TV

DVDs I bought or received in the month of May

• 30 Days of Night (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• Enchanted (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• The Golden Compass (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• Mrs. Doubtfire (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• The Orphanage (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (R0 UK, Blu-ray)
• Waking the Dead: Series 6 (R2 UK, DVD)

Definitely a very Blu month for me, which I have no complaints about whatsoever. I was going to post a bit about the various titles listed above, but for some reason I only managed to get an hour and a half of sleep last night, and as a result I’m absolutely knackered. Therefore, I’m off to get some serious shut-eye now, if I can. Laters.

Thoughts on Kiss of Death

Last night saw the screening, on BBC1, of Barbara Machin’s latest venture, a 90-minute crime drama entitled Kiss of Death. It probably wouldn’t be too much of a stretch for me to say that I think Machin is one of the best writers working in television at the moment. She wrote my all-time favourite episode of Casualty, Perfect Blue (as well as two other episodes in my personal top ten - an impressive feat, given that she’s not exactly prolific), and created Waking the Dead, for which I am forever grateful to her. She also wrote the only episode of An Unsuitable Job for a Woman worth a damn, and has continued to demonstrate a refusal to be governed by the constraints normally imposed on the genres with which she works. Two Christmases ago, she turned Casualty on its head by adopting a Rashômon-like structure to tell a gritty medical thriller story, and Kiss of Death applies much the same format to the police procedural.

On paper, Kiss of Death is not all that different from Waking the Dead. Most of the same personalities are present and correct: we have the haunted senior police officer, the slightly oddball forensic scientist, the over-eager junior female detective who worked hard to get out of uniform, and so on and so forth. The programme’s uniqueness came not from its characters or the situation in which they found themselves but from the fragmented manner in which the story was told. Whereas the Casualty episode Killing Me Softly used the unprecedented (at least in Casualty) but fairly straightforward concept of showing the events of a day consecutively from the perspective of three different characters (each shift being indicated by flashing the character’s name up on the screen), Kiss of Death ups the number of available points of view to at least nine characters and continually jumps back and forth between them, also going both forwards and backwards in time. That I managed to keep up with what was going on is, I think, a testament to Machin’s writing and the directing of her old colleague, Casualty co-creator Paul Unwin, but I can imagine many viewers finding this very frustrating. Credit where credit’s due, therefore, to the often lowest-common-denominator BBC for commissioning and airing in a prime time-slot (9 PM on a weekday night) something that actually set out to challenge its audience’s expectations and intelligence. It’s just too bad it had the misfortune of airing directly after a highly sensationalised and tabloidish Panorama investigation into child molesters who use the Internet to prey on their victims.

Last night’s screening was billed as a one-off drama, much in the same manner as Waking the Dead when its two-part pilot episode aired back in 2000. It eventually returned for a full series in 2001, after certain stylistic elements and character backgrounds had been retooled, and I’d like to think that, in much the same manner, Kiss of Death has its own series to look forward to. However, I very much doubt that it could continue as anything but a one-off in its present form, given the extent to which the events depicted relied on the personal involvement of its protagonists. In what is becoming increasingly typical of television dramas, most of the main characters had a Dark Past, many of them interconnected. Our main detective, Kay Rousseau (played rather well by former CSI star Louise Lombard, this time sporting her native English accent with only an occasional Transatlantic vowel sound), had only recently returned to work after being convicted and later acquitted of the death of her baby, and it was implied that her being let off the hook was due mainly to work done behind the scenes by her ex-husband Miles (Ace Bhatti), who ensured that the “right people” worked on her case. Kay also had a History (with a capital “H”) with both her profiler, Clive (Shaun Parkes) and her forensic scientist, George (Lyndsey Marshal), the latter having helped put together the case against Kay during the investigation into her child’s death. George, it is also revealed, has or had a serious drink problem, and an action on her part in a previous case may or may not be connected to the murder that the team is presently investigating. Finally, Kay’s second-in-command, Costello, is played by Danny Dyer, which is enough of a defect in itself without giving the character any additional problems.

That probably all sounds a bit contrived, and, in a sense, I suppose it was. The structure was such that I didn’t really get to care a great deal for any of the main characters, apart from George, who I’ve come to the conclusion is my favourite, mainly thanks to her uncharacteristically enthusiastic reaction to the blood and guts that her job brings her into contact with. Seriously, the look on her face as she examines the contents of a murder victim’s bowel (see the image below) would put many a gore movie fan to shame. The rest of the characters, however, seemed a bit too distant or flawed to really care about them, and I suspect that a lot of this was a result of the unconventional narrative structure that had been adopted. With the episodes of Casualty in which Machin first began to experiment with this method of storytelling, this was considerably less of a problem, given that the audience had already established a relationship with the characters that she was using to tell her story, in the case of the likes of Josh and Charlie going back 15-20 years. Here, however, I found myself thrust into an extremely disorientating world populated by characters that I was getting to know only via brief snippets of information delivered in non-chronological order.

This probably sounds like I’m coming down rather hard on Kiss of Death, which is not the case at all. On the contrary, I really enjoyed it… if “enjoyed” is the right word, given the bleak tone and often gruesome imagery on display. The programme worked as an experiment first and a piece of storytelling second, and it required me to invest effort in it to get the most out of it, but I suspect that’s no bad thing. On the whole, I feel that the Casualty two-parter I’ve already mentioned was more satisfying as a piece of drama, mainly because I didn’t feel there that the structure was hampering my ability to connect with the characters, but Kiss of Death was a gripping, challenging piece of television and a more than welcome antidote to an often formulaic and predictable schedule.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 8, Episode 14: Wolves at the Gate, Part Three

Written by Drew Goddard; Illustrated by Georges Jeanty

Well, Renée is now dead, bloodily speared through the heart with the mystical scythe by a grinning vampire in what I’m sure was meant to be a deeply shocking and heartbreaking moment, but which just leaves me rolling my eyes and thinking “Jesus, get a new favourite plot contrivance, Joss.” Sudden Unexpected Deaths are all very well when used in moderation and for meaningful purposes, but when you roll out the exact same thing again and again, then please forgive me for not being entirely enthused by it. Jenny Calendar worked, Joyce worked, I’ll even concede that Doyle worked to some extent, but now we’ve had (off the top of my head) Tara, Jonathan, Cordelia, Fred, Wesley, Christian Kane, Shepherd Book, Wash, Random Japanese Slayer… Really, when you add up all the Sudden Unexpected Deaths that have been thrown at us by Buffy, Angel and Firefly/Serenity combined, you’d be forgiven for thinking this was nothing more than a big joke.

Maybe it is. Maybe Joss Whedon is sitting at his desk cackling as his unquestioning fans slavishly lap up each tall steaming glass of liquid fertiliser he serves them and then ask for more. However, if so, I’m sorry to say I don’t share his sense of humour. Oddly enough, what I find particularly obnoxious about the whole affair is that I had no reason to care about Renée in the first place. She was never characterised in anything but the broadest sense, and her entire function, it is now clear, was simply to dump yet more heartache on Xander. Are we at all surprised that the pair shared a kiss not six pages before she was skewered? Then again, given how Whedon and Goddard have treated the Xander character so far in this arc (see his “relationship” with Dracula), perhaps they’ll expect us to see his bereavement as highly amusing. After all, this issue began with Buffy cutting down the body of Random Japanese Slayer, which the vampires had strung up over the streets of Tokyo for all to see, and yet, four pages later, had Dracula hilariously asking if anyone was going to finish eating the corpse.

I haven’t yet mentioned Buffy treating Dracula as a mere annoyance (rather than as the mortal enemy that he is) or the sight of giant Dawn stomping through Tokyo à la Godzilla, but in all honesty I don’t see the point. This comic is a train wreck even by the already extremely low standards set by Seasons 6 and 7 of the television series. I’m sorry to say that I have less and less hope for Whedon’s new TV project, Dollhouse, with every page I read of this travesty. It astounds me that the person who once gave us excellent television like Hush, Restless and The Body has fallen so far from grace, but quite frankly, I’m finding it increasingly difficult to bring myself to care.

My next Buffy comic review will be my final one. My subscription stops after Episode 15, and I most assuredly won’t be renewing it. So, you can all breathe a collective sigh of relief.

Dead rising

My copy of the DVD release of the sixth series of Waking the Dead arrived on Tuesday, coincidentally on the same day that the twelfth and final episode of seventh series aired on BBC1. Series 6 stands out to me as by far the weakest of the bunch, for a number of reasons, but it’s been over a year since I last saw it and I’m genuinely curious to see if it plays better on a second viewing. The thing about Waking the Dead is that the plots are often so convoluted that they require two or three viewings to work out what’s actually going on and simply enjoy the drama on its own merits.

In any event, Series 7, on the whole, constituted a definite step up from Series 6. It shared the same core cast of characters, the same producer, Colin Wratten, and the same head writer, Declan Croghan, but this time round, all but one of the six two-part storylines was at least worth a watch, even if the overall standard varied wildly from episode to episode. The stand-out, this time round, was Skin, a storyline involving a group of neo-Nazis connected with the murder of a gay Jewish man. The twist, which I’ll spoil here given that the episode in question has now aired, was that their victim had in fact infiltrated their group by posing as a skinhead himself, and has succeeded in infecting all of them with the AIDS virus by mixing his own blood into the pigment he then used to give them tattoos. It was a unique concept, and exceedingly well-told too, and I’m quite pleased with myself for managing to work out what was going on a good five minutes before it was revealed in the programme itself, which I think speaks well for its refusal to cheat the audience by throwing in a massive twist out of left field.

Unfortunately, Skin, and the first part of the final storyline, Pietà, were the only ones that I felt were up to the standards of the earlier series. It doesn’t speak well of the second two-parter that I actually had to look up LocateTV to remind myself what it had been about. On the other hand, the fifth storyline, Wounds, sticks in my mind for all the wrong reasons. Gimmicky in the extreme and confusing for its own sake, it was more along the lines of the previous series with its pseudo-mysticism, muddy structure and overuse of flashbacks. I also continue to be less than impressed by forensic pathologist Eve (Tara Fitzgerald), who joined the team last year and has so far been a less than riveting replacement for Holly Aird and Esther Hall. Part of the problem stems from the fact that she never seems to alter her facial expression or manner of delivery, to the extent that, when she actually gives a slight half-smile in the final episode, it’s something of a shock to discover that her mouth can actually make that shape.

In my review of Series 5, I criticised the increasingly exaggerated and unrealistic behaviour of the central character, Detective Superintendent Boyd (Trevor Eve), who would repeatedly bully his colleagues and extract confessions from suspects under duress. This behaviour escalated throughout the previous series to the extent that it became a running joke, so it was something of a relief that Series 7 went in the opposite direction, giving us an older, quieter, wearier Boyd than the one we’re used to seeing. The writers certainly reined in the character’s temper tantrums in this series, and likewise, Trevor Eve toned down his scenery-chewing in favour of brooding and scowling. He also, to the best of my knowledge, didn’t assault anyone this year, preferring instead to leave the strong-arming to his sergeant, Stella (Félicité Du Jeu).

This uncharacteristic calmness seems particularly strange when you consider that this was the very series in which Boyd might have been considered justified in flying off the handle, in that a storyline that has been lurking on the sidelines since the very beginning of the show, the disappearance of his son, was finally resolved. At the beginning of this series, his son, Luke (who I’m fairly sure was actually named Joe in Series 1), re-appeared, a homeless drug addict who Boyd spent the rest of the series intermittently running away from and trying to help. In some respects, I thought this storyline was quite effective, providing a reason for Boyd’s bizarre behaviour and also helping to tie what would have been six disparate storylines together, but at the same time I feel that it breaks the programme’s crucual tenet of never allowing us to see anything of the main characters’ personal lives.

The Luke storyline also created a far bigger problem for the rest of the series, because the writers seemed to insist on drawing parallels between Boyd’s relationship with his son and most of the cases the team were investigating. This led to a sense of repetition, not least with the continual emphasis on missing children and fathers’ dysfunctional relationships with their sons. It also meant that four of the six storylines involved a suspect, victim or witness who either was or was suggested to be gay: it is implied, at the end of the second storyline, that Luke is gay, or possibly working as a rent-boy to feed his drugs habit (the specifics of what we see are infuriatingly unclear), and, reading between the lines, I wonder to what extent we are meant to suspect that this in some way led to his estrangement from his father. The thing is, though, that Boyd may have been shown to be many things, but homophobic has never been one of them; actually, his views towards most aspects of humanity have always been characterised as fairly liberal. In the end, I don’t know what to think.

On the whole, though, what we got was an improvement on the previous year’s clumsy, wishy-washy series. I wouldn’t characterise any of it as essential viewing, except perhaps the Skin two-parter, but it proved to be an engaging enough distraction on Monday and Tuesday evenings for six weeks, and only two of the twelve hours I devoted to it (the Wounds two-parter) are ones that I consider to have been wasted.

Creator Barbara Machin’s newest project, another crime series under the title of Kiss of Death, airs next Monday, by the way. It’s being billed as a one-off 90-minute drama, although Waking the Dead started out very much in the same way, airing its two-part pilot episode in 2000 before returning for a full series in 2001. The advance buzz suggests that Machin is continuing her interest in non-linear storytelling, using an approach similar to that of the Casualty episodes she wrote for Christmas 2006.

Actually, it really is that bad

The illustrious Baron Scarpia has braved a fate worse than death and submitted himself to reading all thirteen of my Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 comics. It was actually the Baron who first drew my attention to the world of rubbish Buffy comics in a post he made back in 2006, and, while I’m sure I’d have sought the Season 8 comics out regardless, I suspect that his, erm, appraisal of the comics available on the BBC web site probably served as something of a warning of just how bad things could get in comicdom. Therefore, I suppose I have him to thank for my experience with Season 8 not being as traumatic as it could have been. You see, my expectations had already been tempered somewhat by what I knew about the previous comics in this franchise, to the extent that I wasn’t particularly surprised by the poor quality of this official continuation. Still, I think my appreciation for the comics would have improved immensely had they included this delightful line from a piece of Buffy fan fiction, quoted by the Baron in his 2006 post:

The demon jumped into the air and landed in front of Buffy. “I know you Slayer. You cannot stop me. I shall defeat you then I shall fuck you to death.”

Is that poetry or is it poetry? Proof, perhaps, that Willow asking Satsu what Buffy is like in the sack (in Episode 13) is actually not the single most absurd conversation that could have been written.

Anyway, there’s a point to this post other than simply hawking a friend’s review (not that I wouldn’t have done that anyway - go and read it, it’s insightful and quite amusing). I want to take the time to reply to some of the issues raised in a comment left on of my own reviews of these comics. Basically, the visitor, Marc, felt that, in comparison with my reviews of other series and films, my Buffy reviews were a bit like something you might find in a “tawdry fan blog”, featuring over-analysis and without sufficient context given for those who are not followers of the show to understand what I was writing about.

I disagree with the first point, in that I don’t think my coverage of this series has been any more (over-)analytical than the other reviews I do. And if it is… well, let’s not forget that Buffy is a series that has gone out of its way to be very self-aware and referential towards pop culture. It’s the sort of thing that practically demands that you address it in an analytical way rather than just saying “I liked this, I didn’t like that”.

The other point, however - the lack of background explanation - is a perfectly valid one, however, and is a shortcoming of the Buffy project that I’ve become aware of over the course of re-reading some of the episode reviews recently. It’s quite true that there is a lack of context: if you don’t watch Buffy, most of the time you’ll have no idea what I’m talking abut in terms of characters, events or the mythology in general. In that respect, these reviews are very difficult, not to mention weaker, than the reviews I normally write. In my defence, when I began the Buffy project I wasn’t really writing the reviews for anything other than my own benefit. By the time I realised that this was a problem, however, it was too late to modify the tone of these capsules without going back to the beginning and starting over, something that I don’t feel particularly compelled to do, since it would necessitate yet another trip down memory lane, dredging up all the painful memories that come with it.

Tell you what - one of these days, I’ll sit down and write a summary-style review of each season, written with the assumption that the reader has no prior knowledge of the series in question.

Turn that frown upside down

A couple of days ago, if you’d told me I’d enjoy Enchanted so much, I’d probably have laughed. I must admit that the idea of an intentionally saccharine Disney fairytale spilling over into the “real” (i.e. live action) world didn’t really sound like a bundle of laughs, but, all the same, reports of stellar image quality and some very nice hand-drawn animation piqued my curiosity, and I picked up the Blu-ray release.

I watched it on Friday night, and I honestly don’t think I’ve got so much pure enjoyment out of a film in a long time. If Disney fairytales aren’t your cup of tea, you’ll probably hate this, but in that case you, sir, are Scrooge McDuck and have a heart of stone. This film has its head lodged firmly in the clouds, and frankly I’m not complaining. A little bit of escapism now and then is a very good thing, especially when it’s executed with this degree of panache. I still haven’t decided whether Amy Adams is intensely charming or intensely irritating, but she and the rest of the cast have a level of enthusiasm that is incredibly infectious and lets me overlook the script’s shortcomings.

I found the live action material more appealing to look at than either the traditional animation or CGI elements, which is quite a feat indeed. Then again, given the bland (albeit slick) look of the hand-drawn elements and the overall shoddiness of the CGI (including the worst talking dragon this side of Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Graduation Day episode), perhaps that’s not entirely surprising. Anyway, I thought I’d do a bunch of screen captures to show just how far Disney managed to hit their Blu-ray release out of the park. Feast your eyes on these:

Enchanted
(Buena Vista, USA, AVC)

Animation:

Live action:

Greetings from Vista

I’m back inside Windows Vista again, this time permanently, I hope.

Why? Well, it all started when my brother put together a new computer, a quad core system with 4 GB of RAM to enable more efficiency in his DVD projects (the first of which I hope will be announced before very much longer). Among the components he picked up for it was a new video card, an ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro, which gave him access to the advanced deinterlacing and other hardware video acceleration technologies that weren’t available on his previous Radeon X800. As I previously explained, problems in the hardware video acceleration department were responsible for me crawling back to Windows XP with my tail between my legs. Imagine my surprise, therefore, when I discovered that he was getting perfectly good deinterlacing, with subtitles, in Vista using Windows Media Player.

A reinstall of Vista later and I discovered the reason for my video problems. It seems that installing the ArcSoft TotalMedia TV recording software that came with my TV stick buggered up Vista’s EVR video decoding, to the extent that, even when I uninstalled TotalMedia and removed all references to it in the registry, it still continued to be borked. Completely reinstalling Vista was the only way to solve the problem, and solve it it did. (I don’t need TotalMedia anyway because Vista Home Premium comes with the very slick Windows Media Center, which has its own TV viewing and recording capabilities.)

So, here I am, just about as happy as I can possibly be with Vista. There are still some niggles to be worked out - it looks as if EVR video playback, at least on this video card with these drivers, suffers from blocky chroma upsampling (see the image above, from Pocahontas) - but the situation is much better than it was before.

Update, May 2nd, 2008 02:42 PM: Well, slap my face! It turns out XP’s handling of chroma upsampling (in PowerDVD, Media Player or Media Player Classic - take your pick) is identical to that of Vista, and I can’t say it’s bothered me unduly before. It just goes to show the things you spot when you’re in nitpick mode. Ah well, at this point I can’t claim that XP offers anything that Vista doesn’t give me, so I suppose you can officially call the earlier operating system dead and buried as far as my system is concerned.

DVDs I bought or received in the month of April

• 101 Dalmatians: Platinum Edition (R1 USA, DVD)
• The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (R0 UK, Blu-ray)
• The Aristocats: Special Edition (R1 USA, DVD)
• The Black Dahlia (R2 UK, DVD)
• Bonnie and Clyde (R0 USA, Blu-ray)
• The Frightened Woman (R0 UK, DVD)
• Holby Blue: Series 1 (R2 UK, DVD)
• Juno (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• The Lady from Shanghai (R2 UK, DVD)
• The Maltese Falcon (R2 UK, DVD)
• Mother of Tears (R2 UK, DVD)
• The Postman Always Rings Twice (R2 UK, DVD)
• An Unsuitable Job for a Woman: Series 1 & 2 (R1 USA, DVD)
   

DVD Review: Holby Blue: Series 1

Holby Blue seems to suffer from something of a crisis of identity. Piggy-backing on the success of a medical series, it masquerades as a police drama when in actual fact it seems to want to be nothing more than a soap. With The Bill running bi-weekly on rival network ITV and the likes of Waking the Dead and various American imports fulfilling the higher brow end of the market, it’s questionable whether there is really room for another police series, let alone one so unsure of its own target audience. It’s watchable enough, but it all seems a bit pointless, and, for all its surface gloss and high aspirations, doesn’t really seem to have anything fresh to say.

A police drama spun off a medical series, you say? Whatever next? I get out my magnifying glass and gives Series 1 of Holby Blue a grilling in the interrogation room.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 8, Episode 13: Wolves at the Gate, Part Two

Written by Drew Goddard; Illustrated by Georges Jeanty

Another month, another wondrous Buffy comic. The previous issue was irksome because of the Buffy/Satsu nonsense, but this one is completely and utterly bloody infuriating. First of all, this episode has more Andrew in it than any previous one - Goddard must be in love with this character, and it’s one of my main reasons for my considering him to be utterly overrated as a writer. Seriously, it absolutely astounds me that he and illustrator Georges Jeanty have managed to make this character every bit as annoying on the page as he was on screen. That must constitute some sort of dubious special talent.

Secondly, the character of Xander continues to be run into the ground with the revelations, spoken (by Andrew) without a hint of jest, that he and Dracula “stayed in touch” post Buffy vs. Dracula, writing “the occasional letter here and there”. I mean, seriously. This is the Xander who, after freeing himself from Dracula’s spell, gave a bit speech about how he would never again be anyone’s butt-monkey. But even this pales in comparison to the statement that, after Anya’s death, Xander went to live with Dracula for several months because he “needed some guy time”. Oh, and taught Dracula how to ride a motorbike.

I know this shouldn’t really be surprising. The character of Xander was treated like absolute crap in the final two seasons of the TV series, and indeed Nicolas Brendon has since stated that, at around the beginning of Season 5, Joss Whedon essentially told him that his character arc was finished and was welcome to stay but shouldn’t expect any meaningful storylines (he only stuck around because he felt he needed the money). But this is a new low. It demonstrates, to me, that those involved have lost any interest in telling a believable story about people the audience can empathise with and instead are content to trade the core characters’ dignity in favour of a cheap laugh here and there.

By this stage, I was pretty close to tearing my comic in two and chucking the two halves in the bin, but I hadn’t even finished page 7 at this point, so against my better judgement I persevered. If I hadn’t kept going, I wouldn’t have got to enjoy the sight of Buffy completely blanking Satsu and barking orders at her, and a whole cavalcade of jokes suggesting a homosexual relationship between Xander and Dracula, each one more hilarious and mature than the last. Oh, and Willow pestering Satsu to tell her what Buffy’s like in the sack. That, by the way, comes after Satsu saying she knows Buffy’s not “a dyke”, surely the most tasteful piece of writing since that infamous deleted exchange in the Season 6 episode Dead Things where Tara sympathises with Buffy’s sordid relationship with Spike by pointing out “Sweetie, I’m a fag. I been there.” (You think I’m kidding? Just follow the link.)

Following this hearty recommendation, I’m sure you’ll all be rushing out to buy copies of this masterful work of literature. Myself, I’d cancel my pre-orders for Parts 3 and 4 of this four-part arc if I could.

So many discs, so little time

The last few days have heralded a shed-load of DVD and Blu-ray releases pouring through my letterbox, most of which I’ve scarcely had time to give more than a cursory glance. Most of them were free review copies, and a good thing too as I recently had to pay off my Graduate Endowment, so my coffers are looking a little empty at the moment.

First up, and one that I did pay for, was Sony Pictures’ UK Blu-ray release of Terry Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. It looks to feature a decent transfer for a catalogue title: detail is, on the whole, very good, but the tell-tale signs of grain reduction are consistently evident. At the moment, I’d peg it as being slightly better than the re-release of The Fifth Element, also from Sony, but more investigation will be needed.

Next up, on Saturday, Shameless Screen Entertainment’s UK DVD release of Piero Schivazappa’s trippy 60s shocker The Frightened Woman (a.k.a. Femina Ridens). As a nice surprise, they sent me a fully boxed copy rather than the “DVD in a paper wallet” affair that most of the UK studios favour, so I can savour the tacky artwork in all its, erm, glory.

Unfortunately, I can’t say anything particularly positive about the transfer. Yes, it looks considerably better than my old VHS dupe, but that’s not a fair or particularly realistic comparison. A more valid counterpoint would be Severin Films’ release of The Psychic, which had similarly poor image quality, with a lack of detail and what looked like a dodgy scaling job, manifesting itself in the form of jagged diagonal lines. I wonder what caused this. Perhaps both films were acquired from the same licensor, or perhaps both companies used the same (incorrectly set up) encoder? Either way, if I’d paid for a company to encode my film and it came back looking like this, I would have rejected it outright. In case anyone gets the wrong idea, this is nothing to do with the quality of the source materials, which, barring some tape-based inserts for scenes which wouldn’t be sourced from a print, appears to be in great shape. This issue here has nothing to do with that and everything to do with the way it has been treated at the authoring stage. Not impressed.

Also in the package was the 2-disc release of the first series of Holby Blue, from 2 Entertain (the BBC’s front for commercial exploitation via optical disc). This is interesting, because I recorded the entire series directly to my computer via my USB TV stick back when it first aired, so I had a point of comparison to refer to when examining the image quality. The results, which you can see by clicking the smaller images below, are quite surprising:

Example 1
(Left: Commercial DVD; Right: My recording from DTV)

Example 2
(Left: Commercial DVD; Right: My recording from DTV)

Example 3
(Left: Commercial DVD; Right: My recording from DTV)

That’s right: the DVD release is considerably more filtered than what was broadcast on BBC1. Obviously, there are considerably more compression artefacts in the captures taken from my off-air recordings - that’s not surprising, given the notoriously shoddy standard of BBC’s encoding (BBC1 has a fixed 6 Mbps bit rate to play around with, so there’s really no excuse). I am, however, surprised, by how much more detailed my recordings are. A further black mark against the DVD release is that 2 Entertain have unceremoniously lopped off the “Previously” and “Next week” segments at the start and end of each episode, sometimes incredibly badly: the music has noticeable jump cuts and generally reeks of shoddiness. Is it so unreasonable to expect a complete package when you shell out your hard-earned cash for a TV series that you already helped pay for with your robber baron tax? (Ignoring the fact that I got the DVD for free, and, not being a home-owner, don’t pay the robber baron tax.)

The final disc in this package of joy was Optimum’s UK release of Dario Argento’s Mother of Tears. Audio options are Dolby Digital 5.1 and 2.0 English, with no subtitles, while the only extra is the trailer. Image quality (and I’m aware of sounding increasingly like a broken record here) is not too bad, but not too great either. There’s plenty of evidence of ringing as a result of brick wall filtering, and also a massive amount of noise reduction which robs the image of its natural grain. A couple of people who got advance copies of this disc mentioned that the film looked as if it had been shot on digital video, and I see what they mean. I wonder if Medusa’s Italian release (which doesn’t have any English audio options) looks any better?

This morning, I received an order from DVD Pacific containing the US release of An Unsuitable Job for a Woman. This was an ITV adaptation of P.D. James’ novel of the same name (which I’m reading at the moment), starring Helen Baxendale and Annette Crosbie, and the DVD contains all four three-part episodes. My interest was piqued when I discovered that one of the three-parters was written by Barbara Machin, creator of Waking the Dead (the seventh series of which incidentally started tonight), so I decided to pick up this DVD set, fully aware that all four episodes feature standards converted transfers. This is, unfortunately, as far as I’m aware the only release of this programme on DVD, and beggars can’t be choosers. I won’t start watching till I’ve finished reading the book, though.

Finally - and this is where my luck with image quality finally changes - I also received a review copy of the US Blu-ray release of Juno. My good friend Peter M. Bracke opines that this is “a fairly good-looking presentation”, but as usual I beg to differ. This is definitely the best high definition transfer I’ve seen from 20th Century Fox so far, bearing in mind that I own fewer of their films than any of the other major studios. The source material is such that it won’t make you leap out of your seat, marvelling at all the detail on display, but even so it’s an excellent presentation of a fairly low-key, muted-looking film.

Expect full reviews of The Frightened Woman, Holby Blue, Mother of Tears and Juno at DVD Times before very much longer.

Happenings in Whedonsville

A couple of recent goings-on in tellyland for your attention, both concerning Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon. The first, and probably least interesting from my perspective, is that Firefly, his short-lived sci-fi western series, looks set to get a Blu-ray release at some point down the line. The release is still a considerable way off, given that it is described as only being in the “early development stages”, but it has been confirmed by a 20th Century Fox spokesperson, so this news will surely please its many devoted followers. Myself, I could never get into Firefly, which is odd, given how much I enjoyed its big screen follow-up, Serenity. In its defence, I didn’t try particularly hard to watch it, and had a lot of other things on the go when I rented the first disc of the DVD set, so perhaps I didn’t give it enough of a chance. I’d certainly be up for revisiting it in high definition to see if my view on it has changed.

Secondly, and in my eyes far more excitingly, is the news that Whedon has a new television series in the pipeline, which will be titled Dollhouse and will reteam him with Eliza Dushku (Faith in Buffy) and, erm, 20th Century Fox. Yes, the same 20th Century Fox whom he vowed never to work with again after they, in his eyes, screwed him over so royally with Firefly. Also, I must admit that, in light of the debacle that was Buffy’s sixth and seventh season, and its shark-jumping comic book continuation, my faith in the man to put together a half-decent show has waned somewhat, but there’s a little part of me that is nonetheless excited to hear that he’s returning to television, paired with the always-watchable Dushku no less. And come on, you’ve got to admit that the premise has promise:

Echo (Eliza Dushku) [is] a young woman who is literally everybody’s fantasy. She is one of a group of men and women who can be imprinted with personality packages, including memories, skills, language - even muscle memory - for different assignments. The assignments can be romantic, adventurous, outlandish, uplifting, sexual and/or very illegal. When not imprinted with a personality package, Echo and the others are basically mind-wiped, living like children in a futuristic dorm/lab dubbed the Dollhouse, with no memory of their assignments - or of much else. The show revolves around the childlike Echo’s burgeoning self-awareness, and her desire to know who she was before, a desire that begins to seep into her various imprinted personalities and puts her in danger both in the field and in the closely monitored confines of the Dollhouse.

The word is that former Angel (and Firefly, and Wonderfalls) executive producer Tim Minear will also be involved, so here’s hoping he’ll help steer this new show in the right direction.

DVD review: Waking the Dead: Series 5

Waking the Dead’s fifth series is, on the whole, not up to the standard established by its predecessors, although it does offer some real gems of entertainment at various points throughout its 12-episode run. Like Boyd, the programme may not live in the real world and may at times baffle with its seemingly nonsensical twists and tangents, but, when it’s firing on all cylinders, the journey, however convoluted, is always an engaging one.

Waking the Dead’s seventh series begins airing tonight on BBC1, and, to coincide, I’ve reviewed 2 Entertain’s DVD box set of Series 5, containing all 12 episodes on six discs.

Media Center is da bomb

I’ve been exploring some more of the new features included in Vista, in particular Windows Media Center, the all-in-one multimedia application that comes with the Home Premium edition of Vista. I’m particularly impressed by its TV recording capabilities, not least for its smooth, streamlined interface, excellently integrated programme guide (see the image above), and last but not least the fact that it actually detected and was able to interface correctly with my notoriously finicky USB TV stick. Until now I’ve been using the ArcSoft TotalMedia software which came bundled with the stick, but I think I’ll now stitch to Media Center as my recording device of choice.

Of course, there is the slight problem that Media Center saves your TV programmes in the DVR-MS format, which, in addition to having the capability to inflict all sorts of DRM nastiness on you, is not exactly the most widely-supported of standards. Luckily, those plucky reverse engineers anchored off the Barbary Coast have sprung to my rescue once again, this time with a helpful little program called AutoDVR Convert, which strips out the all the metadata guff and rewrites the file as a vanilla .mpg (MPEG2), all in a matter of milliseconds. Hoorah for the modding community!

Apparently they sell DVDs in shops now

As you probably know, I buy most of my DVDs online. Not only does it usually work out far cheaper than shopping for them on the high street, it’s also considerably more convenient too. Since getting a job in the centre of town, however, I’ve often found myself wandering around the nearby shops during my lunch break, without much else to do, and have come across the odd bargain or two.

One such quite unexpected find came last Wednesday, when I decided to have a peek inside the shop that used to be called Virgin Megastore but was recently rebranded under the utterly ridiculous name of “Zaavi” and as a result is now often as quiet as the grave. They were doing a “2 for £10” deal on selected television series box sets, one of which, the first series of Lewis, I’d been meaning to pick up for a while. (To put this into perspective, it currently goes for a whopping £24.99 just up the street at the local Borders.) There weren’t really any other titles in the offer that piqued my interest (why is that always the way?), so I eventually settled on a somewhat battered-looking copy of the Series 1 and 2 box set of Sugar Rush. I saw a few episodes of its second series when it was airing on TV a couple of years back, and while they weren’t exactly masterpieces (ex-Casualty writer Bryan Elsley’s Skins is, for my money, by far the better of Channel 4’s “stroppy teenagers screwing each other and getting wasted” dramedies), I can think of worse ways of spending an evening. Besides, it was only a fiver.

Oh, and while we’re on the subject of TV DVD sets, Waking the Dead’s sixth series is being released on May 19th, with the seventh series supposedly to begin airing a month or so ahead of that. Series 6 was, for my money, the weakest of the bunch (I said as much when it finished airing last February), but I would welcome the opportunity to see them again and re-evaluate them. Often, with Waking the Dead, an optimal two viewings or more is required in order to work out precisely what is supposed to be happening, and seemingly weaker episodes have a habit of transforming themselves once you’ve had a chance to actually figure out the plot.

DVDs I bought or received in the month of March

• Across the Universe (R0 USA, Blu-ray)
• Atonement (R0 UK, HD DVD)
• Danny the Dog (R0 Japan, Blu-ray)
• Hidden (R2 UK, DVD)
• Lewis: Series One (R2 UK, DVD)
• The New York Ripper: Special Restored Edition (R2 Denmark, DVD)
• Sugar Rush: Series One & Two (R2 UK, DVD)
• Tragic Ceremony (R1 USA, DVD)
   

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 8, Episode 12: Wolves at the Gate, Part One

Written by Drew Goddard; Illustrated by Georges Jeanty

Note: Several of my thoughts on this issue were previously worked out in an email exchange with my good friend Baron Scarpia.

Wow.

I take it most people know the phrase “jumping the shark”. In case you don’t, Wikipedia describes it as

a colloquialism used by U.S. TV critics and fans to denote the point at which the characters or plot of a TV series veer into a ridiculous, out-of-the-ordinary storyline. Such a show is typically deemed to have passed its peak. Once a show has “jumped the shark” fans sense a noticeable decline in quality or feel the show has undergone too many changes to retain its original charm.

Now that we know what it means to jump the shark, my question is can a series jump the shark more than once? Or do you have to jump over some other form of sealife? A Blue Whale, perhaps? By my reckoning, Buffy the Vampire Slayer jumped the shark at some point during Season 6, either with the episode Wrecked or Hell’s Bells. (Others might argue for the final scene of Seeing Red, but as far as I’m concerned it was past the point of no return before that episode anyway.) Still, I now find myself in the unfortunate position of having experienced an event that makes all Buffy’s past transgressions seem minor in comparison. This is worse than magic!crack Willow, worse than the comedy rape of Spike, worse than Buffy juggling, worse than the murder of Tara, even worse than the yellow crayon speech. And no, I’m not referring to the sight of Xander flying around in a helicopter that looks like a fish-bowl.

Buffy just screwed another woman.

I specifically chose to say “screwed” rather than “had sex with”, “slept with”,* “got jiggy with” or any number of other hilarious euphemisms, and the reason for this should become clear in due course. First of all, a little back-story. To briefly set the stage, one of the junior Slayers in Buffy’s squad is a young woman called Satsu, who is fairly blatantly in love with Buffy. I’m not just talking about a crush here - I’m talking full-on true lurve. The reason we know this is that, in an early issue, Amy cast a spell on Buffy which sent her to sleep, and, in typical Buffyland fashion, it had an escape clause built in: she would wake up if someone truly in love with her kissed her. Well, that someone turned out to be Satsu (although this was so unclear in the actual comic book panels that it had to be revealed in retrospect in a “Letters to the Editor” section after several readers wrote in asking who had awakened Buffy). In the most recent issue, Episode 11, Buffy had a long chat with her in which she explained that, while she was flattered, that wasn’t her thing. Fair enough. Cue Episode 12, and what does Buffy do?

She has sex with Satsu. For real.

This is horrible on so many levels it isn’t funny. There are a few ways you can attempt to spin this plot development, and none of them do the character of Buffy or Joss Whedon and his merry band of writers any favours. But here goes:

Theory 1. After being fed seven years’ worth of evidence to the contrary, we are now being told that Buffy is in fact attracted to women. It worked for Willow, after all.

Theory 2. Buffy has learnt nothing from the abominable manner in which she treated Spike in Season 6, and is proceeding to do much the same to another person, using them for a quick lay despite the fact that they want more out of it than a quick orgasm. Now do you see why I used the word “screwed”?

Theory 3. 2 grls 2gether = teh s3xy = $$$.

Yep, sorry, guys - I think Theory 3, probably with a bit of Theory 2 thrown in for good measure, is the most likely. The publisher suggested that retailers order more copies than normal for this issue. You do the math(s).

(Incidentally, I once read a very funny piece of intentionally absurd fan fiction which culminated in, for want of a better description, a gang bang involving a good 95% of the female characters in Buffyland. It’s some measure of how low this series has descended that, if Joss Whedon served this scene up as it exists in Issue 13, I wouldn’t even do a double take.)

So, we now find ourselves in a situation where the heroine of the tale is, in all likelihood, so callous and heartless that she is willing to toy with a friend/underling’s emotions in a manner that is utterly reprehensible and makes it difficult, if not impossible, to continue to root for her. Okay, so Seasons 6 and 7 did a pretty solid job of stripping Buffy of every ounce of humanity, but until now I still held on to a rather slim hope that she might have learned from her mistakes and realised that it’s not good to treat your friends as commodities that are devoid of feelings of their own, and can be picked up and used to scratch an itch, then immediately dumped. I really shouldn’t be surprised, though - it’s not as if there have ever been proper consequences for bad behaviour in Buffy, regardless of the writers’ endless pontificating to the contrary.

Perhaps I’m taking this all a bit too seriously? After all, it’s only entertainment, and at least on some level this episode was clearly written with its tongue planted firmly in its cheek (and yes, a lot of it is genuinely funny, considerably more so than any previous issue). Maybe I should lighten up and just see this as a bit of a laugh, a bit of outrageous fan fiction that really isn’t any better or worse than 99% of the other fan-written jaunts you can find for free on the web. Only it’s not fan fiction, and it’s not free. It’s also rather depressing to watch characters who I have developed some degree of affection for over the years being used for such cheap ploys. I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that these comics aren’t worth my time or money, and that I would be better served by cancelling my subscription and devoting the cash I save to something that actually gives me some degree of enjoyment.

Oh, and incidentally, what happened to the searing animosity between Willow and Buffy? The only thing worse than creating insincere conflict is creating insincere conflict and then not following up on it. (Hmm, sounds like Season 7 described in a nutshell.)

* Pointless aside: did I ever mention how much the euphemism “slept with” makes me roll my eyes? I’d imagine sleeping is that last thing either party will be doing. Which reminds me of a great exchange in the Season 5 episode Intervention:

Willow: Um… Buffy, this thing with Spike, i-i-it isn’t true, is it? You didn’t, you know, sleep with Spike?
Buffybot: No. I had sex with Spike.

Ah, happier times.

It pays to be safe

Since picking up my USB Freeview stick just over a year ago, I’ve amassed a good 150 hours or more of television programmes. Most of this consists of programmes of which I am a regular viewer, such as Casualty, Holby City and Trial & Retribution, but also the odd one-off like Five Go Mad in Dorset. The downside to this rigorous (anal) cataloguing of my TV viewing is the amount of disc space required - broadly speaking, around 1.5 GB per hour of material.

Until recently, I’ve generally been relying on recordable media to store it all, as it became clear fairly quickly that I couldn’t store everything on my PC’s hard drive in perpetuity. Last week, however, I came to the conclusion that a far more economical (in terms of both money and space) solution would be to buy a dedicated external hard drive. So, over to Maplin Electronics I went to pick up what gave me the best trade-off between cost, disc space and brand name - a Western Digital Elements 400 GB drive. (I used to be a Maxtor customer, but I no longer buy from them after my brother’s experiences.)

The drive arrived yesterday, and I now wish I’d done this sooner instead of relying on something as volatile as cheap DVD-R media. While I was able to salvage most of my recordings, several discs ended up putting quite a strain on my DVD drive, which struggled to read data closer to the outer edges (luckily, mine isn’t the only DVD drive in the house, and, as I’ve tended to find, where one fails another may succeed), one was suffering from a fairly advanced stage of disc rot, meaning that the final hour or so of material was completely unreadable, while another was a complete write-off thanks to the dye from the top appearing to have actually seeped through on to the readable area.

So please, take it from me: if you routinely back your data up, I wouldn’t recommend relying on bulk-bought DVD-Rs. And I certainly recommend keeping regular backups. While I can’t say I’ve ever experienced any major disasters regarding my data (the only time a hard drive ever failed on me, I was given plenty of prior warning and had time to salvage my data several weeks before it went completely belly-up), you can never be too careful.

Personally, I’d prefer to just keep buying external hard drives. Once I’ve filled this one up, I’ll move on to another. To store the same amount of data on DVDs probably wouldn’t cost much less, would occupy considerably more physical space and wouldn’t be half as safe.

I’ve got the (Holby) blues

The BBC1 police drama series Holby Blue started its second series on Thursday night (the first of twelve episodes). I discussed this distant relation of Casualty and its spin-off, Holby City, just under a year ago when the first series began airing, but for some reason forgot to give my appraisal of it once the series had finished. Therefore, for the sake of clarity, I’ll briefly sum up my feelings here: essentially, it was enjoyable but highly variable, falling uncomfortably between a drama and a soap opera in much the same manner as its parent shows. Its biggest problem, I suspect, is that the use of the “Holby” brand name gave viewers false expectations, because, while it does share certain tonal elements with Casualty and Holby City, it was ultimately a more mature and, dare I say it, more intelligent programme than either of these two stalwarts of the schedule are at the moment.

On the flip-side, I do wonder if perhaps the powers that be shot themselves in the foot by failing to provide strong links between this show and its predecessors beyond the title itself. Barring a very brief and inconsequential visit to Accident & Emergency at the beginning of the first episode, there was absolutely no interaction between the programmes. Frequent mentions of A&E and trips to the hospital (supposedly the same one, but fairly clearly filmed on a different set) to interrogate injured suspects notwithstanding, you’d be forgiven for assuming that the executives in charge of branding said something along the lines of “Hey, we’ve got yet another cop show and we don’t know how to sell it. Which show that pulls in decent viewing figures can we tenuously link it to?”

The Season 2 premiere, therefore, did a significantly better job of selling this as a series taking place in the same world as its parent shows than anything in Season 1. The central concept was that of a two-part storyline, starting on Holby City on the Tuesday and continuing on Holby Blue on the Thursday, involving one of the former’s regular characters, registrar Jac Naylor, because accused of murder and hauled down to the local nick for a grilling. As written by both shows’ respective creators and showrunners, Tony McHale and Tony Jordan, the two-parter surpassed my expectations considerably, and a lot of this, I think, is down to Rosie Marcel, who plays Jac. She’s a decent actor, and has successfully sold the character as a ruthless, selfish, borderline psychopath throughout her two-year tenure on the show. It’s difficult to play a villain, particularly for so long, and have them remain engaging, not to mention convincing, and I think crucial to the character’s success has been the fact that Rosie Marcel recognises that her character is an absolute cow with little or no redeeming qualities. In recent years, both Casualty and Holby City have fallen into the trap of featuring characters who can only be described as absolutely loathsome, hoping that their insertion into the mix will stir up some drama (note to writers: “drama” does not always necessarily equal “conflict”), something which is continually undercut by an irritating habit, on the part of the writers, of suddenly transforming the aforementioned villains into angels, once they have exhausted all potential use of them as villains but can’t bear to let go of the people playing them. Often, when asked about these characters, the actors playing them will attempt to claim that they are simply misunderstood, a trap which Marcel has so far not fallen into, continually stressing in interviews that her character is absolutely loathsome and that she is not at all like her.

Anyway, Holby Blue did the impossible and made me feel sorry for Jac. That the character is more or less devoid of anything approaching human empathy makes this an all the more impressive feat, but watching her crumble in the interview room, when it became clear that the case against her was airtight, was actually genuinely moving. To use a tired cliché, it showed a different side to the character, and yet at the same time avoided falling into the trap of having her break down in histrionics (a tearful “I don’t understand” was sufficient to convey what was going through her mind). To the experienced viewer, it was obvious from the start that Jac was innocent (and, given that the actress has just signed another one-year contract, the character was hardly going to be convicted of murder), so the outcome was never in any real doubt, but, even so, the writers skilfully wove in an intriguing twist that seemed to come out of the blue and yet still made perfect sense.

The episode, as a whole, was far from perfect. Along the way, we had to endure the risible sight of a bobby barking like a dog in order to lure a criminal out of an attic (this sort of thing doesn’t even make sense written down, let alone filmed), and someone really ought to take Zoë Lucker aside and explain to her that it’s okay to make more than one facial expression. Still, the Jac Naylor case, as well as the seemingly unrelated storyline involving an assault victim that they successfully wove into it, were strong enough for me to overlook these irritations. It’s always nice when a series that is considered safe and undemanding manages to surprise you with a genuinely thoughtful and moving storyline, and, while I am of no doubt that the two shows will now go their separate ways and not interact again (at least until the next time a rating boost is called for), I’m now sufficiently optimistic about the remaining eleven episodes.

Incidentally, the first series of Holby Blue is coming out on DVD this April 21st. While I would welcome the opportunity to watch these episodes again, part of me is livid that this show, which is less than a year old, is already getting a DVD release, while BBC have yet to release any DVDs for Holby City (I would probably welcome the first two and a half series), or Casualty beyond its third series. Given that Casualty, at its peak, was pulling in 16 million viewers per week while Holby Blue struggled to hit 5 million during its first series, I’m not sure I see the logic.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 8, Episode 11: A Beautiful Sunset

Written by Joss Whedon; Illustrated by Georges Jeanty

Hmph. Another month, another underwhelming episode of Buffy’s eighth season. I’m fast reaching the point where I’m considering cancelling my subscription. Yes, for the first few issues there was the novelty factor of seeing my favourite characters (well, some of them, at any rate) having new adventures that were given some degree of authenticity due to being sanctioned (and, much of the time, written) by their creator, but that appeal has long since dried up.

This week, Buffy finally encounters the season’s Big Bad, the muscular, masked Jason Voorhees lookalike who first appeared in Episode 9. Guess what? Buffy announces that he’s tougher than any opponent she’s ever faced before. Sort of like Caleb, and the First, and Dark Willow, and Glory, and Adam, and the Mayor, and… See what I’m getting at? Oh, and it looks as if we’re headed for another season of “I’m so alone” angst, to boot. Clearly, Joss Whedon still hasn’t learned that fans generally don’t enjoy seeing Buffy moping about as a manic depressive. Nor do I particularly enjoy having the gang at separate corners of the earth. I’d like to see them actually interacting properly, not briefly mentioning or phoning each other every now and then.

They’ve changed the cover art too. The new artist isn’t bad at all, but his work is not a patch on that of Jo Chen, which I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I called the best thing about these comics.

Next month, Drew Goddard comes in and starts his Tokyo arc. This four-parter will probably be the last chance I give the series… although, given that Goddard is probably the single most overrated writer in Buffydom (his greatest claim to fame is that he wrote one or two of the Season 7 episodes that weren’t complete garbage), I’m not holding out much hope.