My Joint Review Of Mummy On The Orient Express And Flatline.
My joint review of Mummy on the Orient Express and Flatline.
Man, I hope they rehire Jamie Mathieson next season and every season.
More Posts from Jjgaut and Others
Can we talk about Goncharov's sound for a moment please?
I know this is tumblr so we've mostly gotta do extended examination of the themes and fanfic about the gay subtext that's absolutely there between Goncharov and Andrey and the subtext we all wishing was actually there between Katya and Sophia (as I'm sure has been point out, in the original script, it was "You could have been my *son*", not *sun*, which is a whole different mess of subtext, and the other reading only came about because of the lousy closed captioning on the one VHS release). But so much of what makes the film so involving and powerful is the *sound*.
And I know, too, that it's incredibly hard to find a version that sounds good -- I was so lucky to see a 16mm print at a now-closed arthouse theater years ago, and the sound was an absolute revelation over the aged VHS tapes we normally see. But if you can find a version with proper sound somehow, absolutely do, and listen with the best sound system you can. I also saw a version pop up on a local cable channel in Denver of all places once that had pretty decent sound, so I know that version is out there somewhere!
The way each clock and watch ticks different ways that relate to the mood and character. Listen especially to how Goncharov's has a barely-perceptible stutter - it's such an old watch, one he has cherished, but he doesn't have time to repair it. And the way the seconds ticking on it slow just a little each time he looks at it. (My mom's old VHS of it was so worn I couldn't even hear it on her copy when she showed it to me as a kid!)
Or the gunshots! I miss the expressionistic way 70s and 80s movies had handguns sound like cannons to get across how loud and powerful guns are in general, but this was one of the first to really push that idea, and the way you *feel* the impact has been replicated so rarely.
And it's all the more impressive because Walter Murch only had a few weeks to work on this between American Graffiti and The Conversation! It's partly why I believe the rumors that George Lucas actually did a lot of the sound mixing uncredited - not because Murch wasn't good enough to do this, but because there's just no way he had enough... well, enough time.
Anyway, hope at some point this gets a restored release so we can properly appreciate some of the craftsmanship that's been all-but-lost in what few versions are out there.
Have you not seen Mad Max, Inside Out, & The Martian?
You know it’s a bad year for film when you don’t even have a definite Top 3.
I intensely disagree. I think that's actually part of what set your blog apart. While there are other sites that review the books and such (though it takes some digging to find good ones), the way you showed both how they fit in their eras, and how they could never have fit in the eras, and considered what they said about the show both when they were set and when the books themselves were written, gave tremendous clarity on your themes and ideas.
I mean, I started reading your blog when you were only up to Marco Polo, but I think The Time Travelers was when it first started to really evolve from an interesting, quirky take to a fascinating and arguably definitive take on the show. Showing the contrast between what was, what might have been, and what maybe should have been couldn't really have been done in another way.
And there are a number of those that the blog would be far poorer without - The Time Travelers, the Two Doctors [Troughton version], Interference [Pertwee Version], The Well-Mannered War, Spare Parts, The Song of Megaptera, and The Nightmare Fair in particular are all absolutely crucial pieces of your arguments about the eras. I can't imagine the blog without them.
I mean, sure, you could maybe have saved a few here and there for the book versions without a major problem (Campaign, maybe), but, on the whole, they're an essential piece of the texture and meaning of Eruditorum.
I suspect it may also have (marginally, at least) helped sales and the Kickstarter; saying you're going to review the spin-off books means a lot more when we can see how good and important your reviews of those are. The book versions clearly weren't just going to be longer; they would be richer.
Finally, the reviews of the books spaced around helped prime us for the onslaught of book reviews in the Wilderness Years. I was finishing up viewing the entire series around the time you started the blog, but the books were completely new to me. I mean, I was aware they existed, but figured they were typical tie-in media: enjoyable but inessential. Because of your approach to the books, they were clearly shown to be an important and worthwhile part of what the show really was and is. (I actually bought The Time Travelers right after reading your blog entry on it.) It also created some preparation for reading about large swaths of stories I had never experienced. Without those, it's entirely likely I would have dropped out after Survival and other than The TV Movie, would have just waited around for Rose to pick back up. And while I imagine there may have been a bit of drop-off there anyway, I'm convinced it was far smaller than it would have been otherwise.
http://philsandifer.tumblr.com/post/104783235786/i-also-might-not-have-done-any-time-can-be
I also might not have done any Time Can Be Rewritten entries. I’m not sure there’s any era that wouldn’t have been improved by saving those for the book, both on blog and in book. Actually, I think that’s probably it. Now that I know there were book versions, I’d have conceived of the non-episode...
[Not the anon, but I'd be interested in your answer to these objections.]
I don't have any problem whatsoever with the ideas in the episode - conceptually, it's brilliant. "The Moon is an egg" is a contender for the best premise Doctor Who has ever had. Playing it out against a backdrop of a humanity that has lost interest in space exploration and, in the process, in its own future gives the story real weight and resonance. And putting the fate of the Moon's life and humanity's future in the hands of three women of wildly different generations and experiences is terrific, giving a fantastically feminist spin to a golden-age yarn.
But I've watched it three times, and every time, I found the execution in both the writing and directing badly lacking, and despite some lovely moments (particularly the last scene), it feels like a near-miss to me.
To begin with, the entire thing is set up by the Doctor telling Courtney she's "not special", which Clara suggests will impact her entire life, and Courtney responds with, "You can’t just take me away like that! It’s like you kicked a big hole in the side of my life! You really think it? I’m nothing? I’m not special?"
Admittedly, it’s been a while since I was a young disruptive influence myself, but I don't buy this. At all. I mean, a rebellious 15-year-old responds to getting told they're "not special" basically by rejecting it and forgetting that person exists, assuming they care in the first place. And if they do go into a deep funk and freak out about it, honestly, they're probably immature and spoiled, which certainly isn't how Courtney's been built up. Her entire reaction rings completely false, and, worse, it basically means she spends the entire episode moping around. It feels like those artificial Hollywood stories about parents who are evil for missing the kid's baseball game because they were making a living and, you know, putting food on the kid's table when they get back from the game. The drama falls flat, and Courtney, who I really liked in The Caretaker, ends up being written like an obnoxious TV 10-year-old. Ellis George is appealing when given the chance, but she can't sell this guano. This failure is especially egregious in a season that excels at building the stories on vividly real drama and characterizations.
(I do love the bit where the Doctor suggests the astronauts shoot her first, though.)
And this sort of thing comes from a script that delivers its ideas in an incredibly sloppy way. The clearest example is probably the spidery death of Red Shirt Astronaut #2. He gets all of two lines before getting spidered to death 1/3 of the way in, at which point Lundvik stops to give a eulogy about how he was the guy who trained her, and apparently his name was Duke, and she’s really upset about all this, and I’m just mildly surprised the astronauts actually knew each others’ names for all they’ve actually acknowledged each other at this point. Maybe if the script had cared to develop any of the astronauts at all, this might have some impact, but it doesn’t even get around to telling us Lundvik’s name before the end credits, let alone give her any sort of apparent personality beyond the intensity Hermione Norris gives her. Of course it doesn’t bother with the red shirts. I mean, were we really supposed to care when she delivers her eulogy?
Or there's little details like Courtney taking a big antibacterial bottle with her in her spacesuit. Even the Doctor’s advanced spacesuits look large and cumbersome, and seem unlikely to have pockets large enough for that. But even if they do, does Ms Disruptive Influence really seem like the kind of girl to go through the hassle of carrying around a full-size bottle of Windex in her spacesuit?
Even the climactic debate between Lundvik, Clara, and Courtney has moments that feel off. When Lundvik proclaims, “It is killing people. It is destroying the Earth,” Clara responds with “You cannot blame a baby for kicking.” All the coastal cities were flooded. Lundvik rightly calls it “the greatest natural disaster in history.” The baby kicking metaphor kinda breaks down once you’ve broken the 100 million mark on your death slate. All this sloppy writing climaxes, of course, with the moment where Clara asks the world to vote, but they only get 45 minutes, meaning we actually only get the votes of Europe, whoever actually has lights in Africa, and the American East Coast. That 45 minutes is completely arbitrary, just to put a bit of faux-cleverness in the cold open. Changing the deadline to 24 hours wouldn't impact the story in any negative way, and would allow the entire world to actually vote.
None of this is helped by the directing; the color is badly washed out, removing any sense of wonder to the moon, but that's the only limp attempt at atmosphere in the thing. None of the horror builds tension. The action sequences, while thankfully not the point, are poorly done. Rather than papering over the flaws of the script, the directing only exacerbates the parts that don't work, and don't help the bits that do.
Which brings me to the backdrop. The idea of the world having abandoned space travel, only recovering it when shown something truly beautiful, and thus embracing its future, has a powerful relevance. But this idea is basically mentioned offhandedly in a couple of lines. We never see this world, and the few mentions of it by the astronauts aren't enough for it to really sink in emotionally. The Doctor's speech at the end almost seems to come out of nowhere.
As I say, I love the idea conceptually. I snarked about the science on my blog, but I don't actually have a problem with that; I'm not going to object an awesome idea like "the Moon is an egg", and if I'm not going to object to that, who cares about the fact that the Space Shuttle had no ability to make it to the moon and its landing is ludicrous? It's all in fun, and complaining about it really isn't much more than snarking. I mean, yes, when you can say with a straight face that Michael Bay’s Armageddon had a superior grasp on astronomy, physics, and how the space program actually works, you could probably at least check the first paragraph of the corresponding Wikipedia pages before filming. But Moffat’s fairy tale approach hasn't bothered me before, and I love it more often than not. I mean, if you don’t like the moon hatching into a dragonfly, you’re probably watching the wrong show.
But the characterizations, atmosphere, and world-building all feel sloppy and dashed-off, leaving it to stand strictly on its ideas (which are admittedly grand) and some magnificent Doctorishness. That's enough that I certainly don't hate it, but it's very much the mess the Anon claims it to be.
Poppycock, sir! Kill the Moon is a mess.
I mean, I assume you’ve read my review of it, so where do you disagree?
i really like looking at google image searches for “firemen rescuing cats” or something because you get super cute pictures like
AND THEN THERE’S THIS ONE
My review of John Krasinski’s spectacular upcoming horror film.
Box Office Prediction (August 15-17)
I know it's a long shot, but I'm calling Guardians of the Galaxy to retake the number one spot this weekend, though it won't be until the weekend actuals are released on Monday that we'll know.
At any rate, Guardians, Expendables 3, and Ninja Turtles 5 will all make ~$25 million.
With mixed word of mouth and terrible reviews, the turtles should dive pretty fast, staunched only because family audiences hang on a little harder than teenagers; it'll lose around 60%.
Expendables should be able to open near the $28-$30 million of the first two, but the enjoyable yet underwhelming nature of the first films (and the growing consensus from critics and screenings that this one succeeds and fails similarly) combined with the usual diminishing returns for sequels means it probably won't be much over $25 million.
In its third weekend, Captain America 2 fell 49%; Guardians is being received even better than Cap, so it should end up hitting at least $22 million. I think, though, that on Sunday, it will take the top spot by enough of a margin that it will end up claiming the weekend.
Meanwhile, Let's Be Cops should do fine, but it'll burn off a lot of demand by opening on Wednesday. It should make $30ish million over the five days, but probably just under $20 million for the three-day weekend.
The Giver does not look very good. Certainly, it doesn't look all that much like the book, which will turn off a lot if its fans, and looks too generic to grab anyone else. It'll hit low teens at best.
PREDICTIONS:
Guardians - $25 million
Ninja Turtles - $24 million
Expendables - $23 million
Let's Be Cops - $19 million
The Giver - $13 million
The Hundred Foot Journey - $7 million
Into the Storm - $6 million
Lucy - $5 million
Hercules - $3 million
Step Up All In - $3 million
• An Oxford comma walks into a bar, where it spends the evening watching the television, getting drunk, and smoking cigars.
• A dangling participle walks into a bar. Enjoying a cocktail and chatting with the bartender, the evening passes pleasantly.
• A bar was walked into by the passive voice.
• An oxymoron walked into a bar, and the silence was deafening.
• Two quotation marks walk into a “bar.”
• A malapropism walks into a bar, looking for all intensive purposes like a wolf in cheap clothing, muttering epitaphs and casting dispersions on his magnificent other, who takes him for granite.
• Hyperbole totally rips into this insane bar and absolutely destroys everything.
• A question mark walks into a bar?
• A non sequitur walks into a bar. In a strong wind, even turkeys can fly.
• Papyrus and Comic Sans walk into a bar. The bartender says, "Get out -- we don't serve your type."
• A mixed metaphor walks into a bar, seeing the handwriting on the wall but hoping to nip it in the bud.
• A comma splice walks into a bar, it has a drink and then leaves.
• Three intransitive verbs walk into a bar. They sit. They converse. They depart.
• A synonym strolls into a tavern.
• At the end of the day, a cliché walks into a bar -- fresh as a daisy, cute as a button, and sharp as a tack.
• A run-on sentence walks into a bar it starts flirting. With a cute little sentence fragment.
• Falling slowly, softly falling, the chiasmus collapses to the bar floor.
• A figure of speech literally walks into a bar and ends up getting figuratively hammered.
• An allusion walks into a bar, despite the fact that alcohol is its Achilles heel.
• The subjunctive would have walked into a bar, had it only known.
• A misplaced modifier walks into a bar owned by a man with a glass eye named Ralph.
• The past, present, and future walked into a bar. It was tense.
• A dyslexic walks into a bra.
• A verb walks into a bar, sees a beautiful noun, and suggests they conjugate. The noun declines.
• A simile walks into a bar, as parched as a desert.
• A gerund and an infinitive walk into a bar, drinking to forget.
• A hyphenated word and a non-hyphenated word walk into a bar and the bartender nearly chokes on the irony
- Jill Thomas Doyle
