Romola on preserving film.

Film The (future) Doctor gazes into a hand-held time space visualiser at footage of the original suffragettes and comments on the implications of being able to see something as it happened rather than having rely on contemporary written reports.

Our Digital Past.

Life Next year this blog will be fifteen years old and I will have been writing something here since I was twenty-six. Although it's not as much of a personal diary as it used to be way back and there's much less about what's happening right now, there's just enough that I expect that if I'm still doing this in another five or six years I'll be able to read between the lines and be reminded of what was happening at this moment.

Sometimes our past is being recorded without our knowledge as Matthew Malady of The New Yorker discovered whilst browsing Google Street View the other day. We've all gone and searched for the places we remember from our life. How many of us find something this immediate?

"According to the Web site, the images had been taken in April of 2012, and I was glad to see that my old street was doing just fine. That was no great surprise, though; my mom lived on a suburban block in a middle-class neighborhood with lots of trees. What I saw was pretty much what I had expected to see.

"When I reached my mother’s house, that all changed. First, I noticed that a gigantic American flag had been affixed to the mailbox post at the corner of the driveway. That was new. Then I spotted the fire pit in the front yard that my mom and her husband, my stepfather, used for block parties, and the grill on the patio, and my mom’s car. And then there she was, out front, walking on the path that leads from the driveway to the home’s front door. My mom."

Good luck with reading this.   But it's a reminder that often what used to be simply held within our own minds and personal knick-knacks now have a back-up online.  Somewhere.

Claudia Wells on Back To The Future II.

Film Claudia Wells played Jennifer in Back To The Future but hadn't given up acting to care for a sick relative so decided not to participate in the sequels and was replaced by Elisabeth Shue. Under The Radar has an interview with her today which asks her how she felt when she saw the two sequels. It's a cornucopia of trivia and not just about BTTF:

"I saw Part II in the theaters, and I saw Part III in the theaters. Both times I went by myself and slumped down in the seat and watched the movie with everyone else. It’s funny that Elizabeth Shue got the part, because I’d screen tested for Adventures in Babysitting. That role had come down between her, me, and Phoebe Cates. So, the fact that she wound up getting my role in Back to the Future is a funny synchronicity.

"Almost every movie in the 1980s came down between the three of us and Sarah Jessica Parker. It was the same group, no matter how many people auditioned, it was almost always the same people it came down to, just switching up who got it. Phoebe Cates got Gremlins, and then I got Phoebe Cates’ role, Linda Barret, in Fast Times [the TV series]. So, literally, it was a very small group of people that got most of the parts.

"There was one audition one morning where Sarah Jessica Parker and I were trying for the lead in a movie, and then that afternoon it was between the two of us for the starring role in Martin Sheen’s directorial debut, Babies Having Babies. When I saw Sarah again that afternoon, I went to her and said, “Sarah, let’s make a deal. You get one part, and I’ll get the other. Let’s shake on it.” [Laughs] As if we had any power. So we shook on it, and she got the morning part, and I got the afternoon part."

This has happened ever since, a small pool of actresses working around projects. My guess is it's something like Emma Stone, Mila Kunis, Jennifer Lawrence, Michelle Williams and for a time Carey Mulligan with Shailene Woodley in there too.

As a bonus, here's Wells giving an interview in French:

My Favourite Film of 1976.

Film "Nobody knows anything." Hello William Goldman. If there's an co-architect of my film appreciation, its William Goldman and his books, notably and especially Adventures in the Screentrade of which "Nobody knows anything" is the key and most often repeated quote. As the wikipedia notes in a rare example of bit of editorialising surviving the editor's knife, it's often used in film articles to suggest film executives are stupid, which is why such and such a film has been a failure, but what Goldman actually means is that executives, however much planning they do, can't really know how a film will be received until the opening weekend. In other words, Waterworld was going to be an expensive, expensive failure until it wasn't.

For the uninitiated (and what is wrong with you), Adventures in the Screentrade is part biography, part screenwriting manual and filled with extraordinary anecdotes about filmmaking during the 1960s and 70s.  As well as the above quote, it's also the source of the Marathon Man story about Dustin Hoffman killing himself physically as part of his method process until Larry Olivier tells him to "just act".  But that's just the start.  If Kevin Smith's anecdote about working with Jon Peters on Superman Lives sounds extraordinary, he's essentially following the Goldman pattern of expurgating the irrational twists and turns many screenwriters have to cope with thanks to indecisive producers and directors.  If his name's on a script, it doesn't necessarily mean he wrote any of it.

Goldman's book introduced to me to All The President's Men, a rare example of having read around a film thoroughly before having a chance to see it.  In writing the script, as I explain in this ancient article about film adaptation, Goldman bravely garoted Woodstein's original account of their investigation into the Watergate break-in, ending his story half way through removing their self adulatory and triumphant conclusion, which in the film is relegated to the newsroom wire machines.  Realising that the lesser known material will be of most interest to an audience which has seen how they story ends, he chooses to close on a downbeat moment in which his characters are on the brink of failure.  Imagine trying to sell that story beat in 2015 without a second film having been greenlit.

The reasons why it's a favourite, if you've been keeping an eye on this list will be pretty obvious.  As with so many of them, it's about city folk dwarfed by their surroundings, architecture as antagonist (see this essay about the Library of Congress sequence for an in-depth analysis).  It's beautifully shot by Gordon Willis in a style which has been cribbed by David Fincher and his DPs in most of his work, especially in the presentation of night contrasting with the blary light of the newsroom (made all the more present by the use of dual focus lenses which keep both a foreground and background object in focus) (discussion of a key shot here).  But mostly it's because Dustford is so damn witty as Woodstein, making Goldman's script feel improvised and natural even though they're following it to the letter (or part of the Bernstein/Ephron draft).

What makes Goldman's book timeless is that in mixing anecdote and methodology he manages to make each of the films under consideration deeper experiences without entirely removing the veil, even those films, like The Stepford Wives, in which his contribution is almost gone.  Knowing his approach to structuring A Bridge Too Far we now can see the difficulty he had in bringing the characters in and out of focus and servicing its miriad stars (a work the Russos would do well to have a glance at before embarking on the Avengers 3 circus).  Arguably the final third of the book in which he writes a script for others to poke holes in is less readable or useful for people who aren't considering a job in actual screenwriting but we forgive him because the other two chunks are so compelling.  Expect me to return to some of its themes again over the coming year.

Sarah Silverman on her Career.

Film Note I haven't actually watched this yet, but putting it here so I can remind myself to. In a rare move, TIFF have included clips that they're talking about, which are usually edited out for copyright reasons.  But yes, can't wait.

Linda Gray on Directing.

TV The most recent Random Roles on the AV Club is Linda Grey. Back in the 80s when he contract renegotiation happened for season eight of Dallas, she didn't want more money, she wanted to direct an episode. This was the response:

"... at the end of season eight I went to my producers—it was the time to negotiate for the next two years—and I said, “I would like to direct.” I had been studying with a French woman director, whom I adored. And I said, look, I don’t want to go in there and say, “I want to direct and and you’re going to let me direct, blah blah blah.” I didn’t want to be that person. I wanted to go in with a solid bag of my solid work, my homework, and I did it. I said to my director I was studying with, “Tell me when you feel that I’m ready.” So after a long time, she said, “Okay. You’re ready.”

"So I went in at the end of season eight and I said, “I’m really tired of Sue Ellen drinking and having affairs. And the world is changing and women are changing and I really would like to direct.” And I said, “I don’t want money, I’m not asking for money, I’m just asking to direct one in 52 episodes. The next 52.” And they said no."

To spoil the ensuing text, Larry Hagman threatened to resign and so they let Gray direct and as a surprise to the them, because men, was pretty good and ended up directing at least five according to the IMDb.  As a side note, I'd love to know which French woman director was mentoring her.  Let's pretend it was Agnès Varda.

The Girl Who Died.

TV Good old Donna Noble. Despite having suffered a Time Lord lobotomy and presumably still knocking around on Earth enduring the new perils besetting the planet (you bet she was on one of those planes frozen in the sky with Wilf underneath looking aghast and hoping his Casanova looking friend is somewhere around), the Doctor’s own memory of her, crying in the console room, pleading with him to show some humanity bubbles to the surface causing the Doctor to once again do something rather against the rules. You might well ask why it’s only now that the memory suddenly emerges given the shit he pulled last year, but nevertheless, this risky flashback to the Russell T Davies era, surely another part of the subtle celebration of the revival’s tenth year on television is utterly gut wrenching. The Netflix stream of Fires of Pompeii’s going to have a spike in traffic this evening.

There’s a hypothesis I’ve been cooking for quite some time about who the Doctor is, or at least how Time Lords are wired internally. In The End of Time, there’s much talk of how the Tenth doesn’t want to go because one man walks away and another takes his place. Still the Doctor, but a different Doctor. The nature of this and how it’s explained has changed over the years because different writers have interpreted it in numerous ways, from Terry Dicks’s assumption that essentially it’s not about the words it’s the actor to the majority of other writers and producers who’ve very clearly tailored his attributes to a given actor. The Eccleston incarnation is a different man to Tennant and to Smith and to Capaldi and more often than not its impossible to imagine them reading each other’s lines.

Here’s my theory. I think that inside each Time Lord there’s a core being, a kind of sub-conscious creature who is the Time Lord who then essentially inhabits each new incarnation like a suit. But rather like a TARDIS it isn’t autonomous and when each new body emerges, it essentially takes control of this core being. In other words, a Time Lord’s conscious being changes around his or her subconscious, which is also an archivist for everything the being known as the Doctor is. So when the Tenth Doctor says he doesn’t want to go, when he talks about it being a kind of death, it really is for him, as his conscious mind goes to replaced by another who has all of his memories and knowledge, sort of, but with a different approach to how they can and should be used. None of which explains the whole Romana business, of course.

When the Twelfth Doctor says he’s been given this face for a reason, it’s because his subconscious pulled that face from his memory as a way of providing guidance for this new man who’s taking control. Except he’s been wildly slow on the uptake. Part of the problem I had last year was if this was supposed to be the same man with all of the memories of the deeds and compassion of his previous incarnations, how could he then act that way? Increasingly its looking like we were witnessing a season long post-regenerative torpor. With his conscious mind on an even keel, his subconscious finally feels confident enough that if it throws up the memory of Donna in the TARDIS crying and of saving Caecilius and his family from the fire he’ll know what to do with it. Last year you could imagine him dismissing it out of hand.

If all of that feels a bit like discussion heavy obviscation its because as I write, I’m not sure what I thought of Jamie Mathieson and Steven Moffat's The Girl Who Died. My instant reaction is that it’s a hilarious, Pythoneque romp which suddenly takes some very odd narrative turns in order to set up the next episode and that even though Maisie Williams was very good, she didn’t seem to be given enough to do in order for her death to resonate enough to be an emotional gut punch but that you could argue that given the title essentially sets up that death, the paratextual noodlings about this being a multi-episode visit for the actress meant that we knew she wasn’t dead anyway and we were just waiting to see the method of recovery so that she could turn up in an obviously much later setting in the following episode which is presumably were she’ll have a much stronger role anyway.

On the whole, this near stand alone Vikings adventure was just a welcome change. With the exception of The Time Meddler and the iconography of The Curse of Fenric, probably for reasons of cost in relation to convincing production design, this is a time period barely tapped by the television series.  There are also only sporadic appearances in the spin-off material, the key texts being Jenny Colgan’s Eleventh Doctor hardback Dark Horizons about a Scottish village under constant menace from a Viking horde and Marcus Sedgwick’s The Spear of Destiny in which the Third Doctor is caught between two warring factions during a search for Odin’s weapon. Perhaps its because Vikings tend to be utilised as antagonists. I’m not sure, for example, that we’re even told what the Viking warriors here were doing before they met the Doctor and Clara, though the indication is that it’s something the Time Lord probably wouldn’t agree with.

Like Mathieson’s Flatline, this is about the Doctor in purely heroic mode, the whimsical figure who, as Clara recognises, throws together an otherwise inconceivable plan, in this case by proving to some farmers that they can’t actually be warriors and that its entirely possible to fight without picking up a hand weapon because what else are you supposed to do against a villain who’s taking cues from a Terry Gilliam animation on how communicate with humanity (“A blessing, a blessing from the Lord! God be praised!"). All of which is hilariously played with Capaldi and Coleman at their comedic apogee, the latter notably during the description of the action we’ve just missed as broken villages loll about as we *lol* too.

The Mire are as much a narrative function as an alien race. Apart from having an MO straight from Soylent Green via Jupiter Rising, they generally exist to be a menace in a similar way to the kinds of monster or the week or fortnight or month (depending on the publication era) of Doctor Who Adventures and the solution to punishing them is in just that mode. Giving one of them a human face, albeit modelled after a God, does provide some point of interest, but recognising everything else which is happening the episode, the writer purposefully barely sketches them in. Perhaps for monsters to make their mark in the revival they have to be the key point of the episode, as per the Weeping Angels and we haven’t had anything with that kind of complexity since the turn of the regeneration.  Which isn't to say that this lot won't make good on their threat and return.

Weaving through that is Ashildr's story. To use this word again, the Doctor ruminating on how his choices affect time isn’t especially new, as the overt flashback to Pompeii underscore, but it’s the fact of this version of the Doctor having those concerns, to see the pain of Eleventh during Vincent and the Doctor washing across Twelfth’s face worrying about how saving one person can create ripples coupled with some of the manic rule breaking bravado of Tenth during Waters of Mars, knowing full well that his actions will have consequences even if the Time Lord’s aren’t around to tut at him from under their giant circular hats. Capaldi’s performance in these moments is superb and if you want another example of how he’s answered the question for himself about who the Doctor is, it’s here.

There’s also Clara’s acceptance of Ashildr’s death. Way back in World War Three, when Harriet Jones notices the rather blaze attitude of Rose considering all the deaths which have been occurring in Number 10, the companion suggests that travelling with the Doctor changes you. Clara herself seems to have become inured to death now too, both of the Vikings on the space and unsurprised in some ways here about the girl’s demise even having guessed the cause and that perhaps the Doctor was well aware that this might be the outcome. But this no longer shocks her and indeed it’s the Doctor’s kindness which probably astonishes her more, especially having had to convince him to stay earlier in the episode. This is probably the most mature portrayal of the relationship between Doctor and companion we’ve had in quite some time and equal, particularly in comparison to last year.

The writing in the closing scenes is multi-layered and complex. On the one hand it is exposition heavy, the Doctor explaining what he’s done, why he’s done it and what the results might be, cue Arthur Darvell screaming at his television that he didn’t get a spinning homage to George Pal’s The Time Machine crossed with the Genesis Wave when plastic Roman Rory guarded the Pandorica for two thousand years (while it brought Amy back to life). But it’s also thick with the themes of the opening Dalek two-parter about having the right and the Doctor having created a hybrid (the resurrection scene itself being reminiscent of Laszlo’s resurrection in Evolution of the Daleks). To an extent, the Doctor’s become Davros to Ashildr, utilising alien technology in order prolong her life.

But what’s unusual about all of this is that in televisual terms, this is a cliffhanger in which mystery resides in the results of the Doctor’s own actions and his self-revelation that in allowing his subconscious right of way the man he is now is going to have to deal with the consequences of leaving the gate open. If the Doctor hasn’t saved Ashildr there’d be no The Girl Who Lived. Also, at the risk of thinking too far ahead, these two episodes will also be analogous to The Ark, both in terms of structure, revisiting characters in two different time zones in what’s essentially the same story, and also in that Dodo’s illness is what changed the status quo of the Security Kitchen in a similar way to the Doctor’s actions here albeit on a more conscious level. Bet there won’t be many reviews which make this comparison.

Having written all of that I think am able to have an opinion now and it's much the same as before. I liked it. I laughed a lot and it’s lovely to have the heroic, questioning whimsical Doctor back.  But it's tonally all over the place and  I think bits of it feel rushed and that we’re never quite properly introduced to Maisie’s character early on and there’s a lot of reliance on cross franchise empathy with Arya Stark but that some of this will be mitigated by her return in the next episode and rewatching the two together. We’re five episodes into the series and the whole thing has an undercurrent of reliability which is really comforting. I’m back to looking forward to the next episode again for the first time since the Moffat era 1.0 and how brilliant is that?

Olivia Wilde on Producing.

Film Olivia Wilde has decided that the only way to get the kinds of films she wants to appear in to be made is to take a more active producing role. After gaining some experience on Joe Swanberg's superb Drinking Buddies, she's now going to champion female filmmakers, beginning with Reed Marano, an otherwise cinematographer who's new film Meadowland, in which she's starring and producing (trailer above). Buzzfeed interviews:

Wilde was also motivated by her desire to support a female filmmaker in an industry where directors who are women are still consistently overlooked. In her quest to get funding for the film, Wilde was confronted directly by the gender bias she was rallying against.

“It was incredibly difficult to get financing,” she said. “Reed Morano has DP-ed Oscar-[nominated] films. She is no newbie. Of course she’d make a great director based on [her] experience. So for me, it seems like a pretty safe investment. I wonder if it would have been easier if she were a man. I suspect it would have been.”

The piece is diplomatically short on detail. We don't discover who refused to fund the film and the reasons they gave (presumably because to break those confidence could affect future projects).  Let's hope the funding process on Marano's next film, Lioness, coming in 2017 film and starring Ellen Page is much simpler.

Dunham Massey.

During the First World War, this Georgian house, set in a magnificent deer-park, was transformed into a military hospital, becoming a sanctuary from the trenches for almost 300 soldiers.

To mark the centenary we have turned the clock back. Discover what life was like for the patients and how members of the Grey family helped injured soldiers to recuperate. Spend time in the ward, nurses’ station, and operating theatre as you experience the Stamford Hospital as it once was.

Dunham Massey has one of the North’s great gardens, with plenty to inspire throughout the year, including a stunning rose garden and one of Britain’s finest winter gardens.

Heritage Let's begin with some route talk. When I last visited Dunham Massey for the other project, I travelled all the way to Altrincham from Liverpool Lime Street, changing in Manchester then took a bus out from there.  This time, having consulted the ever useful Moovit app, I trained-it to Warrington then took a number 5 bus out to the house shaving a whole hour off the journey each way.  Not that it was quite that easy: at the travel office I asked for a train+bus ticket and the clerk busked and just gave me a Warrington rover ticket for the other end which was entirely invalid for the journey so I had to pay the fair to the property again on the bus.  On returning to said office to ask for my money back I was told that refunds due to clerical error required a £10 fee - so we pay them ten pounds even if they're the ones that make the mistake.  Imagine that system in other retail situations.  A complaints form is in the post.

Dunham Massey's the first place I've used my National Trust membership card which arrived in the post on Saturday.  The covering letter is short but still somehow made me weep. It says, "This is the start of something exciting.  Goosebumps, wonderful memories and many stories to share [...] Your membership isn't just the beginning of your journey with the National Trust.  It's the start of finding a a place you love."  Even if that wasn't written by Sharon Pickford, Members and Donors Director despite the letter having her facsimile signature and instead someone in the publicity department, it's still just the sort of poignant Doctorish sentiment which I needed, for various reasons, at the moment I read the words.  This is very much the reverse of "You wouldn't want to be a member of any club that would have you as a member."

As you can see from the above synopsis, the house has changed dramatically since my last visit.  Whereas then it was about displaying the history of the house across the generations, and I urge you to revisit that entry for a potted history of the building and its inhabitants, currently the interior has been changed to reflect a single three year period in its history, when the ground floor rooms were transformed into hospital wards and operating theatres and the then current owners of the house, the Stamfords and Greys aided in the care of soldiers who were broken and ripped apart by the war.  Based on photographs and eye witness accounts, halls have been turned into a replica ward,  recreation room and nurses quarters with an operating theatre set up at the bottom of a stairwell, the upstairs rooms largely changed too to recreate how the living areas would have been like at that time.

Judging by the reproductions of contemporary photographs in the spaces the accuracy is stunning, right down the patterns on the blankets, the playing cards on the bedside tables and the curtains on the modesty blinds.  When the display began, the house administration apparently assumed there wouldn't be much change in visitor numbers but these increased to such an exponential degree, pretty soon timed entry was introduced at ten minute intervals, but from my experience yesterday, the spaces were still very busy for a stately home on a cold October Wednesday afternoon.  Even with these crowds in the spaces, it's impossible not to become swept away into this history, aided by the sounds of patients in pain emanating from the bed clothes and diagnostic boards at the end of each outline the injuries some of these men had to endure.

The ticket to exhibition is a pamphlet filled with facts about the hospital.  It tells us that Dunham Massey was one of 3,244 auxiliary hospitals created to treat the wounded, designated between April 1917 and February 1919.  By the time of its closure, 282 soldiers have been treated.  But the effects of the war continued for both them and the house owners who even after returning the various rooms back to something of their original state won't ever have been able to think of their home in the same way.  Indeed much of the belongings and treasures which went into storage in one of the large hallways stayed there until the house was handed over the National Trust in 1976, subsequent generations losing track of what was there.  That room is partially returned to that state in this recreation, furniture covered in flysheets, the walls covered in many more paintings than usual.

Verisimilitude is aided by a group of actors playing various inhabitants of the hospital who wander through the spaces in costume playing short scenes, about sixteen different in all.  The effect is frankly unnerving, like seeing ghosts stepping through time like an episode of Torchwood.  We're asked not approach them, but we daren't as these fearless players,  offer their short performance pieces in a way which is entirely convincing.  There's the flirtation between patient and nurse, the rivalry between amateur and professional caregivers, the pain of post-traumatic stress and the tragedy of wife visiting the hospital searching for her husband and heading away empty handed.  I've nothing but admiration for these players who can remain in character amid the gaze of visitors with their cameras and noise and disinterested chatter.

The version of me who visited the halls for the paintings would have been disappointed if he'd left Dunham Massey until now.  Although a couple of the rooms have been turned into exhibition spaces to highlight the treasures of national importance, the silver and whatnot, in seeking to bring the atmosphere of war the designers of the display have quite rightly returned luxury items into the shadows, the artworks I venerated last time are barely visible amid the low lighting and any information about them has been removed.  They'll all be back out again next year when the interior changes again with a new emphasis on an even earlier inhabitant, the Booth family of whom there was apparently scandal.  But for at least another month until the current exhibition closes, it's about stepping into the war period.

Stepping outside after a couple of hours, I decided to finally take the ranger tour of the grounds, which was supposed to be an hour's duration but stretched out for an extra forty minutes as ranger Bob, who's apparently been visiting the house and gardens since the 1950s offered thorough, interesting explanations for everything from the hollow trees still charred by the effects of the blitz to the slaughter house used as part of the park's utility for breeding deer during the Georgian period.  Their descendants are still in the park and were always in eyeshot as we walked around, the tour group gasping with excitement every time they hopped past.  My favourite fact was that the house's Mill originally used for grain, later wood, was the model for The Old Mill by Atkinson Grimshaw which is displayed in Leeds Art Gallery and I remember vividly from when I was a student there.

In other words, on the whole this was a happy, contented day and there's little doubt that if I lived in the area, the grounds would be somewhere I'd want to spend a lot of time (they're open 365 anyway due to being a legal right of way).  Even having received my card, part of me's become quite nervous about visiting too many houses, too quickly.  Glancing through the handbook I see that the National Trust owns a variety of different kinds of property but I don't want to become as blase as I did during the art collection project or treat the visits as a chore or box ticking exercise as can sometimes happen.  The trick with this will be to take things slowly, relish each visit for the privilege that it is.  Plus the revisits, oh the revisits.  Dunham Massey changing its interior again during the the closed winter months means I'll be back again next year.

Jennifer Lawrence's Wage.

Film From Lenny, Lena Dunham's new newsletter:

"It’s hard for me to speak about my experience as a working woman because I can safely say my problems aren’t exactly relatable. When the Sony hack happened and I found out how much less I was being paid than the lucky people with dicks, I didn’t get mad at Sony. I got mad at myself. I failed as a negotiator because I gave up early. I didn’t want to keep fighting over millions of dollars that, frankly, due to two franchises, I don’t need. (I told you it wasn’t relatable, don’t hate me)."

Unarguably, J-Law's the most famous actor in American Hustle thanks to the two franchises she's talking about and yet they thought it fair to pay the three blokes more money.  Shame on them.  I daren't think how much Scar-Jo is getting at Disney for The Avengers films in comparison to her co-stars.

My Favourite Film of 1977.

Film The first film I saw at the cinema was Pete's Dragon.

At least I think it was. Having asked my parents, they seem to agree that it must have been though they don't know why they chose that in the end. I think it might even have been that my Dad wanted to see it and since it was of a low enough BBFC rating I was brought along too instead of asking someone to babysit me.

If it was at this first release, I would have only been about three years old so you'll have to forgive me if I don't have some wild anecdote about seeing the film. The only image that's lodged itself in my greys is of a little boy, which I have to assume is Pete, dancing along the road with the dragon which on reflection might have been from a trailer montage at the beginning of a VHS release for some other Disney release later.

The only solid memory I do have is of walking away with Mum and Dad, down the stairs from the 051 cinema on Mount Pleasant to the underpass, this being a rare example of me at that age being in town relatively late, I'm assuming past ten o'clock. From what I can gather this would have been early 1978 (oddly enough at about the same time as Star Wars and it's pretty typical of things that the giant animated dragon film would be my first cinema experience).

Having thought about this event across the years, there's one anomaly which has always, not so much bugged me, as given me pause.

Back then, in the 1970s, we lived in Speke which for the uninitiated is a suburb way out in the sticks of Liverpool, so far out that it was part of Whiston until 1932 when it was bought by Liverpool Corporation from the original owners, the Watt family (and indeed so old that it was originally owned by Christmas).

Going to secondary school ten years later involved a half hour bus ride to Penny Lane (yes, that one) so going into Liverpool city centre by bus in '77 would have been something of an achievement.

Which is why we'd usually see films at the Woolton Picture House (see Star Wars). A few years later there was an ill-fated evening trip to see a rerelease of Herbie Goes Bananas which we missed because the newspaper listing was wrong. It had already been replaced with Videodrome. I cried and cried in the rain outside the telephone call box as my Dad phoned home to tell her.

Or we'd make the semi-slog to the Cannon Classic on Allerton Road but that only tended to be on extra special occasions or if I was being taken by relatives. That's how I saw most of the Bond films in my youth, though I slept through most of Octopussy. If I'd been especially well behaved I'd be bought a hot dog which was a Cannon speciality.

So why did we travel all the way into town for Pete's Dragon and why wasn't it on locally? Aha, perhaps we met Dad after work - he worked in the city centre.

Hold on ... I'll ask my parents about that too ...

It's quite simply. Mum says its probably because that was the last place where it was still showing. The 051 was a second run house in those days.

Either way, that answers that question.

Moral: Ask your parents about things you can't remember. They'll tell you stuff.

Miranda July interviews Rihanna.

Music And she's star struck, bless her. A really well written piece in the style of her first person books:

"Souls are funny things. They stay constant even when the outside changes, or when the heart makes mistakes. Souls don’t really care about good or bad, right or wrong — they’re just true. Everlasting. It makes you sound dumb to talk about this stuff, which is why no one could tell me exactly what it was about Rihanna. But millions of fans don’t seem to need it explained to them. A soul just knows a soul. I never told you she was pretty because that’s not what I experienced. My understanding, from the moment she sat down, was that we were in love. We were the most in love any two people had ever been. The sun was finally setting. We’d been talking for almost two hours. I just had one more question."

Don't forget to watch the interview with Miranda about interviewing Miranda. It has one of the most Miranda July moments you'll ever see.

On The Doctor and Strategies.

TV Just a short note.

One of the running themes of reviews of last night's episode of Doctor Who, Before The Flood, including mine to be fair, is how the Doctor's solution to returning from the dead, hiding in a box for several centuries, has been used as a plot device before, notably in the shape of the Pandorica and by Captain Jack in Torchwood. Oh and the passing of a message via a hologram resembled Blink.

This is a common complaint you see about the programme. That the Doctor uses such and such a device, or the narrative takes such and such a familiar turn and isn't that boring and repetitive and why couldn't the writer have tried something new.

Well now, and I'm including myself in this, stop.

One of the inherent problems with a television narrative, especially if it resolves itself around a single protagonist, is that their arc has to be more fluid than it would be in a more self-contained text like a film. To an extent, the characters have to remain relatively static or at least change more slowly than they would over ninety minutes.

Doctor Who has been running for over fifty years and it's only in considering last night's episode that I realised that the Doctor going out of his way to find another solution to the problem for the purposes of narrative originality would be have been illogical and frankly unrealistic.

In fact, a strength of Doctor Who, his way of "learning" if you will, is that he's gained the ability to repeat game plans across time, to know when a survival strategy or approach to repelling an alien invasion works and being able to replicate it when the situation requires or the opportunity arises.

As with so many things, this was even turned into a character point during the Eighth Doctor novels when he and Sam Jones actually gave such strategies numbers, rather like the Eleventh Doctor's "rules". When she left he was somewhat bereft because he'd shout a strategy number at the new companion who wouldn't have the slightest clue what he was on about.

Most often the Doctor does have to utilise bespoke solutions in unique situations.

But when we talk about how the Doctor uses similar approaches for dealing with Bootstrap paradoxes it's because he's realistically realised how best to deal with them and is making the necessary arrangements. Blowing the dam in Before The Flood to create that piece of expected history in the same way as The Fires of Pompeii, albeit with a smaller death toll.

Before the Flood.

TV Let’s look into the future. At a certain point what looks like a generally positive review is going to take a turn for the worse. I’m telling you now because it’s important that you should be prepared for it even though the very reason for this change in tone and how it will appear isn’t unlike its emergence in the episode. It’s a shame and I wish it wasn’t going to happen and because that’s the case I’m also giving you enough time to calculate what it might be. I appreciate that you’ll now spend the next few paragraphs wondering what I’m on about, unless you’ve already guessed because you’re thinking the same thing, in which case no matter how much you might want to change this future you can’t. The opinion has already happened. Roll credits.

In most and nearly every respect, Before the Flood is a fabulous episode which almost carries on the high quality of the first half. As is now becoming standard with the Moffat, a second half does not necessarily mean more of the same, as a base-under-siege tale gives way to Doctor Who’s more recent genre, the paradox or Moffat loop.  In a brave move, writer Toby Whithouse recalls Listen and actually has the Doctor explain to us the concept of the Bootstrap paradox for a change, though not to the extent that we don’t have to google it. When you actually do google it now, the first result is the wikipedia entry about causal loops and the second is a handy not to mention entertaining primer on the topic opportunistically posted by the Radio Times website just as the teaser ended.

Older fans will notice that the example the Doctor gives about Beethoven has actually happened on various occasions in the spin-off media but with a different genius, William Shakespeare, who literally dropped out of history in the second Eighth Doctor audio and whose legacy was saved in a similar way to how the Twelfth Doctor describes in Nev Fountain’s fifth Doctor piece, The Kingmaker. The TARDIS Databank informs me that the Doctor actually met Beethoven himself on several occasions, witnessing his birth, receiving an organ lesson and returning him from some intergalactic party in this online prose story. When we’re doing celebrity historicals again, it’d be nice to have someone musical appear.

The notion of the Doctor addressing his audience is beginning to feel perfectly natural. Back in The Feast of Season and The Face of Evil it was a bit of a punchline, but between Attack of the Graske, the aforementioned Listen and the various recordings made for exhibition tours, he’s almost become the Time Lord equivalent of Francis Urquhart (or Frank Underwood for readers in the US) and I’d certainly welcome an episode were he actually does this all the way through offering an insight into how his brain works and intellectual strategies. Not that it will ever happen because a Doctor who intimately goes around explaining himself all the time rather works against the contents of the words in the actual title of the series.

There’s so much to talk about in the teaser it threatens to overshadow the rest of the episode (can we keep the guitar version of the theme now please?) and given the late hour due to continuing insistence on broadcasting this ostensibly family show so it finishes after the watershed, let’s press on. Apart from to notice that this continues to be a series which feels more confident about itself that it can drop this sort of thing into an episode which isn’t otherwise trying to be an event as such, is simply a next instalment. The extent to which we should acknowledge Moffat or Whithouse for this idea will presumably be revealed in ensuing interviews and Pixley archives, but nonetheless, yes, the show’s had a dose of vallium and is doing veeerrry well.

To an extent, what both of these episodes end up being is a slight merging of ideas from a couple of previous scripts. The notion of a giant mythic beast taking the souls of others, including an S&M favouring Tivilion, so that they become amplifiers for a message is not unlike Whithouse's own The God Complex and we now find it fused with the paradoxical merging of two time periods from Tom McRae's The Girl Who Waited albeit with a handier, though less visually interesting than a spy glass communication tool of an iProduct. Remember back in World War Three when Mickey taking a photo of a Slitheen and sending it to the Doctor seemed like the height of technology? Now here’s the Doctor and Clara communicating via Facetime across time zones.

There’s also a heavy dose of Father’s Day in here too, of course, though ironically, O’Donnell, the one person who might have noticed, the Whovian of the group, is killed off before she can realise why she’s getting a romantic close-up. Or after. Or … anyway her verbal equivalent of the pin-board in The Black Archive is interesting for its omission of Donna and for the mention of a Minister of War, oh and that the Doctor’s reaction on hearing that name (“I expect I’ll find out soon enough.”) seems to be a reference to this piece of fan fiction in which he meets Kim Possible. O’Donnell is added to the list of potential companions about whom we ache when they expire (mostly because Morvern Christie is so damn good).

Before the Flood trundles onwards from there hitting all the right notes in correct order building on its mysteries and playing to the strengths of this sort of story in which a large percentage of tension is as much about how things happen and why though we’re not quite sure how much the Doctor knows.  Even as Bennett berates him over O’Donnell’s body, the Doctor’s poker face gives few answers other than to confirm his fear that he knew this woman would be next having communicated the names back to himself. If for much of the time the key influence on this incarnation is the Fourth Doctor, here he’s offering us full on Seventh but it’s in a calculated way.  A choice.

What’s perhaps surprising to me about that is how accepting I am of it. The notion that he might have chosen to let O’Donnell die in order to test a theory with his primary motive being to save Clara isn’t that unlike his deplorable attitude in Mummy on the Orient Express. But the episode’s central thesis is that some elements of history cannot be changed, which suggests that his sober reaction is actually an understanding that his test and her death are part of series of events and his realisation of that is what leads him towards his decisions at the end of the episode. When he says that this regeneration is a bit of a “clerical error” as well as arithmetically could it also be him acknowledging that there’s something else wrong?

If only I’d been able to make these sorts of rationalisations last year. But the Doctor of season eight was a much more ambiguous figure, whereas that ambiguity has largely been evened out, especially in terms of Clara who he seems to genuinely care for again and not just in terms of duty in a way which didn’t seem to really exist last year, when it wasn’t ever clear why they travelled together. Now they give each other a sense of purpose and they both understand that as evidence on numerous occasions in this episode. The depth of characterisation within the writing helps, especially when she berates him about his “survivor guilt” which is the just the sort of thing only someone who knows you profoundly can say when you need it.

All of which pop psychology ignores just how scary the episode is in places. The scene, which is sure to be thought of in the future as Doctor Who at its most scary, in which Moran’s ghost menaces Cass, recalls J-horror films about sensory deprivation. The cross cutting between the scrape of the axe and Cass’s audio world are masterfully directed as is the twist in which she turns her debility into an ability and saves herself. I can only echo my comments from last week with additional applause for the sections that will only be eligible to people who sign giving those of us who’re unable an incentive to learn and for introducing us to a character who can only really be represented on television and presenting her on television.

But then, after all that, despite this having a fantastic script, beautiful direction filled with classic dutch angles from Daniel O’Hara and atmospheric visuals, notably the moment when the Doctor enters the crypt of the church and into a strip of blue light intersecting the centre of the screen indicating immediately his height within the space, at almost exactly half an hour in that the episode almost falls apart. Such things happen in Doctor Who and there’s not a lot as a viewer that you can do about it other than try and look beyond it especially since you know there’s at least another fifteen minutes to go and the episode up until that point has been pretty well put together. If it has a diagnosis, it’s Androzani syndrome. Welcome to the future.

In the days leading up to the episode there’s been much hype in relation to The Fisher King. How Corey Taylor of popular beat combo Slipknot would be providing his roar and the delicious notion of having this mythic figure appear in Doctor Who with all of the connected resonances, not least in relation to the Doctor himself, a man who has the properties of the Holy Grail running through his veins. As the episode progresses we hear the figures gut wrenching tones as provided by Peter Serafinowicz in full on Darth Maul mode, finally receiving a Who credit having managed to swerve from Big Finish and a couple of years on from his Dalek relaxation tape. What kind of beast could possibly resonate that sound?

Then he lumbers in looking like a piece of Spinal Tap set dressing and almost derails the episode. Not quite at first. Unlike the Myrka, he isn’t revealed in bright light and so at least impresses us with his scale and I like to imagine whenever this happens that Mat Irvine sits at home on his couch nodding approvingly as he laments again what might have been. But slowly as this object bares down on Capaldi its clear that something gone terribly wrong with the thing and there’s a reason why he’s mostly being presented in silhouette. The voice doesn’t match the visuals and  what we have is admittedly a beautifully designed piece of sculpture without any expressive ability whatsoever beyond its sheer scale.

Serafinowicz’s performance continues to impress and yet what we’re looking at doesn’t match at all and undermines everything. Obviously across the show’s history, there’s been a lot of voice work that has managed to broaden the value of under-performing visuals. Sutekh’s costume is menacing to a degree with its black sheen and red trimmings but would be nothing without Gabriel Woolf who was so good he was hired again to do much the same in The Satan Pit. The Daleks. The Cybermen. Well, yes, ok, this has happened a lot and hasn’t always been successful, though I do have a soft spot for the Garm, especially his smile at the end of Terminus achieved by tipping his mask upwards slightly towards the camera.

But the problem with The Fisher King is that while Serafinowicz is speaking the only place his voice could be coming from is those silly pincers on the front and they're simply moving backwards and forwards and not matching his speech patterns at all in a way not seen since The Web Planet. As the Doctor’s plan comes into effect no matter how much the editors apply the Kuleshov effect in an attempt to suggest some kind of performance is coming from that boney face, and Murray’s music thunders dramatically in the background, the costume is simply too large for wearer Neil Fingleton do much physically to express the monster’s reaction and we’re left to try and imaginatively fill in the blanks with not a lot to go on.

Reading all of this back, the comparison with the Myrka is unbelievably harsh. This alien war lord is an extraordinary creation from a design point of view and it’s to the show’s credit that it isn’t just another piece of CGI (with the added question about whether what seems like the show’s current budget would have stretched to that). You can absolutely see the image that was attempted to be captured here and it isn’t quite enough to ruin the episode completely.  The aforementioned scenes of Cass in peril occur just after he’s introduced and it's to the episode's credit that my chortling at seeing this monstrosity quickly gave way to silent dread. Yet there he is and he will be as we rewatch this story for its other virtues, just like Androzani.

Let’s deal quickly with the other couple of niggles. Firstly, the climax. Anyone else hope or assume, the Doctor would use his foreknowledge to re-enter the time stream and somehow also save the people who became ghosts? I’m not sure how, and narratively speaking it doesn’t really make sense, but the slightly smug recall of the bootstrap paradox in this closing scene only moments after Clara asks where those ghosts would end up and their ultimate fate leaves a discordant note. In some previous episodes, Hide, The Forest of the Dead and Evolution of the Daleks, what in one moment seems hopeless is suddenly turned around due to the Doctor’s will that everybody lives and that’s what I expected here. No.

Then there’s the box and the fact that last week I managed to predict that it would indeed be the Doctor lying in it, being half right about the origins of the ghost. I was a bit disappointed to be honest, especially as this isn’t the first time we’ve seen this trick used in the franchise, now and then by Captain Jack on screen, the Pandorica of course, and by the Eighth Doctor in Martin Day’s novel The Sleep of Reason (with the notion of all of these time/space incidents existing on Earth at the same time sealed in various boxes). The whole thing’s entirely logical within the context of the story but I was still underwhelmed when he burst forth in that kind of “Aha, so I was right all along …” kind of way. I like surprises.

All of which is to generally and genuinely amplify some minor niggles. This is still a superior Doctor Who story with beautiful performances, clever writing and direction and the three of us still watching live should be well satisfied that this is the state in which our favourite show’s in at the moment. According to the BBC website, next week’s episode has a co-writing credit, Moffat and Jamie Mathieson which indicates something’s afoot presumably something surround Maisie Williams’s character. Again we ask. Who is she? Who is she? Yes, she's probably just some in story figure who we’ll see again later in the series for some reason. But wouldn’t it be fun if it does turn out to be someone else? I say again, I like surprises.

Ant-Man and the Wasp.

Film One of the best moments in the Ant-Man film is the look of wonder in Evangeline Lilly's eyes on seeing the Wasp suit. That look of wonder is one of her killer apps - she's utilised it in Lost and The Hobbit films before. After the film's less than expressive box office, I'd feared that we'd never actually see her character Hope in that suit for anything more than an extended cameo at some point. Well woo-hoo:

"Now that Phase 2 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe has officially reached its conclusion with the release of Marvel’s “Ant-Man,” we have new details on what to expect in Phase 3!

"Following our hero’s debut adventure in this summer’s “Ant-Man,” Scott Lang will return alongside Hope Van Dyne on July 6, 2018 with Marvel’s “Ant-Man and the Wasp.” The sequel will mark the first Marvel Studios film named after its heroine."

Which isn't necessarily anything to be proud of after a decade and all of these films and she's sharing the title but it's a start. Nevertheless MARVEL clearly think they have something here because in order to incorporate the film, they're shifting the Phase 3 schedule around again:

"Additionally, Ant-Man’s second adventure will lead to a couple of other films shifting their dates, with Marvel’s “Black Panther” moving up to February 16, 2018 and Marvel’s “Captain Marvel” landing on March 8, 2019.

Finally, three untitled Marvel Studios films will premiere on May 1, 2020, July 10, 2020, and November 6, 2020.

Which also confirms the existence of a Phase Four after The Infinity Gauntlet in the year when I turn forty-six.  This means that Phase Four will end when I'm fifty years old.  Jesus.

No word on director or writer yet but I'd be quite pleased to see Peyton Reed return should he want to.  The storyline seems pretty obvious -- the two of them entering the microscopic realm to find Hope's mother which sounds like it could be quite expensive.  Also it'll be about who's cast as the mother.  Perhaps we'll finally get Meryl Streep into the 'verse.

Here's the new revised release schedule.

May 6, 2016
Captain America: Civil War

November 4, 2016
Doctor Strange

May 5, 2017
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2

July 28, 2017
Untitled Spider-Man film

November 3, 2017
Thor: Ragnarok

February 16, 2018
Black Panther

May 4, 2018
Avengers: Infinity War – Part 1

July 6, 2018
Ant-Man and the Wasp

March 8, 2019
Captain Marvel

May 3, 2019
Avengers: Infinity War – Part 2

July 12, 2019
Inhumans

Jennifer Lawrence's Marshmallows.

"I don't wash my hands after I go to the bathroom."

My Favourite Film of 1978.

Film Right, let's talk about Star Wars too.

But first:  1978.  Much of this list has worked from the rule of slotting films into the year of release as per the IMDb.  But for various reasons, see next week, that simply doesn't work for Star Wars and so I'm invoking the "Stories We Tell" rule and borrowing the year when the film received its national UK release, which is the first occasion I could have seen the film.  So here we are in 1978.  Sorry Grease.

Except unlike most people of a certain age, I don't rightly remember the first time I saw Star Wars.

My best guestimate is at Woolton Picturehouse in 1980 during a matinee double bill with The Empire Strikes Back. I remember clearly walking to the back of the auditorium with my Dad to buy a carton of Kiora during the closing credits. This was at about six years old, so I can't really tell you how I felt about it, indeed I was probably more excited about the concentrated fruit drink which was too fruity for the crows. I loved that advert.

For years I thought I'd imagined or dreamt all this but then I discovered a quad poster at a film fair, this quad poster, which was reassuring. There are few things more disappointing than when the memories of life's milestones a revealed to be fraudulent.

Of all the films on this list, it's also the text which I've watched the most.  More than Adventures in Babysitting, more than Ferris, more than Star Trek VI, even before George Lucas began to fiddle about with its rusty innards.  More even than my actual favourite film, When Harry Met Sally.

Every rerelease at the cinema, ever new format and I've been there to tut at the changes whilst marvelling at the restorations.  About the only version I haven't owned is the nutty non-anamorphic laserdisc transfer which appeared along with the rerelease of the "special" editions on dvd because I'd already bought first boxed set version.

I learn as I write that this is a film which was even changed significantly during the original theatrical run.  Not surprised.

What draws me back to Star Wars?  There's the nostalgia bullshit, the stuff we all know about.  There's having something to talk about with friends because no matter which other franchise people are fans of, Star Wars exists as a kind of neutral territory we can all meet on.  Star Wars is Switzerland.  Plus habit.  Habit is important too.

Like plenty of films of that era and in general, Star Wars is just sort of always there.  Ubiquitous.

Even in childhood, even before I owned a video recorder of my own, I began the format journey with some second hand copies of the original panned and scanned CBS/FOX releases.

The occasions at primary school on strike days and near summer holidays when half the school would crowd around the institutional television to watch an off-air, or as has always been the case, off-ITV, recording of the film complete with adverts which would sometimes be fast forwarded through depending on whether the teacher was paying attention.

When visiting Germany were a relative was stationed in the RAF and hiring a video from the local newsagents. Other important hires during that holiday where many of the original 60s animated MARVEL series notably The Might Thor: "Across the rainbow bridge of Asgard to where the booming heavens roar!"

At various friends houses across the years when it was impossible not to watch all three together, usually friends who like me could quote the whole thing but would still shush each other just in case we missed some new nuance of what was being said.

I saw it twice during the epic 1997 release of the special editions.  Once on the giant screen one at the Odeon London Road with friends and then again on the tiny screen five upstairs at the front of an empty auditorium before returning to screen one for Empire which was released again just a few weeks later.

Imagine that now - a twenty year old film, albeit in a new version, in general release and projected on the most important screen in most cinemas and taking massive box office.

But was I ever a fan?  Not sure and when it comes to giant multimedia franchise properties, what is a fan anyway?

Essentially if you're of that certain age in the UK, science fiction fandom is dominated by this trinity, Star Wars, Star Trek and Doctor Who.  I'm aware than in the US, until recently, it's been more of duopoly between the first two, but in general it seems to be you were either a fan of Wars or Trek or Who.

As we've discussed I've done Trek. I'm currently Who (just about).  Before both of those it was Transformers though arguably that only really stretched to the comics and comics in general were a huge influence.  There's Shakespeare too but let's not confuse everything for now.

I worked my way through a fair amount of Star Trek's spin-off novel back catalogue and Doctor Who's story runs across pretty much every artistic medium with a narrative.

Yet despite Star Wars having its own expanded universe, apart from some book and records (specifically Planet of the Hoojibs) (you can read along with me in your book) (you will know it is time to turn the page when you hear R2-D2 beep like this...), bits of the radio adaptation and having a run of the MARVEL reprint comics bought for me from Speke Market for a few years, I wasn't attracted to anything.

Which isn't to say I didn't try.  I even bought a copy of Timothy Zahn's Heir to the Empire (Star Wars: The Thrawn Trilogy, Vol. 1).  Still haven't read it (which is probably just as well now).

The only exception is some of the computer games, notably the original PC version of X-Wing which I played with friends into the night at university, someone on the joystick piloting a craft, the other at the keyboard playing R2 with laser and shield strength, which was about the only way to be successful with some levels.

Having considered this for a good ten minutes before sitting down at my laptop to type this into the Blogger box the only reason I can come up with is that I didn't see the point and that I didn't see the point because unlike Star Trek and Doctor Who, Star Wars tells its story pretty well across the three films.  Once you reach the celebration at the close of whatever version of Jedi you happen to be watching, the story's done.

Now, George didn't think so, hopefully JJ's found a way out of that narrative quagmire, but ultimately, I must have subconsciously decided that however much I like these characters unlike those other television properties which were chemically designed from the off to generate stories, by hitching himself to Joseph Campbell and Valdimir Propp in telling us the story of farm boy makes good, George essentially limited his options.

Leland Chee, keeper of the holocron (such as it is now) would obviously disagree with me.

And as the superb The Clone Wars demonstrated, it is possible to engineer something within the same universe to fit a television narrative structure and I loved every minute of that.  Even began to like Jar Jar a little bit especially in those episodes in which they clearly dared themselves to produce entertaining television that just featured that damned Gungan and the droids.

The anthology films are also intriguing but they're generally going to be telling known stories.  Rogue One is the Star Wars equivalent of The Dambusters, telling a familiar story albeit in a fictional universe.

But the further adventures of Luke, Han and Leia and the team?  Not so much, especially since the films end on such a positive note.

Does that stop me from being able to call myself a Star Wars fan?  Or is this like so many other things now, a matter of self-identification not to mention cultural monogaminity as I've always assumed.  As a Doctor Who fan I'm not really allowed to call myself a fan of any of these other franchises or something like that?

This is probably getting a bit silly.

Perhaps it's enough for me simply to say that Star Wars is my favourite film of 1977.  Or 1978.  From a certain point of view...

Less Furious Road.

Film The Guardian's interview with George Miller has an interesting titbit about the preview process of the best action film of the year (sorry Joss):

"The studio released the film with an R rating in America, very rare for productions that cost as much as this one – somewhere in the vicinity of US$150m. From a financial point of view it is considered a given that releasing an R-rated movie, rather than editing it down to a more widely palatable PG, significantly impacts performance at the domestic box office. Potentially by tens of millions of dollars.

Says Miller: two versions of Fury Road were completed and screened to test audiences. “I’m happy to go on the record as saying we tested both versions and it was very clear that the bland version scored a lot less across all demographics than the version you see,” he says.

“To the great credit of the studio they realised if we decreased its intensity and took away a lot of its key imagery it would basically take the life out of the film. It was the studio that said if we compromise the film too much to get a PG, we won’t have a film at all. I thought that was very brave."

It would be an interesting academic exercise to see the PG version of the film, what exactly was lost (although I expect we can probably guess).  There have been plenty of examples of films having been compromised for ratings purposes, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire notably in the UK which had plenty of blood shots removed for theatrical release.  Sometimes you just have to let films be films.

Now, See Hear, Doctor.

TV When writing about Doctor Who's Under The Lake yesterday, I suggested it might be a good idea for the BBC to make a signed edition available as quickly as possible on the iPlayer. It's not on there yet, but yesterday there was a signed screening of the episode with Q&A as part of the See Hear festival and this making of piece from the programme itself about Sophie Stone's part in the episode has been posted online.

It's predictably fascinating, especially in relation to how the signing sections were prepared with Stone, Zaqi Ismail and a signing coach working through the next group of scenes to be filmed the evening before and negotiations about which pieces of signing would be used. Stone and Ismail essentially have their own dialects of signing due to communicating with relatives leading their own signs for various words.

Here is a less complex Extradental version:



Which includes how they had to make up signs for words which don't have official equivalents yet.

“Girly-girl”

Film I think I'm just going to keep posting these quotes because something has to change. Whilst it's true that Raimi's Spider-Man was filmed and released over fifteen years ago, the second paragraph explains why this is still relevant.

  Kristen Dunst being interview by Elizabeth Day in The Observer:

"We start talking about whether the pressure to look a certain way is stronger for women than it is for men. Does she think the film industry is sexist? “God. These conversations are always so, like…” She pauses and I see her actively decide to say what she really feels. “I mean, yeah,” she concludes. She recalls that, when she was filming Spider-Man at the age of 18, the older men on set – including director Raimi – would call her “Girly-girl”.

“I didn’t like that at all. I mean, I think they meant it as endearing, but at my age I took it as dismissive.” At the time she was too intimidated to speak up for herself. But recently she found herself working with the same first assistant director on another film. “I told him how much that upset me,” she says. “And he treated me completely differently on this movie and we got along really well. He’s a great guy.”