to scoop up extra bums for seats

Film Andrew Collins writes about filling in for Mark Kermode or not. It's a useful curtain sneak into the life of the modern film critic, not least how they have to watch films:

"Here how it works. The film companies screen all the week’s new releases on a Monday, traditionally. The national newspaper film critics attend those screenings on a Monday, sometimes a Tuesday, and file their copy in readiness for Friday, Saturday or Sunday depending on their paper. Most weeks there are about ten new films, released on a Friday, with the inevitable blockbuster that comes out on the Wednesday, to scoop up extra bums for seats and steal a march on that week’s box office chart. When, as happened two weeks ago, a Tuesday night screening is cancelled, and rescheduled for the following night, a review of that film (Scream 4) did not appear in that Sunday’s Culture section, due to its long lead-time. You can see how important the Monday and Tuesday NPS’s (national press screenings) are."

No wonder some reviews seem rather mean spirited; there have to be some weeks when the critic just simply isn't in the mood and no matter how hard, professionally, they try not to let it be reflected in the text, I know from my amateur experience it's almost impossible.

Tubular Bells by the Brooklyn Organ Synth Orchestra

Music The subtitles are what make the difference in this addictive video. They work rather like the explanatory text in Don Roos's film Happy Endings which convey exposition information which simply couldn't be included in the dialogue. Well, either that or Network 7 [via].

one of those irregular delurking posts

About I've added a new commenting system to the blog which integrates exciting social networking opportunities bringing it bang up date.

Sorry, bringing it bang up to 2008.

Seems like the perfect opportunity to have one of those irregular delurking posts.

Hello, how are you and mores to the point, who are you?

Leave a comment.

the Kryptonian has concerns

That Day US Republican Presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee comments on Superman #900 (in which the Kryptonian has concerns about representing his adopted home) written by our very own (meaning Doctor Who fan and often writer) Paul Cornell. Which is fairly surreal. We await Huckabee's thoughts on the Human Nature canonicity debate with great interest.

Letters: "Still Dreaming"

Dear Stuart:

I wanted to let you know about a new Shakespeare documentary we are developing called "Still Dreaming". The film follows a group of entertainment retirees as they bravely mount A Midsummer Night's Dream. Set at the Lillian Booth Actors Home in Englewood, New Jersey, this troupe has decided to act on their collective love of Shakespeare and take a huge leap of faith into what was once known, but is now so seemingly treacherous. And we can't wait to see what happens.

If you'd like to view some scenes from the film, please go to www.indiegogo.com/still-dreaming, or click on the widget below. We also have a Facebook page at www.facebook.com/shakespearemovie.

The film is a follow-up to our award-winning film "Shakespeare Behind Bars", about Shakespeare being done in a Kentucky prison. For more background info on that film, you can check out www.shakespearebehindbars.com, but to view the trailer, click here: http://documentaryhowto.com/shakespeare-behind-bars-now-playing

And for bios for me and my partner Jilann Spitzmiller, go to www.documentaryhowto.com/about.

Best regards,

Hank Rogerson
Co-Producer/Director
"Still Dreaming"

Still Dreaming IndieGoGo Trailer from Hank Rogerson on Vimeo.

"Remember, the Rebellion is in hiding."

Film Topless Robot offers ten disturbing questions raised by the original Star Tours:

"Tour groups bring in a diverse group of people, so the odds that some of the passengers on Star Tours are pro-Empire are very good. Having different political views is one thing; actively taking part in an attack on the largest government battleship in the universe is another. Remember, the Rebellion is in hiding. The whole beginning of Empire is them trying not be found out while they're on Hoth, otherwise they'll be massacred by AT-ATs. If anyone on the tour to Endor wasn't allied with the Rebellion, they'd be calling the authorities ASAP once they touched down. "Those rebels you've been searching for? Would you believe it, they're running a goddam tour company."

The post includes a POV video of the actual ride in which part of the fun is obviously in the hydraulics. It's worth watching for the sound of the "audience" who are clearly having a brilliant time. Saves us a plane fare too.

Patrick Stewart flowers at the Shakespeare Birthday Celebrations

Shakespeare Birthday Celebrations, a photo by barbara.jackson55 on Flickr.

Arthur clearly likes Karen rather a lot.

TV Kerry Shale is one of life’s unsung actors. Like Stephen Tobolowsky he’s a character actor who’s never out of work but unlike Tobolowsky who’s had a fair few iconic roles in his career (Ned Ryerson, Werner Brandis, the forgetful guy in Momento), Shale’s always stayed on the fringes, and despite turning up in some prominent tv work, including Moffat’s own Joking Apart, he’s primarily called upon for voiceover work on the likes of Budgie: The Little Helicopter and the cgi abomination of Thomas The Tank Engine.

He’s also the king of audio books including the majority of The X-Files tie-in readings (despite never having appeared in an episode) so it was quite a pleasure to see him as the random oppressed stranger saying enigmatic things when Doctor Who paid homage to its US genre cousin. Dr. Renfrew is just the sort of desperate figure who doesn’t receive a happy ending in either show, so far gone that their function along with their bloody environment is simply to creep out the audience, a wide-eyed desperation that suits Shale’s style.

If such talk seems like I’m playing with the packaging and not the treats inside, it’s because appreciating such incidental pleasures will be the first casualty of the opinion war when The Day of the Moon with its gobsmacking, hopping on one foot pointing at the television screaming epilogue is discussed. I’ve already glanced at a couple of reviews and neither of them have seen fit to even mention Shale or his character even though they’re both vital in making us understand what The Silents are psychologically capable of.

Similarly Mark Sheppard’s laconic gay agenda nudging Canton Delaware one half of the Mulder/Scully dynamic in these terrifying haunted house sequences might not be recognised for the point of view character he is, orientating the audience outside of a TARDIS crew which has slipped ahead of us three months in terms of understanding, as Moffat boldly experiments with the temporal order of his narrative having already begun a narrative which resequences the temporal order of his characters. Luckily he’s rather smarter than Duggan in City of Death.

And so I think is the television audience. Rather like the politicians in the NO! campaign for AV in relation to counting from one to some other number under ten, professional tv reviewers this week have seriously underestimated the capability of the public to follow the twists and turns in the show’s sequence of events, some even suggesting that Doctor Who has lost the ability to tell a coherent story even though they were reviewing half of one and had no problem previously in suggesting that they should keep with something like The Wire because it’s a slow burn.

Well, this is Doctor Who as slow burn. As Doctor Who Magazine dvd reviewer and ex-editor Gary Gillatt tweeted earlier, this is just episode fifteen in a twenty-six part story which in terms of the Key To Time season means part three of The Androids of Tara which as episode threes often were, half an hour of running around hoping to bump into the cliffhanger. We know now what the aliens behind the cracks and the explosion of the TARDIS in the last run of episodes look like and that Amy's Schrodinger's pregnancy (that joke © a bunch of clever people on Twitter).

Plus there's the epic concept that the silent have been on Earth for thousands of years guiding the human race each of its scientific marvels a result of their nudging, rather like Scaroth times several dozen. Reminds me a lot of the revelation in Big Finish's Sixth Doctor and Charley arc that he's had an invisible friend floating around the TARDIS for the duration of the series. That the Silents own the FAUXDIS also explains why the Doctor failed to notice all of those deaths in The Lodger. He simply didn't remember.

But I’m getting ahead of myself because as well as the Canton device, Moffat keeps the audience orientated here by offering what at its heart is actually a pretty trad bit of Doctor Who. For all their other functions in the wider story, in The Day of the Moon, Moffat keeps The Silents very much in the alien of the week mould with the Doctor having already decided how to defeat them very early in the episode, the methodology unspooling like an episode of the unreal Hustle, a methodology for all its epic underpinnings that shows the Doctor himself learnt something from The Wire. No, the other one.

This is not a criticism. Big, cocky speeches from its Bafta award winning Time Lord centre are the franchises’s stock in trade as is the “broadcast something to defeat the enemy” trope. Perhaps his visit to the royal wedding this week was to make sure that it all went down without a hitch because as per some story soon to appear in Doctor Who Adventures, he’s using the tv coverage to battling a time travelling rogue element in the Forest of Cheem who’s trying to destroy the fleshy future of the human race by activating his ancestors incongruously planted in Westminster Abbey.

You know you want to Eddie Robson. Russell T Davies already did at the end of Torchwood’s Children of Earth. And Moffat himself a couple of times. Not to mention the classic series. At some point, some clever person will work their way through the whole series, perhaps the whole franchise and produce a taxonomy of story resolutions and find there are only about five. Which is another of my problems with professionals who suggest the tv series has run out of ideas because they’re clearly under the impression that’s why we love the series.

We love the series because it surprises us. Surprises us by employing the real moon footage as part of the plot or by creating NASA related elements that feel just right, feel indeed like Apollo 13, even if detaining of the Doctor in a lecture theatre is a bit of a hedge scratcher as is the fact that Nixon now seen more of the TARDIS interior than Churchill despite his slightly less admirable rep. We love that the cliché of American’s previous oblivious huddled around their televisions watching history is can be given a neat twist as they turn to fight a newly obvious interloper, regaining their grip on that history in the process.

Yet in the midst of all that, we love that this is still the Moffat who brought fairy tale scares back to the series, and stunning images like faces covered in tallys, doubly scary because they’re self inflicted, a physical approach to remembering the unmemorable. Employing a similar jump cut to the that used for the voting machine in The Beast Below, when the character forgets we remain in their point of view by not witnessing the events they’ve missed, piecing together their action just as they are like that Hangover film over and over again the hierarchy of knowledge forever fluctuating.

Yes, this is Moffat who even as far back as The Empty Child isn’t capable of writing a script with a simple conclusion, without some strands left dangling (two years?) and given the reigns of the series has taken it to the most obvious extremes. It’s not enough to Amy to become lost in the haunted house; she experiences strange images which generate still more questions. Who’s baby are you? Who was that terrible woman? When she’s snatched by The Silents and spirited away to the FAUXDIS did Amy spend all the time just strapped to the chair or …

At least we know that Rory does sort of remember his two thousand year wait and the depth of performance Arthur Darvill’s capable of. As I’d hoped more of the chemistry between he and Gillan seen in Confidential has seeped into the scripts and it’s rather poignant not mention realistic that no matter how much she says she loves him, he still can’t quite believe it. If you want my opinion (and lets face it you’ve read this far) I think some of their character’s relationship has soaked into their real world friendship. Watching this week’s Confidential, Arthur clearly likes Karen rather a lot. Bless. But then, don't we all?

Speaking of which, storywise, River had less to do this episode, leadership of the group dynamic having shifted back to the younger version of the Doctor for the duration and into the rest of the series. The already convoluted TARDIS Index File entry for the character will now require and extra dimensional supplement as we now have to cope with the fact that the version left in the Stormcage at the close of the episode has already had dozens of adventures with the future Doctor (including Billy the Fish & The Easter Island statues) and now shared her final kiss with the younger version.

I’ve suggested previously that Moffat’s running two separate narrative threads and that at some point in the future we’ll be able to watching all of the River stories in reverse order culminating in Forest of the Dead. Now I’m not so sure. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to tell at which point their time lines intersect since this version seems well aware of the Pandorica business even though if we’re taking things literally as backwards/forwards it should be in her future. Either way, her reaction to the kiss, impeccably played by Alex neatly demonstrates her fears and apparently hints at more complex issues.

All of which brings us back to the alleyway in New York and the little girl regenerating. There’s a universe of possibilities, from Jenny to any one of a number of other random femlords (let’s not forget when the Master was hidden away it was as a child – imagine if he’d opened the pocket watch at a much younger age) but because this is episode fifteen of a longer story it can’t be some random element it has to be locked into the story. Could my unlikely theory that River Song’s a Time Lord and Amy’s her mother be combined here somehow?

Professional journalists will hate all of this of course but us amateurs are also in a bit of a bind (explaining a little bit why this has all been a bit slapdash and haphazard) because we won’t properly know just how successful as a piece of art even this episode is until Moffat reveals his whole story or indeed how much of it was just in service of this week’s set of incidents, if we’re all just chasing a transparent dangling carrot or if in another eleven episodes we’ll be properly satisfied. It has to at least be better than The Armageddon Factor. "Men out there - young men - are dying for it." Including Canton apparently.

Next week: Shiver me timbers.

ANIMALS ...

TV Adam Curtis has posted a trailer for his new BBC film, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace: "NOVELISTS ... ANIMALS ... THE WORLD WIDE WEB ..."

I can't believe it's not Poliakoff

TV You will have to watch this showreel for upcoming BBC dramas a couple of times to catch all of the delights (including David Hare's I can't believe it's not Poliakoff thing Page Eight) (are they from Mondas?) but it's well worth it for the closing Torchwood preview which seems designed to demonstrate that for all the co-production money and US shooting style, the distinctive spirit remains intact, thank the lord.

the populist crowd

That Day Here, music critic Alex Ross offers an alternative fanfare for the Royal Wedding which if they'd used it would probably have gone down as well with the populist crowd as the new series of Doctor Who.

Elsewhere I'm simultaneously delighted and appalled by Kenneth Clark's Civilisation.

Civilisation: A Personal View by Kenneth Clark (1969).

Hamlet played by Ian Richardson.

Despite its excellent reputation for pioneering the presenter led documentary format, after forty years in which the structure has been developed and redeveloped it's often difficult to watch and properly appreciate Civilisation now. Epochs are passed over in a matter of minutes and Kenneth Clark's idiosyncratic, dismissive attitude to the material (material in this case being the great works of western civilisation) has an alienating quality.

As you might expect, I parted company with Clark somewhere in episode seven when he dismisses all of cinema as being "mostly vulgar, always ephemeral" whilst unfairly comparing it Michelangelo and Bernini which probably lacks a sense of perspective. On the one hand "a personal view" gives him some latitude to stray out of a simple exercise in imparting knowledge. I'm just pleased this isn't my first introduction to some of these great works.

Before that, slotted in at the tail end of episode six, which largely concerns itself with Albrecht Duerer, Martin Luther and the world of the humanists Erasmus and Montaigne, he assigns a measly ten minutes to Shakespeare. But what a ten minutes! Against the backdrop of a ruin, William Devlin wanders through offering a reading of Lear's wrath against the elements and his own mental decrepitude and in voice over Eric Porter gives us his "Tomorrow and tomorrow..." from Macbeth.

Hamlet is served by a beautifully filmed version of Yorick which begins by focusing on Ronald Lacey just slowly revealing the presence of Ian Richardson's Hamlet and a very young Patrick Stewart in an early television appearance from when he was still predominantly known as a stage actor. Interestingly, though all three were at the Royal Shakespeare Company at the time of filming (as far as I can tell) only Richardson is credited as such in the closing credits.



The whole scene is available above. Richardson originally played the role just after leaving drama school at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre which is where he was talent scouted for the RSC (rather like a footballer) by John Barton, a story he told to The Theatre Archive Project in 2007 (just ten days before he left us):

What happened was in 1959 I played Hamlet. And in 1959… Sir Peter Hall - then just ordinary ‘Peter Hall’ - was director - Artistic Director Designate - of the… what was then called the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. And he wanted to start afresh with a young company. So what he did was he sent spies, - there’s no other word for them, ‘spies’, I suppose you call them nowadays ‘talent scouts’ - all over the provinces to see plays done by these many, many repertory companies up and down the country, to see if there were any promising youngish actors - because Peter Hall was not even thirty when he took over, you know. And one of those so-called ‘spies’ was John Barton, and he saw me playing Hamlet at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre and he immediately reported back to Peter Hall, ‘I think you’ll want to get this one!’, and the long and short of the story is that I was offered a contract and I joined the - still the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre - as one of Peter Hall’s ‘babies’ as we were all called, and my contemporaries were Diana Rigg, Ian Holm, Peggy Ashcroft to name but three."

Richardson's rendering of the part here, whilst just a fragment and in the Olivier mode (understandable given the requirements of the series) the actor's performance still encapsulates Barton's philosophy of making the pauses count and showcases the supine regality and mesmerising eyes which he'd employ to greatest effect as Francis Urquhart in the House of Cards trilogy.

the fabric of our politics

That Day Some of you might be moderately surprised to learn that I'm rather looking forward to tomorrow and that with the usual caveats about how badly Diana was treated and Prince Philip, I'm quite the monarchist. I really shouldn't be. On two occasions, once when I was very young and stood for hours on Speke Boulevard and once when as part of a school choir who'd spent three weeks learning Zadok the Priest I've been ignored by the Queen as she scooted on past.

But I can't help my self. Kate's lovely. William seems a nice enough chap, his mother's son in all the right ways. Like Melvyn Bragg, I view tomorrow as history in the making, the next step in the line that reaches back beyond the Tudors in the dark ages, and though they don't really have any legislative power apart from in extreme circumstances (Oliver Cromwell has a lot to answer for) it seems important to the country's identity that we still have this family woven into the fabric of our politics. 

There's the cost of course, not just in terms of what amounts to their salary but also the upkeep of the castles and I can understand the view that they like the upper classes are symptomatic of a society that's fundamentally unfair.  But I'm not convinced that if we removed the monarchy such inequalities would vanish.  The likes of David Cameron would still offer jobs to his friends rather than offering a more open door policy.

So I'm just going to continue to enjoy the spectacle, and hope it lasts a little bit longer. Just to add some balance. Meet Melvyn:



[via]

"He comes from somewhere else ..."

TV Allyn has pointed me towards the news that the North American version of Doctor Who includes a short explanatory prologue in the style of Quantum Leap and low and behold here's a low grade copy from YouTube:



It's nice. It evokes the fairy tale values of this new version of the series and isn't the infodump which arguably ruined the TV movie.

US fans older than me with longer memories will know that when some of the Tom Baker era was broadcast in the 70s, they also featured story specific intros narrated by Howard Da Silva. Sadly YouTube hasn't been as forthcoming in that regard

A Cosmic Collection

Books I've been quoted in print again. According to its Amazon page, The Quotable Doctor Who: A Cosmic Collection of Quotes About the World's Favourite Time Lord, Vol. 1 includes this line from my raggedy review of The Eleventh Hour:

"The Tenth Doctor's first action in defence of the Earth was to pick up a sword. The Eleventh doesn't look like he could even lift a sword."

Hold on, they've truncated it. What I actually said was:

"The Tenth Doctor’s first action in defence of the Earth was to pick up a sword. The Eleventh doesn’t look like he could even lift a sword or would even want to."

The upcoming pirate adventure should sort that out.

vice-versa

TV Best moment in this publicity for the next series of Torchwood? Pullman's face when Barrowman says that the British actors have learnt from their American counterparts and vice-versa:



"You speak for yourself."

"holding a glass of cucumber water"

Food Indulge me. The New Yorker have covered the press launch for Gwyneth's recipe book. At her house. The Guardian's Hadley Freeman couldn't have written a much better parody:

"Mario Batali, in pink cargo shorts, was talking to Ruth Reichl. “She eats like a truck driver,” he said of Paltrow. He recalled being in Valencia, Spain, and “watching her eat an entire pan of paella as big as a manhole cover.”
Michael Stipe added, “Once, a duck she was cooking caught fire, and she threw it in the pool.”
Paltrow greeted people by the door, holding a glass of cucumber water. Her mother, Blythe Danner, arrived.
“Hi, Mommy,” Paltrow said.
Danner unfurled a white monogrammed cloth: “I brought you something. Daddy’s napkin.”
“Oh, boy,” Batali said. “The tears are gonna fly now, baby.”

As David Hepworth said on Twitter, "This evening at Gwynie's story is the best portrait of the power elite since Tom Wolfe wrote "radical chic" in 1970."

"with champagne!"

That Day I offer the following press release I've just received unsolicited into my in-box without much comment other than to note that you should keep reading until you reach the price.



Who's paying for the couple's trips to London next week?  Have the hotel rooms been booked yet?

when actors weren’t just intoxicated by the thrill of live performance

Books With William Boyd’s experimental remix of Cardenio in production at Stratford, discussions about authorship and canonicity have once again entered mainstream discourse which makes Stewart Buettner’s fiction The Shakespeare Manuscript a timely publication. When an agoraphobic actress receives a box of her father’s papers she’s amazed to discover within what looks like the original leaves for a prequel to Hamlet and despite her attempts to keep the text under wraps until it can be verified as Shakespearean by experts, before she knows it her old financially insolvent theatre group have decided to put it into production and she’s agreed to play Ophelia. Meanwhile her amnesiatic father isn’t sure he didn’t actually forge the thing and the company producer is desperately attempting to keep the operation running.

Like similar mysteries revolving around such discoveries, the through line which keeps us reading is whether this possible Ur-Hamlet will turn out to be the great discovery. In portraying the rehearsal process, Buettner bravely offers some of his own faux-Shakespearean verse which certainly rings true enough to maintain our suspension of disbelief within the machinery of the plot. He’s under no illusion that he can mimic Shakespeare – in places his characters actively criticise the verse either for being created by a genius in early bloom or wasting themselves on a drippy love triangle between Queen Gertrude and two brothers. Mention of Hamlet Snr’s bloody battle against Fortinbras Snr also has the ring of Titus Andronicus about it, also written in the period Buettner’s fictional experts suggest this would have been scripted.

But such textual discussions sit on the fringes of what’s mainly the back stage story of an actress regaining her inner confidence. April is the best drawn of the characters, her slow progress from a paranoia at greeting anyone who visits her home in her father’s bookshop to being able to step up in front of an audience again is compelling, the clever choice of Vanessa Redgrave as her idol creating a perfect touchstone for the character. The men who help or take advantage of her in between are perhaps slightly over-familiar and fans of In The Bleak Midwinter or Slings & Arrows will see a similar group dynamic in play, albeit with a slightly darker edge. Buettner’s sets his tale in the New York theatre land of the late 80s, when actors weren’t just intoxicated by the thrill of live performance and the brownstone atmosphere of apartments and town houses is beautifully evoked.

[A website about the book has been produced which includes a page from the manuscript and discussion amongst the characters about its authenticity.]

The Shakespeare Manuscript by Stewart Buettner is published by Performance Arts Press. $7.99 paperback, $2.79 Kindle. ISBN: 978-0615462653. Review copy supplied.