Ant Reviews Jonathan Creek: The Letters of Septimus Noone

David Renwick’s Jonathan Creek returns to TV in 2014 with more of a sombre affair than what we typically expect. We still have more of that awkward humour we’ve come to expect from Renwick and series star Alan Davies, but instead the overall themes presented are of death, loss and grieving, and knowing when to move on.

Created in 1997, Jonathan Creek has been a favourite of mine since my youth. The shows combined an amazing mystery, an impossible crime that defies explanation, which can all be neatly explained by Jonathan at the end.  Sometimes the episodes were very scary on the front end, as Jonathan would often say things like ‘how can a man simply vanish into thin air?’, which is a great way of making you uneasy as you wonder how it all went down. Jonathan, of course, was an engineer who dreamt up magic tricks for magician Adam Klaus (played by both Anthony Stewart Head but longer and more consitantly by Stuart Milligan) who gets involved with Maddy (Caroline Quentin) a mystery writer. Add to that numerous pop culture references (with a house called green lantern, a woman who goes by black canary, a victim called Doctor strange, and the use of original Doctor Who’s Peter Davison, Colin Baker and Paul McGann to play parts.)

But this episode isn’t as fun as we’d hoped. We are already shown how the impossible mystery is shown, and two other, smaller mysteries have little impact. While still entertaining for the most part, this episode seems to be Renwick dealing with how we all have to grow up and move on, as we become more responsible adults.

The central mystery, an attempted murder on actress Juno (Ali Bastian), is a locked-room mystery set at a West End play of a locked-room mystery. How it happened isn’t important, its how Jonathan and Ridley (Kieran Hodgson, pictured), the son of a friend of his wife’s, interpret it.

Ridley is an interesting character. He seems to be a combination of both Cumberbatch Sherlock and 10^th Doctor Tennant. He’s full of bold proclamations and arrogance, but at every turn is shown as goofy and false. He does a typical Sherlock ‘reading’ of a person, only for us the audience to find it to be completely wrong. He misreads a crime scene incredibly inaccurately, while Jonathan watches on amused, eating an orange. He collects all suspects into a big theatre to show off his thesis regarding the crime, only to have it interrupted by a suicide.

This seems to be a dig at Stephen Moffatt and the new Sherlock and his over the top arrogance and superiority. Watching this character and Jonathan on the screen together you can see the contrast from Jonathan’s previous adventures and how quiet and unassuming he was compared to the new look-at-me theatricalities of modern detective stories. Jonathan even remarks that he’s getting too old; that this new detective is the future and that he has no place.

This episode deals with this feeling of mortality and of parenthood. The titular ‘Letters to Septimus Noone’ refer to love letters Polly’s (Sarah Alexander) late mother had hidden, and what that means to her recently deceased father. In investigating the mystery surrounding them she learns secrets about her mother and about what you want to leave behind when you die. A suspect of the locked-room crime lost a child and it made her unhinged; the opposite scenario at play.

Polly’s friend Sharon (Raquel Cassidy) is a somewhat irresponsible parent, raising two kids in a world of fantasy. Yes, Ridley is named for Ridley Scott, and her daughter is named Ripley. And her house is called Nostromo. So you’d think that’d make her pretty cool, but her failing is that she indulges her children’s fantasies and doesn’t reinforce reality, and thus both children open themselves up to disappointment and conflict.

Being that Jonathan is so low-key and quiet, his companions have always been quite large and vivacious with their personalities. Maddie was rude and pushy, Carla (Julia Sawalha), an ex of Jonathan’s, was likewise a busy-body and in-you-face. Recent companion Joey (Sheridan Smith) is a trashy tomboy, and all of these companions played off of Davies well. Sarah Alexander brings a different energy, particularly in this story as she’s dealing with her father’s death. She’s too nice and works to well with Jonathan, as they’re very close. There’s very little conflict and he isn’t embarrassed or annoyed with her at all. It’s a different dynamic, and it may have a pretty big impact on how the show works in the future. But for this episode, it suits the tone.

So, all in all a not-bad effort. I know that’s a wishy-washy response but while it wasn’t as scary, mysterious or as fun as what I’d come to expect from the show it still had some merit and worked with a different tone than normal. I can accept that for this episode, but here’s hoping it the show won’t change as much with permanently or the rest of the season will turn many fans off.

***Stars

Ant Reviews: Helix (Double Episode Pilot, 2014)

There are some TV shows out there that you wish were simply miniseries instead. By the end of the pilot you question whether or not a show of that kind, with the narrative they have established, could sustain the typical US network series length of around twenty two episodes before it gets super boring and stale. Helix is one of those shows.

Helix, produced by Battlestar Galactica’s Ron D. Moore, tells the story of Alan, (Billy Campbell) a CDC genius virologist who travels to a remote research base to investigate an outbreak in the Arctic with his team, with his assistant Sarah (Jordan Hayes), his ex-wife Jules (Kyra Zagorsky), a sassy biologist (Catherine Lemieux) and a (seemingly) boring army mechanic (Mark Ghanime). At the base he runs into Captain Kaneda/Shingen Yashida (Hiroyuki Sanada) who runs the base as well as his estranged brother Peter (Neil Napier) who is one of the first infected with the mysterious and deadly disease.

The show is in the genre of horror and sci fi, and handles these science fiction elements well. It visually draws its visuals and ideas from things like Resident Evil, The Thing, Fringe and Alien (and if Campbell kept his beard he’s look like Captain Dallas). There’s something refreshing about a cast made up of trained professionals, 90% of which are doctors and leaders in their field. The base itself is outside the scientific regulations of most countries and the multinational group of scientists can play around with the laws of nature to their heart's content. And of course there’s all kinds of secret corporate travesties hiding in secret labs waiting to be unleashed. It’s an interesting starting point for science fiction shenanigans.

There is a wonderful freakiness conceit that I like, where they play pleasant elevator music while something messed up is going on visually. It’s my wish that the freakiness, the violence and the depravity be accelerated ten fold (within the bounds of network television) so that the juxtaposition can be that much stronger, but perhaps that opinion is based on my love of American Horror Story and how amazing that show looks and how well they use music there.

I apprecitate this stylistic conceit as it speaks to a certain attitude of the creators whilst also helping to establish a greater sense of location to proceedings. The vibe they’re trying to establish is one of normality and calm in the face of horror, which speaks to the attitude of the people who work at the base (Peter included) who have to soldier on despite what they know is really going on.

While I applaud those choices I cannot say the same for the visual representation of the base. It should be, for all intents and purposes, another character of the show, and should be very distinctive in its form and function. The outside of the base looks interesting, what looks to be a buried radar-dish-looking structure. There is a central elevator that we see, the window of which gives a sense of the size and depth of the structure, and there is this one hallway that has occasional wood panelling. But that's about it. 

The rest is all hallways and labs, shot in a blue filter. Labs look like labs look like labs, and hallways and air-ducts look like hallways and air-ducts. As they are underground for a majority of it the geography of the base is difficult to map out in one’s head, making the base seem much less visually distinctive as it should be. There is also a theme of escape that's present in the narrative and the base and location simply don't seem that inescapable or claustrophobic as it should be. 

The characters aren’t given much to make them seem distinctive either. Like with most modern genre shows there are typical conflicts and mysteries set up with everyone involved, but the characters do very little to act on those feelings within the framework of these first two episodes.

 For example, the lead Alan has to deal with his ex-wife, who became his ex-wife after she was caught sleeping with his brother. He’s become estranged from both it seems up until this mission, but you wouldn’t believe it if you saw it. The decision to act should have been far harder a choice for him, as should be the decision to put aside his baggage and care for his brother. On the surface it seems everything is ok with him, really, which doesn’t feel natural.

His ex-wife should have been drawn a certain way, more impulsive and young and brash, his brother should have been portrayed as someone who is competitive and a real arsehole. It takes a certain kind of prick to fuck his brother’s wife, and on the show Napier’s character looks like someone’s dad (though thats not the case on his IMDB). It seems like we should all question whether or not he’s worth saving from Alan’s POV, which would give weight to his decision to help, but their relationship is under written. They set up potential there for some heavy drama and family conflict but with these first two episodes there’s not much.

And because Allen used to be the Rocketeer, his lab assistant of course is in love with him secretly. I wouldn’t blame her. However, it is annoying to have young female characters solely motivated by love or a crush. Its clichéd and should stop. There needs to be more female characters who participate for their own reasons, not because a man is involved. Speaking of clichés, Campbell’s character is a bit of a globetrotting older wiser heroic adventurer type, though its understated. Shit, at least he isn’t like Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s character in The Burning Zone, who was a rock and roll Cadillac driving virologist. Hey, it was the 90s.

Going back to what I said at the beginning, I wish this show is more of a mini series and not a whole series: there are indications that there are only so many places they can go with it. With these first two episodes we have two incidences of infected people escaping, two instances of an Aliens-esque air-duct crawl around. And while I will admit that I like the show better than most, the potential for a monster-of-the-week format with the horrors hidden in the base dosen’t sit well with me, unless all episodes deal with viruses, then it would take some heavy duty writing to keep it fresh. They'll also need to tease out some of that emotional truth in the characters and do so honestly to keep me around. So we’ll see where it goes.

***stars

Ant Reviews: Intelligence (TV Pilot, 2014)

I’ve never been much of a devotee of Lost, though I did watch the first season when it was on television. One character that was memorable was Josh Holloway’s Sawyer, pretty much the TV equivalent of X-men’s Gambit – a charming, handsome arsehole hiding dark personal secrets. Holloway was destined for great things (actually turning down the role of Gambit in an X-men movie because it was too close to Sawyer, go figure) but never got far, save for a few welcome appearances in movies like Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. He holds a special place in my heart for being one of the first vampires to be seen and killed in Angel (his second on-screen role), so I’ve always wanted to see him do well.

And here he is in new TV show Intelligence. The story centres around Holloway’s Gabriel, a spy with a high-tech chip in his head, making him a hot spy commodity. To protect him, his boss Lillian (Marg Helgenberger) appoints young Secret Service agent Riley (Meghan Ory) to protect him. I’ll avoid the puns regarding intelligence and lack thereof. The biggest criticism to be made is simply that it’s a TV show. It’s very much a TV show.

Rather redundant to point out, I know. But the pilot is rather aggressive in its mainstream genre TV mediocrity.  The characters don’t pop, the settings are bland (save for one set-piece involving a shootout in a paintball room, which added some much needed colour). The dialogue is stilted and unrealistic, the performances underwhelming and the plot predictable. The word ‘safe’ springs to mind.

Gone is the Holloway charm. Characters are reduced to caricatures (geeky, wisecracking nerd anybody? Tough but fair boss?) and the romantic tension/friendly rivalry between Holloway and Ory is both boring in its execution as it is chemistry-free. The whole thing is frustratingly pedestrian and again, ‘safe’.

The whole thing could do with an injection of tongue-in-cheek fun. If the characters are to be caricatures, at least paint them with broader, more colourful strokes. Let Holloway do what he does best, let him be a lovable rogue, occasionally sleazy but sexy and mysterious. Play up the fact that a pretty brunette is body-guarding a tall surely superspy, perhaps cast someone who looks less capable as juxtaposition to her actual ability. Spice up the dialogue, sprinkle it with self-awareness; doing so will remind the audience that ‘hey, nothing here is original but we’re having fun anyway’.

What’s even more frustrating is how Intelligence is all very obviously shot in Canada. From the faking of snowy Canadian mountains for Pakistan in the pre-titles sequence, to the abandoned warehouse that I recognise from not only Stargate SG1 but Fringe as well, the whole thing reeks of corner-cutting and low budgets, which is not what you expect from a pilot.

That leads to the one successful thing of the show: the chip. The chip allows Gabriel to hack the Internet and various communications with the power of his mind. The conceit allows him to combine all available evidence to create a virtual recreation of a crime scene that he can walk through. This is used to good effect at the beginning when he relives his wife’s supposed defection to a terrorist organization and her participation in a massacre. Moments like identifying a terrorist as his wife by having a wedding video in a little window playing next to her face as she guns down civilians is a novel way of displaying background information to the audience. They’re also very beautifully rendered, so I guess we now know where the budget went.

The show runs the risk of this being too much like BBC’s Sherlock, what with available information on screen for both the character and the audience to observe, and with Gabriel being a super know-it-all in every situation because of his brain, they’d need to work very hard to not draw comparisons to that superior product. The show is already too much like a combination of Chuck and Person of Interest, it would serve them not to imitate further. 

So the show has much potential, if it had a ground-up redo of everything from characters, acting, dialogue and plot. While I do like the central conceit of the show there isn’t much for me to keep watching. Many recent mainstream genre pilots do very little to challenge audiences and do something interesting. Not all shows have the leeway of cable shows like Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones, sure, but many shows have created great work in a mainstream context, for example, Joss Whedon’s oeuvre.

Ultimately there is very little here to justify my continued viewing. Much like the pilots of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Almost Human and Sleepy Hollow (the most fun of the three), the conventions of mainstream genre TV have changed so little since the 90s, where such conventions are so easily identified that the whole thing feels monotonous. What you’re left with is shows that will either get cancelled in no time or will drone on with nothing interesting to say for a few years before vanishing, either way they’re not worth your time. I mean, Almost Human has Karl Urban in it and I still wont watch it. It’s a tragedy when shows that have something to say get cancelled (like recently with the amazing show Boss with Kelsey Grammar) but if Intelligence goes the reasons why are right there on the screen.

*Stars

Essay: New Dredd, Apartments and Influences

So my friend Josh has been raving about the new Dredd film coming out, with Keith Urban. As cheesy as it was, I still have fond nostalgic thoughts for the original Judge Dredd (1995) so I was have interested, half weary about a new Dredd film, what with this age of remakes and reboots. I was mainly in love with the 90s colourful Blade Runner style environment that was created, as fake as it sometimes looked, and seeing images from the teaser made me suspicious it would turn out to be (what Josh and I call) ‘Lo-Fi Sci-fi’, that is to say, a sci-fi movie that doesn’t transport you to a completely different context, because they film in uninteresting contemporary locations, most probably somewhere in Toronto or Vancouver. Think of the difference between the all encompassing dystopia of Blade Runner and the uneven, real world/crazy futurism dichotomy of Minority Report or The 6^th Day. Let’s just say that the old Judge Dredd consisted of completely fabricated sets and environments, while they’re filming parts of the 2012 Dredd in South Africa. 

Admittedly I’ve started to appreciate the location idea: Judge Dredd stories are set in a post-nuclear-war city, why wouldn’t the whole place be sun-drenched? But it wasn’t until the big trailer debut where my doubts really came to the forefront. The plot of Dredd is such: in the future thousands of people live in giant apartment blocks, one such block ruled by Lena Headley, a controller of a powerful drug. The Judges, police with the power of judge, jury and executioner, storm her building, battle to the top and attempt to capture her. 

It was in this trailer where I found there was a huge comparisons to and Gareth Evan’s Serbuan maut (The Raid or The Raid: Redemption) (2012) come about. In both trailers, cops raid an apartment building, only to have the gang boss inform his criminal tenants that they must kill the invading cops. I know both films were created and developed independently of each other, and my friend Josh has insisted that trailers sometimes screw a film up completely. Some early-bird reviews have reassured me that the film is much better than it seems on paper, so while I’m now a little keener to watch the film (pictures like this make me excited) the comparison cannot be ignored. 

But why is such a story so prevelant. As I said, both films developed independently (Dredd is written by the amazing Alex Garland, after all), so how could two completely different sets of moviemakers come up with the same basic story? I thought about some great foreign films I’d watched along the same veign: violent murder and chaos in an apartment building. And you’d be surprised at how many there are. Those films are Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza’s [●REC] (2007) from Spain, Benjamin Rocher and Yannick Dahan’s La Horde (The Horde) (2009) from France and the aforementioned Serbuan maut (The Raid or The Raid: Redemption) from Indonesia.

Lets start with a movie called The Horde. Oooh boy, is it rough. Imagine a combination of two of my favourite films from the past couple of years, Assault on Precinct 13 (2005) and Dawn of the Dead (2003). In this film, violent, corrupt cops raid a dilapidated apartment building to take out a drug lord (see the theme?). This time it’s over the death of one of their own, and of course, there’s a super race of shark-toothed zombies attacking the building, while Paris burns on the horizon. 

 The characters are what make this for me. Low down and dirty gangsters teaming up with low down and dirty, violent and vengeful corrupt cops. Not a single soft character in the bunch, really, all vicious and all of them violent killers. It makes for some fun moments, there’s no pretty heroine, no handsome hero, just tough guys being tough, none of them sympathetic or relatable, just hard. It really is one of the most badass horror films I’ve seen, and if you’re a dude, like, a DUDE’S DUDE, then you’ll appreciate some of the badassery on display, involving one of the most brutal and heroic sacrifices in a Zombie film, ever. 

 Another zombie apartment building film is Balagueró and Plaza’s [●REC]. In this, a very good looking journalist (Manuela Velasco) and her cameraman tail emergency workers, who receive a call about an apartment building. Within they find a situation of escalating terror, where a viral zombie infestation has taken place, of which there is no escape: the police have sealed the place up, and anyone who breaks this quarantine will be killed (which they learn the hard way). This film was also made into an American version called Quarantine (2008), and eventually a crappy straight to DVD sequel. Despite it being a first-person camera perspective film, or found footage film, the Spanish REC films have spawned two very successful sequels and is very popular in that part of the world.

 Oh boy, if The Horde was rough, this was more terrifying than brutal. One of the most adrenaline-inducing films I’ve ever seen, there’s one chase scene toward the end that’s full-on crazy. Though more in the vein of 28 Days Later, with blood spewing, red eyes and running zombies, the films makes great use of the camera conceit and the pace of its vicious antagonists. The night-vision sequence at the end is classic, and the whole film blends terror, dread and creepiness together into a great little package. I remember watching the film on my TV the first time; with the sound down, playing the computer a bit as well so I wouldn’t get too overwhelmed by it, like the pussy that I am. It was so much easier to stomach without the screams, haha. 

 And now we get to The Raid. I stumbled across the trailer once, and showed it to my dad, who is Indonesian. He thought it was great, but I never had any illusions that it would make its way to Australian shores, yet low and behold, it was getting some impressive international buzz and I took my dad out for Mexican and a movie. 

 The story is simple enough: a team of elite police raid a dilapidated apartment block to take out a drug lord. The inhabitants of the building are told they’d live rent-free if they killed a cop, and thus Rama, the plucky rookie, kicks a lot of arse as they battle floor by floor towards the penthouse. That’s about it for the plot. 

 I have to say that the film was delightfully violent. I’m not really big on high violence, unless it’s against bad guys, then I’m ok with that. I know it sounds like a dumb contrast, but if you watch Rambo (2008), for all the violence against enemy soldiers there was, there were scenes of innocent people being machine-gunned and children being bayoneted, which was hard for me to stomach. This also marks the first time I’ve seen people walk out of a cinema because of the violence.

 I’ve read reviews damning the film because of its tissue-paper-thin plot and weak characterisation. It doesn’t really matter to me, not in this film, especially considering the action and the entertainment is of a high quality. When you’re slapping your knee they way I was and laughing as loud as I was (much to my father’s embarrassed chagrin) it doesn’t matter as much as it should. Personally I was pleased at seeing an openly Islamic hero, who prays before a rigorous workout. I mean, yeah it’s a film from an Islamic nation, but in this post-911, post-Osama world, it’s good to see a sympathetic, heroic Islamic character.

 Ultimately the film is very much like a computer game. I’ve always been aware of this when I watched an episode of the now dead ABC program Mondo Thingo, a pop culture program, where tey discussed videogame movies. It wasn’t just that they were making films of Resident Evil and Tomb Raider, but now films are being influenced by video games. To illustrate they simply played a clip from Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003), where a handcuffed Salma Hayek and Antonio Banderas swing their way down the side of a building, the whole thing structured like an old Nintendo game. The Raid, however, resembles more a game called Die Hard Arcade, and reminded me a little of Time Crisis in its story as well, but that’s just me. 

 So perhaps that’s the most enduring influence on all these films, the Video Game influence. All films are in apartment buildings, all films have a constant violent antagonistic presence, and all films ultimately involve reaching the very top (or, in The Horde, the very bottom) to achieve some kind of conclusive end and all films have a level-by level structure to them, which explains the apartment building conceit. 

So despite some imagery and plot conceits that both Dredd and The Raid share, idea that both films have their roots in gaming and video game structure has made the comparison a little easier to stomach. The whole situation reminds me of the Coldplay Plagarism case, where Coldplay was accused of stealing a song, though both songs were influenced by old Nintendo the Legend of Zelda theme. There is such a thing as two independent artists coming to the same conclusion. And here I am thinking that all these films were influenced by American pop cinema, when it’s the home entertainment that’s the real culprit.