TV

A day in at the movies

The Problem Child 3-pack and Black Book both arrived today from Play. After checking the first two films and verifying that they were indeed in widescreen and that Problem Child 2 was uncut (they are, and it is - 1.85:1 nunchuk action ahoy!), me and Lyris steeled ourselves and popped in Problem Child 3, as prepared as was humanly possible for the horrors that this made for TV sequel, with the key roles recast, could inflict on us. And it was… surprisingly bearable. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a load of crap (not that the first two Problem Child films were ever going to win anything, of course - not even a Razzie), but it made us laugh, and the shift in tone wasn’t as dramatic as in, say, a Disney cheapquel. It’s a hell of a lot more surreal, even going so far as to include a couple of physical gags that wouldn’t seem out of place in a Tex Avery cartoon, and the guy playing Ben Healy (William Katt - who was in Carrie, by some coincidence) is about as poor a match for John Ritter as you could ever hope to find, but the scenes with the three returning cast members - Jack Warden, Gilbert Gottfried and Eric Edwards - provide much merriment. There is also some rather sly humour, some of it surprisingly twisted by network TV standards. Am I suggesting that everybody rushes out to see it? No - like I said, the film (if you can even call it that) is garbage by anyone’s standards, but it was a painless enough way to kill an hour and a half.

I also finally sat down and watched Pan’s Labyrinth, and I’m exceedingly glad I did, as it’s probably the best new horror movie I’ve seen since The Descent… although perhaps “horror” isn’t the best way to describe it as, contrary to what the marketing campaign would have you believe, only small portions of it take place in the world of make-believe. The rest of it is all unsettlingly real, taking place in Spain in 1944, with the country under the grip of General Franco’s fascists, and the military stopping at nothing to root out and destroy the resistance forces. The film is absolutely beautiful to behold, and the designs and effects work on the various creatures that the protagonist meets are astounding. In some ways, it reminded me of a twisted live action Spirited Away: a dark fairytale for adults.

Now I’m seriously considering picking up the French HD DVD, due for release on July 4th (my birthday!), even though it doesn’t have any English subtitles (I suspect the film can be enjoyed without the intrusion of translation anyway). Annoyingly, though, it will only be available in a 5-disc box set, packaged with the standard definition release and the score, rather than as a stand-alone HD DVD. It will also be the first HD DVD title to be THX-certified, which means… bugger all, of course.

PS. Black Book is my 600th DVD.

It took you long enough

Casualty finally won a BAFTA last night, and not before it was due. By that I mean that the award should have been given to the show years ago, back when it was still good, not now that it is a shadow of its former self. The award, not surprisingly, was thanks to the astoundingly good Christmas two-parter I’ve already mentioned several times, and those two episodes genuinely deserved this recognition, but, as it was given for the series as a whole rather than the deserving episodes in isolation, it all felt a bit hollow. Worse still, now that the show effectively runs all year round (well, 48 weeks, actually, but who’s counting?), it was placed in the “continuing drama” category, which is really just a nice way of saying “soap opera”, and was contending with such, ahem, masterpieces as EastEnders and Coronation Street, which make its win a bit like a professional sprinter winning a children’s egg and spoon race. I suppose Casualty, for all intents and purposes, is a soap these days, or at least a drama with an incredibly soapy format (interestingly, though, it doesn’t meet the criteria required for it to be eligible for the British Soap Awards, according to What’s On TV), but it really grates, because the two episodes in question were proper, intelligent drama, a throwback to the glory days when you could admit to watching the show without feeling a bit ashamed.

Still, it was worth it just to see the looks of shock and fury on the faces of the soap opera crowd, followed by an off the cuff acceptance speech by a bewildered Ian Bleasdale, who clearly hadn’t been expecting to win (ever the gentleman, he dedicated to award to the real medical service, and to the show’s original producer, the late Geraint Morris, rather than going off on a rambling “and I’d like to thank him and him and her and him…”).

You can see the full list of winners at Digital Spy.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 8, Episode 3: The Long Way Home, Part Three

Written by Joss Whedon; Illustrated by Georges Jeanty

As I suspected as soon as I saw the cover, much of this episode is a pyrotechnics extravaganza, a showdown between Willow and Amy, whose sudden hatred of Buffy and co is something I sincerely hope is going to be explained before too long, because it seems to have come out of nowhere and makes no sense at all (like so many ideas that materialised during Season 7). The amount of power with which Whedon has infused Willow is also giving me cause for concern. Unless he can find a convincing way of curbing her obviously impressive magical prowess, people are going to start wondering why, if she can turn all the Potentials in the world into full-blown Slayers, she can’t, oh, say, end world hunger, go back in time and prevent World War 2, resurrect her dead girlfriend (or anyone else who happens to be dead, come to that)… I’m getting shades of vengeance demon Anya from early Season 7 all over again, where the writers suddenly realised that having a character who can teleport anywhere at will created a few plot problems.

Elsewhere, Buffy’s atmospheric dream continues, although personally I found its resolution slightly anticlimactic. Some definite issues to be worked out between herself and Xander, methinks - although romantic angst, in my opinion, certainly beats the manic-depressive angst of Season 6 (and, to some extent, Season 7). Some nice dialogue as well, and, shockingly, the best line of the episode goes to Dawn: “Fe fi fo fucking fum!”

6/10.

Crocodile tears

Another British child has gone missing. Looks like summer’s definitely here.

Sorry for the off-colour joke, but it’s true, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who finds the whole media circus surrounding the matter distateful in the extreme. This time round, a four-year-old called Madeleine McCann has disappeared while on holiday in Portugal, and, predictably, most of the 24-hour news channels have dropped everything in order to dedicate 99% of their airtime to providing up to the minute coverage of how the parents’ neighbour’s best friend’s dog is feeling about the tragedy. Every time this happens, thousands upon thousands of people line up to grieve for the disappearance of a child they don’t even know, while the tabloids dream up nonsense like “Support Madeleine by wearing yellow” (this particular little doozy courtesy of The Sun).

The phoneyness that people are capable of seriously makes me sick, and they don’t come sicker than Sky News, who have replaced their usual lead-in with a special “Search for Madeleine” title sequence. They have a reporter permanently stationed at the Praia da Luz resort to deliver “up to the minute news”, and the studio-based newsreaders are all wearing yellow ties. The whole thing is such a piss-take that it would be funny if it wasn’t so tragic. And, if all this mawkish, insincere sentimentality wasn’t bad enough, Sky News has already begun making rumblings about Europe-wide paedophile rings, and speculating, in true News Corporation fashion, as to their involvement in the child’s disappearance. The only thing the Brits enjoy better than wringing their hands over a missing child is an old-fashioned paedophile hunt.

Please excuse me for not going into any more detail here. I’m going off to puke my guts out.

From one kind of arrest to another

As I’ve mentioned a few times on this site, I am, for better or for worse, an avid viewer of the medical drama Casualty and its spin-off, Holby City. As far as I’m concerned, both shows are well past their prime (barring the odd unexpected surprise, such as the two-parter Barbara Machin wrote for Casualty last Christmas, which showed that it was still capable of holding its own with the best of UK television, as well as the assisted suicide storyline that concluded the previous series of Holby City), but I soldier on doggedly, and, given that I watch very little live television, I’d estimate that they make up at least 50% of my weekly viewing schedule. Given that, as year-round “continuing dramas”, the two shows are pretty much being stretched to breaking point, I was understandably sceptical about the news that a third series was to be added to the franchise… and a police show at that, entitled Holby Blue. “Great,” I thought. “Just what the world needs - another The Bill.” Still, obsessive that I am, I tuned in on Tuesday night, expecting the worst.

Casualty in high definition - who’d have thunk it?

I was pleasantly surprised. The use of the “Holby” name, and the setting of the show in the same fictional world as its medical counterparts, turned out to be little more than a marketing gimmick designed to pull in viewers of the two other series. It’s essentially just a brand name, and, barring a brief visit to Casualty and an even briefer appearance by Charlie Fairhead during the pre-credits teaser, I suspect that the spin-off and its parent shows (which have, despite being filmed in completely different locations, managed to retain something of a tenuous link while just about managing to convey the fact that they are supposed to be set in the same hospital) will go their separate ways, never to interact again. Holby Blue, as it happens, is not produced by BBC, but rather by Kudos, the same company responsible for Spooks and Life on Mars. Tonally, it has far more in common with those two shows than Casualty, using music (which almost never features in Casualty), and operating at a somewhat faster pace. It’s also shot in non-interlaced high definition, with a film grain effect and digital colour grading applied to it, which automatically makes it infinitely more credible than its DigiBeta predecessors. (Seriously, I hope these stylistic choices are adopted by the other two shows, especially Casualty, which these days is so amateurish-looking that it resembles a home video.)

Looking beyond the aesthetics (which many will no doubt consider to be superficial, but I personally believe to be of the utmost importance), though, how successful is the show? Well, pilot episodes are always difficult to gauge, but personally I was very impressed by what I saw. At first glance, the show seems to suffer from the same bloated cast of characters as Casualty and Holby City, which I would imagine is going to cause some problems given that the first series is only eight episodes long. Indeed, as early as the first episode, four or five of the regulars all but disappear into the background. Many of them also come across as broad stereotypes rather than actual people (a problem also affecting its parent shows in recent years), although this could easily be put down to the fact that 15 or so of them had to be introduced to us in the space of just under an hour. The cast is also comprised of the usual mix of seasoned veterans (Tim Pigott-Smith arguably being the biggest name of the bunch) and former soap opera stars whose acting ability is, er, limited to say the least (unlike Holby City, which has a couple of soap actors whose acting has turned out to be quite impressive). The fellow who looks set to emerge as the main protagonist, however, seems to be an interesting chap. The structure, a sort of variant on the “guess the accident” routine established by Casualty, also seems fairly effective, cross-cutting between the cops and the criminals and/or victims to be in the run-up to all hell breaking loose.

HD + grain filter + patented BBC encoding techniques = MPEG soup.

Of course, whether or not this can all be maintained over a more extended period is anyone’s guess. As I mentioned earlier, the first series will only run for eight episodes, but, if it proves to be successful, I can easily imagine them stretching out to a year-long affair, and in doing so flushing any semblance of quality down the pan, à la Casualty and Holby City. For the time being, though, I’m certainly more than happy to watch another seven episodes in this mould. Ironically enough, I can see the use of the Holby brand name - the very element that the powers that be are hoping will be the biggest draw - ultimately losing viewers rather than gaining them, as people tune in expecting apples and getting oranges instead.

It’s good to be back

Apologies for my unexpected silence during the last couple of days. I had intended to make a couple of posts, but I found myself getting a little sidetracked.

The primary cause was the arrival of my new computer. Seriously, I must take a moment to praise ShuttleUK’s excellent service. When my brother called them on Tuesday, while I was out at work, to check the status of the order, they said that, if they finished building it before 4:30 PM, it might reach me by Thursday or Friday. Imagine my delight, then, when I got home on Wednesday to find it waiting for me, pre-assembled and ready to go. Although my previous four systems were all self-built, there’s definitely something nice about getting more or less a complete system out of the box. Of course, there were a handful of extra steps involved for me, namely hooking up my USB sound card (which conveniently arrived on the same day), opening up the case and fitting my secondary hard disk (the SATA and power cables were a bit of a squeeze, but everything worked out in the end), and installing Windows Vista.

I liked Vista, by the way, although it ultimately ended up lasting for just over 24 hours before I wiped it and went back to XP (more on this in just a moment). I cursed at it several times, but only over trivial things that I could easily correct by changing the settings, or could have got used to over time. Most importantly, there was nothing about the basic functionality that caused me to revert back to XP.

Unfortunately, as is almost always the case with computers, all was not plain sailing. As nice as Vista is, the available drivers and software are currently not in the best state. Lyris has already run into problems with his Radeon X800 video card, since ATI have yet to add video-in functionality to their Vista drivers, while I found myself unable to use my USB Freeview stick. I also encountered a whole host of problems with both PowerDVD 6.5 and PowerDVD Ultra, although how many of them were because of Vista, my video card or a combination of the two is unclear. Anyway, I would say that, until DirectX 10 games start becoming widely available, Vista doesn’t really have anything substantial to offer beyond a more aesthetically pleasing (albeit in my opinion slightly less productive) GUI. Anyway, prior to uninstalling Vista, yet another problem reared its ugly head in the shape of my new nVidia GeForce 8800 GTS.

Yes, nVidia. I swore off them last year, after the chaos that was my brief dabble with a GeForce 7600 GT before Christmas, but hey, I thought, surely the problems I had with their video playback have been fixed by now. It has, after all, been five months. Oh, how wrong I was. nVidia’s driver programming team must be comprised of blindfolded monkeys, because I can’t think of any other explanation for why their overlay implementation is so bafflingly idiotic. For a start, their inverse telecine quality is inferior to ATI’s (which, for computer-based deinterlacing, is in my opinion close to flawless). The main problem, however, is the same one that I encountered back in December: piss-poor contrast, brightness and gamma controls. Seriously, the sliders seem to have a mind of their own, and are inconsistently applied depending on which software you’re using to play back your video, DVD or whatever (unlike ATI’s AVIVO, where you just set the sliders once - leave them at their defaults, in fact, because they are pretty much perfectly calibrated from the outset - and never have to worry about them again). Try as I might, I could never get anything approaching “pure” black without lowering the gamma so much that the entire video would be plunged into a state of almost complete darkness. I basically had to settle for murky grey in PowerDVD, because nVidia’s brightness settings were so high, even with the slider in their control panel at 0%, that PowerDVD’s brightness slider couldn’t be dragged far enough into the negative figures to counter it. Oddly enough, Windows Media Player was much better from a brightness standpoint, although I was still losing massive amounts of shadow detail in order to get anything approach true black.

I bravely soldiered on with nVidia for several hours, trying every combination of slider controls and different generations of drivers that I could think of (including one, which ironically enough was included on the CD that came with the card, which caused me to lose control of the overlay’s settings entirely), before finally saying “Screw it!” and ripping my case open, ready to prise the card out and fit my old Radeon X1950 Pro. The only problem is that my Radeon has a ridiculously large fan, which causes the card to take up close to three expansion slots (despite only being a single-slot card) and be considerable taller than normal. Translation: it doesn’t fit in my new ultra-compact shuttle case. As a result, I’ve purchased an unused Sapphire ATI Radeon x1950 Pro 512MB on eBay, which should fit nicely, as it only takes up two slots (judging by the size of the picture fan) and is a sensible height. In the meantime, it was extremely fortunate that Lyris had a spare Radeon X1300 lying around, because I’m using that just now. It’s a lightweight as far as gaming performance goes, but it’ll do until my new card arrives. Anything but having to wrangle with that GeForce again. I’ve now decided: from this moment on, no nVidia product will cross the threshold of this house. It’s just not worth the hassle. It’s a shame, because I’m sure that, for 99% of gamers, it’s an absolutely brilliant card. For someone who demands high quality, hassle-free video playback, however, it’s hopelessly crippled.

(ATI do, by the way, have their own DirectX 10-enabled video card coming out in the near future in the shape of the Radeon HD 2900 XT, but I expect it will be a little too expensive for my means when it first comes out, and in any event, a DirectX 10 card is fairly pointless without Vista. I’ll definitely be keeping my eye on it, though - the given benchmarks show it absolutely thrashing the GeForce 8800.)

Oh yeah, I came across another random annoyance yesterday. As nice as my USB Audigy 2 NX is, it doesn’t have the full functionality of its PCI variant. For a start, there’s no tone control (basically treble and bass with Creative’s drivers). Worse still, I discovered that, for standard PCM audio, it can’t pass anything better than 2-channel stereo via its digital connections (DVDs, however, can still be experienced in all their 5.1 glory, thanks to the wonders of S/PDIF). No problem, I thought, I’ll just connect the card to my decoder through analogue. Next problem: my decoder has front and rear analogue inputs, but nothing for the centre speaker and subwoofer. Who in the hell makes a 5.1 audio decoder and then only allows up to 4-channel analogue audio? Answer: Creative, the same loonies who made a 5.1 sound card that can’t send 5.1 audio over digital. I can live with 4-channel audio for games and other miscellaneous functions at the moment, but I’m actively eyeing up the alternatives. A new sound card - one which supports 5.1 digital audio - would be considerably more cost-effective than a new audio decoder, but the problem is that you’re rather limited when it comes to USB sound cards (as I’ve already explained, my Shuttle motherboard can’t accept any PCI devices due to size constraints).

Oh yeah, and I’m going to have to get a new keyboard, since Shuttle, in a further attempts to save space, removed some of the legacy I/O ports on the motherboard, including the LPT, and P/S2 mouse and keyboard connectors. Unfortunately, my keyboard is P/S2, meaning that it’s USB keyboard hunting time. I’m currently using a spare wireless Microsoft keyboard belonging to my brother, but it’s a pretty rotten piece of hardware, so blame any spelling mistakes in this post on it rather than my poor addled brain. I need to find a long network cable somewhere too, so I can connect my printer to our router via 10BASE-T (previously, it was connected to my old computer’s archaic LPT port, for some ungodly reason).

All in all, I can’t say I’m not frustrated by the situation. I love my new Shuttle: it’s compact and deliciously quiet - so much so that, when I first switched it on, I thought it was dead on arrival until the boot screen appeared on my monitor. It’s also going to be a pleasantly powerful gaming setup once it has a half-decent video card in it. The whole process, however, is turning out to be somewhat more expensive than I was expecting, and, with the obvious benefits provided by a small form factor PC, come the even more obvious trade-offs brought about by the decrease in available space for components. I’m confident that I will eventually be completely happy with my purchase. In the meantime, however, it’s off to Google to look for some bargains.

HD DVD celebrates first birthday with 100,000 sales

HD DVD turns a year old today (the official release date for the initial line-up of titles was April 18th 2006, although a few retailers started selling them early on the 15th, hence last Sunday’s buyathon). With the format having made major gains in the charts recently, now seems like the perfect time to convey more good news: HD DVD has now passed a major milestone, having sold (not shipped, sold) 100,000 stand-alone players since launch. Note that this figure does not include the number of Xbox 360 HD DVD add-on drives sold.

In addition, Planet Earth on HD DVD became the first title on either format to reach a sales rank of 4 in the DVD sales charts (covering DVD, HD DVD, Blu-ray and the, ahem, special interest formats like UMD), ousting the previous king, Casino Royale on Blu-ray, with a high of 7, from its throne. Now that the disc drought of early 2007 seems to be at an end, HD DVD seems to slowly but surely be clawing its way back to its previous position. Clearly, the gap between the two HD formats is going to be a lot narrower than it was in the glory days of mid to late 2006, and I expect that both formats will overtake each other at various points throughout the coming months, but I must say that those who poo-pooed HD DVD and predicted its demise spoke rather too hastily. One thing’s for sure, 2007 is going to continue to be very interesting.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 8, Episode 2: The Long Way Home, Part Two

Written by Joss Whedon; Illustrated by Georges Jeanty

Well, this is better than the first episode - a lot better actually, in virtually every way imaginable, although the first few pages did give me cause for concern. The plot is, initially at least, rather disjointed, flicking between various locations and attempting to draw parallels between the lessons of three different “teachers” to the junior Slayers. The first of these is Giles, who makes a not unwelcome return, although he seems to be both written and drawn more like the Giles of Season 1 than the more rounded, developed character who emerged later during the show’s duration. The second of these is Buffy, who, for some reason, looks rather unlike Buffy in these panels (although she certainly talks like Buffy). The third, alas, is Andrew, who is annoying even in comic book form. Actually, I thought he was Jonathan reincarnated at first, given the manner in which he is drawn, but as soon as he opened his mouth I found myself convulsing in horror as memories of Seasons 6 and 7 came flooding back. Actually, while we’re on the subject, why is Andrew serving as a mentor to the Slayers? Why is he qualified to do this? Why isn’t he in jail yet?

Elsewhere, the army nonsense continues to give me worries that Season 8 is going to be another Season 4-style clumsy amalgamation of science and magic, although it consumes less than three pages in this particular episode. There are some amusing lines of dialogue, and a couple of panels in which Georges Jeanty’s artwork comes impressively close to capturing the essence of the characters as embodied by the actors in the TV series (the manner in which Buffy tucks her hair behind her ear on page 15 is very Gellar-like). There’s also a genuinely unsettling dream sequence which, if filmed, would have been highly effective. Oh, and there’s Giant Dawn taking a bath in a highland loch… although she looks considerably less emaciated than Michelle Trachtenberg.

I’m sufficiently interested in the story now to want to see how it develops. The final panel promises some interesting pyrotechnics in the next instalment (although I’m not quite sure why Willow is dressed as a ye olde medieval wench, Once More With Feeling style). Whedon even has the balls to mention Tara’s name in this episode (in comparison with Season 7, where it took until Episode 7 for that forbidden word to be uttered). There’s also a fan letter at the end of the comic where a young lady named Alissa warns the author, in no uncertain terms, that she will have his head on a pike if he doesn’t bring back her favourite witch. Given that they posted this letter, I have a feeling they’re going to go somewhere with this.

7/10.

Five Go Mad on YouTube

“What a gorgeous view!”

“Yes, I’m so glad it’s private property, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I expect the Welfare State would like to build a motorway here.”

“That, or a secondary modern school!”

“Woof! Woof!”

“Look! Timmy hates city folk as well.”

When I was a child, I was an avid reader of Enid Blyton’s books. Blyton, for those who don’t know, was an extremely prolific English author who, in the middle part of the 20th century, churned out several extremely popular books for children. I say “prolific” and “churned out” because she managed to write a whopping 800 books over the course of 40 years, most of them adhering to more or less the same formula: respectable, well-off, privately educated group of children have exciting adventures in which they foil dangerous criminals while the police are still scratching their heads. Miss Marple in short trousers, if you like. (Blyton also wrote books exploring other themes, but it’s the mystery stories that I’m most familiar with.) They are, of course, very much a product of their time, and while nowadays they are still enjoyable, they have tended to take on rather more sinister overtones in today’s somewhat more enlightened world. Times has not been kind to Blyton’s books, and, reading them today, they stand as a catalogue of the racist, sexist, classist (and any other “ist” you might care to mention) attitudes of their era.

Such a fact was not lost on the makers of The Comic Strip, a British sketch show which began in 1982. Their first episode, Five Go Mad in Dorset, aired on the first night of Channel 4’s transmission, and is a parody of Blyton’s The Famous Five stories, one of her most successful series. The episode, and its later follow-up, Five Go Mad on Mescalin, are outrageously funny, not so much because they’re far-fetched (which, at times, they are), but because they actually don’t veer that far away from Blyton’s original books. Obviously, for the purposes of comedy, a few changes have been made - for instance, the four children are all played by actors in their 20s and 30s, and their Uncle Quentin has become, in his own words “an outrageous homosexual” with an “incurable drug addiction” (he needs a dustbin full of the stuff each day to keep him from going insane). Oh, and in the books, the tomboyish George, arguably children’s literature’s first ever transvestite, actually managed to convince most people that she’s a boy. In the parody, she’s played by Dawn French.

The children’s bigotry is also rather less oblique than it is in Blyton’s originals - although lines like “You really are a proper little housewife” and “You’ve got to stop thinking you’re as good as a boy” are lifted right out of the books.

“Look here! I think it’s a downright shame that our heritage is being bought up by people like you who can’t even speak the Queen’s English!”

“Listen, bud, if we hadn’t come over and saved you Limeys during the war, there wouldn’t be any goddamn Queen’s English!”

“Yes, well we think it’s a pity the Nazis didn’t win, actually, because at least they cared about racial purity! And they didn’t litter the countryside with bubblegum wrappers!”

Both episodes have now mysteriously appeared on YouTube (1, 2), and I suggest you grab them while they’re hot. The quality is awful, to put it mildly, but it’s better than nothing.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 8, Episode 1: The Long Way Home, Part One

Written by Joss Whedon; Illustrated by Georges Jeanty

It feels weird to be writing a new Buffy review, not least because of the rather drastic change of medium: from television to comic book. In a sense, it’s a good idea: realistically speaking, there’s no way the series can ever continue in televisual form, unless most (if not all) of the characters ended up being recast. At the same time, though, this means that it’s difficult to see the comic as anything more than a poor man’s substitute. That’s perhaps overstating the case a bit, and, to be fair, the graphic novel format does offer some benefits not available to a TV series - for one, the scale and ambition of the locations, monsters and battles is now limited to the author’s imagination and the artist’s ability rather than the budget. That said, it naturally lacks a great deal of what made the show enjoyable, not least the performances of the various regulars.

Not constrained by such bothers as actors’ contractual obligations, Joss Whedon does something a little different with this season premiere, choosing to showcase a limited number of his characters. Buffy, Xander and Dawn are the only three regulars to appear, along with a handful of new character who will presumably be relegated to supporting roles as the “season” develops. Unfortunately, these new characters are all either forgettable or annoying. We have an irritating, clichéd army general, Krull, and a whole gaggle of new Potentials (actually, I suppose they’re technically full-blown Slayers now), who somehow manage to be just as annoying as their live action counterparts. Worse, the extent to which technology is showcased in this season premiere (we are introduced to Buffy and various other Slayers parachuting out of a helicopter, brandishing firearms) is giving me flashbacks to Season 4’s more cringe-inducing moments. The artwork is also not as good as it could have been: it’s technically sound, but the characters don’t really look much like the actors who played them in the show, and the colour palette has a weird “gooey” pink and yellow style (a shame, because the cover art for this and the various upcoming episodes that have been previewed is excellent).

It’s also short. The story is a mere 24 pages, with several large full-page or half-page illustrations, and I read it in less than 10 minutes. Allowing for dramatic conventions and the naturally slower pace of filmed narrative, I suspect that, were this episode filmed, it would last for around 20 minutes at most. Perhaps my expectations were a little high, but the fact that this was marketed as a new “season” did make me think that each “episode” would be something close to the equivalent of a full episode (or at least half of one) of the show. I’m also not that much of a fan of Whedon’s decision to have Buffy and Xander “narrate” much of the episode through their inner thoughts, although I suppose it’s a necessary evil given that, unlike the show, he can’t rely on the performances of the actors to convey what their characters are feeling.

That said, the tone is still clearly Buffy. There are some funny lines, a couple of Buffy’s trademark mid-combat quips, and some nice scenes between Buffy and Xander, and Buffy and Dawn (who has undergone certain, er, transformations since our previous encounter with her, in more ways than one). The final frame also sets up a nice cliffhanger with the reintroduction of a previous character: a certain witch. That’s all I’m saying.

Ultimately, while reading the comic, I did my best to dramatise it in my head as a regular episode of Buffy, and it’s based on this interpretation that I’m going to review it. Had it aired on TV, I would probably have described it as an extremely ambitious and technically impressive but thematically jarring episode. The characters feel like the ones we know and love (or hate, as the case may be), but the situations in which they find themselves feel a bit like a betrayal of the world and rules established by Whedon and his writers in the show. As such, I award it a cautious…

5/10.

The king is dead - long live the king!

Source: Animation World Magazine

The Disney direct-to-video animated sequel is dead.

What more need be said? All hail Big John!

Seriously, I can’t even begin to describe how happy I am to finally see this news given official confirmation. I harbour no ill will towards the artists who worked on the likes of Bambi II, Cinderella III: Dreams Come True and, erm, Leroy & Stitch, but these “films” have run the Disney label into the ground for far too long. This should be proof, if proof was ever needed, that John Lasseter is absolutely serious about making the brand respectable again. Okay, I can’t say I’m too thrilled by the prospect of a CGI Tinker Bell movie, but it’s a long, long way from the sacrilege that has been committed since the concept of Disney cheapquels first came into being in 1994 with The Return of Jafar.

Buffy the Comic Book Slayer

Back in September 2006, I mentioned that Joss Whedon was planning to continue the story of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, not with another television series, but rather with a “virtual” season in comic book form. News seemed to go pretty quiet on that front, with the only available information being that it would be comprised of six issues and be published by Dark Horse. Well, the first episode finally went on sale on March 14th, and I’m expecting to receive my copy soon. I’m a little sceptical of how successful this continuation of the saga will turn out, given that (a) Seasons 6 and 7 of the TV show were dreadful, and (b) I have it on good authority that previous Buffy comics are nothing to write home about either. Nonetheless, I’m willing to at least give the first couple of issues a shot before writing it off as a failure, and I’m expecting to receive my copy of Issue 1 soon.

Some more information has now emerged in the form of an article at Midtown Comics interviewing series editor Scott Allie, including the rather surprising revelation that there will now be at least 50 issues rather than the originally projected six. Whedon’s plans for the series seem to have grown more ambitious, and the news that the original print run of 100,000 flew of the shelves can’t have hurt either. At the moment, Whedon will apparently write Issues 1-5, 10 and 16-20, while Brian K. Vaughan will 6-9 and Drew Goddard, who was a writer on the show’s final season, will do 11-14.

Ah well, I can’t say I’m wildly optimistic about the whole affair, but we shall see.

Mother of Scissors

Source: Dark Discussion

According to a news post on Dario Argento’s Profondo Rosso shop web site, The Third Mother’s distributor, Medusa, have not only delayed the film’s release date to October 31st (so they can have a Halloween-themed advertising campaign), but are also demanding cuts to the film’s more violent scenes and effects. This sort of thing truly beggars belief. Did Medusa seriously think that the sequel to Suspiria and Inferno wouldn’t be violent? What is the point of this? This isn’t even a censor attempting to cut things, just a bunch of meddling executives sticking their oar in.

I suppose the best course of action right now is to hope that the news becomes widespread and a backlash from angry fans convinces Medusa to rethink their decision. Failing that, we can only hope that it will eventually surface in an uncut form on DVD. This really is the story of Argento’s career, isn’t it? Something tells me that something is seriously wrong with the way people think when Pelts can be screened on American television without any cuts, but what has got to be one of the most highly-anticipated sequels of all time for the Euro-cult crowd looks set to be butchered at the whims of a bunch of people in suits.

What would the unholy lovechild of Scooby-Doo and Family Guy look like?

Answer: this. I’m going to have nightmares for a week.

The funny things you see on television

The “What am I doing here?” look.

Last night, I watched a one-hour drama written by Richard Curtis and starring Angus Deayton. Not the world’s most unexpected combination, I must admit, especially given that it was put together to raise awareness for Comic Relief. What was unexpected, though, was the name of the programme. It’s called Casualty, and, for the last few years, it’s been on virtually every Saturday night at around 8.30 pm (it’s actually more than 20 years old, although it’s only in the last few years that it’s become a year-round affair). You may have heard of it.

Actually, if the participation of those two figureheads of comedy wasn’t strange enough, the episode also featured a guest appearance from Oscar-winning actress Brenda Fricker, who starred in the show for its first five years. Given the people involved, therefore, you might have been forgiven for expecting something somewhat better than average (I make no secret of the fact that, despite having been an avid fan of the show for as long as I can remember, and despite missing no more than four or five episodes in the 14 years or so that I’ve been watching it seriously, I really don’t think much of it these days). Sadly, it was more or less business as usual, with the added distraction of some of the most ham-fisted moralising you’re ever likely to see on prime time television. Take this little doozy of a monologue emitted from the comely lips of the usually demure receptionist, Alice:

The “Why are they making me recite this crap?” look.

That’s the point. It’s not just Africa. Lots of the money we raise stays here in the UK […] I sit at that desk every day, and I see the kids in trouble with drugs and alcohol - kids with mental problems. I see women who’ve been beaten up by the men they live with, and I see girls who’ve been sucked into prostitution. We all do! And the whole point of this annoying Red Nose Day stuff is to catch people before they fall - before they arrive in this ED [Emergency Department]. There are real lives at stake here, and if I’ve got a chance to help by baking a biscuit, then I’m going to grab it with both hands, and so should you.

Does it seem bad in written form? Then imagine someone actually having to deliver it as dialogue. As someone else put it, the fact that the writers actually felt the need to spell the moral of the episode out so clearly speaks wonders about what they think of their audience’s intellect (or perhaps their own abilities to convey a message using the plot itself). Cue a room full of regulars, plus the aforementioned Mr. Deayton, looking very serious and then applauding bombastically. The sad thing is that moralising as obnoxious as this is probably just as likely to turn people away from supporting endeavours like Comic Relief as to persuade them to get involved (Make Poverty Fashionable, anyone?). At least with Mr. Bean, dialogue was not an issue for Curtis and his collaborators! (Then again, Blackadder is celebrated almost entirely because of its verbal comedy, so what’s going on?)

The “Charlie, I got better lines on Home Alone 2” look.

Still, there was some enjoyment to be had. Brenda Fricker and the storyline with her schizophrenic grandson carried the whole episode, as far as I was concerned, and the reunion between her character, Megan, and Charlie (Derek Thompson; the only character left in the show who would ever have seen her before), was probably the most genuinely human moment in the show since the magnificent Christmas 2006 two-parter about which I’ve waxed lyrical in the past. Unfortunately, the one-off reappearance of a much-loved character from the past really only served to drive home how much of a shadow of its former self the show has now become.

DVD review: Waking the Dead: Series 4

Waking the Dead is one of these shows that can rub people the wrong way. Many viewers dislike the character of Boyd and his temper tantrums, and the manner in which Trevor Eve portrays him (although, in comparison with the most recent series, he is an absolute saint here). Others find it confusing for the sake of being confusing (again, this may be true of later series, but the cases presented here are for the most part, logical). I consider it an excellent series, however, and one which, at least at this stage in its life, could be relied on to deliver solid entertainment week in, week out. It may be resembling CSI more and more with every year that passes (there’s always something slightly painful about an older child aping its younger siblings), but it’s nice to see a home-grown crime series which doesn’t insist on insulting its audience’s intelligence.

With the sixth series of Waking the Dead having recently drawn to a close, I’ve taken a look at the Cold Case Squad’s fourth series, released on DVD by 2 Entertain.

USB stick delivers MPEG soup!

This tiny stick contains 67 channels!

I picked up this little doozy for a mere £19.57 (plus shipping) at SVP. It’s a Freecom DVB-T USB Stick, and it is in fact a miniature digital terrestrial TV and radio receiver that plugs directly into your computer. This, in conjunction with the bundled software, provides a very convenient way to watch and record TV shows. It comes with its own mini-antenna, but it turns out to be little more than a glorified fridge magnet (it wasn’t managing to pick up any channels), so I ended up connecting it directly to our roof antenna, which has a decidedly strong signal (all six signal bars are lit up in the software).

The TotalMedia software, as it happens, isn’t the most brilliant piece of engineering. It has a lot of niggles, and switching between channels is a little on the sluggish side, but it’s nicely laid out and easy to use. The MPEG2 files it saves are also pretty reasonably sized (approximately 1.2 GB for an hours’ worth of poorly-shot shakycam, at the lowest compression settings) and there doesn’t seem to be any noticeable degradation in quality, with the end results looking noticeably better than the dedicated DVD recorder my parents have… not that the quality of British digital TV is any great shakes in that department anyway. For £20, it strikes me as being a really good deal.

Oh yeah, and I now have a job. I don’t have a concrete starting date yet, but, after several months on the proverbial dole, my days of scrounging are finally about to come to an end!

Amateurism as a style

Apparently, this is style.

I’ve been meaning to do a rant about this subject of amateurism for some time now. At the risk of sounding like a crusty old fart (at the tender age of 23), I’m becoming increasingly aware of how poorly produced so many products are, whether it’s packaging, music, DVD transfers, films or television. Something that, in my eyes, has come to define this decade so far is a misguided notion of “irony” - a belief that, by saying or doing something, you’re actually saying or doing the opposite. In the absolute broadest sense, it means you have garbage masquerading as quality. Therefore, a TV show like Shameless isn’t amateurishly shot - it’s “raw and gritty”. A boy band who dress in suits and ties, and spend hours making their hair look as if they’ve just been dragged through a hedge backwards, aren’t a bunch of sad-sacks - they’re somehow cool. A music video with some baggy-eyed, messy-haired twentysomething barely even attempting to mime the lyrics of his song isn’t a complete layabout or a pretentious tosser - he’s full of burning passion. And so on and so forth.

You can see this all the time - you only have to turn on the TV and you’re more than likely to be assaulted with a barrage of trendy amateurism. I’ve ranted before about badly-animated shows like South Park and Family Guy, asking why they look so awful. The reason, apparently, is that they look like that on purpose. Why? Well, I’ve yet to receive a coherent answer to this. There seems to be this bizarre belief that, by making something look awful, it somehow comes closer to illustrating real life - only I don’t know about you, but my life isn’t the badly-deinterlaced, shakycam nightmare that is Shameless, or any of those other shows that are receiving accolades for their apparently realistic portrayal of the world. A clunky piece of garbage like Hoodwinked gets praised for having “style” (so that’s what they’re calling it these days - “Honey, come and see the style the dog has left on the carpet”). Actual good-looking cartoons like Ren & Stimpy: Adult Party Cartoon don’t even get to run for a full season while ugly, has-been sitcoms like King of the Hill and The Simpsons are likely to remain on the air indefinitely while we all wither and die. Recently, the local news showcased an animation student who was convinced he was the Scottish answer to Pixar - his “film” turned out to feature the sort of graphics that would look embarrassing in a 1995 Playstation video game.

So, what’s the deal? Does nobody actually aspire to high standards any more? Why is it that I can turn on the TV and think “Wow, I could do better than that”? And I’m not trying to be pompous here - I think that just about anyone could make a more visually appealing show than Family Guy if they actually put their mind to it, while the average home movie doesn’t look that much worse than the latest episode of Casualty. There are, of course, occasional exceptions - Peep Show, for instance, is able to use its wonky looks for a purpose, and, of course, there are occasions where the underlying material is good enough to make the ham-fisted execution bearable, like early episodes of The Simpsons, which, ugly as they are, are damn funny - but, for the most part, virtually everything I ever see on TV has me asking myself, “How on earth did this get made?” There are plenty of good artists, musicians, filmmakers and so on around, so why does it always seem to be the crap that gets commissioned?

DVDs I bought or received in the month of February

• American Psycho (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• Babel (R0 USA, HD DVD)
• Beatrice Cenci (R2 France, SD DVD)
• The Descent (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• Enemy of the State (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• Kingdom of Heaven (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• Masters of Horror: Pelts (R1 USA, SD DVD)
• Perversion Story (R0 USA, SD DVD)
• This Film is Not Yet Rated (R1 USA, SD DVD)

As you can see, a rather blue month for me - put that down to the giddy thrills of a new format to play around with. I suspect that, in future months, as the HD DVD side continues to ramp up production, there will be a more even split between the two formats as far as purchases are concerned.

Burying the dead

After some delay, I finally managed to finish making my way through the fourth series of Waking the Dead this evening, a full review of which is forthcoming at DVD Times. As it happens, the sixth series finished airing on TV last Monday, and the difference between the two could not have been more pronounced. I’ve always liked Waking the Dead: its creator, Barbara Machin, is an excellent writer, and one capable of crafting interesting characters with believable foibles. For the first four years, the show focused on the same core five characters, but much changed at the end of the fourth series, with the departure of co-stars Holly Aird and Claire Goose (and executive producer Alexei de Keyser, who died shortly before the final episode of Series 4 was screened). The replacements drafted in to replace them have never quite managed to convince (in fact, Aird’s replacement, Esther Hall, disappeared without any mention after a single series and was herself replaced by Tara FitzGerald), while the notoriously convoluted plots have become baffling in the extreme, with the writers clearly assuming that it doesn’t have to make a blind bit of sense provided you include copious references to DNA and have the character of Boyd have at least three temper tantrums per episode.

Speaking of Boyd, what have they done to this character? He was always an irritable old so-and-so, an egomaniac with a belief that he who shouts the loudest will ultimately get his way, but his behaviour this year has verged on ridiculous. In the past, his outbursts were occasional and often used by the writers to make jokes at the character’s expense, but the sixth series has reduced him to a slavering, screaming moron who behaves like a petulant child. Furthermore, Series 6 was so filled with blithering and moronic, incomprehensible storylines that I actually gave up mid-way through the fifth two-parter (out of six), Double Bind - something I rarely do, and never with a series of which I consider myself a regular follower. Only the final episode, Yahrzeit, which focused on an old case being investigated by Goose’s character, Mel, succeeded in coming even close to matching the quality of the earlier episodes, and even then I found it a little confused as to the adopted Amelia “Mel” Silver, whose birth name was the decidedly Anglican Mary Smith, could have been trying to track down her Jewish ancestors (to be an ancestor, you surely have to be related by blood).

I really am pretty miffed by this turn of events. This show’s decline has been quite staggering - the fifth series wasn’t exactly brilliant, but it did have a couple of solid episodes among the dreck - and, for the first time, I’m not exactly bothered about whether or not another series will be commissioned. (In contrast, the most recent series of ITV’s Trial & Retribution, which aired at the same time on the same nights as this series of Waking the Dead, and which has in the past typically been the more variable of the two shows, was consistently excellent.) Perhaps Barbara Machin needs to come back and write an episode or two, like she did for Casualty during Christmas 2006. Then again, after her two episodes of that show had aired, it promptly went back to its now-customary banality. I don’t know - maybe it’s just time to call it a day.