WARNING: THIS CONTAINS RAMBLING

I have been struggling to find a reason just why Angel just doesn’t engage me in the way that Buffy does. I have some idea: in “Apocalypse, Nowish”,  Angel, Gunn, Wesley and Lorne are trying to decipher the papers from Wolfram & Hart in order to prevent the Apocalypse meanwhile Cordelia and Fred are absent; they are not there as part of the team. OK, Cordelia has a good reason to be missing but Fred is in a café moping about the men in her life and what they did for her.

However, I don’t really mind that Cordelia and Fred aren’t there; it’s more that there aren’t any other women on the show who could be there. The men are in the majority. Of the seven main characters in S4, five are men and two are women.

The question that then popped into my head was, does everything I watch have to be about women? Erm, let’s examine the evidence by considering my favourite recent shows, Mad Men, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Battlestar Galactica.

Mad Men and BSG have more male cast members than female but women are central to how much I enjoy the series. Without Betty and Peggy and Joan and Starbuck and Six and D’Anna, I really wouldn’t be interested.

[I wonder how often I use the word “really”.]

I am bored by John and Derek in T:TSCC while I love Sarah and Cameron. I also liked Riley and Jesse (but only after I got used to Stephanie Jacobsen’s nasal voice and after they were linked together.

Okay, I definitely prefer to watch things with women in prominent and active roles and, if you are like me, I heartily recommend Torchwood: Children of Earth and, no, you don’t need to have seen the previous series (it didn’t stop Andy and I liking it).

Do you think that any men ever wonder at any point why the majority of things they watch are about men? “Oh, my favourite films are Apocalypse Now, The Shawshank Redemption and 12 Angry Men, just why do I like watching films about men all the time?” These two IMDb lists are interesting. No room on the male list for Amelie and To Kill a Mockingbird and no room on the female list for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Goodfellas. I feel a post coming on.

So I do know why I like Angel less than Buffy but it most certainly isn’t the only reason. Angel has clunky dialogue, poor line readings, and character dynamics that I don’t care about because I don’t believe in them due to their contrivance. This list makes me cringe:

* Wesley/Lilah
* Angel/Lilah
* Fred/Gunn
* Fred/Wesley
* Angel/Cordelia

while I only care about Angel/Connor and Cordelia/Connor (spot the connection).

On to the episode: Lilah as Fred was disturbing particularly since at first I thought she was supposed to be a schoolgirl. And having her hair done up in plaits caused Lilah’s hair to be tremendously bouffant later on.

Chocodiles are a real thing!

Satan was rather immobile except when he Springheel Jacked over the rooftops. I don’t dislike slow motion except when it is used in a hackneyed way or to serve no purpose except to prolong a scene and that’s exactly how it was used here.

A bright spot was Lilah (despite her relationship with Wesley) because she gets to call Fred a “Texas twig” (although part of me thinks that is mean to Amy Acker) and summarizes this audience member’s feelings when she says “so let’s say we skip the usual two-step, you threaten me, I threaten you, yadda, yadda, yawn”.

I’m not sure what to think of Cordelia and Connor having sex but I do know that in the Buffyverse sex can only lead to bad things happening. And, by bad, I mean worse than the Apocalypse.

Sigh. Why do I continue to watch it? The obvious reason is that I have watched Angel and Cordelia over seven seasons of Buffy and Angel and I do want to see the end of their journey. And the DVDs are cheap. And there are occasional crossovers with Buffy. And I like Cordelia Chase/Charisma Carpenter. And I like Lorne. And I like Vincent Kartheiser (even if I do have to check how to spell his surname every single time I type it). It isn’t hard or difficult to watch. Finally, I want to work out why Amy Acker can’t sell Fred to me but can do so with her portrayal of Dr Saunders in Dollhouse.

Why haven’t I seen the Oscar winning film There Will Be Blood? Because a film styled as a “story about family, greed, religion, and oil, centered around a turn-of-the-century prospector in the early days of the business” which has “ Less than two women in [it]” is simply not high on my list.

I don’t need the money. Not needing the money puts me in a magical place because I can say no. I like the idea of having good movies made or having no movies made.

Neil Gaiman on The Anansi Boys, black characters, white Hollywood and ethics.

Apparently Terence Stamp turned down the role of Montag because he thought he would be overshadowed by Julie Christie. Well, to this set of eyes and ears he needn’t have worried. I am at a loss to understand the attraction of Julie Christie. She doesn’t seem either talented or compelling or even that good looking.

Andy and I started thinking about who was good-looking in the sixties and seventies and we had a problem thinking of anybody. I suggested that Terence Stamp himself was beautiful and maybe that was the problem – the era was full of beautiful men like Stamp, Hemmings, Beatty and McDowell. The women couldn’t get a look in.

Fahrenheit 451 is almost a great film but it suffers from its limited locations (making it look like a TV programme), its disconnected continuity, its lacklustre lead and from any sense of urgency. It failed to make Montag’s wife at all interesting when I think in the book she was clearly depressed and repressed and not simply shallow.

I did like the locations they did find especially the Alton Estate and the SAFEGE Monorail.

The most powerful sequences were in the old woman’s house with the increasing tension between the Captain and Montag and the old woman’s suicide along with her murdered books.

The spoken opening titles were fabulous and Bernard Hermann was the Danny Elfman of his day: instantly recognisable.

Doll House Crowd Convicted, originally uploaded by moley75.

This is a poor screengrab of the final few seconds of Walk on the Wild Side (1962). The dollhouse in question is a brothel.

]]> http://www.moley75.co.uk/2009/03/28/the-season-finale-revealed/feed/ 2 http://www.moley75.co.uk/2009/03/22/stranger-than-fiction/ http://www.moley75.co.uk/2009/03/22/stranger-than-fiction/#comments Sun, 22 Mar 2009 00:21:49 +0000 Hazel http://www.moley75.co.uk/?p=1612

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to
stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.

–Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar. in Following the Equator by Mark Twain (1897)

I really enjoyed this film starring one of my favourite people, Emma Thompson. Great music, fascinating story, good cast and lots of baked goods. I would have happily been one of Ana’s study buddies.

Best line “I brought you flours.”

I love Christopher Nolan’s Memento and The Prestige was interesting but felt like two films stuck together. It took me two viewings to appreciate Batman Begins – the first time I fell asleep – but second time I thought it was pretty good – certainly better than any of the Batman films of the late 80s/early 90s. I was quite looking forward to seeing The Dark Knight and here are some things I don’t mind about the film:

• I don’t mind Batman’s stupidly deep voice.
• I don’t mind the detour to Hong Kong.
• I don’t mind the contrived and idiotic scenes on the ferries.
• I don’t mind people criticising Katie Holmes’ performance in Batman Begins as if it is bad.
• I don’t mind people pretending Maggie Gyllenhaal’s performance is any better just because she isn’t married to a Scientologist (because that is what it’s about, isn’t it?).
• I don’t mind that Rachel Dawes isn’t as interesting in this because we have Harvey Dent instead as our person/man/knight on the side of good.
• I don’t mind that there is a variation of the “Mind if I borrow your girlfriend?” line used in this film (“Mind if I borrow Rachel?” says Dent to Wayne).
• I don’t mind that Rachel is refrigerated. It’s boring and predictable for a woman to be killed (sometimes a child) in order to motivate heroes and villains but it’s been happening for a long time and we don’t need anything fresh.
• I don’t mind that women are almost completely unimportant in this Gotham. There may have been one with dialogue on one of the ferries. And, of course, we do have Rachel and Detective Ramirez.

Actually, I have just got to the point of this post, women are so completely irrelevant in this film that James Gordon Jr is the focus of the scene between Two-Face and Jim Gordon at the end. However, if you ask anybody who knows the tiniest thing about Batman to name Commissioner Gordon’s children, they will say he has a daughter (maybe a niece) called Barbara Gordon and I bet most of them have no idea there was a son called James Jr.

So, when I say I don’t mind, I mean I do but not as much as I mind that during the climax (okay, one of the climaxes) the daughter of Jim Gordon (who is likely to be the future Batgirl) is barely considered as one of Gordon’s choices (in fact, her face is hardly even seen). Sorry dear but Jr is so much more important.

[Heath Ledger is good though.]

My first criterion is that the majority of the films made by the actresses are in English since I am not likely to have seen more than two or three of their films if they mainly star(red) in foreign language films. My second criterion follows from this and is that I must have seen more than four or more films with the actress in question. My third criterion is that I have to have watched any old nonsense in order to follow these actresses (examples of these in brackets)

In alphabetical order:

Jean Arthur (If You Could Only Cook)
Ingrid Bergman (The Yellow Rolls-Royce)
Claudette Colbert (Without Reservations)
Bette Davis (The Watcher in the Woods)
Judy Davis (Who Dares Wins)
Olivia de Havilland (Airport ‘77)
Jodie Foster (Nell)
Greta Garbo (Anna Christie)
Judy Garland (Love Finds Andy Hardy)
Miriam Hopkins (The Chase)
Nicole Kidman (Eyes Wide Shut)
Myrna Loy (Airport 1975)
Julia Roberts (Pretty Woman)
Barbara Stanwyck (Stella Dallas)
Meryl Streep (Mamma Mia!)
Emma Thompson (Love Actually)
Sigourney Weaver (Half Moon Street)
Kate Winslet (Titanic)
Reese Witherspoon (Sweet Home Alabama)
Teresa Wright (Somewhere in Time)

I am going to tag Everything’s Swirling, Laughing Wild and this to say about that.

Frank Capra was a genius. I have no idea how he managed it but every sentimental, corny, mushy, unlikely scene in this film just wasn’t.

The dialogue (by Robert Riskin), acting and casting certainly helped. The film overcomes its abrupt changes in direction with charm and verve.

I love Jean Arthur. She makes me laugh (I know she is supposed to but it doesn’t always work out that way) and her cracked voice gives her dramatic scenes extra poignancy. The hard-boiled but actually quite squodgy girl reporter was a thirties standby but she played it so well. The rope and coin tricks were quietly funny.  When she drops the coin and had to get on her knees to search for it, I was reminded of the piggybank scene in Easy Living. This excerpt from Ray Carney’s American Vision: The Films of Frank Capra talks about Arthur’s performance in the film and has a fascinating take on the dropped coin incident.

I’m not a fan of Gary Cooper. I can’t think of another of his films that I have particularly liked but I do like him in this particularly when he was untidy. I liked the fact that Longfellow rang up Babe to confirm the truth of the story rather than relying on secondhand news: that happens too often in films and on TV.

Lionel Stander was super as the strong-arm who was the first to recognise Longfellow’s merits. The two old ladies (Margaret Seddon and Margaret McWade) were hilarious and I really liked John Wray’s affecting performance as the farmer.

There is a huge problem with this film that stops it from being completely enjoyable. Why is Longfellow so violent? Thumping people was not the answer to any of the problems he faced and his powerful words at the hearing amply demonstrate this.

Nice photography too:

I haven’t seen this film in years but I have seen it several times as I realised when I watched it on DVD and found myself anticipating many of the scenes and the funny moments and lines. It has aged quite well and I actually like Bill Murray this time. Dustin Hoffman is utterly fantastic as Michael Dorsey and Dorothy Michaels. However, it is too long, I found it a bit boring in parts and the music and songs were…dated.

The film examines gender roles and expectations but fails to maintain consistency. Many of the problems that women face were picked up but then left dangling. This is most notable in the case of Sandy who is treated thoughtlessly, dishonestly and carelessly but is not given any closure. How are we supposed to believe Michael will behave better towards Julie (“but I was a better man with you, as a woman than I ever was with a woman, as a man”) when we have seen how he treated Sandy while he was busy being this wonderful man as Dorothy? He even sleeps with Sandy because he would rather do that than tell her the truth.

Revolting predatory behaviour by an elderly male actor is portrayed as commonplace sexual harassment and the step-up to rape is seen as a natural progression. I believe that we are still supposed to think that John Van Horn is not unequivocally repulsive but amusingly and misguidedly mistaken.

Another thing that irritated me was that Julie’s father got an apology from Michael while Sandy got nothing and, not only that, he got to moan about how he could have done without the dancing when it was he who had forced Dorothy to dance with him.

Finally, Dorothy was lucky to get away with so much ad-libbing in the hectic world of soap opera and I love how there was not a writer to be seen anywhere near the studio.