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

A New Direction?

I might try a few new things this year, and start writing a bunch of reviews for different stuff, like TV, some Games, and Action Figures. Should be fun.

My End of Year 2013 Movie Review

So, it’s been a while because I’m lazy and there’s no other excuse. So, instead of listing my favourite films of 2013 during this 2013 list-making season, I’ll instead talk about the last 5 movies I watched during the 2013 list-making season. That and I haven’t written anything in ages so to do several mini-reviews will make up for not writing anything in ages. So, good or bad, here are my list of movies I watched at the end of 2013

Phantoms (Joe Chappelle, 1998)

After the death of Peter O’Toole, I wanted to watch The Lion In Winter, one of the greatest movies, in terms of performance, ever. Failing to find a good copy of that I instead watched Phantoms, probably his lowest point. He did admirably, all things considered, and there is one awful moment of shit dialogue he had to contend with, he was pretty cool in it. Though I don’t usually side with the Ben Affleck haters, I will agree he really wasn’t great in this one. Liev Schrieber was fantastically creepy, however.

One thing that impressed me as a kid watching this is that the common sense thing happens: the military gets called in and scientists check out the bullshit supernatural thing. They all die, of course, some of them in particularly horrific ways (some I had forgotten since I’d watched it as a kid), and their role was simply to have more bodies to add to the kill count. There were some good creepy moments, and it’s strange that such a bullshit film like this will set up and pay off stuff, whereas bigger budget, better received films don’t bother and cut shit out completely and confuse the audience. I’m referencing a scene where two main characters drive through a ghost town, and find a car sitting there with the engine running and no driver, as if the driver simply vanished. Later, when they find that their car wont start, one of them gets and idea and they return to that first car to find that it’s dead as well. Its nothing much, but it tells you something about modern movies that many things aren’t set up well enough of the pay-off is erased completely.

Aside from the gross-out moments (there aren’t a lot, but a mutating dog is gross enough for me to look away) you’d be surprised the kind of mileage the director Joe Chappelle can get out of mundane, un-horrific things. A friendly looking dog, sitting under a street lamp, is an ominous sentinel for a larger monster. A silent, staring man is creepy, and its surprising how simple and effective back-lit silhouetted people in terms of freakiness. Some of the scares are undercut with cheese, like two severed heads in a bakery oven (?) because the monster wanted to store them for later?

There is one scene in particular that is very nostalgic for me, and one of the reasons why I wanted to revisit this film. Once a bunch of the main characters meet up they find themselves in an inn. They hear music from upstairs and split up to investigate. Now, when I was younger, in the primary-to-early-high-school age, I spent a lot of time with this one guy. He was exposed to shitty movies like this (he had cable before a lot of us had) and thus we’d end up watching shit movies like this on DVD, or a bad cam version someone had burnt for him. One night I was over with my folks, and while he and I watched Phantoms his mum, a piano teacher, and my mum, who can sing and taught the choir, played music and sung songs together. Loud enough that I thought that the music I was hearing was the one that was freaking out the characters. It means very little to anyone but me but that was very nostalgic for me to revisit.

**stars

Virus (John Bruno, 1999)

Would you believe I watched this before I made everyone breakfast on Christmas day? Virus is one of those movies that I had seen as a poster in the back of comic books and decided once years ago that I had to tape it from the TV when it showed up. It’s a very simple movie, but it stood out in my mind as one of the few horror movies that uses cyborgs as a source of terror, as opposed to zombies or other monsters. The other film from this time period is Star Trek: First Contact, never the less I suppose that the fear of technology element was a response to Y2K, but maybe not as this film was written by Chuck Pfarrer, a former navy SEAL who wrote this as a comic book in 1992 as Hollywood didn’t have the technology to create it competently back then, or so the reasoning was. Pfarrer is an interesting guy, who wrote many a screenplay and one of the first to write about the assassination of Bin Laden.

The plot is basic, as a living energy bolt takes over the MIR space station, and gets beamed down to a Russian research vessel. There it takes over the machine shops, churning out little robots before using the crew as spare parts. A salvage crew (Donald Sutherland, Jamie Lee Curtis (she considers this her worst film) and William Baldwin) come to take the ship and claim the money but inadvertently wake up the virus and begin bullshit all over again.

The movie has some great production work, with the robots and cyborgs and such, little techy gears and wires and animatronics and puppets and that sort of thing. But other than that, it’s a dud, but an ok way to pass the time. One other thing to note, is that this is one of the post-Once Were Warriors Hollywood films that Cliff Curtis was in. That movie sent him and Temuera Morrison to the states. Morrison ended up in Barb Wire (1996) and Speed 2 (1997) during the 90s, and Curtis did things like this and Deep Rising (1998), where he played another sea-fareing dangerous Maori.

*stars

Battle of the Damned (Christopher Hatton, 2013)

I saw a trailer for this and wanted to give it a try. It’s a pastiche of Escape from New York, Hatton’s other film Robotropolis (2011), and a series of zombie movie clichés. Dolph Lundgren’s character Max is sent into Singapore to locate a rich man’s daughter, and escape the zombie plague contained within. In aid of this he uses killer robots that the stumbles across.

This has all the makings of schlocky trash, which means it could be fun. It certainly has better CGI than Sharknado, that’s for sure, and there’s generally a level of care put into the production. It borrows a lot of shaky-cam from the 28 days films, and has a cold washout effect placed on all the visuals, which can get pretty boring.

Max is a pretty boring character, despite Lundgren’s presence. He isn’t cheesy or silly enough for him to be fun in the context. There are moments of making him a little bit interesting, like how he has to use old-man glasses to read maps, that kind of thing, but not enough to make him stand out in a cheesy, Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon kind of way. One super-distracting thing for me was how badly Dolph runs now. Its like he has a really bad back, or knees, and runs with his shoulders back like it hurts, its really noticeable, as zombie movies have tons of running. The rest of the cast is ok, none of them really stand out. David Field, who is an amazing Aussie actor and does these great Oak commercials, is pretty substandard as the prerequisite human villain of the piece. He does get one amazing moment when he literally screams ‘BETRAYAL’ just before he’s killed, though.

All in all it felt like it was a waisted opportunity. The thing about these straight to DVD b-movies is that the marketing, the title or the trailer, is always infinitely more cheesy and more fun than the actual film itself. They had oppourtinities to make this film super self-aware and fun but it just doesn’t work. One character saying ‘serious nerd-gasm’ upon seeing the robots felt both out of character and forced. Now if the whole this was filled with this kind of cheese, it just might have worked.

Matt Doran, who plays Reese in the movie, lives near me, and I missed out on serving him at work recently. I was going to tell him I kind of enjoyed the movie, in a trashy way. I’ll have to wait until next time.

***stars.

DOA: Dead or Alive (Corey Yuen, 2006)

I just wanted to watch something a little sexy on Christmas, so I thought about this. I never got around to seeing it when it came out, knowing full well that it was going to be shit, but I was more lenient in my assessment this time around.

The film is very simple, as a host of characters from the video game meet up on an island to have a fighting tournament. Of course there’s something a little bit more sinister going on, involving Eric Roberts as the main villain (a lovely surprise to see him here) but that’s because a movie needs a plot, whereas games don’t. In fact, why DOA is popular is because the designers of the original game worked out a way for the breasts to bounce on all the girl characters in a titillating way, and thus turned an otherwise unremarkable fighting game into something legendary. Hence the need for a beach volleyball scene, as in the game the breast bounciness was so appealing in the volleyball sub-game they made a whole volleyball game around it.

Its along these lines that I must mention that, while the girls are all very lovely, none of them have the soft, bouncy breasts of their videogame counterparts.

The fights are all great. The film is a mess in terms of focus, scope and visual styles (one character is a master cat burglar, the other like someone out of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, etc.) but the fights are all well done. Its like you’ve made a car-racing movie; the plot and the acting can be crap, but if the car races look like shit then you’ve failed on a fundamental level. So at least it has that.

One scene I want to point out is a fight between the wrestler character Tina (Jaime Pressly) and her dad Bass (Kevin Nash). It was set up by Eric Roberts to be this whole thing as a fuck you to the characters, but it ended up being fun. The daughter beats the father and he’s proud of her, and gives her a big smile and a thumbs up. She doesn’t hate him but he embarrasses her like a proud father tends to do. It’s refreshing to see that, in Hollywood populated with post-Spielberg-daddy-issues-for-all-main-characters style directors, we could have a father and child ACTUALLY come to blows and have them still love each other afterwards with no moody angst. I mean, the movie is trash but that bit made me genuinely happy. That and all the hot girls.

***stars

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (Peter Jackson, 2013)

The movie looked great. And we saw it in 48 frames, which was amazing. The cast were all top notch, the action was amazing and the locations, the sense of scale, was staggering. Martin Freeman is a triumph as Bilbo, particularly in the scene where he meets Smaug and he makes the most out of every second. That’s just about it. I want to watch it again.

*****stars

Faster (George Tillman Jnr, 2010)

Here’s a movie that suffers from a bad title. I don’t know what you’d call it but Faster is the shittiest name you could have used. It’s a movie that’s surprisingly involved, one of those kind of movies where you’ll just pop it on while you do other stuff and find that it takes a lot more to watch. The film has style, with a lot of great music. Some scenes have tremendous pace and energy, others don’t, and sometimes the film slows down the momentum to its detriment. It’s also a surprisingly long film.

The story revolves around The Driver (Dwayne Johnson), who gets out of prison on a trail of revenge over the murder of his brother. While on his rampage Driver is being stalked by The Cop (Billy Bob Thornton) who is out to stop him, and The Killer (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) a slick assassin hired to take him out.

To the films credit it goes into great detail with these main characters, which is good as it gives them all strong motivations. You feel for all of them, and understand them, which is a rare thing for dumb action movies and that sort of thing.

(spoiler zone)

What I want to talk about mainly is the disconnect between the poster and the title, which seem to market this film to the Fast and Furious crowd, and the tone of the film, a ballsy 70s action crime revenge film. This also plays to the soft ending, where he gets his revenge and moves on with his life. The trailer shows us the original ending, more nihilistic, where I assume the Driver dies in battle with the Killer. Its even suggested that the Killer’s wife (Maggie Grace) kills Driver, if the movie stills are to be interpreted as such. This fits the tone of the film and the 70s crime dramas its imitating: the Killer could have chose to leave the Driver but is constantly testing himself and is obsessed with seeing who will win. A theme of the film is that not all people he wants to claim revenge on are unrepentant in their crimes, others have made amends and the path of revenge isn’t always righteous. As such he should have died at the end, confirming this message, that his path will ultimately end in destruction. They even have a scene where he visits his ex-girlfriend to find that she has a husband and a family to this new guy, and the child he had impregnated with her had been aborted. Thus he has no ties to anyone anymore, there’s only revenge. The final action scene suggested in the trailers was pretty sweet as well, unfortunately, so the end is a bit of a let down.

All in all though, it was worth watching. Especially for the first 10 mins alone.

****stars

wow I'm a lazy fuck. Happy new years

The Tournament Review

I remember having a conversation with my friend Josh regarding a poster for a movie called Gangster Squad. I told Josh that it reminded me of the kind of ideas a I had when I was in high school, and if I were the one writing the movie (back then) it would be about 4 disgruntled assassins, who all worked for different gangs: a disgruntled ex-cop mob guy (who resembled me), a ninja for the yakuza, a big heavy machinegun guy for the Russians, etc. It would end with a massive battle as the gangster squad take on 100s of goons who work for the gangs that dissed them. It all sounds pretty puerile and immature, a reflection of my lack of understanding of the world around me, and of crime.

That’s not to say that Jonathan Frank and Nick Rowntree are immature. The conceived this film whilst at college with the director Scott Mann. The film is about a tournament of the world’s best assassins, who compete to see who’s the greatest in the world while the richest bet on its outcome.

I say this with love: the film is like something I would have wrote when I was younger. It speaks to me on a certain level, what with the glamorisations of assassins and the fetishisation of weaponry and insane skills. The lack of understanding of the real world: hackers simply redirect calls and emergency services are suspended, so the environment is lawless like a modern day wild west. It even includes a major role for Kelly Hu, with whom I had a massive crush on in year 10. In many ways this film was made for me.

The characters are paper thin, and like big action ensembles their only distinguishing features are their appearance and their abilities. Ving Rhames is a big, old-fashioned style hitman, Sebastian Foucan as an agile parkour killer, Scott Adkins as a crazy Russian with a cool scar, etc. The most interesting to me is Ian Somerhalder’s psychopathic Texan, who we first see shooting a dog. He screams anime to me, with his garish white coat, crazy hair, and ‘skilled rival’ mindset in contrast to Rhames’ character. So much of his construction resembles what a non-American thinks Americans are really like. Robert Carlyle rounds out the cast as an alcoholic priest caught in the middle of the tournament.

The action is fun, sometimes exaggerated, and very violent. You can tell this is an independent film. Many people completely explode in this movie, and the beginning sequence is soaked in blood. I also love how each assassin kind of goes outside their gimmick, like the Russian martial artist throwing grenades and the parkour expert shooting guns. Some of the action setpieces are a lot of fun and pretty imaginative. Again, this reminds me of something a teenage me would have written, and that’s what makes this movie so cool.

This brings me back to the days of my youth where the coolest things ever were silenced SMGs, night vision goggles and samurai swords, and the word ‘assassin’ denoted something skilled and deadly and awesome. Back before maturity and an understanding of the real world set in. I’ve been dealing a lot with childhood nostalgia, thinking back to how I felt and how media affected me when I was particularly young, this film spoke to the fantasies I had when I was a teen. I could almost imagine myself writing this thing as it transpired onscreen.

So, while this movie isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, if you were a teenage boy in the early 2000s this movie is right up your damn alley.

****stars

ADKOB Music Video

This is the music video I conceived and directed for emerging Sydney talent ADKOB, who is a longtime friend of mine. The shoot turned out amazing, shot by my creative partner Joshua Skinner, and edited with amazing ease and talent by Peter Makryllos.  Check out ADKOB's Triple J Unearthed page and his soundcloud where you can check out his music, his tunes are catchy and he's a great guy.

There is also a colour version of the video available for viewing on my creative partner's Vimeo.

'Raptor' Music Video

This is the proposed music video for the song Raptor by the band Teal. The video was conceived by myself, was produced, directed and shot by Joshua Skinner and edited by Skinner and Julia Allsop. The clip stars the band alongside Reid Singleton as the teacher/monster, with Robbie and Johnny as the two kids. The whole production, start to finish, took 5 months to complete with a crew of three. The latex SFX was designed and created by Joshua Skinner while wooden mask was made by Alice Wong and Roma Sato, with some assistance from myself. Ultimately the clip was rejected by the band and their management.