the m0vie blog

My 12 for ’12: The Master & The American Century

Posted on December 26, 2012 by Darren

I’m counting down my top twelve films of the year between now and January, starting at #12 and heading to #1. I expect the list to be a little bit predictable, a little bit surprising, a little bit of everything. All films released in the UK and Ireland in 2012 qualify. Sound off below, and let me know if I’m on the money, or if I’m completely off the radar. And let me know your own picks or recommendations.

This is #6…

It’s very weird being a popular culture nerd who lives outside the United States. A significant portion of pop culture is exported directly from the United States. I grew up on Star Trek and Batman, two iconic American franchises. I probably know more about American history – filtered through feature films, television shows and other popular forms of entertainment – than school taught me about the origins of my own nation. Even then, it still feels a little strange to watch American film makers commentating on American situations, and to not only recognise but almost understand how those references work within the American subconscious.

The Master is a fascinating exploration of post war America, the period where America well and truly emerged as the defining global power, where the country embraced economic prosperity and manifest destiny no longer referred to expansion out west, but a bold adventure into a promising future. In an article published shortly before America entered the Second World War, Henry R. Luce argued that the twentieth century was “the American century.” If it seemed that way before the conflict, it was all but certain afterwards. Of course, economic prosperity does not always bring with it a sense of peace and tranquillity, and The Master explores the sense of existential ennui that took root in a way that is, if you’ll pardon the pun, masterful.

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Filed under: On Second Thought | Tagged: arts, batman, British Isles, Church of Scientology, Dodd, Feature film, film, Freddie, games, Ireland, January, Lykke Li, Master, Movie, Paul Thomas Anderson, Scientology, star trek, United States, world war ii | 2 Comments »

Doctor Who: The Snowmen (Review)

Posted on December 25, 2012 by Darren

Snowmen are rubbish in July. You’ll have to be better than that.

– the Doctor points out that the Great Intelligent doesn’t seem especially… intelligent

The Snowmen is a return to the sort of plot-driven Christmas Special that we occasionally saw during the Davies era. Much like The Christmas Invasion was concerned with introducing David Tennant and The End of Time, Part I was focused on wrapping up the Davies era, The Snowmen feels like it’s more concerned with setting up the fiftieth anniversary half-season ahead than it is with being a Christmas Special in its own right.

Sure, The Snowmen has all the festive trappings you might expect. There are killer snowmen, as the title implies. There’s a rich lonely old miser, as we’ve come to expect in these sorts of tales. There’s a nice Victorian setting for all the action as well. However, The Snowmen devotes a considerable amount of time to developing the mystery surrounding the Doctor’s new companion, and setting up a recurring foe for this fiftieth anniversary half-season.

The result is somewhat unsatisfying, as if The Snowmen is working harder to check the requisite boxes than it is to provide seasonal Doctor Who viewing.

What white teeth they have…

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Filed under: Television | Tagged: bbc, BBC America, christmas, Clara, doctor, doctor who, Jenna-Louise Coleman, matt smith, Moffat, Richard E. Grant, Sherlock, sherlock holmes, Simeon, Snowmen, steven moffat, tardis, Yeti (Doctor Who) | 2 Comments »

Star Trek: The Next Generation – Season 1 (Review)

Posted on December 25, 2012 by Darren

To celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and also next year’s release of Star Trek: Into Darkness, I’m taking a look at the recent blu ray release of the first season, episode-by-episode. Check back daily for the latest review.

Well, the video and sound quality on the blu ray are excellent. I feel the need to state that here, first, before I delve into the season as a whole. I jumped on board the recent high-definition re-release of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and the work done here by the production team is astounding. As I trawled through every episode from Encounter at Farpoint to The Neutral Zone, I was amazed and impressed at how much care had gone into restoring and renewing the show for high-definition. I can’t imagine how painstaking the work was – re-editing the original film stock, remastering old effects, remixing the sound. The team have made a believer out of me, and I am on board for pretty much any restored Star Trek boxset that CBS sees fit to release. (I can’t wait to see Deep Space Nine updated.)

I think it’s important to acknowledge the work that went into producing a set that looks and sounds fantastic. It made returning to the show a joy, even when I was (frequently) reminded of just how rocky that first season was.

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Filed under: The Next Generation | Tagged: Devil in the Dark, Encounter at Farpoint, kirk, Naked Now, Neutral Zone, Next Generation, patrick stewart, picard, star trek, Star Trek Next Generation, Star Trek: The Animated Series, star trek: the original series | 10 Comments »

Star Trek: The Next Generation – The Neutral Zone (Review)

Posted on December 25, 2012 by Darren

Watching The Neutral Zone, it’s hard not to feel that the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation should have wrapped up with Conspiracy. At least that would have represented a bold step forwards, even if it wasn’t the direction that the show would ultimately take. In contrast, a lot of The Neutral Zone falls back into the trite, patronising arrogance that we’ve seen our crew demonstrate repeatedly over this first year, treating three refugees from twenty-first century Earth as an excuse to lord their superiority over the viewers at home. It’s a rather strange direction to take, and it certainly doesn’t make for good television. Which feels like a bit of a waste, given that the B-plot is actually quite workable.

“We’re back.”

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Filed under: The Next Generation | Tagged: Balance of Terror, Benedict Cumberbatch, Beverly Crusher, Data, Deanna Troi, Federation, Geneva, jean-luc picard, Klingon, Neutral Zone, picard, Romulan, star trek, Star Trek Next Generation, Starfleet, Television and Movies, Wall Street Journal, Wesley Crusher, William Riker, Worf, Yuppie | 8 Comments »

12 Movie Moments of 2012: “You’d Love My Boyfriend, He’s a Total Chick Flick Nut” (ParaNorman)

Posted on December 25, 2012 by Darren

As well as counting down the top twelve films, I’m also going to count down my top twelve movie related “moments” of 2012. The term “moment” is elastic, so expect some crazy nonsense here. And, as usual, I accept that my taste is completely absurd, so I fully expect you to disagree. With that in mind, this is #7…

I’m normally hesitant to involve politics in this blog. It is, after all, a blog about popular culture. Indeed, I am the first to complain about obnoxious celebrities standing on their soapbox espousing their political beliefs. It’s not that I disagree with them, or that they aren’t entitled to their opinion, I’m just uncomfortable with the idea that being famous makes you an expert to speak on a particular cause or issue. Still, in the spirit of Christmas, allow me one small digression.

That said, I couldn’t help but smile at the climax to ParaNorman, a solidly entertaining family adventure that took its own message to heart. Embracing the idea that there’s nothing scary about something just because it’s different than you, it earned the wrath of the extreme right because it dared to suggest that one of its character might be in a loving and stable homosexual relationship. It’s great to see a family film actual acknowledge that sort of diversity, particularly in a way that doesn’t sensationalise the matter in hand. It’s a damn funny one-liner to boot, and the fact that it’s willing to call the audience on their assumptions is particularly endearing.

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Filed under: Movies | Tagged: Anna Kendrick, art, avengers, Blu-ray Disc, Casey Affleck, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Courtney, Dark Knight Rises, Family film, film, joss whedon, Kodi Smit-McPhee, loki, Mitch, Moonrise Kingdom, Movie, nick fury, Norman, ParaNorman, Sam Fell, Tucker Albrizzi | Leave a comment »

The Spirit Archives, Vol. 25 (Review/Retrospective)

Posted on December 25, 2012 by Darren

DC have done a tremendous job with their Spirit Archives collection. Twenty-four volumes collecting the twelve years of the Sunday strip is quite an accomplishment, and they’d be forgiven for stopping there. No other character in DC’s back catalogue has such a consistent collection of their early years. (Batman and Superman might have similar volumes of material collected, but somewhat haphazardly.) It’s to the company’s credit that they decided to close out their collections of Eisner’s work on the character with what might be considered two appendices. The next collection will include most of Eisner’s post-1952 work on the character, but this hardcover collects each and every daily Spirit strip published between 1941 and 1942. While it might not be the most essential collection every published (whether in terms of the character or in the history of daily newspaper strips), but it’s still nice to see it collected with the rest of Eisner’s work.

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Filed under: Comics | Tagged: Adolf Hitler, comic strip, dc comics, Eisner, germany, history, hitler, Lou Fine, Nazism, Newspaper, Sphinx, Spirit, Sunday strip, Third Reich, Twentieth Century, United States, Wars and Conflicts, Will Eisner, world war ii | Leave a comment »

My 12 for ’12: Silver Linings Playbook & Earning Your Happy Ending

Posted on December 25, 2012 by Darren

This is #7…

The term “uplifting” is thrown around a lot these days. Happy endings are very funny things. They seem to be a given for most major Hollywood films, and so there’s a degree of predictability to them. And yet, despite that, there’s also usually a sense that they are somewhat contrived or manipulated or otherwise the result of a rigged game. In order to raise the stakes, films will generally put our characters in peril, and create a massive sense of jeopardy for our heroes to overcome in order to secure the inevitable happy ending. However, as time goes on, we become increasingly cynical and sceptical, so those stakes get higher and higher. The ending remains guaranteed, so making the threat so much more menacing means we have to suspend greater and greater levels of disbelief in order to accept that everybody involved lived happily ever after.

Your ability to accept Silver Linings Playbook will directly correspond to your ability to accept an improbably neat happy ending. However, what distinguishes David O. Russell’s latest film from the bulk of the other “uplifting” examples of modern cinema is the fact that the stakes manage to seem far more emotional and psychological than literal and tangible, and that the characters involved feel so much more real.

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Filed under: On Second Thought | Tagged: A Farewell to Arms, Academy Award, arts, bradley cooper, British Isles, Cinema of the United States, David O'Russell, David O. Russell, film, Happy ending, hollywood, Ireland, January, Jennifer Lawrence, Lykke Li, Movie, Pat, robert deniro, Silver Linings Playbook, The Silver Linings Playbook: A Novel, Tiffany | Leave a comment »

Star Trek: The Next Generation – Conspiracy (Review)

Posted on December 24, 2012 by Darren

Conspiracy stands out from the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation. In fact, it stands out from pretty much the majority of the Star Trek canon, feeling distinctly unpleasant and unnerving throughout. It is not just the gore – which remains one of the most weirdly graphic scenes in Star Trek history, to the point where it was edited out of the original BBC broadcast of the show.

There’s something more unnerving and uncomfortable about Conspiracy, as it represents the first time we’ve really seen the Federation and Starfleet so thoroughly corrupted and subverted. Sure, we’ve had rogue officials, obfuscating bureaucrats and meddling administrators, but Conspiracy represents a thoroughly cynical examination of some of the core concepts that Star Trek takes for granted.

It isn’t indicative of what The Next Generation would eventually evolve into, even seeming considerably darker than Star Trek: Deep Space Nine normally delved, but it does represent something bold and new, something that we never would have seen in the original Star Trek. I think that is what makes it such a fascinating episode in this rocky first season, even ignoring its sizeable flaws.

A can of worms…

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Filed under: The Next Generation | Tagged: arts, Beverly Crusher, Federation, gene roddenberry, Next Generation, picard, Prime Directive, science fiction, star trek, Star Trek Next Generation, star trek: deep space nine, star trek: the original series, Starbase, Starfleet, Starfleet ranks and insignia | 12 Comments »

12 Movie Moments of 2012: Running (Shame)

Posted on December 24, 2012 by Darren

It is quite common to see New York presented in an unpleasant light. After all, Martin Scorsese’s films capture the metropolis at its very best and its very worst, and there are countless gangster films devoted to exploring the dark underbelly of a city that is easily one of the most recognisable in the world. I have never been to New York, and yet I feel like – through years of film-watching – I have come to know the city almost as if I have lived there.

As such, I was surprised when Shame managed to offer me a somewhat novel take on New York itself. The city is as much a character in the film as any of Steve McQueen’s supporting cast. (Indeed, Carey Mulligan even gets to perform an extended version of “New York, New York” in tribute to her co-star.) McQueen manages to craft a distinctly unpleasant and uncomfortable exploration of the city without resorting to any of the trite clichés that one associates with the horrors of urban living.

Indeed, one long single-take shot of Brandon running within the confines of the city offered a more powerful sense of urban anomie and isolation than I have ever seen before, presenting a cold blue city completely indifferent and unaware of the millions of people living within the city limits.

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Filed under: Movies | Tagged: arts, avengers, Brandon, Carey Mulligan, christmas, Dark Knight Rises, film, gangs of new york, Hobbit, Jack Reacher, martin scorsese, McQueen, Michael Fassbender, Movie, Movies, new york, New York City, NewYork, Sean Bobbitt, Shame, steve mcqueen, United States | Leave a comment »

The Spirit Archives, Vol. 24 (Review/Retrospective)

Posted on December 24, 2012 by Darren

And so, the end is near. The Spirit Archives, Vol. 24 is a bumper-sized edition, collecting every Spirit weekly strip published in 1952, from January through to October. It’s nice of DC to put out a slightly larger collection to finish out the weekly strip, rather than breaking the final year of the comic into two smaller (possibly more profitable) volumes. This collection devotes its cover to The Outer Space Spirit, but that storyline only emerges towards the end of the book. Given how much attention Wally Wood and Jules Feiffer’s reinvention of the masked crimefighter has generated, it’s interesting that it’s actually a fairly small contribution in terms of page count. Still, reading those adventures now, it’s easy to see why the storyline has attracted such a strong following, even if you practically see the weekly strip dwindling as you approach the final pages.