“Who are you really and what were you before? What did you do and what did you think?”

I fell over a quote in the Atlantic the other week to the effect that nobody is the same person now that they were before the pandemic. Is it true?

Well, maybe… Certainly as things have opened up I have found myself… unwilling to return to 2019. Not unable, though also that to a degree, but more unwilling. I cannot rouse myself to excitement at scanning cinema listings for the new Mia Hansen-Love, try I ever so hard. I find to my surprise that the Gate theatre has a new artistic director, but scarcely shrug. Barry Douglas performs the Beethoven Triple Concerto at the NCH, and I am not there. It may not even be a question of will, so much as a fundamental disconnect – I know I should be excited by these things, I have the memory of being enthused by their predecessors in the past, and yet it seems like everything in that sphere happened to someone else, not to me. One sympathises, but it has nothing to do with me. Maybe this is only a temporary aberration. Maybe it is a permanent seachange. But, having initially scoffed at the idea that everybody is no longer themselves, I now think- yes, that’s true.

In some senses I find myself doing a somewhat baffled personal inventory akin to Kate McKinnon’s post-6/1/21 ‘What Still Works?’ SNL sketch. It’s rather like standing dazed in a room full of disassembled building blocks, and seeing which ones I can still get to glom to form a Lego statue recognisable as me. I still like listening to Lykke Li, the bard of heartbreak and unrequited love. I still like watching The Avengers, and savouring John Steed and Emma Peel being debonair and romantic. I still like walking in Marlay Park, and hearing the strange sound made by the wind whistling thru tall trees. I still like ruining both coffee and ice cream in restaurants, by pouring one over the other. I still like the inimitable sound of Sorkin speeches and Gershwin glissandos, the thrill of Mondrian lines and Van Gogh swirls. But on many fronts I feel psychically unsteady when my hollowed out sense of self clashes with the 2019 self remembered by others; who are disconcerted to find my ‘passions’ extinguished.

And so I ask myself Bogart’s Casablanca question to Bergman in the mirror, and unnervingly I don’t know the answer.

Miscellaneous Movie Musings: Part XXV

As the title suggests, so forth.

The Golden Age has passed

Alas, Kirk Douglas is dead. As plans for this week’s Sunday Breakfast with Patrick Doyle quickly change to pay tribute to the last great of Hollywood’s Golden Age something that’s occurred to me is just how vivid and indelible Kirk Douglas’ performances were. When I caught up with At Eternity’s Gate recently I kept faulting Willem Dafoe for not capturing Vincent Van Gogh in the way that Kirk Douglas did, though it had been over 20 years since I’d seen Lust for Life. When I finally saw My Darling Clementine a couple of years ago I kept inwardly (and occasionally outwardly, to the exasperation of the Engineer) sighing that Victor Mature was not measuring up to the Platonic Ideal of the nervy, doomed live-wire Doc Holliday, which was of course Kirk Douglas in Gunfight at the OK Corral which I hadn’t seen for a decade. Here are ten Kirk Douglas films I’m thinking about:

Build My Gallows High (1947)

Young Man with a Horn (1950)

Ace in the Hole (1951)

The Bad and the Beautiful (1952)

Lust for Life (1956)

Paths of Glory (1957)

Gunfight at the OK Corral (1957)

The Vikings (1958)

Spartacus (1960)

Seven Days in May (1964)

The means defeat the ends: Part IV

As rumours continue to swirl that JJ Abrams originally delivered an entirely different lousy Star Wars movie to Disney than the lousy Star Wars movie they released in cinemas one strand of speculation stands out. To wit, that the grand finale was severely reworked in deference to the sensibilities of the Chinese Communist Party. I knew when watching Taiwanese movie The Assassin a few years ago that the appearance of a ghost was a provocative move, but I didn’t really understand why the mainland was so firmly opposed to ghosts. I only recently read that the appearance of ghosts was associated with disorder and the loss of the mandate of heaven, and so the Party is eager for those associations of ideas not to start associating in the minds of the people. And of course Force Ghosts would start such associations, were they to physically appear as ghosts. But why else would Hayden Christensen have been on-set if not to physically reprise his role of Anakin Skywalker as a Force Ghost? It seems likely that he and others were originally physically present in the showdown between Super-Rey and the inexplicable zombie Emperor, but that the scene was reworked to make the Force Ghosts a mere vocal montage of pep talks. That is to say Disney completely reworked the scene in an attempt to make mucho money in China. But… Chinese audiences really couldn’t have made it any plainer that they could give a damn about Star Wars in toto. The idea that a finale which would have added some pizzazz belatedly to this asinine cash grab trilogy was scrapped for the sake of making mucho money in a territory where it was never going to make mucho money, at the cost of luring back disenchanted actual Star Wars fans in the rest of the world, blows the mind.

Any Other Business: Part XLIII

As the title suggests, so forth.

I don’t know, Holden, sometimes I feel I’m just playing John the Baptist to the Jesus Christ that is Criminal Minds’ Hotch.

The virtues of network television

David Fincher has walked away from Mindhunter after two seasons, and who could blame him? Joe Penhall, its creator, had walked away after the first season. Catching up with the Netflix show and HBO’s The Pacific simultaneously in the last few weeks has been a dispiriting experience. And I can’t help but feel that both cable shows could really have done with some network aesthetics being beaten into them. To wit:

• making a character unlikeable does not magically also make them compelling, as my sometime co-writer the Engineer put it, Livia and Gregory House are horrible people but very entertaining to watch
• all your episodes should be the same length, randomly having a 34 minute episode when your show is meant to be an hour long is not okay, it’s like a Modern Family episode ending unresolved at the ad break
• gather an ensemble that you use every episode because they are each individually actually there for a purpose, it would for example be absurd for Josh to miss three episodes in The West Wing
• course correct in real time by airing as you shoot rather than dumping all your episodes out as is…

• Sans feedback you end up with (a) preposterous ciphers like Holden’s walking sociology textbook girlfriend who would have been tagged for writing out on network after negative reaction to her first few episodes (b) Wendy’s absurdly yellow makeup which made her look like she just fell out of a Van Gogh painting at best and like a cut-rate Oompa Loompa at worst (c) supporting characters disappearing with no mention of their fates, ever

• being able to answer the question ‘what is your show about?’ with an answer that isn’t entirely abstracted, iZombie has complicated season arcs but each episode has its own internal motor
• having episodes exist as episodes because they are actually about something, like early House‘s medical mysteries and later House‘s illuminations of character, rather than just being a spoon sized slop of gruel
• it may seem trivial to ask for a name for each episode, but it gives the impression that you know what the point of an episode is if you can name it, rather than simply say it’s ‘Reasonably Sized Slab of Content #11’

Flights of fancy

Well, that didn’t take long. Ryanair has been told to stop using their ridiculous climate change ad because it features a lie. It features more than one, in point of fact. They do not fly direct to destinations, they are rather famous for doing the complete opposite. Beauvais is quite far from Paris, I’ve been on that bus. They do not try to fill every plane for the sake of the environment, if that was their noble aim they wouldn’t price gouge the poor saps booking the last seats just before takeoff. And if their customers really wanted to save the environment they would not fly anywhere. Until we get the early 19th Century international network of sailing clippers up and running again grounding yourself is really the only honest move.

Notes on Yesterday

Richard Curtis’ Beatles rom-com Yesterday was the film of the week much earlier today on Sunday Breakfast with Patrick Doyle.

Danny Boyle may be the director but this is a Richard Curtis film, and it would be much better if it weren’t. A world in which The Beatles have been erased from existence save for the memory of one struggling musician is a high concept comedy, but Curtis insists on making it a ho-hum rom-com. Kevin Willmott’s CSA showed that you have to rein in the butterfly effect for alternate history because everything would become unfamiliar. Would the Beach Boys be as important without Pet Sounds, their riposte to the Beatles? Curtis displays no such interest, save an Oasis joke, in exploring the butterfly effect of his own bloody high concept. Kate McKinnon is the most reliably comic element of this film, and she is lip-smackingly playing a caricature record executive – Hunter S Thompson’s famous jibe mixed with notes of her SNL Hillary Clinton. But then all the characters in this film are caricatures. This poses a problem when Curtis wants you to care about the romance as if it involved characters with some humanity.

The romance is already scuppered by Jack (Himesh Patel) and Elly (Lily James) patently having the chemistry of hopeless dreamer and dutiful girlfriend in the opening scenes, until it’s bafflingly revealed they’re just friends. They do not hold themselves as fast platonic friends like Holmes and Watson in Elementary. When she complains she always wanted more, and Curtis writes improbable scenes doggedly making this fetch happen he, like Nick Hornby in Juliet, Naked, defies the felt experience of human nature. But this aggravating drive to the grand romantic gesture reaches a new low for Curtis. GK Chesterton once quipped that art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere. I draw the line at Curtis; in the vein of his Doctor Who episode in which he shamefully zipped Van Gogh to the future to hear Bill Nighy valorise him then returned him to the past to kill himself to general hand-wringing; resurrecting the murdered John Lennon as septuagenarian sage giving Jack a pep talk to make the finale’s grand romantic gesture. No… No. No. No!

Listen here:

TARDIS: Time And Relative Dimensions In Smartness

Dr Who returns to our screens on Saturday so here’s my ha’penny worth on how ace writer Steven Moffat’s first season as show-runner and chief writer went.

Moffat, of course, was responsible for the best and most ingenious episodes of the first three seasons with his rousing two-part Blitz story, incredibly poignant linking of the Doctor and Madame de Pompadour over the course of her life, and the incomparable ‘Blink’ in which his terrifying villains the Weeping Angels, who can only move when you don’t look at them, made their debut. The fourth season saw a slight dip in the quality of plotting in his two-part adventure but he still created a hugely memorable character in Alex Kingston’s River Song. The news that Moffat was going to replace Davies as show-runner led, after the initial jubilation, to the fear that in stepping up to write so many more episodes a year the quality of Moffat’s work would inevitably fall. Well, it did, but only slightly. His season premiere, ‘The 11th Hour’, was an amazing episode, full of many Moffat trademarks, like the heartbreaking realisation that the Doctor came back years rather than minutes later after promising the young Amy Pond he’d return, and which triumphantly announced Matt Smith as a worthy Timelord by giving him a fantastic speech before he walked thru a hologram of his previous incarnations.

Moffat managed, without writing ‘Blink’ every week, to knock out more episodes yet still insert conceits that would make your head explode, such as Liz 10 in ‘The Beast Below’ being finally revealed as Queen Elizabeth X, and hence ‘subject to no one’; and his two-part Weeping Angels story was by turns hilarious, terrifying, upsetting, and also just dazzling in its cleverness. The fact that Moffat was still operating at such a high level though created an all new problem, which, rather than current scapegoat Matt Smith, may explain the falling ratings. Moffat’s writing is so good that it makes the rest of the writing staff look really bad. When Davies was show-runner there was a uniform level of quality that only Moffat rose above. Now that Moffat is show-runner there’s a uniform level that no one else can rise to… This means that while ‘The Lodger’ with James Corden was hilarious, you might just as easily tune into the sub-par ‘The Vampires of Venice’ or Richard Curtis’ embarrassing ‘The Doctor and Vincent’; where Curtis felt impelled to give Van Gogh a trip to the future to have Bill Nighy tell him how great he was, before Van Gogh killed himself anyway. In other words Dr Who has become incredibly hit and miss; if Moffat isn’t writing you must lower your expectations, but the casual viewer will not know that and so may easily watch half a season and pronounce it rubbish – by missing every Moffat episode.

Last year Stephen Fry, decrying the infantilising of television, instanced Dr Who as an example of something that was brilliantly written but was for children, not mature adults. Moffat’s filthy gags and general sauciness are probably no more unsuitable for children than those of Davies (while being considerably better) but Moffat avoids the cheap sentimentality that marked Davies as pandering to children. His season finale ‘The Big Bang’ was for adults as it thrillingly showed a whip-smart writer having immense fun with the non-linear narrative possibilities of time-travel, while it also showcased the quality of an old soul in a young body which had secured Matt Smith the part of the Doctor in the first place. The incredibly feel-good ending with Amy Pond remembering her imaginary friend the Raggedy Doctor and insisting that he was real, he was, but that she’d forgotten something she once knew, something that the Doctor had told her (in very carefully chosen words) about who he was and what the Tardis was; it was something old, something new, (we suddenly realise the Doctor was counting on Amy’s impending wedding triggering her memory of him), something…. borrowed, (cue a very familiar sound), something… Blue (enter the Tardis and the Doctor in a tux); exemplified how Moffat outdoes Davies by achieving wonderful emotional effects with a smidge of cleverness over pure cheesiness.

So perhaps Fry was right, Davies surely infantilised the audience if they can’t recognise that what Moffat’s doing is brilliant…