Drive

A vision in teal and orange, a slow meditation on LA crime that feels personal but is naturally inconclusive.

Reminds me a lot of sections of Pulp Fiction, not least in its ability to make you feel every brutal death. Gosling does a lot with very few words, as Refn and his cinematographer do much with very little light and the natural backdrop of Los Angeles streets. Gorgeous opening sequence.

Overall the story feels a bit pointless (other than reiterating that crime doesn't pay) - much of the suspense comes from the protagonist living under threat of murder from various crime bosses, but he eventually dispatches them with apparent ease, leading me to wonder why the threat mattered in the first place.

This review was imported from Letterboxd by IFTTT.

The Adventures of Tintin

Visually spectacular but disjointed in story and script.

I'll start by being nice: the lighting is some of the greatest I've ever seen in animation, and the detail in skin, hair and fabric is incredible. Motion capture clearly enhances scenes such as the sword fight in the burning ship - but the faces are stuck firmly in the uncanny valley, beautiful in stills but creepy, dead and unsynchronised in motion.

Frozen

"Hoo-hoo! Big summer blow-out. Half off swimming suits, clogs, and a sun balm of my own invention, ja?" — Oaken

Refreshing to see this style of movie feature two women as the main dynamic, who aren't just fighting over men. The 'true love's first kiss' trope hasn't worked since Shrek did it (and did it well, as the point was that they were in fairyland), but the characters' wit was in a modern and slightly different style, the environment was new and the villains less hackneyed than expected. Music variable (For the First Time in Forever's lovely, Let It Go can be nothing less than stonking with Idina Menzel's pipes behind it, but the trolls' song was dire). Not bad, but not topping any lists.

Star Trek Into Darkness

"Bones, what are you doing with that Tribble?" — Captain James Tiberius Perfecthair

A very worthy sequel, with a brilliant villain, with good banter, and succumbing only slightly more to "ooh he said the line he says in the thing" than the first one. As a physicist my favourite part was the National Ignition Facility standing in for the Enterprise's warp core. That's some serious science cred.

Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls

"Shikaka. Shikaka... Shikasha. Shish kebab. Shawshank Redemption. Chi-ca-go, you're outta there!" — Ace Ventura

One of the best comedy sequels I've ever watched - I'd go so far as to say it's better than the original. Maybe just because I didn't get all the baseball metaphors. At least it doesn't hinge on making fun of trans people.

Ian McNeice and Simon Callow are both brilliant foils for Carrey, and some of the set pieces (the arrival at the mansion party, the projection room) are classics. I can never sing Chitty Chitty Bang Bang the same way again.

The Artist

Nice enough as a modern silent film, and modern black and white film. The era and filmic tropes are recreated very faithfully, and Dujardin has one of the warmest smiles in cinema history - but overall it doesn't feel like there's much here. Maybe as I'm so used to the modern busyness and 'rich experience', something with so little to work from just doesn't cut it any more? Yet I still find The General, Sunrise etc. gripping and hilarious. Altogether not sure how this is an Oscar-winning IMDB Top 250 movie.

Terminator Salvation

A reasonable furthering of the franchise. Every plot twist was predictable far in advance, and the writers didn't have the strength to keep the references to and quotes of the original Terminator script to only one tasteful instance, but the story overall worked and paced well between action, suspense and reflection. Sam Worthington's accent was variable as always, Christian Bale's personality was his stock gravelly hard-man, but Anton Yelchin's Kyle Reese and Moon Bloodgood's (what a name) original character Blair found a niche of realism and purpose. The line-less child character of Star might as well have been an inanimate object - I'm sure the young actor did a good job but her presence was purely a tool of the script.

The Wolverine

Stretching it a bit.

The barely-present romantic subplot was completely pointless and transparently tacked-on, the samurai/Yakuza/'disrespect' Japanese setting felt uncomfortably stereotypical, and the secondary villain had no backstory whatsoever. Jackman is once again the perfect Wolverine (the opening sequence in the bar was done well), physically (holy Christ) and tonally, but the film feels like a tedious attempt to wring a higher movie count out of the character. About the only useful transformation as a result is showing Logan's turmoil over Jean's fate - something that could have been accomplished in a flashback or vignette as part of the next X-Men story.

Planet of the Apes

A classic allegory of religious indoctrination against truth and discovery, with added prosthetics. Could have been a Star Trek episode.

The storytelling and the make-up still stand up fairly well (could have been cut down into an episode of TNG, not just TOS...), but some of the pacing is a bit drawn out and unnatural, and the delivery of the line that's more famous than the film itself is out of focus.

Jekyll

James Nesbitt takes the lead in this dark, twisting, slightly predictable Moffat romp with visions of Sherlock, which eventually loses momentum and ends up taking itself a bit too seriously.

Doctor Who: The Time of the Doctor

Another Christmas offering, this time heralding the end of the Eleventh Doctor. Honestly though, it's getting a bit tiring.

On the motion of Bullock in an orbit: Gravity

IT'S SO BEAUTIFUL.

As an astrophysicist, I never quite know how to approach the science in movies. For works like Contact (thankfully written by an esteemed scientist), there's a clear and story-serving divide between the real world and the entertaining fiction inspired by sciency ideas. You can see where the fictions have developed from, and accept them as plausible extensions of reality. I appreciate that scientific accuracy is often rightfully discarded in search of a good story - I'm not puritanical. But movies like Gravity still make me a little fidgety in the science department.

Extra Content: Translation Central

Since this blog rarely gets any use for its original purpose (writing about TV and occasionally movies and related media), I've decided to populate it with more general musings - mostly things that I write as comments elsewhere that I feel are worthy of collection. Beginning with a Tumblr meander on an important object in the history of language and understanding - the Rosetta Stone.

Pageview: Freedom

Freedom by Daniel Suarez

The only comfort we have that the US military is nothing like its portrayal in Daemon is that Suarez was still alive and at liberty to write the sequel - in which it gets worse. A very worthy continuation of the fantastic Daemon story, with the occasional hole or typo (worst author for uncaught typos I've ever read). As with the first book, it's good to read someone who knows exactly what they're talking about when they invoke technology, but doesn't show off.

Pageview: Skippy Dies

Skippy Dies by Paul Murray

This is not the easiest book to read. It meanders, it loiters and the way Murray renders certain characters' thought processes in text via grammar, font changes and disconnected run-ons is sometimes challenging. But it makes the book more real.

Timey-wimey

So it's been well over a year since I last published a post on here. I have to confess, I had an ulterior motive in setting up this blog in the first place - I was applying for a postgraduate degree in film and TV production, and wanted somewhere I could prove my ability to write and that I'd paid attention to TV and film. And it achieved that aim (with the exception of starting that sentence with 'And', just there)! I've been busy on that course for a while. So busy that I haven't posted.

Felix and Murdo

Armstrong and Miller, how could you? A few brief
laughs surrounded by a load of misses and
some spectacular bad taste. © Channel 4 2011

A disappointment. You can tell it’s not written by Armstrong and Miller themselves, but by Simon Nye – who, after writing the thoughtful Doctor Who episode Amy’s Choice, should know better… but then I suppose he did create Men Behaving Badly. Whatever possessed the talented comic duo to throw their lot in with this show? The sets and lighting looked like a bad early 90s soap, the acting was hammy, the premise flimsy and the jokes swung between dull and bad taste. “Hey, I know what, we can have a reference to these two toffs attending Oxbridge, then show a flashback of them bumming in a bush! That’s the kind of insightful satire that Channel 4 really wants brought to a sitcom pilot set in 1908!” I won't even bother to cover the lame shreds of plot in summary form.

Great Expectations

Can Sarah Phelps' adaptation live up to previous
outings of Dickens greats? © BBC 2011

At last, another big Dickensian on the BBC. Having been blown away in my mid-teens by Andrew Davies’ gaspingly epic Bleak House (just look at the cast list – 50 names in the principal corps and not one of them without a Wikipedia article) and the slightly smaller but no less enjoyable Little Dorrit in 2008, it’s about time. But does this three-hour tiddler show the BBC tightening its purse strings, or a lesser commitment to gargantuan period storytelling? Let’s hope not.

Absolutely Fabulous: Identity

Edina & Patsy (Jennifer Saunders & Joanna Lumley)
in their glory days. © BBC 2011

Having never seen a full episode of Ab Fab before, I didn’t know exactly what my expectations for this should be. I’d seen miscellaneous work by most of the cast (Saunders’ Shrek 2 voicing and French & Saunders, Lucy Montgomery in Armstrong and Miller, Horrocks’ Little Voice, the fleeting Naoko Mori in Doctor Who and Torchwood and of course Lumley’s ball-crunching takedown of MP Phil Woolas on the widely-reported issue of Gurkhas’ resettlement rights in 2009, as well as various Comic Relief sketches and her Bond Girl performance), and the occasional clip of the show – my favourite’s at the end of this post – so I almost felt I could grasp the shtick of each character. Patsy Stone is drugged-up, opinionated and completely out of touch with the world, Edina Monsoon is also trying far too hard to be ‘cool’ and younger than she really is through clothes and speech, her daughter Saffy’s the long-suffering sane one trying to help them and her Mother is prying, unappreciated and a kleptomaniac.

And of course I’d heard of the general reputation of the show – my parents thoroughly enjoyed its original run and I remember it being talked about, so it wasn’t a surprise that the buzz for its return in the form of three 20^th-anniversary specials was high. In fact, after cursory research, it appears the show was more highly lauded than I’d expected – the BFI’s 17^th greatest British TV show of all time in 2000, and celebrated recently by Attitude magazine’s Paul Flynn in the Guardian as “prescient […] tour de force comedy and searing satire”. High praise for sporadic splurges of 37 episodes over five series, a two-part TV movie, three one-hour specials and a Comic Relief sketch (and apparently plans for another film). So why did this new half-hour reintroduction feel a bit flat?

Doctor Who Christmas Special: The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe

Claire Skinner's Madge Arwell saves the day... but
doesn't quite trump the year. © BBC 2011

After the usual period of Doctor Who-less anguish since the barnstorming (if not quite the best ever) finale back in October, I was looking forward to the Christmas episode, as my only piece of pinned-down Christmas Day TV, with mild trepidation. Christmas episodes in the past have always been a compromise between the overarching story of the Doctor and Christmas-Day, for-the-kiddies, we’re-filming-this-in-June-but-what-the-hell-let’s-overdo-the-snow-anyway concessions to the season.

The last Christmas episode (the most epic A Christmas Carol, with the ever-regal Michael Gambon, Laurence Belcher as Kazran Sardick giving the best performance I’ve ever seen from a child actor in Doctor Who – which may have helped him gain his recent role in X-Men: First Class, Katherine Jenkins providing the least excruciating celebrity cameo I can remember, and the only Christmas episode up to then not set in London) was the best I’d seen, and gave me real hope for the future of Moffat’s series. This in stark contrast to the nearly unremittingly-with-the-exception-of-Tovey awful Voyage of the Damned (yeah, the one with Kylie and the Poseidon Adventure references… ugh) of the Russell T. Davies let’s-save-something-even-bigger-than-the-world-every-time era.