Shat to the Heart

Well, I’ve been a bit poorly recently, and – as you would – I took to my bed with Netflix and ended up watching a bunch of William Shatner movies. Not the Trek ones from the 80s and early 90s, as you might expect, but rather more diverse fare. A friend of mine recommended I try to get hold of White Comanche, a 1968 paella western in which the great man plays good-and-evil twins, but for some inexplicable reason Netflix has decided not to lay out on the rights to this movie (and it’s not on YouTube either). But you can’t have everything.

What Netflix does have is a couple of documentaries Shat (as I fondly think of him) wrote and directed, The Captains (from 2011) and Chaos on the Bridge (from 2015). You may be able to discern a bit of a common theme here, for it appears that Shat, like his castmates, has come to terms with the fact that – regardless of his achievements as a singer, novelist, horse breeder, and guest murderer on Columbo – it is Star Trek for which he will inevitably be remembered.

There is perhaps a certain oddity to Chaos on the Bridge, in that it largely concerns an iteration of Star Trek with which Shatner himself was not directly involved: the formative years of Star Trek: The Next Generation (henceforth Next Gen, to save my aching fingers). This was the first of the comeback TV shows, starting in 1987, also known to the general population as ‘the one with that bald English guy’.

As all but Next Gen‘s most rabid fans will admit, the first couple of seasons are tough viewing (‘almost unwatchable’ in the words of Ronald Moore, a later participant in the franchise and also the creator of New BSG and Outlander). I myself stuck with it when it eventually turned up on the BBC in 1990 because, well, it was Star Trek, wasn’t it, and there wasn’t any other new SF being made at the time. (I do think the total lack of any competition was a significant factor in Next Gen‘s survival and eventual success. Given that TV is hardly short of SF and fantasy shows nowadays, expectations for Star Trek: Discovery – coming next year – will obviously be significantly higher, and that show may well be in for a rough ride on all fronts.)

Watching Chaos on the Bridge I was kind of struck by the odd notion that while Star Trek may have been created by Gene Roddenberry, its ultimate success was in many ways despite him. A possibly heretical idea in Trekkie circles, but if you look at the dodgiest, stodgiest, least sexy bits of Trek made in Roddenberry’s lifetime, many of them occurred when the Great Bird was at his most hands-on as a producer. There’s an argument to be made that by the time of the late 80s, Roddenberry was more interested in being recognised as a humanist visionary than in actually making good TV, but there are enough horror stories in circulation about the behind-the-scenes shenanigans on Next Gen to suggest that there was a definitely clay-like texture to the great man’s feet.

In terms of actual Roddenberry-bashing, the documentary’s contributors are relatively circumspect – no sign of the ‘goddamned lying, hypocritical, deceiving, thieving, son of a bitch… bullying bastard’ which was writer David Gerrold’s considered opinion in a recent book on Trek‘s production history. Most of the opprobrium is instead directed at the shadowy figure of one Leonard Maizlish, Roddenberry’s lawyer, who took up residence on the show and actually started rewriting the scripts despite having zero experience (this contributed significantly to Dorothy Fontana’s decision to leave the show). Interviewees fondly recall imagining pushing Maizlish out of second storey windows, and so on.

The decision just to cover the early, troubled years of the production is a curious one, mainly because it deprives the narrative of a proper conclusion. Doing the full seven years, over the course of which Next Gen found its identity as a much more consistent and impressive show, would have made for a rather different (and longer) film. It couldn’t just be that Shat only wanted to shine a light on a troubled version of Star Trek in which he had no personal involvement or responsibility? Surely not. Anyway, the film has enough life and inventiveness about it to make up for the fact that there’s probably not much here its target audience doesn’t already know about.

And so to The Captains, an arguably poorly-titled documentary from 2011 in which Shat tracks down his successors as lead actors on Trek and interviews them mano a mano (or mano a womano in the case of Kate Mulgrew from Voyager) about their lives and experiences. I say ‘poorly-titled’ as it is not really about the captains as a group, or indeed as individuals, but mainly creates a suitable venue for everyone involved to talk about Shat, whether directly or indirectly. Shat himself (note to self: awkward phrasing, think about possible alternative) is clearly in his element, and one is ineluctably reminded of Nick Meyer’s assessment of him as ‘all vanity, no ego’.

Various lesser stars from the Trek constellation make appearances – Nana Visitor, Robert Picardo, Jonathan Frakes – along with a fairly substantial interview with Christopher Plummer, there because a) he was the Shakespeare-loving Klingon villain of Star Trek VI and b) he was a mate of Shat’s way back. But the most arresting stuff is the set-piece interviews with the other actors. (The Netflix version of the film, by the way, appears to have been edited down a bit, removing the unauthorised footage of Leonard Nimoy which was the cause of the final estrangement between him and Shatner.)

Shat buzzes around between the different coasts of the US and even over to Oxford to talk to Sir Patrick (apparently ignoring the Keep Off The Grass signs at Christchurch College in one shocking sequence), and it’s fair to say that some of these discussions are more interesting than others. Patrick Stewart is always good value, but some of the other chats can get a bit earnest and are really memorable only for the little stunts Shat contrives: hiding in a cardboard box while waiting for Kate Mulgrew, singing show-tunes on horseback with Scott Bakula, arm-wrestling Chris Pine on the sidewalk outside Paramount Studios, and so on. Most of them are pretty much as you’d expect, with the real exception being Avery Brooks, whose consciousness still appears to be spending some of its time in the Gamma Quadrant. There’s some singing here, too, and at one point Shat asks Brooks if he’s ever thought about life after death, with the one-time Emissary responding by playing the piano and laughing to himself. It is quite magnetic to watch, somehow.

In a way you can’t help thinking that this would have been a more revealing film if it had been directed by somebody else. Some of the most interesting footage is of Shat appearing at a Trek convention in Vegas and interacting with the fans – ‘a rapturous reception’ and ‘eating out of the palm of his hand’ don’t begin to do justice to how this goes down – and very briefly we see a glimpse of a Shatner who isn’t a tongue-in-cheek self-promoter, but someone rather more thoughtful and human. But then it inevitably occurs to one that we’re just seeing this because Shat let it go past in the editing process, so is it the ‘real’ him?

In the end this is probably more of interest to Shat-watchers than Trekkies generally, but such is its occasional weirdness I can imagine it finding something of an audience amongst people who enjoy watching really, really odd vanity projects, as well. What I suppose it comes down to, ultimately, is that there are two kinds of people in the world – people who can’t get enough of William Shatner and all his works, and the sane ones. The former group at least are well served here.

 

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The Black and White Spidey Show

Which weighs more, a ton of oranges or a ton of feathers? It’s a trick question, of course: they are, in one respect at least, equal. But not identical: I know which one I’d prefer to nibble on – and which one I’d choose to nap upon, for that matter. I think this distinction between the ideas of identity and equality is an important one, too often overlooked.

This has been brought to mind by, of all things, the fall-out from the Sony hacking scandal, one of the consequences of which has been Sony relinquishing its death grip on the Spider-Man movie rights license and agreeing upon a sort of time-share agreement with the people at Marvel Studios itself. And one of the consequences of this looks like being the sacking of Andrew Garfield as Spider-Man’s on-screen embodiment, with open season being declared on recasting the character.

The internet has reacted to all of this with its usual restraint and objectivity. (Apologies, by the way, to any of the friends who’ve already seen me articulating some of the impending opinions in a different venue, and indeed to anyone who feels I misrepresent views which I disagree with.) One of the issues is – I am tempted to say ‘inevitably’ – that of diversity, and the possibility of casting a non-Caucasian performer as Spider-Man’s alter ego.

There is a wrinkle here. The casual movie-goer may be very aware of Spider-Man’s best known secret identity, Peter Parker, who has been a fairly middle-class straight white dude since 1962 – said movie-goer may indeed be sick to death of him, given there have been five Spider-Man movies since 2002. Rather less familiar, however, may be Miles Morales, a parallel-universe version of Spider-Man who’s been around since 2011. The key difference is that Morales is, ethnically speaking, black-Hispanic.

So it’s not just a question of whether the new Spidey should be white or not, but whether they go with the Parker or Morales character. There are, I would say, sound reasons for going with both versions: Peter Parker is almost as famous a character as Bruce Wayne or Clark Kent, with the kind of audience investment that goes with this. On the other hand, using Miles Morales could spare us yet another instance of Uncle Ben taking a bullet, in addition to inevitably garnering some publicity for the change of character, and, yes, increasing diversity in the on-screen superhero community.

(I should say I am generally pro-diversity, but not militantly or dogmatically so, quite simply because I am dubious about using mainstream entertainment as an instrument of top-down cultural engineering.)

Having found the Webb-Garfield Spidey films rather dull, certainly compared to the Raimi-Maguire ones from ten years ago, I’d personally be more interested in seeing a Miles Morales Spider-Man film than yet another incarnation of Peter Parker. But I wouldn’t be surprised if famously-cautious movie moguls opted to go with Parker again.

What does bemuse me a bit are suggestions that they go with Peter Parker again but change his ethnicity. This might make a bit more sense if Miles Morales didn’t exist as a popular alternative version of the character, but given a diversity-friendly alternate exists, why make fundamental changes to a 50-year-old and much-loved character? I can’t figure it out.

It’s not as if the movie is going to be called Peter Parker, after all: the name with marquee value is Spider-Man. There’s no reason why people wouldn’t go to see a Miles Morales movie that wouldn’t equally apply to one with an ethnically-transformed Peter Parker. If people aren’t going to go and watch a movie with a black superhero, it doesn’t make any difference what his civilian name is, and if they’re only going to see a movie featuring the Spider-Man they grew up reading, then they’re not going to go and see one with a black Peter Parker because the comics character has a five decade history of being white.

‘Peter Parker is not fundamentally white’ runs the counter-argument here, but I am not even completely sure what this is supposed to mean. It reminded me of a similar discussion – possibly I am gilding the lily here, because at the time it felt like an argument – about whether a particular character had any ‘essentially male traits’. The suggestion in both cases seems to be that being white, or being male, is not a trait – is meaningless in and of itself, and contributes nothing to a person’s essential identity.

If you discard things like gender, race, orientation, and so on, I wonder what is left as a basis of personal identity: memories and experiences, I suppose, but aren’t those fundamentally informed by all the elements I just mentioned? These things are not just cosmetic labels you can pull off and move around without it impacting every aspect of an individual – I said as much when articulating my misgivings about DC’s decision to make a character with seven decades of history as a straight guy suddenly gay. Changing any of these things basically means you’re creating a new version of the character, if you ask me, and to claim otherwise is a bit silly.

Championing the idea of a non-white Peter Parker seems to me to be an attempt at having your cake and eating it: you want to hang on to the name recognition and audience investment that a character has accumulated over decades of publishing history, while simultaneously making fundamental changes to that character in the name of diversity. It completely disregards the fact that characters as popular as Peter Parker have lasted so long precisely because people have invested so much in them: dedicated fans of Spider-Man, which I will freely confess to not being among, really care about Peter Parker, and think of him almost as a real person, complaining when he’s presented inconsistently, and so on. The one thing guaranteed to annoy this kind of fanbase is to make arbitrary, glaring changes.

It almost feels as though there is some kind of secondary agenda at work, one which is trying to suggest that notions of race, gender, and orientation are not just equal but actually meaningless, in the sense of expressing any real difference. I don’t see any problem with accepting that people of different ethnicities or genders or orientations are fundamentally of equal value as human beings. I believe that myself; you would be some kind of medievalist not to, I think. But that doesn’t mean there are not deep and fundamental differences between men and women, or between the cultural histories of different ethnic groups. Equivalency does not equate to identity.

I can’t help but see a parallel with another issue which has caused me some vexation and indeed heartache recently. Not long ago the BBC broadcast a series called Atlantis, about the adventures of a straight white guy. This was the replacement for a series called Merlin, about the adventures of a straight white guy. This in turn followed Robin Hood, about the adventures of a straight white guy. Now, there are arguably sound reasons for making Robin Hood a straight white guy, and also to some extent Merlin the wizard. But the main character in Atlantis was an original creation, and the BBC had a blank slate to do whatever they liked. Did they get any stick at all for not being even a tiny bit more adventurous? Not that I ever noticed.

Yet the voices clamouring for a more diverse recasting in Doctor Who are sort of relentless, once again despite the long history of the character operating in certain terms and the accumulated weight of fifty years of unequivocal masculinity. The demand is once again for absolute continuity and fundamental change at one and the same moment.

Just as the militant pro-diversity movement seems much more interested in interfering with the Doctor’s identity than in persuading the BBC to lead a less high-profile fantasy show with a non-white or non-male character, so there seems to be rather less interest in using the already-existing, diversity-friendly Miles Morales character than in bringing about arbitrary change in the much better-known Peter Parker. And I can’t help but wonder why. You want a non-white Spider-Man? Use the non-white Spider-Man who’s been appearing in books for years. Insisting on turning an established white character black when a viable alternative exists only suggests that this isn’t simply just about diversity.

 

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Able Was I, Ere…

…I saw Idris Elba’s name coming up a lot earlier this week in connection with more information released back into the wild as a result of Sony’s current embarrassment. (Sorry palindrome fans, I just couldn’t make it sing somehow.) Apparently, apart from thinking that Angelina Jolie can’t act and possibly thinking about leasing Spider-Man back to Marvel Studios, one of the things that Sony executives like to spend their time doing is thinking about who should be the next James Bond, and – not for the first time – Elba’s name has come up in connection with this.

First and foremost, the thing to remember is that Daniel Craig is still in-post and will be for at least another twelve months: he’s already started shooting Spectre, after all. He’s contracted for the film after that, as well, though Eon do have form when it comes to unexpectedly dumping successful Bonds – just ask Pierce Brosnan. Whether Craig is retained for the c.2018 Bond movie will probably depend on how well Spectre does with the critics, but I’d be surprised if he went. So I doubt the job will be up for grabs much before 2020, by which time Elba will be 47 or so, which would make him the oldest person to take on the role.

But putting this to one side, is colourblind casting an option when it comes to a character like James Bond? There’s no question that Elba is an accomplished and charismatic performer – I thought that this was someone with a lot of potential the first time I saw him, which was in 1998’s Ultraviolet – but, inevitably, issues of ethnicity and diversity raise their heads when this kind of question is asked. The New Yorker, for instance, ran the following impressively subtle and ambiguous cartoon on the topic.

I wouldn’t have said I was a particularly heavyweight Bond fan, but as this is just about the only major franchise from my childhood I still feel a genuine sense of investment with, maybe I should reassess my position. Certainly, on the ‘could a black actor be plausibly cast as Bond?’ question, a couple of things leap to mind – both regarding exactly who the main character is in the series of Eon films.

The notable thing about Casino Royale is that it is a hard reboot of the Bond series: this isn’t just a new leading man, but a new version of the character, and this is made clear in the movie. This naturally gave Craig and the film-makers a lot of latitude which was, perhaps, denied to Pierce Brosnan. The logical question for those of us who worry too much about trivial stuff is, therefore, one of whether we’re supposed to regard all the preceding films as happening to the same person.

The Bond films are so connected to real-world geopolitics and technology that it’s very difficult to argue that they don’t all happen in or around the year they were released, and this instantly makes it massively implausible that the man who visits Jamaica in 1962 is the same one dropping into South Korea in 2002. Clearly there have been most likely a number of soft reboots along the way, but the question is when this happened.

There is a school of Bond thought that, actually, in the context of the films themselves James Bond is only a codename assigned to a succession of individual agents (in same way Matt Damon’s character is renamed Jason Bourne in that other franchise). It’s an idea, I suppose, but one with virtually zero evidence to support it on-screen beyond George Lazenby’s jokey cry of ‘This never happened to the other feller!’ at the start of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Set against this must be the same film’s painstaking efforts to make the audience believe that Lazenby-Bond is the same guy as Connery-Bond (Bond clears his desk and encounters props from previous films), not to mention various references to Roger Moore’s Bond having been married to the Diana Rigg character from OHMSS.

There are usually so few continuity references between Bond films, so few recurring villains, and such an absence of ongoing plotlines, that you can insert the reboots and rewritings of the character’s history pretty much anywhere you like, although the first seven films all seem to be in continuity with other, while some version of the same events seems to have happened off-screen to Roger Moore’s Bond – hence the marriage references and the brief appearance by supposed-to-be-Blofeld in For Your Eyes Only. (In the same way, the appearance of the tricked-out DB-5 in Skyfall is presumably meant to suggest that Craig’s Bond has been through some version of Goldfinger – rather a shame we didn’t get that film instead of Quantum of Solace, but never mind.)

Anyway, it will be interesting to see if the next change of Bonds triggers another hard reboot. Normally I would doubt it, but casting a non-Caucasian actor would really demand it, I suspect: colourblind casting is one thing, but colourblind recasting another.

This still begs the question of whether casting a non-Caucasian Bond is viable, even following a hard reboot. I suspect it depends on how you view Bond himself – if he’s just a generic tough, wise-cracking, ladykilling, male-power-fantasy-fulfilling cartoon, character then there’s nothing that ties the character to any particular ethnic group. If, on the other hand, you’d prefer to see him as a coherent, aspiring-to-be three-dimensional character – specifically, the one created by Ian Fleming – then it may be a bit more problematic.

Fleming himself obviously never conceived of Bond as anything but white – he admittedly describes him as ‘dark’ at one point, but also likens him to Hoagy Carmichael. There’s also the fact that Fleming writes Bond as – by modern standards – an appalling racist. ‘Koreans were lower than apes,’ is a representative insight into Bond’s thought processes in the original novel of Goldfinger. On the other hand, this aspect of the character has understandably been dropped from the movie version.

One bit of Fleming which has been retained is Bond’s heritage as a Scots-Swiss orphan. The question, if Fleming’s conception is to be retained, is really one of whether a Scots-Swiss Bond can also plausibly be a non-Caucasian Bond. I wouldn’t rule it out, but I must confess to feeling dubious about the prospects of this idea.

But, if we’re going to think about this in terms of Fleming’s conception of the character, then we’re talking about a white Bond, a very traditionally British Bond, a son of privilege, an elitist, a snob, an imperialist. The question is not just one of whether an acceptable version of all these characteristics can be brought to the screen by a non-white performer, but whether any non-white performers of note would be interested in doing so.

In short, then, I would say that a non-Caucasian Bond is possible, but it would be a departure, and a version of the character more widely removed from the source material than any other up to this point. You might say that Bond has already evolved a long way away from Ian Fleming by this point, and I would agree, but only up to a point. Much of the success of the Craig version of Bond is, I think, down to the way in which the films have authentically returned to the roots of the character. Stepping too far away would undeniably be a risk.

 

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The Axe Man Writeth

A brief glance at the stats for this blog tells me that, as of this writing, there are somewhere in the region of 650 film reviews hereabouts. I have been writing these on and off since 2001, and fairly solidly since 2010 (sometimes at the rate of three or four a week). At a conservative estimate, I must have written about 600,000 words about films, all told (the last two novel-length stories I managed to finish, in comparison, amounted to only 230,000 words between them). I have never really thought very deeply about the nature of film writing in all this time: or at least I hadn’t until I read Hatchet Job, the latest movie-related tome by Mark Kermode.

Kermode’s first book was the story of his life in film; his last one was an extended series of moans about the things he finds particularly irksome about modern films and the contemporary movie-going experience. I liked it, even if I found it a bit on the negative side. Hatchet Job, despite the title, is a bit more balanced.

Kermode opens by celebrating the most memorable result of the film critics’ art: the devastating negative review, kicking off with ‘Forest Gump on a tractor’ (The Straight Story) and taking in ‘Miss’ (Battleship), ‘an explosion in a stupidity factory’ (A Good Day to Die Hard) and some of Kermode’s own most vitriolic utterances, such as ‘An orgy of dripping wealth which made me want to vomit’ (Sex and the City 2), before going on to question, if not the value of film criticism in the modern world, then certainly the need for professional film critics as a species.

This is the core theme of Hatchet Job, which Kermode comes at from a number of angles: the decline in the respect in which critics are held, the sometimes strained relationship between critics and film-makers, the current crisis in the lot of old-school print critics in an increasingly digital age, and so on. Along the way Kermode gets to indulge himself on many topics which will be familiar to long-term followers, such as the plight of the skilled projectionist, the careers of Ken Russell (Dr K like) and John Boorman (Dr K very no like), and how lovely Silent Running is, as well as some which may be new, such as the unreliability of the automatically-moderated reviewing system on Amazon.com and the pernicious influence of test screenings on film storytelling.

He is, as you’d expect, very good company throughout, even when dealing with unpromising material without a great deal of interest to anyone not specifically interested in the lot of film critics (he is touchingly eloquent when paying tribute to two deceased giants of the field, Alexander Walker and Roger Ebert, even though it is clear he is rather more simpatico with one than the other). If you know much about films, you are unlikely to learn a lot, but at least you will hear things for the second or third time in a highly entertaining way.

You might expect Kermode to be precious and possessive about his status as someone who’s paid to watch and talk about new films for a living, and perhaps he does come across as slightly self-mythologising when he expresses his belief that ‘[f]or a critic’s opinion to have value beyond the mere joy of the savage put-down or the well-constructed defence, I believe they must have something personal at stake, something about which they care, and which they are in danger of forfeiting.’ (He’s talking about the bubble reputation, by the way, not an actual job.) Yet his argument does sort of hang together. I rarely make much use of critics myself, especially since I stopped listening to Kermode’s own radio show (sorry Doc), but this is largely because I just found myself writing my own reviews as a response to theirs rather than to the film itself, but on an instinctive level I know that I’d rather read a review from someone with a track-record and a real name than by some anonymous username on the internet.

On the other hand, though, doesn’t this just make me a massive hypocrite? My own name isn’t on this book review, after all: why should you give a damn what I think? Why should my opinion have any special value? Well, you might well say, in the case of a cruddy little blog like this one, which on average is read by no-one at all, what does it matter? Speak or stay silent, it doesn’t make any difference.

And yet, and yet. All other things being equal, I wouldn’t write at all if I didn’t think there was at least some chance of getting read (to do otherwise would be, to quote Stephen King, ‘quacking into the void’). And yet Kermode himself argues that ‘writing for free in an arena where someone else is getting paid eventually undermines the possibility of anyone being properly remunerated’. This sounds a little protectionist, I suppose, but there is a grain of truth here, surely – if the reviews on the blog are any good, then I may be taking bread from the mouths of film critics’ children – if they’re not, what’s the bloody point in them anyway?

I don’t know. I suppose the brutally honest response would be to say that if a professional critic with the resources of a national paper behind them can’t come up with something more useful and entertaining than an amateur nobody sitting behind a laptop in a garret, they don’t deserve to be in the profession anyway. And perhaps this is true. It has still made me question exactly why I am so rigorous about writing up every new film I watch, even the really boring ones.

As I’ve said in the past, I have a pronounced OCD tendency, and I think doing the reviews helps control this – also, feeding the OCD helps fend off the depressive tendency I also possess. So perhaps there is a therapeutic aspect to all this. Thinking about this has also made me realise that starting writing this blog regular coincided fairly closely with my stopping writing ‘substantial’ fiction suspiciously closely. I said in an ‘interview’ (it was a webzine feature where completely obscure individuals took it in turns to ask each other silly questions every week) a few years ago that writing is just about the only thing in the world, other than watching the 1970s Doctor Who title sequence, guaranteed to make me happy, and so perhaps obsessively writing endless film reviews has taken the place of producing fiction.

In which case it looks like that the main purpose of this blog is not to actually share opinions and judgements on films, but to shore up my mental equilibrium. If I actually ever say something worthwhile and useful about a film it is a fortuitous fringe benefit and nothing else. I’m not really sure how to process this little nugget of increased self-knowledge, but then that has largely been the story of 2014 so far for me. If you are the starving child of a professional film critic, I apologise, but I fear it may be pathological on my part. And if you are not, but you are at all interested in films and serious film writing, you will probably find Hatchet Job to be an entertaining and thought-provoking read.

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New for 2013

I know, it’s probably a little bit late for the whole New Year resolution thing – but I’ve only got back to my own place today after spending time with family for the holidays, so now feels like the logical time to think about what (if anything) I want to change for 2013.

I did a lot of thinking about this on the train home today – partly, if we’re honest, because my inimitable father drove over my foot while dropping me off at the station, and this helped to take my mind off the discomfort in my toes. I’ve gone back and forth over whether or not to share some of these ideas via the blog, to be honest, because there are obviously pros and cons involved. To wit:

PROs:

• It would add a bit of colour to a blog which usually goes on and on and on about the same three or four topics.
• Having gone public (well, sort of) I will feel more incentivised to actually stick to my guns and do the things I talk about.

CONs:

• Some of these ideas are really stupid and/or petty and I would look foolish for making such a fuss about them.
• When I fail to stick to my guns and all my good intentions lapse after a week I would feel even more reproachful towards myself than I would’ve done anyway.

Ah, what the hell, I decided to go with it anyway, because every bit of motivation is useful, after all.

And so: in no particular order, what I am hoping to do, or do differently, in 2013, on the blog and elsewhere.

1. Look at moving my career on. I always thought that after getting the DELTA I would be happy to coast along for a year or so and not worry about professional stuff. However, six months later I find I am restive, and increasingly aware that my long-term ambitions are not really achieveable with the company I currently do most of my work for. Also, it would be nice to get all my books, etc, out of storage (it’ll be five years this summer) and I can’t do that until I’m making enough to be able to have my own place.

2. Actually play some WFB. I bought the 8th Edition rulebook on the day of release in 2010 but haven’t played a single game – my last WFB outing was, I think, in February or March 2006. I suppose I want a change from 40K as much as anything. This will, of course, involve finishing a WFB army, so this is what I’m going to look at doing in the short term.

3. Write more, and with more variety. Whether this means aiming for a thousand words a day of any kind, or something else, I don’t know. In all honesty I’m really talking about fiction as opposed to endless Doctor Who waffle and film reviews. Not sure how this will work – although I’d like to have another crack at ScriptFrenzy in April. In a proper spirit of working on something which will never, ever get made I think I will have a go at writing the movie version of Flesh (an obscure 1970s SF-horror comic strip to which I don’t have the rights).

4. Waste less time playing games over the internet. This is fairly self-explanatory.

5. Not always have the TV on as a source of background noise. Use Radio 3 instead. Being the solitary individual that I am, it’s nice not to live in dead silence when I’m at home, but at the same time there’s something to be said for not being a passive consumer of TV (or anything else – at least Radio 3 is likely to be more intellectually challenging).

6. Sleep more.  One thing I’ve noticed over the last 18 months is that if I have to work the 9am slot at work for more than a month straight I tend to get sick from sheer exhaustion, because going to bed at 10.30 simply doesn’t suit the way my brain is wired: I end up shaving five or ten minutes off my eight hours every night which ultimately leaves me tired out and prey to any passing bug. More self-discipline required when it comes to bedtimes.

7. Write about different kinds of old film. I have nearly a dozen Kurosawas on DVD, none of which I’ve touched yet. There’s a pile of other movies next to the TV I’ve had for over a year, none of which I’ve written about – LoveFilm is really to blame for this. (I have suspended my subscription for the time being.) I watched a bunch more 50s B-movies last summer, which I was mostly too busy to properly review, and there are still lots of Hammer movies I’ve not properly looked at.

You know, normally I’m not one of those people who finishes every single post with a ‘how about you? What’s your strongest memory of [insert topic here]? Do you have any tips on how to [insert challenging activity here]?’ Maybe this is why I only have 35 followers after two and a bit years of operation. Hey ho. Yet I am almost moved to enquire – reader (yes, this means you), you are probably here for the film reviews (that, or morbid fascination) – exactly what lured you in? The new stuff? The backlog from the 2000s? The 50s SF? The Hammer horror? The Jason Statham? What do you like to read about?

Then again, for me the pleasure of this undertaking has always been in the writing, not actually being read – although without the possibility of the latter, I’ve always found it hard to justify the former – Stephen King’s comment on ‘quacking into the void’ comes to mind. If the massed (ha) ranks of NCJG followers rise up and cry ‘For God’s sake lay off the Babylon 5 retrospective, and we don’t like Japanese movies either’ I think it is highly unlikely I will pay any attention to this. Sorry.

8. Actually write some proper Doctor Who reviews. (As opposed to gut reactions to new episodes, lengthy analyses of aspects of the whole show, or trots through the fictional universe.) I’ve kind of been dancing around this idea – in 2001 and 2002 I spent virtually a whole year watching as much of the series as I could lay my hands on, in chronological order, writing about the stories as I went along (one such piece eventually made it into Outside In: 160 New Perspectives on 160 Classic Doctor Who Stories by 160 Writers from ATB Publishing (ISBN 9780988221000), available to buy now, folks – at least I assume it is, my comp copy hasn’t turned up yet).

That was a major undertaking – a very rewarding one, nevertheless – and I’m wary of just repeating myself. However, this is the golden anniversary year, so if not now, then when? So I am working on a way of writing about Doctor Who stories in proper detail that will hopefully be fulfilling for me and rewarding for readers. Look for them around the 23rd of each month.

Eight not-quite-resolutions is enough for one year, I would say. Pop back in December, when I will feel obliged to see how well I did (or more likely just pretend this post never happened).

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2012: Apocalypse Later

Another year gone by, and (as has become a bit of a tradition) another look at the last twelve months on the blog. Hey, if nothing else it helps to break up the endless flow of film reviews and Doctor Who-related cobblers, right?

Speaking personally, this has been a slightly odd year – the diploma course which really defined the first half of the year for me concluded moderately well, though not quite as well as I’d hoped, and as for the second half… My summer job felt like a bit of a slog for the first time since I started doing it, while throughout this Autumn I’ve felt my relationship with my rest-of-the-year employer growing increasingly strained. Added to this, since the diploma finished I’ve been without a medium-to-long-term goal for the first time since 2006, and it feels like I’ve been drifting and lacking in focus ever since. I’m increasingly realising that I need to keep pushing and challenging myself if I’m not going to lapse into self-absorption and melancholia. As I lead a fairly solitary life, something which I’ve realised is unlikely ever to change, this sort of thing is a constant concern anyway. It’s good to stay self-aware, I suppose.

Anyway, there were just under 10,000 views of this blog in 2012, which sounds nice but I’ve no idea how it compares to anyone else’s. Naive old fool, I thought I was doing okay with 35 followers after two years, before a friend chirpily informed me that her company’s blog had picked up 250 followers after a week. Over a thousand of those visits all came on the same day, mainly as a result of the Mail on Sunday‘s website publicising my piece on Peter Hitchens and Howard Marks’ debate on drugs laws (oh, the shame, the shame). Obviously I need to write more positive things about Hitchens so he links to me again, and just hope people stick around for the Hammer horror reviews. Well, I’m sure a worse plan is conceivable.

The Hitchens thing was the biggest draw of the year by far, with the bulk of the rest of the top five being bankers from 2011 – the final instalment of the original run of Natural History of Evil continues to pack ’em in, along with that silly piece about Lacey Banghard and her two great assets (her Christian name and surname, of course). The only 2012 piece to make the list was… the review of 2011 (sigh), mainly, I suspect, because it also talks about Miss Banghard. I suspect a pattern has been established.

A rare photo of Lacey Banghard where her face is the most prominent element.

Bringing up the rear was another hardy perennial, the review of The Viking Queen. I am completely stumped as to why this keeps pulling in the readers week after week after week – there isn’t, so far as I can tell, anything accidentally suggestive in there that could confuse a search engine, nor is this a notable cult film. Why are so many people reading this one post and ignoring much better-written material completely? I must confess I’m starting to get mildly irritated by it.

The bulk of what I’ve written this year has been film reviews, as usual. I thought the overall quality was higher than in 2011, but with fewer really outstanding individual films – the best things I saw at the cinema this year were Lawrence of Arabia (from 1962), The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (from 1943) and RoboCop (from 1987). Perhaps I’m being a little unfair, as there were still some great movies being released – Chronicle, The Cabin in the Woods, The Raid and The Imposter all turned out to be off-the-radar hits, while there were some quality blockbusters too – The Avengers was better than it really had any right to be, while The Dark Knight Rises, though not Christopher Nolan at the absolute top of his game, was still hugely impressive and deeply satisfying. Despite all that, if I had to name my favourite film from 2012 it would probably be Searching for Sugar Man. An extremely difficult call though.

I think I’ve gone on in quite enough detail about my issues with the Autumn’s crop of Doctor Who, especially as the Christmas show has given me hope that a new and much more impressive approach may be in the offing. Obviously 2013 will be a massive year for all of us who love Doctor Who – expectations are enormous, and it’s difficult to imagine quite how the custodians of the show and the BBC will be able to meet them all.

In the end surprisingly little wargaming or serious uke-playing happened this year, mainly because for a large chunk of the Autumn I was either on holiday abroad or in the grip of one of those emotional entanglements which has occasionally complicated my life prior to this point. A shame, because the wargaming and uke-playing would at least have given me material for a worthwhile post or four.

 Expectations for 2013 are guarded, currently: if I can work solidly and feel like I am making some sort of professional progress, and continue to be a good friend and family member to those around me, I will be happy, regardless of whether I can afford a holiday, or World War Z is any good. Although it would be nice to finally get a WFB army painted before 9^th Edition appears on the horizon. We shall see.

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The Lost Worlds of 2011

I feel the need to mark the passing of one year and the start of another in some form, but not (you may be pleased to hear) in the form of any kind of Best of 2011 list. So this is more a sort of general look back and very brief peek forward.

Getting the tedious stuff out of the way first, speaking personally, 2011 went very nicely for me, despite the fact I didn’t actually make a profit on the year, didn’t have a professional experience as good as the best one of 2010, haven’t managed to resolve any of the dangling personal issues from this time last year, and am still living in a garret. January and early February were rather dark days for me, despite the fact that for the first time ever I got paid for a piece of writing work – I had no idea if I had any kind of future in my chosen profession, and the realisation that the novel manuscript I’d spent November writing was 115,000 words of suck was not an easy one to digest.

However! I received the best birthday present imaginable when an old friend got a new job, and his first act was to give me a new job. I have been there now for ten months (on and off) and have no plans to make a permanent departure either. On top of this I finally managed to scrape a place on a Diploma course and that’s going better than I could have hoped for, too. So there are much worse places I could be in right now. The main priority for the first half of this year is to pass the course, but I would also like to have a slightly smoother summer job experience as well. If the prospect of a hassle-free divorce came along I’d jump at that as well, I expect (any experts on international law reading this, please get in touch) – not because I have any plans or expectations in that arena, but because it’s nice to keep things tidy.

The blog (you’re reading it) has ticked over nicely, boosted somewhat by my decision to back up all my old (2001-2009) film reviews from h2g2 here. As it turned out h2g2 survived the year so this was arguably a waste of time, but it’s nice to have everything together. The decision to change the blog name from So Much More Than This to the (I thought) punchier and more informative current title coincided with the number of average daily visits plummeting by at least two thirds: so there we have it, folks – if you want to be read, be vague.

A rare photo of Lacey Banghard where her face is the most prominent element.

Or write about glamour models. My most popular pieces this year (by a country mile) were both gag items about the page 3 girl Lacey Banghard. Slightly depressing but not surprising. Neither depressing nor really surprising were the continuing popularity of old items about Doctor Who bad guys and The Wicker Man (more accurately, photos from The Wicker Man – my actual review of the movie is seldom looked at, but the one for The Man with the Golden Gun is a banker).  Altogether more mysterious is the steady popularity of my thoughts concerning the obscure and rotten Hammer movie The Viking Queen, which is well inside the top 10 list of all-time most popular film reviews. Hmmm.

Carita in The Viking Queen. For some reason I feel I should reiterate that this really was meant to be a serious film.

I wrote less about Doctor Who this year than I would have expected, mainly because I’m not quite sure what to make of the show at the moment – it’s clearly brilliant on so many levels and yet it also routinely leaves me exasperated and unsatisfied. The head writer is brilliant, the regular cast is very good, the writers are mostly great and the inventors are unceasingly inventive – so why is the actual programme no better than ‘pretty good, but…’? I don’t know. I feel a traitorous cur for even voicing these thoughts, to be honest. (Case in point: the Christmas special was so slight and felt – for the most part – so inconsequential that I haven’t bothered to review or even re-watch it. Something is wrong somewhere.)

Masses of film reviews, of course, as you could have guessed. I could gripe about the low standard of behaviour in Oxford multiplexes, or the mixed fortunes of the year, and so on, but I’ve just written a thing all about that as an h2g2 original and I can’t be bothered to recycle it. So, in a nutshell:  the worst film of 2011 was The Three Musketeers, the best three (in reverse order) were Submarine, Never Let Me Go and The Guard, and the one I’m most looking forward to from 2012 is (tough call this one)… The Dark Knight Rises. Never afraid to run with the flock, this blog.

Brendan Gleeson as The Guard, my pick of the year's films.

It’s all gone a bit quiet on the wargamey front, mainly because the Diploma doesn’t allow me the time or money to do it properly. This year was mainly about the new Blood Angels army I’d been considering since 1997. Looks nice and I’m happy with much of it but it turned out to be a tough one to use well. My inability to actually get a WFB army anywhere near finished proved increasingly annoying too. Come August I may be able to do something about this.

I think the uke may be filling the role in my life that wargaming previously took, anyway, in that there’s a very precise technical element to it as well as a personal and creative one. I have no reason to think that the two shouldn’t be able to co-exist once the Diploma is out of the way – I suspect they may actually synergise quite well. We shall see.

Anyway, that was 2011. Despite all the little niggles and annoyances, if 2012 turns out to be of the same standard I don’t think I’ll have grounds for complaint – so fingers crossed and let’s find out.

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All Kinds of Every Thing

Well, it promises to be a gribbly few days here at NCJG as a new version of The Thing arrives in UK cinemas imminently. As I’ve said before, I’m a big fan of the 1951 version of this story, and I do appreciate that the 1982 iteration has qualities of its own. This seems like a good opportunity to take a look at John Carpenter’s version, which I haven’t seen in over a decade, but before that I thought it would be interesting to look back at the heritage of this story.

Three adaptations (we can quibble about whether to talk in terms of prequels, remakes, and suchlike) mark The Thing out as a bit of a banker as far as stories go – but we also have to take into account the legion of homages and other variations the different films have received. One way or another, there are a lot of Things out there of different kinds, some rather more obscure than others.

So, deep-frozen aliens under the polar ice. Back we go – where did this story originally come from? Which was the first Thing? Passing over the new version and moving back through time, in 2004 we encounter the possibly unexpected form of Alien Vs Predator, written and directed by Paul W.S. Anderson. An intruder from a different set of franchises entirely, you might say – but this film qualifies. The main difference from the Thing movies is the inclusion of a lost alien city at the pole, containing terrible secrets from ancient times – but even this, as we shall see, only confirms that this film is part of the same lineage, albeit something of a distant cousin.

Proceeding back to 1993, we meet our first small-screen Thing-offspring, acknowledged as such by its creators: the first-season X Files episode Ice, in which defrosted parasitic organisms infect a human research station in Alaska, resulting in much paranoia and carnage. The Carpenter version seems to have been the main inspiration here, with infectious sled-dogs and icky body-horror much in evidence. The parasites are discreet and unassuming little Things, but none of the others in the family could really fault them for their attitude.

Innocent Looking Things (ice parasites from The X Files).

Passing over other marginal candidates such as the 1988 War of the Worlds episode The Raising of Lazarus, we arrive in 1982 to find John Carpenter’s famous version of the story waiting for us. This is probably the highest-profile member of the clan , probably on the strength of the eye-popping visual effects.

80s-style Blobby Thing (an iteration of Carpenter’s take on the monster).

This is one of those once-seen, never-forgotten films, which may explain why it has always had such a polarising effect on viewers. It has such a strong identity of its own that it’s arguably less available as a source of story ideas and images than some of the other versions.

We encounter a botanical addition to the Thing lineage in 1976, in the form of the Doctor Who story The Seeds of Doom. Typically, this story wears its sources openly on its sleeve – scientists in Antarctica uncover an alien pod, which infects one of them and initiates a shocking transformation from human to alien.

Green Thing (a Krynoid).

This story – amongst the very best of the series – is interesting in that it seems to be both looking back to the 1951 version of the story, with its hostile, humanoid plant, and forward to the 1982 one with its grim tone and emphasis on body horror. I suspect that to focus too much on this would be a mistake, as the metamorphosis in the story seems largely derived from that in the original Quatermass Experiment – although John Carpenter himself is on record as a fan of Quatermass writer Nigel Kneale.

(It may be worth mentioning in passing a number of other references to The Thing in the history of Doctor Who – most obviously in the 1967 story The Ice Warriors, which is based around the concept of deep-frozen and hostile aliens being defrosted with inevitable results.)

In 1972 we meet one of the more obscure and distant members of the family, in the Spanish horror movie Panico en el Transiberiano. No-one, to my knowledge, has made the connection between this film and The Thing before, but to me the similarities are too significant to be ignored.

Really Obscure Thing (wearing its ape-man body).

The Thing in this movie initially appears to be nothing but an ape-man, frozen in ice for thousands of years, but as the narrative progresses the startling truth is revealed – the ape is merely the latest host of a body-hopping, brain-draining alien, stranded on Earth for millions of years. The mutability of the Thing is psychological rather than physical here, but it otherwise behaves in a very similar way to its cousins elsewhere. The narrative waters are muddied somewhat by the ill-judged addition of supernatural elements to the story, but otherwise this is a fun movie which deserves to be better known.

Moving on back to 1951 we meet the first of the true Things, in Christian Nyby and Howard Hawks’ superb The Thing from Another World. This is really the source of the Thing archetype and nearly all the elements are here: the remote polar location, the frozen alien defrosted by mistake, the desperate battle to survive.

Black and White Thing (James Arness from the 1951 movie).

All that’s really missing is the paranoia and threat to identity which are present in most of the other versions. James Arness’ malevolent plant is rather more of a lumbering, snarling monster than most of its descendants, but the film remains a classic for all sorts of reasons.

Surely, then, we are getting close to the source of the Thing? The 1951 movie is credited as an adaptation of John W Campbell’s 1938 novella Who Goes There?, the most significant change being the nature of the alien itself. Campbell’s Thing is no vegetable but the amorphous, assimilating horror familiar from Carpenter’s adaptation and beyond. So the origins of the Thing as we know it really lie here in Campbell’s story.

Dog thing (Campbell’s monster in mid-transformation).

Or do they? Published two years before Campbell, and written five years before that, was a story in which an expedition to Antarctica discovers frozen aliens, which are not as dead as they first appear. Later in the story the protagonists barely escape from an amorphous, protoplasmic horror.

Original Blobby Thing (a Shoggoth).

The story in question is, of course, HP Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness – which, incidentally, also features a lost alien city at the pole, containing terrible secrets from ancient times. The question of whether Campbell was deliberately drawing on Lovecraft or not is an open one, and one could of course go further back and look at Lovecraft’s own sources for this tale (Edgar Rice Burroughs and Edgar Allen Poe amongst them), but in terms of the recognisable story we’ve been tracking, this seems to be the beginning.

And the final, poetic touch? Lovecraft’s aliens – the ones that are uncovered in the ice, wreak havoc amongst the humans, and thus set the template for everything to follow – are presciently named as Elder Things. You can’t argue with something like that.

Elder Thing.

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Awix says: STOP THIS NOW

Okay, it’s taken me a few days to get my head around this and arrange my thoughts to the point where I can be coherent. But now I am ready to write cogently and clearly, write from the depths of my soul, write about the crushing, draining sense of dismay and horror that consumed me when I saw that David Yates has started work on a movie version of Doctor Who.

Or, to put it less cerebrally: ‘Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo (pause for breath) ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!’

Thanks for bearing with me while I got that off my chest. Now, I imagine there are a number of thoughts impinging upon your consciousness. There may be a few people actually agreeing with me (though not many, I would suspect). More likely you will thinking ‘Oh for God’s sake it’s only a Doctor Who movie, stop making such a fuss,’ or, ‘Awix, David Yates is the multi-award winning director of four of the massively popular Harry Potter films, which have been international smash hits and made over 5 billion dollars at the Box Office – isn’t this exactly the guy we want making a movie of the show?’

Well, to the stop-making-a-fuss contingent I can only apologise and politely suggest you move on, as I fear nothing I have to say will enlighten you in any way. Some things run too deep to be truly articulated. To the isn’t-this-exactly-the-guy crowd my response is a more concise NO!

All right, I shall do my best to wail and shout no more for the rest of this, I promise. I should probably start my explanation by saying that when I initially heard that (yet another attempt at) a new movie was in the works my response was cautious interest and vague goodwill. I’m not sure a big screen Doctor Who movie is a good idea or even really do-able, but I think with the right people in charge it could be rather interesting.

I suppose this is the place to refer briefly to the sixties movies, which if nothing else gives me an excuse to use a nice picture of one of my favourite actors, thus:

I rather like the Aaru movies, although these days I don’t think either of them holds up compared to the small-screen stories they were based on. They are fun and groovy in a kitschy Sixties way, rather disposable, and they have some very likeable people in them. Quite apart from the opportunity to see one of England’s most iconic film actors giving us his take on the Doctor (and – does it even need saying? – Cushing is fantastic in the role), we get folk like Andrew Keir, Roy Castle, Bernard Cribbins (of course), and Philip Madoc, all doing their thing.

Twenty or thirty years ago it felt the films were deeply hated by fandom, while these days they seem to have slipped into the outer reaches of Who-world, more ignored than anything else. I suspect the general distaste for them was largely born of the fact that they are cheerfully and resolutely outside the (apologies for the C-word) canon of the TV show. A certain kind of fan goes a bundle on canonicity – in fact they care rather more about canonicity than they do about quality. Thus Warriors of the Deep gets a relatively easy ride from some people, despite being almost wholly wretched and cocked-up, while Daleks – Invasion 2150 AD is dismissed out of hand despite being pacy and fun to look at and having the brilliant food machine sequence. Sigh.

So I don’t have a problem with a new movie being outside the canon: I really care very little about the whole concept of canon, as you can probably tell. (Although the new movie will almost certainly cleave closer to Who-world as we now know it, simply because Who-world as we now know it didn’t really exist to be cloven to back in the mid Sixties.) But I do have a problem with a movie doing violence to the style and texture of the show, and that’s why I’m so alarmed by the prospect of Yates getting his hands on it.

Writing about HP7b, I said that I thought the Harry Potter books were essentially unfilmable and that the movies are just companion pieces to them. The movies are inoffensive and generally quite entertaining to watch, and of course they’re made to a very high technical standard. But if you think of the Harry Potter books, you think of the richness of Rowling’s prose, the intricacy of the plotting, the depth of characterisation and the sheer detail of the mythology. And – if you ask me, other opinions are of course available – the movies are a gutted vestige in which most of this stuff has been jettisoned, leaving not much more than a trot through the main points of the plot with some nice visuals and fruity cameo acting but not much in the way of atmosphere (Alfonso Cuaron’s entry I partly exempt from the foregoing).

Yates has already made it pretty clear that whatever he makes is going to be an original story, and so it won’t even have the plot-trot option to fall back on. In other words, Yates and his writers are going to have to come up with an original story which works on the big screen in addition to working as a Doctor Who story and capturing what makes the TV programme so very special. As I said, I don’t think a big-screen Doctor Who story is particularly do-able at all – the format of the show is so brilliant because, at its best, it’s a weekly series of unconnected episodic stories in wildly different genres and settings, and how can you communicate that brilliance in a single movie? Achieving that, and bestowing the result with the authentically strange and knowingly absurd atmosphere of many of the best stories, is not something that anything Yates has done in the past suggests he is capable of.

I think he’s just been hired on the strength of the $5bn take and the fantasy hero connection. I don’t really have a problem with the BBC trying to monetise the series, as seems increasingly to be the case, as long as it doesn’t impact on the actual stories. But, if the Yates movie does get made, can you imagine there not being some kind of backwash from it affecting the TV show in some way? I can’t imagine it.

Still… thinking back to the travails of Guber and Peters and their attempt to get a movie made, I can take solace in the fact that, well, it never actually happened. Fingers crossed that history repeats itself. David Yates, do yourself a favour, and accept a suggestion: I believe the movie rights to Merlin are still available.

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The Joy of Jogging and the Modern-day Sisyphus

There comes a time in a man’s life when he realises that some films he wants to see are going to slip through the net – well, it’s more like that there are numerous times when he’s reminded, really. Then again, there are some films that seem interesting but the expense involved is unjustifiable, mainly when the chief distinguishing feature of the film in question is that it’s complete and utter irredeemable cobblers from start to finish. One of the advantages of being a proper professional critic is that you get paid for watching films like that (but not enough, the likes of Kermode and Leigh would doubtless assure me).

 Enjoying what appears to be a tiny, tiny UK release at present is Got to Run, un film de Robbie Moffat, either one of Britain’s ‘premiere independent directors of low-budget films’ or ‘the UK’s answer to Ed Wood’ depending on who you listen to. I have not seen Got to Run and thus am not qualified to pass judgement on it. I have seen what passes for a trailer for the movie, which is quite jawdroppingly awful and technically inept (check it out on YouTube if you don’t believe me) but does seem to support the mainstream critical consensus.

The film is apparently the story of a lingerie saleswoman who’s unhappy with her life but is given a list of ten locations in the UK which, she is told, are good for jogging in. She duly goes forth and jogs and finds her life transformed. Hmmm. Doesn’t sound a million miles away from Roadkill, a low-budget Canadian movie I reviewed many, many years ago, but whereas Roadkill is quirky and moving and has a great central performance in it, Got to Run apparently spends most of its running-time (no pun intended) watching the main character jog around while an orchestra plays on the soundtrack. Certainly there is a lot of jogging in the trailer, more than I’d usually have liked, but in this case it meant there were fewer of the technically inept and appallingly badly-acted dialogue scenes that comprised the rest of it, so I was all for them.

Yes, I haven’t seen it. Good films have had bad trailers before. And critics are not infallible (and speaking as the guy who slated The Bourne Identity back in 2002, that’s an informed opinion). But let us just partake briefly of some of the critical bon mots that Got to Run has inspired. Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian weighs in with: ‘Watching it, I felt like screaming… technically simply unreleasable… Gobsmackingly dire…’ ViewLondon’s review offers ‘Staggeringly inept on every conceivable level…the standard of acting would shame a group of dyslexic non-actors gathering to read a script for the first time…A film so bad it makes all previous one-star films look like masterpieces by comparison.’ Time Out joins the chorus with ‘Technically horrible…it looks like a porn film without the sex.’

(Something is clearly wrong with me. Does anyone know a place where this film is showing within easy reach of Oxford?)

Well, so what, you say, it’s the summer and dreadful films are unleashed upon the world nearly every week, many of them without the excuse of having been made for no money to speak of. Hmm, well, you may have a point. However, what really piques my interest in the whole Got to Run saga is the doughty, nay, ferocious work carried out in its defence by someone who has opted to remain anonymous, but operates under the codename of ‘CultFollower’. Whenever a bad review of Got to Run has appeared on t’internet, CultFollower has been there sticking up for it, reposting highlights of the one and only positive review the film has apparently received, courtesy of the Morning Star (hmmm) and taking the critics to task for their lack of vision and insight.

 Time Out only receives a repost of the Star piece, praising Moffat’s ‘skill, wit, and elegance’ (it’s enough to make you ashamed to be socialist), while Pete Bradshaw gets the following advice from CultFollower – ‘go running and learn to enjoy movies or get a new job.’ ViewLondon are the real beneficiaries of the wisdom of CultFollower, though. The Morning Star review is reposted in its entirety (again) followed by these words of genius:

‘I loved everything about this movie. The Olympics are coming up and the reviewer hasn’t noticed that half of the country goes running.’ 

Crikey, jogging is now an Olympic event. They snuck that one in on the quiet. They still haven’t managed to get Snooker into the Olympics and now jogging’s in? Surely some mistake. And one’s breath is well and truly taken by the incisive logic present in the ‘half the country goes jogging = people will want to see a film mostly comprised of someone jogging’ assertion. More than half the country, I would guess, clean their teeth on a regular basis, so no doubt we can expect Moffat’s forthcoming opus Got to Brush. I wonder what CultFollower makes of the massive success of films like Iron Man and Harry Potter?

‘I’m completely mystified. Hardly anyone I know attends wizard school and battles the forces of darkness, or has built their own cybernetic battlesuit, and yet they still go to see films about these things. What is the world coming to?’

Am I being too harsh on CultFollower? To be honest I really believe he or she has brought it on themselves, quite simply by not having the wit to post under different names when defending the film on different sites. As a result opinion is quite widespread that CultFollower is Robbie Moffat himself, or some associated minion. Moffat and Palm Tree Entertainment are obviously, shall we say, utterly dedicated to promoting their work: on their website, Peter Bradshaw is quoted as saying of Got to Run, ‘Cult classic status beckons…’ – which is true enough, but the rest of the sentence (which has mysteriously vanished) runs ‘…for this film is awe-inspiringly bad.’

 Oh well. I’m actually slightly moved by CultFollower’s unstinting efforts to salvage the unsalvageable, for I can’t imagine anyone being taken in in the slightest, no matter how often they cut and paste that Star piece. But I must admit to be more amused than anything else. Will CultFollower be drawn here to work his or her very special magic in defence of Got to Run? I must confess my fingers are crossed.

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