ix-viii-ix's Reviews

Vikings (2013–2020)

6/10

Interesting, but badly needs better writing to bring it up to spec

9 June 2013

I'm at the middle of the series now, after being intrigued enough to sit down and watch the first couple based on the visual feel and obvious strong casting and set choices.

What lets this show down is the writing. It's without a doubt quite poorly written, or just not refining the source material well enough for the modern viewer, even taking into account they obviously want to portray Viking society as quite blunt and direct. Several times opportunities were missed to make us sympathise with the main characters, particularly Ragnar Lodbrok, who despite being ferocious and manly has to have a side to him we can all connect with, otherwise he is crude and one-dimensional, a mythic figure but not a man a viewer can decode and understand easily, which is essential if you're going to involve the audience as well as impress them.

Saying that I can see hints the writing is improving, although at least three or four times now I've actually cringed at some of the dialogue and wondered what the actors who have to deliver these lines are thinking!

With that criticism over the casting is excellent, the locations are amazing, the visual feel seems authentic for the time period, with excellent CGI. A particular sub plot has me wondering if this show is trying to be authentic at all, but it seems fun and enjoyable, if not entirely well thought out. Hopefully a second series will allow the team behind it to refine their ideas and bring the viewer in more. I plan to continue watching.

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Another Earth (2011)

8/10

Rather beautiful and sad

10 December 2011

I went to the cinema on the spur of the moment, I had a couple of hours to kill. I scanned the billboard for anything that might seem vaguely interesting - "Another Earth" sounded science fiction-y so I bought my ticket and went in.

It's important I explain this for two reasons: first because I saw this movie "tabula rasa", having not seen trailers, read reviews or having any idea what it was about. Secondly it became evident from the bad- tempered muttering in the back I wasn't the only one to have done this.

At first I struggled with the concept, but I kept an open mind and a very different movie to the one I thought I would see developed, and was actually quite well done. After about 20 minutes I was ready to get up and leave, but giving it time paid back dividends, by the last half-hour I had become too involved to consider leaving.

The story is a slow burner that grips you incrementally, and while the occasionally grainy or out of focus shots give you the strong impression this was made on a shoestring, that is no reason to hold anything against it. Having seen the high budget yawn-fest "Transformers" I can actually say that given the current state of big budget science fiction this is a refreshing, if a bit left-field approach to the genre.

Evidently my companion viewers in the cinema, a small group of guys, were not getting as much out of the deeply troubled love story that forms the basis of the plot, and they made their discontent very audible to my irritation.

In brief, not a film for everyone, but if you're in the mood for an introspective slow-burner and you've got the patience for it, this film will prove a rewarding experience

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Mad Men (2007–2015)

10/10

Like bathing yourself in a heady mix of chocolate and whisky

27 April 2011

Donald Draper, or Dick Whitman (Perhaps a curious reference to the "self-made man" archetype Richard Whittington of the fifteenth century) is amongst the most perfect and repulsive characters our modern psyche can deal with.

He is a serial philanderer, a tyrant of the workplace, frequently drunk and possessing the sort of attitude towards cigarettes as would see you bodily flung from an office building today. For this reason our higher orders of consciousness discount him as a dinosaur before he has even lifted that first ice-cold scotch to his chiselled face.

Yet he is also a hero, a man of his own making, a man unafraid to take risks or show his true brilliance. He is a man who does not chafe under the sort of restrictions or social mores men feel themselves subject to in our modern era. For this reason he is beautiful.

He is also beautiful I suspect for a number of other reasons. He represents an era of expansion, of confidence and of a world untainted by shades of grey or the critical reactions to our decisions right or wrong. He is a trailblazer, a rebel, a pirate of Madison Avenue.

That we have to look back so far to see things we like about ourselves, as well as dislike, shows you we are not what we once thought we were. Donald Draper's world unknowingly survived in the shadow of the gearing- up of two nuclear superpowers for total annihilation. But it also survived in that postwar halo of assured certainties - America is a force for good, Western industry is the most advanced in the world, democracy and the American way must always prevail. In other words the American dream still had substance, it was a cheque still being made out to cash, something the ordinary man could achieve.

Perhaps the passage of time has convinced us otherwise, perhaps it is the failure of our leaders to finally send that cheque to everyone, but what Mad Men does so -almost sensually- well is to put you in that time and show you when the cracks started to form. We didn't know it then, big changes take many decades to happen, but something was happening to our dream, our tortured dream of centuries of hope.

Some will blame the thrusting capitalism which Don typifies for our stagnation, others will blame the changes made even back then which altered our model of how we look at ourselves. It still can't make it too far from the truth. Mad Men is superbly written, beautifully acted, well scored, rich historically and detailed.

But it's nostalgia, we like it because maybe we see back then we too might have made something out of nothing in that age when anything was up for grabs, and lived the American Dream. We're not that country any more though. It's a tragedy, not just a drama.

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Outcasts (2010–2011)

3/10

Watched "The Deep" or any of "Spooks"? Then you've watched this.

8 February 2011

It's actually quite remarkable, when you think about it, how homogenised writing for the BBC has become. One would expect different writers to have very different approaches to their work, and even if that wasn't that case, you'd expect them to mess around with their own work a bit and pull a few surprises on their audience.

The BBC must value totally imagination-free scripts then, to have allowed the production and vaunted release of Outcasts as it has. Other reviews have compared it to BSG unfavourably, but that does it the injustice of assuming it is actually science fiction. What Outcasts is, as far as I can make out from the first episode, is a BBC family drama incidentally set on an alien planet. One has to wonder at the spectacular idiocy of the producer who assumed this would work even after the damp squib of "Survivors" or the polished-but-shallow offering, The Deep. The only way you could tell the difference between those shows was often what background

You can tell it's following stock drama format because it has the same relentlessly cliché characters; the overbearing female toughie, the nice-but-dim assistant heavy type, the rough male psychopath, the supercilious government official, the "OXO mum" holding it together... I could go on. Once in a while you'd hope a writer for one of these shows would be wise enough to read his criticisms and do something about the totally flat level of innovation in UK television drama.

Science fiction should be the place to turn these things on their head especially, because by definition the audience is removed from any reality similar to theirs. Why can't we as an audience have a female lead who isn't constantly being strong and masculine, as if to prove some utterly denuded point that she can hack it with the boys? Why can't we have a character who can lead without routinely getting drunk on his own power, or a male character who is motivated by more than sex or money? No doubt our lead female character will automatically be the voice of reason by the end of the series.

You can only assume that the writers don't know they are writing to a template the audience already knows off by heart, and if that's true then it's really time for the BBC to pack it in and use the money to buy US shows we can actually watch.

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Dispatches (1987– )

8/10

An example of excellent investigative reporting

8 December 2007

Dispatches is a highly acclaimed British documentary series, shown by Channel 4, that probes some of the defining issues of our time. It essentially takes you behind some of the stories you see on the news to establish "what's really going on". Along with the excellent "Unreported World" series it is some of the best investigative reporting and aggressive documentary making currently produced on British TV, no small feat considering the prestige and reputation for thoroughness internationally of British documentaries as a field.

Recently the show has slipped into less intellectual territory to pursue sensationalist, attention-grabbing headlines. The show "Mark Thomas on Coca-Cola" typifies this for me, purporting to show the link between Coca-Cola and various human-rights abuses it is responsible for. While the show has always had a left-leaning slant it is usually more balanced and I doubt there is anyone in the Western world who hasn't seen at least one corporation dragged through the headlines for the sake of public disapproval. This doesn't mean the show lacks an edgy, gritty feel, but nowadays it seems more interested in publicity then the cutting-edge of world affairs, which make some of its themes and arguments a bit dated (but does spice things up a bit in a "Michael Moore" sort of way!), and, if you are unfamiliar with the series, unapologetically anti-American. The story (referring to the "Coca-Cola" program) about Coca-Cola's marketing to the Third Riech was all well and good, but I'd heard it all before, along with IBM's (much more thought-provoking) alleged culpability in the Holocaust, and I can remember thinking how earnestly the link was made between the marketing of a soft drink and Adolf Hitler's plans for world domination!

The above paragraph is my own personal grumble at the series, and you can only really pick apart a show when it has totally involved you in it's themes, so please don't let it detract from your enjoyment of what is still an excellent and influential documentary series.

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The War on Democracy (2007)

5/10

Exploitation of a very different kind....

24 November 2007

A well put-together documentary that makes you think about the issues it discusses, with a couple of fatal flaws in its argument that make you love it or hate it, depending on your existing political affiliation. As a longstanding admirer of Milton Friedman, who is lambasted in this film as the economic "mad scientist" of Chile, I disliked it.

Pilger is successful at creating controversy and getting those vital emotional scenes in, but he very much shoots himself in the foot elsewhere. The fawning interview with Chavez (who Pilger, like Ken Livingstone, another old red, seems determined to defend at all costs)leaves a bad taste in the mouth, and indeed many of his scenes describing the bright new Venezuala (like the reading/writing class) give the appearance of state intervention.

Similiarly this film can be easily divided into "light" and "dark" scenes, the darkest being Pilger's descriptions of the USA, usually in front of Capitol looking ominous beneath a grey sky. It shouldn't surprise you the revolutionary rhetoric of the cold war makes an unwelcome re-appearance, America is guilty of ill-defined "imperialism". It's motives for wanting regime change in S. America aren't explored at all, besides a couple of tired old CIA veterans dragged into the light for re-examination of what we already know.

It's pure polemic in some sections, where Pilger abandons all notion of impartiality and speaks directly to the camera. Chile's success as one of the few countries in S. America with a viable non-distorted economy is explored only as far as its homeless problem, while the real reason Chavez's dystopian Venezuala is able to function, the billions in oil bucks handed to it every year by the US and other Western countries, is smoothed over. This style of reporting hasn't been around since the cold war, it's ideas from the decades of revolution (look what a success that was!) between 1940-70. It's my opinion that Pilger, like a lot of old lefties (Galloway, Livingstone, Pinter), was thrown askance by the the collapse of the USSR, and it has taken him, like them, a good deal of time to find their feet in a world which the dreaded capitalism has well and truly won. The re-appearance of any form of revolutionary socialism, no matter how authoritarian, has them jumping over one another to attack the USA and Latin America has become the new battleground. We were on the subject of exploitation....?

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Lady Death (2004 Video)

1/10

Saw it 3 years ago at sci fi festival in curzon theatre, Leicester Sq

31 July 2007

And it falls squarely into the category of "awesomely bad" - ie a movie drunk students would rent to get a kick out of. I was at the sci fi movie festival and all I remember is a wave after wave of hysterical laughter as this movie premiered. Other critiques will better describe this movie's fecal nature, and I felt oh-so-bad at the poor guy from the production company who had turned up, obviously to gauge the audience's reaction. What he got was the sci fi equivalent of a drunken student audience, and after a "serious" anime movie, I think it was "sky blue", the audience was in a sombre mood, and then this movie opened and within seconds everyone in the room was rolling in the isles. I will bullet point the worst parts;

Script: The funniest, and worst part of this movie, it clunks along a linear and predictable road with the occasional ill-thought-out aside. Rubbish, but eminently laughable.

Animation: Poorly done, and put together, if you can put up with drab backgrounds and gradually skimpier costumes for the heroine (I know I can!), then watch out for the montage where she "trasforms" from a Swedish peasant girl into LADY DEATH!!!

Characters: So one-dimensional its painful, there is a brief backstory (with side-splitting lines of dialogue) and little light is shone on the actual motivation behind some of the main characters.

So, in a nutshell, if you've got a captive audience and a few beverages lying around (try and make sure they're alcoholic to ease the pain), then slip this movie into the DVD and get in a "mystery science theatre 3000" mindset. There is no other motivation to watch this movie other than to laugh at it, and its not meant to be a comedy. DO NOT WATCH THIS MOVIE ALONE. It could possible be even more boring to watch solo than "New World" with Colin Farrell as you won't be able to have a laugh at the ridiculousness with a friend or two.

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Hitch (I) (2005)

5/10

Pale comedy, light entertainment

22 May 2007

Warning: Spoilers

One can understand why some people think this film is a valid and even enjoyable way to pass time. I first saw this movie during a bus trip on the West Coast of NZ, the most remarkable thing about it was that it managed to stretch out an already long trip until you felt impatient to leave the bus. On a purely observational point the female half of the audience were the ones getting up, chatting, smiling and laughing after this movie, while most of the men had either given up watching it or fallen asleep. Perhaps that serves to illuminate why this movie gets a somewhat skewed rating both on IMDb and elsewhere.

One thing this movie does to is market exceptionally well, it knows perfectly well what it is and that it has a broad target audience, and while some viewers may find the rampant re-use of tired old clichés stultifying the trailer will at least have given you an idea of the movie itself. Having said that the trailer really does give away ALL of the decent jokes in the movie, from Will Smith's allergy problem to the gentle parodying of male relations.

The plot, quite frankly, is ridiculous and insulting if you try to take it seriously for even just a moment, but hey, it's Hollywood and movies just like Hitch are churned out in unfortunate quantities for the viewing public. Hitch is definitely not the worst of these that I've seen so far, but if I was channel surfing it would be one to miss personally. There are three distinct plot lines following the three most prominent characters and eventually, following tradition for a romcom, they all merge into one big happy ending #SPOILER#(and a wedding just to draw in those extra female viewers).

You could analyse the movie industry all day but at the end of it Hitch is a cash-cow of a movie, light on production cost, light on writing development, light on acting fees (the movie revolves around Will Smith) and if they don't completely foul up and get a bomb Columbia can count on drunk teens, DVD sales and the massive romcom market to get a worthy profit. The acting is disinterested, once again this is a film with only one A-lister and as such the whole movie is oriented around him, with two very obvious secondary stereotypes, the love interest-Eva Mendes and the goofy overweight sidekick-Kevin James. James' acting is at least noteworthy seeing as he is the ready butt of nearly all the movie's jokes. Sound is just as you'd expect, light and fruity, this kind of movie is after all the "lounge music" of cinema. The writing as mentioned before is dogmatic with some occasional flair (don't count on too much to keep you going after the first couple of high-profile jokes though). To sum Hitch up I'd have to say, if you're looking for involvement look in the "serious movies" section. If you like Will Smith he's done better than this. If you want something really funny look elsewhere, if you're looking for a romantic movie this doesn't fit the bill, if, however you find yourself absolutely positively stuck in the house without anything to do and this is the only recent movie on TV it will provide you with adequate entertainment. Personally I felt just a little bit sick after watching this (but maybe that was the long bus ride)!

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