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.

Re-Routh Superman!

The guest appearance of Superman on Supergirl for 2 episodes; which displayed more wit, swagger, and simple sure grasp of the character than Zack Snyder’s 2 movies; led me back to thinking about a couple of unrelated moments this summer.

I was watching Legends of Tomorrow, the audacious episode where three of our heroes are left behind in 1950s America, and Dad walked past, stopped, and asked “Is that Superman?” And yes, it kind of was. Brandon Routh, bespectacled, waistcoated, and jacketed, was lecturing excitedly on physics and slightly bumbling in keeping the space-time continuum free of catastrophic paradoxes. I have always considered that Routh in Superman Returns was a fine Superman, but I was less sold on his Clark Kent. His sensational cameo in Scott Pilgrim Vs the World, effectively playing Bizarro for extra meta-laughs, served notice that the still young Routh was developing his comedy chops apace. But with Legends of Tomorrow there is no doubt that the secret identities Ray Palmer and Clark Kent are starting to become interchangeable on occasion, and if Routh is secretly auditioning to get his cape back (Hell, Routh’s superhero guise still involves wearing a suit largely composed of red and blue), he’s certainly won me over regarding his ability to play Clark. So, with Snyder now having failed miserably, twice, to show that he understands in the slightest the character of Superman, has any coherent vision of how to direct Super-action, or has any sense of humour, might it not be time to simply pretend the whole thing was a fever dream and make a semi-sequel to Superman Returns, bringing back Routh to the role he only got one shot at?

Photo: Dean Buscher/The CW — © 2016 The CW

And the second unrelated moment… Watching Olivia Munn in X-Men: Apocalypse after watching her in season 3 of The Newsroom I was once again disappointed at how an actress who dominates a television screen ended up standing around like a mislaid prop on the big screen. If there was only some role in a superhero movie that would be as juicy for Munn as Sorkin’s creation Sloan Sabbith was… If only she could again play a journalist, someone with an overpowering hunger for nailing a scoop. Someone like… Lois Lane. In 2010 I wrote on this blog that Lois “lives for breaking news and will do anything to get it first – she’s not a particularly nice person but she’s charismatic, tough as nails and you’d always want her on your team rather than playing against you. Writing Lois as nastier than recent anodyne versions of her also helps solve the ‘problem’ of Superman’s uncomplicated morality about which essays of unsympathetic comparisons to Batman and Wolverine have been written. The meaner you make Lois, the harder it becomes for Superman to melt her cynicism, and the better the film will be as a result in selling audiences on his Boy Scout ethics.” Take a look at Munn in action as Sloan in the clip below, and imagine a Lois whose breath-taking abrasiveness in the service of the Daily Planet becomes perversely loveable.

The Snyderverse demonstrably is not working, and the Berlantiverse demonstrably is; surely it’s time for DC to acknowledge reality, reverse the reboot, and give Brandon Routh back his cape and give Olivia Munn another charismatic vinegary role.

Keeping up with the Joneses

Director Greg Mottola returns to cinemas for the first time since Paul, but working with inferior material to his recent Rogen, Pegg, and Sorkin scripts.

Jeff Gaffney (Zach Galifianakis) is an ineffectual HR drone who is genially disregarded by all the people with security clearance at major weapons manufacturer McDowell-Burton International. His wife Karen (Isla Fisher) is dissatisfied designing an absurd bathroom for obnoxious neighbours the Craverstons (being a largely wasted VEEP star Matt Walsh as Dan and Maribeth Monroe as Meg). As the Gaffneys agonise over how to utilise their sons’ time at summer camp to revitalise their marriage new neighbours arrive; the uber-stylish uber-sophisticated Joneses, Tim (Jon Hamm) and Natalie (Gal Gadot). Jeff is surprised at Tim, the travel writer who blows glass sculptures as a hobby, befriending him. But Karen grows suspicious that Tim and Natalie are actually spies, and when Jeff takes his concerns to MBI security officer Carl Pronger (Kevin Dunn), the Gaffneys enter the sinister world of ‘The Scorpion’.

What exactly is Greg Mottola, director of Arrested Development, The Newsroom, Superbad, Paul and Adventureland, doing helming this action-comedy? This is the comediocre terrain of hack auteurs like Shawn Levy or (shudder) Paul Feig. Mottola has some fun playing on the remarkable coincidence that Gadot & Hamm are both 7 inches taller than their counterparts Fisher & Galifianakis. There’s a lot of looming… It’s a treat to hear Gadot berating Hamm in rapid-fire Hebrew insults, but there’s not a whole lot else going on. Mottola shoots action with pleasing commitment to practical stunt-work, and throws in gleefully parodic action-hero slo-mo and hero shots of Gadot and Hamm, but the lack of any real driving comedic intent is almost metatextually reflected in Andrew Dunn’s cinematography being remarkably soft-focus; as if he was massaging out the cast’s wrinkles in Murder, She Wrote.

Michael LeSieur’s screenplay is a strange beast, and it’s hard to see what in it attracted Mottola. This film is obviously in debt to Mr & Mrs Smith, and even that had longueurs, but Keeping up with the Joneses lacks that movie’s over-arching sense of fun; which kept the wheels spinning when there were no actual jokes. Here LeSieur has very few actual jokes at all, and, in sending Jeff on trips to exotic snake restaurants with Tim, slips into what feels like a tip of the hat to David Duchovny’s intermittently interesting satire The Joneses; where perfect new neighbours are actually a guerrilla sales team. Depressingly early on you realise this is another major studio comedy that has tidy plotting and neat character arcs, and basically no jokes. When exactly did that approach to writing ‘comedy’ become conventional wisdom?

Keeping up with the Joneses just about holds the attention, but given the calibre of talent involved you just wonder how nobody noticed that it wasn’t actually … funny.

1.5/5

Steve Jobs

The Social Network screenwriter Aaron Sorkin returns to the well of abrasive tech innovators for an unconventional biopic of Apple main-man Steve Jobs.

We first encounter Jobs (Michael Fassbender) backstage at the launch of the Macintosh in 1984, pushing Andy Hertzfeld (Michael Stuhlbarg) to do the impossible: fix a glitch within 40 minutes so that during the demo Jobs can make the computer say a cheerful ‘Hello’ to accentuate its friendly design. Meanwhile marketing maven Joanna Hoffmann (Kate Winslet) is trying to contain another potential PR disaster, as backstage also lurks Jobs’ ex-girlfriend Chrisanne Brennan (Katherine Waterston) and their daughter Lisa (Makenzie Moss); who Jobs refuses to acknowledge despite all evidence to the contrary. Throw in Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen) also jumping into the fray to beg Jobs to acknowledge the work of the Apple 2 team and it’s little wonder Apple CEO John Sculley (Jeff Daniels) feels the need to descend from Olympus to make sure that Jobs is calm enough to wow the audience. And that’s just the first of three product launches…

The unusual structure of Sorkin’s adaptation of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs works tremendously well, even if its central conceit is mischievously acknowledged in-camera on the third go-round, “It’s like 5 minutes before every product launch everyone gets drunk in a bar and decides to tell me how they really feel about me.” We watch the same characters recur, arguing about the same things in different guises, and the cumulative effect is akin to a super-sizing of Sorkin’s most theatrical television episodes; like The Newsroom season 3 episode about ethics. Danny Boyle has spoken of not wanting to get in the way of Sorkin’s script, but his shooting in different formats for each act emphasises the passage of time and really makes us feel, as much as Mia Hansen-Love’s Eden, that we are watching a life unfold.

Watching a life unfold entails a great deal of sadness, a feeling of squandered potential and missed opportunities hangs over the third act as much as triumphant themes of resurrection and redemption. (Which also features an amazing unintentional [?] meta-moment where Fassbender critiques 39 images of a shark, as if searching for a secret self-portrait.) Boyle and Sorkin mesh in a way that makes them a more obvious fit than Sorkin and Fincher. There is a fundamental optimism to both as artists that when combined with Fassbender’s irrepressible warmth makes Jobs very different to Jesse Eisenberg’s Zuckerberg. Jobs says horrible things, but the Woz will always have a free pass, and Sorkin’s Zuckerberg would never proffer the quasi-apology quasi-motivator “I’m poorly made.” Steve Jobs, despite being filled with cruel zingers, is ultimately summed up by Daniel Pemberton score: rudimentary digital beats that evolve into something rousing and deeply human.

Startling footage from the late 1960s shows Arthur C Clarke describing the world we live in today. Sorkin puts both sides of the case regarding Jobs’ importance in achieving that vision, but Boyle and Sorkin have achieved something great themselves.

5/5