Tom Charman

Incredible jetsetter that I am, I saw Kill Bill Vol. 1 in Vancouver, with Andy. The cinema was a bit small and the floor was ten times stickier than any I’ve seen in Australia, but the film was fantastic. Crazy, genre-crossing, lightning fast, cool, and with marvellous action sequences. Leaving the cinema afterwards reminded me in a vague way of seeing The Matrix for the first time, back in Melbourne with Andy.

Kill Bill Vol. 2 isn’t the same at all. While it’s possible it’s just because I didn’t see this one with Andy, I suspect the answer is more that it’s a completely different type of film. Vol. 1 was an action film. Vol. 2 seems to be more of a character study, telling us the story of Bill and the Bride. Which is quite interesting, and well-acted. David Carradine speaks slowly, but carries a big pipe. And he’s tremendous fun — even if in later scenes his character comes across as having the emotional maturity of a fourteen year old. This might well be on purpose, but it undermines the films for me a tad if they were really the story of some lame high-school break-up.

However, by and large, all the Bride/Bill sections are fabulous to watch. Tight dialogue, good direction, and a great little Tarantino waffle about Superman that is actually reasonably relevant to the story. Also interwoven is the story of the Bride’s tutelage under Pai Mei, a wise old martial arts master complete with superhuman reflexes and strength, corny camera zooms, and an eminently strokable beard. Well, perhaps a little too strokable. I confess to being a little bored of the same joke after the eighth time. Regardless of over-stroking, these scenes are also tremendous fun, and the closest we get to the delightfully crazy action of Vol. 1.

And you’ve got to take those bits when you can get them, as unfortunately, there’s this huge boring bit in the middle of the film. It’s about Bill’s brother Bud, who’s a bit of a loser. I say he’s a loser, because we spend about twenty minutes of screen time establishing the fact. Over and over again. See Bud walk. See Bud get yelled at by his boss. See Bud clean the toilet. Bud is Glum. Aw. The plotline of course gets somewhat more exciting when the Bride turns up, in the middle of her rampaging revenge, but Bud can even make her boring — in a scene too reminiscent of a Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode for me to provide an objective opinion on.

I should point out that I didn’t have a problem with Michael Madsen, who does a good job — but he just hasn’t had the luck of getting a fun and crazy character. Darryl Hannah has though — and what an evil, evil bitch she is. Delightfully fun to watch — and no matter what horrible end fate has in store for her, it hardly seems enough. I’m not spoiling anything by telling you that Elle Driver and the Bride fight, and it’s a goody.

However, while the film suffers from a few cases of the boring and pointless, as well as from a good surprise being wasted on last film’s cliffhanger, it is good, and surprisingly thoughtful, and regularly silly, and touching in a way I really didn’t expect. I’d love to see a version of volumes one and two together, some of the extraneous boredom snipped, and the crazy action scenes mixed neatly with the talkiness. Perhaps I’ll get it. I’m not shelling out my DVD money until I know for sure…

There’s been broken glass spread over the car park at Cheltenham station for AGES. I’ll swear it was there before I left. Does no one clean? Or are there just very accident-prone parkers hanging about?

In other news, the ‘dark’ grapefruit theme (AKA that ugly one) has been switched with the far more exciting formal theme. I’m in the process of making the weblogs respect your theme choice, though this will take time and incentive is small, what with me being the only one who cares.

There are more reviews coming in the future too, I promise. There’s even the vaguest of vague chances some of them won’t be by me. Jess promised me a review of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, but has since disappeared from the face of the net. Don’t tell me she didn’t like it!

Anyhow, I’m off to cook dinner, for the first time in almost two months. Point of interest – that’s about how long it took me to cook when we got the new place in Banff, too.

Ah, the joys of running the second smallest site on the internet and looking at web statistics. If you’re feeling delusional, you can close your eyes and imagine that the stats represent some cross-section of reality. 40% Macintosh users, over 50% not using Internet Explorer. It’s like heaven.

Search terms are also amusing. People searching for “Tom Charman” is understandable. I am pretty cool. It’s when I get other terms like “Jennifer” “Garner” “Stabbed” “Belly” that I start to worry.

It seems a very very small amount of people use Macintosh Internet Explorer. Haven’t you people heard of Safari? Or Camino? In any case, it worries me that I might have to start making these pages look decent for such people. They currently… don’t. Currently, the sidebar floats a whole page away from the main section to the right. Crazy. I’m not sure I can be bothered.

Lucky this site isn’t popular, eh?

I didn’t want to have to watch this episode again. Not because it’s bad — in fact it’s pretty brilliant — but it’s so sad… I’d been keeping up with the american episodes while away, and had seen it before. Fred had died, and I’d kinda moved on. But then, I come back to Australia, and dear old Winifred Burkle is on the screen still, wandering around in her cute little skirts, with adorable smile and bouncy flowing hair, and I realised how very dead she was going to be, and I felt all sad.

So, anyhow, here’s the episode where it all went wrong — unless of course you count things ending so happily with ‘Smile Time’ that there was no way that events could possibly avoid a sudden tragic turn. For what is essentially a tragic, painful episode, it’s surprisingly well balanced. It’s tremendously funny — especially with the Cavemen/Astronauts argument, which even turns out to be all, y’know, thematic. There’s great character stuff — especially for Wesley and Fred, but also for Angel, Gunn, Lorne… well, pretty much everyone.

OK, Whedon, I’ve forgiven you a bit for ‘Chosen’. But not much.

While Gunn’s mysterious signed document was only introduced last week, the journey he’s been on has been leading to something like this happening. Even if, _a la _Buffy, he seems to be having the same character arc every season these days — ‘Am I just the muscle? Who am I? Can’t I be someone else?’. While I would’ve been happy to see him over that after ‘Players’, this does make for good drama.

Less smooth is the blatant recycling of one or two plot elements from last season. While it’s played out somewhat differently, here, it’s a bit disconcerting to be hearing about a beloved female character being slowly posessed, from the inside, by some awesome power from the dawn of time… again. Luckily, Connor isn’t around for Fred to be shagging any time soon. It remains to be seen at this point whether they’ll go a completely different direction or not, but it still feels like it could’ve been… rephrased or something.

The only bad thing about this episode really, is the fear that it’s developments will be handled boringly and unoriginally, and that we’ll fall back into Season Four again. Does it count as a spoiler if I tell you that we don’t?

From Calgary to Banff

Home Sweet Home

Exploring Banff

Christmas 2003

Skiing Adventures on Sunshine

A Raincloud a Day…

Final Days in Banff

Travelling the USA

Since comments are getting used quite a bit, and we’re reaching over 20 per review, I think a revision of the comments system is in order. Post any suggestions as comments please… Or just ignore me.

I’m thinking:

• 10 or 20 per page
• ‘back to top’ links
• an all comments page that lists all reviews with comments, how recently they’ve been added, and by who.

Everyone I talk to these days seems to be hard at work studying these days. As obviously it would be ridiculous to start studying before my next semester of university starts, I’ve found something else to do. Luckily, it may be vaguely entertaining.

The Not Terribly Good Films website has been relaunched as its own entity, and is looking quite nice. Accompanying the relaunch is our first Canadian-made feature: How to Ski. I hope you enjoy it at least as much as I enjoyed having Matt slide straight into my heavily damaged left arm.

Watch for me slamming the ground with my fist. It was really quite painful.

Had my first (that I can remember) ‘I’m back in Canada’ dream today. Somehow, myself and the rest of the family had found ourselves somewhere within 10 minutes drive of Banff — presumably in Canada. So after having been told to stay home and cook the sausages, I left immediately and drove into town.

There, I met Richard and Rachelle (clearly, my name was stuck on ‘R’ words) the former of whom bought me a chicken and chili wrap, which was very yummy. Mmm, Chicken and ch…

Anyhow, I had a good chat with them, walked outside, took a good look around, and for some reason quickly went home without popping by Joe’s. Sorry, dream people. Delightfully, though my parents did get home before me, the sausages were just nicely cooked on one side.

Of course, I knew it was a dream, as Richard had cut off his mullet. Weeeeeeeird.

There’s just not enough instant classics in the world. I was beginning to despair of Angel‘s ability to make them. But no, thankfully, we have ‘Smile Time’. A truly great episode, and surely one of the all time best Buffy / Angel comedy shows ever. Of course, everyone’s just going to call it ‘The Puppet Episode’.

It’s possibly one of the happiest Angel stories ever as well. Two men have women chasing after them, without noticing — both end up with the girl. No one gets decapitated, or turned, or possessed by a higher power. Although there is some disturbing stuff going on with Charles Gunn, Attourney at Law. The match-up of Fred and Wesley has been some time in coming, and while Fred’s change of heart did feel a little sudden — a peculiar look two episodes ago, and then suddenly this — the two of them are just too sweet to care. In fact, Fred’s really gorgeous these days, too thin or not. I’ll try not to let it get in the way of my reviewing.

It looks like Angel is ready to pursue a normal relationship too — albeit with a werewolf. Nina (or ‘Busty Nina’, as Entertainment Geekly took to calling her for no reason I can think of) is a welcome addition to Angel’s life, at least from my point of view. It’s nice to see the poor bastard loosening up and moving on a little. Even if one of the loves of his life did die tragically a few weeks back.

But I’m dodging the main issue here, which is the puppetness. Funny, yet also the most horribly creepy idea that I’ve seen on TV for a while. The grinning kids in their pyjamas. The puppet with his hand in the back of the human, torturing him. Good stuff. And on a more subtle level, I was highly disturbed by the standard ‘cute kid’ kind of puppet swearing, drinking, and having a cigarette stashed behind his felt ear.

The best puppet of the episode of course was Angel himself. Physically spot on, but even more clever was the minor adjustments to his character to make him more puppet like. This Angel goes off the deep end quickly, is far more insecure, and more affectionate. That last touch being something that he really needs with Nina.

Oh, waffle, waffle, waffle. I’ve no desire to quote all the funny bits. And frankly, once Angel gets transformed, there’s precious few not funny bits. Just watch this one if you get the chance.

It’s always nice to get further confirmation that people are insane. I was shocked and amazed when internet fandom liked the end of Buffy‘s season seven, up to and including ‘Chosen’, but felt mean declaring them crazy.

Now that I see them angry and irritated at David Boreanaz for talking about Angel as if it were a mere television show which he got paid for acting in, I know they’re mad. I just wanted to make sure.