CURRENT TV: DRACULA (SKY LIVING) AND MORE, REVIEWED

Just for a change, I'm going to rate these shows. Here's the guide.

***** I'm not going out, I'm not answering the phone and I'm holding my nose until the commercial break when I'll clean up the cat poo.

****   As above, but I'll move the cat poo into another room until the commercial break.

***    As above, but I clean up the cat poo immediately and I could be talked into going out for a drink as I'm recording it.

**       I'm recording it and finding something else to do. Might watch it sometime.

*         There must be some cat poo in the house to clean up.

There's a trend for reinventing classic characters on TV (talking about drama series here) by doing a riff that is at complete variance with what the viewer expects. Recent example that worked: Merlin. Current example that doesn't: Atlantis -rating *. 

And now there's Dracula which is so utterly bizarre that it comes over as completely insane. Either that or it's a work of genius. Drac is still a vampire (or course he is; him not being really would defeat the object) but everything else pretty much isn't. Our anti-hero is revived by the doctor Abraham Van Helsing to help him take out the secret organisation which killed the vamp a couple of centuries earlier. after that opening he appears in late 19th century London as Grayson, an American industrialist-entrepreneur who wants to destroy the oil industry which is controlled by our secret society. Jonathan Harker is a journalist enlisted by Drac to get the dirty on his enemies. Harker's fiance Mina is a woman training to be a (shock, gasp, how dare she, she's a woman after all) doctor. Oh yeah, she's also the reincarnation, so he believes, of Dracula's long-dead wife. Lucy Westernra is a good time girl with a secret crush on Mina. There is a wonderful Amazon (woman, not a pre-Internet version of you know what) blonde with big t... sorry, this a non-sexist blog. Likes: rampant sex, fine food and wine, watching no-rules women fights, torture and decapitating vampires (even though she doesn't know she's shagging one -Grayson aka Drac) for the secret society. Give her a spin-off series.

This show is so over the top you want applaud each successive incident of bravura, chutzpah, or whatever you want to call it. Me, I call it the best trashy show on TV. 

Rating: *****

And then there's Sleepy Hollow in which a famous spooky story about a headless horseman and a school teacher is reinvented. Ichabod Crane (Tom Mison) is now a British military officer who has swapped sides and now works for General Washington in the fight against the British army in the American War of Independence. He decapitates a seemingly unstoppable soldier only to find it makes no difference and not long after wakes up in a crypt to find out that over 200 years have passed and that the horseman is back and he may be one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Crane is teamed up with a young cop (Nicole Beharie) who is not only, as you may have guessed, female but also black. This poses no problems for our progressive turncoat British Oxford professor/spy/soldier/etc. 

Things get complicated, lots of people die (beheading being quite a common way in this series), our heroes accrue a collection of friends and enemies (aka the supporting cast), surprising revelations come at a fast rate of knots as the plot gets knottier and knottier. 

This series is turning into a surprise cult hit in the States -the chemistry between the two excellent leads is an important factor- though the only people who are still surprised are those who haven't seen it yet.

Rating: ****

Last of the new series is Marvel's Agents of Shield. Now given that there are strong links to both Joss Whedon and the larger Marvel movie superhero universe (specifically The Avengers), hopes were not only high they could, like the cow, jump over the moon.

Unfortunately it's just not very good. The characters aren't particularly engaging, though some have got better as the series has gone on. But the stories are, on the whole, quite dull. I keep watching it in the hopes it'll get better. There was an enormous amount of goodwill for this show and it's already booked for a second season. Not sure if I'll be watching it.

Rating: **

Arrow is in its second season and it's steadily building into what may soon be considered the best tv series ever to be based on a super-hero character. In this case it's DC's Green Arrow. It takes much of its mythos from the comic but grounds it, by TV standards, in reality. It has a strong supporting cast of interesting characters played by good actors and in its lead, Stephen Amell, you have someone who looks like he can actually physically accomplish what his character does, who is a good actor, and importantly possesses an undoubted charisma which makes both Arrow and alter ego Oliver Queen convincing. That it's also extremely well made doesn't hurt.

There are plenty of surprises, twists, and turns, revelations and always the feeling that there's more surprises to come. When they introduced Black Canary (in the comics GA's long time lover) and it wasn't the love interest then it could only be one other character who was supposedly dead and I was right.

All in all, an excellent action-adventure series.

Rating: *****

If True Blood hadn't already jumped the shark a couple of seasons ago then it certainly has this time with the introduction of a 6000 year old vampire-fairy in love (and who the hell isn't on this show?) with the heroine. Still, there's enough explicit sex, nudity, blood, gore, flashing fangs, and humour to keep regularly viewers moderately entertained. Rating ***

Spy thriller Nikita is up to season 3 and I hope it will be the last. Loved the first two, don't know why I keep watching the third. Once our hunted heroes took over the organisation that used to hunt them, it went downhill. Rating: **

It's the last season for British underclass super-hero series Misfits and, despite a complete change of cast from the beginning it remains consistently vulgar, funny, and sex-obsessed thanks to a great cast and Joseph Gilgun in particular. It's quitting while it's ahead. But it will be missed. Rating: ****

I'm getting tired so I'll quickly skip over Elementary, a modern New York-living Sherlock Holmes played well by Johnny Lee Miller with Lucy Liu as his assistant Dr Joan Watson. Always interesting and often funny, this is one of those shows that shouldn't work but does. Rating ***

American Horror Story Season 3 is about witches. I gave up watching the first season about halfway through, not for the horror but the cruelty and the certainty that something terrible was going to happen to innocents. For that reason I skipped Season 2. However I'd thought I'd give the latest one a go. For those not familiar with the show, each season is self-contained and while actors may reappear, their characters are different.

This one is set in a school for young witches, but if you're thinking an X-men variant, forget it. There are only four students. The head is generally well meaning but her mother is the Supreme witch and is played by Jessica Lange with such intensity that no-one in their right mind would even want to be in the same city as her. Cathy Bates plays a slave owner/madame given eternal life and then buried alive for 180 years until Lange digs her up and makes her the slave of the obese black teenage witch. Angela Bassett is Marie Laveau who wasn't buried alive, still flourishes and whose mortal enemy is the ruthless Lange. I can't begin to summarise the actual plot as it changes every five minutes. 

In a way, this show does what true horror should do -it unnerves and it disturbs, it goes into truly dark places which is something rare in modern horror no matter how gory. ****

If you see this woman, run!

Dr.Who Special.

The Day Of The Doctor. Well, it is what it is. There's no point to criticising it except by the standards and conventions the show has set itself. There's no point in criticising if you don't like the show because what you see as flaws could be examples of writer/produced Stephen Moffett's genius to someone who does. There's also no point whatsoever in criticising it for its use of science which has always been bibble-bibble, the deus ex machina rabbit out of a hat with one mighty bound he was free and if you can't swallow that, go watch The Sky At Night instead.

Apart from wrapping up loose ends, bringing together strands and bringing them to a resolution, there is a feast of references -some obvious, some subtle, some downright obscure- for fans of the show. One minute it's Monty Python, the next it's the human dilemma and knowing what is the right thing to do.

All that remains to say are: John Hurt was amazing as the War Doctor; and, I just loved it.

And if you haven't seen this show, watch it on BBC's Iplayer.
NOW!

If you have any interest in the early history of British television, if you like dramas based on actual events, if you're interested in Doctor Who, or just like British actors acting brilliantly, watch this now.

In case you haven't heard (and I can't imagine regular readers of this blog not doing so), this is about the creation and early years of Dr.Who. It's how an extrovert Canadian showman got a minuscule budget science fiction kids show on tv, made a pushy female Jew the producer, and put a wog as its director. In the white upper class male patrician BBC this was unheard of. Verity Lambert and Waris Hussein (for it was them) got a grumpy middle-aged chain smoking actor with a chip on his shoulder as the elderly lead, put it together with materials like Blue Peter sticky black plastic and cardboard, and made it an enormous success.

And that is the story. It's also brilliantly done on every level. From its recreation of the BBC of the early sixties, the wonderful cast, a masterly script by Mark Gatiss (possibly the best thing he's ever done), and surely at the least a Bafta award nomination for David Bradley as that vulnerable curmudgeon William Hartnell.

Simply a breathtaking piece of drama that makes the license fee worth every penny.

I did see the first episode at the time and still remember it (vaguely). I also never missed one for many years after that.

SOCIETY: THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

Multi-tasking: a definition.

The ability to perform multiple tasks badly.

"Good at multi-tasking."

An oxymoron.

Thank you and goodnight.

A COLLECTION OF BRIEF REVIEWS FROM AMAZON

5* Transcends criticism-

But is not beyond it. What I mean by that is that if you've seem Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy then you know exactly what you're getting. More or less. This is lighter in tone -it is based on a children's book after all- and includes songs sung by the characters (like the dwarfs). You know that it's going to be Jackson's version of the book too as he takes additional characters and events from various Tolkein-written sources plus original input from his writers. So to complain, as some certainly will that it's a bad thing to include material that is non-canonical to the original book, is entirely missing the point. He hasn't padded out a shortish kids book, he's extended it and done so extremely well.

What we get here, as we did before, is a magnificent cinematic fantasy experience where Jackson creates a completely convincing magical environment -aided, it has to be said, by the scenery of perhaps the most beautiful country in the world. I avoided seeing this at the cinema because I wanted to wait for the extended edition. Now I'll be queueing at the multiplex door for Part 2.

And, yes, the extras are all you ever wanted and possibly more.

Just a word of advice to buyers who are as dim as me. The 2-D version is on disc 3, Discs 1 & 2 contain the 3-D version only. It took me a few frustrated minutes to figure that out. But I'm old and that's my excuse.

4* Deranged

But in a good way.

Also in an often amateurish way too. But there's a loony enthusiasm pervading the mostly frenetic numbers. There are even some which are actually musically accomplished such as Storm Warning by Mac Rebennack (who would reinvent himself in the 60s as Dr. John, as if you didn't know). This is largely fun dumb music and, hey don't get me wrong, that's praise.

4* A feast for Fifties guitar fans.

Um, that was the review, okay? No? A little more then.

It hits most of the high spots so any avid fan of the music is already likely to have the best of the tracks here, though for a dabbler like me, it's excellent. Indeed it was worth getting for my favourite surf instrumental ever -Pipeline by the Chantays. It also highlights just how good The Shadows were in comparison to the competition. Good driving music as all the tracks are pretty short.

3* Not quite so fashionable

Considering that this is set in the fashion industry, of a sort, this is distinctly unglamourous and, in fact, downright ugly thought that, I suppose is part of its intent. Set in a city which reminds me of the perpetual night-shrouded locale of the excellent film Dark City, this is a grim read. The art, while accomplished and effective, is not attractive to look at.

The story, being by Alan Moore, is of course effective, particularly with its motif of illusion and reality which is best exemplified in ambiguity of the sexual identities of two of the story's main characters. However, it's worth remembering that Moore wrote this as a film script and it has been adapted as a graphic novel by someone else -Antony Johnston- so the reader is not getting a graphic novel by Moore as one would normally consider it.

Ultimately it's a bleak depressing piece and one which I believe will come to be considered as one of Moore lesser works. Read it if you must but make sure any sharp objects you own are locked away.

5* The best book about Alan Moore to date.

Okay, I haven't read the academic American texts about the world's most famous graphic novelist but I have read the more accessible ones and this really is the best. Unlike the most recent biography (Alan Moore: Storyteller) by one of Moore's mates, this isn't authorised and author Larkin is prepared to delve into some of the more controversial aspects and in detail.

There's as much about Moore's relationships and attitudes towards the comic book industry as there is about the comics/graphic novels themselves. Just one example: there is a very detailed exploration of Moore's widely publicised dispute with DC Comics which the author looks at from both sides and attempts to evaluate the situation. He also discusses Moore's possible motives for his reactions to a variety of issues. So what makes this book stand out above others published to date is that this is as much about Alan Moore the man as Alan Moore the writer, something very much missing from the other title I cited and which I noted in my review of it here on Amazon. Actually, the two books complement each other quite nicely.

That said, it you only gotta buy one book about Alan Moore then this is one: perceptive, witty, and highly readable it's worth every penny.

Perhaps a little surprisingly, the man himself has given it a tacit nod of approval.

Post Script: Coming Soon.

Maybe. If I feel like it. After I've had a chance to digest them properly.

THE WATERBOYS: Fisherman's Box.

The complete Fisherman's Blues sessions 1986-88. A massive 6-CDs. Expect an effusive review.

BUFFALO SPRINGFIELD: Box Set.

A mere 4 CDs with a shitload of demos and unreleased alternate versions. Previously released in a more expensive edition.

DVD REVIEW: ZATOICHI (2003)

This is one of those samurai movies where you don't know which period it's set in until the appearance of an artifact or a European in costume. In this case it's a gun which places it sometime in the later 19th century. Not that it makes any difference in the slightest. It's also an update of a long-running series about Zatoichi the Blind Swordsman. Here he's played by Beat Takeshi who is capably directed by Takeshi Kitano and also his alter ego.

And it's all good gory violent fun. Lost of action and gallons of cgi blood spatter and some cgi wounds. It's also got a plot, or at least several characters in search of one. Zatoichi, whose name is rarely mentioned, has taken on the guise of a wandering masseur and arrives at a small town ruled by rival gangs. Oh, the opening scene has him despatching a bunch of people who've hunting him. Just to get the viewer warmed up for what's to come. He's taken in by a kindly lady of uncertain age and promptly goes gambling, something he's good at, where he befriends the lady's feckless nephew aka the comedy relief.

There are three other players of significance in this drama. There's the ronin who, needing money to buy medicine for his ill wife, accepts a job as bodyguard to a gang leader. He isn't a bad person as such but is completely ruthless in accomplishing what he is paid to do and we just know that this will bring him into contact with our ageing blind hero. More sympathetic are the two homicidal geishas. Actually they are sister and brother who are tracking down those who slaughtered their family when they were children. The boy has adopted female guise and, while growing up, went with men -who clearly knew what and how old he was- to earn money. I suspect it's this transgressive subplot which earned the film the 18 rating rather than the stylised violence and bloodshed which is always fast and furious and never lingered over.

I much mention the final sequence which is completely at odds with everything that went before. It is a massive and hugely enjoyable percussion-led dance sequence by a famous Japanese tap dance troupe plus the few surviving main characters. Zatoichi, however, is back on the road.

The cover art is very much in the style of graphic novelist Frank Miller though, as there is no credit on the box, it may not be him.

All in all, a highly enjoyable film.