Archive for the ‘Opinion pieces’ Category

Better Eyes Than That: The Avatar Trailer

Tuesday, August 25th, 2009

James Cameron is coming home. The director of The Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Aliens and The Abyss Cameron was, along with Ridley Scott and John Woo, pivotal in creating the grammar of action and genre cinema in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

Whilst Scott favoured worlds that were both functional and richly detailed and Woo became ever more fascinated by the heroic ideal and how that could be represented through balletic, creative violence, Cameron remained unusually practical. A former special effects technician who’d learnt his trade working with Roger Corman, Cameron’s combination of invention, vision and willingness to get his hands dirty led him to work with the likes of Ron Cobb to create futures which were incredible and tangible, brave new worlds where the rivets weren’t just visible, they were vital.

Cameron’s return to the genre is a project he’s been working on for over a decade. Initially written in 1995, Avatar was put on hold until special effects were advanced enough for the film to be properly realised. That time has now come and after years of speculation, the film was previewed this week, through a trailer and 16 minutes of footage shown at IMAX cinemas worldwide.

The response, so far, has been unsurprisingly negative as the unusual combination of hype and secrecy surrounding the project has raised expectations impossibly high. There is, inevitably, already talk of it being the biggest flop of the year and that it may signal the end of Cameron’s career.

I disagree, because I think Cameron’s been here before.

The Abyss is his least well-regarded film but arguably his best. The film follows a group of oil rig workers and Navy SEALs as they find themselves caught between natural disaster, human frailty, the very real possibility of nuclear war and a first contact situation on the ocean bed, combining all four to create what is arguably Cameron’s best and most human film.

It also features one of the the single most influential scenes in 1990s genre cinema. At the film’s halfway mark, the crew discover a tentacle of mobile water snaking its way through their badly damaged rig and their reactions tell us everything we need to know about them. Coffey, the SEAL team leader is terrified, Bud, the rig foreman is shocked and fascinated and Lindsay, the rig designer and his wife is completely unafraid. In one of the film’s best moments, the tentacle mimics Lindsay’s face and seamlessly, without any fanfare, we begin to communicate with an alien race. It’s the moment the clocks stop, the moment the new age begins and it’s heralded by nothing more than an alien water tentacle sticking its tongue out.

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What’s less obvious is that special effects technology changed at the same time. The water tentacle was one of the earliest examples of practical CGI, neatly sidestepping the limitations of the technology by relying on a basic, elemental substance and texture. Simple, effective and unlike anything seen before, it was the moment that arguably opened the door for everything from the Quidditch games of Harry Potter to the subtle recreation of period San Francisco in Zodiac. It’s less a scene, more a hinge around which over a decade of films turn.

Which brings us to Avatar and to Jake Sullivan smiling with two mouths and two different faces.

Avatar is Jake’s story. A paralysed former marine, he’s given a chance to walk again as part of the Avatar program on Pandora. The only world where an incredibly valuable mineral has been discovered, Pandora is as beautiful as it is hostile and the Avatars are an attempt to even the odds. Grown from a combination of their pilot’s DNA and that of the Na’vi, Pandora’s dominant race, Avatars are ‘flown’ by pilots in a secure location, allowing them to interact with and, in theory, survive the Pandoran ecosystem.

They’re also, from a practical point of view, entirely fake. The film uses a combination of motion capture and computer graphics to create most of Pandora, including the Avatars themselves. Unsurprisingly, they’ve also become the focus of much of the film’s early negative buzz, critics citing the Elvish appearance of the characters and their opaque skin as highlighting instead of hiding their artificiality. Neill Blomkamp’s acclaimed District 9 has also been used as a comparison, the ‘Prawn’ aliens of Blomkamp’s seething Johannesburg more integrated, more real and somehow more alien than Cameron’s stylised Na’vi.

All of this may well prove to be true, after all there’s as much danger as glory in being the first one through the door. But for me, the Avatars are as fascinating and I suspect will prove as pivotal as the water tentacle of The Abyss. The reason, I suspect, lies in the space between Sam Worthington, Jake Sullivan and Jake Sullivan’s Avatar.

Unsurprisingly Worthington, the film’s star, is front and centre for almost all the trailer but what’s more surprising is that there’s only one line of dialogue throughout. As a result, the viewer is naturally drawn not only to the special effects but to the physical acting on display and one moment in particular. There’s a shot of Jake, sitting next to the tank his Avatar is suspended in, bathed in the blue light coming from it. He looks at it for a long moment, then smiles. It’s a fascinating moment, not least because of how much Worthington communicates with that smile. There’s abject wonder, intense satisfaction and recognition there, all wrapped up in under a second of screen time.

It’s particularly fascinating when viewed with a moment that comes later in the trailer. Jake has been downloaded into his Avatar for the first time, a gangly, nine-foot tall creature of incredible power tempered only by inexperience. He stumbles and puts a colossal hand against the glass of the observation room nearby then looks up, smiles a wide, predatory smile filled with teeth and utters the one line of the trailer:

‘This is great.’

It’s the same man, the same face, the same smile but wider, wilder and a little more intimidating. It’s a startling moment, clearly Jake, clearly Worthington but somehow something bigger, something different, something new. It’s a moment of startling parity between actor and character as Sam Worthington’s performance, like Jake Sullivan’s thoughts are filtered through to a new, different body. It’s also a moment, like the water tentacle, around which I suspect the next decade’s worth of science fiction cinema will turn.

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Sherlock Holmes-Eliminating the Impossible

Friday, June 19th, 2009

This is Sherlock Holmes’ year, we’re just living in it. No less than three new versions of Conan Doyle’s classic detective are launching this year across three different media and three very different approaches. The obvious question of course is why? The less obvious question is which, if any, will succeed?

It seems oddly fitting to start with the version of which we know least. Sherlock filmed in January, a sixty minute pilot designed to update the character to modern London. Superficially it’s the least interesting of the three until, that is, you examine the cast and crew.
Created by Stephen Moffat, about to take over the reins of Doctor Who and co-created by Moffat and Mark Gatiss, Sherlock appears to have taken great pains to maintain the basic tenets of the characters and stories. Holmes is still brilliant but socially inept, Watson is still compassionate, slightly dogged and his closest friend. They even live at the same address.
But Moffat and Gatiss both have a reputation for surprising decisions and the fact that Moriarty is mentioned in the press release is I suspect, very deliberate. This has the potential to be one of the most interesting takes on the character in decades and with Benedict Cumberbatch as Holmes and Martin Freeman as Watson, the central cast are certainly about as strong as it’s possible for them to be. Sherlock looks set to air later this year and it’ll be interesting to see how it fares.

Stepping across to comics for a moment, Leah Moore and John Reppion are currently writing a Sherlock Holmes series for Dynamite Entertainment. Moore and Reppion have been quietly carving a name for themselves in the industry for some time now and their Albion series was simultaneously a celebration and a particularly nasty subversion of some classic English comic characters. They get the peculiar combination of courtesy and violence, tea and blood-soaked shirts that lie at the heart of this sort of English fiction and it’s this sensibility that they bring to Sherlock Holmes. The idea behind the series is simple; these are the stories Conan Doyle didn’t get to tell, stories set in the Victorian London we know so well, starring Holmes, Watson, Lestrade and the rest but in comic form.
The end result is impressive. The debate about whether comics are better telling decompressed serials or compressed stand alones is rendered moot here as the script, along with Aaron Campbell’s art imitates the erudite language of Conan Doyle’s work through pacing rather than dialogue. The first story, ‘The Trial of Sherlock Holmes’ is currently two issues in and in that time we’ve seen Holmes arrested for a murder he seemingly cannot be innocent of, Watson and Lestrade united against a curiously unhelpful Chief of Police, Holmes remarkably relaxed to be in prison and something terrible moving in the shadows of London High Society. These two issues are packed with incident and information, filled with exactly the sort of dense, informative plotting Conan Doyle excelled at but unfold at a unique, deliberate pace. This is prose storytelling in comic form, done not just right but exceptionally. The principles of the character have rarely been more honoured without it once seeming like slavish adherence to the text.

At the other end of the spectrum, the trailer for Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes film arrived a couple of weeks ago and caused a minor stir in fan circles. The film casts Robert Downey Junior as Holmes and Jude Law as Watson and judging by the trailer sets them against the beginnings of the occultist and spiritualist movement that Conan Doyle himself would become so infamously drawn to.
The trailer is just over two and a half minutes long, gives both Downey Jr and Law a chance to shine and drives home one point over and over again; this is not your father’s Sherlock Holmes. It shows Holmes engaged in a bare knuckle boxing match, a singularly inept fight with a villain in a shipyard, diving out of the House of Commons into the Thames, failing to pick a lock and being knocked out by Irene Adler. There’s gunplay, explosions and the sort of rapid fire deadpan humour that Downey Jr excels at.
It looks, in short, marvellous. This is the other road to take with Sherlock Holmes, eschewing purism for a format where the characters are rendered down to their barest essentials (Brilliant, eccentric detective, compassionate, long suffering friend, charming, wily female criminal) and then something entirely new is built on top of them. It will, and has I’m sure, enrage purists as the character appears to be rendered down to nothing more than Indiana Jones in period London, the Doctor without his TARDIS.
But that’s not the point. The point is, Holmes CAN be rendered down in this fashion, can be altered, changed as the author requires. He’s very nearly a perfect character, unique but mutable, an ideal that stands a little outside the norm and able to reflect whatever an author brings to it. Holmes is a mirror held up not just to the crimes he investigates and the society within which they occur but also the authors who stand behind him.

This is the central point of Paul Cornell’s magnificent ‘The Deer Stalker’. Available for free on the BBC website it’s a dizzying story that begins with Watson in hiding as mysterious soldiers stalk London and culminates in a moment of post-modern surrealism that not only explains every different incarnation of the character but puts each on an equal footing. He’s an elemental, pure figure and as a result is oddly mutable, a figure adept at disguise be it textual or meta-textual.

Which brings us to the definitive Holmes variation; Gregory House. He’s an irascible, bitter, sarcastic junkie with a dogged, overly compassionate best friend, an establishment figure who is as irritated by him as they are awed and a group of young, eager hopefuls who want to prove themselves. He even lives at 221B.
The medical detective show is in its fifth season and, for all the changes made to cast and plotting, for all the focussing in on the lives of individual characters and the quietly dark hearts of the Princeton Plainsboro staff, the stories remain basically the same; a patient with impossible symptoms is admitted, House tries something and it works a little then fails, tries something else that fails and makes it worse then tries something else and nine times out of ten, cures the patient. Not everyone goes home whole but by and large, everyone goes home. More often than not, House wins and more often than not, he takes no satisfaction from that at all, constantly turning to the next puzzle, the next case. He’s a constant, both in the hospital and the series and that has itself become a plot point. Recent episodes have begun to explore the concept that House is terrified of change, that his constant bullying and cajoling of patients and staff is to hold them in line, to keep them from breaking ranks, breaking the pattern.
This is the genius of the show, taking the format of the original stories and hanging a lantern on them, using that repetition as a character beat in and of itself. House is a constant and he’s trapped by that constant, his genius a fragile structure based on a single friendship and the total control he exerts over his staff.
House is Holmes taken to the nth degree, a snarling, sarcastic figure with a horrific childhood that tortures as much as it enables him. The last half season alone has seen him attempt suicide in the name of clinical information, risk permenant brain damage in a desperate attempt to save the love of his best friend’s life and hire a private detective to keep tracks on his friend and his staff. He’s a disaster, a barely functional human being who uses his constant humour to hide the very intellect, the very concern he’s desperate to prove he doesn’t have. House is a far darker, far more driven figure than Holmes and when the time comes for his Reichenbach Falls it’s very difficult to imagine him returning.

But for all the vicodin and motorcycles, the prostitutes and the lewd comments, at his core, Gregory House is Sherlock Holmes. He’s the same driven, brilliant, slightly doomed figure updated to the present day and placed in an entirely unique context that not only allows him to stand out but also throws a blinding light on Sherlock Holmes and the lives the two men all but share.

When it comes down to it, Holmes is Holmes, regardless of whether his name is Sherlock or Greg, whether he’s in print or on the screen, in 19th Century London or 21st Century America. He’s both unique and uniquely mutable and that means he can be whatever is required of him, however impossible, or improbable, it may seem.

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(TV) The Landing, not the Take Off

Monday, January 12th, 2009

The hardest thing, a lot of the time, is not to know where to start but knowing where to end.  Big entrances are relatively easy to pull off, but big exits?  Leaving your audience wanting more?  That’s hard.  After all, openings have a natural structure to them, you introduce your protagonist, introduce the situation they find themselves in, their antagonist, their allies, the time and place and throw in a little drama.  Effectively you’re setting out the stall, showing people your wares and, provided you have a good grasp of your story it’ll go well.

Sometimes, if you’re very lucky or very, very good, then your opening is exceptional.  The first episode of The West Wing, for example, is a spectacular piece of drama for three reasons.  Firstly, the essence of the show is contained in it’s opening ten minute swoop through the lives of the White House senior staff, the graceful, almost balletic way that Leo Mcgarry coasts through his arrival at work and the way his massively intelligent, utterly broken colleagues all answer their call to arms.  This is the show, the movement, the dialogue, the big ideas and bigger personalities and the way they dance around one another.
Secondly, the cast is beyond exceptional.  There’s not a single bum note in the entire hour from the principle players, everyone from Jon Spencer’s charming, fiercely intelligent Leo to Richard Schiff’s quietly seething Toby Ziegler and Bradley Whitford’s utterly confident, utterly arrogant, utterly broken Josh Lyman are pitch perfect.  Even the guest stars work supremely well and by the time you get to the final scene, the President gently taking his staff to task and turning to face the affairs of state it’s somewhere between cheerfully triumphant and deeply moving.
The final and most important reason though is that every element of the series is in play from the start, some more than were initially apparent.  For all Aaron Sorkin’s statements that the series was never intended to be centered around the President and Josh Lyman it’s next to impossible to impossible to look at the first episode and not see seven years of Martin Sheen as the most intelligent politician the world has never had, not see seven years of Josh slowly becoming the man he thinks he is instead of the man he is.  An opening episode is a series in microcosm, a snapshot of the story as much as the gateway into it.

But what about the ending?  Having taken the toys out of the box, how do you put them back in?  To continue to use the West Wing as an example, the final episode, ‘Tomorow’ continues to split opinion, as do all the post-Sorkin years.  There’s no big moment of triumph, even in the inauguration, and as a result of that and the sense of the chairs being put on the tables and the lights turned out, a lot of people find it unsatisfying.  But in many ways it’s the perfect ending to the series, mirroring the personal crises of the first episode and bringing them into land.  The affairs of state are bigger than everyone, even Bartlet and as the new administration gears up, as characters move on to higher positions or leave the White House, that’s communicated with elegance and pragmatism.  In the beginning, Bartlet appears quoting the 10 Commandments and at the end he leaves thinking about the future he’s earned, the chance to not be the President, but to be Jed Bartlet.

But ‘Tomorrow’ continues to be the exception that proves the rule.  The Star Trek franchise is particularly bad at final episodes with Voyager’s ending laden down with a lumpen Borg plot and Enterprise’s a simultaneous slap in the face to fans of the show and the larger franchise.  Even Buffy, cult favourite as it is, is regarded by many, including show creator Joss Whedon, as having reached it’s logical end with the close of it’s fifth year, a full two seasons before it actually finished.  More recently, Lost, widely pilloried for treading water for much of it’s third year was allowed to set an end date and almost straight away became much more focussed, much more coherent.  An end is a start as the Editors might put it

Sometimes though, endings arrive a little sooner than expected.  A few years ago, Alias was one of Marvel Comics’ critical darlings.  Written by Brian Michael Bendis and drawn by Michael Gaydos it was the story of a third-rate ex-Avenger who was reduced to acting as a private eye, working on the streets as her former colleagues soared overhead.  It wasn’t a perfect title but it was consistently smart, funny, dark and marked the start of the company’s drift towards the very contemporary, politically charged work that’s the mainstay of the Marvel Universe today.

Then, one day, it ended.

Bendis freely admits it was the last thing he was expecting, but one day he got to the end of an issue script and realized it was the final issue.  He’d finished the story and once you write those last two words, two words that have more weight and gravity to any others, there’s no going back.

THE END

Bendis, and his boss, Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada played it absolutely straight, cancelling the title and spinning Jessica, the main character off into a new series, The Pulse and later appearances in the Avengers family of titles.  The story had ended, there was no sense in stringing it out and they acted accordingly,

That’s an awareness, not just of text but of consequence that’s surprisingly rare in both TV and comics.  Sometimes you have to know when to get off the stage and sometimes that decision is made for you.

Grey’s Anatomy, for example, finished at the end of the fourth season and so far, no one on either side of the camera appears to have noticed.

The final two hours of Grey’s Anatomy’s fourth season, ‘Freedom’ are an unusual combination of the spectacularly goofy and some of the most needlepoint perfect character work in the last five years.  Mixed in around Derek and Meredith’s clinical trial and the desperately complicated, intricate attempts of the entire surgical staff to extricate a teenager from a block of concrete are quiet but definitive endings to every single character’s plot line.  Each relationship, each character beat is moved to a point where if the ending is not on screen, it’s certainly within sight.  George finally expresses his frustration and stands up for himself, Yang regains her confidence in the operating theatre and Meredith not only finally realizes her mother wasn’t suicidal but is given a chance to finally be with Derek and grabs it with both hands.  This level of resolution is everywhere, as Mark breaks up with Callie voluntarily so she can pursue a relationship with Hahn, the Chief finally asks for and is given forgiveness by his wife and in the closing moments, Izzy is given Denny’s Memorial Clinic by Bailey.  The show even ends with Bailey, literally, turning the lights off and going home.  It’s a genuinely beautiful montage, each character moving onto new things as, underneath it all Bryn Christopher sings ‘The Quest’ like he’s just been released from prison.  As final scenes go, it’s right up there with the final swoop through Cicely in Northern Exposure, the final moments of The Peacekeeper Wars, the wonderful and very odd final scenes of Due South.  This is a series that’s done and it makes sure everyone looks good on the way out of the door.

But it didn’t end there, and that’s the problem.  The fifth season has seen TR Knight, who plays George, asked to be released from his contract, Katherine Heigl finding herself in the middle of a plot that appears to involve Izzy having a relationship with Denny, her dead boyfriend who is haunting the hospital and Brooke Smith dropped overnight for, it would appear, being too good at playing Hahn, the lesbian character in a lesbian relationship she was hired to play.  The fifth season is indisputably in trouble and it’s difficult not to look at the perfect tie off to the show that season four offered as one of the reasons why.

In the end, it comes down to expectation.  Mulder and Scully have a potential romance and the series soars, Mulder and Scully become a couple and the series collapses.  The mystery of who will destroy New York powers one of the best opening seasons in history whilst the disaster being averted puts Heroes into a flat spin it may not recover from.  The story has to please it’s viewers and it’s creators and in the revenue driven world of network TV that’s very nearly impossible.  Get it right and you’ll be given your time on the spotlight, get it too right and you might not be allowed to leave again.
There are exceptions to this of course, with Bill Lawrence, creator and producer of Scrubs for example.  Lawrence, along with series star Zach Braff, is off at the end of this season but is quite open about how happy he would be for the show to continue without the pair of them.  His justification is simple; if the show’s on the air then a couple of hundred people are employed.  If it isn’t, they’re not.

There’s no easy answer here, no magic bullet to keep networks, producers, writers, actors and fans happy.  Some will want the show to last forever, others will want to wrap it up at set points and someone’s certain to go home unhappy.  The best that can be hoped for is that a series aims higher than it can reach, that in the end it knows when to leave the stage as much as when to arrive.

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Posted in Opinion pieces, TV | 4 Comments »