just the two monsters (optionally three, if you feel you need to actually see Grendel's mum in non-Jolie form, but let's face it, you can get away with as much as they did here just by suggesting it) and made it as a live action film. I mean, if the idea was to make it look as realistic as possible...
There's an amusing sequence when Beowulf strips off for the night and prepares to fight Grendel naked. (And yes, it turns out, he does this in the Old English source text.) Suddenly all you can think about is Austin Powers, as objects strategically interpose themselves between your line of sight and Beowulf's groin. And then Grendel bursts in, and suddenly the possibility of seeing Beowulf's computerised balls isn't so funny. (Although bouncy Yoda does spring to mind at times during the fight.) Yes, the action sequences are good, both of them, but the rest of the film drags somewhat. These are the moments at which you're left to admire how much Anthony Hopkins' character looks like Anthony Hopkins, which only leads you to ponder why you're not looking at Hopkins in the flesh. Ditto most of the cast. It just draws attention to the fact that they've felt obliged to "improve" Ray Winstone.
I dunno... it's good, but somewhat lacklustre.
The Golden Compass
Or, as it used to be called in book form, Northern Lights, part one of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. Here it makes strange sense that they changed the title, because the film-makers have cut the story short, and it doesn't actually feature any Northern Lights except briefly in a slide show near the start. Perhaps, as with the second Lord of the Rings film, the exciting ending's had to be bumped to allow more time for the effects people to do the big climactic effect justice. In both cases, the film ends with a lull in the story as the characters journey towards the ending.
The film makes more sense than the stage show and feels less rushed, but I have the same problem with the story (which suggests to me that this may be down to Pullman after all, and perhaps I needn't read the book). To wit: our heroine makes allies by ambling from set-piece adventure to set-piece adventure, meeting one single defined representative of a race or species, who then pledges the faceless mass of their kin to help her in the final set-piece adventure, when a bunch of Cossacks with dogs appears from nowhere on an icy plain and is surprised by the equally abrupt appearance of the heroine's allies. There's no sense that this means anything, there's no sense that Lyra's progressing at all, she just wanders around collecting groups until she arrives at the secret polar laboratory and returns to the plot.
On the other hand, the blending of live action and CGI is very nice (which only shows up Beowulf all the more) and there's some good acting on display. On balance I'd probably take this over Narnia. I doubt, though, that it's destined for the greatness of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
"*ding* - Information - You are all going to die!"
Belatedly, thoughts about the Christmas Who. It had much to recommend it, although it did also contain a generous helping of cheese. Funny Thing #1 - they gave this one an extra ten minutes' run time, pretty much all of which can be accounted for by gratuitous slo-mo and Kylie Minogue's Cheesy Stardust. Funny Thing #2 - the Doctor can't take Mr Copper with him at the end because "I travel alone" - yeah, unless you've got breasts.
But there was some lovely comedy material with the Mighty Cribbins, the choice of which characters lived and died was indeed surprising (and reinforced by overt dialogue, just in case we thickies missed it) and overall it was a sturdy and entertaining episode's worth of adventure stretched lovingly over an hour and ten.
In Old Who terms, the references to The Robots of Death were pretty clear, but it felt more to me like Paradise Towers - the unscrupulous entrepreneur trapped in machine form, hiding in the bowels of his last great creation and sending out the robot serving staff to do his evil bidding. No bad thing, really. They really should have got Tony Hawks to play the villain, though, rather than hire an impersonator.
Overall, easily worth twice the points of last year's Christmas special (of which it was justly said by many reviewers that it was ideal viewing after a few large drinks and a fat Christmas dinner - translation: ideal viewing if you've rendered all your brain cells inoperative, incidentally the only condition in which I'd gladly rewatch it). Perhaps a 7 or an 8 out of 10 this year.
But there was some lovely comedy material with the Mighty Cribbins, the choice of which characters lived and died was indeed surprising (and reinforced by overt dialogue, just in case we thickies missed it) and overall it was a sturdy and entertaining episode's worth of adventure stretched lovingly over an hour and ten.
In Old Who terms, the references to The Robots of Death were pretty clear, but it felt more to me like Paradise Towers - the unscrupulous entrepreneur trapped in machine form, hiding in the bowels of his last great creation and sending out the robot serving staff to do his evil bidding. No bad thing, really. They really should have got Tony Hawks to play the villain, though, rather than hire an impersonator.
Overall, easily worth twice the points of last year's Christmas special (of which it was justly said by many reviewers that it was ideal viewing after a few large drinks and a fat Christmas dinner - translation: ideal viewing if you've rendered all your brain cells inoperative, incidentally the only condition in which I'd gladly rewatch it). Perhaps a 7 or an 8 out of 10 this year.
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