Stranger Things - 'Chapter Three: Holly, Jolly'

So on top of not knowing what happened to Will, we now don't know what
happened to... Never mind.

Episode... I'm sorry, Chapter three of Stranger Things begins exactly where the last one left off, with Barb being grabbed while her best friend has sex. Oh karma, so close and yet so far from the mark.

Unlike Will, we stick with Barb, as sadly this is her big and her final moment. Trapped in a waterless version of the pool, filled with evil alien root things amid a gentle fall of what might be snow, but is probably ash, she comes face to lack of face with a pale, monstrous humanoid and that's about all she wrote. Roll credits on the coldest of cold openings.

The following 45 minutes is just packed with happenings, and despite a relatively sedate pace, Stranger Things never lacks for occurrences.

Mike leaves El at home while he and the other boys go to school, intending to search for Will with El's help later. Lucas is skeptical, not just of El's claimed knowledge of Will's whereabouts, but of everything about her, while Dustin wants to experiment with the telekinetic powers that make her nose bleed, unconsciously mimicking the scientists who held her and made her crush Coke cans. At school, Lucas mocks Mike's supposed infatuation with El, and they have a run in with the kind of school bullies who mostly only exist in eighties movies. During their absence, El explores and experiences flashbacks, including the brutal murder of two orderlies, which elicited a rare show of kindness from Dr Brenner, her head keeper and surrogate 'Papa'.

Nope! Nopenopenope!

Nora is convinced that Will is trying to contact her through the electricity and buys more and more lights to prove it, despite her family's lack of funds. This set up attracts the attention of Mike's little sister Holly during a goodwill visit from their mother, and nearly lures her into the grasp of Mr Pushes Through the Goddamn Walls. Jonathan is doubtful of her claims, and has other problems, as he is seen developing his pictures and exposed as a stalker, leading to a run in with Steve and his increasingly cool hair in which his camera is smashed. This also leads Nancy, worried about Barb's absence, to realise that he took a picture of her remaining at the poolside after the party.

Sheriff Hopper continues his dogged and rational search for Will at the Hawkins Lab, where he immediately spots a doctored security tape and starts digging, despite the hostility of the librarian, who seems to be one of a number of ladies of a certain age to have been done wrong by Hopper. He find references linking Dr Brenner to CIA-sponsored LSD experiments and specifically MKUltra. What they don't see is the alien root mass in the lab basement, surrounded by drifting ash.

Smart.

Getting what seems a definite response from Will, Nora sets up an alphabet on the wall with lights, because she's actually pretty smart, just knackered and desperate. 'Yes', he tells her, he is alive. 'No', he is not safe. Where is he? 'Right here.' What should Nora do?

'Run.'

As Nora flees from the faceless thing and El also tells the boys that Will is at his house, tragedy strikes. A deputy finds a body in the river, and it is Will.

Stranger Things is a busy show, not just filled with events but with incredible imagery and repeated themes. This week's door count includes Holly following the lights to Will's room, and Nora being guided to sit in a cupboard (just as El is when Mike needs to hide her from his Mom.) The thing's tendency to come through walls is almost a refutation of the concept of doorness, marking doors as both portal and as barrier as a human concern that it can't be doing with.

Human concerns are front and centre in the show, however. Hopper wants to bring his town back from the brink of insanity. Nora wants to find her son, and will believe practically anything that offers a chance. The comparison between the brightly lit, well-to-do space of Mike's family home and the drab, dismal interior of Nora's speak volumes of the social gulf that Mike and Will have bridged without thinking about it, but which Jonathan is all too aware of. Even Nora and Steve gain a bit of dimensionality in her concern for Barb and his increasingly uncertain juggling of apparently genuine affection for her and the need to stay cool and in control to impress his friends.

And then there are the children. Finn Wolfhard - and seriously, even the actors' names sound somehow eighties - conveys Mike's wonder and intelligence, but also a really fierce anger burning underneath it. Millie Bobby Brown's El is a picture of measured performance, brimming with pain and unspoken anger. The two characters seem to click at once, and I wonder if that isn't because they recognise that inner rage in each other somehow.

Downton Abbey - A Last Look

Series 1 - The beginning

So, after a couple of years and a stack of DVDs, we've wrapped up the final Christmas special at the tail end of the final series of Downton Abbey, Britain's - and apparently America's - favourite cosy period melodrama of decent toffs and loyal domestics. As I mentioned a while back, we were rather taken with series 1, which followed the Granthams - headed by cuddly patriach Lord Robert and his indomitable mother Violet, she of the perpetual sneer and the silent 'bitch' - and their staff from the sinking of the Titanic to the beginning of World War I.

Series 2 - The one with the uniforms

Season 2 saw the Abbey at war, with first the local hospital and then the Abbey itself drafted in as a convalescent centre, bringing the toffs authority into conflict with the idealistic old Scottish doctor and Isobel Crawley stepping up and clashing with Lady Cora as administrator and Lady Sybil training as a nurse. Resident scumbags Barrow and O'Brien continue to scheme against decent straight man Bates. The melodrama quotient is ramped up, with Matthew Crawley becoming engaged to some random, then being crippled, then recovering, where poor William the footman dies after taking the worst of the shell which did for Matthew's back, but not before Mrs Pattmore the cook basically browbeats Daisy the kitchen maid into marrying him on his deathbed. Bates is arrested for murder and Matthew's lacklustre fiancee dies of convenient flu. Sibyl and chauffeur Branson conduct a shenanigan and marry, gaining an eleventh hour blessing from Lord Grantham, who has a poorly-conceived first base affair with a maid which had us groaning in outrage. Lady Edith continues her run of shocking romantic ill-fortune during a brief appearance by a man claiming to be the dead Patrick Crawley. Series 2 really has everything, including a Christmas special in which Matthew finally proposes to Mary and Bates goes down for life.

Series 3 - The Americans are coming!

Series 3 brings more staff, including an ex-prostitute (shock!) and another kitchen maid who turns out to be prettier than Daisy (horror!) as well as Cora's American relatives. Barrow gets a bit more sympathy, nursing a crush on the new footman and beginning to break with O'Brien. Tom and Sibyl return from Ireland after Tom is implicated in a revolutionary outrage. Edith is jilted at the altar (or was that in series 2?) and then lands a job as a columnist. Sibyl dies giving birth to a daughter, the first victim of the zero-sum curse (no child can be born in Downton without someone dying.) Anna fights for Bates' freedom and Dowager Countess Violet continues to be awesome. Violet's niece, Lady Rose MacClare comes to Downton and is a topping flapper-type gal.

This year's Christmas special has a holiday in the highlands courtesy of Rose's parents. Edith receives a proposal from her editor, a maid gets fired for getting fresh with newly widowed Tom, Thomas saves good looking footman Jimmy from a mugging and Mary gives birth to a baby boy. Matthew hurries to see his son and then dies in a car crash.

Series 4 - Daisy seems constantly to be shoved into the background of these line-ups

Season 4 sees Lady Rose getting a lot of plot, notably an affair with a black band leader which Mary aims to put a stop to because she doesn't think it fair of Rose to play on his affections largely to piss off her parents. Tom, now the family agent, and Mary, as Matthew's sole heir, work to persuade Lord Grantham of the need to modernise Downton, a theme begun in Season 3. O'Brien leaves and is replaced for a while by scheming Edna, the maid who hit on Tom in the Christmas special. With Bates out of prison and everything swimming for him and Anna, she is raped by a visiting valet during a performance by Dame Nelly Melba. To keep the theme, Edna date rapes Tom and gets a verbal pummeling from Mrs Hughes for her trouble. Edith's intended disappears in Germany seeking a divorce from his insane wife, leaving her pregnant.

This series is hella dark, man. In the Christmas special it turns out that Edith's fella was murdered by the SA and she initially gives up her daughter for adoption. Mr Bates is suspected of the murder of Anna's rapist and Mary burns a train ticket which will later prove to have been a potential alibi. On the upside, we get to know Mr Molesley this series, a quiet older servant with perpetual bad luck, who proved to be a breakout hit with us.

Series 5 - Now with 100% more creepy Midwich Cuckoo looking children

Series 5 is the one with the Russians. Tom courts a school teacher whose liberal views annoy Lord Grantham and aggravate the white Russian refugees taken in in the area. Lady Rose hooks up with a Jew (shock!) and Anna is accused of murdering her rapist (horror!) Barrow brings in a ringer by getting a Miss Baxter, whom he can blackmail, hired as Cora's new lady's maid, but she forms a connection with Mr Molesley which has us going 'aww' for the rest of the run. Mary is courted by several men and rejects them all, even the one she's had an affair with, while Edith brings her daughter to Downton to live with a tenant's family in a largely unnecessary sub-plot carefully engineered to bring her the maximum trauma. The Abbey gets a wireless and Violet has a bit of a thing with a Russian prince. Isis the dog dies, no doubt the belated victim of the zero-sum curse. Isobel finds an admirer in Lord Merton, but declines to marry him because it would antagonise his sons. Carson proposes to Mrs Hughes, which also adds a lot of 'aww' to our viewing.

Series 6 - I honestly expected the Abbey to explode

Mary is romanced by a racing driver and Edith by a land agent. Bates and Anna are finally off the hook, only for Mrs Patmore to be implicated in adultery at her B&B. Lady Mary takes Anna to her gynaecologist, Daisy's father in law gets a new tenancy despite Daisy's misguided outbursts, and Daisy gets her ologies with some help from Mr Molesely. Lord Grantham has a perforated ulcer (I was for a while certain he was going to die in the final scene of the series) while Violet clashes with everyone over a plan for the hospital which would reduce her influence in the community. Edith gets engaged to her land agent, who turns out to suddenly be a Marquis, only for Mary to reveal her relationship to baby Marigold and ruin things, provoking a clash between the sisters at last, and Tom pushes Mary to marry the driver despite a racetrack accident which spooks her badly. Barrow begins to regret his past actions as he finds himself isolated and desperate, culminating in attempted suicide.

The final Christmas special sees Mary engineering a reunion between Edith and Bertie Pelham, and ends with Edith's wedding, the birth of the Bates' first child, rapprochements between Daisy and footman and wannabe farmer Andy, Mrs Patmore and Mr Mason, Isobel and Lord Merton (who marry in part to spite his horrid daughter in law) and Barrow becoming butler when Carson is struck by the palsy and persuaded to retire while remaining as a guiding presence. After the last 6 seasons of cray-cray melodrama, it feels almost unbelievably cuddly; as if it were some hazy afterlife after the Abbey did explode.

So, that's Downton Abbey. A mere 52 episodes, but so much dramah! Some say it's reactionary, and certainly the Crawleys are impeccably lovely for a bunch of toffs, but it's not as bad as it's made out, also showing the impact of changing times, the decline of privilege and the erosion of social distinctions, with even Lady Mary, she of the cut-glass accent, surprisingly pleased when Tom and her husband open a used car dealership. Yeah, it's cosy and yeah it's a bit daft, but damnit it's a lot of fun too (the bleak season 4 notwithstanding.)

Penny Dreadful - 'Fresh Hell'

Ah, nuts; Dorian Gray is still in this thing. And... well, the rest of them. The new (as regular) characters at the extreme right
are Evelyn Poole (Helen McCrory) and Ferdinand Lyle (Simon Russell Beale).

Regular readers may recall that I was less than impressed by big-noise Gothic-historical frock-porn gorefest Penny Dreadful's first series. Regular readers may also have gathered that I kind of enjoy watching shit that I don't actually like*, so I'm going to give Season 2 a go.

After an epic night of larging it, Ethan was just prime for a
cheeky Nandos**.

'Fresh Hell' opens with the aftermath of Chandler's 'funny turn'. For a man who wolfed the fuck out and ripped apart an entire pub full of people in a noisy and spectacular fashion, he's noticeably undisheveled and besmirched by only a few spatters of gore. I'm just impressed that the show passed up an opening for some nudity. Perhaps this is a sign of increasing maturity.

Being a responsible and sensitive soul, he reacts to the reminder that he sometimes blacks out and kills a whole shit tonne of folks who happen to be in the vicinity (seriously, I'm sure no-one really remembers, let alone cares about, the thuggish Pinkertons sent to bring him home, but at least some of those people were just out getting a drink and a meat pie) by deciding to slope off to pastures new. Before he does, he stops by for a chatette with Vanessa Ives. She's reluctant to see him go, but no doubt to his disappointment (and again to the show's credit) doesn't attempt any carnal dissuasion, thus relegating her to second least responsible character possessed of an appalling supernatural force, behind Chandler.

Anyway, apparently feeling bad about the lack of nudity so far, three bald, naked women with white skin and scars attack the coach where Ives and Chandler are talking. There is a fight, and eventually the women are driven off when Ives shouts in tongues at them, morphing into dark-haired chicks in cloaks (apparently they, like Chandler, incorporate their clothes in their transformation, which I find weirdly hard to accept.)

"It's a project, Dad; something we can do as a family."

Elsewhere, Frankenstein and his creature are getting Brona ready to become the creature's bride, while at the same time the creature secures employment at a dysfunctional family waxworks to support them. Speaking of dysfunctional families, there's a really messed up vibe between the creature - now going by 'John Clare' - and his creator, hints of Frankenstein fancying his new creation, and a suggestion that Clare may instead fall for the blind daughter of his employers. Anyway, by the end of the episode 'Brona' is revived, but she hasn't spoken so we don't know if her terrible accent has survived.

You can tell she's evil because she's bathing in the blood of a
murdered girl and smoking.

In conference, Ives explains that the women, whom she and Chandler insist are nothing like vampires despite basically looking just like them, are 'Nightcomers'; witches. They are scarred because their demon master rakes his claws in their flesh to mark them as his***. The Nightcomers are led by blink-and-you'll-miss-it Season 1 recurring character Evelyn 'Madam Kali' Poole. In Season 1 she appeared as a medium and briefly flirted with Sir Malcolm; in Season 2 she's gone full-on Bathory with a blood bath and her gaggle of sexy witch followers, chief among them her inappropriately blood-lusty, quasi-incestuous daughter Hecate, which is one of those names that recalls a powerful female figure of myth but is always rattled out in an inappropriately cutesy rhythm so that it sounds like a character from a children's book: Heck-uh-tee. It may be the accurate choice, but I'd go for Heck-ah-tay myself.

I think we might be going to see a lot of this sort of thing.

Poole's big scene is a conference with her minions about their failure to capture Ives (they blame her unexpected use of the Devil's language, and the presence of Chandler, 'Lupus Dei') the chosen bride of their master Lucifer as we may recall, in which she casually offs a quarter of her workforce after giving her a speech about how triumphant Roman generals would be reminded they were mortal. This speech makes no sense in context, and her casual demand that the remaining Nightcomers 'get rid of that bitch' just makes her seem like a sulky adolescent with all the management skills of Darth Vader.

Before the climactic scene of the bride's rebirth, there's just time for Poole to engage Ives in some sort of long-distance chant-off, the two of them each praying in their own room - one spartan, the other oppulent - while imaginary (maybe?) Nightcomers appear behind Ives and the weather gets all pathetic fallacy. It would be far more tense if we were given any sense of the actual stakes involved in the clash.

Apparently the TV watching public at large - or a substantial proportion of them, at least - really dig Penny Dreadful. On the strength of 'Fresh Hell'****, I am not a convert. Vanessa Ives remains the helpless bitch of her own alleged awesome, Chandler is increasingly unsympathetic and basically no-one has any enigma left to them at this point. Possibly the best thing I can say about this episode is that there was no Dorian Gray, although I'll be amazed if we get through the season without either Evelyn or Hecate Poole riding that bike (simply because they're there now and haven't yet.)

* And besides, Dracula, my Gothic-historical frock-porn gorefest of choice, was cancelled, for which I blame Thomas Edison.

** Nothing says finger on the pulse like a joke that will be incomprehensible in a year's time.

*** Because demons are into non-consensual B&D.

**** An odd title, quoting as it does a woman who wouldn't even be born until the very twilight of the Victorian era.

Sleepy Hollow - Season 1

Check my boots the fuck out, yeah!

Sleepy Hollow is a TV series based on Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, in much the same way that The LEGO Movie was based on the instructions for building a LEGO City fire engine.

The nervous, upwardly mobile Connecticut schoolmaster of the novel is replaced by Ichabod Crane (Tom Mison), soldier of the crown turned rebel and the Headless Horseman from a practical joke by a romantic rival to the First Horseman of the Apocalypse called forth by the demon-lord Moloch. Taking a leaf from the Tim Burton adaptation, Crane's wife Katrina (Katia Winter) is, rather than a spoiled coquette, a woman of deep principles and sensibility, and a secret white witch. When Ichabod is mortally wounded decapitating the Horseman, Katrina casts a spell to allow him to sleep until the Horseman returns. Thus he wakes in 2013 and hilarity ensues.

Crane soon finds himself in the company of Abbie Mills (Nicole Behari), a Lieutenant in the Sleepy Hollow PD (or a deputy sheriff; I'm not sure how it works), and the two of them learn that they are the Witnesses of Revelation, set to encounter seven years of tribulations to prevent the comping Armageddon, armed only with a series of documents collected by Abbie's now dead mentor (played by Clancy Brown), hints from the Purgatory-bound Katrina and a set of mad occult devices left by the Founding Fathers, who were totally fucking demon hunters and shit.

Let us not mince words here, Sleepy Hollow is as mad as a bag of foxes. Its history is complete hogwash (the Elizabethan settlers of the colony at Roanoke apparently spoke Middle English), and it throws Freemasons and Golems and God knows what around like they had no existing symbolism. Nevertheless, I love it, because it just powers through all of its failings on the strength of the actors absolute conviction. Mison and Behari, and supporting players Winter, Lyndie Greenwood and Orlando Jones and John Noble, defy every opportunity to wink at the camera, and so carry the drama through the absurdity.

As you can see, the Headless Horseman has absolutely no problem moving
with the times.

It doesn't hurt that the show makes no attempt to be high and worthy drama, and instead focuses on supernatural action and mild horror, tempered with humour. The latter comes mostly from Crane's reactions to the 21st Century, or his reminiscences of famous figures from his original time (such as his discovery that 'faithful husband' Thomas Jefferson had children by at least one of his slaves and had taken credit for a joke Crane made about the gutter press.

In a not-uncommon format, the first half of the season focuses primarily on backstory and stand-alone adventures, while the second moves into arc development and set-up for the big end of season reveal and cliffhanger (which is very well done.) I was pretty sure that Sleepy Hollow would go the way of The Tomorrow People and Believe and never come back, so that ending left me pretty freaked out.

Fortunately, it is back for a second Season, with a Second Horseman.

Dracula

Left-to-right: Lady Jayne Weatherby (Victoria Smurfitt), Abraham van Helsing (Thomas Kretschmann), Jonathan Harker (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), Dracula (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), Mina Murray (Jessica de Gouw), Renfield (Nonso Azounie) and Lucy Westenra (Katie McGrath)

Since TV is on a Victorian Gothic horror kick, let's follow up my Penny Dreadful review with 2013's Dracula, a lavish production which crashed and burned after this, its first series.

What is the core of the Dracula story? Obsession, sex, repression, good vs evil, furriners are bad? This interpretation draws on some of the lesser known themes of the narrative, such as geomagnetic wireless electricity, government corruption, manipulation of the media and international Catholic money conspiracies.

Ooo-kay...

So, pathologist Abraham van Helsing revives Dracula in order to obtain revenge on the Order of the Dragon, a conspiracy of powerful and wealthy (apparently Catholic) individuals who made Dracula into a vampire because... reasons, and murdered van Helsing's family because... evil? In order to do this, they set out to promote geomagnetic, wireless electricity, thus shattering the control of the world's oil reserves that underpins the Order's power. The third member of their alliance is R.M. Renfield, here cast not as a scrawny loon, but as a erudite, intelligent African-American lawyer, whose prodigious size and strength actually fit the literary character much better than the conventional appearance.

Drawn into the periphery of the plot are van Helsing's student, Mina Murray (who is thankfully less strident than a female pathology student in a Victorian melodrama might have been) and her colossal jackass fiance Jonathan, ditzy closet lesbian Lucy and slinky, manipulative Lady Jayne Weatherby, the Order's chief huntsman.

The series is interesting for its shift across its run from sexy melodrama to bloody Jacobean tragedy. Early episodes are marked by Dracula's manipulation of Harker and Murray's relationship, striving to be close to the woman who looks like his long-dead wife (murdered by the Order, natch) while placing an obstacle between them so that he can't destroy her, and his athletic sexual relationship with Lady Jayne. Later episodes are more likely to feature ripped throats and decapitated vampires than the Meyers/Smurfitt nudity double bill, and the final episode wipes out much of the supporting cast with a combination of brutal violence, exploding electricity and crawling parental heebie-jeebie horror.

In artistic terms, it's no better than Penny Dreadful, but I will say this for it: It seems to be having a lot more fun. It embraces its concepts and just goes full throttle, however stupid they may be. I also respect a vampire hunting team that utilises numbers, military organisation and daytime raids.

Don't buy it, but if you can see it for free it's worth the sevenish hours of your life.

Penny Dreadful

Also, this series if full of spiders. Seriously, dude; don't touch it.

Penny Dreadful is a sumptuous, Gothic-historical series. Set in a monster-haunted Victorian London and populated by a mixture of literary characters and original creations, this is pretty much my kind of show and I wanted from the first to love it.

I did not love it.

I'm not sure why Gray rates a place on the
poster above Frankenstein.

The first series tells the interweaving stories of a group of characters who have all become enmeshed in what is referred to as 'the demimonde', the world of horror and monsters, during the hunt for a master vampire and a girl he has abducted. Wild West Show gunslinger Ethan Chandler (Josh Hartnett) is - ostensibly at least - the everyman newcomer of the group, which also includes explorer Sir Malcolm Murray (Timothy Dalton), father of vampire-abducted Mina, and his daughter's best friend, the demon-hounded medium Vanessa Ives (Eva Green). Another new recruit is Victor Frankenstein (Harry Treadaway), who is far more British than his name or literary backstory suggest, and Sir Malcolm's stoic and mysterious manservant Sembene (Danny Sapani) completes the set. Hovering around the edges of the group are Brona Croft (Billie Piper), a terminally tubercular prostitute with a God-awful Irish accent, Frankenstein's abandoned Creature (Rory Kinnear), and Dorian Gray (Reeve Carney), the (immortal) human equivalent of a hairless cat.

This show immediately preceded the great
eyeliner shortage of 2014.

So far, so promising; interesting set up, classic quest storyline, and a pretty top-notch cast. So where - aside from Piper's accent - did it all go wrong for me?

For starters, I found almost none of the characters to be all that interesting or sympathetic. Sir Malcolm is a dick, Vanessa is lauded for her strength and power and then shown to exist almost at the whim of greater forces, Frankenstein is a whiner, Chandler is mopey and Dorian is annoying. The only characters I really clicked with were murdered after minutes of screen time. Determined to make the characters cool and unflappable, the series succeeds largely in making them dense, their jaded suavity apparently blinding them to certain key revelations, such that - for example - no-one seems inclined to stop and note that Chandler can control wolves. They also hunt vampires and do so almost exclusively by breaking into their nests at night. The fact that the vampires are almost always at home and slumbering when they do so is perplexing, as is London's apparently inexhaustible supply of white-haired vixens in black dresses, since it seems to take a matter of days, at most weeks, for the master vampire to completely restock his goth snugglepile.

For much of its run, the primary tension of the series seems to be who Dorian Gray will sleep with next. The show sets up its characters to be mysteries, but goes too far and gives us too little to care about. This is thrown into sharp relief in the final episode when two Pinkerton detectives come looking to take Ethan back to his father. This is an interesting twist, but comes too late in the game to be much more than a throwaway.

Oh, and the series keeps teasing Dorian Gray standing in front of an unseen portrait. Gosh, I wonder what that's going to turn out to be about when it finally pays off?

Conversely, Vanessa gets an entire episode of backstory. This suggests that the series sees her as its protagonist, but this is not borne out by the narrative, in which she is constantly a passive player, driven by crude passion into acts of reflexive rebellion which, rather than marking her as an independent and sexually liberated woman, are intrinsically linked with her subjugation to forces of evil. In fact, for a series so obsessed with sex, Penny Dreadful is shockingly sex-negative.

It also lacks any strong female protagonists. Vanessa's power is weakness and her role to be a tool - even in the final denoument she is a passive player and a hostage; Brona just bitches, coughs blood and ultimately dies of TB, leading her to a fate that has pretty much been ordained for her since she first expectorated into a hankie; and Mina is mere a vessel for the voiceless villain of the piece (although for a moment I hoped it had done something interesting and she was the villain.)

Every so often, it gets it right, and something really works, but overall the series is laden with too many plots that do not come together well enough, and characters who are not quite likable enough for me to want to go the extra mile to find out how it all fits in the end. I made it to the end of the series largely on stubbornness.

On the other hand, a lot of people seem to have loved it, so what do I know? Maybe glumly self-absorbed badasses serially sleeping with a smug hedonist is what the people want.

The Great Gatsby

Don't get blase; everything in the film looks this good.

It was a couple of years ago that I found out Baz Luhrman was making a new adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, all art deco style and anachronistic musical numbers, and I said 'sign me up'. Hannah was also keen, which makes it odd that neither of us managed to watch it until a couple of weeks ago.

So, this is a Baz Luhrman film, so if you don't like Baz Luhrman, it's not going to be for you. It is a gorgeously stylised film, evoking the period of the novel through sumptuous art deco set design and costumes. The actors all look the part, in fact the casting is near-perfect, and the dialogue is snappy, while the plot rattles along at a rapid pace.

Di Caprio has now emerged from his difficult hearthrob phase and, like Brad Pitt, is now cheerfully excelling in the kind of character roles once denied him on account of his boyish good looks. Maguire is a perfect ingenue, and the supporting players - from Mulligan's self-centred Daisy and Edgerton as her brutish husband - to lesser parts such as Fisher's brassy moll and Debicki's enthusiastic socialite. The interaction between the characters - in particular the central triad of Gatsby's optimism, Carraway's blinkered devotion and Daisy's brittle reserve - is note perfect.

It's not a film with a great deal of depth, but it's slick and beautiful, and was definitely worth the wait.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and 47 Ronin

Because that sort of pairing is just how I roll. Okay, in truth I went to see The Secret Life of Walter Mitty with Hannah and Arya a week or so back, and 47 Ronin with my friend Jon yesterday, but I would rock that double bill if the opportunity presented itself.

Ben Stiller's incarnation of James Thurber's protagonist is, like Danny Kaye's earlier interpretation, at first an ineffectual daydreamer, but later engages in real adventures which sublimate his need to fantasise. Intelligent, skilled, but unappreciated by his new bosses, Mitty finds himself tasked with locating a missing photo negative which photo-journalist Sean O'Connell (Sean Penn) has recommended for the cover of the final print issue of Life magazine. At first an apparently simple task, Mitty's attraction to his co-worker Cheryl (Kristen Wiig) prompts him to adopt the search as a quest, which in turn pushes him to abandon his humdrum existence and to live the kind of adventures he has been dreaming of.

The film is a triumph of the underdog travelogue for the middle-aged and underappreciated. In refusing to separate fantasy and reality by on-screen cues, the film almost threatens us with an unrealised reveal that none of the positive parts of Mitty's life are real, but this only makes the eventual validation of his adventures and his final, soft-spoken takedown of the evil asset stripper who has tormented him throughout more heart-warming.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is never laugh-out-loud funny, but has a gentle humour which won me over completely, despite initial reservations. While he can be abrasive as an actor, Ben Stiller plays Mitty with a genuine likability he has increasingly displayed of late, and the supporting cast are all solid. Wiig is an especially good fit as Mitty's love interest, both bringing a similar gentle strength to Mitty's own, and flying the flag as an attractive older woman in a main romantic role.

Speaking of stand out female roles, do we all remember Mako Mori in Pacific Rim? Hold onto that, because I'd rather think of Rinko Kikuchi in that role than in 47 Ronin, and you probably will as well.

The film tells the story of the 47 Ronin, the samurai of Lord Asano who avenged his death in defiance of the Shogun's command after Asano was forced to commit seppuku for striking another daimyo. In the original tale, this happens because Asano is young and rash and Lord Kira is a dick; in the film Asano is old, revered, and bewitched.

The leader of the ronin is Oishi (played by Hiroyuki Sanada, who has an honourary MBE for his King Lear with the RSC, by the way); that's him in silhouette at the bottom of the poster. Given Lord Kira's alliance with a heterochromial witch, he recruits Asano's adopted weirdo half-breed might-be-some-sort-of-demon, Kai (Keanu Reeves), who can see through witchcraft and is all sorts of badass.

Joining Kai and the witch on the poster are skull tattooed English bloke, who has one line, and big metal samurai dude (giant Englishman Neil Fingleton is, for some reason, credited as 'Lovecraftian samurai'), who has none.

What follows is pretty much the story of the 47 Ronin, just with added monsters, witches and Keanu Reeves.

Rinko Kikuchi plays the witch, in a role where everything about the character - her hair, her clothes, her expression, her voice - basically screams sex. You know how in Pacific Rim Kikuchi wore a sculpted body suit and still looked serious? In this film, even when she shapeshifts into a fox, it's clear that this is a fox who is no better than she ought to be. It's not subtle, and placed against the other female characters - Oishi's wife, a stoic and dutiful samurai bride; and Asano's daughter, Kai's love interest, who is painfully virtuous and lovelorn - it is clearly intended to make her seem bad, which is kind of disappointingly conservative.

The fight scenes are well done, and when it's not being all weird the film has a good handle on the story it's telling. It's a shame it seems to feel the need to spend so much time dwelling on Kai's past, his magical powers, and his doomed romance with Lady Asano, and the funky-flowing-cloth and snake-haired witch, instead of getting to the meat.

Also, Tadanobu Asano is so clearly channeling Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa's smug-snake performance as Shang Tsung that when Tagawa's name came up in the credits I almost wondered if he as aging backwards or something.

The Eagle

Hannah and I decided to watch a DVD on Friday, and after considerable searching, we settled on The Matrix, simply because I don't own many DVDs that she was interested in. It's not that our tastes don't overlap, they do, I just don't own those DVDs. Thus, on Saturday we opted to pick up a cheap DVD in Asda for a future evening's entertainment (in the end, Sunday's).

After much careful consideration, we opted to spend £3 on a copy of The Eagle, with Channing Tatum and Jamie Bell, rather than Black Death, with Sean Bean.

Based on Rosemary Sutcliffe's The Eagle of the Ninth and referenced by James Holloway of the Gonzo History Project in his discussion of Picts who look like Native Americans, The Eagle is an odd-couple buddy movie, in which Marcus - son of the last Centurion of the lost 9th Hispania - seeks to restore the honour of his family by recovering the eagle standard of the legion, aided by his British slave, Esca.

This is one of those films where they distinguish nationality by accent, having the Romans chiefly played by Americans - or in one case, Mark Strong doing an accent, which is a bit odd - and the British by British actors. Marcus and Esca argue and talk about whether Rome is awesome or awful; they get captured by the Picts and Esca claims Marcus is his slave, then at the end of the film they basically swan into town hall, give a Tribune the finger and swan out again like they're in a cop movie and they just took down the mob.

It's kind of interesting to watch from that angle.

Alatriste: The Spanish Musketeer

The Adventures of Captain Alatriste is a lengthy series of novels by Spanish author Arturo Perez Reverte. In Alatriste, director Augustin Diaz Yanes takes the sensible course of adapting only the first of these novels, introducing the character and his page/chronicle Inigo, their friends and enemies at court, and their involvement in the upper echelons of 17th century Spanish politics through Alatriste's unlikely rescue of the visiting Prince of Wales and Duke of Buckingham.

Oh, no; wait. what I should have said is that he shoves the central plots of the first five novels into a single, sumptuous two-hour-plus epic. At the very least, I can say that it never drags.

Make no mistake, this is a film that demands your attention and mocks you mercilessly if you let it slide. It's in Spanish, for starters, so if you're not a Spanish speaker, you'd better be watching the subtitles. The plot is also pretty Machiavellian, so try to keep up, and given that most of the characters are swarthy, mustachioed soldiers in the Spanish tercios, the casual viewer could easily get lost.

That said, it is a magnificently shot movie, with superb action sequences, and it never gets bogged down in all that politics. I suspect that I would have been in absolute throes of ecstasy over the cinematography if I knew more about Velasquez, and I was pretty impressed as it was.

Worth a watch, certainly, although it's two hours in which you won't really be chatting much.

Downton Abbey - Series 1

This past weekend, we've been watching Season 1 of Downton Abbey, which is kind of new to us. It's actually quite an interesting series, running from the sinking of the Titanic in episode 1 to the outbreak of World War I in episode 7, and interleaving social and political issues - one of the daughters of the house campaigns for women's suffrage and the chauffeur is an Irish republican; the loss of the heir apparent on the Titanic leaves the future of estate and title in question and in the hands of an unknown Manchester solicitor; the approach of war increasingly colours everything the last three episodes - with domestic storylines - the ambitious lady's maid O'Brien and her cohort Thomas, the gay footman, scheme to ruin the new valet, Bates; the cook is going blind; the three daughters of the family need to be married off; the Dowager Countess spars constantly with the mother of the new heir - to create compelling characters and narratives.

I've not much more to say, as I haven't the time to go into the details of the thing, although I will say that, as with any TV catch-up, do not look at the Wiki page for it, as it will spoil you up good.

The Lion in Winter

Prince John: "He's got a knife!"
Queen Eleanor: "Of course he has a knife. He always has a knife. We all have knives. It's 1183 and we're barbarians.

Based on James Goldman's play (and, with Goldman writing the screenplay, preserving pretty much all of the dialogue), The Lion in Winter is a domestic comedy-romance transformed into grand tragedy by the fact that the family in question are the Plantagenets; Henry II (Peter O'Toole), his scorned wife Eleanor of Aquitaine (Katharine Hepburn), his rebellious children, Richard (Anthony Hopkins), Geoffrey (John Castle) and John (Nigel Terry), his mistress Alais (Jane Merrow) and her brother, King Philip of France (Timothy Dalton). The play was not successful prior to the release of the film, but unusually it did very well afterwards, due in no small part to the strength of the script.

The cast, as you can see, is spectacular, and the production design is lavish, but it is Goldman's dialogue that sparkles, in particular in the many confrontations between the two leads. O'Toole as the mercurial Henry goes from playful to curmudgeonly to snarlingly overbearing with barely a pause and never the slightest warning, while Hepburn plays Eleanor with a sharp and brittle strength. The rest of the cast are no less worthy of note, many of them in very early film roles preceding long and distinguished careers. Hopkins' Richard is a picture of chivalric nobility, and in his moments of defeat has a truly affecting look of wounded pride. Castle's Geoffrey is overtly the weakest performance, so much so that its strength only shows when one realises that Geoffrey is supposed to be the forgettable - and forgotten - one. Terry, later to play Excalibur's Arthur, is here a weasely presence, appearing very much as a lesser analogue to Dalton's beautiful, reptilian Philip. Merrow is sort of the straight man of the piece, never really knocking heads with anyone, but plays Alais and her devotion to Henry with conviction.

The action of the film is limited to one castle and a few days over Christmas in 1183, with eldest son Henry, the Young King, recently dead and the older Henry yet to name another heir. Plot and counter plot fly back and forth, secrets are revealed and past cruelties raked over as Henry pushes John, Eleanor pushes Richard and Geoffrey pushes himself.

Tightly directed and superbly played, the film is a corker, well worth viewing, if it's new to you, or re-viewing if it isn't.