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December 27, 2010 · 12:38 pm

Tron: Reloaded

The glossy, exorbitantly priced Tron movie preview magazine was a frequent flyer in the 1982-3 edition of my school bag. Its scuffed blue and red pages, all neon, polygons and exclamation marks, spent many cycles amongst the wallpaper-wrapped exercise books and text books. I was the living embodiment of the target demographic for the film: an obsessive teen geek.

The original Tron’s CGI wouldn’t trouble the average modern smartphone but it was ground-breaking in those heady post-Falklands days. The visual design embraced and transcended the technical limitations. The neon-effect, the glow of the costumes – made using a hugely tedious and manual rotoscoping process – set the film apart. Its storyline was novel and imaginative, if not exactly plausible, and contained enough geeky references to keep me happy. A character called Bit who could only answer yes or no! A Master Control Program character, or MCP, whose name wasn’t a million nanometres away from that of a prominent OS of the day, CP/M! And Pacman, chomping away as an Easter Egg in the background!

Skip forward 28 years. CGI is ubiquitous, unnoteworthy – and undetectable in most films by most people. We’re all networked – even our mums have email – and words like modem are not the arcane terms of a malodorous minority; they’ve passed through common usage and now begin to seem antiquated and quaint. Geeks have inherited the Earth.

And along comes Tron: Legacy. How could it possibly seem as new and different as its forebear? Of course it couldn’t. But surely there could be an interesting untold story to tell: a subtle or not-so-subtle allusion to social networking, network neutrality or crowdsourcing, or at least a recognition that several billion more people have come online in those 28 years.

No. Let’s just have a bunch of set-piece chases and action scenes, per usual. Oh, and let’s do it in 3D, because it’s teh future, innit.

The film starts, ludicrously, with what I can only describe as release notes. The gist: “Yeah, well, not all of it is 3D. It’s like totes deliberate, stop your moanin or summin or nuffin.” It turns out that scenes set in meatspace are in 2D, so we spend the entire first act doing Buddy Holly impersonations in our specs for no reason whatsoever. But come on! It’s like UI: if you have to explain it, it’s broken. I suppose we should be grateful that the film-makers took care to make it as realistic in that respect as most software.

That first act opens with a whole bunch of exposition for those unfamiliar with the first film. But I’m afraid I wasn’t paying much attention as the dialogue was washed out by a nerd in the row behind fumbling through his bag to find what sounded like a blaring radio. And visually my brain was going: Welcome to Uncanny Valley! Because here’s where we first see the much-hyped de-aged Jeff Bridges, in a flashback scene. But although we can do CGI buildings, CGI vehicles, CGI water, CGI animals, CGI hair and CGI fur, CGI people still look like freaks, animated zombies, utterly unreal.

An unchallenging plot ensues in which grumpy but doable super-rich implausible hacker totty Sam Flynn, son of Jeff Bridges’ character Kevin, plays at being Batman outside and inside the computer with the all-too-predictable assistance of a ladyprogram I shall call Ruby off Rails.

No, actually, Sam is more of a Luke Skywalker character since Kevin is plainly Obi Wan, Ruby is Leia and Clu – Kevin’s program alter ego – Vader.

Or you could look at it as a Spaghetti Code Western, since the white hats all glow blue/white, and the black hats all glow red.

But even this was too complicated for one nearby patron of the cinema, a dozy cow who spent most of the film annoying her nerd boyfriend (and the rest of us) asking him what was going on. Pay attention! Shut up! Pay attention!

The film is almost entirely devoid of humour. I saw no Easter Eggs; no puns, visual or aural, about the net or computing. There are a few nerdsnickery moments when you see (in Real World scenes) glimpses of a Linux command line, but they don’t count: someone typing “ps -ef” is never funny, unless you type it on Windows. The only intentional comedy is in the obligatory appearance by Michael Sheen, playing a gay nightclub host program (don’t ask) as an odd mash-up of David Frost and Graham Norton: Frost/Nortron, I suppose.

I did enjoy some aspects of the film. The soundtrack by Daft Punk is excellent, and the visuals are superbly realised – modulo uncanny valley. But overall the film offers nothing new, nothing ground-breaking. And, you might wonder, why haven’t I mentioned the Tron character himself? Yes, you might wonder that. I’ll say no more.

There is a film to be made melding the concepts and originality of the original Tron with the seismic changes seen since those primitive days – the expansion of online life, the loss of privacy and secrecy, the slow death of long-cherished business models, the scrambling for control – but Tron: Legacy sure ain’t it.

Avaragado’s rating: greenbeans.exe

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September 21, 2010 · 11:56 pm

Pilgrimages

Scott Pilgrim versus The World is unquestionably an Edgar Wright movie, in the style we know from Spaced, Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. Background treats! Easily missed visual and aural gags! Pop-culture references! But no Simon Pegg or Nick Frost. It’s an Edgar Wright movie without the usual suspects: but is it a Carry On Columbus, notable only for the cast not present?

Happily not, matron, oh I say, hwahwahwah, etc. In fact it’s the closest I think I’ve seen to a comic-book-slash-graphic-novel in live-action movie form. I have yet to read the books on which the film is based – mainly due to the incompetence of the Home Delivery Network, a rant for another time perhaps – but, like Watchmen before it, I have the distinct feeling that many of the scenes are lifted substantially unchanged from the source material; storyboards barely required. But perhaps I do Wright a wrong; I’ll see.

The film’s flaw is also what makes it great, for me: as well as being a film-o-comic it’s a film-o-game. Video games and gaming culture are at the core of the story. Those not steeped in the lore may well emerge bewildered – if they stay to the end of the film, which three people at my screening did not. However, gamers should love it: it’s the first mainstream, big-budget film I’ve seen to get the essence of gaming culture right, to feel like it’s been made by someone who has actually played a video game, rather than portraying a hackneyed, Hollywoodised variant thereof. It’s like the first western to include a horse.

I’m a fan of Michael Cera, who plays Pilgrim. Or rather, I’m a fan of the character Michael Cera played in Arrested Development, George Michael, which is no more than a smidge different from the character he played in Juno, and barely an insect’s toenail from his portrayal of Pilgrim. I presume he can play other characters, but in this case I’m glad he didn’t.

But it’s Edgar Wright’s film. Now: please can we have the third in the cornetto trilogy? kthxbai.

Avaragado’s rating: assorted power-enhancing fruit

Last Friday His Holiness Stephen Fry graced the Corn Exchange with his wise and illustrious visage for ninety minutes of chatter and readings from the new volume of his autobiography, The Fry Chronicles.

Fry is of course a national treasure; not quite at Thora Hird levels but then she did have the stairlift. In the talk he told how it nearly didn’t happen – two ‘hinges’ in his life, as he put it, that might have swivelled differently and led to a very different personal history. This is true of everyone, naturally – we are each the sum of our decisions, both micro and macro – and I can identify a couple of hinges in my own life, similarly seminal in moulding the modern me. One of them was undoubtedly the chance meeting I wrote about recently that set me along the computing path. I occasionally wonder how different my life might have been had that meeting never happened. In a parallel universe I might very well be an HGV driver with an intimate knowledge of overhead camshafts.

Fry’s retelling of his first meeting with Hugh Laurie at Cambridge, how they started writing together with virtually no preamble, no getting-to-know-you stage, was fascinating. Almost like love at first sight, he said. It made me want to read the autobiography, which was after all the point of the evening. And it made me want to write more, which most things seem to do at the moment.

Attendees were granted individual audiences with Stephen post-show, assuming they had crossed the palm of the man from Waterstones (Gary) with silver and bought a book to sign. A health-and-safety worryingly large number of people did so; it was impossible to distinguish queue from non-queue. The call of B Bar proved stronger and we high-tailed it out of a side door.

It strikes me that the blessed Stephen’s life is ripe for a BBC Four drama-documentary someday. It’ll happen, mark my words.

Avaragado’s rating: bon-bons

Oh, and the Pope popped in for a visit.

I’m not a fan.

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June 28, 2010 · 7:41 pm

The coughing canary

I was too scared to come out in the 80s, too dumb to come out in the 90s, and already gaydead by the noughties, having hit thirty and therefore ceased to exist except in shadowy, wraith-like form – the film version would be called Logan’s Ring.

Jonathan Harvey’s new play Canary is no Logan’s Ring. It’s more Close Encounters of the Predictable Kind. Imagine a velvet bag full of the usual ‘gay drama’ tropes shaken and cast onto an Ikea coffee table and then transcribed directly into Final Draft and you’re 90% there.

Cliches are cliches because they’re true, of course, and the play is sufficiently true to life to spark a raw nerve once or twice – despite very little resemblance to my own history. It is, though, desperately predictable and hand-wringingly earnest.

There is a message, and the message is that gays have fought, and lost, and won, and lost, and won, and now are in danger of losing again. The story moves back and forth in time following a group of people as they struggle with events: the criminality of the 60s, the militant liberalism of the 70s, the confusion and fear of the 80s, and the complacency of the present day.

You will hardly be surprised to learn that AIDS features prominently. I confess I rolled my eyes when a character started coughing for no apparent reason; I half-expected a Pythonesque neon arrow labelled PLOT POINT to descend from the stage loft above him. This is a play with no time for subtlety.

We skip between eras so rapidly there is no chance to develop any character: the obvious things happen, and then we move on. Despite this some of these vignettes work well – the best feature ‘guest appearances’ from Mary Whitehouse and Margaret Thatcher – and I wonder whether the play started as a collection of sketches later stitched poorly together with Tesco Value plot threads.

The cast do uniformly well with what they’re given, all but one doubling or trebling up in different roles between which they switch with dizzying rapidity. Paula Wilcox, once a Liver Bird, plays scouse and Thatch. Ryan Sampson – a pocket thesp seen in Doctor Who a few years ago as an annoying American youth in the thrall of similarly pocket Sontarans – does well to slowly ramp up the camp in one role while also playing a striking 80s miner. Philip Voss (caution: 90s web design) drags up nicely as Mary Whitehouse; if only we could harness energy from her spinning grave.

The set is minimalist but very effective and necessarily versatile given the frequent scene changes and occasional periods in which two eras clash on stage.

I wanted to like the play, I really did. I enjoyed Harvey’s Beautiful Thing for what it was – a fairytale – despite the schmaltz. With Gimme Gimme Gimme and more recently Beautiful People he has modernised camp comedy on TV, even showing camp schoolboys without as far as I can tell incurring the wrath of the redtops. My disappointment with the play stems from the clunky stereotyping and plain lack of originality.

We are surely past the point where a gay play or film or TV show or soap plot is about gay rather than about people. Were this an educational piece for schools explaining the modern history of homosexuality in the UK it would be effective and might counter a deal of uninformed prejudice. As a night out for grown-ups who value character and plot and perhaps something new, unexpected and challenging, it’s lazy and, for me, it fails.

But hey, it has hot young actors in pants.

Avaragado’s rating: a small punnet of cherry tomatoes

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March 8, 2010 · 12:51 am

A Single Lady

Two contrasting films. One made in 21 days, set in the 1960s; one costing upwards of $200m, set down a rabbit hole. One with a red queen, one with a dead queen. Oh shush you, I’m allowed to say that, it’s here on the membership card in black and glitter.

A Single Man shows one day in the 1962 life of George, a British professor of English at Random College, CA. A closet puddle-jumper, George lost his verygoodfriend Jim in a car crash a few months before. We see him coping, or not, intercut with occasional flashbacks to scenes with Jim.

I predicted in January that Colin Firth would win an Oscar for his portrayal of George. I’m doubtful now since the Academy went gay in this category last year via the medium of Sean Penn. Firth’s still in with a shot; we’ll find out in the next few hours. If he wins, I anticipate headlines punning ‘Firth’ with ‘first’. ‘Firth Among Equals’ perhaps.

Nicholas Hoult, child in About A Boy, yob in Skins, greek in the upcoming Clash of the Titans remake, plays Young Totty Kenny, a student with ambiguous desires. Hoult spouts what seems to my ears a pretty decent accent. Then again I guess Americans loved Dick van Dyke’s, so what do I know?

A few critics have huffed about excessive artiness in what is haberdashergay Tom Ford’s directorial, screenwriting and producing debut. Well, yes, it’s true there’s no Bruce Willis in a grimy vest leaping between exploding buildings, no caped spandex-encased do-gooder righting wrongs with a flick of his jaw. This is a good thing. The camera lingers a little, there are periods of calm. There is what I might haughtily call a conceit: at certain times Ford nudges the colour saturation up to 11. I generously forgive him this; overall it’s an impressive achievement. Production designers nicked from TV’s Mad Men portray that early sixties wood’n’nukes feel convincingly enough.

Artiness aside there is a story to tell, a touching one of loss and heartbreak. Sexuality is pleasingly subdued to a smidge above irrelevance. Not that it’s absent: it’s central, but in the way that heterosexuality is central to a million romcom yawnfests. Heteros won’t be tainted with gay by watching it.

I finished reading the original Christopher Isherwood novel the night before seeing the film. There are one or two noticeable differences plotwise; tweedy litnerds might be all pipes a-quiver at this. The changes improve the story as a film: shockingly, books aren’t films. I enjoyed and recommend both.

Avaragado’s rating: one Twinkie bar.

Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland is, uh, a slightly different kettle of pigs. It contains in some venues at least one extra dimension and an audience of Ronnie Corbett lookalikes. Stars include the Burton Regulars and – marginally boggling – Barbara Windsor as the dormouse. Shame Sid James is dead, he could have played the Mad Hatter. Hattie Jacques as the Red Queen. Kenneth Williams as the Knave. Bernard Bresslaw as Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Charles Hawtrey as the White Rabbit. Anyway.

As well as the usual cast, all the expected characters are present with full, faithful, bonkers Burton polish. Depp is as Depp does. The stand-out for me is the Cheshire Cat, Stephen Fry purring his way lugubriously through the film. As the Red Queen Helena Bonham Carter isn’t entirely unadjacent to Blackadder II‘s Queenie; a shame that milord Fry doesn’t get to purr a Melchettesque “Majesty”.

The visuals are stunning. From the Red Queen’s bulbous head to interaction between the real and the CGI, there’s barely a join visible. A couple of shots involving the Knave have a mildly fishy aroma, and Matt Lucas’s dual Tweedles sometimes veer away from skin towards plastic; otherwise it’s all entirely believable. CGI people are notoriously tricky thanks to the unique way our brains are funded: CGI mice can prance about with waistcoats and we lap it up; but one dodgy movement from a CGI human and we’re swooping into uncanny valley with klaxons blaring. The flying spaghetti monster gave us this talent so we could spot aliens. IT IS MY FAITH AMEN.

As a story it’s fine. Unlike A Single Man this is no faithful adaptation of the original, more a weird combination of sequel and re-imagining. A few climactic elements don’t feel entirely right; a little jarring, too mainstream perhaps given the surreality of most of the film. Not ruinous, and I’m sure perfectly acceptable for the main target audience.

Worth seeing just to be dazzled by the production.

Avaragado’s rating: cake.

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November 18, 2009 · 10:34 pm

2012: Spoilers ahoy!

As you know I despise spoilers, and those who spoil are lower in my esteem than even editors of the Daily Mail. Forget the three-strikes witch trial copyright infringement nonsense Mandy is trying to foist upon us: three spoils and you should be run through with a sharpened courgette, hanged by the neck until February and then ritually simoncowelled.

But I’m going to spoil the film 2012 for you. Because (a) it’s rubbish, (b) it’s laughably rubbish, and (c) everything is oh so obvious that you can probably already tell what happens from the opening scene until the welcoming dark embrace of the final fade to black.

Here are the highlights, minus the boring talky teary parts.

It starts with the science bit: it’s all caused by some kind of wonky neutrino just like what the Mayans sort of not really done predicted. Cue misery faces and the-president-wants-to-see-you boggle eyes. BRING ON THE DISASTERS.

California falls into the sea. Yellowstone caldera erupts. Las Vegas stops gambling. Our action hero John Cusack and his family, plus his estranged wife’s new lover and an extremely handy Russian billionaire and his family, escape all these via limo, light aircraft and Tupolev. Everyone else seems content to wait to die, except when they’re in exciting CGI scenes of utter devastation. Oh, there’s also the world’s worst impression of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

We see briefly what happens elsewhere. In Rome, the Sistine Chapel collapses and St Peter’s Basilica rolls over the Italian PM. In Rio, the statue of Christ on a Bike or whatever it is topples over. Take that, Catholics! In London, they suspend the Olympics and apparently replay scenes of the 1990 poll tax riots on TV in lieu of actual news footage.

The US president stays in Washington so they can drop the USS John F Kennedy on his head and smash the White House into a billion pieces – again.

Meanwhile in Tibet: the Chinese, in secret collaboration with the Americans and all the world’s dodgily accented leaders, have been building enormous arks (sadly numbered rather than lettered, so there’s no Hitchhikeresque B Ark). Construction has been financed by ticket sales to – of course – Russian billionaires and their ilk. Just a billion euros a seat. Animals go in two by two, as per; also the usual treasures, yer Monas, yer Davids.

On their unlikely flight to Tibet our heroes can’t refuel at Hawaii as the volcanoes have spent another ten million bucks or so on special effects. So they just keep flying and figure they’ll ditch in the sea somewhere unless there’s a plot development of some kind.

On Air Force One the scientists and remaining pols watch the world disintegrate and tectonic plates shift. They shift so quickly that – how handy! – Tibet moves 1500 miles east, allowing our sputtering Tupolev to conk out just a few miles from their intended destination. The Russian billionaire deserts them – he has a ticket – and the rest start walking randomly until they just happen to bump into a Tibetan family heading for a secret rendezvous at, seemingly, the unguarded back gate to the huge megacomplex building the arks. Naturally they’re going to be smuggled onto an ark by a family member.

Via a few more contrivances they find their way to an ark, but of course we’re not done yet. They drop a spanner or something into some cogs, which stops a Hugely Important Door from closing just as the tsunami reaches them. This apparently means the enormous vessel cannot start any engines whatsoever, and reminds me of the Death Star’s single exhaust port of failure.

Not to worry: John Cusack disappears under water on a “suicide mission” accompanied by his I-wanna-help whiney son and together they release the spanner, thus saving the ark from utter destruction upon the North Face of Everest. His ex-wife’s lover – who saved them all several times through his mad piloting skillz – carked it a few minutes before in a death-by-cog incident, but not to worry, she’s all over it already and lovey-dovey with her ex again.

Cue the epilogue, arks in the sunset, new world, etc. Can we go home now?

It’s at least half an hour too long. No, that’s not right: it’s about two and half hours too long. The coincidences are too much to bear. The plot twists don’t. It’s all so obvious. And John Cusack never takes his tie off for the entire movie. The world is disintegrating around him in glorious technicolour hogwash and he remains impeccably dressed throughout.

It’s a bad film.

Avaragado’s rating: six billion souls all crying out at once, “no more films Emmerich”

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October 31, 2009 · 12:30 pm

From the Imaginarium of Avaragado

The best films transport you away from your humdrum existence of gas bills, vexatious traffic lights and phlegmy work colleagues, if only for an hour or two. You forget the CGI, ADR and implausible dentalwork and instead inhale the director’s vision.

Sadly, nobody who sees The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus will entirely lose themselves in the film; not for a few years. Maybe ten. It will forever be subtitled in your mind The one Heath Ledger was filming when he died, and not until people can forget that or not know it will they be able to properly judge the film or experience it as intended.

It’s a bonkers plot bulging with trademark Gilliam ideas, visually potty as per, but every time Heath Ledger appears – or Johnny Depp, or Jude Law, or Colin Farrell – The Bungee Of Knowledge whips you back into the real world. And you find yourself thinking “is this the last scene he filmed?” or “I bet they’re glad the sound was good enough as he wasn’t around to redub it” or “have they digitally inserted his face anywhere?” or “did they film this scene with Ledger but reshoot it with one of the others?” or “this scene is surely a tribute to him” or a thousand other thoughts.

For the next few years this film’s a bit of a dancing bear: it’s not about the quality of the dance, but about how they got the bear to dance at all.

The device Gilliam used to cope with the loss of Ledger works fine within the context of the film. The eponymous Parnassus’s titular Imaginarium is a kind of mind-projection Tardis, which allowed them to plonk in a replacement thesp or three and wave it away with a couple of lines of dialogue.

But how much the overall storyline was recarved after Ledger’s death I don’t know. Perhaps not a great deal, although I very much suspect several “INT. CARAVAN. NIGHT” and “EXT. CARAVAN. NIGHT” scenes had “INT. IMAGINARIUM BLUE SCREEN. #7777FF” scribbled over them, especially later in the film.

Regardless of the merits of the movie, or about the struggle Gilliam had to complete it, I almost wish he hadn’t. X’s last film, for various values of X, tends to hover around poking away at their legacy, being referenced ad nauseam in any piece about X. Raul Julia’s last film was Street Fighter. Bela Lugosi’s was Plan 9 from Outer Space. Imaginarium is not in the same category as those two films, not by a long way; but it doesn’t seem a fitting end. It’s a bit too long and a bit too rambly. An ellipsis rather than a full stop.

But ask me again in ten years.

Avaragado’s rating: dwarf in a basket

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September 15, 2009 · 11:39 pm

District 9

Honestly, I had intended last night’s novella to be a brisk lead-in to one of Avaragado’s celebrated film reviews. I, uh, wandered a bit. Approximately 1500 words of bit. Once I considered that homework and spent hours in front of 1980s TV pretending to write essays that long. Now I do it for fun. Good, wholesome, cathartic fun.

The film I’d intended to review was District 9. On the surface a film about aliens and how we’d deal with them if they turned up unannounced, it’s actually about prejudice: hence the connection with my previous blog. The aliens arrive (in 1982) helpless and easily subjugated, unusually for the science fiction genre, and by 2010 when we pick up the story they’re kept in townships (hence the film’s title) just outside Johannesburg in South Africa. You don’t have to dig deep to spot the analogy; it was filmed in real townships.

It’s a curious film. The first part is presented as a documentary, watching bureaucrat Wikus as he leads his team on a project to relocate the aliens – nicknamed “prawns”. When things go wrong we switch to an objective camera perspective for the fun and games that follow. It’s a mix of genres: part buddy movie in places, often gruesome and gory, but never more than a beat away from comedy or pathos. Lovely swearing too.

Although the analogy to South Africa’s own recent past is in your face for the entire film, it’s not laid on with a trowel. I’m glad, as I hate trowel-based facial analogy delivery.

The lead character Wikus is played by Sharlto Copley, which sounds like an anagram. His lack of fame – this is his first leading role – ensures the documentary sequences have an authentic feel, and for greater realism he improvised much of the dialogue in some scenes. Some people apparently dislike his comedy South African accent, which is a shame as it’s his own. I suspect we’ll see him again though I hope not as Murdoch in The A-Team as rumoured.

A high quirk factor all round. But please, no sequel: not needed.

Avaragado’s rating: unidentifiable meaty chunks

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August 3, 2009 · 12:23 am

Lunar rambling

On the phone to dearest mater a week ago, I was blahing endlessly about Apollo 11 in that tedious nobody’s-interested-but-I’m-saying-it-anyway way I have. She said she’d been thinking back to the day of the landing and now remembers that the three-month-old me was unwell at the time. She’s absolutely convinced I was on the settee with her and pater as they watched events at Tranquility Base unfold in the company of Patrick Moore and James Burke and 600 million others.

Take that, kids of today! You might have your youth and your hair and your stupid 80s throwback fashions, but you never saw the first moon landing while wearing a nappy.

The further that milestone recedes into history, the more amazed I become that they succeeded. It’s almost as if Jules Verne’s space cannon in From the Earth to the Moon actually happened. For this anniversary, sites such as http://www.wechoosethemoon.org replayed events from launch to landing with as-live comms recordings, and I fully confess to listening to hours of it. A great deal of it was static and Capcom relaying coordinates to Apollo, but it was nerdily exciting nevertheless.

Naturally I listened throughout the descent and landing. The greatly condensed replays shown on TV don’t convey the drama, instead boiling it all down to the standard soundbites. What struck me was how much time they spent simply trying to keep communications up: moving antennae around, that sort of thing. And the coolness of Armstrong, overriding the system (that tried to land them in a boulder field) and scooting around a couple of hundred feet above the surface hunting for a flat bit, with less than a minute’s fuel remaining.

I just cannot imagine the tension of everyone listening in at the time. So many unknowns. The whole enterprise a teetering tower of risk upon risk.

Space nerd that I am, I’ve also been looking at various transcripts of the mission, with commentaries by knowledgable parties such as the crew. Which led to a surprising discovery: that, as well as the radio transmissions we’ve all heard a million times, there are audio recordings from inside Eagle as Armstrong and Aldrin took her down to the surface. These I hadn’t heard. But, of course, they’re now on the web (albeit only in a stupid streaming format as far as I can see) – see the transcript for details.

Now, 40 years on, we of course have permanently crewed bases on the Moon and Mars and we’re mining the asteroids. How vividly I remember that day in 1988 when Michael Jackson actually moonwalked across the lunar surface.

Ah well. Perhaps in another ten years or so we might actually get out of Earth orbit again. As it happens I strongly suspect the Chinese will reach the moon before the Americans return.

Which leads me to Moon, the new film starring Sam Rockwell as a solitary moon-based employee of a mining company scraping Helium-3 from the lunar regolith. Not exactly the setup you’d expect for a science-fiction thriller, but it works. Without giving anything away, Things Are Not What They Seem.

The film toys with your expectations somewhat. Don’t expect a blockbuster, an effects extravaganza: it’s not that sort of movie. Some people have compared it to 2001, but that’s a lazy and obvious comparison and entirely misplaced.

Much has been made of the retro model effects – no CGI here. There’s a definite dusting of Gerry Anderson over the proceedings, with the gentlest aroma of Michael Bentine. But if you come out of the film moaning about the models (or the odd scientific inaccuracy), you’ve rather missed the point. The lunar setting enables the story to be told.

And it’s an interesting story, original and thought-provoking, and in the tradition of good science fiction all too contemporary in many respects. I liked it a lot.

I don’t expect it’ll be a contender for the next Oscars, but I’d like to think it would get a nod for Original Screenplay. Sam Rockwell deserves something simply for the number of scenes he’s in.

Avaragado’s rating: opal fruits

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July 20, 2009 · 11:52 pm

On plinths and mentalists

On Saturday afternoon Chris and I went to London. First stop: Trafalgar Square. The famous tourist trap and pigeon restaurant is currently playing host to a bonkers piece of art called One and Other. As art goes it’s not entirely my manbag, since I like my art to be in some sense permanent and very definitely lacking a pulse. The idea is that, every hour, 24 hours a day, for 100 days, someone gets to stand on top of the reserved-for-future-wars empty plinth and do whatever takes their (legal) fancy. It’s broadcast constantly on one of Sky’s zero-viewer Arts channels; I like to think it has a Come Dine With Me sarcy voiceover.

Quite what makes this art I’m not sure. By the same token Big Brother is art.

The plinth occupier upon our visit was a woman who occasionally threw paper aeroplanes but did little else. She did have a wendy house adorned with a charity logo, though; similarly branded chuggers were shaking their buckets illegally at bemused Spaniards in a small radius. This exciting yet deeply dull sight I immediately tweeted to an eager world.

We lasted about ten minutes before looking for a pub. You will hear a different story about this from Chris. Mine is true.

“Let’s find a pub off the beaten track!” he said.

“We’re in the middle of London. There’s no such thing,” I replied.

“OK, then let’s get lost. You have an iPhone, we can always find out where we are.”

We headed roughly in the direction of Leicester Square. Chris navigated. Left here, right here. A tell-tale pagoda indicated Chinatown. Cross this road.

At this point I started giggling. “You have no idea where we are, do you?” I said.

“Since you’re laughing, I imagine you do.”

“Yeah.” I pointed at the sign saying Old Compton Street.

We found a bar and sat by the window, watching the gays promenade. I tested Chris on his straightdar: you can always tell the heterosexual couples in a gay environment since they hold hands, paw each other or are otherwise blatantly affectionate. Bless their insecure little ways.

After a drink or two we went to Mildred’s and met up with my friend Damon for a splendid meal. Then the main event: Derren Brown’s new show Enigma at the Adelphi Theatre on the Strand.

I will say very little about the show to avoid spoiling it (Derren also asked nicely). But I can confirm that it’s pretty damn good – jaw-dropping in places. The ending is very clever indeed and you leave the theatre with mind suitably blown. Chris was desperate to be one of the few Chosen Ones selected by frisbee to go on stage, but failed by one row (the person directly in front of us got to go). Oh, we did work out one trick; but others, no luck.

At one point in the show Derren Walked Amongst Us and was briefly beside Chris, who whispered “we love you” at him (yes, he had been drinking). Derren didn’t hear, thankfully.

Amazing show. See it if you can.

Avaragado’s rating: is written on the back of a playing card inside a sealed envelope

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July 20, 2009 · 11:44 pm

Harry Potter and the Onset of Puberty

Well, OK, maybe a bit more than that happens. You know, Dementors and stuff. The obligatory broomstick hockey (as well as the tonsil hockey). Some comedy pratfalling with the world’s oldest teenager, Ron Weasley (“he looks about 40” – C. Walsh). Dodgy acting. A great deal of nudge-winkery.

It’s a looong film for such a slender plot. Did Things Of Great Import happen that would only make sense to a trufan? If so, that seems a leetle faily to me. If not, they should have chopped half an hour off it.

Everyone’s in it, as usual. Gambon expositing Dumbledore, Rickman indistinguishable from sliced pig, Robbie Coltrane in platforms, Maggie Smith being professionally Scottish, etc. Jim Broadbent is good value. The young Tom Riddle (shown in flashback) is played by the humorously named Hero Fiennes-Tiffin, and yes, he is the nephew of Ralph Fiennes. He makes a good job of the role, I think, so maybe it wasn’t entirely nepotism. Poor lad has the middle name Beauregard apparently (and a sister Mercy, brother Titan, and clearly idiot parents).

Is there anything more to say? It’s film six, after all, and mostly magic-by-numbers. Not the best of the six, very much setting things up for the final two films (book seven being considered the last chance to make money too complex a story for one film).

Avaragado’s rating: butter

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