Slither

I was pretty excited to see Slither. I missed it at the cinema and I’ve been holding myself back from paying a premium to see it on DVD. But £9 I can live with, especially as it included a director’s commentary, so I picked up a copy. I suspect I’m in a minority in sometimes finding director’s commentaries better than the movies they accompany. That wasn’t quite true of Slither but it was too close for comfort. That arose from the movie not being entertaining enough and also the worrying observation that Nathan Fillion was often funnier commentating than when working with scripted jokes. Granted he’s a naturally hilarious guy, but he’s not a professional writer. The words that come out of his mouth when he’s speaking lines really should be better than the actor himself could come up with off the cuff and that wasn’t always true with Slither.

Torchwood 11 & 12

At the end of ‘Combat’ it seemed ridiculous to me that Owen could be annoyed about being saved. Secretly annoyed I could have accepted, but actually yelling at Jack for saving him. Huh? Because what was the alternative? Jack could have let him die and then told the team, ‘Hey, I just had a feeling he was happy to be ripped apart’. If Owen could have come back from the grave afterwards, you know he’d have been angry about that too. Jack can’t win. But to make it worse, the very next week, Owen saves Jack by putting the whole world at risk and can’t understand why Jack isn’t impressed. So Owen’s perverse reactions of late have included: ‘How dare you save my life!’ and ‘I don’t get it. Wasn’t saving the two of you worth countermanding your orders and risking a few million deaths?’

He follows it up in ‘End of Days’ by saying he’s not listening to any more of Jack’s orders, he doesn’t trust him and he’s not even sure who he is – oh and plus he’d like to do the most dangerous thing he knows how to do, which is open the rift. The next second he’s incredulous that he’s being fired. Where did he work previously? Tell your boss you won’t do anything he says, you mistrust his motives and you want to do something that will probably destroy everything his organisation works for; can you really just expect a written warning?

More Torchwood

Here’s a Torchwood-amendment to an earlier thought I’ve been meaning to set down. It’s my belief that one of the weak points about otherwise excellent shows like CSI is motive. There just isn’t room for motive when constructing procedural and tense and intriguing crimes that can be unravelled with science. In fact if the motive is too believable, too plausible then it risks undermining the riddle of the forensic science by letting you guess the culprit. So motives are glued on at the end. You know who did it and how, but not really why. And the ‘why’ is often flakey in the extreme: ‘I just snapped’. But Torchwood has found a way round this – or hit upon a solution by accident. Their CSI-like plots lead you to an alien who can have the most warped motivation imaginable. And that just makes them seem more convincingly alien. Well, kind of. The woman in Greeks Bearing Gifts who rips people’s hearts out because… erm, because she did it once and… actually I don’t really know. So true to Torchwood style, they’ve found a way of sidestepping a potential problem with CSI-style plots – and they’ve pushed it too far from the outset. If I had my way, Torchwood wouldn’t be armed because they’ll only shoot themselves in the foot.

Xmas TV

Because it’s Christmas, the TV companies seem to have taken off all the shows I generally watch to make way for lots of nothing at all. I was trying to decide whether Christmas TV is really worse these days than when I was younger, and my conclusion was that movies have become no big deal – what with twenty or so movie channels on Sky – and big movies used to be the things I looked forward to. Of course Christmas specials of dramas – one-off or otherwise – can be pretty interesting too…

Torchwood Ep 1-10

Well, thank god it’s getting better. Torchwood started out doing what I’d worried Doctor Who would do in 2005. I thought it would try to be US-slick and would embarrass itself. But while Doctor Who is not without its faults, it seems to surpass them convincingly enough. Torchwood started out with a flurry of wrong notes and then trampled over a lot of good storytelling practice to produce quite a few hours of terribly disappointing television.

Captain Jack (possessed of exactly the same ‘lovable rogue’ energy as that other famous Captain Jack – just without the rum-soaked delivery) was a very winning character in Doctor Who. I’m sure someone has spotted it, but he was Johnny Depp’s swagger in Han Solo’s role. But by the time he arrives at Torchwood he’s somehow a man with a past. (No wonder the scripts make regular jokes about RetCon.) It’s an interesting idea, but I don’t know if it’s a good one. Captain Jack is supposed to be the link, the way in, the thread. You knew him in Doctor Who, now here he is in his own show… except that he’s totally changed. He seems to have had at least a hundred years of unpleasant experiences since then, so actually he’s a virtually unrecognisable character who happens to have the mannerisms and the face of his old self. So he’s the central character and yet he’s now an unknown quantity – quite intentionally so. He’s the one we want to follow most closely and who we initially care most about, but we don’t know who he is any more – we don’t even know if we can still trust him.

The Hogfather – Sky One

The first entry in a new blog and it’s a tricky one. Whenever I watch something good – or better still when I watch something that could have been good – I want to understand why. What makes the difference, what spoils it, what can you get away with and what mistakes drag a story down with them?

The Hogfather is a difficult one because even as I sat watching I was trying to work out what they were doing wrong – and they were definitely doing something wrong – but I couldn’t put my finger on it. That’s actually the first clue right there, though: I was supposed to be absorbed and instead my mind was wandering and I was trying to find the mistakes. Normally I have to look back on something I’ve seen to understand the way it worked, but The Hogfather had acres of breathing space in which the viewer could reflect and review, before the story took another step forwards. Somehow a good story with good actors became a disappointing and dull muddle. I’m going to go back over Vadim Jean’s approach and see if I can get to the bottom of the problem, at least to my own satisfaction.