TV/DVD: GAME OF THRONES (HBO, 2011)

 

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I read the first volume in George R R Martin's epic fantasy saga not long after it came out in 1991 and thought it was terrific. For some reason -it seemed too much of a good thing- I gave up halfway through the second book and never went back to it. Twenty years later when HBO put out their ten episode version of the book, I couldn't remember a damn thing about it except that it was good. I didn't watch the TV series when it was shown on Sky's Empire channel. It wasn't out of lack of interest rather because I have Virgin Media, Empire wasn't one of the channels they paid Sky for.

When the DVD set of this first season came out I still didn't rush to buy it despite all the praise heaped on it. Then I thought, what the hell, I can always recoup most of my losses by selling it, so I bought it and watched two episodes a night for successive nights, and most of the extras.

And, well, it's as good in its own way as Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings. Not in special effects, I should add. While the show clearly had a healthy budget there is little in the fantasy element where sfx  are used mainly because there is very little fantasy involved at all. Sometimes it's quite obvious when a matte painting has been used for a castle or background scenery but that's the worst criticism I can make of a genuinely outstanding piece of television drama.

The script is a superb distillation of Martin's novel. I'm sure there'll have been some filleting but it never feels watered down. Martin, who appears frequently in the making of extras, appears delighted as well he may be.

The cast is outstanding featuring many of the best of British and Irish (location shooting was filmed in Northern Ireland and Malta) character actors from both tv and film. The standard of acting is, needless to say, exceptional with the youngest included. It's an ensemble piece, though it's anchored by the key figure of Lord Eddard Stark played by Sean Bean with immense dignity. It's also true what they say about how good (his Emmy was well-earned) Peter Dinklage is as Tyrion Lannister who, lacking stature, has to rely on his wits to survive.

Stark with his youngest daughter -a great feisty character herself.

Dinklage as Tyrion.

The beautiful and exiled Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) with a claim to the throne, married off to a barbarian horse-lord so her brother can use his army.

Okay, I'm going to stop with the photos or I'll be here all day as I'll have explain the very complicated plot. suffice to say that it's all about scheming and fighting for the throne of the Seven Kingdoms. But the reasons why it's so good are many. The world (in terms of environment and societies) in which it is set is well worked out. Despite the existence of magic and monsters, they play very little (albeit highly significant) part which makes them all the more effective. The characters are very well rounded human beings. Good people do bad things and bad people do good things. Clearly some characters you'll identify as good or bad but (with one repulsive psychotic exception) none are what you call evil. All do things because they believe what they are doing in right. There are constant surprising developments. You can never tell when a character might die and it could well be your favourite. Also characters grow and change with Daenerys above being a prime example from quiet girl to...well, I won't spoil it. I don't know the full chronological span of the series of novels but I suspect it will be a decade if not decades. One pre-teenager is clearly (well I think so) being set up to be a warrior woman when she gets older (though she could just as easily get killed in the next season and, yes, it's Stark's daughter pictured above).

Amazingly I've forgotten to mention that the language can be really crude, the violence is really violent with blood and limbs and heads all over the place, and the sex sometimes verges on soft-core porn.

So basically this is just a brilliant piece of television which I hope will continue until the very end. (Note: the final two books haven't even been written by Martin yet.) 

Post Script.

Yes, Barry, the music is terrific as well.

DVD REVIEW: SCI-FI INVASIONS (MILL CREEK, 2011, 12 DISCS), PART 2

Introduction.

See previous post for the general intro to this box set. I should have mentioned that the transfers are generally so poor that on my 23inch monitor they look blurry so I generally reduce the size to less that half in order to get a picture that is watchable. As for things like subtitles; you must be joking.

 The robots

The villains

The good girl

Our hero (centre)

Disc 2

War Of The Robots (1978)

This is actually the second film on the disc but I couldn't find photos for the first on Google, but these are better anyway. This does count as invasion though it's the humans invading the alien planet in search of the kidnapped scientist who is the only one who knows the codes to stop a nuclear meltdown (sloppy organisation there) and the hero's girlfriend. Spoiler alert: see above, it's the photo labelled 'the villains'. The good girl is hopelessly in love with the hero who only has eyes for his siren girlfriend (who the scientist has the hots for) and at the end has to choose which one to save. Spoiler alert: there's a happy end. The space battles are excruciatingly bad (a year after Star Wars). The dubbing is by English actors including one who has to adopt a southern drawl. The robots are terrible shots, probably because their guns go poo poo wing! as opposed to the humans whose guns go wing wing poo! and hit every time. The sets are terrible though a couple of Italian (probably somewhere in Rome) external locations look okay. There is a story but it really isn't worth repeating.

Hands of Steel (1986)

Not an invasion film. In the near polluted future, an evil polluting industrialist (John Saxon in a guest role) sends a cyborg to kill an elderly  blind crippled environmentalist -what a stinker! But the cyborg is starting to get his human memories back and only puts the ebce in hospital and so has to go on the run from everyone. The first half of the film isn't really interesting but around the halfway mark the action picks up and just doesn't stop. We find out that the cyborg (our hero) is invulnerable to bullets but he can get beaten up pretty badly. There's also a demented female cyborg who kicks the crap out of him in a really good scene. This isn't a good film by any standards, though it is half an acceptable action movie with some good fight scenes.

984: Prisoner of the Future (1982)

After ten minutes I checked IMDB to see if this film was what I thought it was and I was right. It's a bleak nihilistic totally depressing Canadian art movie with no entertainment value whatsoever. I flicked to the end to watch the final scenes as mentioned in the solitary (no surprise there) review. I also learned from IMDB that this was commissioned as a pilot. Jumping Jesus Christ! I'm surprised this film wasn't buried the first time anyone saw the complete cut.

Top Line (1988)

Spoiler alert: This Italian movie, filmed in English, actually is an alien invasion movie. Franco Nero finds (after 20 minutes in which nothing of interest happens) an alien spaceship buried inside a mountain and then finds that pretty much every authority in the world is after them. And then nothing much of interest happens again for a while until he and his new girlfriend get chased by a cyborg which, in true Terminator style, gets half his human face ripped off revealing a robot eyeball which moves from side to side with a whirring noise until the cyborg gets dismembered by a pissed off bull. An even better scene is when he's confronted by his beautiful ex-wife who metamorphoses quite gruesomely into an alien and he learns the real truth about the world. Sorry but even I have limits. You'll have to watch the movie to find out what it is. (But you can probably have a good guess.)

DVD: (RECENTLY ACQUIRED) THE X-FILES -THE COMPLETE COLLECTOR'S EDITION

What it doesn't say is that it also includes the first movie plus a 60-page booklet. Listed on Amazon for £97.78 (probably a reduction from the original price), I got an excellent used copy from zoverstocks (an Amazon marketplace dealer I highly recommend) for £31.28 (including postage).

The discs haven't been remastered from their original appearance so the menus are a bit clunky -no play all, you have to manually return to the main menu after watching each episode, and other odds bits and pieces. The picture isn't as sharp as you'd expect these days. But it still represents great value for money with a running time of 148 hours and that's not including the extras.

I will be reviewing it some time but, only being halfway through the first series, it won't be soon.

DVD: 10 DAYS OF JOEL & ETHAN COHEN: DAY 3 -BARTON FINK (1991)

The Film.

This is an odd one, make no mistake about it. While Coen movies often cross genres, this one crosses so many that critics can't agree which ones they are. Indeed opinions differ widely as to what it's actually about. I have my own opinions but checked the longish article in Wikipaedia which summarises a variety of views, some of which coincide with mine and some don't. The Coens are two ferociously intelligent individuals who share a puckish sense of humour and it can be difficult to take what they say about their movies at face value. I remember reading that they said they'd never read Homer's Odyssey despite basing the structure of Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? very closely on it. My view is that they probably kept a copy or two on set during the making of the film. The thing about any work of art, particularly a problematic one like Barton Fink is that whatever the viewer gets out of it is, by virtue of it clearly being open to a number of interpretations, irrelevant to whatever the Coens intended.

So. whatever I say about it has to be valid and those views, while my own, are hardly likely to be original. Inevitably I'll be revealing plot twists as it's impossible to discuss Barton Fink without doing so. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Superficially it's about a talented playwright who's poached by Hollywood and finds himself out his depth in their shallows. He lives in a seemingly deserted and fading hotel where he is befriended by a working man who is more than he seems. Fink creates, he believes, his best work and it is rejected by the studio boss. And that is pretty much it.

However, consider another way of looking at it. It's about intellectual elitism. As the film opens, so does Fink's play about the working man (it's set in 1941 by the way) has just opened and is a rousing success. Fink (John Turturro) is full of himself and the need to give the working man a voice. It's clearly obvious that he has no idea what the working man is like at all but he is so full of his own burning need to create that this never occurs to him. When the studio tells him to write a wrestling movie for Wallace Beery he has no idea how to begin because he has no knowledge of popular culture. When his befriended by Charlie (John Goodman) who mentions that he has lots of stories, Fink rolls over him so full of his own self-belief. Only later does a completely mad serial killer tell him bluntly that he never listens.

Then there's the film's visual dichotomy. The Hollywood scenes are crisp and bright, light fills them. Walls and furniture are white or give the impression of whiteness. everything is sharp and clear and busy, even if it is only with the expansive sound of the Hollywood mogul's (Michael Lerner) voice. The hotel in which Fink finds himself is very different. The colours are full and rich but they are deep and dark with reds and browns seeming to predominate. The hotel is faded, looming, and empty. Even though we see a corridor with shoes waiting to be shined at every bedroom door, the only guests we ever see are Fink and Charlie, the only staff the elevator boy (a very elderly man) and the bell boy Chet (Steve Buscemi). Is this the Coens suggesting something about Fink's state of mind or something else? I don't have answer, I'm just asking a question.

Is it a satire or a black comedy about the state of Hollywood in the early 40's. To a certain extent the answer is yes. Many of the Hollywood scenes are played for laughs, albeit sometimes of the bitter kind. Michael Lerner is terrific as the over the top mogul, usually genially ebullient but swift to turn into a cruel intimidating bully. Out of his depth, Fink (who is apparently based on Clifford Odets) turns to the great writer W.P.Mayhew (John Mahoney) who is also struggling in the Hollywood salt mines and is apparently (though the Coens say not really) based on William Faulkner (which I had guessed). Mayhew, however, has become a bitter drunk and his writing is really done by his secretary/mistress Audrey (Judy Davis).

Is it a film noir or a crime drama? Some way through, Fink turns to Audrey (who has already rejected his tentative advances) for help with writing but when she shows up at his room it's with sex not writing on her mind. When Fink wakes up next morning he finds her next to him dead and bloody. Charlie appears and offers to get rid of the body, just to help his friend. Much later when he returns, Charlie says he has to go away but asks Fink to look after a parcel for him. Not long after that the police arrive to interrogate him about a homicidal maniac called Madman Muntz. Guess who Charlie really is? One of the cops, the appropriately named Detective Deutsch, makes a deliberately anti-semitic remark. Some days later, the cops appear again to interrogate Fink but Charlie arrives and kills them both as he sets fire to the hall. Fink escapes with his precious new (and ultimately worthless) manuscript, and the parcel Charlie gave him.

Symbolism is clearly important to the film and I'll cite a few images, but as to their meaning... In his room is a picture of a girl on a beach to which his eyes are drawn constantly. In the final scene, he's sitting alone on the beach when a pretty girl turns up, they talk briefly, then she sits down in the exact same pose as the picture. Also in his room, the wallpaper is gradually is gradually peeling away and at one point Chet tacks it to the wall. Gluey paste which closely resembles semen slowly rolls down the damp wall. There is definitely a subtext about sex here. The parcel, which I was certain contains Audrey's head, is never opened and is with him at the beach. (Another unanswered question is: did Charlie kill Fink's family while he was away -Fink had already given him their address.) And the name, Fink, itself. What does that tell us about him? And why did they pick a 5 feet tall actor for one of the cops?

And that's as far as I'm going to go. Barton Fink is a film which asks more questions than it answers. If you haven't seen it, do. Then you can try and discover them for yourselves.

Random Notes.

They loved this movie at Cannes. It won three major awards: Best Actor, Best Director, and the Palm D'Or.

DVD: THE GOOD WIFE, SEASON 1

My good friend, Mr Anonymous (aka Barry), raved on at me for months about this tv series so I decided to give the new season a try and started with the second episode as he'd forgotten to tell me it was starting again. It seemed quite interesting but obviously I was missing a lot of nuances so I decided to pick up the DVD. 

And I watched the entire thing in a week.

Initially, it seemed a little bit formulaic -new case to win, more revelations about her imprisoned husband (for corruption) and his extra-marital affairs, new eccentric judge -but while it never did really vary much from this formula, I stopped caring because on the whole the show was just too damn good in every other respect. This is down simply to good writing, involving characters, and a damn fine cast of actors firing on all cylinders.

Julianna Margulies (Alicia Florrick) is a revelation as the main character: she's very self-controlled, trying to keep her family together (she has a teenage son and daughter), trying to decide her feelings for her estranged husband and for her new boss (who is an old friend), trying to do a good job as a lawyer and beat off competition for a permanent post from a confident younger man, and more.

Josh Charles (Will Gardner) is an actor I've never come across but he's terrific as one of the (financially vulnerable) firm's three partners. Overtly charming, you're never sure if he's genuinely nice or wearinga false face. Is his interest in Alicia genuine or opportunistic. Christine Baranski (always good value) is the second partner (the third is mostly absent) and less than altruistic.

Chris Noth (Peter Florrick) is appropriately charismatic as the disgraced and imprisoned D.A. but again his motives are always suspect. Is he innocent of corruption, has he repented his liaisons with prostitutes, does he genuinely love his wife, etc?

And then as the firm's investigator Kalinda, there's Archie Panjabi an Anglo-Asian actress whom I was vaguely familiar with but can now state I think she's brilliant. And hotter than hell. Her character is intensely private, strong, cynical, with lots of contacts. Her sexuality is a matter for much speculation (particularly in the lesbians in the media website AfterEllen). Panjabi steals scene after scene and well deserved her Emmy for Best Supporting Actress.

Here she is in a scene with Chris Noth and Joe Morton. Look at her body language -both men are very strong characters and Kalinda isn't the slightest bit intimidated.

I could go on listing the various other key characters and how good the actors are but that would get boring. Suffice to say that the rest of the cast is uniformly strong. Alan Cumming arrives late in the series, but to good effect, as Peter Florrick's new manager.

This is a genuinely rivetting show packed with characters whose motives and allegiances are uncertain, a murky swamp that the vulnerable heroine has to negotiate in more ways than one. The various crimes/trials themsemselves are always interesting and, again, often morally ambiguous. One minor quibble is that the law firm tends to be on the side of good a little too often for plausibility and they also win a little too often. But despite that I really do highly recommend this show.

Oh, and here's a picture of Kalinda with, perhaps, her object of desire, FBI agent Jill Flint. And in the scene that this is taken from it becomes clear that Kalinda is most definitely Flint's.

DVD: MEGA-PIRANHA

So I've just got back from a crowded pub having had a meal with my friend Barry (aka Anonymous No.1), half a pint of real ale and a bottle of Hardy's Shiraz (£6.30) and I'm just in the mood to review a piece of crap like Mega-Piranha.

This cropped version of a poster is exaggerated. It takes at least half a dozen to eat a battleship.

This isn't. It is also very funny as our hero kicks several over-large piranha which are trying to eat him.

The Plot. In Venezuala, well-meaning American scientists have accidentally developed a strain of piranha which double their size every 48 hours and they have gotten loose in the Orinoco River. I know this because every time you see a South American river the words Orinoco River flashes on the screen. This also happens every time you got to a new location or see a new character.

When they American ambassador and his V conterpart are eaten by big piranha, our hard-core hero is sent to investigate his mysterious death (he doesn't know they were eaten by big piranhas). He meets the bad guy, a Venezualan military man. (NB Venezuala dislikes the USA so much they changed their clocks by half an hour so they wouldn't be in the same time zone: fact!) He also meets our heroine 80's Pop Sensation Tiffany (as she is always billed on the DVD box and any other publicity material) who is a scientist trying to grow fish to feed the population but grew the piranha which accidentally got loose so it's all her fault!

The bad guy fails to destroy the piranha which keep on growing and head downriver towards the open sea which they couldn't exist in but who the hell cares. On their way they leap out of the river and hit several buildings which explode. Don't know why but they do. They also eat lots of people and get kicked by our hero.

Hero and Tiffany and another scientist who hasn't been killed head for the coast to alert a a battleship to destroy the piranha before they reach the open sea and get to Florida faster than a jet. They are pursued by the bad guy and his minions but who cares because the battle ship doesn't kill enough of them and gets eaten and the giant piranha head for Florida.

Reality check. Venezuala is actually on the west of South America with its coast on the Pacific. However, the maps we see are of the east coast, specifically Belize where the movie was actually filmed.

At this point I stopped caring. The end doesn't make sense but neither does what happened before that. There's a documentary about how they made this wonderful film film for peanuts and I believed every word, almost. Not that it doesn't have some entertainment value but it sure is a pile of shit.

DVD:VIDEO NASTIES THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE

 

Back in the 80's when the Nasties furore was at its height, I was a regular borrower of videos from one of those corner shop video libraries. However, what I wasn't, still believing myself to overly squeamish, was a fan of gory horror movies. I remember fellow SF fan Harry Bell describing lurid details from Romero's Dawn of the Dead and Ian Penman insisting that I'd enjoy Evil Dead 2. Oh yeah, sure, like hell. I'd seen enough to clips and trailer of them and similar films for me to realise that I'd run a mile rather than see them. Of course I've now seen DotD several times and The Evil Dead (which I've just bought on Blu-ray) and ED2 are two of my favourite horror movies.

The point I'm leading up to is that at the time while being aware of the moves to ban the Video Nasties, my actual memory of the events surrounding them are vague in the extreme. I have, however, become more familiar with the details through reading various books about horror movies. And now along comes this DVD on the subject.

The focus of the DVD is Jake West's 60 minute documentary about the subject which features original contemporary footage and specially shot current interviews with a variety of horror experts and people who had been involved with the Nasties at the time. One is a smug ex-MP (Tory, unsurprisingly) who hasn't changed his views and another is Martin Barker the writer, then one of the few dissenting voices of reason opposing the witch hunt. West reveals an uncontrollable hysteria in which certain horror movies were put under the blanket Video Nasty label and anyone involved with them could find htemselves prosecuted and imprisoned. The VN's became the source of all the ills and evils in society and banning them was the cure. Barker accurately points out that this resembles the 50's persecution of horror comics, a persecution that was just as pointless and ill-informed. The media (in particular my old friend The Daily Mail -see many previous posts- always the bastion of ignorance and middle-class hysteria) seemed to wage war on these Nasties, prominently publishing the results of spurious surveys one of which claimed 40% of under 7's had watched one. An academic named Cumberbatch (any relation to the actor?) did his own survey which proved that kids would say anything that they thought adults would want to hear and happily claimed to have seen films whihc didn't exist. But watch the DVD for yourself, it's a fascinating revelation of how censorship can creep in through the back door before it even has the legitimacy of legality and is founded on sheer ignorance.

On disc 2 is a compilation of all the trailers to the 39 nasties which were successefully prosecuted and on disc 3, the 33 which were later acquitted. Each trailer has introduction (sometimes extensive, sometimes brief, all interesting) by a variety of writers and academics who can legitimately claim some expertise in the field. There's the usual suspects -Kim Newman, Alan Jones, and Allen Bryce- plus the lesser known but excellent Stephen Thrower. Director West has his mate Emily Booth do a few and she reads lasciviously from a cue card in the same manner she introduces horror movies on the Horror Channel (or Zone Horror or whatever it's called today). There are also a few academics and directors, most notably Dr Patricia McCormack, an Aussie Goth lecturing at a British university. She's very good but her appearance, particularly the nose ring, is a bit of a distraction from what she's saying. It's all good stuff and the sort of thing to be dipped into rather than watched all the way through.

Ironically, over 20 years later, most of these films have been released uncut on DVD and very few remain banned outright and those mostly for scenes of animal cruelty which is something I find hard to argue about. One of them- Contamination, which I've seen- is now, uncut, rated only 15. What we are presented with is an enormously diverse range of films from cheap trash to something approach Art, from exploitation to moral explorations. This set of 3 discs is packed with food for thought and debate -would I Spit On Your Grave have caused the same controversy if released under its original title Day of the Woman? I honestly can't make up my mind if it's sexist or feminist polemic or what.