The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy (radio series)

My first experience of THGTTG was the book omnibus (at that stage only a trilogy in four parts) which I found very funny and a great ode to the wonder and infinite possibilities of science fiction. I actually assumed that the books were where it all started so I was most surprised recently (when I was bought the whole collection on disc) to find that it actually all started here, or there, on radio.

Listening to it for the first time I was amused to find Arthur Dent being played by the guy who plays Sir Walter Raleigh (“Oh, Sir Walter, really!”) in Blackadder which took some getting used to (I kept imagining him in stockings rather than a dressing gown) but Geoffrey McGivern as Ford Prefect (I thought it was Ford Perfect for years, even thought it was there in black and white) has a very cute voice, which keeps me going.

I think the one thing I’ve found disappointing is how very “Radio 4” (now an adjective in it’s own right) and pleased with itself it sometimes sounds. When I originally read the book it felt like Douglas Adams had a genuine love and interest in sci-fi whereas the Radio 4 production team’s take on his play feels like a piss-take of sci-fi and almost mocking in tone. It just sounds like a lot of posh people stood around with Martini’s guffawing about how silly sci-fi fans are.

Then again, that was the sound of the BBC back then and it’s only fairly recently that there’s been a little more regional diversity injected into the Beeb’s “voice”.

Niggles aside, the stream of consciousness humour and core themes of probability and the meaning of life, the universe and everything punch through the slight air of snobbery to keep me going as I listen in bed at night. I’m on series two at the moment (where Arthur and Ford have become almost supporting characters to Zaphod) so let’s see how I get on.

I’ve still yet to watch the television series (with a similar cast, I believe) although I’ve seen bits of the film starring Bilbo Baggins, so I think I’ll get both on DVD to compare/contrast/pontificate.

Bottle Rocket - film review

A fun and quirky feature debut by Wes Anderson, with “fun and quirky” being his stock in trade, that feels more like a low-budget training ground for a fledgling artist than a great accomplishment in its own right.

And yet it’s the second attempt at the story, after a short film outing.

Taken into the general context of cinema at the time, this must have seemed like just another mid-90s lowlife/gangster/caper black comedy, which had been all the rage since Reservoir Dogs came out. Tiresomely so. But, out of context, it’s a rather heartwarming tale of two nobodies trying hard to do nothing in particular and getting nowhere in the process.

Aww.

The early signs of Anderson’s technical trademarks are all in place, including whip-pans, POV shots, bird-like physical mannerisms, and Owen Wilson, as are his thematic ones, such as emotional turmoil, unrequited love, spiritual boredom, and Owen Wilson. However, its dramatic rough edges, comedic misfires, and dismal location cinematography all remind us that Anderson’s best work was yet to come.

Sparsely engaging, but still above its peers.

Do stay in touch, darlings.

Toodles!

RIP Tony Scott

The work by South Shields’ very own Scott brothers, Tony in particular, is what led me to notice style in cinema for the first time. In short, it led me to notice that there was something unique to look out for with every filmmaker. Tony’s work was so outrageously flashy, with its striking neon colours, filtered skies, smoke-filled rooms, and particular editing beats, that it was hard not to be woken up to what a director could leave as a trademark.

That is what I now take from cinema, and take with me into every film I watch. I look for a style and a visual pattern. I want to be seduced by framing and lighting in its simplest and showiest of forms. I don’t require them to be great philosophical works, or to try my patience, I just require them to do what film was invented to do: to show me something interesting.

In every film I watch, I look out for at least one shot that’s like no other, and which may reveal to me what a love of cinema the director has.

Tony Scott’s movies were an orgy of these moments. They were addictive and compulsive viewing, because every shot had some decadent design to it, and every scene had a nakedly joyful quality, much like a street carnival or kinky burlesque. But there was also a liberalist approach to Mr Scott’s contrasting characters. His heroes were often tortured, down on their luck, but intelligent, with an inner strength. Whereas his bad guys were simply bad, brutal, and greedy to the core.

This showed Tony’s sympathy for the lost souls and wayward spirits of this world, including a merciless aversion to corruption and privilege.

Although he has inspired many other directors over the years, his work has stood out amidst his lesser copyists, mostly due to his own work being that of a soul who just loved to capture images on film.

And loved to make them as bright and colourful and as entertaining as he could.

Tony Scott’s style and fingerprint will last in cinema for years to come, entertaining armchair critics such as myself and inspiring real filmmakers forever.

May he Rest in Peace.

Kingdom of Heaven: Director’s Cut – film review

I’d describe myself as an existential nihilist who finds comfort in the fact that the universe, our galaxy, the solar system, planet Earth and all the life found upon it is the product of a great cosmic accident that can or may never be replicated. I also (perhaps begrudgingly) appreciate the role that religion once held in our society before the formation of the welfare state which took education, health care, employment, financial welfare, social services and civic responsibility away from the educated holy minority and put it into the hands of the larger democratic community. Up until the twentieth century we would have found it hard to get by without religion and the superstitious belief in an all-seeing all-knowing deity that gives and takes life away without reason. In reality it’s the world around us that gives and takes life without reason… and that world is more callous than any vengeful god could ever be. There are so many factors that change our environment and atmosphere and effect our ecology and climate and these factors may change at random because of the way our planet and environment interacts with itself. I’m of the belief that there is a god of sorts, but it’s teachings are to be found in science books, not in religious texts.

But I don’t say this as a cynic out to offend, I’m far too open-minded and laid back for that.

If you take a casual walk around any significant religious building and breathe in it’s architectural magnificence you’ll realise that the people who built them really believed in God and in their religion. I mean they really believed. And so I admire that passion and truly respect that for many people religion isn’t just a fanciful notion and an easy answer to the mysteries that surround them, it’s something that drives their lives and pushes them to do great things.

Those great things can be good but unfortunately they can also be bad.

Kingdom Of Heaven is about when it drives us - all of us; of all faiths, even athiesm - to be bad. It’s a soap opera on an ambitious scale which sadly falls short of what it seemingly sets out to do: which is to create a possible final sobering word on misguided faith. It succeeds in it’s moral journey by presenting a thoughtful and balanced opinion on the positives and negatives of having a faith that may lead a person to take up arms, but it undeniably fails in it’s acting and storytelling aspects.

Ridley Scott believes that the secret to having a good relationship with your actors is in the casting – if you cast the right actor in the right role then their skill and talent will work for you and there will be little need for your interference and direction. The cast which Scott has assembled for Kingdom Of Heaven has let him down mortally and what needed to be a character driven film has become a pantomime skit more ridiculous than the type you’d have to sit through during the festive season. In fact it’s one Widow Twankey away from being comical.

Our heroes want to fight for innocent people, rather than for a god, but for the audience who rarely get to see these beloved people or get to know their plight the film becomes sort of a struggle. We only see the plight of royalty, of the privileged and of a band of self-righteous knights throughout which, as a group of protagonists, are hard to relate to and root for. Next to the unwise casting choices this is the film’s biggest failure.

But amongst the ridiculously dastardly villains, absentee heroes and the pompous speech-making provided by the eager-to-please screenplay there is a beautifully crafted film just aching to be rescued. It does well to recreate sprawling battle hordes that otherwise would be hard to imagine by just reading a history book. The terrifying sights and sounds of medieval wartime logistics are all here to marvel at on screen. Scott succeeds in not turning his effects laden scenes into CGI showreels and brings a sense of heart-stopping realism to key moments that would surely have been exploited by other filmmakers. There’s a restraint on show that’s worthy of great praise.

But Kingdom Of Heaven is let down in core places that unfortunately cannot be rescued. As mentioned above it’s failings began in the casting of it’s leaden, pantomime leads who seem to be in the wrong movie altogether. Jeremy Irons, who I usually love so dearly and often lament his poor career choices, seems bizarrely unable to convincingly portray a human being. He affects no accent that I can discern or any attitude that is particularly telling – he just growls about the place in a manner which is as stiff and wooden as a crucifix.

Kingdom Of Heaven wants to be emotional but lacks an invaluable investment in real people. There are all the surface signs of a story and of characters and of a narrative arc, but that unquantifiable magic of emotional attachment is missing. It may have all seemed right on the page but it’s execution is surprisingly lazy and presumptuous.

Basically, everybody should have tried harder.

This could have been so much more had the right pieces been in place from the start, but they weren’t and so we’re left only with something that could have been great like the hopes and dreams of a holy man waging war in a far off land thinking an intangible spirit will bring him glory.

This is a wounded victory.

3/5

Body of Lies (2008) – film review

Good film, terrible title.

I expected this to be a so-so surveillance thriller with lots of unconvincing satellite imagery, CCTV snoopery, shouting down mobile phones by sharp suited government agents trying to save the world and well worn suspense thriller clichés but, although it does have some of those elements, it actually has a lot more to offer.

Body Of Lies is more about what a Western intelligence agency tracking down a terrorist organisation has to do when modern surveillance methods fail to deliver any real results and their field agent has to rely on people, relationships and face-to-face dealings in order to get the job done.

That said, about two thirds of the way in the plot is sort of thrown away and our heroes just try something else instead, rendering everything that’s gone before it a bit redundant… or maybe what starts two thirds of the way in is actually the real plot but it just takes ages to get going. I’m not 100% sure.

Russell Crowe is fun as the film’s rotund exposition sponge and Mark Strong is nice and menacing as a very convincing Arab intelligence boss, but don’t let the posters and video covers’ promise of a double billing fool you, this is Leonardo DiCaprio’s film and he plays a man growing bitter at having to play dirty in order to fight for what’s right with great conviction. As always his manner and general persona lets his performance down in places, but his eagerness and commitment to the part ends up shining through and winning us over.

Ridley Scott keeps a sturdy hand over everything, perhaps wisely resisting setting the wrong tone with his usually poetic visual trademarks, although there are a few moments that remind us that he’s behind the camera. It’s also a great example of his mastery of production economics as, although the narrative takes us to five or six different countries, it was all shot on location in either Washington DC or Morocco.

There are a few clunky editing choices which offset the pace, in particular a moment where Scott and editor Pietro Scalia try to have their cake and eat it by showing us an explosion within the standard editing/camera format of the film and then, for no reason at all, shows us it again through the jumpy frame-skipping tape of a CCTV recording. The two could have been woven together in the editing room but, no, we’re just shown it happening twice instead. There are also some awkward cuts between scenes that are jarring with the previous scene’s dialogue and shots promising something in the next scene that’s not delivered. There’s also a light hearted moment where a character waves a napkin as a mock gesture of peace and surrender, but it’s not pulled off well by the actor and could have been saved by a reverse shot or some quick cutting.

But apart from a few speed bumps this is a smooth, sleek and exhilarating ride that was perhaps unfairly dismissed by some critics, a potentially larger audience (including me) and it's own marketing campaign at the time, but it’s definitely one that’s built to endure.

A rough diamond that’s worth dusting off and giving a go.

3/4

Samurai Cop (1989) - film review

Inspired by and indeed part of the 1980s trend of buddy cop movies but by no means as original nor as ordinary, Samurai Cop is fascinating in it’s filmmaking ineptitude and tedious in it’s formulaic presentation.

It is, in all ways, brilliant fun.

It’s greatest inspiration seems to be Lethal Weapon 2 in that it features a team of foreign bad guys (in this case Japanese instead of South African) who come up against a rebellious pair of Los Angeles cops (a long haired white guy in jeans and a black guy in a suit) who will stop at nothing to halt their evil plans… especially when the bad guys get personal and start killing our hero’s buddies in blue.

Samurai Cop features awkwardly gratuitous sex scenes sometimes sandwiched uncomfortably between violent torture scenes; a continuing stream of mild racism (or not so mild) against Asians and African Americans; sexual harassment by both men and women; homophobia; and a flippant disregard for police procedure.

None of the above is too offensive, mind you, and should be taken as the naïve attitudes of a decade that probably should have known better.

The most offensive thing on display in Samurai Cop, though, is it’s awful… and I mean awful… writing, “acting”, directing, editing, sound design, continuity, set design, costumes, special effects, stunts… well, everything. I’d even go so far as to say that this feels like it was made by a softcore porno company that tried to break away from it’s seedy roots and attempt something more mainstream… but ended up making a softcore porno movie with some extreme violence and a samurai cop who doesn’t seem to know much about being a samurai or being a cop.

Watch it with some beers and some friends and laugh non-stop for 90 minutes… it’s a mildly offensive blast!

1/5

Prometheus - film review

SPOILERS

“We were so wrong!” Exclaims Noomi Rapace as her character realises that she and her team of dangerously non-multitasking astronauts have travelled across the galaxy with high hopes of making first contact with an apparently benign alien race only to end up on a deadly bio-weapons storage facility.

We were so wrong, too, in turning up to see Prometheus with high hopes of seeing a decent entry into the dwindling Alien franchise only to realise it was a trap. Ridley Scott and his team, however, were right - this is not a prequel/sequel/reboot, in fact it feels more like the fruition of a brain-dead sci-fi body horror script that was laying around a production office for years that nobody wanted to touch, but after realizing they needed room in the script archive they took it out, dusted it off, slapped some explicit references to Alien on it and brought in Ridley Scott to direct.

That’s obviously not what happened. but I’m trying to paint a disgruntled picture here.

When I regrettably saw The Da Vinci Code in the cinema when it first came out I could tell even from the very first few shots that it was going to be bad; not because I’m particularly observant or a trained film theorist but because there seemed to be fundamental flaws in the way the film was laid out and constructed. It was illogical and amateurish. I had that same sinking feeling when Prometheus began and its placid opening credit sequence got under way and its unnecessary prologue started. Even the “Fanfare for the Common Man” flavoured main musical theme seemed cloyingly upbeat for such a movie as if it really belonged on a period war epic.

And that’s it. The film starts off on the wrong foot and never recovers, only to reveal more and more problems as it goes along.

If you’ve ever watched Paul WS Anderson’s Aliens Vs. Predator film, which is stunning in its mind-boggling stupidity but fun in a so-bad-it’s-good kind of way, then you’ll notice that Prometheus follows many of the same opening beats, even down to one character challenging another about why they need to take defence measures with them out on their risk-free scientific expedition. It’s a staggering series of oversights/coincidences that will surely end up as a fan-made mash-up video.

There are logical flaws strewn about the place in Prometheus that become irritating even if you only have half a brain that’s semi-functional. Unlike the work of Christopher Nolan – which just omits logic explaining exposition that can still be found and answered by the viewer if they think (or drink) hard enough – Prometheus and its characters just come across as dumb. For instance, why would you take almost twenty people out on a two year space mission (and why would they agree to go?) when you’re not going to tell them why they’re there until you’ve all arrived; wouldn’t you have done that back on Earth? Why would you enter a strange planet’s atmosphere without undertaking some sort of geographical survey first to find out where to land? Why would you bring booze? Why would you get a young(ish) actor to don old-man prosthetic makeup when you never show him as a young man?

The gaps in logic continue and never end, a list which I’m sure is catalogued in full elsewhere on the internet.

But the film somehow passes the blame for much of its stupidity onto its characters, which has become the source of much of my ire. In Alien the characters were blue-collar slobs with attitude problems, but you genuinely cared about them after a while and didn’t want to see them die. Nearly every character in Prometheus is so obnoxious, vulgar and dim-witted that you feel like cheering after each elaborate death sequence. Even our main character deserves a dispatch that sadly never comes. So for 124 minutes you find yourself following the adventures of a bunch of people you’d probably cross the street to avoid in real life. Yes, it’s basically Big Brother In Space.

The only film experience I’ve had recently which comes anywhere close to confusing my sense of compassion in such a way is Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, which I’m still half convinced was meant to be a slapstick comedy.

Oh well, maybe the only hope for a decent Alien film in the future is if David Fincher decides to go back and remake Alien 3 now that he has more clout in the industry… but then we’ll lose all those fine performances that made 3 more watchable than it should have been.

But I sincerely doubt he ever will.

Well, like Ridley Scott’s own noble Nottingham project which took a u-turn during development into being just a second rate Robin Hood movie, Prometheus might have been so much more had it been retooled into not being set in the Alien universe and its characters rewritten into being a little more likeable.

On the upside, though, Idris Elba is charming and charismatic as the ship’s captain and remains the only character in the entire film that you don’t want to slap; the film is beautifully crafted by the art department and visual effects team with background plates that would look nice framed as pictures on your wall; and there was a funny commercial that was shown before the film started in the cinema (but I think that constitutes “scraping the barrel” for compliments).

But that’s it.

Watch Prometheus just to satisfy your curiosity but be prepared to feel pretty miserable and annoyed by the time it finishes.

I did.

2/5