Archive for the ‘TV / Media / Music’ Category
Written whilst angry. Coherency suffers as a result
Life on Mars kept audiences in rapt attention because of its premise. A Manchester cop from 2006 is run over by a car in the middle of an investigation into a serial killer, the latest victim of which is his girlfriend. Our hero, Sam Tyler, wakes up in 1973. The first episode dealt with his investigation of the same serial killer, three decades previously. Naturally our hero deals with the crisis, but the audience is left with some questions (which set up the series)
Is our hero in a coma?
Is our hero from the 1970’s, and the future was a delusion?
Or Is our hero actually back in time?
Of course, there was every hint dropped (from doctors voices, to the voice of his mother, being stoned on drugs, about to have his life support turned off, to electro-convulsive therapy literally tearing the world apart) that he was in a coma. But surely it couldn’t have been that simple? Because otherwise why would the question at the start of the series be posed? Lardy Jeremy Clarkson lookalike Matthew Graham must have had some sort of genius plan up his sleeve, surely?
Well, it turns out that after 16 hours of my life, waiting for the answer to the question and being forced to sit through a barely entertaining retro cop-show in the interim, that no. In fact, our creator Mr Graham decided to instead frustrate, annoy and alienate his audience in one fell swoop.
Sam Tyler wakes up from his coma in 2006, immediately forgetting any possible crisis, remorse for his (presumably dead) girlfriend. Of course if he was able to affect change in his past, then he’s managed to solve quite a few cases. He’s a hero. But no, the whole thing was fantasy. Gene Hunt, Maggie, the boys, are all a brain tumour induced fantasy in which he is the unloved central character.
When he wakes up (through a series of rather trite flashy camera moves) he finds 2006 ‘boring’. I’d find 2006 boring if I’d somehow managed to forget my job, my girlfriend and the serial killer I was chasing, but that doesn’t seem to matter to Mr Graham, who decides to skim over the following questions:
Was Sam back in time?
Did Sam change the future with his actions?
Were the events with his father and mother when he was a small boy real?
Is any writer of a mainstream TV series going to end the show with the lead character’s pointless nay moronic suicide?
No, sorry, they answered that last one. In the world’s most obvious steal from ‘Vanilla Sky’ Sam hurls himself from the roof of the police station (A good 10 storeys) and back into his coma. Reunited with his old crew and the radio blaring out that Mr Tyler is close to death, he speeds off into the sunset to solve a crime, the test-card girl ‘switching’ off the TV as Tyler dies, happy in his fantasy.
In short, Tyler decides that living his life is too boring, so he returns to his fallacy. The same fallacy he’s been trying to escape (and us with him) for the last 2 years.
Did it ring a satisfying conclusion to the show? No. Was it logical for Sam Tyler to instantly change his mind and decide that he wanted a few brief snatches of fantasy because he wasn’t man enough to face up to his own idiocy? No. But Graham did it anyway. This wasn’t a ballsy narrative decision, this was lazy, hackneyed and clichéd writing that hurts even more because this is 2007, and we expect better from TV writers, especially in this country. Our memory spans back 8 months, but obviously Matthew Graham’s doesn’t.
Life on Mars. The biggest let down of 2007.
Friend, Colleague and current exile from MSN, Edward A. Jennings is the Clerisy’s resident Music critic, so I’ve deliberatley avoided discussing it here because I don’t want to muscle in on his turf.
That said, here is my attempt at muscling in on his turf:
You see, over Christmas and New Years, I prepared ‘Dan’s The Best of 2006′ as a playlist. I even went to far as to collate the mp3 files in case I wanted and felt the need to pass it to my friends. But then It hit me, the conversations post-sharing would be something along the lines of ‘But Dan, we respected you so little already, but your music taste has proved to us all that you’re a grade a wanker! . So I didn’t bother.
But then I, for my own playlist edification, wrote one for Jan / Feb 07. And today, on the cusp of discovering (through a glorious accident) A.C. Newman, I started my Feb/March 07 playlist, and so it seems I shall be producing these, bi-monthly, for the year (Or so I hope). So - I thought I’d bore you with a list of said songs, but not the MP3 files for them. if Eddie wants to enable that, then he can, but as far as this goes, I’m hands off.
NOTE: A lot of the songs in the 2007 files won’t actually be 2007 songs, because I choose playlists on when I discover them, as opposed to the year in which they are produced.
Dan’s the Best of 2006
1. I Will See You in Far Off Places (Morrissey)
2. Living Proof (Cat Power)
3. Love & Communication (Cat Power)
4. Call Me When You’re Sober (The Allman Brothers)
5. We Share Our Mothers’ Health (The Knife)
6. Lost & Found (Feeder)
7. Blessed Night (Howling Bells)
8. Never Be Lonley (The Feeling)
9. Sewn (The Feeling)
10. Crazy (Gnarls Barkley)
11. Atlantic (Keane)
12. How We Operate (Gomez)
13. Empire (Kasabian)
14. To Me You Are A Work of Art (Morrissey)
15. Sophia (Nerina Pallot)
16. Steady as she Goes (The Raconteurs)
17. Dive (The Sanderson Pitch)
18. Land of a Thousand Words (Scissor Sisters)
19. Follow Me Home (Sugababes w/ Amelle Barabbah)
20. Sexual Intercourse : American Style (Mitch Magee)
Jan / Feb 2007
1. Gold Lion (Yeah Yeah Yeahs)
2. Grace Kelly (Mika Mikelsson-Götterdämmerung)
3. Mickey (Bill Conti)
4. Gonna Fly Now (Bill Conti) [Hey, Rocky VI was out, what was I gonna do?]
5. Redemption (Bill Conti)
6. Golden Skans (Klaxons)
7. Let’s Make love and Listen to Death from Above (Cansei De Ser Sexy)
8. Standing in the Way of Control (Gossip)
9. And Repeat (Mellowdrone)
10. Now or Never (Josh Groban)
11. Catch You (Sophie Ellis Bextor)
12. Ruby (Kaiser Chiefs)
13. Behave (Charlotte Hatherley)
14. How am I different (Aimee Mann)
15. Simple (The Beta Band)
Now, perhaps I shall make more of this than a list, that is up to my generous and sexy host’s feeling on the matter, I may even talk about my choices and review them, but for now all you’re getting is the list.
Channel 4 of late have been broadsiding us, (The audience) with a variety of adverts in which Calvin Klein adverts are parodied, because all of the individuals are wearing red glasses and braces. It’s the promo campaign for ‘Ugly Betty’ which kicks off here in January.
Ugly Betty, as far as I can tell, is the story of a girl who is ugly and called betty. A cursory IMDB goes on to tell us that Betty works in (wait for it) the Fashion industry.
So far so ‘Working Girl’, or
So far so ‘The Devil Wears Prada’, or
So far so ‘She’s all that’.
Either way - this apparently original (ho ho!) and novel conceit is marred (I say even with nary half a month before the first episode is screened) because you can plainly see that despite this being touted as (Executive producer) Salma Hayek’s shout-out to the Ugly of America (Yes, they patronisingly say, even the morbidly ungoodly can have jobs, and speak to your (thinner) betters!) the conceit collapses, because America Ferrerra is plainly gorgeous and as far as Hollywood can make in terms of a concession to ugly people is thick Anastasia* glasses (Which, if you Americans have been paying attention to your bloody Baristas these last five years, aren’t unfashionable anyway) and Braces. Wow.
Which is serving to make me wonder what the point of this show is going to be, if I can save myself the time and effort and rent the aforementioned three movies and save myself the bother of watching a whole season of this show. Maybe you all should too.
*The hot singer, not the Russian princess.
Sadly I retract my previous statements. Cliff was right. We’ve been fobbed off with a meandering, puerile, cackhanded attempt at doing ‘modern, adult’ sci-fi. Torchwood is an overblown wobbly mess wrought from the mire of it’s own self confusion. It doesn’t know if it wants to be a serious, dramatic work that RTD was banging on about when he said he wanted to create something modern and sexy like Buffy. It doesn’t know if it wants to be a BBC3 rom-drama like Bodies or the one where everyone was shagging, mostly because that’s awfully mishandled too. It certainly doesn’t know if it wants to be a modern, urbane, tight real-world Sci-fi show and it certainly hasn’t achieved to stride those three in any meaningful way.
Maybe because my expectations have been raised so high this year it is impossible for me to watch Torchwood objectivley, but every time it flashes a moment of sheer brilliance there are twenty more instances I can drub simply by putting my tongue out and making monkey noises. For example - take tonight’s episode. The cut-price Marc Wooton takes the spotlight whilst the other characters remain incedental, so far so ‘Love and Monsters’ (Again, you can’t have an ’sideways glance’ episode in your spin-off ape almost to the bloody shot the same ’sideways glance’ show you did yourself barely months ago). If that wasn’t bad enough, the bog-eyed bloke from Grownups portrays a mouth-breathing moron who stiffs our hero without any real reason for doing so, yadda yadda. Finally, the whole father/son relationship with the missing parent was bollocks. They could have sustained some credibility but for the ludicrous singing sequence. Singing?! Way to break the mood…
… I’ll stop. I’m ranting. I have an exam on the Law of Evidence and the lecturer (did I mention he’s a leading authority on criminal law in this country?) likes to give two answers that are almost identical to sort the men from the boys. To me. Who will probably agonise, pick over the two answers and then pick the wrong bloody one because I’ve overthought it.
(inhale)
… It’s probably because I’ve been spoiled this year. In the last four months I’ve watched almost nothing exclusivley but The Prisoner, Rome, Battlestar Galactica, Deadwood and the oh-Lord-I’m-coming!-I’m-coming!!!!!-good The Wire - and when you have that much HBO careening through your veins, almost everything else seems sub-par.
But let’s get back to Torchwood. Let’s examine two general flaws with the series.
Ideas are Poorly Thought Out.
For Example, last week Suzi Costello* came back from the dead.
How’d she manage that? She did so by using the glove from ep 1.
But the Glove only worked for 2 mins! Yeah, and we proved that she couldn’t master it herself neither
So how come she was alive for the whole ep?, well that’s not the question you’ll be asking in a moment
She put a virus in the computer just in case she was killed? Yeah. Because when you go on a mental serial-killing spree, the first thing you do, as a mentally ill person, is put in all of these ‘just in case’ little doodads which stop the team from reaching you.
So what was that shit about the father? Oh that was BBC3 being ‘edgy’, cos like we as audience thought she was going to save his life, and then, when she got there, she, like, OMG KILLED HIM LOL. Couldn’t have seen that a mile away.
And how did they resolve that? Well… here we come to point 2.
The Price.
Robert McKee’s Story is a book I have read, and re-read, and re-read. I also can barely comphrehend it, it’s so dense, but immaterially - the book is without a doubt the BIBLE for how to write things, and like all good texts on constructing a story, he discusses THE PRICE in detail. The price is the sacrifice the nominal ‘hero’ makes in order to win; i.e. Buffy dies to save her sister, Luke loses his hand and his father, Kirk loses his best friend in the engine room, the Doctor has to regenerate in order to save Roses’ life. The price is the crucial element to any story, and the one I believe makes or breaks the story. If the price is too easy, or the cost is barely visible, what then was the point? For example, and using Torchwood as our guide here:
The Price of Torchwood:
1 - Nothing. Jack gets a headache for 10 mins. (Maybe the price here is that Jack’s secret is revealed, big bloody whup)(No Price)
2 - Gwen offers herself as sacrifice, but oh no. Jack’s got the Deus ex machina from earlier in the show and he uses that instead.(No Price)
3 - The rapist guy commits suicide. Oh, nice. Twist ending there.(No Price)
4 - Before Ianto can kill the woman he loves (Clichéd yes, but would have been the first actual price in the show), Jack, Owen and Gwen do it for him. (No Price)
5 - Jack gives the faeries the kid, but instead of treating that as if he’s just offered up a child to some fucking aliens, he’s quite casual about it. (No Price)
6 - Jack arrives (He’s immortal, don’t you know) and saves the day. (No Price)
7 - The Hot Alien has Tosh, what does Jack do? He throws her the McGuffin. And it defeats her. (No Price)
8 - Jack shoots suzie, but since she’s already dead, it’s hardly a price. (No Price)
9 - Gwen arrives at the truth. Eugene disappears. (Guess what? (No Price))
So yes. Sadly not one episode has required the cast to actually work hard for their supper. Which devalues the series beyond any reasonable expectation of it for me.
Rant over. Sleep now.
*btw, to all TV execs - If you cast Indira Virma in a TV show, could she possibly live in a series, or like - at the very least, not commit suicide? Just once? I watched three shows with her in, in the same week, and she topped herself in every bloody one!.
Mike McCafferty & Jason Makaris’ ‘The Jogger’ was a genius short about a crime solving jogger, done in one take along an entire street. When a production company bought the rights to it, it was pulled offline never to be seen again - but now it’s back on YouTube!. Technically, it’s a masterpiece, it’s hysterical and If you listen to anything I say (Which you don’t) I am telling you now to watch it here at youtube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-cZI8VQwU4
Well, It looks like the money’s gone up again. At least I hope so. They can even afford a helicopter!
Bloody good fun. Not perfect (But RTD never wrote good pilot). The two Twists that will have the fans talking were sufficiently suprising and there was lezzing. What more could you want from a Doctor Who spin off that had a “Fuck” in the first 3 minutes?
It could do with a little more money and a little more of a decent throughline, but it’s certainly a bloody funny show (Chris Chibinall’s second episode is a hundred times better than the pilot, and since he’s showrunner for the series, I’m hoping that it remains that way.)
More commentary later.
Lumpen Faced tooth merchant with the appearence of a man trying to injest his own penis and pretend he’s enjoying it 
Charles Allen the man who will soon be vacating his office to make room for myself if ITV Recruitment ever get back to me has derided Channel 4 as “Banal” and “like a 25 year old still living with it’s parents”. The statement is on a par with a quadraplegic moaning at Pele for his Footballing skill or Ken Livingstone calling George Clooney “An Ugly Wanker”. Allen, who has spent five years turning low rent trash broadcaster ITV into… and even lower rent trash broadcaster with as much entertainment potential as shitting a razorblade and padding his failing companies bottom line by selling off any asset not nailed to the floor, has been regarded by the rest of the civilised world as “A bald deluded retard with as much talent in the broadcasting world as Lew Grade was as a Gigolo”.
Mr Allen was subsequently unavailable for comment. The cunt.
http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/article/ds36310.html
I love you. Your song “Living Proof” is so Chilled, you have literally turned my blood to a aqua blue gel, like the ones they use on Cool&Soothe Strips.
http://www.matadorrecords.com/cat_power/music.html
So, the shouts of joy are exclaimed as I have finally expelled my first pilot for Channel 101/2.
It’s finished. In the can. I realised that I might have a chance to make the August screening, and then realised the PTP is tomorrow/wednesday. Even with express mail, I doubt my little DVDs can get from Lowestoft to LA & NY in under 24 hours. Not even first class.
So it’s going to sit there until the September screening, which is a shame, but at least I know there’s something going up, and It feels as if I’ve taken that important first step. The staggeringly deep first step. It only took about 6 hours to make and it’s 3:39:- short, snappy and the focus group of three who have seen it so far laughed.
I’m not going to do the usual thing and whack it up on Youtube, at least not until September 30th or whenever it is rejected by the respective Prime Time Panels (Or not, if the Lord is smiling down upon us). What I can say is that it is called “Secret History” and is a hard hitting documentary. With buttcracks.
