neil gaiman

Mark of Excellence

  • Reading time:3 mins read

Last week I found myself commenting that, on the basis of the last couple of scripts, I was looking forward to a Mark Gatiss one for a change. I was rather surprised to find myself in that position.

As it turns out, my better judgment… was the better judge. This certainly is a Gatiss script here. Mind you, I hate it less than his previous scripts. Though it has gained a certain incoherence present in the previous Moffat script. How much of that is down to the direction, which is some of the worst since the series has returned, and how much the script, I can’t say and I’m not really bothered to sort out. There’s just something so generic about everything Gatiss writes. He doesn’t seem to know anything but pastiche.

I have never been impressed when people merely channel the thoughts and ideas of others and wear them as a badge to brand themselves or lend their own words legitimacy. It feels intellectually lazy, and as such it tends to bore me. Which is one reason I’m not all that impressed with Neil Gaiman, as well as he tends to choose his words. He doesn’t so much create his own worlds as he cherry picks references that he figures his audience will appreciate, or perhaps rather that fit into the distinct cultural trope that he means to evoke, and then rather than breaking them down or analyzing them or undermining them in some way as to create a new argument or perspective, he kind of lets them sit there and speak for themselves. “You like these elements?” he asks. “Well, you’ll really love my work, because it contains all of these features!”

To get back to Who, that’s what I get out of much of Robert Holmes’s writing. A few stories from that era sidestep the problem, and come off to me as a little less obvious. I like The Hand of Fear, and The Android Invasion, and The Sontaran Experiment. Each of those is a little weird, and doesn’t quite do everything as it is supposed to. The Deadly Assassin is also rather a startling divergence from form. It’s got something of its own to say. By and large, though, I feel like the era is trying to impress and placate me simply by evoking things that I don’t care about. At least, not in their own right.

I’ll accept that Moffat was just settling in with his first couple of scripts, and that the second was partially damaged by an unfortunate choice of director. And I’ll accept that Gatiss wrote this episode early on, before he had a character for either of the leads — which is one of the larger problems. I am a little unsettled, though. I wonder how much control Moffat really has over the show. Maybe he’s not a big-decisions guy. We’ll see how the next few episodes present themselves.

The next two episodes are directed by the guy from “The Eleventh Hour” — which, if nothing else, was directed with skill and a bit of bravado. Aside from young Amelia, I’d say the direction was the highlight that week. So for the near future I remain optimistic. Mostly.

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.