Insomnia TV

In the last week or so, I haven't been sleeping much and while not sleeping I have been watching TV and catching up on shows I have missed on Hulu.

So. Some reviews.

Heroes is all a bit complicated.

So...the Petrelli family continues with it's twisty ways, totally unable to be in the same place without hating one another. Angela's paralysis is cured in a dreamscape sequence engineered by Matt Parkman; we get the usual stuff about psychosomatic injuries becoming real, and Matt's new girl attempts to save him, and then Arthur "Call me Q" Petrelli shows up. Angela reminds him that deep down inside he still loves her, so Arthur cures her.

Wow. OK, Angela, now remind him that his insane quest to destroy the world is also because you two have had a tiff and...Angela? Angela!! Crap. The show goes on.

So anyway, Ando has been saddled with a Hiro that believes himself to be ten years old (Thanks to Arthur "Magneto's a lass" Petrelli).

And then at the end of the episode, everyone picks sides. The teams are:

Team Arthur
Sylar
Flint Gordon, the big dumb lunk that hurls fire.
Mohinder
Ellie Bishop
Knox
Tracy Strauss

Team Angela
- just about everyone else.

Except Hiro and Ando. So far. They used to work for Arthur, but quit.

And then in the next episode, things get stranger. An Eclipse happens and suddenly everyone loses their powers. Oh noes! This provides one really decent scene, in which Matt Parkman refuses to believe he can win his girl back without his powers and Hiro pelts him with corncobs until he smartens up.

The other thing that happens here is Sylar changes sides roughly eighty-seven times. Is he playing a complex game of his own? Is he really this easy to manipulate? Is he just a mass of conflicted broodingness? I think he's up to something, and it's amusing to see him turn into a badass (with the line "I hate heroes") just before the eclipse happens - during which Noah, the man with the Horn Rimmed Glasses and real tough guy, dislocates Sylar's shoulder and makes the badass cry like a little girl.

Claire gets shot, Arthur "Omnipotent" Petrelli makes an elementary deductive mistake based on more prescient art, and the Petrelli boys end up on Haiti arguing with each other about who the bigger jerk is. Right now, lads, I would have someone Zombie you and be done with the pair of you.

Onward to

Fringe

The premise for this show is not simple.

FBI Agent Olivia Dunham is recruited to investigate odd events that seem to form part of something called The Pattern - which suggest that someone is performing experiments on the world using rather extreme fringe science.

Olivia is pretty good stuff, actually. She's sensible, rational, passionate and clever. She's played by Anna Torv.

Olivia's team consists of a Mad Scientist, Walter Bishop. Walter (played by John Noble) has been in a lunatic asylum for the last 17 years.

If you watch this show for now other reason, do watch it for John Noble's performance. He's fab. I love Walter Bishop, who can segue from bewildered non-sequiters to towering rage in moments, and who's dialog you have to pay close attention to. The rest of the cast are more or less forgetable (apart from Astrid Fenyman, the assistant, who is a background character that needs more lines and more of a part in the show).

The ideas presented are firmly in the X-Files territory, but instead of having a spooky explanation, everything here is rooted in Science. Although there are nods to things being Odd, like the rather well done Classic MiB who shows up in the epsiode The Arrival. This is no Will Smith MiB, this is one from the annals of the Mothman reports, and the early days of UFology, and it made me rejoice to see it.

I love the show. There, I said it, and recommend it to you.

Next?

The Sarah Connor Chronicles

I wouldn't have watched this at all, but Summer Glau is in it.
Anyway.
It turns out to be pretty good.

Summer Glau, "River" from Firefly, is a Terminator programmed by John Connor to protect his younger self. The show talks about Emergent Behaviour - which is when a machine that is programmed to learn does something outside the normal range of what it should do - and then uses Cameron to demonstrate this.

There is a moment where Sarah Connor sees a tortoise on it's back. She turns it over. Later, Cameron asks John why she did this and John tells her that good humans like to help when they can, and that it would have been cruel to leave the tortoise to die. Shortly thereafter, Cameron beats the pogies out of a former FBI agent while John interrogates him. Once the beating is done, Cameron looks at the agent, who is on his back in the remains of a table, and turns him onto his front before walking away.

The show is full of little moments like this, and Summer Glau is very good at them. The rest of the cast are...more or less what you'd expect.

Lena Headey has the unenviable task of playing Sarah Connor; the character is basically nuts anyway, tortured by what she believes the future holds, and has forced herself to become a steely killer. This conflicts with what the character really wants to be, which is a mother to John. It's not an easy role, especially since Sarah Connor is what you get when a woman tries to be a man - or in this case, as we saw in Terminator 2, a Terminator.

Thomas Dekker plays John Connor, and it's another one of those difficult roles to carry off; the initials JC are not a coincidence. He's going to be mankind's last hope, but when we meet him he's fifteen and already has the attitude of a combat veteran. John's character is very much darker and more troubled than the John Connor we have seen in movies, but again this seems to work well.

Watching John and Sarah in conflict about how life is to be lived is interesting, and forms part of the show's emotional conflict. There are other characters, some from the future and some not, and an interesting sideline: Shirely Manson is apparently playing a T-1001, that happens to be running a company which looks like it might want to create Skynet.

It's worth picking an episode or two to watch, simply to work out whether the show's mix of sly commentary about the future and explosions is for you. Again, I like it enough to have caught up on Season 2, but I'm not quite sure if I like the show as a whole. I shall watch more.

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Thanksgiving

This is Thanksgiving weekend, a lovely American tradition in which they celebrate something and eat a lot.

In many respects, it's like Christmas - which it's a month before - but dedicated to family. This year, people all over America will be flying and driving to be with their relatives and to spend a couple of days doing what families do.

It's bittersweet for me, because it will be my last.

By this time next year I should be back in England, for good, and no longer a husband or stepfather. My wife of six years has decided that she can't put up with me being a depressive, and whatever else I am - typically, I don't know why I'm a crap human being - and doesn't want to be married to me any more. I cannot explain how this feels, so I won't. It's hard enough to blog it, because I'm normally a quiet, private person. Ideas are for sharing, pain is not.

The plan, then, is to do the whole divorce thing and move out. I will spend several months saving like mad, and then I will leave the country, return to the UK, find a city and live in it.

My family have not spoken to me since I came out here. This has been a source of pain for some time, and they are not likely to start talking to me any time soon. They do not like me, and to be perfectly honest I am no longer all that fond of them.

I have not picked a city. I like the looks of Leicester, and Newcastle, and perhaps Birmingham. I won't make a decision about this for a while, because I don't need to. I am not looking forward to starting again, from scratch, for the third time in ten years. But I will.

I am very good at beginnings, but time is ticking on. My father died aged 49 and I wonder if I will follow him; given that I am currently a conglomeration of bad habits - and that's infuriating because the ones I want (wine, women and song) are denied me (can't drink, don't want to turn into a drunk. no more women, thanks all the same. Couldn't carry a tune in a bucket) while the ones I have (depression, a tendency to eat when depressed, a tendency to smoke instead of eat) are getting worse.

And I cannot tell you how dull this all is. Look, I hate talking about myself because I'm boring. Instead:

Don't see The Brave One. If you want to watch a movie about a vigilante gunning people down for no reason other than that it seems like a good way to make sense of the world, go and rent Death Wish. Jodie Foster is excellent, and as a study of how someone turns to violence and revenge as a way to make sense of the world this is a good character study. But character studies do not make good movies unless there is a story to be told. Here, there isn't. You want to see this done well? Watch The Dark Knight instead.

Also don't see Click because it's just It's a Wonderful Life done with considerably less charm and warmth, or even life affirming qualities. It's an Adam Sandler vehicle telling that all too familiar tale of a man who can't do everything at once but desperately needs to because his life demands and pressures him into it, and his own role as breadwinner means he needs to provide for his family. And it's dull. There are some laughs, but they are too few and far between and the best of them are delivered by Christopher Walken.
Normally I wouldn't spoil a movie, but you don't need to see it - so, it Adam Sandler - who is playing himself as usual - fast forwards through his life using a magic "universal remote" and ends up losing his wife and kids (to Sean Astin in a red speedo) whilst becoming a success at his job. Of course, this leads to him also alienating his own parents, and missing all the fun times. At the end, on his deathbed (or death tarmac, possibly, since he kicks the bucket on a road while it's raining) he passes on one scrap of wisdom to his son and expires. Only to wake up back where he started, given another chance at life with a stern injunction from the Angel of Death to do it right this time.

I also saw Sweeny Todd, with Depp and Bonham Carter and Timothy Spall, Alan Rickman, Sacha Baron Cohen...assorted others. Victorian, gloomy, lingering shots down HBC's top for no readily apparent reason, and Johnny Depp. Since he's generally worth the price of admission on his own, I thought I might like this. I was right. Well, it's the movie version of a Sondheim musical and that's also good news. The gruesomeness is gruesome. The cast are pretty decent, although I am getting a bit weary of seeing the entire cast of Harry Potter trot before my eyes - don't we have any other actors in Britain? - and although I wasn't supposed to be uplifted or cheered by this gore splashed penny dreadful, I was. So there.

It also renewed my enthusiasm for owning a straight razor. I had one once and was almost able to shave myself properly without opening an artery. I would like to master that skill, so I might go look up something special for my tonsorial arrangements.

Meat pie, anyone?

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ZOMG! Cyberpunks!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7740483.stm

As the article says, the USA is under increasing threat from Chinese cyberspies.

There are a couple of reasons for this. First, the USA is proud of technology. And while it makes some really neat toys, neither government nor enterprise understand how to use and abuse them properly.

Second, because any human product is inherrantly flawed and an sufficiently dedicated hacker can get into just about anything given time and resources.

I say this not because I am some ub3rl33t h4x0r capable of "hacking the Gibson" or "hacking all the internets at once", but because I'm moderately I.T. aware and moderately paranoid. You build defenses expecting that some other bugger is working on ways to crack them.

In this case, if you want to secure information from cyberspies my immediate thought is "stop leaving it on vunerable networks". Print it, put it in a box, lock the box in a safe, lock the safe in a room, lock the room in a building, lock the building. This low tech solution is neither interactive nor sharing, but it will flat foot 100% of computer based hacking.

If information is sensitive, why is it being shared? If someone needs to see it, do not allow the information to go to them, make them come to the information. This is also simple, low tech, and irritatingly obvious.

In the same sense, if your government officials leave laptops full of sensitive data on the tube, take away the laptop, give the man a desktop bolted to his desk and don't let him work from home ever.

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Heroes Season 3 - yet again

The story continues by going backwards and filling in some backstory about the current situation.

Everything takes place during Hiro's visionquest and we assume we are viewing the true facts of the events depicted. We've rolled back two years, watching the early events of the first season, knowing what we now know about the Petrellis, the guy with the Horn Rim Glasses, Sylar and the rest of the gang.

It's sort of an Origin story episode.

Over the last couple of weeks we have seen the Petrelli family a'fightin' and a feudin', so it was probably about time that we discovered why. Everything hinges around Arthur and Angela Petrelli, their plans to take over the world (or something) and their difference of opinion.

Arthur dominates his wife and family, literally messing with Angela's head any time she takes against him. He plans to kill Nathan, has Linderman attempt to do so, and is poisoned by Angela. We know he survives.

We also see Sylar attempt to kill himself, and be forced into becoming the relentless and unstoppable killer we came to know and love by HRG (who is busily manipulating things behind the scenes).

At least this week we get to spend relatively long periods of time with the characters. There's plenty of attention given to the Petrelli family, and in fact to the extended family given that we now know Sylar is in fact Gabriel Petrelli.

This should be a low key episode, and it more or less is. It's nice seeing Zachary Quinto turn Gabriel Gray into Sylar, it's also nice to see how much of a bastard Arthur Petrelli is.

Eric Roberts is in this too, as an Ageny for The Company, and Christopher Eccleston's character gets a mention.

And since this is all a vision quest, we're not overly concerned with Suresh turning into a monthter, or Peter turning into Sylar, or adding anything to the story at all. Until the last few seconds, when it all seems to go terribly pear shaped for Hiro.

Somehow, the threat to Hiro and the "origin" of Sylar are the most compelling threads of the whole episode. Gabriel Gray is a harmless enough guy who attempts to kill himself after he kills someone with an ability because he's unable to cope with his own feelings of guilt and remorse. This sort of makes sense, seems to be a good start point, feels right.

And it turns out that Clint, the guy in level 5 that can throw fire, is the brother of Meredith - Claire's biological mother.

- as an aside, will you please look at the amount of SOPE! in this storyline? If this was Doctor Who, people would be up in arms about the interrelationships of characters.

I, on the other hand, am sort of digging it.

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Good Books

I don't just watch TV and fret about politics.

The book I absorbed today was The Knight in Battle, a non-fiction work examining the changes in medieval warfare from the 1100s to the 1500s. The author, a titan of a chap called William Ewart Oakeshott, who alas died in 2002 before I could find him and thank him for being brilliant.

In the course of the book we get a looksee at Richard the Lionheart vs Saladin, the Battle of Lincoln Fayre (featuring the always awesome William Marshall) a glimpse of Bayard and the changes rise of the Swiss pikeman.

Oakeshott's scholarly abilities are never in doubt; his writing style is lively and engaging to the point of his works being collector's items for me. You never have a moment's doubt that he loves this subject completely, that he understands how to present it to the people who are new to the material and that he wants you to engage with it and learn more. In short, he's a joy to read.

For example, in describing the battle of Lincoln in 1217, Oakeshott throws us a quick appreciation of Bad Prince John - who was definitely bad, and yet also a really very competent soldier and strategist. If all you ever see of Prince John is the man being baffled by Robin Hood and standing in the shadow of Coeur De Lion, it's not surprising he gets a raw deal. Oakeshott drags him out of the shadows and lets us get a good look at the King who lost his country and then fought like a man possessed to keep it away from the French.

Oakeshott is deft, clever, witty and warm and any of his books are heartily recommended.

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Halloween Viewing

Every Halloween, my family has a tradition: junk food and scary movies.

This year, we gave Emily (our eldest) the job of picking out the movies we'd watch, because on the whole she has good taste in films.

The Happening was up first.

M Night. Shal..whatsisname rarely lets us down, and The Happening is a departure from his recognised formula; there is no discernible twist, so what we get is a straight story with characters and a situation. The Happening is a nice little ecological parable, with the Gaia Hypothesis at the core. What happens when the planet decides it's had enough of humanity?

The human story at the core is low key; a high school science teacher and his wife, who may be having relationship problems, are forced to care for a young child and attempt to survive a situation which pits them against human nature and Mother Nature.

The teacher, Eliot Moore (played by Mark Wahlberg) and his wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel) are isolated from the herd of humanity by an ever decreasing circle of horror. Humans aren't a herd animal, but we are social creatures, and one of the things the movie exposes is the smallest common denominator of human society - the family. As the events of The Happening close in around the characters they are forced closer and closer together, finding strength in each other and growing to accept their feelings for one another.

In some senses, this is a cliche. Rarely do we see a Situation Movie where the estranged male and female leads don't come out of it with renewed bonds of love. In another sense, though, the movie shows us what we are at the core: a society of families, with the bonds that we choose to make being the most enduring and important to us as individuals. We also get a long, hard look at trust and friendship - again, choices that we make which are far more solid under pressure than we might initially believe.

The Happening is chilling in a very small scale way, and although the movie has been roundly panned by critics, professional and otherwise, it works. Wahlberg plays against type, his character isn't a hero and instead comes across as an intelligent and earnest man out of his depth. There are no heroics here, he doesn't save the day, the decisions he makes are small on the global scale but intensely personal and all the more interesting for that.

I enjoyed the movie, not because of the scare factor - Shyamalan uses the R rating to show grisly death after grisly death, although with a remarkble lack of gratuitous gore, using the horror to underline the hopeless nature of the crisis. It also works better because of the lack of twist. This defeat of expectation is probably why a lot of people felt let down, but that's a good thing: directors and movies should not be product.

The Strangers is torture porn. Although scary, tense and well constructed after watching the film I couldn't find a reason for it to exist.

Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman play a couple who have just had one of those relationship mis-steps, where one person wants a deeper level of committment than the other, and don't know what to do in order to resolve this issue. Luckily for them, they are subjected to psychological and physical peril by a trio of roving psychopaths and this solves to resolve them both to love each other, shortly before being butchered.

And that's it. The scares are of the "boo!" variety, there is a load of creeping menace that is deftly and unnervingly put together which keeps you either on the edge of your seat or forces you to curl up in the back of it. All well and good, but the movie doesn't do anything else. It's entertainment of a form I am deeply uncomfortable with - for one thing, it's based on a true story and, at the very beginning, tells you that no one is quite sure of the events that took place that fateful night. Which tells me that our lead characters don't, in fact, make it out alive. With this knowledge in place, with almost no script and therefore no real character development possible, all we're left with is being helpless witnesses to an episode of insane brutality.

The one bright spark is Liv Tyler, who manages to create an emotional journey for her character and who stands out as the one reason to watch the movie at all. But not more than once.

Oh, and as noted above, the couple do come out of the situation with renewed ties and love. They just don't get to enjoy it.

The Mist is a Stephen King yarn, dealing with the ties that hold communities together when faced with things beyond their understanding. There are tentacles, a base under seige, religious mania and claustrophobia - a neat examination of modern America in the face of the War on Terror, in fact.

I will actually review it when I have watched it at not 2am, and when I can remember more than that initial paragraph. It should be noted, however, that the direction and acting are enough for me to want to see it again. Good movie.

Iron Man we got because Dad is a geek and on a superhero kick.

Yes, it's a popcorn movie and yes, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby have created yet another flawed hero who is, nevertheless, a hero. It's a tale about responsibility, power and really neat technology and it has everything I wanted from an Iron Man movie. Robert Downey Jr. was a perfect choice for Tony Stark; I think Hollywood has caught on to the big point about superhero flicks, that beneath the fights and the cool stuff these are stories about people and their choices. We've seen it in The Dark Knight and we see it again in Iron Man, but in both situations it;s not as forced or rammed down our necks as it has been in the Spider Man sequels: with great power comes great responsibility. Shouldering that responsibility is the mark of a hero, at least according to Marvel.

It works.

If you aren't interested in that, RDJ and the movie deliver on absolutely every other score. The action is pacey and suitably huge. The technology is cool, and it's fun that Stark has a better relationship with his household robots than he does with the people around him. Watching him attempt to break out of this situation is as entertaining as the CGI antics of the suit of armour.

My one gripe is that the trailer used "Iron Man" by Black Sabbath for Tony's breakout from his terrorist captors - which was a 'punch the air' moment, but the movie leaves this music for the end titles. A shame, it worked better in the trailer.

An excellent blockbuster, with loads of room for sequels and extrapolations, and RDJ is apparently on the Tony Stark gravy train for at least another three films, which makes me happy because he has the character down to a tee and is extremely watchable.

And that'll do for now.

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The Next Doctor

So, in 2010 we get a new Doctor. Well, the tail end of 2009 really.

Much is being made, in fandom, of who the next chap will be. Some interesting names are being kicked around, including a couple of black actors, and some parts of fandom are not entirely happy with that possibility.

Being charitable, I'd say they've fallen into the trap of "tradition" (a thing that is done because we've forgotten the reasons for doing it that way in the first place). The Doctor has always been a white guy, therefore he should continue being a white guy.

Which isn't really much of an argument.

My point of view is that the role should go to someone who is going to get the most out of it as an actor, someone who will hopefully stick with it for more than one season and someone who will be entertaining. The final choice of actor doesn't matter to me outside these criteria.

I'd like to see David Tennant's replacement last longer than a season simply because The Doctor is important to people. Give the actor a chance to get into the role, to become "my Doctor" for another set of fans, to do something interesting with the part. That's going to take more than one season.

Plus, I'm a fan. I like a bit of longevity in my Doctors. From the little I've seen of Patrick Troughton, I find myself wishing he'd done another year (if only to ensure that more of his tenure survived the great episode cull), but that's just a side effect of me really enjoying his performance and wanting more. I think David Tennant, like Patrick Troughton, has a shrewd eye on his career and has made the right decision for himself and his future - and I can hardly blame him for that, especially given all the fun he's provided over the last few years.

If you really want to speculate, you can probably narrow down the range given the comments made by the cast and crew over the last couple of years, but beyond that I don't really want to investigate too deeply.

Because for me, there's still something magic about regeneration. In a way, I'm hoping they keep this a secret until we actually see the regeneration around Christmas 2009. I'm looking forward to being surprised, and slightly wrong footed, by the choice. Looking at regenerations past -

- actually, one of my first memories of the show is watching the Pertwee/Baker regeneration scene and being curious, a little surprised, and a bit upset that the Doctor was changing. I was equally emotional over the change from Tom Baker to Peter Davison, and once again when Davison became Colin Baker. I was utterly nonplussed at the choice of Sylvester McCoy but by the time he changed into Paul McGann I didn't want him to go either. All the way through my time with the show, I've been enthralled and saddened when one actor bows out and another takes his place.

That magic remains.

In the end, it doesn't matter who plays the Doctor and in all honesty skin colour is probably the single least important aspect of the person who steps into the role next. Time and again, we've been shown that the writing, the ability of the actor and the dedication of the production team are what make the show captivating. As long as the folks in charge of the casting process are aware of this, I feel that they'll make the best decision for the show as an entity. If they want to do something non-traditional, I'm more than happy with that. Things that don't evolve tend to stagnate and a stagnant Doctor Who isn't good for anyone.

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