Category: reviews

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movie reviews

Spiderwick Chronicles

The Spiderwick Chronicles is a movie based on a series of fantasy books for kids (which I’ve not read). It had positive reviews to varying degrees and I was in the mood for something reasonably light last night so I chose this.

A good choice I think.

Though perhaps a little patronizing of me to call it ‘light’ when Kermode called it ‘a horror movie for kids’. What can I say? I am a wimp when it comes to horror but I can cope with fantasy goblins and ogres. Besides is it patronizing to say that I thought it enjoyable?

So the movie is the story of a family moving into an old house, the eponymous ‘Spiderwick’ estate, they inherited from an old relative. Decades before it was the home of Arthur Spiderwick, a self-taught expert in fantastical creatures, who wrote his ‘field guide’, a compendium of information on the various array of goblins, fairies, bogarts, sylphs (?) and others that roamed, invisibly most of the time, in and around his home. Having completed the book it instantly became dangerous because its secrets would allow the local ogre to take control and then, as one character had it, ‘you all die’. Arthur Spiderwick protected his book with charms and a semi-friendly brownie/bogart and promptly disappears. Eighty years later the kids of the family, two twin boys and their older sister, find the book and get caught up in an adventure trying to protect it, and one another, from the grasp of Mulgarath (that ogre I mentioned).

And as I said it’s a lot of fun. It’s not incredibly original but it’s well done. Hogsqueal the hobgoblin as the slightly disgusting, alternately brave and cowardly, humourous sidekick is the kind of thing we’ve seen before — but nonetheless entertaining for that. If you’re not a fan of CGI then you might have a problem because that’s what’s used to realise the creatures. I didn’t find it any more distracting to the story than I would have done costumes or animation.

It’s quite quick paced and certainly doesn’t out-stay its welcome, despite I’m guessing, having had to cut some material from the books. I think this shows in particular in the part of one of the twins Simon, whose only real function is to get himself kidnapped instead of his brother Jared, whose story this really is.

The film is at its best when we’re chasing or being chased by goblins and wotnot. In a couple of moments of ‘family drama’ it descended into sacharine sentiment. I don’t know, maybe kids need or like an unsubtle approach to emotions but it jarred for me.

In fact I’d say this movie has two messages. The most obvious and least successful of which is about father-child relationships and the importance of being there for your kids. The more subtle and better realised is that knowledge, in the form of learning, is power, and that it can be exciting and an adventure. The central item in the plot after all, is essentially a text book. My inner nerd, the kid that had to be kicked out of the classroom at break time to play with the other kids rather than read under the table, quite likes that.

So overall, an enjoyable, undemanding piece of entertainment.
7/10

Categories
Buffy Rewatch reviews Season 1

Buffy Re-Watch: 1.05 Never Kill a Boy on the First Date


“Clark Kent has a job. I just wanna go on a date.”

“Never Kill…” is an important episode. It dramatises something I think is one of the core ideas of the show. Not “High School is Hell” or “Monsters as Metaphors” those are the how. The what is encapsulated in that quote I began with – the conflict between being The Slayer and being a normal girl. The show in the early years did a great job of using the horror genre to talk about every day problems the audience could identify with. Later on it got harder to do that and not repeat themselves, until by season 5+ these were pretty much just telling stories in that world, without so much the direct parallels. However one thing that runs all the way through from Welcome to the Hellmouth to Chosen is the way being the Slayer isolates you and yet how Buffy still tries to live a normal life, connecting to those around her. To varying degrees she succeeds but often at great cost.

It’s this conflict that’s not only at the heart of the show but, I believe goes a long way to making it what it is. After all, the danger with something that wears its feminism so clearly on its sleeve as BtVS does is that you become po-faced and preachy. What rescues it from that, apart obviously, from humour and lots of it, is the fact that Buffy is not just a hero she’s an ordinary teenager. She likes boys and shopping and chatting with her friends. She gets frustrated with adults who don’t understand what’s really important, like dates and having the right shoes. So this instantly gives us a way in, makes her identifiable and makes us care.

Another way Never Kill… is also a key episode for the Season 1 over-all arc. It introduces the idea of the Annoying One who has a lot to do with the finale. So given how important this episode is it’s a shame it’s not a better one. I mean it’s still very good, there’s lots to enjoy. But that’s mostly Joss’s humour and some good performances by Sarah and Tony Head, but still on a BtVS scale it lacks something. Partly I think it’s that the show is still finding its feet. I think you can tell that there’s still a lot they haven’t figured out yet. It hasn’t yet quite broken out of the mode of a teenage show, albeit a slightly quirky one. You can see this in the costumes (some very short skirts) and even some of the dialogue –

“You’re acting a little overly, aren’t you?”

“Tonight! Isn’t that so?”

“Yeah, so it is. It sure is so.”

I’m not sure but this sounds to me like it’s deliberately intended to sound teenage-ry. Joss talks about trying use real teenager slang at first and then gradually developing something else, something that was unique to the show, so-called “Buffy-speak”. So compare the above with for example:

“Ooo, two points for the Slayer, while the Watcher has yet to score!”

Giles: Well, you know what they say. Ninety percent of the vampire
slaying game is, is waiting.

Buffy: You couldn’t have told me that ninety percent ago?

In season 2, 3 and beyond the skirts get longer and we get more of the second kind of dialogue. That’s when I feel the show has found and is playing to, its own audience rather than chasing a “demographic” or some-such. Not that there’s a lot of that, but it’s not completely absent.

Perhaps another reason for me personally not to out-and-out love this ep is the prophecy. Prophecies in the Buffyverse have a habit of being self-fulfilling. In fact a major part of a seasonal arc in Angel was built around just such a concept. I don’t mind a prophecy having that sense of irony that the outcome is changed by the telling itself, but in order to be called a prophecy there needs to be an element of genuine mystical foresight. Telling a group of vampires that on a certain night five people will die and then having those vampires go out and kill five people on that night, is an instruction not a prophecy.

One final reason is that Owen is, despite the way he’s cast, a bit wet. They got the right kind of boy that you can imagine Buffy and Cordelia drooling over, but that whole shy, Emily Dickinson reading, talks about bees thing seems out of line with that somehow. I get that he’s supposed to have more depth but he just seems a bit too other-worldly in a weird way. And of course at the end the script requires him to do a complete 180 and want to become a danger-thrill-seeker. Now I can see how that might happen, reaction to his earlier, don’t get out much lifestyle but… I dunno, it just makes him overall seem much less impressive than he could have been. Probably that was the point but it left me wanting a better foil for Buffy. Oh wait Angel’s waiting in the wings, maybe he’s the one to… 😉

This is getting long so just a couple of note-worthy things to erm, note before I wrap it up:

  • pedants and continuity types, notice that Giles says “I don’t have an instruction manual”. Later on we find out about the Slayer Handbook
  • more Willow-Xander-Buffy-Angel love quadrilateral hints – with Owen and Cordy thrown in too – not so much as with Witch but still cool.
  • “OK at this point you’re abusing sarcasm” is one of the few BtVS quotes that can be easily re-used in everyday life. Trust me I’ve tried and most Buffyspeak, however cool, are too specific to work out of context.
  • first of a run of gags about the Library – the ‘batcave’ of the Scooby gang – actually being used as a Library.

So, overall, it’s an episode that deals with a, if not the, major theme of the show. It comes from a season where it’s not yet become the show I fell in love with but it’s still full of a lot of fun stuff.

7/10

Categories
book reviews

Watchmen

I used to read comics when I was a kid. First stuff like the Beano and Dandy and later 2000AD. Being into all things SciFi I thought the later was really cool, but at some point, for some reason, like watching Dr Who, I grew out of it.

Then when I was 21 someone I was working with told me about something called “a graphic novel” which was, so I heard, a kind of grown-up version of a comic book. The particular book under discussion was Dark Knight Returns about the return to cape-dom of a middle-aged Batman. I borrowed it from my enthusiast friend and did enjoy it but I remember thinking that whilst it wasn’t for kids it was still more adolescent than adult, like action movies and heavy metal. (I suspect if I re-read it now I’d be kinder to it. At 21 I was still too young to enjoy things that others might have  thought of as childish.)

I don’t think I picked up another graphic novel until after I’d become a Buffy fan. It was from other fans recommendations that I bought Watchmen. Of course when I saw that it had big stretches of actual text in it I gave up on it.

What can I say? I’m lazy.

But then a few days ago I noticed that there was a trailer online for an upcoming Watchmen movie. I didn’t watch it, instead I pulled out my copy of the book and started to read. I couldn’t put it down and I finished it a couple of days later. And this is my review. I make no attempt to summarize the plot, nor to avoid spoilers. If you’ve not done so already, I strongly encourage you to read it.

So ok, I get it now. Because I read the Dark Knight, I’ve read various Buffy-related comics (mostly the origin one and season 8), and even the two League of Extraordinary Gentlemen ones and whilst they are all to varying degrees enjoyable, I never really got the whole “comic books as an artform” thing. Until now.

Watchmen really is on a different level from those other books. I think it’s because of the depth of it, the layers of story and the sheer density of concept. That and extraordinary visuals. Take for example the iconic cover-art image and see how that’s used and developed on the very first page. This kind of thing — starting on a small detail and pulling back and back until a fuller picture (literally and thematically) is revealed — is done throughout the book. It’s no wonder people want to make this into a movie. It’s like a pre-drawn storyboard for itself.


But it’s so much more than that. It has great, intriguing characters. I guess most people like Rorshach – who’s morally ambiguous, possibly mentally unstable but badass in a way that fiction can’t quite resist. Personally I was quite drawn to Nite Owl. I liked that he was shy, fumbling, quiet man when out of costume and yet is so confident and competent with it. I love when he serves coffee and plays music for the victims of a building fire he rescues. Dr Manhattan, who is key to the entire plot, is fascinating too. He is to all intents and purposes an alien, even though his origins are human, and successfully communicating an alien point of view is something that’s done all too rarely, but it’s done beautifully here with the scenes on Mars in particular.

I think the thing I like most about Watchmen is the layering of different story elements in a way that complements or contrasts, but always adds to the overall thematic message. Take for example the sections with the excerpts from the fictional comic (“Tales from the Black Freighter“). I can think of a couple of moments where you go from an entirely different scene and we get the last line of dialogue from that scene, over a panel showing the kid reading the comic, the newsvendor talking about the events in the wider world, some background activity, perhaps the ongoing drama of the lesbian taxi-driver’s breakup, leading into a panel showing horrific scenes from “Tales” where a sailor is trying to reach his home on a raft made from the dead bodies of his comrades. When I first read this I stopped and not only thought how well done it was but wondered whether I’ve ever seen a movie or TV program intermingle so many different elements so successfully in such a short space of time. Then I wondered if it’s even possible and that’s why we need this artform.

Who knows? It’s very possible I just haven’t seen the right movies!

It’s noteworthy that this was written/drawn in the mid 1980s and whilst it didn’t feel dated it was “of its time” in the sense that one of the major themes is the ever present threat of nuclear war. I don’t have a problem with that, because I lived through that age and remember well that sense of impending doom bubbling beneath the surface. It was there in popular culture if nothing else. A younger reader might perhaps, not get those references immediately.

If it has a weakness I think it’s the ending. I’m not quite sure that I buy into the idea that a fake alien accidental one-off invasion would unite the world. At least I’m not sure for how long it would. There was also some stuff with an attempted rape that I was a little uncomfortable with at best. But that wasn’t a huge part of the story.

So overall it definitely deserves its high praise. 9/10

P.S. I have now watch the trailer and they seemed to have included all the main elelments that I’d expect. They’ve made the characters younger by at least a decade but that’s Hollywood I guess. Supposedly this is one of those unfilmable books but I’m not sure about that. I guess people have said that because a) it’s long, b) it’s got complicated effects scenes in it and c) it’s perhaps too adult to get a rating that will sell enough tickets. Well a) anything can be condensed – work out what the heart of the story is and make sure you tell that, b) CGI has come along way since 1986 and c) as has what you can get away with in a 15 (Dark Knight is a 12a!) plus some of the violence can be toned down without losing the tone.

It’s all a question of how good the movie makers are. We’ll see I guess.

Categories
movie reviews

Cloverfield

I’ve only ever walked out of a movie once. It wasn’t because I was offended at the content, or bored, or even because I felt the quality was so bad it wasn’t worth finishing[1]. No, the only time I ever walked out of a cinema viewing was when I saw The Doors. During a concert scene in which the camera was swooping in, up and around the audience, I felt saw nauseous that I had to get up and leave. I tend to have a similar problem with non-steadicam hand-held footage. I made it through Bob Roberts but it wasn’t pleasant.

So for this reason I waited until Cloverfield was on DVD so I could watch it on my not-so-large[2] TV. Even so I still had the problem. I made it about 13-and-a-half minutes in on the first attempt. But I wanted to see it, so today — having had no breakfast yet and armed with remote on pause-standby — I watched the whole thing. And yes it made me feel sick so this blog entry is about whether or not it was worth it.

Why did I want to see it? Well first it had pretty decent reviews. It is clearly a monster movie and whilst they’re not top of my list of favourite genres they are at least genre and I like that. A large part of it was that the writer was Drew Goddard – ex-Buffy writer who was responsible for some of my favourite episodes. I wanted to see if he’d done anything fun with the old monster-attacks-city trope.

Oh, and Kermode, in his favourable, but not quite glowing, review had said that anyone who knows movies should be able to predict the final shots of the movie. I wanted to see if I could, and I did.

Cloverfield is actually a pretty straight forward monster movie — out of the blue a monster attacks New York, whilst everyone else is fleeing Rob, our hero, and a few of his friends head straight into danger by trying to get to and rescue, his not-quite-girlfriend — she’s the one who got away, the one he should have said I Love You to but never did. They reach her but then they’ve got to get out of the city and not all of them make it out alive. So that’s a fairly out-of-the-box kind of plot, what Cloverfield does that’s different is use the idea of ‘found footage’, it’s all supposedly coming from a video camera that one of the friends happened to be using at the time of the attack. Hence the shaky-cam and my spinning head.

Actually in some ways it’s a pretty good device because it allows them to do that thing that Jaws did[3] which is to hardly ever show the monster and then only glimpses. The movie then becomes much more about the effects of the monster rather than, the special effects that made it. This also gives the movie a feel akin to The Zeppo that we’re watching a story (a guy trying to find the woman he loves before it’s too late) that’s the foreground to a much bigger story (monster eats New York). Not sure it works that well because it’s not trying for humour but it does work.

I’ll just say briefly that there’s a clear subtext here. Just like some 50s alien invasion movies were really about paranoia about communism and the original Japanese monster movies were about anxiety over new technology and things like nuclear testing, Cloverfield could be read to be about 9/11. Indeed one of the characters is heard to say early on “Do you think it’s another attack?” Certainly there are plenty of parallels — the monster appears apparently out of nowhere, no-one really knows why it’s attacking and even the military are unable it seems to stop it. That sense of being caught up in a disaster that you have no real idea how or why it’s happening, is quite familiar. Even some of the imagery is reminiscent of 9/11 news footage. I’m thinking of clouds of dust and debris rolling down streets toward the camera. I don’t really want to say anything more about that just nod to it on my way past.

So the big question is, was it worth it? Was it worth making myself ill for? Well possibly, but a lot of that is the smug feeling of guessing the final shot correctly. But I could have gotten that from the FF button. I think it does work well when it’s evoking a sense of “WTF?” about what’s happening. I think showing the monster in passing is good. I approve of putting the human story front and centre and relegating the CGI to it’s proper place. I’m just not sure I cared enough about the people. The camera-device that works well for the monster makes it harder to show the intimacy of the central relationship — or maybe that’s the acting I’m not sure.

Also it was a fairly downbeat ending, but par for the course for monster movies, so maybe my lack of outright love for this genre let me down. And of course, selfishly, I can’t help thinking that they could still have had essentially the same movie without the need of a camera style that sets off my motion sickness.

Probably worth it if you’re a monster movie nut – 6/10

[1]I’m talking about at the cinema, TV is a little different.

[2]23in – I love TV, I love movies, I don’t see the need for a massive screen.

[3]Although it did it largely out of necessity because of technical difficulties with the rubber shark as I understand it.

Categories
book reviews

The Time Traveller’s Wife

At the end of last year when I was in the full grip of my new found enthusiasm for writing, when my sister asked me what I wanted for Christmas I told her to buy me a book, but make it one she’d read and enjoyed. She bought me We Need to Talk About Kevin[1], The Kite Runner and The Time Traveller’s Wife. Last weekend I finished the later.

But it would be unfair to suggest that me taking six months to read this book was any kind of reflection on the quality of the writing. It has more to do with me trying to re-kindle that reading habit when there are slightly less taxing forms of entertainment competing for my time. In fact, having picked it up again after a couple of months, I finished the last half of the book in a couple of days. Of course I was partly avoiding a writing deadline…

Anyway, enough of stuff you don’t care about, how about the book? Well the central idea is simple yet effective – we follow the life of a woman and her husband who travels, involuntarily, in time. Hence her present could be his future or past leading to some interesting encounters. It’s an idea that was recently borrowed by Doctor Who writer Stephen Moffat for the episodes “Silence in the Library” and “Forest of the Dead”. Given this device one could label this SciFi but really it’s more about the relationship between the two and though there is some discussion about the mechanism involved[2], it’s much more about the effects, the emotional effects, than the mechanics of time travel.

I enjoyed the book and especially in that final half I was driven mainly by wanting to see how it ended. Given the nature of his condition we know about 2/3 of the way through how things will end for the main character but it’s still intriguing to see exactly how that plays out. Giving away the ending but still creating a sense of suspense as we head for it has to be a sign of good writing in itself.

If I had problems with the novel I think there were times when I had trouble identifying with the time traveller[3] as he had to be quite ruthless and violent in order to survive the consequences of his random excursions in time. Turning up naked in some random place and time is a problem and I can see how he might need to be an accomplished thief and skilled in fighting to cope with this. But these are consequences of a deliberate authorial decision so I feel like Audrey Niffennegger wanted me to feel some ambivalence towards Henry’s morality. Which is fine but it a) distanced him from me a little and b) jarred a little with the cultured, urbane, son of a musician and a singer who liked hanging out in a library, of the rest of the book.

Another problem for me was that the ending was sad. The actual ending, or coda perhaps, redeemed it somewhat but I still felt a little unsatisfied. I liked the relationship between Clare and Henry and so it was painful to see what happened to them. I like happy endings – so sue me!

I do think that that relationship, which is the core of the book, was well drawn. And particularly later in the book, the sense of happy domesticity which even extends to the necessary accomodations made for Henry’s condition is well described. I especially liked some of the sex, which felt real, intimate, casual in the sense of everyday and most of all bonding. It was definitely erotic but much more so it drew me into the depth of feeling at the heart of Clare and Henry’s marriage.

I’d definitely recommend it, especially if, unlike me, you’ve got the patience to let a book breathe a little.

8/10

[1]Later replaced by A Thousand Splendid Suns since I’d already read Kevin.

[2]Which was organic rather than technological, hence again lessening the SciFi feel.

[3]I realise the main character in the novel is, per the title, Clare, but as a bloke I can’t help trying to identify more with Henry.

Categories
reviews

Studio 60 – a guilty pleasure that shouldn’t be

Three posts in one night is probably too much (especially if I end up not posting for a month or something) but I thought of this earlier and anyway I’d like to have something a visitor to the blog could relate to.

I’ve just watched an episode of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip – which is what Aaron Sorkin did next after The West Wing. It’s a TV show about a TV show (a Saturday Night Live type sketch show) and it never really found enough of an audience to stay on the air. They let it play out the season meaning that if you watch the whole thing you get a sense of closure but clearly in many ways it was a flop.

I love it. And the title of this post is kind of unfair since there’s a lot there to love. It’s as well written as West Wing, more consistently probably in my view. And I think the reasons it never got the ratings probably aren’t what I would think of as its weaknesses. So why am I calling it a ‘guilty pleasure’ – a term usually used when something’s not great but you like it anyway?

Studio 60 is like The West Wing, very like The West Wing. So much so that it could be the West Wing does a TV show. Obviously the writing has the same tone and humour, given its from the same writer, but its not just that. It tackles many of the same themes – there’s a lot of politics in there, ostensibly because political sketches on the show with the show, but mostly, you feel, because that’s what Sorkin likes to write about. One of the stars is Bradley Whitford, Josh from TWW. It often has a slightly preachy, pompous tone. The episode I watched tonight had one the comedians take his parents on a tour of the theatre they use (the eponymous Studio 60) and tell them the history of place, and the history of broadcast TV in a very tour-guide kind of way. In a word, it’s often a bit too worthy. Which would be fine, except, an overly earnest tone, a sense of “this is real serious and important stuff” is understandable and forgiveable in a show about the government of the USA. That tone in a show about TV comedy is a little over the top.

Not only that but they sometimes re-use ideas and even lines from TWW. In an earlier ep, Whitford’s Danny Trip, Exec Producer, tells a roomful of writers that “This isn’t TV camp, it’s not important to us that everyone gets to play.” Replace “TV camp” with “government camp” and you have a line from a WW ep. Also, in tonight’s show, there’s a rather sentimental sub-plot about a mysterious old man who’s caught trying to steal a photo. Clearly not really a threat, they investigate and find out that he was a blacklisted writer from the 50s who got a single sketch on the show before his career was ended. The episode ends with Matt (current head writer) and Danny magnanimously not only offering him the photo, but allowing him to sit in the writers’ room and tell stories of the past.

Whilst not identical, this bears remarkable similarities to the WW episode where an old French lady “freaks out” on a tour when passing a particular painting in the Whitehouse. Turns out it was painted by her father, stolen by the Nazis and ended up as a gift to the US President. That show ends with the painting being made a gift to the old lady. It may not be precisely the same, but it hits all the same notes.

Add to this that there are a large number of references that parallel stuff in Sorkin’s own life. From the head writer who writes the show virtually single-handed (something he did in the WW’s early years), the relationship Matt has with the conservative evangelical Christian Harriet (again it mirrors a real relationship), drug problems and of course, one assumes, all the politics of the day to day dealings between the TV network and the show.

So, to put all this together, it is incredibly self-indulgent. It’s like he’s sharing his favourite in-jokes and re-writing his favourite parts of the West Wing. So why, after all this, do I still love it?

(Oh and I nearly forgot to mention that the show within the show, is awful. Not funny. It’s just not Sorkin’s type of humour at all, and that really shows.)

I love it because it’s warm-hearted. Everyone, upto and including the scary big network boss and bilionaire tycoon owner, is ultimately a good and decent person. Whilst this should be annoying it’s actually quite pleasant. You enjoy being with these people because you root for them.

I love it because the humour on the show itself (not the show within the show) is great. It’s all that great dialogue that Sorkin does so well.

I love it because the comedic chemistry between Whitford and Matthew Perry, who plays Matt, is just superb. They just work really well together, you totally believe this is a creative partnership responsible for some smart, clever movies and TV shows.

I love it because of Matthew Perry’s acting. I could describe how good it is in a number of ways. The most concise would be that I defy anyone to watch him for more than a couple of minutes and still remember who Chandler Bing is. And yet Matt Albie is just as perfectly formed a comic character.

I love it because the stuff that works, really works and it all gels together into this warm, funny, sometimes slighty too serious, sometimes slightly too sentimental, clever show.