'Tis the season for list-making so
without further ado, films and TV shows which I rated this year. (In
top tens, but no particular order beyond that...)
FILMS
'Birdman'
'Selma'
'Chappie'
'Inside Out'
'Dance of Reality'
(The return of Jodorowsky, yay!)
'Macbeth'
'The Lobster'
'The Martian'
Three films I firmly intended to see
yet failed were 'Ex Machina', 'It
Follows' and 'Bridge of Spies'.
...which means I only blogged about two
of my favourite films! Then again, that's better than I did for TV
shows...
TV SHOWS
'Gotham'
'Wolf Hall'
'The Walking Dead' (season
5)
'This is England '90'
'Witnesses'
'Fargo' (season 2)
'Homeland' (season 5)
'London Spy'
'The Last Kingdom'
'The Bridge' (season 3)
The TV shows of 2015 which somehow
passed me by despite best intentions were 'Humans'
and '1864'.
(Reader, please note we are a
terrestrial establishment here at Lucid Frenzy towers, and know not
of your 'Jessica Jones' or 'Game of
Thrones'. Nor, before anyone asks, did we deliberately
write a list just to keep 'Doctor Who' off it.)
Some random witterings follow...
I may be the only member of the viewing
public to compare 'London Spy' to 'Alien'.
As I've said before “an effective component of the Company's
ruthless inhumanity is the way they lie unseen, existing only as
offstage orders”. (All lost in the sequels, alas.) And here we see
a similar thing, only with officialdom. Danny (played by Ben Wishaw)
is occasionally able to identify the strings being pulled, but never
trace them back to those tugging them. It's like we live our lives as
the audience of a stage illusionist, perpetually falling victim to
misdirection and applauding the wrong things.
(SPOILERS in this para) At first the
worry was it was so atmospheric with so
little concrete happening, that it was painting itself into a moodily
lit corner. As it turned out, it played the thing about right. (Even
if the very last scene tried to wrest some feelgood out of a fire
that should really have burnt everything down.) What seemed the style
eventually became the theme. Alex's invention was akin to creating
light in a world of shadows, so of course the shadow-dwellers must
amass to save their habitat. Plus the gay element wound up the 'Daily Mail'. Really, what was
there not to like?
As said, I haven't made any attempt to
list things in a rank order. But 'Fargo' I'm
fairly sure I'd place on the bottom rung. Though jumping back to the
Seventies, it duplicates roles from the previous series. So Lou
Solvenson (Patrick Wilson) can take the 'good cop' badge from his
daughter Molly, while Mike Milligan (Bokeem Woodbine) displaces Lorne
Malvo as the urbane antagonist. But the triangulation breaks down
with Ed and Peggy Blumquist (Jesse Plemons and Kirsten Dunst), who
fluctuate between being Hickcockian innocents swept up in the storm
and reprising Lester's petty scheming. (The early-offed used
typewriter salesman seems introduced partly as a Lester equivalent,
as if to undermine his similarities to Ed and Peggy.)
And so it moves further away from the
original Cohen brothers film, where the provincial hicks may have
been kooky (with their “oh ya” accents and all) but ultimately
prove themselves smarter and stronger than the more worldly
criminals. Here, rather than being spread around the town, human
decency is confined to the cop characters and their family circle.
And by moving away from the Cohens they move towards Tarantino –
snappy dialogue, non-linear storytelling puzzles (sometimes as an end
in their own right), foregrounded cinematic devices (such as
split-screening) and above all an assumed audience reaction of hip
irreverence. Perhaps everything will end up Tarantinoeque in the end,
including Shakespeare adaptations and the forthcoming remake of
'Camberwick Green'.
(More SPOILERS here) Apart from Lou,
the character who really shines is the Indian hatched man Hanzee
(Zahn McClarnon), largely because he's so taciturn and direct when
everyone else is verbosely circumlocutory. (Imagine if Gary Cooper
had been on the redskins' side.) But it does mean that, when he tires
of everyone and tries to bump them all off, you kind of know how he
feels.
Yet for all that its a better example
of the style than anything Tarantino himself has come up with lately.
It's often genuinely inventive, and the characters are striking if
cartoony. Above all, despite its greater length, it doesn't have the
same loghorric meander. And, being set in such a bywater, it avoids
the 'theme park Seventies' which now seems so ubiquitous. Don't
expect endless sideburns and hessian wallpaper here.
'The Last Kingdom'
did at times seem undecided whether it wanted to be a tale of
derring-do akin to 'The Musketeers', following the
adventures a he-man hero who gets his shirt off a lot, or something
as morally muddied as the Dark Ages probably were. And sometimes it
was able to make a creatively ambiguous virtue out of its indecision,
with Uhtred (Alexander Dreyman) performing some great deed them
offsetting us by hacking down a thieving servant.
While having a neither-Saxon-nor-Dane
protagonist was effective, if they wanted things as dark as the age
they needed to play the supporting cast up more. More moments like
the clash-of-values scene where Saxon first parleys with Dane.
Perhaps the introduction of Alfred (David Dawson) needed to wait
until Uhtred meets him, but from there more could have been done with
him. The way he can go from pure-hearted ascetic to monarch capable
of cold ruthlessness, while its clear that in his mind both come from
his Christian faith, is fascinating and has something of the ring of
truth.
But above all its Guthrum (Thomas W
Gabrielsson) who needed more development. Perhaps the adventure
aspect demands one crazy warrior Dane for Uthred to fight. (When he
defeats one before the finale, another conveniently appears.) But
Gurthrum is needed as the head to the swiping hand, the Dane with a
brain amid berserkers. We're shown how they don't win their battles
through greater savagery but more superior tactics, and how the
Saxons have to emulate them to defeat them. But still, scenes between
them can feel like a meeting of the Secret Society of Super Villains.
(Denmark probably won't be taking this series as a swap for 'The
Bridge'.)
And a consequence is that characters
don't really develop in any way. As the plot
rattles on they repeatedly spark off against one another, and even
change sides, without ever changing inside. It's hinted Guthrum's
last-minute conversion to Christianity is politically motivated,
which in history it almost certainly was, but this receives almost no
narrative attention – it happens in the background as Uhtred rides
boldly off. Similarly, Uhtred's frequently telegraphed headstrong
nature goes nowhere in plot terms.
And the attitude to religion in this
sort of thing is fast becoming a cliché. Christians are endlessly
having their blind faith in an interventionist God dashed, their
devoted praying hands lopped off by the brute reality of Danish
broadswords. Yet paganism, particularity in the form of seer Iseult,
is indulged to the point of being presented as a working system.
Surely if we're all too growed up now for one set of superstitions
the same should be true for another.
The appealing thing about 'The
Bridge' is that of Nordic import TV in general - it has
the courage to work as a novel. Rather than set everything up in the
first episode, then provide eight hours of running round before
hurriedly wrapping everything up for the finale, it takes its own
time to evolve. Key characters won't appear until several episodes
in. 'The Killing' even ended.
(Unlike that American remake...)
Of course its the box-set/catch-up
technology which has enabled this. (You couldn't
miss an episode of 'The Bridge', any more than you
could skip a couple of chapters in a novel.) But that technology
exists everywhere. Perhaps what really delivers is combining it with
the old-style remit of public service TV. (Tak to Sveriges Television
of Sweden and Danmarks Radio!) Inevitably enough, Nordic Noir frequently questions the social democratic model of Scandinavia, much like the BBC of old would bite the hand
that fed it more readily than commercial media.
The surprising thing to hear was that
Saga's new parter Henrik (Thure Lindhart) was only written in when
Kim Bodnia (who had played Martin) declined the offer to re-appear.
Because the whole thing ends up hanging on him. Like Hathaway in
'Lewis', even as you can see how he's written to
fill a hole he becomes a character in his own right. Cleverly coded
on first appearance to come across as a creep (like many, I first
assumed he was a perp) he gets Saga in a way even
Martin couldn't. The point where he tells her “this is what you
want, right? To talk about the investigation not all the problems in
your life”... well, I must have had something in my eye.
'Witnesses',
conversely, proved you don't have to be Nordic to be noir. You can
even be French, provided you set things on the north coast in order
to capture the statutory washed out look. In an eerie case of
synchronicity, there was even the same staged crime scene of the
model nuclear family.
Five seasons in and 'Homeland'
is not just doing
that faux moral ambiguity thing it does, its become the
byword for it. I used to try to think of a snappy name to employ, but
“the Homeland syndrome” works well enough. Yet even as it gives
the name to one rule it breaks another. It's now jumped more sharks
than there can be in the Pacific. (Quinn falling in with a bunch of
jihadis while in a city the size of Berlin. What are the odds, eh?)
Yet alongside the absurd contrivances it can still serve up riveting
plot twists. And as a child of the Cold War, to me its almost
nostalgist to see the Russians back as the bad guys and Berlin as
some kind of front line.
'Walking Dead'
rather than setting itself in one locale like earlier seasons,
smartly divided itself between the poles of Terminus and Alexandria.
And having been through Terminus changes their reaction to Alexandria
completely. The phrase “you're the butcher or you're the cattle”
resounds through what follows.
'This Is England' -
apart from showing how spookily distant 1990 now is, while none of us
want things to run past their shelf-life, there's scope for one more
season there, surely. And I enjoyed 'Wolf Hall' so
much I even thought I should read the books. (I didn't, admittedly.
But I thought about it.)
Perhaps what's most striking overall
about this list is the absence of comedy. 'Fargo'
could be called a black comedy, while 'This is England'
has humorous elements, but that's about all. Was there simply little
to laugh about in 2015? Excepting of course that video of Donald Trump and the eagle...
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