blahflowers

( 'Convergence' )
( The Other Reviews )

I'm a bit rusty at this, trying to ease myself back in to writing... again.

Wow, I mean wow. I've seen episodes of Monty Python's Flying Circus that had more narrative cohesion than that. I accept that you could write an eighty-minute episode of a television programme using the 'cut-up' technique but I never thought you'd be allowed to broadcast it in prime time. When did I meet Steven Moffat? Because surely I must have met him, we got drunk, and I challenged him to make every episode of Doctor Who more wretched, stupid and full of loathing for everybody than the last. I re-watched last Christmas's episode a few days ago just to reassure myself that it was as terrible as I remembered. Oh for those carefree halcyon days when the Doctor could destroy a Dalek fleet by regenerating. We were so happy then. Tonight's episode didn't just ignore what makes a good Doctor Who story, it ignored making a good story period. The two things that remained constant was that it was set in the Victorian erathat the Doctor now seems to go to every other episode and that every actor played the same role all the way through the episode, clearly they are waiting for episode four before having Peter Capaldi play Emmanuelle and Jenna Coleman played Pontius Pilate while the Doctor is played by a box of tissues, because The Man doesn't get to tell Moffat how to write a script Godsdamnit!

I don't really want to summarise the plot because doing so would require me spending more time thinking about it than Moffat did. Also, there is just the vaguest possibility that I have been pranked and shown something completely different to what the rest of the world saw. What I saw was a dinosaur appearing in Victorian London and coughing up the Tardis. Victorians aren't particularly alarmed by the appearance of the Tyrannosaurus Rex, they're probably blasé after that Christmas when the giant robot trampled half of London. Indeed no one tries to do anything to remove the dinosaur despite the fact it stalks around Westminster for at least half a day presumably eating people and shifting everywhere. It then catches on fire and dies. We will later find out this is due to robots that want to use part of its eyes to repair their spaceship. Of course, one might point out that if you set fire to something that you run the risk of destroying whatever it is you're after but as we know Steven Moffat writes these scripts based entirely on the visuals and his clever dialogue and everything else is for those spotty virgins he hates that are called 'fans'. Clara, meanwhile, is for some reason having immense difficulty getting to grips with the idea that the Doctor has regenerated into an older body. Let's ignore the fact that three episodes ago she took a ride in the Doctor's lifestream and saw every incarnation of him and hung out with the War Doctor for a while as well. Let's ignore this because Moffat certainly is. If you want to have a character express surprise that the doctor is now an 'old man' then in Victorian London you've got the choice of three characters who could be the audience surrogate for that story point: Vastra, Jenny or Strax, don't have it be the woman who in the previous episode saw the Doctor as an old man. He still has some of the more annoying habits of his previous incarnation such as the delusion that he can understand what non-verbal lifeforms are saying, the Eleventh Doctor claimed that babies were capable of having conversations much more advanced than ten-year-olds, the Twelfth Doctor can apparently talk to the animals, or at least understand them. Yes, it turns out that 'The Name of the Doctor' is actually Doolittle.

Anyway, Vastra takes the Doctor and Clara in while he recovers only for him to escape and live on the streets as the Tramp for a bit. Clara is a bit put out by this but doesn't really do anything to find him because clearly the Doctor's not in any danger at all in a confused and amnesiac state in Victorian London. They finally come together in a restaurant, both thinking the other has placed a newspaper ad to attract them, clearly the 'Bad Wolf' of this season. This restaurant is full of robots similar to the clockwork robots from the Madame de Pompadour episode except for the small difference of being completely different. We know that in recent years the show has had to reuse sets and costumes to save money, this is the first time that I'm aware of a show reusing the same story, especially considering the way Steven Moffat repeatedly draws attention to this as though he wants to win a BAFTA for recycling. The robots have been stuck on earth for millennia replacing worn out parts with human limbs because if you're a robot with access to metals then clearly you ignore that in favour of human flesh which, even if you have the means to keep it in good working order when separated from its original owner, still only has a working life of a couple of decades. I'd say that Moffat started writing a Jack the Ripper story and then realised late in the day that he'd already had Vastra dispose of Jack and changed it to except that was series and series ago and we know what Moffat thinks about continuity.

The Doctor and Clara dick around for an unedifying amount of time, everyone fights robots that only attack them if they breathe, the Doctor goes for a flight with the head robot in a balloon seemingly made of human skin, persuades the robot to kill itself which for some reason kills all the others and then goes off in the Tardis before coming back for Clara. That summarises the last twenty-five minutes or so, it's odd that Moffat has been given extra time for this episode when he clearly doesn't need it and has to resort to an awful lot of padding. The robot is doing what it's doing in order to fulfil a confused desire to reach the promised land. After the Doctor persuades it to kill itself it wakes up in a garden with a mysterious woman who tells it that it's in heaven. Whether this is whimsy, it's killed enough people that it somehow has developed a human soul and gets to go to heaven despite, you know, killing loads of people, or whether this is a more material place we may find out in a future episode but I really don't care. We have a final scene in Glasgow where Clara finally reconciles herself to the new Doctor by talking on the phone to the old one before he regenerated and that is the one genuinely interesting and emotional part of the episode where Clara and the Doctor open up to one another and it is far, far too brief.

As I suspect might have been hinted by the above I hated this. And I hated it pretty much entirely for the writing. The lazy, self-congratulatory writing. I can't believe that if Steven Moffat wasn't in charge of Doctor Who that the scripts he turns in would be considered acceptable. He has written nothing of the quality of what he wrote in the Russell T. Davies era and each week approaches the show as a collage of interesting images rather than a story. There's an interesting tale to tell each week but he seems absolutely uninterested in telling it. The actors tried very hard, the Victorian team are great as ever but Jenna Coleman was never particularly interesting beyond the mystery of Clara and Peter Capaldi, just like David Tennant, is sidelined in his first episode so we don't get a chance to see him shine. Next week is apparently 'Daleks killing lots of people' week, so the recycling of episodes hasn't stopped yet.

Two quick reviews before I head out.

( 'Beautiful Darkness' )
( 'Andre The Giant' )

At some point the bumper for Bryan Singer's production company 'Bad Hat Harry' has changed from two comic characters to being one based on 'The Usual Suspects'. It makes sense, if you try and subliminally remind people of your one good film maybe they'll think the film they are about to see is as good as that one. Oh boy oh boy, 'X-Men: Days of Future Past' is not a good film.

( (Spoilers, although strictly speaking this is such a linear film that you will know exactly what happens before the Fox logo fades away at the start) )

Still, the X-Franchise limps on, showing that when it comes to development of the property those behind the film show no signs of either evolution or intelligent design. And we've got Guardians of the Galaxy in a short while, hopefully showing how comics movies should be made, if we're lucky.

Hey Loz, Whatcha Readin'? (With apologies...)

( 'Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children' )

( 'Nemo: The Roses of Berlin' )

( 'Super Graphic: A Visual Guide to the Comic Book Universe' )

Brighton: The Graphic Novel.
By Various

Twenty-eight writers and artists tell stories set between 1728 and 2013. Some are historical, some are personal, a few are fantastical, a couple aim for realism. We see beginnings, we see endings, we see life. We often see Brighton as it perhaps is rather than as it would like to be seen, a city supposedly noted for its liberality and creativity, as long as you're rich and white and don't want to rock the boat. If there is a theme that runs through the disparate and self-contained stories in this collection it is often one of façades being torn down, sometimes this is literal, such as with Henry Phillips's Anthaeum in the 19th century, sometimes it's more figurative when the truth behind a murder is exposed. Of course when each chapter is written and drawn by different people you sometimes have great stories badly illustrated and sometimes great artists wasted on inferior scripts. I'd be interested to know how much collaboration there was between the writers and artists on this work when this was an open call for scripts.

It's not terrible but really such faint praise is all I have to offer. Despite getting the nod from Bryan 'Alice in Sunderland' Talbot it cannot hope to compare, that was a focused and singular vision, this is just a bunch of stories. I generally prefer the historical stories (in this case I mean everything pre-1945) as they are mostly telling stories about the construction of Brighton. The post WW2 stories are largely personal stories that could be set anywhere that has a seafront and a pier. 'Brighton's Angels' by Glenn Stevens, Emelie Marjarian and Collette Tarbuck and 'Beside the Seaside' by Tom Harrop and Iain Buchanan inadvertently distil Brightons queer culture into drag queens and 70s homophobia while the latter story and 'Jonas Tindale: Night Man' by Jon Sapsed and Pete Katz are the only two stories with non-white characters. The blurb from the publishers suggests that the content of the stories was left up to the writers, all of whom from their bio pics are all white so what could QueenSpark Books do?

My favourite story is probably 'Short Back & Sides' by Mark Pembrey and Adam Moore about a local barber of the 70s and 80s. I love the artwork of 'The Sea Swimmer' by Ottilie Hainsworth and Salka (one of only a couple of the stories that address the sea that Brighton borders) and 'One Step Into the Future, One Step Into the Past' by Robin Tulley and Kathryn Miller which has Talbot-like qualities.

Getting hold of this outside of Brighton might be tricky. I got it from my local library and they had fun purchasing a copy. So why not try contacting the publishers or Dave's Comics in Brighton if you want a copy? Even if not entirely successful it's still a laudable project and, in the end, what could be more Brighton than that?

Or was that Joss Whedon's 'Wants to Sell You His House'?

How much alcohol was drunk in that film? Seriously, almost every scene has at least one glass of something being drunk. They should have made it continuous so that by the end everyone is sailing three sheets to the Tony Stark...

LEONATO

So-so-so-so- wha' wos I sayin'?
so are the prince-guy and fuckin' Claudio, who accuserated her
abou' all the stuff you heard:
Madge wos in some messing all up in this
Although she is a hottie so screw it,
In de true course o' alllllll the question.

ANTONIO

I fuckin' love you all guys, come 'ere, big hug...

The one thing this does, which the few other adaptations I've seen of this don't do, is explicitly say that Benedick and Beatrice had some sort of relationship before he went off to war. It's only in the silent pre-credit scene, the sticking close to the text doesn't allow any other elaboration on what it is, so it's not clear about whether WesleyBenedick and FredBeatrice were having a one-night I-may-die-tomorrow hey-nonny-nonny or whether Benedick was using going to war to get out of a relationship that he was too immature to commit to. Either way I don't like this as it gives an unpleasant edge to Beatrice's attacks on Benedick, this time it's personal. In other versions their relationship plays as the 'love-masquerading-as-dislike' whereas here it's all about how that man done did her wrong. And why would she accept him at the end, he's charmed his way into her bed before, what proof has she got that he isn't just doing it again?

Amy Acker's pratfall down the stairs when she hears the maid and Hero discuss Benedick's love for her is beautiful.

So, Nathan Fillion's turn as Dogberry was a great shame. It just didn't work for me. I saw the film in a nearly empty theatre but while the scenes where Benedick and Beatrice run around listening to the others talking about them got laughs the scenes with Dogberry were received in silence. Admittedly he wasn't as annoying as Michael Keaton's weird grotesque in Kenneth Branagh's wonderful film but it just fell flat. Maybe light relief needs to done to an audience (John Ramm's Dogberry in the staged version with David Tennant and Catherine Tate was fantastic) but there was something in the delivery of the lines that it's not really clear to the audience that he's talking nonsense and dropping malapropisms all over the place. It's only really the moments of physical comedy with Tom Lenk as Verges that really work.

Something that's always disturbed me about the play is the bit where Beatrice and Benedick admit their feelings for one another and then Beatrice gets Benedick to swear to challenge Claudio to a duel to the death for his treatment of Hero. I mean, what the hell? At this point she is one of the very few that know that Hero is not dead and that the friar has some sort of plan but while I can understand that she feels extremely upset and even angry at Claudio for his behaviour and words towards her kinswoman wanting to actually kill him seems a little extreme. I can understand her wanting to pretend to be really angry in order to continue the masquerade but to go from that to "If you really loved me you'd bring me Claudio's still beating heart" is rather odd. What's her motivation, a final scene where she gets to announce "the good news is the bride isn't actually dead. The bad news is that Benedick killed the groom"? I can only assume that when writing it Shakespeare started that scene thinking he needed to give the other actors a chance to do costume changes and the like, got distracted half way through and went to the pub, came home drunk and dashed that half of the scene off, went to bed, woke up the next morning and went "what the hell did I write last night?" and forgot to rewrite it before the script went to the printers.

Otherwise it's a nice little film from Team Whedon.

Seriously. What was wrong with me taking this picture? This being 'Model', the largest piece of work at the White Cube Bermondsey which currently has a show of sculptures by Antony Gormley. As the White Cube favour a rather minimalist approach to showing it will probably be enjoyed by Gormley fans and/or those that are unsure. What I don't understand is why photography isn't allowed, both here and at other art galleries. Does excessive flash photography bleach steel? Is there a concern that through photography the soul of an artwork is lost?

I wouldn't mind so much if the galleries weren't such hypocrites over the whole issue. They are quite happy to let the press take photos of course. They don't stop people taking photos of the Gormley piece outside in their courtyard but I stood and watched as someone who had taken photographs came inside, walked up to the first piece they saw, raised their camera and were told they weren't allowed to take photos. Why?

The funniest time I remember was years ago when I was told by a guard at Tate Britain that I couldn't take photographs of a piece of sculpture, the piece in question being a painstaking recreation of the anti-Government display by the peace campaigner Brian Haw, who was at that time camped about a quarter mile along the road.

I can see how there is an issue that excessive flash photography may bleach old paintings but we live in a world now where we don't have to use our flashes for every photograph we take indoors, indeed the flash on my camera doesn't seem to be a very good one so frequently photos in poor light manage to come out better than those with the flash.

As it was, I was disappointed by 'Model', it wasn't interesting to the touch, like a Richard Serra or Anthony Caro. Clambering about inside it was also rather dull, there was the brief excitement of whether your head might meet an excitingly sharp corner and start bleeding, but other than a few little cubbyholes to crawl around in it was a bit meh. The rest of the models, all variations on figures standing, sitting or lying down and doing yoga poses, were a lot more interesting, right up to the one item which was a copy of another, simply inverted in the vertical.

It has been open less than twenty-four hours and someone had already thrown some money in the fountain. A ten pence piece. An austerity offering. Maybe it was Jeremy Hunt, dashing out from behind one of the many trees to make a desperate wish to keep his job.

Despite being drawn back here every year I've tended not to be impressed by the Pavilions the Serpentine Gallery displays by it's side for the Summer months, they've tended towards the anonymous and blocklike (last year) or the self-conscious and wacky (2006's offering), the kipper tie as architectural statement.


But I have to say I did like this year's offering. Partially submerged but supported by a cushion of guff from the Gallery and the architects wittering on about 'excavating the previous galleries that stood there' like the worst episode of Time Team ever it's an art pillbox, waiting malevolently for those approaching from all directions. "Aah, Emin and Hirst! For you ze art war iz ovah!"


With my usual talent for going on a day when it was overcast and cool there was no way to judge how it will deal with the heat (the Sun is obviously a Republican, it's currently due to rain on Sunday) but there are a variety of different places for people to perch including some little toadstools that felt like they might be cork. If someone doesn't post pictures using them for a game of skittles before the end of the summer than I will have obviously overestimated the skill of Londoners.


Herzog and de Meuron I don't know from a different hole in the ground but Ai Weiwei is everyone's favourite Chinese import at the moment despite his less than impressive Tate Modern installation from 2010 where everyone carefully ignored how the millions of seeds were manufactured in conditions that looked not only suspiciously sweatshoppy but also that might cause any number of respiratory conditions in his workers from all the dust that it was judged Tate visitors mustn't inhale. He wasn't let out of the country to attend the opening apparently. No doubt the central committee took one look at the price list at the Pavilion Cafe Booth and were too busy laughing at the imminent collapse of Western Capitalism to sign the form to let him leave.

2000 AD is a magazine with a strong pedigree in this country. Started sometime in the late eleventh century it's first story was a satirical retelling of the defeat of King Harold by the forces of William the Bastard and ended with Judge Dredd firing an arrow into the former's eye and saying "Prithee get the pointe, creep!" 2000 AD's main role is to be a venue for aspiring British comics creators to showcase ideas and create work, before being snapped up by American companies to produce stuff that isn't shit. After a few years in America whoever owns 2000 AD will put out collections of their juvenilia to try and cash in, presumably to try and embarrass them. To be fair, Garth Ennis's Judge Dredd stuff isn't that bad, mainly because he's such a monumentally dumb character that all you can do is turn the crazy up to 11, something that Ennis has never had a problem with. But while Hewligan's Haircut is young, dumb but full of fun, most of the time a creator's 2000 AD work is as cool as your Mam turning up on Cribs to show everyone your baby photos.

Someone has decided that Alan Grant is big enough to make it worth trying to get some money out of his old stuff and so Mazeworld has been shat out into an uncaring world. Arthur Ranson's art is generally above par for a work like this, but Alan Grant's script is awful balls. Adam Cadman is due to be hung for a crime he did commit, but every time his life in this world hangs by a thread he finds himself transported to the alien Mazeworld and the identity of The Hooded Man, where he comes to be a hero of the rebellion of the oppressed people against their corrupt rulers and Gods.

The page restrictions of 2000 AD means Grant doesn't have the space for things like characterisation so it's all straight by the numbers sword-and-sorcery nonsense. If at any point anything in this surprises you then please turn in your reader's card. But it is worth a glance at for Ranson's often lovely work, this is a man who should be doing more work.

The spine of Who is Jake Ellis? by Nathan Edmondson and Tonci Zonjic has a '1' as though this the first book in a series but I think it's a self-contained story. Freelance mercenary Jon Moore is constantly advised by Jake Ellis, smarter than him and more invisible, he is able to scope out scenes in an instant and tell Moore what to do in any situation. But Moore was once subjected to a horrific series of medical experiments and his former captors are after him, forcing him to confront the issue of what Jake is, his own superenhanced abilities, a ghost or something else. Zonjic's uncluttered artwork compliments Edmondson's Nu-noir script, often washing pages in a limited pallet of colours and the eponymous Ellis a black and grey ghost. It's published by Image so it's obviously a promotion for 'Who is Jake Ellis?' the movie, but that would be a film worth watching. The story jumps continents like James Bond as Moore closes in on the truth behind his life and can be read in less time than it takes to watch 'The World is Not Enough'.

Supergods is a collection of random thoughts that escaped from the word processor of Grant Morrison when he wasn't concentrating. Jumping topics like a fourteen year old on two cans of Red Bull the book is occasionally a partial history of comics, sometimes a partial history of Mister Grant Morrison and sometimes whatever he was thinking about at the time. On his own personal history Morrison is most interesting, but on discussing culture he is a blunt tool when compared to the non-fiction work of someone like Warren Ellis. What's most annoying is that as he progresses through his own career he's voluble on the 2000AD days but gets progressively briefer on his DC/Vertigo work. He writes about Flex Mentallo but on The Invisibles he concentrates on the much-put-about story of the alien abduction that came to inform it's cosmology and The Filth is pretty much ignored. Perhaps he wants the work that's easy for people to access to stand for itself but it's annoying that he passes talking about them for chapters about the actors who have played Superman or Batman on the small and silver screens.

Red Wing. No. That is all.

If you are within spitting distance of the capital then Tired of London, Tired of Life should be one of your regular reads. A daily suggestion of somewhere to go, something to see or somewhere to eat and drink, it has been reproduced in book form suggesting something for every day of the year, though from what I've seen so far the majority of them are not particularly date specific so don't feel you're missing out if you buy a copy next December. But you should buy it now.