Blue Man Sings The Whites

Unlike many other nerds, I never waste any time wondering what I’ll do when the world is overtaken by zombie apocalypse. This is because I’m a large, slow-moving target with no practical or combat skills and a picky appetite. In the event of things going all Romero my assigned role isn’t as one of the plucky, desperate last remnants of humanity but rather as one of the shambling mindless horde. To be honest, I’ve got Boomer written all over me.

Not that these are zombie movies, of course. The difference between zombies and the “infected” from 28 Days / 28 Weeks Later is both semantic and profound. Zombies symbolise our mortality – they might be slow but they pursue us tirelessly and relentlessly. We can stave them off for a while but in the end there’s no escape, whether through bad choices or bad luck eventually they’re going to get us. There’s also an element of zombies representing our society and specifically our worst impulses – our fears, our hate and/or our greed. Single zombies are easily avoided and almost laughable, it’s only when gathered en masse they become incredibly destructive and dangerous.

You know. Like Leeds fans.

The infected don’t have quite the same flavour. They’re much more of a direct individual threat and especially in the first movie we rarely see them in large groups. And, of course, they run. Key sequences in the opening of both films feature characters fleeing with the infected in hot pursuit.  It’s a threat that feels more personal, more aggressive than that which their forebears present, an impression that’s further heightened by the speed with which victims join their ranks. Unfortunates bitten by zombies generally take hours if not days to die and rise again, but the Rage virus is passed on in seconds. We live in a world where advertising and the media bombards us with the message that we’re all special, that we’re all clever nonconformists, that our opinions matter. These films give us the monsters we deserve, zombies suitable for attention spans eroded by the millions of different ways Western society presents to distract ourselves while the planet falls to ruin.  The infected are suppliers of bespoke carnage for the Me Me Me Now Now Now Generation. Because we’re worth it.

A few years ago, I read a biography of the late Bill Hicks. Despite knowing from the off what the ending was likely to be (I mean, it’s hinted at pretty strongly by that “the late” part) the last chapter left me inconsolable. The impossibly cruel timing of his impossibly premature death, just as his career was starting to take off after years of toil in relative anonymity, hit me like a kick to the stomach.

See also: Control.

I really, really have to be in the right mood before I’ll sit down in front of a movie I know is going to be a bit of a tough watch. That’s the reason why American History X was on the shelf for the better part of two years before even getting its shrinkwrap removed, it’s the reason why I’ve seen Magnolia a grand total of three times despite it being one of my five favourite movies and it’s the reason why I hadn’t watched Control even though a chum had leant me the DVD an embarassing number of months ago, well before before I conceived the notion of the grand folly for which there really must be a better name than The Great DVD Project.

Suggestions on a postcard to the usual address.

I’d already hung on to the film for a shamefully long time so slotting it in down the order in its “correct” place (between Constantine and Coraline, as it goes) wasn’t really an option. So before I could start grinding away precious hours of my brief mortal span in earnest I had to clear the decks, and that meant manning up, sitting down and watching a film that I really wanted to see about a band that I absolutely love.

I’m pathetic, honestly.

To my complete non-surprise, Control is a terrific piece of work.  The quote on the box reads “The coolest British movie of 2007″, and it’s hard to imagine a review that could be more misleading whilst remaining more-or-less factually accurate. “Love, laughs and lessons in life set to a foot-tapping eighties soundtrack”, maybe. The phrase “a cool British film” makes me think of brashness and glamour and excitement, of beautiful people and sharp clothes and snappy dialogue. It makes me think of Velvet Goldmine or The Italian Job, basically.

Control is pretty much the opposite of The Italian Job.

Watching it is like listening to I Remember Nothing – it’s fragile and beautiful but relentlessly oppressive, a slow shuffle to breaking point punctuated by moments of frustrated anguish and rage.

I can apppreciate why that might not be everyone’s cup of tea.

In a film filled with strong performances Sam Riley’s central turn as Ian Curtis stands out as something special, awkward and delicate and haunted and deeply, deeply sad. It’s a portrayal of an obviously troubled young man that’s carefully understated yet completely magnetic. Every time he was on-screen I genuinely had a hard time looking anywhere else.  As the film goes on the sense of Curtis being ground down by the pressures of the world and by his own failings and frailties grows and grows until tragedy is unavoidable.

Joy Division’s music greatly aids the depiction of its singer’s mental and social disintegration of course, but the reverse is also true. Love Will Tear Us Apart is now so overplayed it’s become a cliché but when it’s used here, when it’s placed against context of Ian and Debbie Curtis’ marriage falling to pieces the song suddenly regains all the meaning and emotional impact that familiarity stole from it. The sweetness and heartbreak of it come rushing in all over again.

If you need a better recommendation to see Control than “it’ll make you hear arguably the greatest pop song ever written like it’s the first time”, consult your GP immediately.

Fantastic as Control is, it did cause me a problem – specifically, being wide awake at 1am on Easter Saturday having just been pretty thoroughly bummed out (ooh-er Matron, etc). However, an obvious solution did suggest itself – I was now free to begin my ascent of Mount Pointless Distraction. So what was at the top of the pile? A Better Tomorrow? 300? 28 Days Later?

Nope. 24 Hour Party People, the 2002 biopic of former Factory Records boss Tony Wilson. Or to put it another way, the other film that prominently features a fictionalised account of the rise and fall of Joy Division.

Damn you synchronicity my old nemesis, once again you have defeated me!

Now, on a good day with a following wind my taste in music lags about three years behind the cool kids. On most days it’s closer to ten years behind the weird kids that get sniggered at almost behind their backs. Every single significant musical movement of my teenage years passed by with barely a nod in my direction, and the rise of Madchester was absolutely no exception. While schoolfriends were getting into the Happy Mondays and Stone Roses I was busy developing a mild obsession with absolutely Godawful American perm-rock that’s been more embarassing and difficult to get rid of than a cold sore. A year or so later a mate who worked at the local games shop leant me his record collection for the last weekend before he moved away to Romford and kickstarted a passion for mid-eighties goth that would heroically shepherd me through the shoegaze, grebo, grunge and Britpop eras without the slightest threat of credibility. My parents bought me my first CD player for my 17th birthday in late 1992, giving me the ideal opportunity to restart my music collection and carry out a Stalinist purge of the Roxette albums and dad-rock best-ofs that were my first flirtations with pop in my early teens.

The first CDs I bought? All About Eve’s first album, Floodland by The Sisters Of Mercy and Slippery When Wet. Cool Britannia really was just something that happened to other people.

I digress. Massively and self-indulgently. Here’s the point – if you’ve slogged through the last couple of paragraphs you’ll have no problem believing that when I first watched 24 Hour Party People I had no idea who Tony Wilson was, beyond being that bloke with the floppy hair and incredibly smug manner who’d appear infrequently on ITV as an all-purpose frontcreature. Finding out that he was the bloke who’d discovered Joy Division was surreal and a bit disorientating – it was like hearing for the first time that teatime TV demigod Bob Holness had been the saxophone player on Baker Street.

Except, you know. True.

24 Hour Party People does two difficult things incredibly well. Firstly, it manages to portray Tony Wilson as one of the single most irritating, difficult,  grandiloquent men in the history of pop music without making him seem unsympathetic. In this respect, casting Steve Coogan was a stroke of genius. After all, he’s made a career out of coaxing reluctant affection from audiences for characters who are deluded, massively monomanaical and generally reprehensible. There’s certainly more than a pinch of Alan Partridge in this version of Wilson, most obviously when he almost pulls out of creating the first Factory night because the club owner’s name is too similar to his own (“There’ll be Tony 1 and Tony 2. Can you not see how that’s a problem? Straight away there’s a hierarchy“). Like Partridge, Wilson’s intial success and inevitable downfall are both rooted in his overweening ambition. Like Partridge, most of the time we’re laughing at him rather than with him. Like Partridge, there’s something about Wilson’s Quixotic tilting at windmills, his repeated refusal to accept his own limitations or the status quo, that makes him oddly but genuinely appealing.

My favourite moment in the film comes when Tony Wilson is at his lowest ebb, just he’s left by his first wife and Ian Curtis has committed suicide. Walking down a Manchester street he’s accosted by a homeless man (played by the ninth Doctor) quoting a 6th century Christian philosopher:

BOETHIUS: It’s my belief that history is a wheel. “Inconsistency is my very essence,” says the wheel. “Rise up on my spokes if you like but don’t complain when you’re cast back down into the depths. Good times pass away, but then so do the bad. Mutability is our tragedy, but it’s also our hope – the worst of times, like the best, are always passing away.”

Coogan’s delivery of the reply – a silent beat then “I know” – is wonderful. It’s both arrogant and vulnerable, both funny and heartbreaking. This is Tony Wilson’s moment of doubt on the cross and in two words you learn everything you need to know about him as a character.

To quote Wilson himself, though, he is a minor character in his own story. 24 Hour Party People is primarily a film about music, about musicians and the about their environment. This is the second difficult thing that it gets right – it makes Manchester circa 1979-1990 seem a genuinely exciting place. The film isn’t really interested in getting the facts right – often, it openly and gleefully deviates from historical events. What it’s interested in is getting the mood right. And it succeeds. From the first Joy Division gig (“The intro doesn’t normally go on this long, I think our singer’s in the toilet”) to the exhilarating, strangely moving last night of the Haçienda there’s a great sense of place and a greater sense of something new and revolutionary being created.

If you had no specific knowledge of either Control or 24 Hour Party People you might expect it to be tedious and /or tough to watch the same tragic story twice in quick succession. You would be completely wrong. The two movies compliment each other brilliantly – they could, in fact, almost be seen as companion pieces. Control is a eulogy. It’s grim and grey and grounded, intently focussed on the characters of Ian and Debbie Curtis. 24 Hour Party People is a celebration. It’s light and arch and vivid and completely, gloriously all over the shop. Both films are utterly fantastic.

Control
RANK: A.

24 Hour Party People
RANK: A.

Well, that was a productive use of a couple of hours of my Friday night.

Look upon my works ye socially adequate and despair.

Best guess, that’s the better part of 300 DVDs and 500 or so hours sitting there. We’re only including feature films not TV series, standup sets or music DVDs. There is still some debate as to whether we should be watching every DVD in the house (and subjecting ourselves to Blue Man III’s petrol-station bargain-bucket action/light horror collection, or Ms. Blue Man’s diabolical taste in romcoms) or just the stuff that either Mrs. Blue Man or myself voluntarily bought.

Number Of DVDs Still Shrinkwrapped: 6 (Anvil! The Story Of Anvil, Cruel Intentions, KIll Bill vol. 1, Kill Bill vol. 2, Terminator 2, Velvet Goldmine)

Number Of DVDs That I Know We Own That Have Mysteriously Gone Walkabout: 5 (28 Weeks Later, Almost Famous: Untitled Edition, Batman Begins, Bulletproof Monk, Pirates Of The Caribbean)

Number Of DVDs That I Had No Idea We Owned: 2 (Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World’s End, Underworld: Rise Of The Lychans)

Number Of Films That We Own At Least Two Copies Of: 11 (A Matter Of Life And Death, Blade Runner, The Longest Yard, Mission Impossible 2, Reservoir Dogs, Jackie Brown, True Romance, Goodfellas, Fellowship Of The Ring, The Two Towers, Return Of The King)

DVD That I’m Most Embarassed To Admit Owning: Dead heat between Bring It On and Basic Instinct 2.

Sorry so long without a post but hey, it’s not like you’re not used to frequent inexplicable losses of signal from this direction, is it?

Here’s a measure of how eventful and thrilling my life’s been in the time I’ve been away: I’m seriously considering trying to re-watch my entire DVD collection. In alphabetical order. The drawbacks I can see to this plan are a) it would would mean watching Alien, Alien 3, Alien Resurrection then Aliens, and b) it would mean watching Batman & Robin.

Anyway, some stuff that’s been great that I’ve discovered in the last three months:

The latest Metric album (especially Gold Guns Girls). The latest Raveonettes album (especially Heart Of Stone). Moon. Mount & Blade. The latest Yeah Yeah Yeahs album (especially Dragon Queen). The Incredible Hercules. Drag Me To Hell. The Sounds (especially No-One Sleeps When I’m Awake). Castle. Lloyd Doyley’s first ever senior goal. Forza Motorsport 3 (especially after finally working out how to use the XBox steering wheel I got for Christmas last year and has been lying shamefully unused since because of my general hamfistedness. Turns out I just needed some patient tutoring. Actually, one sentence of impatient tutoring. Actually, just my wife saying “You’re turning that wheel like you’re driving a hugging clown car”). The second series of Being Human. The second series of Newswipe. Pretty much everything Gail Simone’s written for DC Comics, especially her brilliant brilliant work on Birds Of Prey, Wonder Woman and Secret Six. The Answer Me This podcast. Lego Rock Band. Snow. Oh, and the iPhone.

Some stuff that’s not been great in the last three months:

Champions Online. Work. The Doctor Who Christmas special. The end of the best coverage of any sport on UK telly as Channel Five show (probably) their last Yankee Helmetball game. The Digital Economy bill. All car insurance ads in the history of all things, ever. Flash Forward. The iPhone’s battery life when you’re playing games on it.

So yeah. Alive and reasonably well. Further updates to follow. Eventually.

Here’s proof I’d rather do anything than what I’m supposed to. Right now, in order of importance I probably ought to be a) preparing for tonight’s first session of a game I’ve never played before in a genre I’ve not GM’d in, oooh, 15 years?, b) sorting out my Christmas list or c) working. Instead, here’re some one-paragraph brainsplurges on some stuff that’s moved me to having to write over the last few months.

Once
The low-key and super-low budget story of the friendship between a Dublin busker and a young Czech pianist it made me laugh, made me weep like a tiny child for approximately 75% of its running time, then made me rush off and buy the DVD and soundtrack album. It’s not a musical, but rather a film about music so it’s just as well that the songs are absolutely bloody wonderful, by turns beautifully delicate and spine-tinglingly passionate. In an attempt to claw back my Hard-Bitten Internet Cynic image by proving that there’s nothing so exquisitely crafted and personally affecting that I can’t crush it under the lumpen weight of objective overanalysis, I’ll say that Once is better than Garden State and the Commitments, about on a par with Almost Famous but not as good as Magnolia. Rank: A

The Beatles: Rock Band (Xbox360)
We bought the game solely to replace the drum controller that got knackered on our heroic expedition up the north face of Mount Rock a couple of bank holidays ago, so it was a pleasant surprise that the game was so good. It’s fair to say that nobody in the family is a big Beatles fan – personally I’m so amazingly ignorant that before playing this I’d never previously heard While My Guitar Gently Weeps or Dear Prudence (other than the Banshees’ version, obv) – but this game totally won us over. The enthusiasm that the developers obviously have for their subject matter comes across over and over again, in the animation of the band members, in the often-beautiful staging of the songs (Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band/With A Little Help From My Friends being a particular highlight), in the wealth of unlockable photos and video that’s included, even in the names of the Achievements. The Beatles: Rock Band is like reading an article by a really great writer on a subject they really know and really love but that you never previously cared about. Rank: B

Lie To Me
Someone’s seen House and gone “I’m getting me a piece of that action!” Quirky take on an established (some would say tired) TV genre – check. Grizzled veteran British lead actor who’s plainly having a whale of a time – check. Troubled but charismatic and brilliant central character with a distinctive gait (House’s limp, Lightman’s bizarre half-gibbon, half-Quasimodo shambling) – check. Unbelievably formulaic scripting with exactly the same story beats every week – check. The always thoroughly watchable Tim Roth does a nice job with a part that calls for him to say “Ah! Now THAT’S the truth!” fifteen times an episode but that doesn’t cover the fact that this is a slightly degraded photocopy of a show that itself has no pretentions to being anything other than disposable fluff. Rank: C

Dragon Age: Origins (PC)
Love it. Love it love it love it. It’s a properly beardy fantasy RPG for properly beardy people. I could pick nits – I’d like the game mechanics to be a bit more transparent so that I could make more informed decisions when levelling up, and while the main story feels decently epic it doesn’t wander far from painfully familiar fantasy tropes – but that would be stupid because this is the best game I’ve played this year that doesn’t involve a man dressed as a nocturnal mammal jump-kicking people in the face. What makes it come alive for me above anything else are your NPC party members, as consistently likeable a group as I’ve ever encountered in a CRPG. In particular, the droll-but-dorky Alistair (Chandler Bing in plate mail, but nowhere near as annoying as that sounds) and Morrigan the sarky heartless sorceress have spent most of the game in my active party, in large part because I enjoy them sniping at each other so much. Only slightly less fun are desperate romantic Leliana, the golum Shale who’s reminiscent of the (awesome) psychopathic android HK-47 from the (awesome) original Knights Of The Old Republic, and lust-for-life Elfish assassin Zevran who’s spent most of his time with the group trying to get into my pants. Bring on Mass Effect 2! Rank: A

[rec]
An hour of enjoyable-enough mockumentary zombie hokum, 15 minutes of HELL ON TOAST. In a good way. Rank: B

Dexter
When I first heard the premise of Dexter – a serial killer working for the Miami police department who preys on other serial killers – I was utterly repulsed. It sounded tacky and sensationalist and dark-for-the-sake-of-darkness and generally not my cup of tea. But eminently sensible people kept singing its praises, so eventually I gave it a whirl and was duly blown away. After a bit of a wobbly second series it got back on track with an excellent third (starring Jimmy Smits’ enjoyably terrible Cuban accent), and now the new season is easily the best yet. The latest episode – set on Thanksgiving – is like a distillation of everything that makes the show worth watching. It’s got Dexter struggling to cope with regular human interaction, it’s got terrific performances all round (particularly from John Lithgow in magnificently creepy form) and it’s got incredibly tense sequences alongside moments that are laugh-out-loud funny. It really is pretty much as good as telly gets at the moment. Rank: A

Lungs – Florence + The Machine
Since last.fm arrived on the FunSquareSuperPlus, I’ve spent a fair bit of time listening its automatically-generated reccomend-o-tron. It seems that Skynet has decided that I’m almost exclusively into impassioned and slightly eccentric female singer-songwriters. And, you know. It’s hard to argue. So it’s fair to say that there was a better-than-average chance I’d go for this album. And sure enough, it’s awesome and proof positive that modern pop really needs more a) harp-playing and b) songs about werewolf-themed sexuality. Rank: A

Let The Right One In
Unsettling lo-fi Swedish vampire flick that plays with themes of alienation and adolescence. But better than that sounds. I couldn’t shake the feeling there was stuff going on here that I was too stupid to understand - what was with the repeated shots of characters’ feet, f’rinstance? Rank: B

Here’s the problem with Mark Wahlberg – he’s got exactly no ability to elevate the material he’s working with.

That’s not the worst problem in the world to have. It’s not that he’s a bad actor, it’s just that he hasn’t got the charisma to carry a film on his own the way, f’rinstance, George Clooney or Bruce Willis or Will Smith can. But neither is he a Keanu Reeves who’ll drag anything he’s involved with down to his level. He’s a safe pair of hands, a decent complimentary piece. Give Marky Mark a great script, a great director and a great supporting cast and you end up with Boogie Nights or Three Kings. Give him a mediocre script, a mediocre director and a mediocre supporting cast and you end up with The Italian Job. Give him one of the worst scripts in the history of motion pictures, a toweringly awful director and a helpless supporting cast and you end up with The Happening.

The Happening opens with hundreds of people in and around New York’s Central Park abruptly deciding to commit suicide. This leads to a moderately eerie scene of construction workers throwing themselves from the top of the building they’re working from and hitting the ground like sacks of tomatoes. From there on, it’s downhill all the way.

The rest of the film follows Mark Wahlberg (for it is he), a high school science teacher in Philadelphia as he flees from the “terrorist attacks” that are hitting the north-east coast of the US with his wife (Zooey Deschanel and her enormous Manga eyes – they could have cast her in that bonkers new BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU anti-drugs ad and saved themselves a fortune in CGI). It’s vaguely reminiscent of the Spielberg version of War Of The Worlds, with the majority of the movie spent showing its main characters running away from an implacable, unbeatable enemy before an anticlimactic deus ex machina ending. The reasons why War Of The Worlds works while The Happening very much doesn’t are many but the two most important are the presence of Tom Cruise, who despite being a batpoo insane religious cultist has screen presence out the fundament, and the drama that develops between the Cruise character and his two children being at least as interesting as the wider conflict with the aliens. You empathise with those three people. You care about what happens to them. It’s hard to give a toss about anyone in The Happening because they’re all so brain-bludgeoningly boring you find yourself rooting for their bloody and violent death just to temporarily alleviate the monotony.

M. Night Shymalan’s second movie, Unbreakable, was a film about comics written by someone who’s never read a comic in his life. Without wishing to give too much away in case you’re still inclined to see this terrible, terrible movie The Happening is a film about the arrogance of science and humanity’s impact on the Earth’s ecosystem written by someone who’s never spoken to a scientist in his life. Although given that the film hardly contains a single line of dialogue that sounds like something a real person might conceivably say, it seems to have been written by someone who’s never spoken to a human, either.

The first time we’re introduced to Marky Mark he’s telling a roomful of students about how millions of bees have suddenly vanished and inviting them to speculate as to what might have caused it. “A disease?” “But there are no bodies.” “Global warming?” “Could be. The temperature goes up a fraction of a degree, the bees can’t tolerate it any more and die.” EH? For a kickoff, wouldn’t that leave just as many bodies as a virus? And if bees were so sensitive that they couldn’t withstand a minute temperature fluctuation, wouldn’t they all die every time the sun went down? Plus, it’s stated this is happening all over the country, so presumably the bees in Arizona are being killed by an increase from 30 to 30.2 degrees centigrade at the same time that bees in Seattle are being killed by an increase from 18 to 18.2 degrees. Really? That’s your best guess? That’s your theory, is it?

Of course not! He’s got a much better answer than that. “They’ll come up with an explanation to put in a book but the truth is, it’s an act of nature. We’ll never know why it happened.”  Yes. Because that’s what science is, isn’t it? It’s basically just a load of hand-waving to fob people off. Really, science can’t hope to understand Nature in any significant way. And yes, it does deserve a capital N. You could write this attitude off as just being the wrong-headed attitude of one chump of a character, except that at the end of the movie another “scientific expert” repeats the line almost verbatim. They don’t say that there are various different theories. They don’t say that there hasn’t yet been sufficient study into the phenomenon to hazard a guess as to its cause. They don’t even say that we might never fully understand what happened. No, it’s stated as a hard fact – act of nature, we’ll never know why, end of discussion. Mark Wahlberg’s character and the TV talking head are presented as the face of enlightened science, they survive and thrive because they accept man’s place in the scheme of things. If that’s your attitude, fine. If that’s the message you want your film to convey, fine. But you can’t put those words in the mouth of your characters who’re meant to be flippin’ scientists because it makes them and you sound like cavemen cowering in fear at the sight of the giant golden ball of fire floating in the sky.

Beyond the heavy-handed fable it’s hard to work out what sort of film The Happening is trying to be. It’s not an action movie, because there’s sod-all action. Somehow, Shyamalan’s managed to make a film called The Happening and forgotten to include anything, well, happening. It’s not a twist thriller or a whatdunnit because the source of “the terrorist attacks” is made obvious half an hour in, explicitly stated about fifteen minutes later then repeated about three more times after that. It’s not the story of two people resolving their differences against the background of A World Gone Mad because the two protagonists barely have any differences. There’s not a single moment in their relationship or indeed the film as a whole that rings true intellectually or emotionally. There’s no character development. There’s no character depth. There’s no character conflict. To be honest, there are barely any characters. Instead, there’re just a bunch of cardboard cutouts riding the world’s least interesting ghost train trying not to step in the metaphor.

If you feel it’s been too long since you’ve properly hated something, The Happening might be just what you’re looking for.

I’m not a huge fan of Star Trek. The original series was camp fun, and the movies that embraced that (primarily Wrath Of Khan, The One With The Whales and The One With Shakespeare In The Original Klingon*) were thoroughly enjoyable. Next Gen was largely “meh” with only a few flirtations with REALLY ANNOYINGNESS (So-called empath Deanna Troi and her ability to state the stupefying obvious – green guys with weird foreheads are blasting away at the Enterprise with a battery of Kill-O-Death Cannon, at which point Troi helpfully interjects “I sense… anger”. Come to think of it, what IS the ship’s councillor doing sitting on the bridge anyway? Also: Troi’s relationship with Riker. Also: Riker. No wonder Picard kept sending the fatuous git on every possible away team. “Captain, our sensors detect millions of ten-foot tall heavily-armed warrior-lizards whose society appears to be entirely based around the loathing of trombones, stupid beards and self-satisfaction.” “Number One, report to the transporter room.”). Deep Space 9 I actually quite liked, despite it being a poor man’s Babylon 5 and featuring the most wooden commanding officer in Trek history. Voyager was nearly unbearable, it’s only saving grace being the holographic doctor who seemed to hate every other character on the ship nearly as much as I did. And Enterprise was actually unbearable.

This disclosure isn’t coming from the sneery “Trekkie? Me? No, I Have Known The Touch Of A Woman Haw Haw Haw” place that seems in rather pathetic vogue at the moment (I really must get round to writing that post on The Cult Of Nerd that’s been kicking around in the back of my mind for the last few weeks). It’s just that a person’s reaction to the new Trek film is inevitably going to be coloured by their feelings about the franchise so I feel I should get my cards on the table right from the off. I wouldn’t want you thinking it’s just nostalgia talking when I tell you that the film’s really, really good.

The film’s really, really good.

Going in, I had some trepidation. Classic Trek given a smirky noughties shakey-cam makeover sounded like something that was potentially smug enough to provoke me to gouge my own eyes out with a spoon. Particularly seeing as it was being directed by the bloke who made the really not terribly good at all Mission Impossible 3.

Any lingering doubts were quickly dismissed. Within the first ten minutes I’d laughed, I’d cried and I’d seen the vehicle that I now want a go on more than any other in movie history. Sorry, Dark Knight-era Batmobile. Sorry, Speeder Bike. Sorry, hoverboard thingamy out of Back To The Future 2. For all the flashy whizz-bangery and unnecessary wobblycam this film looks and sounds and feels like Star Trek. More importantly, it looks and sounds and feels like a massive, epic, sweeping space-opera. There’s derring-do and a remarkable but mis-matched group of misfits battling against impossible odds with The Fate Of The World Itself At Stake. It’s as close as (almost) anyone’s come to recreating the fun and wide-eyed excitement of the first Star Wars film. Certainly closer than George Lucas has managed since 1983.

One of the big reasons Star Trek works as well as it does is the casting. Central to the original series was the Freudian relationship between Bones the irascible, emotional humanist id, Spock the cold, rational ego and Kirk’s (heh) superego resolving the two. In this film you can see that dynamic shaking into place via the three terrific central turns from Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto and Karl Urban.  The film usually remembers that the lasers and splodes aren’t the point, they’re just there to dress up what’s fundamentally a story about people. And, importantly, they’re people you really enjoy spending a couple of hours with. For the most part the performances are pitched to evoke the original cast without impersonating them, something that’s done through little mannerisms such as Kirk’s smirk and command-chair slouch, Chekov’s wide-eyed enthusiasm or Spock’s patented “Hmm, you’re right, I hadn’t considered that” expression. It’s a difficult trick but it’s pulled off immaculately give or take a dodgy Scottish accent or so.

It’s not perfect by any means. It’s pretty relentlessly white-male-centric: Uhura is set up as an interesting character then given next to nothing to do for the last half of the film. I’d have preferred a plot resolution that relied a bit more on outwitting the enemy and a bit less on peace through superior firepower. However, my only major issue we’re probably going to have to break the old spoiler warning out for:

CAUTION! SPOILERS AHEAD!

The whole baggy, slightly tedious section with the (slippy-slidey) ice world needed to go. Really? There was no more elegant and cohesive way you could have woven in the time-travel plot and Old Spock than that? A massive Exposition Dump and an even more massive coincidence that Kirk got marooned on the same world that Nero stuck Old Spock on? I’m not even sure which of the two was more of a stretch of logic. Wouldn’t New Spock just have chucked Kirk in the brig? Wouldn’t Nero have just kept Old Spock on the Death Star for fun, torture and maybe more? Couldn’t he have shown Old Spock the destruction of Vulcan from there? Hmmm and ahem and come on now.

I know cohesive water-tight plotting is hardly Star Trek’s raison d’etre, but in this case it was abusing the privilege. Thing is, the whole alternate universe, time-travel thing was such a clever and brave idea it really did deserve an awful lot better.

CAUTION! SPOILERS BEHIND!

That’s being just a fraction nit-picky, though. To reiterate: the film’s really, really good. Comfortably the best Star Trek film ever, comfortably the best sci-fi movie since Serenity. Between this and Iron Man we now have two unexpectedly terrific summer blockbuster franchises that are ready to follow the path well-trod by Pirates Of The Carribbean 2 and Matrix Reloaded right over the quality cliff.

Which’ll be something to look forward to.

* – Actually, just go here, they’re all great.

Tom Clancy Presents Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. By Tom Clancy (Xbox 360)

It’s an arcade flight sim in a contemporary setting. And it wants to be Ace Combat 6 so badly it hurts, right down to the pre-mission target-percentage breakdown, the post-mission cinematic replay and the three camera view options, each practically identical to its equivalent in AC6.

Here are the things H.A.W.(ks – Ed) does better than Ace Combat 6: more planes (although they all feel pretty much exactly the same to fly), external fly-by “assistance off” view that looks hugely cool (but is completely unnecessary and massively difficult to control), your plane carries anti-missile flares (not that you’ll have any left when you need them because some idiot mapped “deploy flares” to a click of the control stick, something that’s incredibly easy to do accidentally when engaged in intense flight manoeuvres) no portentous and jarring cut-scenes about the hideousness of war (instead there’s a staggeringly nonsensical plot about a corporation as lacking in business-sense as they are in morals), moderately groovy R6: Vegas/CoD4 XP-O-Gain level system (which mostly only unlocks new planes which, as previously stated, aren’t much more than re-skins), looks hugely pretty in places (but extremely ropy in others – the Chicago level with the skyscrapers jarringly plonked down on what looks like a perfectly flat Google Earth map will take you back to the worst sins of mid-nineties flight-simmmery) and its whole campaign is playable in co-op (actually, that one’s pretty much an unreserved yay).

Here are the things it does worse than AC6: smaller maps with smaller, almost linear missions. One of my favourite levels in Ace Combat sees you asked to assist a massive amphibious assault on a coastal town. There are three different allied forces landing in three different places facing different compositions of enemy, and who you choose to primarily support in what way is up to you. Fly a mud-moving A-10 Warthog with iron bombs to easily take out enemy tank formations? Or air-to-ground missles for knocking out priority targets from a safe distance? Either way, you’ll be vulnerable to enemy interceptors and too slow to effectively support all three fronts. Go with a multi-role plane like the F-16 or the Mirage 2000 which’ll let you carve through enemy close air support bombers like a multimillion dollar supersonic knife through butter but is somewhat brittle in the face of ground fire? Should you take the risk of attacking the well-defended town in order to secure its airfield, giving you a base near the front-line where you can land to get repaired and re-armed?

All that light tactical layer is absent from H.A.W.(ks. – Ed). In your first playthough, you’ll have a lot of planes to choose from but generally only one weapons load and one approach to any given scenario. There’s no landing at carriers or airbases, no chance to change your payload mid-mission, no trading off effectiveness against X sort of target with effectiveness against Y. It’s pretty much just a shooting-gallery – hostile unit appears in front of you, press A to fire a missile, done, done and I’m onto the next one.

There are tons of smaller niggles. Hard mode is too easy (so I presume you could finish Normal mode without actually looking at the screen) while Elite mode doesn’t, y’know, make the enemy AI any more dangerous it just artificially and unfairly limits the number of weapons you can carry (which wouldn’t be as much of an issue except that, as previously mentioned, there’s no way of re-arming mid-mission). The targeting system is fiddly and thoughtless – if I’ve got AAMs armed, why on Earth does it let me lock onto ground targets that I can’t hit? And why oh why oh why is “change weapon” mapped to the D-pad? Did nobody twig that when you want to switch to, say, dogfighting missles you might possibly be in, f’rinstance, a dogfight and so not really be overly keen to LET GO OF THE HUGGING CONTROLS?

If the flight scenes in Top Gun mildly arouse you, you’ll have some fun with H.A.W.(ks – Ed). Me? They do and I did. It’s not a bad game by any means, it’s just shallow, workmanlike, a bit bland and lacking in charm. It’s like a tribute band – the songs are still good but the magic’s not quite there. H.A.W.(ks – Ed) is the Bootleg Ace. It’s the Counterfeit Combat. It’s the Tesco Value Ace Combat 6.

With an unnecessarily silly name.

John Woo Presents John Woo’s Stranglehold By John Woo (Xbox 360)

The graphics are ropy, the controls are slightly worse, its difficulty is up and down more than a manically depressed junkie kangaroo on a space hopper and it’s a pony that barely manages one trick. And that’s the exact same trick as Max Payne’s, only – and I appreciate this will be hard to believe – with a worse story. If I’d paid full price at release I’d have been a) insane and b) furious. But as a cheap, throwaway b-movie title it hits the spot. Stranglehold is the first game in history where the stuff you can do in-game is cooler than the stuff you’re shown doing in cut-scenes. The first time I slid down a banister, shot a sign that fell on a mook’s head, blew up a second mook by taking out the barrel of propane he was slightly foolishly hiding behind, then dove onto a wheelie-trolley and rolled across a courtyard shooting two more mooks in the face I’d pretty much had enough fun for the fiver the game set me back. And the massively over-the-top spinny-around-with-doves-flying-up-everywhere special move made me laugh every single time I did it. For that, I’m willing to forgive semi-frequent moments of frustration brought on by the lack of a Left 4 Dead-style “Spin 180 Degrees” button and insufficient information as to the location of the THOUSANDS OF ENEMIES currently shooting your wanger off.

Stranglehold is rubbish. But it’s extravagant, operatic, cheerfully stupid, generally good fun rubbish. It’s rubbish with the courage to be rubbish as loudly and forcefully as it can. Much like Face/Off, actually.

Russell T. Davis Presents Russell T. Davis’ Doctor Who Easter Special By Russell T. Davis (Alright, you can stop now – Ed) (Telly)

It was alright, wasn’t it? The Lara Croft wannabe pseudo-assistant was good fun, the visual of a London bus crashed in the middle of a desert wilderness was cool to the point that you strongly suspect that RTD started with that image and worked back to find a story that semi-justified it, I liked that the ugly menacing-looking aliens actually turned out to be innocent bystanders and the story rollocked along at a decent old pace even if it didn’t make a lot of sense and fell apart a bit in the final third. No change there, then. So not a boundary, but a controlled single that keeps the scoreboard ticking over. Still looking forward to seeing what Who will turn into in fresh hands, mind.

Nobody Presents Nobody’s Empire: Total War By Nobody (You’re fired – Ed) (PC)

Medieval: Total War is one of my favourite games ever, I’ve read every Sharpe book ever written (they are, after all, Mills And Boon for boys), and there’s nothing I like more in movies than some buckles being suitably swashed. So why oh why oh why hasn’t this game clicked with me? Am I just a bit Total Warred out? The real-time battles have a very different feel to Rome or either of the Medievals. Those games depended on you winning the scissors-paper-stone-lizard-Spock matchups (archers beat everything at range, everything beats archers up close, spears beat cavalry, cavalry beats swords, swords beat spears) and making practical use of flank and rear attacks on already-engaged units. Outflanking remains important in Empire, but its battles seem to primarily hinge on your ability to concentrate fire. Almost everyone’s got guns, so all things being equal what you’re trying to do is get two of your units shooting at one of the enemy’s. If you can do that, the opposition will rout before you and your freed-up soldiers can then start shooting at the next enemy unit, continuing a virtuous circle that will eventually see you “rolling up” the other fellow’s battle-line. It’s a different tactical challenge, and an interesting one, but for some reason the whole package isn’t quite grabbing me.
 
There are lots of little problems with it, but nothing I can see as being The Sticking Point. The naval battles are fiddly but easily-skipped. The battlefields seem a lot more varied than they used to be, with buildings that you can garrison, but occupied buildings are such easy prey for enemy artillery that they’re not remotely worth the bother 90% of the time. In the strategic layer, I don’t feel like I’m getting enough feedback on the socio-economic situation in my territories making it hard to determine which cities are performing well and which are on the brink of anarchy, although this may simply be down to not yet having spent enough time learning the nuances of the game.

Can’t put my finger on it. All I know is that this weekend I spent nine hours fiddling with a game I’ve had for six months and three quid’s worth of tower defence shenanigans rather than bestriding the nations of the Earth like a colossus. That can’t be right, can it?

Werner Herzog Presents Werner He… (*gunshot*) Grizzly Man (DVD)
 
Grizzly Man is a documentary about Timothy Treadwell, a failed actor who spent 13 summers living among bears in Alaska before he and his girlfriend were killed by a bear.

(Much as with Steve “Man Who Teases Dangerous Animals For A Living Killed By Dangerous Animal He Was Teasing” Irwin it’s such a horribly predictable fate I’m not even sure that it counts as ironic.)

It’s fascinating stuff with some beautiful footage of the Alaskan wilderness in general and bears in particular. The opening scene, with Treadwell talking the camera, describing himself as a “gentle warrior” who’s “earned the trust” of the bears and will never be hurt by them leads you to think that he’s going to be portrayed as an absolutely colossal tool. In fact the film gives a much more nuanced, interesting picture of a divisive, remarkable, quixotic and thoroughly tragic figure.

A few of the interviews seem weirdly forced, even staged – every time the guy who did the autopsy on what was left of Timothy Treadwell’s body is on camera for instance, or the scene where Herzog listens to the audio recording of Treadwell’s last moments. But that aside, it’s a terrific film that I’d thoroughly recommend.

As mentioned in a previous life, Blue Man’s First Law Of Comic Adaptations is this: just get the big stuff right. Work out what makes a comic worth reading, find the foundations that it’s built upon and make sure that those essentials come across successfully on screen. The corollary to Blue Man’s First Law Of Comic Adaptations therefore is this: change as much small stuff as you need to.

The first two X-Men films keep the mutants-as-an-oppressed-minority and family vibes from the comics, along with the iconic powers of Cyclops, Wolverine, Magneto and Professor X but change the costumes (“What, you think we should be wearing spandex?”), turn the Xavier Institute For Gifted Youngsters into an actual school, and re-interpret both Magneto (as a Holocaust survivor) and Rogue (as a teenage runaway). Batman Begins shows us Bruce Wayne’s double life, keeps Batman’s ambiguous relationship with the law and portrays him as a figure of superstition and terror to the criminal classes. However, it also gives us an on-again off-again romantic dalliance, the Batmobile as a military vehicle and Batman being trained as an actual no-fooling ninja. My very favourite comic movie ever, The Crow, retains almost nothing from the comic - about one-and-a-half scenes (Eric visting Gideon’s pawnshop and his confrontation with Fun Boy), plus the basic look, origin and mission of the central character, a bunch of villain names and that’s your lot.

I reiterate this to make my attitude clear – I’m a huge fan of Watchmen, but I don’t regard the book as a sacred text from whose holy writ deviation is not to be tolerated. I understand that what works on the page doesn’t necessarily work on screen. In fact in the case of Watchmen this is doubly true, it being  a story that is structured specifically to take advantage of the strengths of the medium it was written for. Sin City may have basically treated the original comic like a storyboard with more-or-less successful results (mind-bendingly rampant misogyny aside), but in that case you’re talking about a very simple plot and books that were intended to be a film noir in comic form. Try the same thing with Watchmen and you’d just end up with a sprawling mess, albeit one with some great characters, nice set-pieces and interesting visuals.

Watchmen is a sprawling mess, albeit one with some great characters, nice set-pieces and interesting visuals. It’s not a very good film at all. I enjoyed it very much, look forward to seeing it again and would recommend it without hesitation to anyone who’s read and enjoyed the comic.

(Anyone who hasn’t read the comic I would recommend to, er, read the comic – it’s about the same price as a cinema ticket, can be read in about the time you’d invest in a visit to the flicks and is better than the film in every respect).

Let me attempt to explain.

The Phantom Menace is a terrible film by anybody’s standards. It’s got a rotten script, dodgy performances, it’s bloated, baggy and filled with characters I couldn’t give a flying hug about. But the first time that Qui-Gon O’Jinn The Oirish Jedi and Awful Alec Guinness Impression drew their lightsabres with that ssssccccchvooom! sound and began cutting loose with them I started grinning like I had a flip-top head. There are things that I’m just programmed to enjoy, that are hard-coded in my Nerd DNA to give me pleasure.

The sight of a giant Doctor Manhattan creating a glass palace of cogs and gears is one of these things. So’s the Comedian’s costume. So’s Archie the Owlship. So’s “You don’t get it! I’m not locked in here with you! You’re locked in here with me!”

Director Zack Snyder is obviously a fan of the comic, and he’s pretty good with cool images, with cool lines, with cool props, with cool fight scenes. He’s not so good with anything below the surface sheen. To coin the excellent phrase that m’good friend Lori used while we were comparing after-action reports last night, he’s respectful but not insightful. Almost without exception,every problem with Watchmen as a film can be traced back to one of those two traits – too much respect or not enough insight.

SPOILERS FOR BOTH FILM AND COMIC FROM HERE ON OUT. FAIR WARNING GIVEN.

The scene near the start of the film showing Dan Dreiberg visiting the first Nite Owl, Hollis Mason, is a decent example of showing too much respect for the source material. In the comic, Hollis plays a much bigger part, largely via the excerpts from his autobiography that make up the last few pages of the first three issues. We know him, we empathise with him, we’re upset when he gets killed, a shocking, saddening piece of collateral damage from Rorschach’s crusade. In the movie, Hollis gets that one short scene and is never heard from again. So if you’re not going to develop him as a character why include him at all? We don’t learn anything from the scene that couldn’t have just as easily been included in the (excellent) title montage that sums up the rise, fall and replacement of the Minutemen. The scene doesn’t serve any dramatic purpose so why does it exist? The answer: because it exists in the comic.

A smaller example is Bubastis. In the comic she’s a tiny bit of foreshadowing, an example of the genetic engineering that Ozymandias later uses to create the Space Squid Of Doom. In the film, she’s just a cool (and quite badly animated) pet. Why is she there? Because she was there in the comic.

Ozymandias was a major problem in general, in fact. In the comic he’s portrayed as a cross between John D. Rockerfeller, Bill Gates and Bono. He’s a media star, he’s a philanthropist. Yes, he’s a genius but he’s also approachable and down-to-earth. When the “assassination” attempt occurs, we hear a character saying “Who’d go after a guy like Veidt? He’s a real hero.” When it’s revealed that he’s behind the “mask killings” and then worse – much, much worse – it’s a kick in the gut that’s all the more savage for being totally unexpected.

In the film, he’s a stereotypically superior corporate kingpin. If he’s using his riches to do good works we never see it, beyond one rather nice little speech early on where he’s talking about infinite resources meaning an end to war driven by envy and hate with the twin towers of the World Trade Centre silhouetted behind him. We see him using people as human shields to avoid an attacker’s bullets. When it’s revealed that Veidt is behind the “mask killings” and worse our reaction is “yeah, he seemed the type”.

It feels almost as if the director’s started from the premise of Someone Capable Of Killing Millions To Save The World and worked backwards from there rather than appreciating the nuances of the character as written. In the book Ozymandias is a reflection of Rorschach – the latter is a character who we initially see as a despicable right-wing psychopath but gradually gain a measure of respect for. The former is a character who at first seems noble and sympathetic but who is revealed to be capable of unthinkable atrocity. That symmetry is lost in the film, as are plenty of other subtle parallels and juxtapositions and it’s the poorer experience for it. I don’t mean to sound like I’m complaining that too much has been taken out in the transition from stage to screen, that’s not the issue at all. Almost the opposite in fact – the problem isn’t that Stuff Has Been Taken Out, it’s that the director’s primary concern appears to have been getting as much Stuff into the film as possible, with the structure that that Stuff hangs on a secondary concern.

This is a film that seems to have been made by someone who loves the book too much and understands it too little.

The director’s big stampy bootprints are uncomfortably visible all over the place, making sure that any layers are properly smashed flat. There’s no room for subtext, nothing’s allowed to be hinted at or implied. I could nit-pick any number of examples but I think one sums up Snyder’s approach perfectly. He’s perfectly fine with allowing Rorschach to speak the iconic line;

“No. Not even in the face of Armageddon. Never compromise.”

So long as he then adds:

“That’s the difference between you and me, Daniel.”

For CRYING OUT LOUD. YES. We KNOW that’s the difference between them, you’ve just spent TWO AND A HALF HUGGING HOURS SHOWING US that that’s the difference between them, this line is coming at the end of a scene where they’ve practically specifically DISCUSSED that that’s the difference between them, you’d need to have a MAJOR CONCUSSION not to realise that that’s the difference between them so WHY ON EARTH do you feel the need to SPELL OUT THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THEM, you ENORMOUS HACK?

Honestly, it’s “from my point of view the Jedi are evil!” all over again.

For all that, there was plenty of stuff to like. The look of the film is almost perfect, a couple of dodgy costumes and some extremely dodgy makeup aside. Rorschach is utterly fantastic, and his incarceration is one of the few sequences that the film abridges almost completely successfully – a lot of the detail is gone, but the shape is still right, it’s tense but romps along at a good pace and is comfortably the best section of the movie. Dr. Manhattan comes across as properly unearthly, the Comedian as properly brutal, Nite Owl as properly diffident. The Silk Spectre is OK, but didn’t display anything like the hatred for the Comedian that she shows in the book which rather undermined the Luke I Am Your Father revelation on Mars. The change to the ending is perfectly acceptable. The action scenes are pretty good, albeit over-reliant on slow-mo and maybe erring on the side of “whoa, cool!” a bit too often. 155 minutes shot by amazingly quickly.

I just wish I could have seen a Watchmen movie made by someone who didn’t seem as scared of the source material and the fanbase. I wish I could have seen a Watchmen movie that was more interested in the book’s themes than its look, with its steak rather than its sizzle. I wish I could have seen a Watchmen movie that complimented the comic rather than just trying to duplicate it. I wish I could have seen a Watchmen movie made by Paul Greengrass, basically.

Until that happens, we could do an awful lot worse than the Watchmen movie we’ve already got.

2008 was plainly the Year Of The Awesome B-Movie. I’ve already gushed about The Mist, and now along comes Doomsday. It stars Lara Croft (no, not that one), supported by a bloke who wasn’t even the best voice actor in Fallout 3, the second most annoying Hustle cast member, the third most annoying Deep Space Nine cast member and a man who was comprehensively out-acted by a cartoon rabbit. Oh, and Sean Pertwee, whose picture is still in the dictionary illustrating the word “world-weary”. Good old Sean Pertwee.

The plot is moulded from purest Toshonium. 30 years ago, a killer virus broke out in Scotland that necessatated walling off the whole country. Now, the virus has suddenly appeared in London and it’s up to a small team of commandos to re-enter Scotland and find the only man who might have a cure. Almost immediately, they discover that the survivors beyond the wall have gone totally feral and the quest for the McGuffin goes Very Badly Wrong. From there on out, the story grows steadily more and more bonkers.

Let’s try and put this in context. The strikingly awful Matrix Revolutions was like a Shadowrun game being run by a first-time GM, with characters being railroaded from pointless set-piece to pointless set-piece to collect a string of artificial Plot Coupons. Doomsday is like a Shadowrun game being run by a veteral GM who just happens not to have had time to create an adventure. If you stop and think about it, what’s going on doesn’t make a lot of sense but the setting’s so cool and you’re having so much fun picking holes in the plot is the last thing on your mind.

With the D-list cast, ludicrous story, cheesy dialogue and hilarious costumes Doomsday seems like nothing as much as a straight-to-DVD petrol-station-rack filler accidentally given a summer blockbuster budget by some inattentive studio accountant. Director Neil Marshall (of Dog Soliders and superbly nasty, claustrophobic spelunk-em-up The Descent fame) has created an homage to trashy eighties action movies turned up to 11, then turned up a bit more to Completely Off Its Chump. It’s massively good fun, totally comfortable in its own skin, totally aware and totally unashamed of what it’s trying to be. It’s absolutely rammed to the gills with nods and references to its genre forebears – Mad Max and Escape From New York are the obvious touchstones, but in less than two hours’ running-time we picked up nods in the direction of The Warriors, Gladiator, Lord Of The Rings, Evil Dead 3, Aliens, Lethal Weapon, Robin Hood Prince Of Thieves, Robocop, Excalibur and 28 Days Later. All this, and special effects that hit you like theomeny and will repeatedly get you making the same delighted wincing noise that Mike and Tim always made watching the skateboarding video in Spaced.

Doomsday. It’s running, jumping, shooting, shouting, splodes and really meaty violence just like mother used to make.