Monthly Archives: September 2008

Alan Wake

  • Reading time:3 mins read

So, Sarah Jane is back in town. And Sladen is a bit less awkward in her acting.

I like the way (new showrunner) Phil Ford accounted for a rather tough list of ingredients — writing out Maria, giving a big role to all the Jacksons, reusing props and effects from Who, setting up some recurring story threads, following up on recent and ancient continuity without relying on it — and churned out a rather solid, pacey adventure at the same time.

Maria’s departure could have been handled so many ways, all trite, yet it felt organic, truthful, and not at all cloying. And I love the way it folds into the A plot, effectively giving her whole family a big farewell.

It’s all rather… snuggly. A shame to lose Maria and (especially) her dad. Ah well.

I quite like, also, that the story isn’t predicated on “big reveals”. Both the Sontaran thing and the America thing are unveiled halfway through the first episode (not that either was a secret coming in), leaving the rest of the story for the development of the characters’ reactions to these facts, and for the Sontaran’s own story. (The flashbacks are pretty great, too — especially the injury.) And those reactions (to start with, SJ’s coolness to Maria; the boys’ nervous yet restrained reaction to the Sontaran) were both pleasantly atypical and, again, true.

Chrissie is another example — how she gets roped into the story. Again sidestepping the tedious, she just squints at Alan and says she believed him, because his mouth didn’t twitch. Which was a bit pat, yes, but it both fit her character’s line of thinking and for the first time illustrated a good side to the way she processes things.

The story’s full of subtle little things like that, making grace of moments that should have been annoying. It was as if the story elements were there to explore how the characters might react, rather than the characters behaving in a particular way so as to allow Things to Happen.

Even the corridor-running has a nice lateral energy to it.

The only criticism I have, really, is that whoever did the production design for the inside of the radio telescope, and the computer graphics, really… sucks.

That’s something that always bothers me, the bizarre TV/cinema notion of how computers and computer displays work. It’s kind of amazing, considering that everyone working on this show and nearly everyone in the audience must use a computer constantly. What’s the point of the wacky-flashy graphics?

You have to shrug off some things, of course — the dad’s “hypnotized” acting, “totally creeped-out to the max”, constant potato jokes. Kind of the price of admission.

. . .

So consider this. The next full series of Who isn’t airing until 2010, leading people to label 2009 the “gap year”. Between December and then, there will be just five specials, a half-series of Torchwood, and probably a third series of SJA.

At twelve half-hour episodes, a season of SJA is nearly the length of a McCoy season of Who. This is more or less what aired each year, between 1986 and 1989.

At five hours, so, actually, is the rest of Davies’ Who run, through 2009.

At five hour-long specials, so is the length of Torchwood 3.

Altogether, that’s about 900 minutes (or fifteen hours) of Whoniverse programming in 2009. That’s compared with ~1000 minutes per season in the ’60s, 650 minutes in the ’70s to mid-’80s, and 350 in the late ’80s. And, of course, a total of 90 minutes between 1989 and 2005.

Some gap year.

Mirrormask review (***)

  • Reading time:3 mins read

by [name redacted]

For all the grumbling from the peanut gallery, Mirrormask is one of the better children’s movies to come around in the last couple of decades. Something that I can imagine annoying some is a certain deliberate lack of urgency to the tale. Fair enough, one might assume, since the opening scenes establish that all which follows is a dream. Logically enough, then, at some point the heroine will wake and everything will be more or less okay. What happens in between is important on on the basis of peril but in terms of character development — a bit of Lewis Carroll allegory crossed with your Peter Pan or Narnia-flavored psychological metaphor. The issue at stake is our heroine’s emotional state and whether and how she makes sense of the problems in her real life through the tools provided by her subconscious.

Another potential problem is the magpie-like way that Gaiman evokes snippets and tropes from his favorite fantasy and children’s stories then rearranges them to color his own work. In some of his work, like Coraline, the appropriation is overbearing and feels like a stand-in for actual development.

Here, though, the story treads carefully to avoid feeling like it’s simply borrowing pop-Gothic furniture. It’s knowing, though not smug. There’s a sincerity in the story’s execution, particularly in the way it’s shot, and in the acting.

If you’re not paying attention, you could accuse Stephanie Leonidas of seeming a bit wooden. Clearly most of the movie is shot against greenscreen, and you do get some of that glorious “where am I?” acting that comes with the territory. Yet otherwise she’s a bit of a revelation — quirky, sensitive, yet rational and well-adjusted. She’s written like a developing adult, and played like one. It’s rare that children are written as smart and individual characters to the extent that we see in Helena, making her a lovely role model for the intended audience.

Curiously, for all its clear artifice the movie rarely gets caught up in whimsy just for the sake of whimsy. Though it often seems in danger of vanishing in a puff of affectation, I don’t recall feeling like it got carried away. In the end I was impressed by the movie’s restraint. For all its glam sensibility, it has a head on its shoulders.

I won’t call this a great movie. It’s a very good one, though, especially for the genre. I like to think of it as empowered. It’s a film about learning empathy and responsibility, and distinguishing one’s own wants and needs from the expectations of others. And it manages to avoid being overbearing about any of that. It’s very light movie, all around. As I said, from the start it’s clear that there’s never any real danger. It’s just an hour and forty minutes of self-exploration and musing.

These are the sorts of topics that I think distinguish “young adult” fiction from children’s stories. Whereas the children’s fiction might just dwell in the fantasy and metaphor for its own sake, a growing mind feeds on this kind of film; on the exploration and gradual understanding of one’s own self, and through that the surrounding world. Often using very clumsy metaphor. Which is also true here.

Cybermen

  • Reading time:1 mins read

Mm. Tomb is really the only time I think they’ve been used well — as objects of creeping fear and mystery. There’s a sense they’re this contained force; they’re the snakes in this box that you absolutely must keep closed. And they just keep charging forward, blank, expressionless, incomprehensible. They’ll charm you, try the back door, use every crack to their advantage. (Much like Captain Jack?)

Mostly they’re just used as generic shuffle-monsters. Or, in the ’80s, alien race. Or as a droll bit of wank, as above.

Actually, I thought that Cyberwoman did a good job at capturing their threat. They’re like a plague, is what they are. A schlocky B-movie plague. The kind of thing you should be making up arbitrary rules to protect yourself from. Don’t dangle your feet over the bed. Don’t step on the red squares.

I’d like to see Moffat write for them.

Snips of conversation

  • Reading time:1 mins read

A nail clipper is a pretty interesting little bit of machinery — the construction, and the principles behind it. It’s very simple, yet it’s also oddly complex. And on a level it seems like some ancient baroque thing. Like some awkward eighteenth century invention, that just happens to work as intended. And on top of that there are some curious concessions to convenience — the complex way the top swivels back around so you can close it flat, and the nail file.

The idea behind it is… a bit odd. Nail scissors aren’t good enough. What we really need is a finger guillotine! No gradual snips here. Just snap ’em off, one quick motion! And the way it achieves this is by a rather simple yet oddly complex lever and spring system, that transfers a huge amount of force to a tiny area. (To make up for the lack of the falling distance, you see.)

It’s such a strange invention.

Where is Zar? Zar is gone.

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Classic screenwriting (both film and TV) does take on something of a middle school essay structure, doesn’t it. Tell the audience what you’re going to do, do it, tell the audience what you just did. I guess with a new medium it’s seen as necessary. Then when people get more comfortable with the grammar, you can stop patronizing them and get down to business.

What’s weird about videogames is that mainstream games at least have kind of gone the other way. Now you buy a top-shelf console game, you won’t even be allowed to play it properly for the first half hour. Unless it’s Zelda. Then you might have to wait three or four hours before you get started. Whereas in 1987… plop. There you are. Make sense of it the best you can.

Is there a good reason in there to assume the audience has, on average, grown less sophisticated over the last twenty years? And Wii Fit aside (which is kind of a different issue), is there much evidence that patronizing the audience leads to greater sales? Generally the only people who buy videogames are people who buy videogames (which is where Iwata comes into the discussion, and then leaves by the back door). And generally they only get to play them after they’ve made a purchase.

It’s one thing to make a game accessible. Not to overburden the player with complications right from the start. That’s just good design.
The hand-holding that’s been going on, the last ten years though — that’s something else. Something insidiously banal. It’s not just that the art hasn’t been progressing since 1998; it’s been moving backward.