Adam Richard

VIP

5

DISCLAIMER! I'm a comedian. 22 years of wrestling with the double-edged creative sword of trying to say something to an audience and trying to make them laugh. It's not an either/or proposition, as it seems to be with Samir in this episode, but the metaphorical aspect of what you give to the audience no longer being yours, is certainly a truism.

I've long been a fan of The Twilight Zone, and the eighties revival was a must-watch for me in my teenage years, when I was devouring the works of Harlan Ellison and Richard Matheson, as well as Alan Moore's wonderful short comic strips in 2000AD. In our world of ongoing narrative, where even cinema releases require a knowledge of twenty preceding films, it is wonderful to wallow in an hour of television that asks many questions, and when it is over, it is over.

I thoroughly enjoyed Tracy Jordan's enigmatic appearance in a vaping cloud, and I thought all of the performances were uniformly excellent. The depiction of standup comedy was, like in The Marvellous Mrs. Maisel, necessarily unrealistic (there's only one club in these TV towns because they're expensive to build...), but effective in its simplicity. The laboured adherence to a potentially funny bit, that is delivered in a woefully unfunny way, is something I have personally seen thousands of times over the past two decades, and hearing Samir launch into it every night gave me PTSD from hosting shitty tryout nights.

I hope the rest of this series is as skilfully handled as this first installment. It's not a big showboating episode, and I am grateful for that. Along with Love, Death & Robots and Black Mirror, I'm glad the single-episode anthology is making a comeback.

I think this is my favourite show at the moment. There was a period where I was watching this (The Good Friend, as my sister and I stupidly refer to it) as well as Big Little Lies and Feud, and I couldn't have been happier. Strong, female-led drama is what I crave in a TV show (one of the stereotypically gay things about me). This season has been a belter, as well. They're playing with the form of television, having started to break the mould set by network television in the first couple of seasons, now they are going all out to see how far they can push the medium, and still tell a compelling, dramatic and at times, hysterically funny story.

The confrontation referred to in the episode title is just one of the moments where the show breaks out of traditional television narrative to great effect. There are odd moments when people start singing (I can't even begin to understand what was going on with Michael Sheen singing the Jackson Five song "I'll Be There" over the closing moments of a recent episode), and real-world back stories to the events in the show are told in song, with accompanying animation. These disparate elements really should not work together, but somehow the whole is greater than the sum of its parts (and the parts are already fairly heavyweight, amazing cast, showrunners honed on a decade of network television, being let loose on a niche streaming service).

Even if you never really got into The Good Wife, this show is still worth a look.

If you are, like me, in Australia, The Good Fight is available weekly on SBS.
https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/program/the-good-fight

Godzilla movies are, by their nature, the definition of camp. So bad, they're good. The suspension of disbelief required to accept a man in an ill-fitting rubber suit, kicking over cardboard boxes painted to look like buildings, is something only a ten-year-old can muster. For the rest of us, it a silly nonsense that we either love or loathe. I am in the former, and at the IMAX screening I went to, I was definitely alone in that love. I was laughing, applauding, slapping my thigh, while my fiancee (and no doubt the people behind me) grunted with dissatisfaction that this was not "better."

Bad movies have a tipping point, when you can either jump on board and go for the camp ride, or you tap out and decide it's not for you. If a film is marketed correctly, then that tipping point is in the trailer, and you can settle in knowing you are getting one hundred percent schlock. For example, Jason Statham and Ruby Rose in a movie about a prehistoric shark bigger than a blue whale. Casting alone should tell you that is going to be ludicrous, and when watched knowing that, it is an enjoyable mess ( although the shark did not heed my many calls for it to eat Ruby Rose ). Similarly, Godzilla II, as it was marketed to us here in the antipodes, signalled its intentions in the trailer. Playing an orchestral arrangement of Judy Garland's 'Over the Rainbow' during carnage is a red rag, not to a bull, but hanging out a back pocket under a pair of gingham chaps. It tells you this movie is going to be spectacularly camp.

Big monsters, and lots of them, big actors, delivering terrible dialogue like their lives depend on it. If none of that was enough to tip you off that this was a big budget bad film that needs to be enjoyed as such, rather than the revisionist angsty nonsense that the 2014 version attempted, then look no further than the casting of Charles Dance. His big budget action movie resume reads like a how-to manual for overblown films: Last Action Hero, Alien 3, and the incomprehensible Dennis Hopper movie, Space Truckers. Also, Dance has pitched his performance perfectly, delivering his lines as if he is about to look at his watch and ask what time the catering is served. It is a hilarious counterpoint to the hand-wringing over-emoting that the lead trio of Kyle Chandler, Vera Farmiga and Millie Booby Brown are cluelessly bellowing at the sky. (Godzilla is very tall, and a lot of the acting involves neck craning and shouting). Add to this a scenery-chewing turn from Bradley Whitford, trying to make a comedic meal out of dialogue with no actual humour in it, and Zhang Ziyi and Ken Watanabe as The Asians Who Know Everything, and you have a cast that is perfect for hanging out the back of a plane as our viewpoint on giant monsters kicking the bejeezus out of one another.

If you have managed not to notice all of the indicators that this film is lovingly dedicated to the camp sensibility of its source material, then the end credits dedication to actor Haruo Nakajima, pictured standing in water, still wearing the bottom half of the rubber suit he used to kick over sparking power lines, is all the evidence you need that what you have watched was meant to be like that. It is not a "giant misstep," as some smug pundits have attempted to say, it is exactly the Godzilla film a Godzilla fan would make, and it is exactly the film this Godzilla fan adored. Now I am going to see if I can find a session in one of those cinemas with the chairs that wobble and spit at you.

The first episode (Star Trek: Discovery "Such Sweet Sorrow: Part One") is less a calm before the storm episode, and more a stationary bicycle. The wheels are spinning, but it's going nowhere. I've enjoyed much of this series, but this episode felt unnecessary. Even watching it, as I did, along with this season finale, it did little more than tread water. The big emotional moments felt rushed, when there was ample room for them to breathe, and the space talk and explosion bits felt laboured, and given that they were there only to foreshadow similar scenes in the episode to come, they felt overplayed.

This episode, however, I enjoyed much more, with huge space battles, some great performances from the core cast, and huge sacrifices to save "all sentient life" (that's what they kept saying, and it was weirdly jarring) but as action-packed as this episode was, for me, it did have a couple of irritating downsides. There will be MANY spoilers for the entire season, as well as the final moments of this episode, so get ready to go blurry!

First off - I will miss Pike. Anson Mount has brought some much needed gravitas to this program, and I absolutely adored him. I was sceptical of his casting, having already thoroughly adored Bruce Greenwood's take on the character in the Kelvin timeline. There was a moment a few episodes earlier where I felt sorry for Sonequa Martin-Green, because it felt as if after Saru and Tilly walking away with the show in the first season, Pike and Georgiou were doing it again here. Then we find out that the Red Angel is Burnham and she's forced back into prime position. I wonder if this is a failing in writing her character from the outset? The fact that they have to keep forcing her into the foreground to stop her being overshadowed by bigger characters seems to be a flaw at the heart of the show.

Another annoying thing this season is the bow they seem to be trying to tie around continuity. It's a messy bow. Looks like it was tied by a toddler. Sucking up to fanboi sentimentality irks me. Yes it makes no sense that there's been no mention of the spore drive or Spock's sister in fifty plus years of Trek, but if you're enjoying the show, that shit shouldn't matter. I was more annoyed that Control, the evil AI (inexplicably given the same name as the incompetent agency in Get Smart) chose to keep pretending to be the corpulent Leland.

Also, why dispatch Cornwell so gratuitously? How many times are they going to re-film the ending to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan? Blast shields really shouldn't have windows, and how a bomb can wipe out half a saucer section but leave a turbolift intact is baffling. Also, that whole scene with Number One was weird. Like they've realised they've hired two great actors and given them nothing to do, so they've hastily cobbled together some moments for a pair we've never seen interact before.

Look, all these quibbles aside, I really enjoyed the second episode. I like what is implied for the next season, I thought there were some spectacular moments, and I will happily watch anything with big space battles and Michelle Yeoh kicking someone in the head. It was a juicy chunk of space opera, and that is exactly what I signed up for when I started watching this show.

The calm before the storm episode!

I have to say, this was far more satisfying an episode than the similarly themed one from Star Trek: Discovery ("Such Sweet Sorrow: Part One"). Lots of characters completing their journeys and coming to realisations about themselves does not bode well for them to survive the next few weeks. The most difficult part for me were the beautifully sentimental scenes around the fireplace (sentimental does not have to be a pejorative term) where the episode's title character received such a comprehensive end to their tale, that I cannot imagine there is any reason for them to survive the coming battle (other than the fact that this show continually confunds all expectation).

There is a sense of dread building throughout this installment, the impending unwinnable battle underscoring almost every scene, making the handful that raise questions of life beyond the battle (John Snow's lineage, the place of the north under Queen Daenerys) feel oddly jarring.

After the breakneck pace of the Season 7 episodes, it was nice that time was taken in this short final season to give these characters, who we've followed for a decade, some moments to breathe before what is sure to be a frenetic finale.

I didn't really enjoy Avengers: Infinity War to be honest, and did not have the highest of hopes of a three-hour plus sequel. Thankfully, I saw it in a packed cinema full of bona fide Marvel movie nerds, who buoyed me along with their enthusiastic cheers and rounds of applause every time some bit of fanwank was served up to them. Which was often.

Like all the Marvel movies preceding it, to which it pays incessant homage, it all feels like something you've seen or it's something you've seen or it's just what you expected to see. Nothing is terribly surprising, but there were a couple of moments that touched something in my cold heart, and caused me to feel an emotion, be it nostalgia or ebullience.

One of these movies is inevitably a bunch of special effects with the occasional talking head, and the effects range from the sublime to the annoying. Kudos to the teams behind rendering Josh Brolin as Thanos in the previous instalment, whose exemplary work was outdone by the team making Ruffalo's Hulk into a character of subtle emotion that very rarely fell into the uncanny valley. On the other hand, whoever was in charge of compositing Don Cheadle into his CGI suit needs a smack. That is some of the worst tracking I've ever seen in a big budget film. Also, in this day and age, it's not okay to see the bluescreen line around a character. I was also taken out of one of the most emotional moments of the film by a bold decision to have a long unbroken tracking shot of a bunch of actors who were clearly not all there at the same time. I'm happy to suspend my disbelief at huge spaceships and giant battle scenes, but actors' heads wobbling about on their bodies during a quiet moment is horrific. If they can't all be in the same shot at the same time, shoot around it, don't jam them all in unconvincingly.

Anyway, if you don't notice these things, and you want to see all the Marvel characters from all the previous twenty-something films blowing stuff up, saying funny lines (and being dour for about an hour and a half) then this is exactly what you'll get. Chris Evans and Robert Downey Jr. really go to town in this movie, delivering possibly the best performances of the series (In my opinion, Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Iron Man 3 are their best work prior to this).

Some other thoughts, that will ruin the film if you haven't seen it:

The self-sacrifice scene was too much. Competing about who can commit suicide the most nobly was neither funny nor poignant. For me, that was a real misstep, and severely undercut what should have been a much more affecting moment. I was upset at the death of that character, but it was tainted by the ludicrousness of the lead up to it.

The scenes in the seventies were by far my favourite, and I think the Russos do an amazing job with real-world action - just look at how assured and exciting Captain America: The Winter Soldier is. I really wanted to see more in that world. If the Russos wanted to come back and make a film about Cap and Peggy getting into seventies action and espionage with Howard and Jarvis, I would be lining up tomorrow.

It seems ironic to have the word ‘Dawn’ in the title of Zack Snyder’s latest superhero epic, given how little light there is the film, both figuratively and literally. There is a lot of moping about, and a perpetual vibe of ‘oh no, this is the end of the world,’ as if Snyder is cribbing from his Dawn of the Dead remake (there’s that word again, dawn, implying a source of light that is tragically absent from any of Snyder’s auteuristic affectations). The iconoclastic treatment of Superman owes much, also, to a previous entry in Snyder’s visually stunning but incoherent oeuvre, Watchmen. The core visual inspiration for Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice comes from The Dark Knight Returns comic series by Frank Miller, whose 300 was also turned into a film by Snyder earlier in his career.

Those first three blockbusters by Snyder, Dawn of the Dead, 300 and Watchmen, were all pretty much lifted from existing works of visual storytelling, be they a film or a comic book, and all Snyder had to do was add his intolerable grainy close-ups and slow motion blood splatter. When left to his own devices, we get the incomprehensible Sucker Punch, which is a series of big budget dream sequences distracting from a rather tawdry pastiche of Girl, Interrupted and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest told almost entirely in a paradoxically shiny yet dirty toilet. He also gave us Man of Steel, and rather than use some of the incredible Superman stories already told on screen or in comics, he decided to plough his own trough with phallic spaceships, a Kevin Costner transplanted from Field of Dreams, and a climax cribbed from one of Toho’s Godzilla movies.

In his search for inspirational visuals to jam into the ponderous script for Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice (yes, I am going to use the entire title every time I reference it, because the unwieldy moniker is a delicious metaphor for this stupidly overblown film) Snyder has become tragically self-referential. There is a scene early in the movie where Amy Adams as Lois Lane slithers around in a bathtub that appears to be in one of the leftover gleaming but grimy bathrooms from Sucker Punch. The titular fight between the heroes takes place in a toilet that is equally grubby, but is only glistening from all the water splashed around. (I’m not even going to begin to examine the homoerotic undertones of two icons of masculinity writhing around in onesies on the floor in a urinal). It’s not just the bathrooms, either, as during the dreary first NINETY MINUTES of the nearly three hour film, there are no action sequences, save for those experienced by Batman when having a nigh nighs; yes, that’s right, a string of big budget dream sequences a la Sucker Punch.

Being a sequel to Man of Steel, it can’t help but borrow the visual language of that film, most notably in the opening sequences where Ben Affleck’s Bruce Wayne interacts with the human cost of the destructive climax to the previous film. Also, Snyder has another crack at his ‘Superman as Jesus in space’ image, while simultaneously paying homage to one of the more affecting moments from Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns. It’s this kind of confused layering that hampers much of the film. During one of the many unnecessary dream sequences (which feel like they’ve been jammed in as an ersatz defibrillator to the floundering story) Snyder uses images from Grant Morrison’s Batman 666, Rock of Ages and Final Crisis stories as well as nods to Crisis on Infinite Earths (Wolfman/Perez), the New 52 Justice League (Johns/Lee) and the video game Injustice.

The now-ubiquitous Batman origin gets yet another airing, Snyder’s over-graded, CGI treatment of it reminding me more of the risible TV show Gotham than Nolan’s or Miller’s understated efforts. The overuse of these reliable, and in some cases very worn, elements gives the whole film a sense of deja vu, and over the unnecessarily long running time, you start to wonder if you haven’t seen this film already. There is an explosion taken from Emmerich’s Independence Day; Eisenberg’s hammy performance as Luthor could be any twitchy genius villain in any number of cheaper films; the CGI monster at the end looks like it has been pasted in from Jackson’s Lord of the Rings or Letterier’s Incredible Hulk; the excruciating capital-D dramatic dialogue in the script by Chris Terrio and David S. Goyer is painfully reminiscent of Ang Lee’s Hulk; and all of this added to the fact that there is little of the film that wasn’t shown on the internet in the desperate marketing push, means you probably HAVE seen it all before. In fact, the only scenes in the film not aired in a trailer or on a talk show are the scenes of the fight between Batman and Superman, which also isn’t a surprise, because THAT’S THE TITLE OF THE MOVIE. Although, they did wrong-foot me a little with the title, because there’s no dawn, and there’s no justice. If there was, Zack Snyder would not be allowed to make movies.