Any Other Business: Part LXV

As the title suggests, so forth.

The Death of Patterson

What an emotional few days it was last week catching up with network television shows bowing out… Martin Gero has been on a veritable rampage killing established characters in the final (half a) season of Blindspot: Reade, Brianna, Keaton. But to then take out Patterson in a hail of thermite. Hoist on the petard of her own MacGyver’d cleverness, trapped in Rich’s own mini-Pompeii of a self-destructing server silo, incinerated in falling flames while Rich looked on at her slow motion death helplessly. I had to rewind this a few times to actually believe that they had really killed Patterson, the heart of the show, much as Joss Whedon had enraged fans when he killed the heart of his show Firefly in the resolving movie. I understand that Gero is building the stakes ever higher as Madeline Burke becomes ever more monstrous, but there is a point at which you simply tip into excess, and arguably Blindspot has long passed it with her unpunished supervillainy: did we really need this gut-punch?

The Death of Dean Winchester

And then just two days after Sky Witness had inflicted that trauma on us 4Music aired as a triple bill the final ever episodes of Supernatural. And Dean Winchester; lover of bacon, killer of Hitler, eater of pie, vessel of Apocalypse World Michael to kill Lucifer hopped up on Nephilim grace, Scooby-Doo aficionado, and occasional Batman; died on a sharp piece of rebar sticking out of a barn post… Who knows why exactly showrunner Andrew Dabb chose Medium as his model on how to end a series, but the influence was obvious.

Any Other Business: Part L

As the title suggests, so forth.

Modern Family goes big

11 years is a long time for a sitcom to run, Cheers and MASH did it, but they didn’t have child actors built into the premise of the show like Modern Family did. Modern Family is the only American network sitcom that I would stand beside Arrested Development, and for much the same reasons. The faux docu-format, the lack of a soundtrack, and the delight in absurdity made it stand out in a world befouled by Chuck Lorre crudities. What made Modern Family so great for so long was the sheer variety of comedy in play: cross purposes, mistaken identity, sight gags, slapstick, word play, parody. Its weakest moments came in seasons that wobbled towards parody in the way that the final Naked Gun movie seemed to run out of comic invention and leaned too heavily into parody and ex nihilo zaniness. The triumph of the show is that it managed to course correct, perhaps as the maturing of the child actors into adults opened up new realms for the writers to explore. As a result this final season, now airing on Sky One, has had episodes; in particular ‘The Prescott’; that have been dizzying in the sheer number of plates kept spinning for twenty minutes, while the ‘Paris’ special feels like a North by Northwest moment as the writers grabbed one last big chance to do stuff they’d always wanted to but never got to.

Supernatural returns

E4 have finally got round to airing season 14 of Supernatural, two years after season 13. Since then RTE2 have shown the second revival of The X-Files, which seemed at times to be directly pitting itself against its spiritual descendant. Supernatural is not the show it was back in 2005, not least because someone turned on the lights in season 6 after creator Eric Kripke left and they’ve never been turned off again since, which has changed the goriness and mood of the show. But starting season 14 now is an odd moment, because you can’t but be aware that season 15 is coming to an end in America, and its final episode will be the finale for the entire series. Supernatural began in 2005, first aired in Ireland on TV3 in summer 2006, and will likely finish its run on E4 in 2021 or 2022 depending on their dilatoriness. That is an incredible amount of time to have spent with the characters of Dean and Sam Winchester, and their treasured Chevy Impala – which as we know from Chuck turned out to be the most important object in the history of the universe.

The democratic revolution continues

Today is the first day of a further three week period of what feels rather like martial law, imposed by a government rejected by the people but which has refused to leave office – and nobody in the media seems to want make a fuss about that. Far from all being in this together the Garda Commissioner has been actively encouraging people to inform on their neighbours. That feels a bit too much like Soviet Russia for my liking, and, it should be noted, comes just months after Drew Harris wanted access to everyone’s business on their phone ‘to fight serious crime’. That was before the pandemic. As the idea of testing and tracing for a relaxation of lockdown in Germany involves accessing data on phones it’s not hard to see Drew’s snooping being double downed as ‘for the sake of public health’. And yet… a temporary crisis is always a perfect moment for doing away with civil liberties on a permanent basis. By all means lockdown the country for public health, but let’s have more discussion. And if a national crisis needs national unity then form a national government. The refusal to do so should be seen for what it is, and discussed for what it is, a shameful attempt by Fine Gael to profit politically from a pandemic. Their failed election campaign centred on scaremongering that only they could handle the crisis of Brexit. And now they cling stubbornly to power to … make their point that only they can handle a crisis…? Remember Varadkar blustering he wanted to go into opposition? What exactly does it take for Fine Gael to leave government when they lose an election? Must we send the entire Cabinet abroad for St Patrick’s Day and change all the ministerial locks?

Any Other Business: Part XLVIII

As the title suggests, so forth.

Status … Burgundy

Drip, drip, drip… It seems best to describe where we are now as Status Burgundy. We can still leave our homes without a printed and signed permission slip so it’s not quite Status Red. Yet. But as with the drip, drip, drip feed of restrictions tightening like a vise there’s a lot of ‘yet’ in the air too. Why did we not move to this crisis status immediately on March 13th? Why the sustained refusal to admit that schools would not re-open on the 30th? Fears of ‘behavioural fatigue’? It’s not like we don’t know from the experience of countries preceding us in these dominoes how this works; if you are responding to the numbers as they spike you are already too late. Uncertainty is not something stock markets or citizens appreciate. Varadkar unbelievably decided to paraphrase Terminator 2 last night following his Churchill plagiarism last week, refused to call this a lockdown when being told to ‘stay at home’ (even emblazoned under the RTE logo today onscreen) is patently a lockdown, and unwittingly combined the worst elements of Trump and Modi’s addresses. We were given three hours notice not to stray more than 2km from the house or else. But Leo, outside of Dublin it might be more than 2km to the nearest food store. And so today, presumably after howls from outside the Pale, we have a ‘clarification’ that 2km is the straying radius for exercise, you can stray 5km to get yourself a burger.

SEAL Team: Havoc has Fallen

Jessica Pare’s burnt CIA analyst Mandy has been notably underused in season 3 so it was nice to see her unexpectedly get tactical alongside Blackburn and Davis as Havoc fell the other night on Sky One and impose herself on the action in her guilt-ridden determination to rescue her kidnapped asset. Her work the problem drive and firefight skills also gave new hope to shippers that Mandy and Jason should get together, despite the awesome kismet that exists in Emily Swallow as Jason’s partner Natalie; uniting as it does Supernatural‘s Amara with Buffy’s Angel. The use of drone photography on SEAL Team has been outstanding but season 3, especially the opening episodes in Serbia, has taken it to new heights. The fact that this story of Bravo getting roughed up in Venezuela has now revealed itself as a three-parter makes one compare this trio of episodes very favourably to most action films out there. I for one would take the thrilling and legible choreography of the action in these three episodes against the choppy nonsense of Mile 22 any day.

From the Archives: P.S. I Love You

From the pre-Talking Movies archives.

Merciful Zeus! Was the Cecilia Ahern novel really this bad?! Disregarding the fact that this film shows all the emotional maturity of a moody teenager, and an insulting approach to bereavement and grief that staggers the mind even by lobotomised Hollywood standards, this trash is disgracefully long. No romantic comedy should last more than 90 minutes. To hit 2 hours and 10 minutes with this diabolically unfunny enterprise shows an amazing lack of cop-on by all concerned. Director Richard LaGravenese has a track record though, having scripting painfully extended films like The Horse Whisperer and The Mirror has Two Faces. If I was going to be mean I would point out that Hilary Swank gets fired in the first 15 minutes and apparently lives on air for the next year, and make some reference to the surname of a writer and certain tribunals, but it’s Christmas time so there’ll be no savage political tangents.

Instead we’ll savage the stupidity of this film, beginning with the ‘acting’. Gerard Butler’s Irish accent as the late Gerry is a sociological essay waiting to happen. It’s accepted in Hollywood that a stage-Scottish accent is merely an amped-up stage-Irish accent with rolling r’s. Gerard Butler though IS Scottish, so what the hell was he thinking when he decided to reverse that procedure to do an Irish accent? He is nightmarishly confused here; swinging between a stage-Irish accent, his own Scottish brogue, and that bizarre Irish-American mobster accent that recent TV show The Black Donnellys quickly abandoned. The decision to move the story to America but keep Gerry Irish is baffling anyway and cringe-worthy as it necessitates a trip to the auld sod for some ‘hilarious hi-jinks’ by the American girls in the third act. Quite why so many capable actors opted to appear in this dreck is an enigma. The presence of Buffy star James Marsters is referenced by an in-joke about vampire slaying not being a profession for Swank’s heroine Holly. He is utterly wasted in a tiny role as Gerry’s business partner, his only notable contribution being a well deserved put-down of Lisa Kudrow’s disgustingly materialistic chat-up lines. As for the awful cameo by Grey’s Anatomy and Supernatural star Jeffrey Dean Morgan the less said the better…

There’s only so much you can hurt a film in a review. I can’t even begin to scratch the surface of how insultingly this film portrays grieving. Apparently all you need to work through grief is to sing along to Judy Garland films, eat take-out, not clean your house and hope your loved one is psychic enough to continue corresponding with you. P.S. I Love You is savagely life-wasting trash. Compared to The Jane Austen Book Club which was absurdly enjoyable and like drinking cappuccino this is unbearably dreadful and like drinking weed-killer.

1/5

Any Other Business: Part XLI

As the title suggests, so forth.

TV seasons of the Decade

I may seem slightly obsessed with it but the fact that American film critics are intent on passing off Twin Peaks season 3 as a film of 2017 and a film of the decade continues to blow my mind. I mean, if Twin Peaks season 3 is a film, then what isn’t a film? True Detective season 1 is clearly a film, and a damn good one at that. Maybe my favourite episodes of the first three seasons of The Flash are in fact superb short films. The Newsroom season 2 is clearly in contention for being a film of the decade, because it is so clearly structured as an intricate flashback puzzle, but then couldn’t you stitch together the 3XK episodes of Castle to present a compelling story? But leaving aside such categorical confusion how do you construct a list of the best television of a decade? Do you just mention shows? Elementary or FlashForward for instance. Or, taking a leaf from this book of nonsense, go by seasons of shows? In that case you must grapple with the odd effect of shows starting in Autumn and ending in Summer. Which means technically both Supernatural seasons 5 and 11 are eligible for the 2010s. So how about listing out some potentials:

Legends of Tomorrow season 1
Blindspot season 2
Person of Interest season 2
Nikita season 1
Modern Family season 1
Bored to Death season 2
The Blacklist season 2
Heroes season 4
LOST season 6
24 revival
The Orville season 1
The X-Files season 11

Longmire season 3

The Newsroom season 2

The Following season 1
Bones season 5
Hawaii Five-O season 2
Sherlock season 1
CSI: Miami season 8
Criminal Minds season 4
SEAL Team season 1

House season 6
Medium season 7
Sleepy Hollow season 3
Justified season 2 & 4
The Gifted season 1
iZombie season 2

And that’s before considering Rick Stein’s Long Weekends, Rick Stein’s From Venice to Istanbul and any of the equally rewarding travelogues of Simon Reeve, Michael Portillo, Bear Grylls, and TG4’s Hector.

 

A cowardly uncouth narcissistic troublemaker and a bull

So Boris Johnson stopped hiding from the media for long enough to address a terrorist attack.

And blamed it on the ‘leftie’ government of the previous decade.

‘Leftie’. Would even Eton schoolboys be encouraged to express themselves thus?

Boris Johnson’s ‘rightie’ government has been in power for 9 1/2 years.

More than enough time to change any laws they found objectionable one would have thought.

But never mind, Boris made political hay, and surely we can all agree that’s all that really matters in this world.

And only two people had to die for him to come up smelling of roses.

Any Other Business: Part XXVII

What is one to do with thoughts that are far too long for Twitter but not nearly long enough for a proper blog post? Why round them up and turn them into a twenty-seventh portmanteau post on matters of course!

The Hounds of Hell

There is something finally and karmically wrong about watching The X-Files in full flight while Supernatural is still running almost at full steam. This second return of The X-Files, which we’re encouraged to just call season 11 and pretend it’s normal to have hiatuses between seasons of a decade, has been far better than 2016’s far shorter and less successful comeback. Some of this season’s mythology episodes have been damn good, while the monster of the week ones have frequently knocked it out of the ballpark. In particular ‘Familiar’, a disturbing tale of small-town hysteria with vigilante action going horribly sideways when due process is disregarded.  But it’s not just a witch-hunt parable, there really are witches at work. And that’s when it felt like this was a direct challenge to Supernatural as mystical circles, ancient grimoires, and vicious mostly invisible hell-hounds started to appear. Was it a bit weird? Yes. The return in 2016 was a jolt as you realised how everything from Smallville to Supernatural to The Flash had shamelessly lifted their episode structure from The X-Files. So watching Supernatural be appropriated by The X-Files is like watching a father and son competing against each other at the Olympics. But maybe the influence has gone both ways. Season 13 of Supernatural gave Dean Winchester a number of godlike character moments. Here Mulder went by the name Bob to avoid having to explain Fox for the 1000th time in cafes, almost brought about the robocalypse by eschewing tipping robot chefs, and was shamelessly obsessive over old TV sci-fi VHS and Sasquatching. Perhaps it’s an example of what the Greeks called eris – good strife, or competition making both parties better.

From the Archives: Mirrors

Another dive into the archives, another forgotten movie…

Kiefer Sutherland doesn’t seem to have grasped that the point of making a film between seasons of 24 is to stretch his acting muscles and avoid typecasting, not to bloody keep on playing Jack Bauer…

Kiefer plays disgraced undercover NYPD detective Ben Carson, suspended for shooting a fellow officer, who is battling alcoholism and rage issues (subtly depicted with lots of wall-thumping and shouting) and is thus estranged from his wife (Paula Patton) who keeps him from seeing their two children. Jack, I’m sorry I mean Ben, gets a job as a night-watchman guarding a burned out department store whose redevelopment is being held up by legal wrangling. His younger sister, whose couch he’s crashing on, strongly disapproves of this move as she thinks his ramblings about seeing horrible reflections in the mirrors of the store herald a nervous breakdown. Amy Smart is actually quite sympathetic as Ben’s sister, however her role is a glorified cameo as she’s only in Mirrors for two reasons. To take her clothes off (of course) which she does briefly, and to suffer one of the nastiest screen deaths seen in quite some time.

Her death sparks some farcically Bauer-like rampaging, the comedic highlight of which is Kiefer kidnapping a nun at gunpoint from a monastery (yes, all the characters refer to it being a monastery…). Mirrors is destroyed by being three very different films: a quality shocker where images in any reflective surface can hurt you; a ho-hum ‘the ghosts want you to avenge their murder’ whodunit; and an all-action showdown with a demon which seems oddly uncommitted to actually killing Ben given its preternatural speed and strength, intercut with Ben’s family being seriously menaced in their house by a number of logical inconsistencies in the high concept.

Alexandre Aja is the talented horror director who gave us French chiller Switchblade Romance but he comes badly unstuck with his script for this remake of a Korean film. While Aja will never lose his absolute mastery of using sound to create dread this script crams in so much that it becomes an endurance marathon. You have vague memories, amid the pyrotechnics of Bauer Vs Demon, that 100 minutes ago you were watching a visceral shocker about evil reflections in mirrors, before being hit with Aja’s trademark asinine ‘clever’ finale.

There is nothing in this film which isn’t done better on a weekly basis by TV horror show Supernatural. If you want some enjoyable scares catch that at midnight on Mondays on TV3. If you want the experience of this film watch it – while mentally replacing Jensen Ackles’ Dean Winchester with Jack Bauer, hilarity should ensue. If Mirrors was just a little less efficient at the “HA! Made you jump…” scares then it would be gloriously bad. Regrettably that efficiency means that it’s just rubbish.

1/5

From the Archives: Taken

Ten years ago today Taken was released in Ireland.

Liam Neeson admitted that he only took this part because at 56 he didn’t expect to be offered an action role again, from such inauspicious beginnings comes an unexpected joy as Neeson has the time of his life in Taken as effectively he gets to play Jack Bauer at age 56.

His operative secret agent (or “preventer” as he describes himself, think CTU…) has retired to spend more time with his estranged daughter. She is living with her aggravatingly wealthy stepfather Xander Berkeley (yes, that’s right Jack Bauer’s boss George Mason in 24) and Neeson’s bitter ex-wife Famke Janssen, a thankless role which is becoming so prevalent that someone really needs to have a character riposte “Well, if you’re ex is that much of a loser, it doesn’t say much about you that you married them, does it?” to get rid of it. LOST’s Maggie Grace plays Jack’s daughter Kim. Yes that’s right, French writer/producer Luc Besson has brilliantly pre-empted the planned 24 movie to the extent of having a permanently in peril daughter Kim. Kim travels to Paris with her friend Amanda (Katie Cassidy) and, Kims being Kims, they get kidnapped by a gang trafficking in sex slaves. It’s worth sighing at this point that both actresses are far too old for their roles and ‘act young’ by jumping around a lot and screaming, which is not much of a stretch for Grace it must be admitted but is quite disappointing from Cassidy given her very cool role as a taciturn demon on Supernatural.

Neeson, as you might have seen from the absurd trailer, talks Kim through her kidnap and threatens the kidnappers before they hang up on him. He jets over, courtesy of the private plane belonging to Berkeley’s wealthy businessman, and gets medieval on the kidnappers. This isn’t “ooh look at our fancy fight choreography” fighting, this is down and dirty “how many punches, jabs and kicks do I really need to give in order to cripple this person?” fighting and bone-crunchingly realistic it looks too. This is the adrenaline rush that 24 provided before it got ridiculous. Neeson is superbly cast for this, his 6, 4” frame dominating any room he walks into, while his boxing past makes his fight scenes more plausible than is usual in a Besson produced action flick. Neeson finds the gang holding his daughter through a mix of dogged detective work, old contacts (including a mentor who features in a scene outrageously lifted directly by Besson from Day 5 of 24), old fashioned brutality and yes, you guessed it, one very nasty torture scene involving a lecture by Neeson on the joys of a constant supply of electricity when trying to beat confessions out of bad guys. Besson sure knows his 24… By the end of this film you feel sure that Neeson has killed or maimed half the Parisian underworld and, quelle surprise, the big bad turns out to be an evil Arab.

If one wanted to gripe about all this one could say that Pierre Morel’s film endorses the sort of pop-fascism espoused by 24 but analysing the politics of this nonsense would really be pushing it. This is not high art. What it is is gripping, plausible, brutal and ultimately awesome fun. Highly recommended.

4/5

The Drone Aesthetic: Part II

I recently saw the effective double-bill of ‘The Bad Place’ and ‘Wayward Sisters’ episodes of Supernatural season 13 and think it’s time to revisit the idea of the Drone Aesthetic.

September 2^nd 2016 saw me musing on the unusually expansive quality of aerial photography in three BBC documentaries. Simon Reeve showed off his drone with shots that started near him and then wheeled away to reveal the mountainous quality of the Greek landscape. Brian Cox was observed from a height walking English beaches and Icelandic glaciers, and he also deployed the drone for the same effect as Reeve: the camera suddenly tumbling back in space, revealing itself as airborne and the person standing near a cliff edge. Peter Barton explained the Battle of the Somme using a drone to seamlessly move from a trench view to an aerial vantage point of the battlefield; revealing obvious differences in height over the wider landscape which, while invisible from a trench, was consistently put to work by the Germans in their defensive strategy.

It seems something of an arms race then developed in the BBC as both Rick Stein and Michael Portillo’s various travelogues were granted their own drones. Soon Stein and Portillo were mooching around Europe and North America by plane, train, and automobile, accompanied by a faithful drone to show they could walk along a beach observed from a height just as well as that young whippersnapper Cox. But they were less given to the ostentation of what we might call the Reeve Effect. There were a sight less sudden pull-outs by the drone to reveal its airborne status. Instead the focus was on shots by the drone serenely observing cityscapes or flying gently over rising hills. By an odd coincidence just 10 days after I wrote about the Drone Aesthetic I saw Don’t Breathe, which begins with a drone shot.

From the Archives: The Accidental Husband

Another deep dive into the pre-Talking Movies archives uncovers a drab rom-com starring Jeffrey Dean Morgan before Watchmen and Negan!

The Accidental Husband is the sort of drab film that inspires long involved tangents in your own mind as you try to ignore the boring predictability of the on-screen action. Uma Thurman is Dr Emma Lloyd, a relationship expert with her own phone-in radio show and whose first book of dating advice is being launched by the publishing house of her fiancé Richard (Colin Firth). However when she advises one of her listeners to break up with her fiancé, the duly jilted fireman Patrick Sullivan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) sets about taking the ‘love doctor’ down a peg. One ingenious hack into the NYC municipal database later and Emma and Patrick are man and wife, as she finds to her horror when she arrives at city offices with Richard to sign their forms. Her futile efforts to get Patrick to annul their non-existent marriage inevitably see her start to question her relationship with her dull, dependable fiancé whose worst vice (and only funny characteristic) is his comfort eating when stressed.

The Accidental Husband is above all other objections just painfully predictable. Will Emma throw away a lifetime of habits and, ignoring the advice she dispenses every day, choose the risky option? What do you think?! The painful whirring of the plot mechanics aren’t drowned out by laughter as Uma Thurman simply cannot do comedy. She produced and starred in this to prove to herself that she can, but even her role as a DJ invokes memories of The Truth about Cats & Dogs – which worked because she was not the lead but was supporting Janeane Garofalo. This film is Exhibit A in the case for the prosecution that Uma murders romantic comedies with her stiff, awkward approach which has to resort to slapstick to engage our sympathies.

Lindsay Sloane as Emma’s PA (and sole friend) Marcy takes what good lines there are, as is customary in romantic comedies where second-string is always the better role, and Colin Firth is sadly underused. Jeffrey Dean Morgan meanwhile is rugged. Apparently that’s what the ladies like these days and at the age of 41, courtesy of his celebrated role in Grey’s Anatomy, he is now a bona fide heart-throb. Morgan also appeared as the charismatic father in TV horror series Supernatural so it’s little surprise that he’s rather good here as the roguish NYC fire-fighter whose heart is in the right place.

But this film has very little heart. Emma likes to remind her listeners endlessly that 43% of American marriages end in divorce. That spectre of futility hangs over the film as she spouts invective about the stupidity of expecting lasting happiness in the modern world. The Accidental Husband systematically deconstructs the concepts which support the romantic comedy genre even as it performs them making for a quite singularly depressing experience.

2/5