With the passing last week of Sir Christopher Lee, it seemed fitting to mark the event in some small way by viewing one of his films. Of his large and impressive rap-sheet I only have The Wicker Man, and so Mrs Simian and I spent our Saturday night knocking off another milestone - we finally watched The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies.
Let me say in opening that this is not a good movie to watch if you're after classic Lee. Much of the great man's role was filmed in isolation, and vastly supplemented by distracting CGI and an obvious body double keeping his face out of shot (a pause to recall the fate of another great cinematic Dracula actor may or may not be appropriate here). Unfortunately, the appearance, scripting and execution of Lee's role in Five Armies sums up the maority of the movie to me, also.
I went in expecting to be mildly disappointed, but came away just feeling cross. This film has no heart. It's cluttered, over-saturated, poorly-edited, narratively confused, and bogged down unnecessarily with future continuity. Throughout the production of this trilogy the spectre of Lucas' Star Wars prequels was frequently invoked, and despite my doubts, I think those naysayers were pretty bang on.
The horse is some way back - it's a metaphor!
To me this movie's greatest failing is as an adaptation. A straight conversion from book to film was never going to be on the cards, pre-existing Rings trilogy or not; and yet as I mentioned in my review of The Desolation of Smaug, the result waters down the core of Tolkien's story with unnecessary diversions. Jackson, Boyens and Walsh's insistence on turning the story into an ensemble piece of elven, human, orc and wizard leads longside its titular hobbit and his dwarven counterpart makes the series title almost redundant. The tragedy of Thorin gets a good covering here, but it's delivered with a hammering home of other things - a made-up blood feud with a character from Tolkien's Rings Appendices; an elven-dwarven romance, Laketown refugee politics, Sauron's gambit with Smaug - also from the Appendices (the reason of Erebor being a strategic stronghold seemed a weak and unconvincing explanation given the movie's confusing geography), the fate of the elves (again) and the all-important scene-setting for the Rings movies.
On paper these additions don't look so bad - some even compliment the sketchiness of the original book in detail. But their execution here is just shoddy, and underline to me how in selling the Laketowners, Legolas' parents, Dol Guldur and Dain short on detail, the great Professor did better service to Bilbo and Thorin as characters. Here it's almost the reverse.
The extended edition is yet to come, of course. I say Enough!
In recent weeks the roster of TV superheroes availabe to see here in NZ has shifted. We still have Marvel's Agents of SHIELD on Thursday nights, and Daredevil is accessible to those with a Netflix account. but it's fair to say that terrestrially at least, things have quietened down for the most part. Arrow closed off a reputedly acklustre third season with more pillaging of the Caped Crusader's book of enemies and plotlines (still, if you're going to steal...), while Gotham brought its first year to a bloody close and maybe a reduction in the castlist. The biggest finale for me, though, was Flash's.
Saviour of the universe! In my house at least.
This series started with not a lot and just grew and grew. The Flash comes across to me as a second-tier DC superhero - as any of the roster are behind the Big Three of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. Yet with a carefully-put together season of mainly one-off metahuman-of-the-week stories, slowly building towards recreating the comic strip's Rogue's Gallery, teasing the identity of the mysterious benefactor Harrison Wells, seeding the season with peripheral allies (Firestorm mainly, but let's not miss out those fun Arrow and Atom crossovers) before ending with a genuinely moving and breathtaking finale. You sit there in wonder that what you're viewing is a television budget show, with the requisite rules and limitations of storyline, narrative and location, and thenan item of headwarepops through a time-space vortex. This is a series that got my derisive wife invested on the strength of a seemingly peripheral man-child support cast member (Cisco Ramon take a bow!) brought in Mark Hamill mid-season, and then a pretty convincing CG gorilla before the curtain went down. I genuinely can't wait for the next run. It looks like anything could be possible right now with this show.
I never got into Arrow, and increasingly Gotham became a grim watch. The future Batman references were a minor addition in the end - I actually took to this series as a procedural with two great characters in Jim Gordon and Harvey Bullock easily, and the lingering complaint that it's not speeding up towards the obvious finish line seem silly to me. With two promotions among the support cast to core cast for next season it looks like not much will change. I hope for the best.
Also hoping for the best: Legends of Tomorrow, which looks rather crazy and as camp as Christmas on the strength of the trailer, Wentworth Miller's ham-tastic Captain Cold and Arthur Darvill sporting a Tenth Doctor wardrobe and not entirely convincing anyone that he's taking his new casting as a time traveller entirely seriously either. I'll stay for Atom shrinking, Dr Martin Stein, Firestorm flying, Hawkgirl in costume and the occasional Flash appearances. I guess I'm in, then.
Proving not all Kryptonians are grim-faced these days
Also from the DC stable and Flash Producer Greg Berlanti is Supergirl, the pilot of which I saw accidntally thinking I was watching the epic-length trailer (sort of). So far it looks fine to me, though nothing astonishing. Comparisons to early Flash are perhaps apposite, so maybe the best is yet to come, and I do think CBS got the lead casting bang on. It hoves very close to established Superman mythology and tropes once more, and I can't decide whether this is a sensible move for a pilot or not; and of course I can't know whether nods to Kara Danvers' famous cousin in Metropolis will be a staple of every episode to come. Unfortunately, Supergirl has a large hill to climb whichever way you look at it - a legacy series based on a succesful movie franchise, a female-centric superhero vehicle, or a newcomer to a busy genre. I wish it well, because I'd love to see something like this do well, especially without the questionable 'support' of a male-centric and over-entitled fanbase.
Winter has arrived, and with it 2015 is halfway through. Funny old year. Some triumphs, some upsets; by early next week I may well be on the hunt for a new job, my present one quickly running out, but with this turn of fortunes perhaps an opportunity for some reinvention. A change would be nice.
Outside the workplace there's been some quiet shifting of priorities for me: I'm gradually coming around to the quite-settled realisation that I'm robably no longer a fan of Doctor Who. The old series has been in my life for over thirty years,and it's the old series I still love, but the new stuff? Ehhh. Really like Capaldi, Jenna Coleman's good, too. But the rest just doesn't grab me, and that's okay.
Besides, there's still heaps of stuff to get excited about: two of my favourite bands have put out albums this year, and two more are expected to before the year's over. Four albums is nearly three more than I usually buy in twelve months! TV's been pretty decent, and there are some witty, fun, informative and just really interesting podcasts out there forthe listening. Before I got into a regular cycle of CV updating and cover letter writing I was working on a Mirkwood-themed model (yeah - remember those guys?) and I'm thinking of returning to study. Haven't done that for a few years, but I do remember I got a lot better at it the older I got.
So perhaps the second half of the year will be a busy one, and hopefully a productive one. I'll keep the blog up, anyway.
Of all of the new releases in my Unexpected Year of Dad Rock, a new album by The Darkness was the least surprising, but still hotly anticipated. After years of spending time with other projects the Hawkins Brothers' return with 2012's Hot Cakes was itself surprising and very welcome, but its success couldn't be measured much beyond the album's merit as a comeback - and that's a kind of album which can be fraught with options. New direction? New dynamic? Old school styling to win back the lost faithful? In the end Hot Cakes took a turn for 'more of the same, but moved on a little', with the band being in their thirties, family men and with quite a lot of water under the bridge, the return was 'enough' for all concerned. But even in the world of the comeback, you're only as good as your next album - so what of the follow-up?
Time has again moved on, and on either side of Last of Our Kind The Darkness have lost a drummer - first their core stickman Eddie Graham, then not long after LOOK's release, drummer for this album Emily Dolan Davies; but I think it's an element of the band's newer resilience that they've weathered these changes and forged on, aided for the time being by second generation rock royalty, Rufus Taylor, son of Queen's Roger.
For its efforts the album is something newer also - no older compositions dusted off and given a studio polish (a la Hot Cakes' 'Nothing's Gonna Stop Us'), but all new songs, and a new energy. Opener 'Barbarian' is a rip-snorter with a great heavy riff and measured falsetto, and sets the tone for an album about heroes, villains and invasions - see also 'Roaring Waters' which matches 'Barbarian's' story of Edmund the Martyr's fall with the Sack of Baltimore. But that's enough history lessons, because the only history for the remainder of the album is that of 'the rock'. 'Open Fire' is very much Electric-era Cult, and 'Mighty Wings' takes heavy stylistic cues from Queen's Flash Gordon soundtrack with its synths and posturing lyrics. Before you write that one off, though, Dolan Davies' drums in 'Wings' are indeed mighty, and it demands loud volumes to be played at.
I'm less enamoured with the ballads on this album, though Hot cakes' ones weren't hitting the same spots as the band's debut either - but for wat it's worth, I quite enjoyed bassist Frankie Poullain's
vocals on 'Conquerors'. Not a bad album ender - though if you're a fan and a little more discerning, the Special Edition of this album contains four extra tracks including some belters in 'I Have Always Had the Blues' and the Van Halenesque 'Million Dollar Strong'.
In all, LOOK is a big mark up from The Darkness' previous two albums, and easily reaches the top two of a discography of, er, four. It makes me want to hear more, and that's what albums, debuts or comebcks or mid-career ones, are supposed to do.
And I haven't even mentioned the title track. Oh, hang on - yes, I did.
Let's go back to the Eighties. The mid-Eighties. The Cold War's not yet over, and we don't really trust those Russians, but we also don't want to go to war with them because what would follow would be a Very Bad Thing for the entire world. This dread of brinksmanship and the possibletipping point into nuclear oblivion is seeded throughout a lot of creative works from this era - even music. Even here in little old, Nuclear Free (tm) New Zealand.
Soviet Snow hails from Shona Laing's big comeback album South (1987); this version is a revamp of the earlier one on South's predecessor, Genre. In the time between albums the Cold War has lingered, perhaps a little less worryingly than the early 80s, but other, equally worrying events have unfolded.
At the time of its release I took the song's title literally, being aware of panic across Europe of fallout drifting with weather currents across Europe and as far as Ireland following the catastrophe at Chernobyl. Laing's song of course was composed before the reactor meltdown, but the incident allows a second reading of the song's chorus and, if I might be so bold, grounds it a little:
Now we're wide awake, the world's aware Radiation over Red Square Creeping off to cross Roman roads Fear of freezing in the Soviet snow One eye on the winter - oh, just a hint of Soviet snow.
So there's that, at least.
The video is pure Eighties - all big caps CG text buzz words and video montages. And of course, there's the Soviet and Russian imagery and iconography,
none of it demystifying the Soviet Union of the Eighties, but anchoring
it in a jumble of popular associations, a visual word association game. Laing is a far cry from her long-haired, freckled teenaged Seventies self with spiky, cropped hair (the infamous 'femullet' is, as far as I can remember, only a feature of the video of her bigger hit (Glad I'm Not a) Kennedy), her face intruding from angles, like Rodchenko's Lilya Brik. One more single, Drive Baby Drive and Laing's career would shift again, back out of centre stage; but this song at least freezes a moment of Southern Hemisphere pre-Glasnost anxiety, two years before the Wall would fall and the thaw would begin.
God I love the Nineties. It's close to being the last decade I ever took notice of the pop charts, regularly watched daily music channels (initially the local Juice TV channel over breakfast, but later MTV in the UK when it had a brief life here in NZ), and when buying a CD happened more than once or twice a year for me. You never think that this sort of thing will leave you, and for some of my friends it hasn't entirely, but for me it has. The Nineties are now for me a golden age of grunge, Britpop, a glam revival, electronica, and ready-access to alternative and local music. New Zealand music was begining to find its feet in a new way in the Nineties - Flying Nun had become part of the Establishment, and local artists were begining to get international recognition. Were were, in a small way, as it seemed on those music channels at least, in amongst it - part of the conversation.
All of which has little to do with the fortunes of one Neil Finn, whose music career in 1998 was already twenty years old through Split Enz and Crowded House, and for whom a first solo album at forty would seem a curious prospect. I've not heard anything more from its parent album Try Whistling This, but 'She Will Have Her way' is a personal favourite, with reliably enchanting Finn harmonies between chorus and verse, and some lovely production, not to mention a very infectious "to doot doot doo!" vocal refrain that makes this song a winner with Jet Jr at bedtime.
The video is a hoot, too. A fun play on Attack of the 50 Foot Woman and The 30 Foot Bride of Candy Rock - both as old as Finn himself, but also somewhat redolant of Nineties pop culture as well, to me. In film andTV weird science and UFOs were making a comeback with a mini Roswell craze, Independence Day and of course the runaway success of The X-Files. I'm drifting, and this is a topic I may return to shortly anyway. In the mean-time here's Finn's goofy unlikely wooing song, slightly delayed from its intended ANZAC eve posting, but better late than never.
