KICK-ASS

Okay, so, yes, I’ve read the comic.  But it came out so intermittently over the last two years that, reading it an issue every three-or-four months, I don’t feel I fully appreciated it.  I can also barely remember most of it.  Therefore, I approached this film with a keen sense of anticipation and only a vague idea of what I was going to see.

Inevitably, the film heaves with post-modern inter-textual references to other comic-books and comic-book movies, from the Superman pastiche of the opening credits to the strategically-placed Marvel comics in the comic shop and the cinema hoarding advertising The Spirit 3.  But that is not done simply to stroke the egos of geeks; in this case it happens to be a necessity because Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) and his friends Marty and Todd (Clark Duke and Evan Peters) live in the real world, a world where superheroes only exist in comic-books and comic-book movies.

This is why Dave’s opening monologue wryly points out that his origin has no moments of tragic epiphany like that of Spider-Man or Batman.  In fact, it’s not an origin at all.  It’s a life story.  The life-story of a nineteen year-old.

In-keeping with original author Mark Millar’s mission to explore superheroes in real world settings, Dave’s debut as Kick-Ass results in him … getting his ass kicked.  Because, of course, villains in the real world don’t build elaborate machines and have crowds of henchmen aiding them in their bid to take over the world.  They steal innocent people’s cars or deal drugs and, when challenged, stick the knife or boot in.

As Dave is being stretchered off, we are introduced to the film’s other main protagonists, the family of Damon (Nicolas Cage) and Mindy MacReady (Chloe Moretz).  He’s an ex-cop determined to teach his daughter to protect herself, she’s a ten year-old who likes butterfly knives and machine-guns.  In other words, he’s The Punisher mixed with Batman and she’s Robin.  Their world is more violent than Dave’s and less real.  They live in the hyper-reality of a revenge fantasy.  It is not without meaning that script-writer Jane Goldman has made Damon a comic-book artist.  This is the world in which he lives.  It also gives a well-earned opportunity for John Romita Jnr (the comic-book’s co-creator and artist) to get his gorgeous art-work on screen.

When Damon pulls on his costume – which deliberately echoes Batman’s Kevlar armour, he adopts a very mannered, hesitant vocal pattern.  At first this mystified me, I thought it was Cage trying too hard then, suddenly, it dawned on me: He’s doing Adam West.  Cage, of course, has wanted to play a superhero in the worst way for a long time.  He was pencilled-in to play Superman some years ago but, thankfully, that didn’t happen.  The closest he has so-far come to realising his dream was playing the ludicrous Ghost Rider in the pointless film of the same name (2007).  This opportunity, then, must have come as a gift from the Gods for him.

Dave’s full recovery is remarkably swift and the first element of his life that seems unreal but you forgive the film this conceit because, as it proceeds, he gets drawn further and further into Damon’s fantasy and further away from his comic-book reading mates.

The genius of the original comic, carried through even more dramatically in the film, was the idea of Kick-Ass’ heroism being videoed and going viral on the net, making him an instant celebrity.  Kick-Ass, then, is the perfect hero for the on-line generation with their micro-attention-spans.  It’s worth bearing in mind that the comic came out more than a year before Millar’s fellow-Scot Susan Boyle became world-famous literally over-night by the same method.  It didn’t take long for his prediction to come true!

This is a British film (with every frame – apart from some very obvious New York cityscapes – shot right here in Blighty) and a low-budget one.  Some of the locations and special effects betray the lack of money, but such is the joie de mort of the movie, one can forgive it pretty-much-anything.  Besides, keeping the budget down ensured that director Vaughn and writer Millar could get their vision on-screen intact, Katana-wielding foul-mouthed moppet and all!

Mark Strong – British film’s villain du jour – gives his best performance since RocknRolla (2008) as Frank D’Amico, the comic-book villain who Damon has sworn to bring down.  He is the reason Damon’s Big Daddy alter-ego does have an origin with a tragic epiphany.  He is also the father of the wonderfully nerdy Red Mist (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), whose appearance signals the left-turn into total fantasy for the film, and constitutes the greatest deviation from the source book.

But the star of the show – and a brand-new movie-star in the making - is Aaron Johnson.  I was amazed when I found out that he was English, because he blends-in so perfectly with this American genre with his American friends.  He brings such humour, pathos and out-and-out likeability to Dave that the film’s more outrageous conceits just seem so much more acceptable because he has to deal with them.  If anything, his face is more expressive when he is wearing his mask – possibly because he doesn’t bother with the black eye-liner that has become de rigeur since Michael Keaton’s Batman (1989), which allows his big blue eyes and prehensile eyebrows full reign.

Vaughn has, of course, taken his biggest cue from the source comic book – although the script does stray further and further away from the comic book and, ironically, more and more into fantasy as it proceeds – but he has also taken inspiration from Quentin Tarantino (especially in his excellent use of music), John Woo and Luc Besson in his staging of some phenomenal action sequences.

Like last year’s comic-book masterpiece, Watchmen, this is a film that has found its moment.  The film-going audience is ready to have their super-hero films dissected, just as the comic-reading audience was twenty-years ago.  The film is different to the book, less grounded in gritty reality, but that works.  They are two different and successful interpretations of the same story.  If you’ve enjoyed one, the other will have some pleasant surprises for you!

This film is a gold-plated, pump-action, four-colour crowd-pleaser and it’s loaded for bear!  I can’t wait for the Blu-Ray.

One thing though, one element which just pushes the bounds of possibility too far.  I know scriptwriter Goldman is married to Britain’s richest and most famous comic collector, but the idea that a comic-book geek can have a super-hot girlfriend who also reads comics … nah … That’s just one step too far!

Dir: Matthew Vaughn

Screenwriter: Jane Goldman & Matthew Vaughn

Stars:  Aaron Johnson, Chloe Moretz, Nicolas Cage, Mark Strong

Dur: 117 mins

Cert: 15

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DOCTOR WHO: Time of Angels / Flesh and Stone

The first two-parter of the new series begins with a couple of red herrings.  Firstly there’s the cameo from Mike Skinner (a.k.a The Streets) who doesn’t appear again.  He is hallucinating about trees and grass and the open air because of the hallucinogenic lipstick River Song has kissed him with.  Ordinarily, a smoking gun like that would be introduced good and early because it is going to come back at an important moment later on.  But this doesn’t re-appear later, either.  Although, to be fair, the story is book-ended with a different kiss, but we’ll get to that later.

What it does is proceed to a lovely science fiction idea, River Song (Alex Kingston) breaks into a safe, all Mission:Impossible stylie, and carves a message on the artefact she finds there, so The Doctor can find it thousands of years in the future and travel back and rescue her as she throws herself out of an airlock.  Ingenious stuff.  Bill and Ted sort-of did it first, but it’s still a lovely moment with a great idea behind it an a nice way to propel us into this story.

Of course, River Song herself is just really irritating.  She can write Gallifreyan, fly the Tardis better than its owner (apparently The Doctor has been flying it with the brakes on all these years) and has the previously-revealed close relationship with The Doctor in the future – all of which suggests she is a Time Lord.  But she can’t stop gloating about the fact that she’s knows “spoilers” about his future.  He, on the other hand, never once gives her the merest hint that he knows hers, yet, since the last time they met he watched her die, that’s a pretty big secret to keep.

Writing of being irritating, I find the way Moffat chooses to write The Doctor’s dialogue is particularly galling.  Yes, I understand that the show is meant to appeal to kids and kids don’t understand the laws of grammar so they just make words and sentence structures up.  That’s fine.  In kids.  It was even fine when Joss Whedon started doing it in Buffy because, y’know, they’re American.  One sympathises.  But here, The Doctor’s dialogue is deliberately infantile and that just annoys me:  “ … it’s a Boringer! … I’m Mr. Grumpy Face … They will be sorrier … I made him say comfy chair … That’s extremely not very good …” And so on.  Once in a while for comic effect, fine, but all the time?  No.

I think the cumulative effect of The Doctor being wrong when Amy was right a couple of weeks before, The Doctor being on the back-foot because of River Song, The Doctor losing his temper momentarily every episode now, which makes him seem panicky fallible and this, along with his dithery, graceless mumbling and ill-disciplined use of language is all, presumably, meant to humanise him.  But he’s a super-hero!  He’s an alien with super-powers, two hearts, an indeterminate life-span and something approaching omniscience!  He’s not meant to be human.  Making him human just undermines his authority, as if making him someone who has barely started shaving didn’t already severely dinted that!

Then there’s the inconsistency:  When he finds that he is up against The Weeping Angels, he tells Amy that they are “… the deadliest, most powerful, most malevolent” of life forms.  Funny, but he had a different opinion of them last time, he seemed to feel their habit of propelling you somewhere else in space and time (Hull, in one case) was quite quaint.  What they didn’t do was kill people.  Well, make your bleedin’ mind up.

Right.  Got that off my chest.  Now then …

He also meets Bishop Octavian (Iain Glen) and his squad of battle priests who are, if you’ll forgive the image, going commando for God.  But, of course, there is no God in The Doctor’s universe, there’s only him … so they end up putting their faith in him.

They plunge into some caves, looking for stone monsters (!) and that affords some truly gorgeous scenery and photography, benefiting from some very moody lighting and clever use of matte paintings. 

The statues they find in there are all in a state of considerable disrepair, their faces melted away.  When, in a surprise turn of events that was only patently obvious from the very beginning, the faces start to slowly resolve and repair, that leads to some very disturbing imagery.

There’s no denying that this story is incident-packed, every new scene introduces a new element, a new problem, a new thread, but the highlight of the episode is undeniably Amy’s scene trapped in the locked room with the recording of the Angel.  This is a genuinely chilling moment and the solution (which, characteristically, she comes up with on her own) is ingenious.  It also employs a common thread that has run through several of Moffat’s scripts: The notion of the haunted recording device.  We had the ghostly child’s voice in the radiogram in The Empty Child (2005), the communicator data-ghosts in Silence in the Library (2008) and the conversation with the video-tape in Blink (2007).  Here we have both this video-recording of the Angel, which is interactive, but also the voice of dead characters cutting in on the walkie-talkies.

Then we get the first episode’s crescendo, the climax, the cliff-hanger … and you doubtless know all about the controversy when this happened:

Well, at least it took people’s attention away from the fact that The Doctor has gone to very great pains in the past to avoid using guns.  Here he picks one up without hesitation.  Is that another inconsistency or just me being picky?

Well, if that’s picky, how does the whole jumping up and getting grabbed by the artificial gravity thing work?  And, if it did work, how come it didn’t result in them crashing into the surface of the space-ship as though they’d just fallen thirty-odd feet to the ground?  Not sure I buy that at all.  But the reveal shot when the camera pulls away and rotates 180 degrees is an excellent visual with which to start episode two!

As with all-together too many elements from this year’s season – the lovely idea of having Amy counting down to her own demise, just fizzles out … she doesn’t even get to ‘one’.  It’s an event that doesn’t happen.  Once again, we have villains who don’t do anything, a Doctor who seems to have no sense of purpose and clever plot-points like this one that just dry up or get forgotten about.

Then there is the whole issue of Amy having to fool the Angels in to thinking she can see.  But it has already been established that they communicate with each other somehow, so they must surely know that she is possessed and might well even be in contact with the Angel that has possessed her.  So how, then, can she walk gingerly past them without them realising there’s a problem until she, inevitably, falls over?

The moment where, finally, we see them move comes far, far, far too late.  We have seen too many of them and we have seen them too clearly for them to keep holding the dread that they had at the beginning, the visual cue of actually seeing them move was, I think, needed to inject another level of horror into them.  It’s skin-crawling the one time they do move but, again, comes to nothing.

However, shot through this are some very powerful, very clever lines:  “Yes, if we lie to her she’ll suddenly get all better … If I always told the truth I wouldn’t need you to trust me” These are beautifully enigmatic concepts that Smith delivers well and which prove that Moffat absolutely knows what he’s doing!  The moment when The Doctor faces up to the inevitability of Octavian’s sacrifice is cunningly written and beautifully performed by both actors.  Smith giving long, meaningful looks that betray the depths of character that his off-the-cuff dialogue goes so far to hide, Glen being stoically determined and making a line like “I think you’ve seen me at my best” truly tug at the heart.

Finally, the show-down, where the Doctor uses gravity to dispose of both of his problems in one go, is very neatly constructed and, again, proves what a great writer Moffat can be when he lets himself be.

The coda is very interesting, with Amy being the first companion ever to openly demonstrate a desire to explore the sexual possibilities that The Tardis offers.  Of course, since she is due to get married the following day, one has to wonder about her sense of commitment.  Maybe her claim in episode one that she was “a kissagram” really did mean what we thought it meant.

But no.  She’s a good, clean, honest girl really, who is just having the most galactic case of pre-wedding jitters.

So, over-all, whilst I clearly found much to criticise in these episodes, I do feel they constitute a marked improvement on the first two that Moffat wrote.  It’s as-though he had more time to work on them, and more confidence about where his vision of The Doctor is going.  It’s still not a vision I whole-heartedly buy into, though.

I imagine a more confident, more consistent depiction of the central character (such as that presented by either Eccleston or Tennant) would have carried me past a lot of these problems I have and made for an altogether more satisfying viewing experience.

I am still not enjoying Smith’s depiction of The Doctor, despite the very obvious acting skill he demonstrates which, as I noted with episode one, demonstrates a greater range and subtlety than Tennant managed.  But, and it’s a huge, big but: The character as written by Moffat is just not convincing or endearing or consistent enough for me.  Karen Gillan’s Amy is beat perfect, she is an excellent companion and it is gratifying to see her being allowed to play against the type that young, attractive women in mini-skirts usually are stereotyped into playing.  But The Doctor … sorry, I still don’t trust him.  

DOCTOR WHO: Victory of the Daleks

Now, this is what I’ve been waiting for.  A barn-storming classic Doctor Who episode with moments that I’ll remember and talk about for years to come: Spitfires in space, man.  It don’t get much better than that.

As you would expect from Mark Gatiss, a man steeped in British heritage, this is a terribly stiff-upper-lipped story with a brilliant central conceit.  Churchill, during Britain’s ‘darkest hour’, supervising the war from the dark and dingy depths of his bunker, is presented with a solution, a weapon he can’t possibly resist: A camouflaged Dalek, or an “Ironside” as their supposed inventor, Dr. Bracewell, terms them.  There is something so right about that description yet so curiously wrong about their behaviour: The early scenes with the Daleks as servants, bringing cups of tea or trundling down a corridor carrying a box file, are delicious. 

Obviously, there are a few quibbles with this episode, not least:  Why is no one shocked that Amy is wearing a mini-skirt in 1941?  Where the Hell did the Daleks come from?  I thought The Doctor had destroyed them all.  Again.  Isn’t it convenient that that they just happened to stumble across a Progenitor Device floating in space!  Quite how - and why - would these pepper-pots with sink-plunger hands manage to fashion a cyborg – then make it middle-aged and Scottish?

However, these worries simply dissipate as the episode barrels along.  There’s enough going on here to fill a two-parter (with the “Testimony is accepted” bit clearly the cliff-hanger ending of the first part) but they have packed it all into one episode.  The down-side of that is that none of the lovely ideas contained in this episode really get enough screen-time or chance to develop.  The up-side is that none of them outstay their welcome.  This is the archetypal British war-movie rendered down to its essentials and packed into 42 electrifying minutes.

Little throwaway lines like “Broadsword calling Danny-Boy” (which had me laughing so much I fell off the sofa) are all part of a very rich mix.  The bright sixties colours and sound effects on the Dalek ship are lifted straight from the sixties Dr. Who movies, plus they contribute to Moffat’s apparent desire to channel the spirit of the very earliest Doctors and, in this case, are all the more welcome for it.

Yes, the multi-coloured Daleks are a marketing manager’s wet dream.  Yes, they will spawn a huge line of all-new expensive toys and, yes, they’ll probably be back again at the end of the series.  Again.  But all of that is fine.

The whole episode is a mosaic, a collection of small, perfectly formed ideas stuck together to form a whole and, if some of the ideas don’t work on their own, that’s okay, because they are an important part of the big picture.

Spitfires in space.  Epic.  Iconic.  Perfect!

Ian McNeice’s performance as Churchill is note perfect, every sentence a statement of eloquent defiance delivered in that jowly rumble which we all know so well.  If you’ll forgive me for pinching the best line: “If Hitler invaded Hell, I would give a favourable reference to The Devil …” That’s exactly the kind of dialogue I’ve been waiting for, made all the richer because it is, of  course, a paraphrase of a genuine Churchill quote from the period.

Bill Paterson has fun with a fairly undignified role, spending much of his screen-time lying on the floor being psycho-analysed.  However, this scene, like the previous week’s Starwhale dilemma, allows Amy to shine, managing to talk her Paisley Boy down when The Doctor, once again, fails.  Then, afterwards, when he’s despondent, she perks him up by reminding him that he saved the Earth, which is patently untrue:  She did!

As for The Doctor, well, what seems to be turning into a weekly temper-tantrum at least has an understandable cause this week, because he’s terrified of the damn Daleks.  As with Eccleston’s Doctor, the presence of his nemesis makes him betray vulnerabilities he ordinarily wouldn’t.

This third episode has saved the series, for me.  Now there is at least one episode this year that is up there with my favourites, and that fact buoys-up my flagging faith for the rest of the series.

Well done, Mr. Gatiss.  Keep buggerin’ on!

DOCTOR WHO: THE Beast Below

 

So, I think it's fair to say that no one counts any of the second episodes among their favourites (although I remember re-watching The End of The World (2005), the second Christopher Eccleston episode, over and over because it was such a beautifully constructed statement of intent for the new show).  Second episodes are not the ones to showcase the big badguys and, compared to first episodes, no one really has that high an expectation.  So, pressure's off.

We are re-introduced to our shiny-new characters in their shiny new TARDIS as The Doctor is proving to Amy that it really is a spaceship.  She is out in space, flying, while he is fast hold of her ankle and ... looking up her nightdress.  Hm. Okay. 

Well, this shows that she is a spirited companion, as we have come to expect in these modern, enlightened times.  Her idealised analysis of his behaviour as being that of a documentary film-maker who has to observe dispassionately without getting involved is very succinctly put, and shows why The Doctor has no right to feel superior to her ... because, just like her, he can't help but tamper.

Matt Smith does pathos well, particularly when he, like Eccleston before him, struggles with the notion of being the last of his kind (again).  At least he succeeds in keeping this just the right side of maudlin.  He also does zany quite well, flapping his arms around in a childish, ungainly way like Basil Fawlty (an analogy which is, no doubt, aided greatly by his ill-fitting tweed and that ridiculous dickie-bow). To be fair to him, he does petulant and troubled well too and gets the chance to try on all those guises in this episode.  But I wish they'd stop giving him an acting work-out and settle on just one sort of Doctor for him to be, rather than an amalgam of all that came before.

Moffat has followed a couple of second episode traditions so, like Tooth and Claw (2006) and The Shakespeare Code (2007), this episode features the Queen of England and, like The End of The World it considers the diaspora of the human race.  Where that story had echoes of Douglas Adams'  The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, in that its location was an observation platform set up to watch the Earth consumed by The Sun, this tale looks at what happened to the humans who fled.

Tom Baker's second story The Ark in Space (1975) featured a not-dissimilar idea and there is a very noble tradition in science fiction of generation starships (even Pixar's Wall E had one).  Here, the ship is Starship UK, a floating island of enclosed skyscrapers (as t'were) each named after a different county.  Nice touch that, pity nothing is done with the idea.

The population is under the thumb of an all-seeing authority represented by automated Smilers, who sit there in booths, remind one of eerie, haunted ventriloquist dummies and ... don't do anything.

As with The Eleventh Hour's jellied eel bad-guy, everyone is scared witless of them, yet they don't actually do anything.  They frown, they grimace and, when goaded, they stand up then ... fall over.  Oooh, scary.

The pre-title sequence involving the isolation and punishment of a child is not explained.  I get that people who protest get eaten.  I get that the titular Beast Below doesn't eat children ... but why are under-performing children fed to it then?

Of course, there is a real child-centric feel to the new show (so far).  RTD was determined to make it a family show, to not pander to children but rather to motivate them to aspire, to think, to work at understanding it.  He brought prime-time adult television standards to his scripts and to the production as a whole.  Sadly, I'm not seeing a lot of evidence of that retained here; instead, I'm seeing a children's show.

Having his protagonists slip and slide around in the whale's mouth was, I imagine, originally intended to have some mythical or fairy-tale overtone but, as presented, it is simply Star Wars' Garbage Compactor scene with added gunk.  It is the sort of messy humour that patronising, non-aspirational children's TV is all-too replete with.  That's two weeks on the trot, Steven.  Enough now, please.

But, of course, I suppose the focus should be on children.  After all, as is made clear by the end, The Doctor sees all humans as children.  But then, in asserting his superiority ("You look Time Lord.  We came first!") he simply comes across as childish and petulant.  Later, when he feels that Amy has taken some power away from him he really throws his teddy out, bellowing like a spoiled brat "No human has anything to say to me today!" In fact, he loses his temper so much that he misses the all-important detail that'll save the day.

Thing is, all this "I'm mightier than thou" routine should have been kicked out of him ... The Tenth Doctor's arrogance burned him and that, in the show's continuity, happened only a few days before, yet The Eleventh Doctor seems to have forgotten all he recently learned about hubris.  Well, memory loss has gone hand-in-hand with regeneration in the past, but not this conveniently.

So, however well performed it is by Smith, that just rings wrong for me.  But, however much he hates it, I do like the way Amy thinks for herself, took his advice to see and understand the world around her and acts without consulting him - even after he did get all pissy at her.

What worked brilliantly was the character of Liz Ten: "I'm the bladdy Queen, mate!" Wonderful.  The process that has kept her on the throne for so long, the Forget / Protest buttons is a lovely philosophical commentary on the General Election we are now immersed in ... even if the idea does bear a family resemblance to The Matrix's red and blue pills. 

As with The Eleventh Hour, this script felt almost finished, but there were some continuity, motivation and narrative beats that needed more work.  Moffat's fascination with bio-mechanics (seen in the gas-mask faces of The Empty Child - 2005 - as well as the clockwork robots and cannibalised crew of The Girl in the Fireplace - 2006) is here in the spaceship / alien hybrid and in the half human / half Smiler crew.  But the culture of The Smilers and The Winders suggests at masses of fascinating back-story, but there is no time to fully develop or explain that.  That's a problem.  That suggests a script that still needed work.

One final (small) example.  The realisation that "very old ... and the very last of its kind" things can be very kind is a lovely idea.  But did we really need to have it explained to us three times?  Once, of course, twice, fair enough ... but thrice?  That, again, feels to me like a script that needed one final polish.

And (cue tenuous link here) while we're on the subject of polish ... The new TARDIS.  Same as the old TARDIS.  Not being a hardcore Whovian I didn't realise that the sudden appearance of the St. John's Ambulance logo on the shiny new door is a reboot to William Hartnell's TARDIS way back when.

So I did a (little) bit of research and I didn't realise there had been so many TARDISes over the years.  Here is an exhaustively researched and well-written analysis of the evolution of the TARDIS.  Enjoy.

DOCTOR WHO - The Eleventh Hour

 

My immediate knee-jerk reaction to the extremely-long-awaited debut of the eleventh Doctor:

My first thought, during the first few moments of the new much-heralded Doctor Who, was: For a show which now features an actor with the most precipitously high forehead in all British telly, the level of humour in the new Doctor Who is ironically low-brow.  Firstly we have him almost being castrated by the minaret atop Big Ben (as previously featured in several episodes) and then, in a matter of moments, he is spitting out food.  Again and again and again.

This left a bad taste in my mouth ... Because my big fear for the new series has been that the BBC will use the departure of the three people who brought the show back to life (Russell T, Phil Collinson and Julie Gardner) as an opportunity to make the show safe and predictable and just like every other bland, compromised, lowest-common-denominator show they pump out at a mass audience.

Spitting food and dipping disgusting things in custard is exactly the sort of 'humour' to which Saturday morning children's TV has been reduced.  Please, not Doctor Who too ...

Well, okay, people's opinions on what is and isn't funny are as divisive as their opinions on religion and politics, so I'll just have to let that slide.  But humour there is here, more than I expected.  New show-runner Moffat has, of course, worked very successfully in comedy in the past and has hired a lot of comedy writers for the new series so, maybe, we should expect a show with a lighter, less funereal tone than of late.

Moffat has, at least, retained the child's sense of wonder which, of course, is the show's stock-in-trade.  Little Amelia Pond (Caitlin Blackwood) is a delightful creation, praying to Santa and treating the new-born Doctor with a willing exasperation.  The moment when she dashes out of the house in her nightie, duffel-coat and woolly-hat to sit on her suitcase and wait for the Doctor's return is delicious.  A great testament to children's willingness to accept.

Much as Smith and Moffat must be hoping the children watching will accept them.

So, Matt Smith ... Well, his youth certainly gives him an energy and athleticism greater even that David Tennant's.  It's a logical progression to have him act even more wildly than Tennant did; always before Doctors have had to be pointedly different than their predecessor (Baker was wackier than Pertwee, Baker 2 was more solemn than Davidson) but, as Moffat points out in the Confidential documentary that followed on BBC Three, there is no Eleventh Doctor, just the eleventh face of the same Doctor.  He's the same person, therefore he should carry a lot of the same traits.  Maybe this is why Smith delivers many of his lines exactly as Tennant would and also why Moffat will have (one assumes) deliberately written them to make that happen.  Hopefully, this will fade away as Smith and Moffat establish their own character.

The "Geronimo" catchphrase is already annoying me, but at least they got "Trust me I'm a Doctor" and "The Doctor will see you now" out of the way early.

What's the other thing we know about Moffat?  Well, he does creepy really well.  Here we have an alien which shapeshifts into a man and his dog, which then mirror each other’s actions (which oddly reminded me of Philip Kaufmann’s Invasion of the Bodysnatchers).  We then have a mysterious mother and her haunted children in a room-full of comatose people (all of which reminded me just a little of Moffat's first foray into Doctor Who - The Empty Child).  That's creepy enough and the big shiny eyeballs in the sky are also just icky; but the main monster, Multiform Prisoner Zero, a big jellied eel, really isn't that scary.  It has no motivation and, to be frank, doesn't actually do anything except make the sonic screwdriver sticky and turn into a barking man.

But then he (she?) isn't the real threat, The Atraxi are, because they are going to destroy Prisoner Zero and the planet on which he hides.  But why are they?   To make way for a hyperspace bypass? Why are they so threatened by the Multiform?   The script doesn’t find time to explain this during its 65 minutes (which is feature-length by TV standards) run-time.

What it does give us is a sexual charge between full-grown Amelia (Karen Gillan), now abbreviated to Amy, and the newborn Doctor, which begins with her revelation that she's a "kissagram" (but we all know what that really means) in her tight mini-skirt, and continues through her watching him get undressed to her positively flirting with him inside the new Tardis.  Maybe this is the result of a heterosexual in the show-runner's seat?  We'll see if it develops into something interesting or, given the fact that she leaves behind her fiancé, (either Rory [Arthur Darvill] or Jeff, presumably, we’ll find out soon enough, I imagine), is it simply a retread of the Doctor/Rose/Micky triangle from series one?  The face-off on the roof in the latter moments certainly reminded me of David Tennant's "That's the sort of man I am" exchange in The Christmas Invasion.  The Atraxi crystal star-ship is itself very similar to The Runaway Bride's Racnoss starship (and let's not even think about how that ties in with the shot of the wedding dress at the end).

The new, improved Tardis looks shiny an more solid and the interior is suitably impressive, with touches of many of the previous control rooms hidden in the details, just as the script reminds one of many elements from previous episodes.

The music, during the dramatic sequences is just as bombastic as we've come to expect from Murray Gold, yet the new arrangement of the main theme is oddly cheery and almost whimsical.  I've listened to it a few times now and I think I'll get used to it.

So, overall, how is Smith; do I think he has the energy and gravitas to pull off the role since it has been layered with so much God-like significance?  Hard to say yet.  I think he may have a greater acting range than Tennant who tended to act through his teeth, but I also fear that his age will continue to preclude me from taking him entirely seriously.  But then, maybe that is why they have made the theme chirpier and added more humour, to get away from the weight of consequence that Russell T. brought to the show and which, ultimately, began to hang around its throat like an albatross.

As for Ms Gillan, she'll certainly give dads a motive to watch the show again; although, as a character, I confess I preferred her as a child.

So, the show was certainly not a failure, it rattled along like all the more popular Davies shows, had a good mix of clever ideas and one-liners, introduced some potentially interesting supporting characters, dropped one or two hints of what is to come but, ultimately, didn't quite hang together for me.  The villains were not fully-drawn, they had no clear motivation.  The script didn't feel as polished as we've come to expect from Moffat and, since this will have been the first he wrote and, therefore, the one he had the most chance to re-work, that troubles me a little.

Various elements will, presumably, become clearer as they return in later episodes, such as an explanation of the knowing looks that pass between Gran (Annette Crosbie) and Jeff (Tom Hopper) while The Doctor is hacking into the world wide web.  The 'Myth' brand on the laptop will, one presumes, be a hint of this season's Big Bad.  Both suggest that we'll be back in this quaint little village later in the series. 

Then, of course, we get  the Multiform fulfilling its only significant role (that of dramatic foreshadowing) when it explains to The Doctor that, as with Amy's wall, The Universe is cracked, The Pandoric (?) will open and "silence will fall".  Since neither we not he know what any of that means, it'll obviously come back to bite him later.  I hope Moffat deals with it better than Russell T. did with all that tedious "He'll knock four times" twaddle that dragged through last year.

But we shall see if he can assuage my concerns as well as if he can answer some of the questions the show left me with, such as ...

Why is it called The Eleventh Hour when the countdown lasts twenty minutes (even if it is twenty TV minutes that last nearer forty) and the show itself lasts 65? (Yes, I know he's the eleventh Doctor but that's not sufficient justification for a punning title).

What's the whole duck-pond exchange about?  Was it leading to a pun about Amy's surname, that then doesn't happen.

What about Amelia's aunt?  Where is she?  Why is the child alone in the house?

Exactly how does Jeff make the world's scientists believe him and help him save the world?

What happens to Doctor Ramsden (Nina Wadia), why was she even in the script, she served no purpose?

And finally ... the montage of coming attractions at the end left me untroubled and unexcited ... it even starts like the prologue of Ashes To Ashes, which doesn't bode well, but there's one image ... a brilliant, striking, perfect Doctor Who image: of Spitfires fighting a Dalek Warship in orbit.  Spitfires in Space! Oh yes.  Roll-on episode three: Victory of the Daleks!  Meanwhile ... see for yourself (Click twice to get it fullscreen):

GREEN ZONE

So, you know the pitch: it’s “Bourne in Baghdad”.  Set in the weeks and months following the initial invasion of Iraq, Matt Damon is leading a team who risk life and limb to drive out of the safe ‘Green Zone’ into enemy territory, hunting for the WMDs that were the pretext for the war.  What we already know (and he’s slowly learning) is that there aren’t any.

Damon’s Chief Warrant Officer, Roy Miller, is becoming all-too aware of the disjoint between the war as it is being fought on the ground and how it is being planned and perceived by the civilians back in the Green Zone.  This puts him in the difficult position of being smart enough to know that something is wrong, but he is still soldier enough to take and follow orders.

In-keeping with the way this war is always depicted; the dialogue between Americans and Iraqis is almost entirely made of yelled, hysterical mis-communication.  Damon shouts so much that he sounds hoarse throughout.  Sadly, the dialogue between the Americans is hardly more effective, meaning that Miller is at odds with most of his fellow troops, particularly Briggs, played by the ever-malevolent Jason Isaacs, who glides through the film like a shark (albeit a shark in a ridiculous ’tache).

 This is your typical political thriller with all the underhanded double-dealing politicos, conniving CIA agents and scary special-forces operatives you’d expect but, instead of being set in the relative calm of decadent DC, its in the dust and heat of an actual war zone.

Everything is set to pounding music and the trademark Greengrass wobbly camerawork with staccato editing.  Indeed, the camera never sits still; dialogue scenes are walking and talking, action scenes are shot hand-held and at the run, even a scene of Miller on the computer has the camera prowling restlessly around him.  The action sequences follow the Bourne aesthetic well, cutting from satellite shots to computer screens to heroes on foot, with loads of radio cross-talk.  The pace and sheer volume of this film doesn’t give you chance to think about what you are seeing, so the political message about WMDs is clearly not the point of the proceedings.

They obviously wanted to avoid the trap that many political thrillers fall into, of being too dry and confusing.  This film is certainly neither of those things but, amid all the noise, chase-scenes and gun-fights, there isn’t really any news.  We know our governments lied to us.  We know that blood was spilled and continues to be spilled under false pretexts.  But this film does nothing to address our confusion over politicians’ motivations or our quiet conviction that the war was capricious.

But, are all soldiers as idealistic as Miller and all politicians as corrupt as Poundstone (played with easy, greasy charm by Greg Kinnear)?  Of course not.  Are all Irish actors’ pretend American accents as dodgy as Brendan Gleeson’s?  Thankfully not.

To its credit, the film is careful not to tar all American soldiers with the same brush, but it is also careful not to demonise the Iraqis.  We see them planning to defend their country, but are made aware that many Iraqis feel that this rebellion is simply protracting the torture.  In the character of Freddy, the taxi-driver and translator, we find someone who is desperately doing what little he can to bring around peace in his ruined country.  He is, by pretty-much any measure, the bravest character in this film, being that he is the only one who has no Green Zone to which he can escape.

 The final fire-lit chase / showdown through the burnt-out, Hellish streets of Baghdad is visually extraordinary and as tense as any chase scene shot in the last few years (certainly since the last Bourne movie) but, even during this master-class in how to make great action sequences, I couldn’t shake the uncomfortable feeling that an on-going war is not really an appropriate framework over which to stretch this action/adventure yarn.  It neither adds to our understanding of the war nor offers any realistic closure to it.  How could it? 

So what does the film do?  Sadly, it simply whets the appetite for another proper Bourne movie.

Dir: Paul Greengrass

Writer: Brian Helgeland

Stars: Matt Damon, Greg Kinnear, Khalid Abdalla, Jason Isaacs

Dur: 115 mins

Cert: 15

FIVE SCI-FI FILMS YOU'LL PROBABLY NEVER SEE

The UK cinema market isn't a big deal, globally speaking.  There aren't enough of us here to make our island that important - from a purely financial perspective.  Therefore, sadly ... annoyingly, a lot of films simply never see the light of day here, either because they can't get a distributor or because the distributor they do have doesn't think a UK release will be financially worthwhile.

Thankfully thanks to the miracle of internetography and free trade ... it is possible to import DVDs or download films you really want to see, irrespective of where they were released.

Nowadays, if you know a film is out there ... you can usually track a copy down.  I hardly need add at this point that independent and art-house films need your support even more than big mainstream Hollywood releases and, therefore, downloading them illegally for free is even more damaging to the careers of the people who made the film.  So, if you like their work please pay them for it.  Then they will be able to make something else you enjoy. 

Now, a few cases in point ... trailers for films which, unless I'm very much mistaken, will not be playing at a multiplex near you any time soon ... if you, like me, live in the UK.

Because of the page width of my blog, these YouTube links run off the side of the page on some browsers so, to see the full picture double click on the image.  A second window will open taking you to YouTube where you can watch the trailer in glorious fullscreen if you choose.

Cos, well, cos this is my blog ... I'll start with science fiction films:

The first is a film that has just played at the SXSW festival - Cargo: a horror/sci-fi from Switzerland that bears more than a passing resemblance to Pandorum and contains not a hint of a cuckoo clock ...



Secondly, another SXSW debut: Mars, a film which seems to follow on the motion-capture work Richard Linklater did with Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly:



This atmospheric little piece was released in Europe in 2009, Metropia:



And finally, two films which became available on DVD in The States in 2009, firstly: Battle For Terra:



Last and very much not least is the only one of these films I've seen: Dreams With Sharp Teeth - a documentary about the great SF writer Harlan Ellison.  I saw this film at its only UK screening at 2008's Edinburgh Film Festival.  It is a great film about writing as a career, it's a great film about this particular writer and, even if you don't know how great a writer he is, he'll win you over in what is, essentially, as magnificent an extended interview as I've ever seen an SF writer give.  A real must see ... and only available on DVD in The States.



Go on, try something the big corporations don't want you to see ... because they don't think you matter.  If enough of us import enough films ... they might decide that we are important enough, after all.