Tom Charman

It’s hard being all pimply at school. It’s even harder when everyone around you is gorgeous and perfect-looking, and you’re the token geek. Especially since that means that you’ll inevitably hurt people in your quest to be good looking when the pressure gets too much. That’s what happens this week to “Scabby Abby”, when her mother uses Kryptonite to give her the ultimate makeover. Of course, there’s always a drawback with Kryptonite — this time it’s a kind of sanity-draining effect. Poor Abby. Luckily Clark’s always around to sort these things out. With a little help from his friends.

Alright. Let’s get one thing clear at the outset. Smallville is crappy. It’s not one of those shows that I’ll defend with my last breath, I’m not obsessed with it, I don’t care if it gets cancelled tomorrow. The acting’s usually alright, but sometimes dreadful. The writing is usually dreadful, but sometimes alright. So why am I still watching it?

I don’t know. I need help.

But in my defense — Smallvile‘s fourth season is a great improvement on previous years. We’ve lost some of the series’ most irritating baggage. Pete Ross seems gone for good; I’m sure the writers could’ve come up with something to do with him if they’d tried, but ultimately he became the quintessential boring best friend who whines and gets in trouble. Lana and Clark seem to accept that they’re over, which means no more irritating back and forth there.[ftn]

There’s also a breath of fresh air or two. Jensen Ackles[ftn] joins the cast as Smallville High’s new football coach / Lana’s new boyfriend. Here’s hoping he doesn’t suddenly and unbelievably become an evil marauding corpse working for Lionel. He has the somewhat unfair advantage over other Smallville characters of getting reasonable dialogue most of the time. Sam Jones III must be really pissed off. But even better than Jensen is Erica Durance as Lois Lane.

Yes, finally Lois Lane, Clark Kent’s future bride, is in the show. Different people judge their Loises differently I’m sure. Some will view Margot Kidder as the definitive version — me, I’m proud/ashamed to say that I grew up with Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman and Teri Hatcher is mine. Durance is suitably sassy,[ftn] and also seems to be getting good dialogue. Mostly. It’s all helped by the relaxation of watching a couple that you know will get together at some point. I don’t know what’s happened to this show. Well, alright, I do, they’ve got some old Buffy writers on it. A good move.

However, there’s always things to remind you that it’s the same old Smallville. The show is still taking any excuse to show off its female cast — this week, Lois wakes up to find herself strapped to a table wearing only two strips of lycra. Phwoar! Oh wait, I was going to take the moral high ground there. Dammit. I concede the moral high ground and move on to the famed “Freak of the Week” syndrome. Yes, kryptonite has once more caused problems for an unsuspecting member of Smallville High. And yet again they’re not strong-willed enough to deal with it, choosing instead to go after one of Clark’s friends. This show doesn’t have a very high opinion of humanity.

It also doesn’t manage a very convincing high-school. Sometimes the kids act their age — even if less and less effort is made to make them look anything less than 25. But other times the writers seem to lose themselves completely, and the characters start slipping off to have sex with each other in the showers after only just meeting. I’m pretty sure this isn’t realistic.[ftn] Disturbingly little attention is paid, as usual, to the emotional effects of the story on the guest characters. This week a reasonably nice character is followed to the point where she purposefully causes psychological pain to another person … and then suddenly drops off the plot’s radar. I’m not sure if she even got the traditional Smallville “So how’s X holding up?”

So. Smallville. A guilty pleasure of cute american girls, the occasional good line and affectionate play with the Superman mythos. And an improving one, at that.

Footnotes

1. Which is just as well, because I couldn’t have taken another season of that.
2. Apparently, really good on Dark Angel. Not bad here either.
3. To be honest I’m not entirely sure what “sassy” means. I think it’s a word people invented to describe women when “plucky” became too patronising.
4. A difficult criticism to make, this, as I inadvertently reveal that I was not in fact having sex with people in the showers at school.

From today’s MX. If I were advertising an educational institution, I’d proofread like buggery.

New reviews soon, promise. We’re all lazy. And depressed. Yes, depression is a good excuse. Now Christopher Reeve is dead too, it’s too much for one man to take.

Perhaps, if Mr Howard killed a puppy in front of the electorate, they’d sit up and take notice.

Probably not.

It’s not worth talking more about it. I just don’t get the Australian people. I preferred it when I was 14 and it only became obvious when the cricket delayed Babylon 5. These days the gap is more painful.

What are the most risky jokes to make? Jokes about the Holocaust? Jokes about suicide? Jokes about killing puppies? Suicide doesn’t get you into as much trouble as long as they’re very generic. Going specific — joking about shutting yourself in your garage and hanging yourself for example — lessens your odds of applying to people around you (or rather, people they knew), but increases the potential fallout if it does apply.

Trouble is, most of the time when making a joke, you want it to be funny to the smallest number of people possible that includes all the people around you. Since in general, the fewer people who get a joke, the funnier it is. But you have to go completely the other way when dealing with tastelessness.

If Hitler comes up in conversation, for instance, your instincts may subconsciously remind you that someone in the conversation is Jewish. If you twig onto this cleverly, you won’t make any jokes. If it just sits in the back of your mind, you may actually decide that your joke about gassing heaps of people to death will be funnier because there’s someone around you that knows about that.

Of course, I’d never be that stupid.

In other news — the parents are returning! If my lazy, good for nothing brother hasn’t done some serious tidying today, then he’s toast. He seems to think that going on a weekend camp to help disabled people is his high moral ground ticket to do nothing around the house.

Not really. My assignment slowly approaches getting done, but only slowly. You’d think holidays would’ve resulted in increased Grapefruit activity, but of course those who remember previous years will know that it’s really exam period that does this. Look forward to November, people.

I’d write something interesting, but I keep forgetting them before I get to my weblog. Maybe next time. I swear, sometimes I think of interesting things.

Ooooh! I remembered one! Last night I saw An Air Balloon Across Antarctica — and you all should too. A really good play; balancing comedy and tragedy perfectly. If you enjoy things about explorers and hamsters, you’ll like this.

Keira Knightley will be starring in a Working Title adaptation of Pride and Prejudice as Elizabeth Bennett! AND, Rosamunde Pike (from Die Another Day) will be playing Jane!

Well, it excites me.

Mmmmm. Always pays to pop by JB Hi-Fi. Certain box sets of definitive classic movie trilogies might have been released early. Darth Vader, Boba Fett and a Stormtrooper tried to stop me purchasing said box set, but a Jedi held them off while I snuck past.

No, really.

By day, I am mild-mannered Tom but by night, I watch Smallville. Which sucks. Yesterday was the episode where the hero’s friend gets in with a bad crowd and thinks the hero is jealous/mean/unappreciative of his gifts when he cautions him against it. I could write some of this with my eyes closed. Kinf og likr yhid buy eiyh bryyrt dprllinh.

This whole “no parents” thing takes a bit of getting used to. All these little jobs that got done invisibly behind my back. Closing the blinds. Opening the blinds. Preparing dinner. And who knew that clothes didn’t wash themselves? They’ve been sitting in the corner of my room for ages, and still have yet to do that thing where they jump neatly folded and clean onto the end of my bed.

In geekier news, I got around to installing the AdBlock extension to Firefox today. Oh my. See an ad you don’t like? I presume this is all of them. Right click on it, block it and all others like it. Pow! They’re gone. I’ve killed five sorts of ads already today and I’m just getting started. I always quite appreciated the subtelty of Google’s ads but I destroyed them anyway.

I have the video camera again, so a series of ‘webisodes’ charting our time in Canada might turn up. Bite size pieces, I’m thinking. Sadly — or perhaps happily for you folks — we don’t have overly exhaustive footage. But stay tuned to NTGF for “Operation: Hypothermia” and “Assassinate Georgie-Boy”.

I can’t believe Monash don’t have mid-semester break yet. What are you losers waiting for? Any later and you’ll have to call it swot vac.

The thing I like most about Goldeneye is, it’s not lace, nor leather. It’ll do what I please, and has no time for sweetness. It also has really, really bizarre lyrics to its title song, in the grand old James Bond tradition.

The first Bond film in ages when it was released in 1995, Goldeneye made quite a splash. I don’t recall much of it, but I do remember the Nintendo 64 game. Which isn’t strictly relevant to this review. Interestingly, the three subsequent Pierce Brosnan Bond films are quite different to this one — the rest have the same writers and composer, and Goldeneye is notably different on both counts.

Goldeneye opens with a flashback[ftn] that introduces a villain with a more emotional connection to Bond than normal — a good start, with some excellent stunts thrown in. There are good chases, good fights, women with sexy Russian accents[ftn] and funny lines. I’m tempted to call it the perfect Bond film. While it keeps an emotional side to the story, it doesn’t usually get in the way of the plot, and at no point does it drop all its integrity and just go completely stupid, unlike a certain Bond film that will remain nameless. Director Martin Campbell is known for his magnificent British mini-series, Edge of Darkness, and brings some of that grittiness to this film. Sensibly for a Bond film, he leaves a lot of it behind.

The dialogue in Goldeneye is for the most part far superior to later Brosnan Bond films. Here, Bond is after the women, certainly, but makes very few sleazy jokes, and more than a few good silly ones — teasing the Russian Defense Minister about the lost art of interrogation, and thanking assassin Xenia Onatopp for “a lovely time”. The romance is a shade more convincing than most Bond films, though as per usual for an action film, there’s a moment where for no apparent reason two people who’ve been dodging bullets and getting hit for half an hour suddenly snog. And for all I know, that really does happen when you do all that. I’m not about to try it out though. At one point, the villain does put Bond in an easily escapable situation, but it turns out to be part of a plan to frame him and so can’t be boiled down to villain incompetence / bad writing.

The music is interesting. I’ve read harsh criticism of it from people who believe Bond films should only ever have big brassy music, and weren’t so big on Eric Serra’s[ftn] more peculiar scoring. As far as Bond films go, I like the music to play a big part, and hate it when it falls into the background for large stretches of time — something that’s obviously desirable in other genres of film. That doesn’t happen here, and Serra’s echoing, percussive score gives a lot of tension to the movie.

Brosnan himself would’ve been a breath of fresh air after the extreme seriousness of Dalton, and extreme campness of Moore. An actor who can do both? Amazing. Brosnan’s bond is cheeky and likeable in this outing, yet brutal and focussed when he has to be. He’s very convincing at getting beaten up, too, I was wincing a bit in the final throw-down. It’s a shame that later films wouldn’t give him quite as much silliness to play with, although they did keep the emotional pain coming regularly. Natalya and Onatopp are both excellent Bond girls. Natalya is genuinely convincing as a self-motivated sidekick to Bond, even if she is far far too gorgeous to have ever learned anything about computers. Onatopp is over the top, and yet she fits into the film perfectly. If I die prematurely, I want it to happen between Famke Janssen’s thighs. It beats having my neck sliced open by a metal-rimmed bowler hat in any case.

The other characters are pretty good too — Ourumov is a fantastic highly strung Russian general, and Sean Bean as always acquits himself well. Playing 006 must be pretty cool — all the fun with none of the typecasting. Although, probably not as much money. The Q scene is fantastic — “That’s my lunch!” — and the action is continually entertaining. Though someone should tell them that you can’t have it both ways — if you want a vehicle to get crushed by a tank, you can’t then show everyone getting out unhurt a moment later. If you want people to get out unscathed, then, well, don’t scathe them.

The film even manages to flesh out Bond’s character a shade, and make it nearly convincing. “He was your friend. And now he’s your enemy and you will kill him,” sums up Natalya, indignant at being caught in the black and white world of the action movie. Bond is forced to agree, but at least he looks a bit sad about it too. Later comments by 006 concerning the men Bond has killed and the women he failed to protect aren’t handled quite as well.

Amazingly, Goldeneye keeps a near-consistent tone throughout, despite featuring women who murder men by suffocating them between their legs, a comedy Russian crime boss played perfectly by Robbie Coltrane, a crazy tank chase, and a man who can fall from a great height into a plane and pull it out of a dive. Because he’s Bond. James Bond. And this is him at his best. Now, if someone could just make a cinema show it,[ftn] I’d really like to see that tank business on the big screen.

DVD Review

This DVD, like all the Bond ones I’ve bought, for some reason requires you to press ‘enter’ at the very start in order to get to the menu. I can’t understand it. It’s not like you’ve got an option. II like to turn on the DVD player, get food, and come back with everything ready for me. This stupid menu was seemingly made specifically to make me unhappy.

On slightly less petty matters, there’s a commentary by Martin Campbell and producer Michael G. Wilson, which isn’t quite as boring as most Bond commentaries, since there’s a bit to talk about regarding the introduction of a new actor, as well as the large gap between Bond films. Tina Turner’s Goldeneye music video is there, too — only to view if you want to see just how daggy music videos used to be.

The best feature is probably the Goldeneye Video Diary. Starting off with the caption “Day One,” it looks like it’s going to be amazingly exhaustive for a moment, but doesn’t actually do every day individually. It gives excellent insight into the stunts however, and makes me really concerned that no one will bother doing any in ten years time or so. There’s an extra thrill to watching the dam bungee jump or motorcycle dive at the beginning of the film when you know someone really did it.

Your proper DVD reviews will mention the audio and visual transfer, aspect ratios, sound quality and colours. You’ll find them on proper sites.

Footnotes

1. As regular Grapefruit readers know, flashbacks are cool.
2. Thus allowing me to show a gorgeous woman who’s actually relevant to the review. There’s a challenge for you, Andy.
3. Serra did the awesome score to The Fifth Element, too.
4. I’ve been checking The Astor’s listings for years in this hope. But nooooo, they keep trotting out boring Roger Moore films. Pah.

Oh yes. I’ve got positive money. No more of this negative money, or anti-money as I like to call it. Nasty stuff. So now, I’m earning interest and not paying bank fees. Oh happy day. I’m one step closer to my iMac. Mmmmm. iMac.

I’m also only two days away from my parents’ three week holiday. Party at my place! Everyone’s invited!

No, not you. I don’t like you.

In other news, Kofi Annan has said that by the UN Charter, the Iraq war was illegal. All the people involved seem hurt by that comment. Frankly, if the UN Charter doesn’t have some line in it to the effect of “If the UN tells you not to do something, and you do it, then that’s ILLEGAL,” then it’s exactly the kind of pathetic institiution these same people continually accuse it of being. But no, no one is impressed, they all insist it was quite legal, and kinda brush over the bit where the UN told them not to go, and they went.

It makes me wish we were still doing St Crispin’s News. Then Jackson could write a comedy story effortlessly melding GameCubes and UN Charter Law, and I could laugh.