Tom Charman

This week’s episode of Angel featured many story elements we haven’t seen for some time… Flashbacks. Willow doing something useful with her magic. And of course, happy endings. Also pleasingly, last week’s cliffhanger was resolved in an interesting and believable way — which also involved some cool walking along corridors in slow motion, which I’m always a sucker for.

The idea of Angelus’ personal hell — having flashbacks of Angel’s good deeds — was a very amusing and fitting one considering the many vice-versa flashbacks Angel has had to endure. The twist of also having the experience about Faith was a good one, if a bit awkwardly handled. I’m still not entirely sure how Angel could have popped up in Angelus’ head before his soul was freed into the ether. Ooooh, let’s have a go…

Souls have a slightly blurry relationship with time, and there’s some temporal overlap in any process involving their movement from one vessel to another. Yeah, I’ll buy that. Better editing could have helped this bit however. I doubt it would have spoiled Angel’s (excellent) surprise entrance.

Meanwhile, in the real world, Willow’s back in town! And being not only funnier and more useful than she’s been on Buffy for ages, but also managing to have convincing chemistry with another female character for the first time in a while. Her scenes with Fred do rather show up the ‘relationship’ she’s having with Kennedy as rather pathetically constructed. I’m still not sure if Fred really was interested in her, or just overly chatty having someone vaguely happy hanging around the Hyperion though. I’d like to think the former, but that, uh, may just be me. Speaking of chemistry, the discussion between Willow and Wesley concerning their respective darknesses was very funny.

On the less exciting side, we had Cordelia continuing to be evil. I’m surprised that Connor hasn’t complained about her taking kitchen knives to bed before. My enjoyment of Connor’s character, while bolstered by his concern for Faith, was almost destroyed by his EXTREME stupidness in falling for obviously-evil-Cordy’s stupid ‘kill Angelus’ scheme. He’d better be having words with her next episode.

Oh, and evil-Cordy’s fake voice is still lamer than lame.

Someone who deserves a mention at this point is Lorne, who hasn’t exactly been getting the big plots this season since his Vegas trip. But his bedside song to Faith was a really soft and kind moment, of the sort that we haven’t gotten enough of just recently. Good on him — perhaps he’ll end up becoming the heart of the group now that Cordy’s otherwise engaged.

Overall, an above average episode, with the first sparks of happiness all season, a very nice resolution of Wesley and Faith’s Watcher/Slayer relationship (I’m thinking spin-off…), and some excellent special effects, handling both the Angel v. Angelus fight and his re-ensoulment. Well, excellent for TV anyhow. One has to make an adjustment from The Matrix.

You know, this would be a brilliant season if Cordy wasn’t dragging it down every episode.

What’s that you say? An essay due this week? Then it’ll be due in on Friday, at 5pm, yeah? Of course it will.

Do de do de do…

WHAT? Thursday??? Well, I suppose I can swing… 9AM??? Ah, right. Well done me.

I bought Die Another Day on Friday. In a 2 disc set, it’s got more special features than any other Bond film. The question is — do I care? Generally, the special features are pretty dull, at least after you’ve seen one of them. I mean, there’s a whole feature on the 10 seconds of surfing at the start of the film, which everyone forgets was even there. Well, I did anyhoo.

But the point of this is not to review the DVD — I’ll do that later — but to say that some of the effects look much much better on a smaller TV screen. The horrendous CGI when Bond does his parachute/surfing was hardly noticeable to my Dad, and he loved it. “I bet people were laughing at this bit, eh?” “Well, yes Dad, but not for the reasons you think…” I have yet to watch the end fight on TV, but perhaps it also improves as Dad looked fairly happy then, too. This is a bit of a surprise, as I’d previously noted that The World is Not Enough was much worse on television.

Firstly — I promise that my next entry will have no Buffy or Angel references whatsoever. But things have come to light that need mentioning.

My journeys on the internet have led me to the (frankly, shocking) discovery that some people out there think Spike is cooler, and an all-round better person, than Angel. So much so that fan pressure appears to have forced the-buzz.com to remove an ‘anti-Spike’ article. This is frankly absurd, and not just for the free speech issues.

Firstly – Spike looks dumb. He insists on waxing his hair back like a helmet – and then has the nerve to tease Angel about his hair. It’s clear to me which needs the most attention every morning. And his coat just emphasises how thin and weedy he is.

Secondly – despite going insane for a little while, getting a soul has had little discernible effect on Spike. He still dresses the same way, he still worries about his image, and he feels no need to apologise to anyone, or atone. All he’s after is a little bit of slayerey goodness – and that’s the only reason he got the soul in the first place. While Angel didn’t choose to have his soul, once he got it he spent a suitable amount of time repenting, before making the choice to help others unselfishly. While the more skeptical of us may have thought he did it to get Buffy, his willingness to give happiness with her up to continue being a champion for good proves where his real loyalty lies – with the people he has pledged to protect. And he was doing this well before he was told he’d get to be human some day.

And finally – Angel has a convincing character. He has the same flaws many of us do. He is cheap, he is petty, and he enjoys, to an extent, playing the hero in simple, good versus evil situations. But he rises above these in his actions. Spike has just as many petty flaws. It’s too early to tell whether he shall distinguish himself in the same way. But I suspect he won’t reach Angel’s heights. Why? Because he’s a big poo poo head.

Case closed.

I’ve finally found a beginning to my script that I’m vaguely happy with. Which is lucky as the due date’s approaching and I’d really like to be honing it for the last day, at least. I promise to put it up when it’s done, but I reserve the right to remove it again if I receive a lousy mark. It’s about a lazy guy who figures that he has no real free will, and that humans are just big cogs in the universal machine. So to teach him a lesson the universe switches its rules around a bit.

Having bought the second half of Angel Season 3 last week, I got a chance to listen to yet another commentary by Joss Whedon. He still sounds vaguely clever, so I’m ruling out my ‘brainsuck’ theory as to why Buffy has been sucking so badly. My current one is that if we look hard enough we’ll find some spooky subliminal message in the last two years of the show that spells “Let us out, we’re being held here by a terrible monster and forced to make bad television against our will!” Or something like that.

I promise to get over this Buffy thing soon.

Previously, on Angel, Angelus did some pretty clever work, with one key flaw, killing the Beast and almost taking Faith too. I had some respect for our evil friend, therefore. However, after watching this episode, it almost completely evaporated — thanks not only to some atrocious dialogue but also to David Boreanaz’s decision to overact insanely when speaking to the disembodied evil-Cordy voice. These scenes in particular were painful to watch, with the exception of when Cordy taunted Angelus with his coexistence with Angel, which was a nice point. Does an impressive, somewhat ancient vampire go to pubs to brag about how cool he is? I wouldn’t have thought so. His cunning plan to beat up some random shopkeeper until he told him who the Beast’s master was seemed just a little poor also.

While we’re talking about evil people, let’s briefly consider Cordy, or ‘the Beastmaster’ as everyone seems to have decided is a good name. Well, they managed to pick the Beast’s name, as well as the Powers that be, so they probably figure they’re onto a good thing here. I hope she turns out to be Loretta instead. I was shocked this episode to find out that while Cordy’s ‘evil’ voice is lame, the voice she used inside Angelus’ head is actually lamer.

But don’t think this week didn’t have it’s redeeming features. If you’d said the words ‘Faith’ and ‘Shower’ to me before watching, I’d have been awfully excited about this episode — especially if you’d also added ‘Willow’, ‘Fred’ and ‘Bubbles’. However this scene turned out to be something quite different, and gave a good, wordless insight into the struggles that Faith is dealing with. A lot of the best moments came from this struggle, as well as her relationship with Wesley, most notably in their heated discussion behind the demon pub. Continuity with their previous relationships with each other and with Angel was impressively maintained, and the characters benefited from it. Wesley trying to get Faith ‘in the game’ was an amusing inversion of Faith’s similar demands of Angel in season one’s ‘Five by Five’.

Gunn and Fred were vaguely interesting — I can’t work out whether their kiss was the first of a new relationship, or the last of their old one. Although I found Fred’s continuing dismay that she — a fairly weak mortal — wasn’t able to take down a centuries old vampire in close combat rather puzzling. Connor in a few scenes managed to show some charisma and interest — ironically this was always stymied by dull scenes with Charisma Carpenter. Was his self-inspection the funniest and most endearing side we’ve ever seen of him? I’d say so. Lorne continues to be a welcome, and uniquely happy presence, but with little character development so far this season.

The episode ended of course with a pretty impressive fight scene — one of Angel‘s best to date — that particularly dealt with Faith’s questions of who and what she is. In the end, this week we got an intense, emotional episode concerning aggression and control… spliced together with some of the most boring and cringe-inducing stuff the show has ever done.

Unfortunate, that.

Well, it turns out that Windows 2000 can access the .Mac iDisk as well. So now I have yet another thing I can do while avoiding the endless grind of putting survey data in the computer. It’d be more fun except that they’re all a bit negative.

I’m reading the text of Arcadia as I need to review a play in detail for my ‘Writing Scripts’ assessment. It’s just as funny when reading, though I have a hard time getting the actors out of my head. A blessing in some cases, a curse in others…

Having decided that neither ‘Chosen’ nor Season Seven in general is a suitable end to Buffy, I’m now left with the task of working out where the show DOES end. The alternatives are:

Season 3: The show is therefore only a show about high school, but doesn’t really end on an important emotional note — the characters don’t really learn anything about themselves.

Season 4: Ends with ‘Restless’, which is almost reason enough to stop the series here. The characters drift apart, then come together to defeat their enemy.

Season 5: Cons — highly crap for large stretches, with stupid things like Glory and those dumb knights running around. Pros — it does contain the death of Joyce, Spike’s backstory, and ‘The Gift’, which has that cool flashback-ey “Previously, on Buffy the Vampire Slayer”.

I’m leaning towards 4, but 5 is a much rounder number.

There’s a few things I really need to get out of the way first, otherwise this review will never get anywhere: Damn, Wesley is a great character. Well done to Alexis Denisof and the writers for making him the most real and believable character in the Buffy and Angel Universe.[ftn] The quiet speaking at the start. His discussion of love with Lilah. His moment of decision to save Angel, and knowing just who to call in to help. Brilliant stuff.

Now to the rest of it. Myeeeeeh. Evil Cordy is not really as much fun as the words look on paper. Let’s face it, when Cordy was schoolgirl-evil in season one of Buffy, she was great to watch. I really feel that perhaps this would have worked better if Charisma Carpenter had decided to play this as a twisted version of her former self, all bright and bouncy. There would be the risk of being a second Glory there — but anything’s better than Little Miss Soft ‘n’ Regular Speaking. Every scene she’s in makes me want to go to sleep, and as Connor tends to share them, I’m losing the enthusiasm I was building for his character. Not a terribly exciting twist at the end there.

I’ve handled the best and the worst, let’s look to the middle. Eliza Dushku makes a very welcome return as Faith. A more restrained individual than the one that we last saw, she retains her strength, while holding to some firm, incompromisable values. One of these is Angel, and her desire to save him — if she gets the chance then it’ll be a nice way to round off her character’s arc on Angel. She’ll have to try a bit harder than she did this week though.

We see a more clever and calculating side to Angelus this week — though sadly this is undermined slightly by his bungle with the sun. Still, I can imagine him deliberately ignoring the possibility that killing the Beast would return the sun simply because that’s what Angel thought would happen. But his plan to kill the Beast, get closer to the Beast’s master, and kill Faith into the bargain was a good one. His short phone call to Dawn was a nice touch also.

When not around Cordy, Connor was quite enjoyable — I liked the almost instantaneous crush he developed on Faith! It makes his subsequent baby-induced thrall to Cordy all the more tragic. This boy just seems to bounce around from one controlling liar to another.

Things to ponder… Is this still Cordy? Or just someone walking around in her body? And if she’s happy about the pregnancy, can we conclude that the bonking was part of her evil plan, and not in fact as bizarre as it initially seemed?

Footnotes

1. If I ever use the words ‘Buffyverse’ or ‘Jossverse’ you can kill me where I stand.

Sequels are always worse than the original, as anyone will tell you. Then they’ll sit there for a bit, before saying: “except for Empire Strikes Back… and The Godfather II.” Those two may come in a different order depending on the person’s relative geekiness. So it’s not a hard and fast rule — but often the creative minds who came up with the initial film just can’t quite find enough new ideas in time that will sit nicely in their created universe.

X2 doesn’t have this problem. Chiefly because, there’s a gazillion X-Men comics out there to choose from. If we ever see an X-Men film that’s short on ideas, then we’ll know that the script writers weren’t being terribly clever. That isn’t the case here. With a plot drawn in part from a classic old X-Men comic that I can’t seem to find the name of, X2 packs in a lot more plot than it’s predecessor — yet still manages, for the main, to juggle a crazy amount of characters, developing almost all of them nicely. This makes it hard to review, so I’ll just pick a few characters that particularly appealed, rather than cycling through all of those crazy mutants.

The film seems to start off a few months after the first film. The consequences of that experience are still being felt, which is a nice touch. Jean Grey feels a little peculiar ever since ‘the Liberty Island Incident’. Wolverine’s off using the information the Professor gave him, Rogue and Bobby are starting a relationship, and Magneto’s still cooling his heels in his plastic prison. Something seems to have removed Storm’s dodgy Jamaican accent, too, which is a relief. Into this mix comes a man with a vendetta against all mutants, and the power to put it into effect — Major Stryker.

Director Bryan Singer presumably knows he’s onto a good thing with Hugh Jackman as Wolverine. The plot again runs fairly closely (though not exclusively) to his character, and we see him get uncomfortable hints as to his origins, which Jackman handles very nicely. Also, of course, his action is pretty insane — from the berzerking defence of the school to his later, rather more painful one-on-one battle.

Ian McKellen (The Lord of the Rings) is absolutely fabulous as Magneto. Given far more to work with than in the previous film, he uses it all, being regretful, vengeful, camp, sleazy and tempting at the drop of a hat. Every scene with Magneto is a joy to watch — especially his awesome escape from his prison. His cohort Mystique — played by Rebecca Romijn-Stamos — also gets much more to do — acting independently from anyone else she manages some impressive detective work. And of course any males in the audience will enjoy her that little bit more — especially when she spends some time imitating a woman that looks suspiciously like the stunning actor/model. That phrase — “actor/model” — needn’t strike fear in your heart on this occasion: Stamos actually gives an emotional, sexy performance, revealing a strong heart to Mystique as she talks with Nightcrawler.

Jean Grey gets some interesting things to work with, as she begins to become rather more than the slightly scared telekinetic she was in the first film. In fact, all the X-Men are far more confident here, presumably from having won the day at Liberty Island. It’s a nice development.

The ‘X-Kids’ — Rogue, Iceman and Pyro — get a bit more to do here, and are surprisingly enjoyable. Sadly their plotline fades out towards the second half of the film, meaning Rogue especially gets far less focus than Anna Paquin deserves. Iceman’s dealings with his family are nicely handled — to fit such a personal moment inside an action film is a peculiar but very welcome touch — and Shaun Ashmore does good work with Bobby/Iceman. Hopefully he’ll get to be an X-Man soon… Another potential X-Man is Nightcrawler, sympathetically played by Alan Cumming (Goldeneye), with one of the most useful mutant powers ever.

Stryker (played by Brian Cox) is a suitably irritating villain, who has an evil plan that actually makes sense. I mean it — if you had a good sit down, having seen the first film, and thought evil thoughts, I reckon you could come up with it yourself. This gives the film a much more solid foundation than it’d have if Stryker was just using ‘Huge Death Ray #2’.

I feel that I’ve hardly scratched the surface, and yet I’ve already babbled on far too long. This alone is surely reason enough to see the film — you definitely feel like you’ve gotten your money’s worth. Even if some bits are too corny, some too emotional and some a little cliched, there’s so much of it that there’s always something around the corner for you to enjoy more.

The direction — apart from making what could have been a messy jigsaw of a film into what feels like a cohesive tale — is also pretty exciting at times. Notable moments include Nightcrawler’s dynamic first scene and Magneto’s escape. In later parts there’s just a few too many corridors for my liking — but there’s a slight sense of claustrophobia to go with it that almost makes up for it.

This review sounds like a rave, and to some extent it is — I came out grinning the way I do from a particularly exciting Angel episode, or Bond film. The film’s major drawback, however, is that it doesn’t try hard enough in places to be more than that. The multitudinous character list and plot leaves little room for thematic depth, and one is left with a slightly hollow feeling at the end. X2 is deeper than your average action film — but it’s still straight character development rather than anything clever or philosophical. And it’s probably got one or two more endings than it really needs.

But it is immensely enjoyable, and shows tremendous promise for a series of movies to rival Bond for enduring appeal. With new mutants popping up all the time, there seems no reason why the saga can’t continue on film for many years.