Do You See
29 November 2003
I keep watching Charmed, as I’m easy meat for anything like that, as I was for I Dream Of Jeannie and Bewitched and Buffy and almost anything else with magic on TV (do they have to star women? I’m not sure). But tonight’s episode on C5 is a perfect illustration of what is wrong with it.
Plot: a witch doctor decides that the three sisters are too immature and unfocussed to trust with such power, and that eventually their powers will be taken by evil. He has direct evidence that they have already defeated unimaginable numbers of powerful evil opponents, but he ignores that. And despite his being pitched in the end as a good guy, there is no thought of offering help. Instead he decides he has to kill them. So he casts a hex, which is designed to exaggerate their worst tendencies, which will obviously destroy them (it is not made clear how).
It was at this point that the reason for all three acting utterly out of character in the opening subplot scenes became clear: they had each displayed a trait to be exaggerated – tidiness, jealousy of an ex’s new fiancee, competitiveness. Now obviously we would expect such a setup, but I’ve watched pretty much every episode of every season of this, and I can’t remember seeing any sign at all of these tendencies ever before. Obviously a better idea would have been to play on their real character traits, but you can see why the writers didn’t do that – they don’t have any.
Martin Skidmore in Do You See • No Comments
28 November 2003
I was trying to work out what it was about Elf that reminded me of Ghostbusters. I loved Ghostbusters as a kid, and really rather like Elf. Perhaps it is the slightly fantasy setting of both films. The fact that both are firmly rooted in a vision of New York being a slightly curmudgeonly wonderland. Perhaps it is just the Saturday Night live alumnus aspect. Probably what it has most in common is an appeal to both kids and the ads. Jphn favreau has managed to direct a film which fakes a subversive attitude but is at its core really, really sweet.
It helps that the casting is so good. Bob Newhart is wonderfully doddery as Papa Elf, and frankly Ed Asner current owns the role of Santa. The New Yorkers also manage to convince, Zooey Deschanel is winning in a hugely underwritten role, and Caan and Steenburgen really do convince as a vaguely (but only vaguely) unhappy couple. The film rises and falls on Will Ferrell though, who grins his way through the film, perhaps equating innocence too much with stupidity, but wrings laughs out of the lamest of set-ups. One of the nicest things about Elf is how it has been properly screenwritten, the plot – whilst ludicrous – makes just about enough sense for it to be funny and heartwarming. A very good family film, which probably sounds like faint praise, so go back to the Ghostbusters analogy.
Oh, I’ve finally realised. The reason it reminds me so much of Ghostbusters: is it has the same resolution as Ghostbusters 2. Don’t let that put you off.
Pete Baran in Do You See • No Comments
26 November 2003
Just to add to that afterthought of Claire Forlani being Box-Office Poison, here is the list of productions she has been in. Meet Joe Black, Mallrats, Mystery Men, AntiTrust and what’s that, right at the bottom of the list. Police Academy VII: Mission To Moscow. This girl is so detrimental to a films fortunes that she could even kill this unstoppable comedy jugganaut. Sorry love, I think you need another career.
Pete Baran in Do You See • No Comments
Jackie Chan’s Hollywood career is a little bit sad really, just when he started to make it big he stopped being able to do all the things that made him good in the first place. This does not mean that he does not still have great comic timing, but it does mean that he seems to be involving himself in some real lowest common denominator tosh. Hot on the heels of the pretty poor Tuxedo comes The Medallion (nee the Highbinders) where Jackie tries to work out the formula to his American hits and replicate it. The formula seems to be Team-Up With A Comedian. The failure here is that the comedian he teams up with is Lee Evans.
Don’t get me wrong, Lee Evans can be very funny. But there isn’t a single gag that works in this supernatural powered, poor special effects effort. The idea of pairing two gifted physical comedians drops the moment that we realise that Evans has been hired to do some sub Norman Wisdom schtick. Suffice to say the plot makes no sense, the characters make no sense and – even for £1.60 at an EasyCinema – we felt robbed.
Note to scriptwriterss (and comic writers since they suffer from the same disease). Merely pointing out an inconsistency in your plot, does not make it go away. Here when Jackie Chan is resurrected he comes back naked. Yet the other characters come back fully clothed. When Evans’s character points this out this is supposed to funny (and a bit smutty because he wants to see Claire Forlani in the nuddy). It just illustrates how bad the movie is.
By the way, Claire Forlani = Box Office Poison. Yes?
Pete Baran in Do You See • No Comments
24 November 2003
The Mother is not as misogynstic as a lot of Hanif Kureshi’s work, but it still has some pretty horrible women in the centre of it. On paper this is a potentially laudable taboo busting film about sex between an older woman and younger man. It is actually one of the ultimate yuppie nightmare movies. Your mum, old fuddy duddy that she is, starts shagging your boyfriend. Ugh.
It is as a disconcerting horror movie that the Mother works best. Unfortunately all the hard work done by the first half of the film making Daniel Craig a loveable loser is thrown away in the second half making the other man merely a mercenary pathetic creature. This brings the mother daughter relationship closer, and dissipates the wonderful tension that had been built up. The scene when Craig goes nuts destroy all the hard work the rest of the film done in a peak of improv acting nonsense. Its a pity, since Craig and Anne Reid as the titular mother had built up an unlikely but real feeling relationship. By complicating the plot, Kureshi unfortunately allows the characters a get out from an otherwise intractable situation.
Oh, and it is set in West London, and I hate films set in West London.
Pete Baran in Do You See • No Comments
22 November 2003
Bring on the Branston, bring on the Branston, bring on the Branston tang! Featuring excited pickles on forks and sandwiches singing along with Harry Hill, this must be the best TV advert of the year.
And is it just me or is Harry Hill’s TV Burp his funniest work to date?
And, on the subject of adverts, was that “Mouldy Old Dough” I heard on a recent Playstation “Fun anyone” advert?
Lionel in Do You See • No Comments
21 November 2003
Gonza The Spearman
There’s some first-rate discussion of two approaches to acting on this ILE thread (before it zeroed in on Brecht), but there is another approach to the art that isn’t the default modern western style, the psychological (I mean this to include 20th Century movie acting, for instance, not just the Method and so on), or the Brechtian/epic style where the actor is to embody an idea or condition. Maybe this goes back to before Harold Bloom’s claims for what Shakespeare did not only for our ideas of drama but even our notions of what it is to be human, but it is perfectly possible to play a person without trying to create or evoke their psychology, or without making them emblematic of some abstraction.
I thought about this last night after watching Gonza The Spearman, a 1986 Japanese movie based on an 18th Century puppet drama. It’s an interesting collision, modern direction (by Shinoda Mashiro) visibly post-Ozu and Kurosawa, with an aesthetic often strongly redolent of 19th Century Edo prints, and using rather mannered plot and indeed acting. The acting is an odd collision itself, in that the titular character and star is a very early major J-pop star, Go Hiromi, but maybe the heightened gestures and expressions of a pop singer convert to a pre-psychological approach quite easily.
Anyway, I think this style that seems inexpressibly dated, almost impossible in the west, is still not uncommon in Japan. It shouldn’t be confused with bad acting, it is a distinct way of approaching what acting is.
Martin Skidmore in Do You See • No Comments
Right, there’s this film about a guy called Noi, and he’s an albino. The film is called Noi Albinoi. Really before I went in I though Noi Albinoi had a proper, deep meaning, rather than – hey look at Noi, he’s and albino. The film is a bit like this. For eighty minutes of its ninety run time its pretty much watch Noi. Luckily Noi is a charming character, if troublesome to his teachers, his classmates and his family. He sends a tape recorder to school instead of attending, fixes fruit machines to win and scams his way around his sleepy Icelandic village.
And then something happens. Before thatsomething happens it looks like Noi is going to end up dead or in prison. Smart but nihilistic he starts getting into trouble, and losing his charm too. then something happens to put Noi’s life into perspective. The film is equally charming but inconsequential until this final sequence. Its a bit late to exactly save the film, but it does make the previous hour and a half worthwhile. Gentle, eccentric and at the end thought provoking, its just a film about an albino called Noi.
Pete Baran in Do You See • No Comments
20 November 2003
What do I hate the most in movies and TV? Stupid people. This may seem harsh, okay, stupid characters. Actual stupid people can be quite interesting on reality TV. Despite playing an college English teacher, Meg Ryan’s character in In The Cut is termendously stupid. There is a hint to this when she illustrates her lecture on To The Lighthouse by drawing a lighthouse on the blackboard. Jane Campion’s film uses shaky camera, intimations of repression and lashings of sex to try to hide her idiocy, but in the end I was waving my fist at the screen as if a group of kids in a haunted house had just decided to split up.
Basically in the sketchily defined world of Ryan, there is a serial killer. For script economy reasons were are only really introduced to three suspects. Kevin Bacon’s weirdo ex, Cornelius her intense black student and Mark Ruffalo’s sexy yet moustachioed cop. We quickly find out that the killed has a distinctive tattoo, which Ruffalo has. Yet this fact is never, ever followed up, through the two more murders. Instead Ryan is happy to keep shagging Ruffalo and then worry about him being the murderer. The viewer, veterans of much more complex TV mysteries, know that if there are three suspects, the culprit is none of them. Since there is only one other male character in it… The tattoo situation being so important that we know from the moment it is raised that the killer isn’t the student or Bacon. Which means it must be Ruffalo, which would remove the suspense so it must be someone else.
Campion would probably riposte that this is not really a murder mystery at all, rather a meditation on sexuality and Meg Ryan’s new brown hair. To which I say don’t make your lead character so stupid. The key point is that a film is always in trouble when it kills of the most likeable character in it. Here this is Jennifer Jason Leigh’s sister character, and from the moment she got it, I could not care less.
Pete Baran in Do You See • No Comments
19 November 2003
Law and Order: Special Victims Unit celebrated its 100th episode by airing one of its most freakiest. Castration in Grand Central Station, (Cragen “Penectomy, how often do I get to use that word?” Me: “Have you forgotten what show you’re on??”)(Also, since when can you say “pecker” on network TV?) a “Catholic vampire” aka a Nosferatu-looking underground-dwellin’ porphyria sufferer, dungeon masters and kidnapped brides in dog collars, and good old stunt casting in the form of Jacqueline Bisset. And the original Tzeitel and the tailor Motel Kamzoil together again! (Or not. Motel was dead before they got to judge Tzeitel’s chambers. God has unmade a man today.)
tokyo rosemary in Do You See • No Comments
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