Tom Charman

Merry Christmas, everybody! Here follows a list of all my received gifts…

• Doctor Who: Fallen Gods novella. Nice hardback thing.
• Canon iP3000 Colour Printer.
• $50 dollars.
• $25 dollar cheque.
• Black short sleeved shirt.
• Roses Chocolates.
• The Complete, Annotated Sherlock Holmes short stories.

More results added as they come. I’d hoped for the Complete Yes, Minister boxed set, but unfortunately Mum got the first two seasons individually instead. This is what happens when you let other people by your presents. It looks like the boxed set is in short supply currently, so I’ll have to wait. I was shocked at the childish urge I had to throw the cases across the room and throw a temper tantrum. Christmas indeed makes us kids again.

I knew it! I knew it! I was wandering around Halo 2, and for once, a marine survived with me. She kept saying encouraging things, and I thought to myself — You sound like Donna from That 70’s Show. So then I looked at her. Hang on, you look like Donna from That 70’s Show.

I checked the cast, and I have indeed been fighting alongside Laura Prepon, Donna from That 70’s Show. And I’ve gotten her killed a lot. I feel really bad now. Interestingly, Topher Grace was in my dream last night. Things should definitely be the other way around.

I’ve been playing X-Men: Legends as well, which started off a bit slow but has turned out to be a great dungeon crawler (if I’ve got my terminology right) which improves with more people. With four, it’ll rock. No silly AIs controlling the valiant X-Men.

This week, the Grapefruit music reviewer and I continued our ongoing squash tournament. Due no doubt to him returning from an injury, I managed to defeat him for the first time… ever. This is a momentus achievement. The dancing girls and champagne, it seems, didn’t make it there in time, but I’m sure they had a good excuse.

Written in a weekend, because some loser people with authority demanded you give them what they wanted. This describes most of my essays, and also, the other first episode of Firefly — ‘The Train Job’. And while compared to my essays, it’s pretty good, compared to the rest of the series, it isn’t. Whedon and Minear had 42 minutes in which to quickly sell the entire Firefly universe to the audience, as well as quick introductions to nine different characters. They just about manage to check every box that they had to — but the result is unfortunately an episode lacking greatly in subtlety.

The crew of Serenity get a job involving a train — a ‘train job’, if you will — from a very nasty, evil, creepy man. They go to steal a bunch of Alliance supplies from a train, but then find out that the supplies were badly needed medicine. Aw. So they give it back. While the story is fleshed out by some excellent dialogue and cute set pieces — especially the thug in the engine business — it doesn’t really manage to escape from being a rather dull and morally straightforward story.

The brooding, sarcastic Mal of Serenity[ftn] has given way to funny happy comedy Mal, at the request of the studio. If Greedo was in this episode, he’d have fired first.[ftn] Later episodes would find a better balance between the two, but ‘The Train Job’ just feels a little out of place when viewed straight after its predecessor. The performances are all up to scratch, but some bits, such as the opening bar fight, feel a little forced. I find it hard to see the Mal we were introduced to in the previous story doing things this stupid. Well, not on purpose, anyhow.

With a first episode like this, some plot lines really suffer — not the least of which being that of Simon and River. In Serenity, they’re fascinating, desperate and reasonably mysterious. Out of their introductory context, Simon comes off as a little whiny, and River, debuting in hotpants and a jumper, as just a random psycho. If it weren’t for these two I wouldn’t be so vehemently opposed to the idea of having this as a first episode. But how anyone could look at this, and then look at Serenity, and say “Yes, this train job business is a much more satisfying beginning” is just beyond me. Pondering on this gives you a good example of how Fox didn’t really want what they’d paid Joss Whedon and Tim Minear to give them.

This is an average episode of television, and a lame episode of Firefly. It means well, and achieves a lot — but all its achievements hide in the background, and the viewer is unlikely to appreciate the subtle world-building underneath the simple plot and slightly cartoony characters.[ftn]

Footnotes

1. For future reference, I’m talking about the pilot episode here, and not the upcoming movie.
2. Or maybe just at the same time, but at a CGI Han. Who knows.
3. Perhaps I’m being a bit too harsh, but I won’t have the chance to properly bag any other Firefly episode.

It’s important to cite one’s references, so I shall point out that the idea for the new touch-ups on grapefruit came from Mimicking Magazines at Standardice, which had a whole bunch of interesting CSS things.

Jackson has gone to Bali, Matthew has gone to Perth. And the streets around here get busier and busier thanks to near-round-the-clock Christmas shopping at Southland. I feel I must side with Jess on this one — Bah, humbug.

Watching Smallville the other day — yes, I’m still doing that, they don’t have patches for it or anything — I was struck by how the show has never done anything surprising ever. It often teases you, makes you think “oooh, Clark’s going to do something shocking” or somesuch, and then it takes a quick turn back into conventional-land and things go on in much the same way they did last week and will do next week.

A good show should bring you to a point where you say “They’ll never do that”, pretend to fake out of it, then damn well do it anyway. I’m getting sick of watching TV that seems like it was put together by statistics. It’s still better than reality TV, just not by much.

Speaking of the foul scourge that is Reality TV, I heard a reality TV star talking about how this new… phenomenon… was so much better than written dramas because no writer could possibly come up with the stuff that just happens naturally on reality TV. I suspect she got confused with “would want to”. If there are really people in this world who enjoy a bunch of losers — and by losers I mean the sort of people who’d agree to go on TV and eat slugs/get locked up for weeks/live on an island — doing the same old crap that we do at home, but with close-ups, then I’m saddened.

Well.

On a lighter side, my brother has gone on holidays for a week. This is very sad. Not because I’ll miss him, but because he’s taken the Xbox. So I might write more reviews this week. I’m trying to review a computer game but they’re trickier than other reviews. It might end up just like a film review with an extra section at the end saying — oh, and the person on the screen moved where I told them to. Hmmm.

I went to see Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason the other day. It was a romantic comedy with Hugh Grant in it. If for some reason there was a bookie following me around, offering bets on my life, he wouldn’t have touched this one. Tom likes romantic comedies with Hugh Grant in them, made by Working Title films.[ftn] And yet… The Edge of Reason was rather dull, irregularly funny, and contained an overwhelming aura of pointlessness.

As I was leaving the cinema, I found myself desperately trying to work out what it was that I enjoyed about romantic comedies. It must be something to do with the cute girl and cute guy getting together. In this film they start off together, so first you have to watch them split up, which is irritating as you know that they’ll just fix things up again in, ooooh, sixty more minutes. So it’s not so much sexual tension as sexual slack, which is a shame.

Is there something else I like about these films? The wit, of course. The Edge of Reason is a shade short on wit. There’s a bit of it, Grant gets most of it, but in general things are pretty sparse. Whole scenes go by with nothing more to keep them afloat than our supposed concern for Bridget’s well-being. Which is unfortunate as the movie invests a lot of time early on showing us how irritatingly stupid Jones is. If you though Ally McBeal was dumb, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet — though in fairness Mark Darcy has his stupid moments too.

Surprise is a big part of comedy as well, so it’s a shame this film desperately tries to use all the same jokes that the first one did.[ftn] Bridget’s bottom slamming into a camera? Check. Darcy and Cleaver getting into a fight? Check. The list goes on — or rather, it would if I could be bothered. Unfortunately, despite a series of replicated events from the first film, this movie ends up being far less. Bridget Jones’ Diary at least had a few subplots; no such beasts exist here. Bridget’s parents renew their wedding vows, but this isn’t so much a subplot as scenery. Given the touching performance Jim Broadbent gave as Bridget’s dad in the first film, it’s a shame he gets almost nothing to do here. And some of the things I would have liked more of from the first film, such as the cute integration with Bridget’s diary, and her handwriting on the screen, are completely absent.

Let me now move briefly to the subject of friends. It seems a staple of (bad) romantic comedies to have one, or many, friends who give the protagonist awful advice. This presumably comes about because the writer is desperate to work out why their theoretically sensible character would screw up their life to the point where it got funny. And so it is in this film too — why would Bridget break up with Mark? Hmmm. Let’s have the friends feed her a steady stream of bullshit. Brilliant! Even Bridget comments that her friends seem to spend all their time trying to set her up, then trying to break her up again. She’s this close to working out that she’s a character in a crummy film.

One of the painfully few points of interest in the film is that it slides in a plot strand from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice that didn’t get used in the first movie; Darcy doing something above and beyond the call of duty, but not taking credit for it. Of course, this cute little reference is sullied by its association to the Thai prison section of the film. I bet you thought getting busted for smuggling drugs and almost sentenced to life imprisonment was a horrible fate that ruins lives. Well, it can also be life-affirming, as this film shows. I wouldn’t mind so much, but the film has a shocking lack of interest in the lives of the incarcerated Thai women that Bridget meets. Perhaps I’m being a bit stodgy here, but I feel that if you’re going to drop such things in a romantic comedy, you’ve got to put a shade more depth in than just reminiscing about bad boyfriends.

When criticising this film, it’s hard to know who to address. The Edge of Reason is of course, based on a book — and from the looks of things, not a very good one. Perhaps Andrew Davies, Richard Curtis and the rest had nothing to work with. Still, I’m shocked and disappointed. Working Title haven’t served me this kind of crap before. I feel like my trust has been violated. v. v. disappointing.[ftn]

Footnotes

1. I have to put that qualifier in, as Two Weeks’ Notice was pretty lame.
2. Rather reminiscent of Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me.
3. And you thought I had the strength to avoid a ‘v.’ joke. Alright, no you didn’t, and you were right.

I feel like I’ve seen a run of bad films lately. Going to the cinema has become a recipe for disappointment. Garden State is not a bad film — in fact, it’s damn good. But if I’m over-enthusiastic it’s probably because I’ve come from watching Hero and Bridget Jones 2, and was desperate for something interesting.

Garden State‘s strength is in its intriguing characters, which immediately separates it from the two films I mentioned in the previous paragraph. Andrew Largeman has been on Lithium since he was ten years old, and has finally come to the decision that there might not actually be anything wrong with him — sadly, he’s not seen his family for nine years, and this decision comes too late to share with his mother, who dies at the start of the film. Largeman returns from Los Angeles to attend the funeral, and finds contact with both old and new friends begins to reawaken him.

I’ve always wanted to like Natalie Portman, but over the last few years her turns in Star Wars I and II have made this a bit difficult. This film makes it easier again. Portman plays a quirky girl called Sam, who Andrew meets at the neurologist. I’m always a bit leery of American attempts at ‘quirky’ characters, as they so often end up simply stupid.[ftn] There are one or two moments where Sam looks in danger of falling into this trap, but some excellent dialogue and Portman’s acting save her from this.

Largeman’s grave digging/robbing friend Mark is perhaps a shade more interesting, via Peter Sarsgaard’s dangerous performance. There’s an underlying menace to a lot of his scenes, and yet there’s also a strong friendship shown between him and Andrew. I’m not quite sure how he managed this combination, but it goes a long way to making this film intriguing as well as funny. The other strong performance is Ian Holm’s quiet, understated Gideon Largeman. Holm pulls off an impressive American Jewish accent, and manages some dry humour and honest sadness — making a potentially unsympathetic role much more deep.

The film is written by, directed by, and stars Zach Braff of TV’s Scrubs, and he brings a lot of the crazy atmosphere of his show to this film. Of particular note is the near-perfect scene when Sam accompanies Largeman to a friend’s house after they meet. The first half of the film is packed with excellent, quirky jokes that are played with slow but perfect timing. As an actor, Zach does a good job of slowly emerging from his stupor, and achieves an endearing performance despite the strong alienation at the start. He even manages to make a few speeches that should have sounded awful play alright, due to his natural and compelling delivery.

There’s enough good things in the first half of the film to make you fall in love with it — which is lucky for the film, as the last half is occasionally quite painful. Garden State avoids most micro cliches, but runs headlong into a bunch of larger ones. I suppose you can see it coming from the premise, but Andrew’s journey out of his bland existence, and relationship with Sam, start to point you inevitably to two conclusions; either everything’s going to end up really happy, or someone’s going to die.[ftn] And while you’re desperately hoping something more interesting might happen, you lose a bit of faith every time one of the characters makes a long speech about life and death and what have you. Andrew’s first monologue, in the pool, is alright, but from there it’s down, down, down, and you’re almost expecting Aunt May to pop in and explain to everyone why we need heroes.

Ultimately this film is a shade disappointing, but I found it charming enough in the beginning to forgive its later sins. While there’s no denying Natalie Portman cries better than almost any other actor I’ve ever seen, I could have done with less of this — and Ian Holm deserved a more dynamic final scene than the passive one that he ends up with. Garden State may be corny, but it’s also interesting and funny. If you can stand a bit of cheese, you’ll like this movie — and if you don’t, just leave when it starts raining.

Footnotes

1. Dharma, for instance. Or any number of comic relief sidekicks in hollywood movies.
2. The Jackson Rule of try-hard cinema, so named after its discoverer.

An Xbox stole my concentration. Playing through Halo (the original) on heroic is taking up too much of my time. But I’ve got two reviews that just need proofreading, and then they’ll be up. And one from Shannon that I’d better get up before she returns from her holiday (though it seems she’s on the internet wherever she is anyhow).

But now the Xbox is taking over my brain. There’s a fly in my room, and so I’m looking down the bottom left of my vision to see if it’s showing up on my motion sensor. It’s very disturbing and also not very useful.

Damn this heat. And it’ll only get worse. Give me a white Christmas any day.

There’s been little activity around these parts just recently. I apologise. Many more and exciting reviews to come in the future. Honest. Today’s a public holiday anyhow. It isn’t? Well, it should be. 41 years should count for something.

Anyhow, I was busy last weekend taking part in the world famous Victorian Corporate Games. Neil, James, Jane Rudman and I made up the third and finest team from AMES. After varied performances in rehearsal, we were in fine form on the day, with the exception of James’s last game, when he hurt his hip.

Of course, there were some bowling gods hanging around who whumped us convincingly, but managing a personal best, team-wise, was quite satisfying. In competition you must alternate between the left and right hand lanes with the team in the same area as you, but as the ANZ something-or-others hadn’t showed up, we were over in half the time and couldn’t be bothered sticking around to find our exact placing.

A successful day indeed. Well, more successful than the dragon boat racing we tried two years back, anyhow.

Separate entries for separate moods. I’ve got a widescreen television! Woot! It’s not plasma or anything but it works rather well, especially with component video from the DVD, or digital TV.

Things seemed a bit dubious on the digital TV side of things until I found the menu that specifies what aspect ratio the set top box is sending to the telly. Suddenly it was filling the screen like a good little… box. You can even adjust the opacity and colours of the menus! Phwoar!

The major drawback to digital TV via a set top box: watching all your telly through AV1, and thus needing a different remote for changing channels and for turning the TV off. And not being able to use the “picture in place” option nicely. But it’s a small price to pay for widescreen TV. Did you know Bert Newton’s Good Morning Australia is transmitted in widescreen? It’s to keep his head in the picture I suspect.

[Extra! Extra!] And then, after thinking, “Hmm, this DVD looks a shade thinner than I’d expect,” we realised that the DVD player still thought we had a 4:3 screen and wanted the movie letterboxed. We informed it otherwise and it looks much cooler now. Congratulations to my father for working this out.