LONDON CITY NIGHTS

Monday, November 25, 2013

The Day of the Doctor (2013) directed by Nick Hurran

Monday, November 25, 2013 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Watching Doctor Who in a cinema is blasphemy.  Television in the cinema rarely works well; especially not special effects driven science fiction.  What looks great from the corner of your living room can look very cheap and nasty splashed over a 30 foot wide screen.  But blasphemy though it may be, at least it being on in the cinema gives me the excuse to write about Doctor Who, one of the only good things about an increasingly tired medium.

One of the major reasons the show is so suited to television is that the basic premise is television.  Doctor Who is about a man with a magic box who takes normal people to strange places.  The TARDIS, therefore, is a symbolic television: a real-life box that's bigger on the inside than on the outside.  Much like a television it transports ust to a new exotic world each week, exposing us to new ideas, expanding our horizons.  Doctor Who is the ultimate evangelist for the transformational power of television, its position that time/space channel hopping makes you a more rounded person.

At the centre of all this a mercurial character that might have stepped off the pages of a H.G. Wells novel.  Given his shared DNA with Wells, it's appropriate that The Doctor comes wrapped in the trappings of the most recent British fairy kingdom; Victoriana.  On paper he's an ideal of British imperialism; the compassionate, educated white man dropping out of the sky to fix the problems of the natives.  Thankfully in practice the Doctor works as more of a collective dream of Britishness; respected but not feared; kind but powerful, funny, whimsical; stylishly retro, sometimes foolish but still respected.  In many respects he's the natural creation of a sixties Britain still coming to terms with its diminished place in postwar geopolitics: a man able to retreat into history yet also equipped with the knowhow to deal with very British worries: fascism (Daleks), communists (Cybermen), immigration (Silurians) etc. 

His closest modern cultural analogue is James Bond. Both share immortality, but where the Doctor is an example of what, deep down we think we might be, Bond is a brutally misogynistic wank fantasy. The crucial difference is that Bond is designed as an export - his films dispatched to cinemas around the world to demonstrate Britain's cultural virility. On the other hand the Doctor is historically a domestic phenomenon; a way for Britain to explore its own history, culture and psychology with a steaming mug of tea on cold Saturday nights.

So, to The Day of the Doctor, the centrepiece of the BBC's bombastic 50th Anniversary bonanza.  Traditionally, the programme concerns the transformative properties of the Doctor as he acts as a catalyst for change wherever he is this week.  With a 50 year history and future stretching off into infinity it's difficult to actually develop him as a character, and so he usually functions best within a narrative as the static point which other characters bounce off.  Not here: the Doctor himself is the subject of the story - the point of the episode to examine just what the weight of 50 years of story does to a character.

The story presents us with the ultimate moral conundrum.  To stop a war that threatens to destroy the universe the Doctor must decide to kill billions of children.  The tragic twist is that he's already made the decision and carried out the deed.  In Doctor Who chronology the character did this just before the 2005 revival and each Doctor since has been haunted by this psychological trauma.  This is a trait that's been pretty extensively mined for dramatic potential; the paradox of a doctor killing his patient.

As is traditional for Doctor Who anniversaries this is a multi-Doctor show - David Tennant and Matt Smith's Doctors bickering with each other and finding things in common.  Thrown into the mix is John Hurt's 'War Doctor', a hitherto unknown regeneration that pressed the button, wiping a planet of innocents off the map.  After all three are together the plot then becomes a series of 'Labours of Hercules' that in turn demonstrate the essential qualities and flaws of the character.

The first is when all three are trapped within a cell in Tower of London.  They want to disintegrate the door, but calculating how to so will take hundreds of years. Using some charming Bill and Ted logic they figure out a genius solution; but just as they're congratulating themselves on their cleverness, the door swings open - it was never locked in the first place.  The second is done to resolve the small matter of an Zygon invasion of Earth, which, hilariously and appropriately is relegated to the B-plot.  When faced with two sides heading towards mutual destruction for the sake of an ambiguous greater good, the Doctor tears down the distinctions between the two sides, forcing them to consider the consequences of what they're about to do. All this adds up to the moment where all three Doctors are stood in front of a big red genocide button.  It's to the show's dramatic credit the audience assumes that it's going to be pushed; that the 50th anniversary is going to climax with the Doctor killing 2.47 billion children.  

In retrospect of course he finds a way out of it, being put in an impossible trap and getting out of it by the skin of his teeth is kind of what he does.  It's how the Doctor saves the day that's interesting - the material he constructs his solution from is nothing less than the history (and a smidge of the future) of Doctor Who as a TV show.  Almost uniquely in television (and in most forms of media) this is a 50 year unbroken narrative - in a metafictional twist, Doctor Who is saved by Doctor Who.  What's also implied (and in any other situation this would seem a mite pompous) that both textually and extratextually the show's outlook, imagination and humanity saves children's lives.

All this would almost be sappy if it wasn't done with such sharp writing, humour and intelligence.  By the time Tom Baker shows up the episode has done more than enough to justify a bit of self-indulgence.  Baker plays both himself and the Doctor (a neat mirror of the way the final scene of An Adventure in Space and Time has Matt Smith doing the same thing).  It's notable that we leave these characters within the National Gallery, a science fiction TV programme weaving itself into the tapestry of hundreds of years of British culture - with 'a' Doctor as Curator.  In this epilogue the character becomes a way for us to know ourselves, a lodestone as primed with cultural importance to Britain as Robin Hood, Sherlock Holmes or King Arthur.

It's a hell of a final bow at the end of a great special - Tom Baker informing us that actors, writers, directors and show runners will come and go, but there will always be a Doctor.

And quite right too.

Thursday, December 20, 2012

'Safety Not Guaranteed' (2012) directed by Colin Trevorrow, 18th December 2012

Thursday, December 20, 2012 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

'Safety Not Guaranteed' is a mean little tease of a film.  It tempts you with all kinds of time travel based shenanigans, for most of the film you feel pretty sure about where this is all going, but then the film takes repeated turns away from what you expect it to be, but ends up in an equally familiar place.

We live in a time where almost anything can be adapted into a film: theme park rides, board games and seemingly every comic-book property under the sun.  But the genesis of 'Safety Not Guaranteed' is even more unlikely than these, a classified ad placed in 'Backwoods Home Magazine' in 1997.  

This advert eventually took on a life of its own, being the subject of a skit on the Jay Leno Show, and becoming an internet meme in its own right.  The concept here is, what if this advert was serious?  Darius (Audrey Plaza) is the hero of our story, an unpaid intern working for an upmarket Vice-esque magazine.  She, and the geeky Arnau (Karan Soni) are chosen by writer Jeff (Jake Johnson) to come with him on a field trip to investigate the advert and write an article about the guy behind it, who they naturally assume is a crackpot. 

Our would-be time traveller is Kenneth (Mark Duplass), and fortunately for Darius, who is told to get to know him, he's not a total psychopath.  He's an intense, depressed man who wants to travel back in time to re-unite with his childhood ex-girlfriend.  He initially comes across as a harmless nut, but as Darius gets closer to him she's drawn into his world and starts to believe that maybe, just maybe there's a slight chance he could actually travel in time.

Darius (Audrey Plaza) - btw those glasses tell you much of what you need to know about this film

Audrey Plaza does a decent job of showing her gradual thawing out.  She begins the film suffering from an undefined and irritatingly vague depressive state, taking a kind of masochistic pleasure in being one of life's punching bags.  Plaza is great at this, just one blank, big-eyed incredulous stare from her is enough to tell you all you need to know about her character.  She spends much of the first half of the film hunched over in a hoodie, self-defensive to a tee and ready with a barbed comment for anyone that crosses her path.  She isn't that likeable, but smartly, the two people she's paired with on this investigation are both annoying in their own ways.  The writer, Jeff is a shallow, sex obsessed jock who is using this assignment as an excuse to track down his high school girlfriend and Arnau is a socially crippled, bordlerline autistic nerd.  Faced with these unappetising social prospects, Darius' smart-ass, cynical demeanour becomes quickly relatable.

But this Darius' iceberg quickly melts when she meets up with fellow social outsider Kenneth.  I've only seen Duplass in one film before this, the so-so 'Your Sister's Sister', and is playing a variation on what seems to be his 'type', namely the slightly rumpled, somewhat slobby but ultimately loveable bachelor.  It's not exactly a stretch for him, although to his credit he believably inserts a certain manic layer underneath much of Kenneth's actions.  He's paranoid, at times worryingly so, most obviously when he suspects he's being followed and begins threatening an innocent couple with a shotgun.  Despite that there are these elements of dangerousness in Duplass' performance, they're quickly glossed over by the film. It is a little odd how quickly Darius falls for a man who lives in a shack in the woods with a large collection of firearms and a predilection for burgling medical facilities.

Kenneth (Mark Duplass)

After these two 'meet cute', they begin to open up to each other and learn that maybe you don't need to go back in time to find happiness, maybe you can find it right here right now.  Bleeurgh, vomit-inducingly sweet stuff.  And here my problems with the film begin. These characters begin their arcs as broken, just barely functioning people:  in other words, they're interesting.  As their relationship develops they start to become slightly better adjusted and open up to each other, and the more they do the less interesting they become.  Sure, it's uplifting to watch these two lift themselves out of their depressive states, but uplifting in an increasingly dull way.

The film settles into following a well-worn indie romantic comedy groove, with our two oddballs getting to know each other through Kenneth's wacky time travel guerilla training.  We see them geekily practicing martial arts on a beach, running through the wood smiling dreamily and (a bit off-puttingly) practising shooting stuff.  In the opening act of the film, it seems like it could head into some untrodden ground, even if it was 'just' a mashup of indie romcom and time travel shenanigans, but quickly it settles into following a well-trodden formula pretty rigidly. 

Darius, Arnau (Karan Sohi) and Jeff (Jake Johnson)

'Safety Not Guaranteed' never quite lost me, but it came pretty damn close during an excruciating scene where, on a camping trip out in the woods, Kenneth plays Darius a heartfelt song he's written for his lost love.  You really want to go here film, fine, I'll tough it out.  I braced myself for the inevitable appearance of the beaten up indie romcom acoustic guitar.  But what was to come was even worse, Kenneth is too kooky to settle for a guitar, no, he pulls out a fucking zither.  As Darius dreamily looks on, her big eyes lit up by the campfire, he proceeds to plink out a horrible, morose, sub-sub-Coldplay zither song.  

My eyes widened in horror during this scene at what I was seeing.  Not only was the song rubbish, not only was it played on a stupidly pretentious dumb-looking instrument, but the film actually expects to nod our heads sagely and come to the conclusion that under all his oddness and paranoia lies the softly beating heart of a sensitive artist (one whose passion can only really be expressed with a fucking zither*).

I've always held that when you're writing about a film, it's important to write about the film you've seen, rather than the film you wanted to see.  But taking that amazing classified advert as a starting point and then making a by-the-numbers quirky indie romcom is a waste of a great concept.  Throughout the film they repeatedly set up plot points to be resolved using time travel that just hang in the air as if left over from a previous (and more entertaining) draft of the script.  Characters will bemoan their actions from 10 years ago and wish they'd done things differently, with the obvious solution being crazy time travel.  It's clumsy exposition, but you can comfort yourself with the idea that the payoff will be worth it.  Ultimately there is no payoff.  The film even wastes Jeff Garlin on a one scene blink and you'll miss it cameo!

Even more annoyingly, the film ends at the point you feel it should have gotten to at least an hour ago.  We watch our characters head off into a far more interesting film leaving us staring at the credits feeling vaguely let down.  Perhaps it's a question of personal taste.  I've seen a hell of a lot of indie romcoms where two eccentric outsiders connect, and I've also seen a lot of films with bonkers time travel paradox conundrums.  I know the general beats of both of these genres, but I'd much rather the film have been more 'Back to the Future' than 'Garden State'.  

I find it difficult to disagree with the overall message of 'Safety Not Guaranteed'; namely that travelling back in time to solve your personal problems isn't a mature way to go about things.  But the execution is something I've seen many times before with very few surprises.  It's nice to finally see Audrey Plaza in a leading role, she's a great actor and makes a difficult character work.  Likewise I've got few complaints about Duplass' performance.  My problem is that the film wants to subvert audience expectations, which is all well and good, but its idea of subversion is to adopt another equally predictable set of conventions that are pretty dull  and played out in 2012.

'Safety Not Guaranteed' is on general release in the UK from 26th December.

*I want to point out here that I have nothing against zithers per se, the soundtrack to 'The Third Man' is awesome, and I'm sure in the right hands zithers are a fine, fine instrument, but still, an acoustic camping zither player is a special kind of tosser.  To make things worse I just read this goofs entry on IMDB: "When Kenneth and Darius are at the camp and Darius asks what kind of musical instrument Kenneth has, he responds that the instrument is a zither. The instrument they are using is a mountain, or Appalachian, dulcimer. Mountain dulcimers do fall into the general zither category, but typically when people refer to zithers they mean instruments that have shorter scale lengths and many more strings, or courses, than mountain dulcimers. Calling a dulcimer a zither is like calling a viola or cello a violin simply because they fall into the general "violin family" category."  IT’S NOT EVEN A PROPER ZITHER!  GAH! 

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

BBC Television Centre, 10th December 2012

Tuesday, December 11, 2012 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

BBC Television Centre is one of the more understated landmarks in London.  Step out of White City and you'll find it looming in front you, its curved exterior immediately recognisable from a thousand channel idents over the years. This place occupies an enormously important place in the British psyche.  It's a nerve centre of sorts, beaming out into practically every home in the country in some form or another.

But soon it is to close.  Rising property prices in the area, and a desire to create a "smaller, fitter BBC" spell doom for the building, at least in its present incarnation as a major television studio.  In 2013 broadcasting will cease forever, and a few years later the place will be converted into a luxury hotel.  Tours of the building finish in February, so while I've got a bit of spare time I thought I'd better get in there and check it out.  And I'm glad I did.

The reception

I was met by our two brilliant guides, Lisa and Susie, in the main reception.  It's a smoothly designed, ergonomic and modern place, stuffed with people and authoritative looking security guards keeping an eye out for any troublemakers.  They've got reason to be on the look-out; the place has been targeted by protesters throughout its life, whether it be the 6 o'clock news being invaded by lesbians protesting Section 28 in 1988, to Fathers 4 Justice storming the National Lottery or the news room being bombed by the Real IRA in March 2001.  

This smooth and slick room proves to be the exception on the tour, this is a building very firmly rooted in the past, and behind this glossy facade it's extremely utilitarian and bodged together, with bits looking like they're held together with duct tape and good will.  There are ominous echoes of this even here.  The subtitles on the televisions are corrupted, showing a rolling feed of gobbledegook, while hastily scrawled post-it notes stuck on the side warn visitors not to touch the televisions under any circumstances.

<tardis noise>

After signing in we're led around to the audience entrance just down the street.  I've attended a few BBC recordings, but always in the evening, and always with an eye to getting me in and out of the studio as fast as possible.  It's nice to be able to take our time a little, and we're pointed out some of the landmarks and props dotted around the place. There's a Quattro from 'Ashes to Ashes' parked off to the side, and towards the main entrance there's a genuine TARDIS signed by the Doctor himself.  This and the dalek that lurks inside the cafe are like catnip for those seeking a photo opportunity.

But, as quickly as we step into a sci-fi fantasy we're dragged back to the cold hard reality of 'now'.  We're led up the stairs into a meeting room that overlooks the BBC news offices.  This is the most recent area of the building to be renovated, being completed in the late 90s.  Looking out onto the reporters working away feels strangely zoo-like. There are tours coming through here all day, if I was working a few feet away from a load of goobering tourists I'd begin to feel a little self-conscious.  They do have some need for privacy though, and I was amused to learn that when you see a news room you see behind the news readers on TV it's a CG recreation.  They used to use pre-recorded footage, but once Moira Stewart was reading the news, and wandered across the news room behind herself, deeply confusing viewers.  

I expected the biggest news centre in the country to be a throbbing hub of activity, full of over caffeinated, totally wired journalists running around clutching pieces of paper and frantically tapping up urgent news reports.  Maybe it is like that when 'big news' happens, but the pace when I was there was a bit disappointingly sedate.  A guy was lazily editing a report on 'Strictly Come Dancing', while one of the guys from Newsround was mooching around in the background with not much to do.  Perhaps all the white knuckle stuff has moved their new home in central London already.  There were some neat things to look at here though, John Simpson's bulletproof jacket was hung ominously on the wall behind us, a reminder that while the people working here seem pretty safe and secure, they're sent from here into dangerous and volatile situations.

John Piper's big ass mosaic

Next we're led through the building all the way to the 'doughnut', the ring of studios where most of the BBCs entertainment over the last half-century has come from.  We stop off en route in what was once the main reception to admire John Piper's enormous mosaic on the wall.  The mosaic, tessellated ceiling and the wooden walls made you feel like you're in an episode of 'Mad Men' or 'The Hour'.  It's always weird being in a sensitively preserved modernist building like this, somewhere designed to be forward thinking in a future that's passed it by.  

"They needed a system, yes, an industrial-age machine."

This feeling carries on as we're led out into the centre ring of the doughnut with its statue of Helios, the Greek God of the sun, representing the radiation of television around the world.  Two nymphs recline below him symbolising sound and light.  This area was once a fountain, but according to our guide the sound of running water day and night was causing bathroom problems for the BBC employees so they took it out.  We head inside and we're led to the studios. Wandering through this part of the building feels a bit like being in an old NHS hospital.  The floor and walls are covered in scuff marks from things being quickly wheeled about, the pipes along the ceiling are exposed and dusty and there's signage in all sorts of 60s and 70s looking retro fonts about the place.  

The place is labyrinthine, and the circular nature of the building means that pretty every corridor curves around.  It's very easy to get confused and turned around here, and our guides keep a close eye on us to stop us blundering into Cheryl Cole's dressing room by mistake, or opening the door onto the set of '8 out of 10 Cats'.  When we reach a studio we look down through a forest of lights.  This system dates from the 1960s, using a phenomenal amount of electricity and producing so much heat special air conditioners are needed to prevent, say, Dick and Dom's bungalow becoming an unbearable sauna.  

The Blue Peter set looking a bit shabby and drab.

Props and set stuff lost to time.

After seeing this, we're taken off to see an abandoned set from Blue Peter which has been left set up in a warehouse.  The thing looks a bit used and depressing, when TV sets aren't under bright stage lights and massaged by nice camera angles it all looks a bit cheap and flimsy.  The walls are a dull, plain grey without coloured lighting, and as you look closer you can see parts where it's chipped and stained.  I guess this is a symptom of the transitory nature of television.  All these props and sets, however welcoming and cleverly designed are temporary, designed to be discarded.  Even knowing that this process is inevitable, it's a bit depressing to see children's drawings discarded in the same way, left to slowly rot in a warehouse in the middle of nowhere.

VHS graveyard

As we're led around these spookily empty huge spaces it almost feels like production has already moved out.  You see the odd guy in a boiler suit wheeling something about, but apart from that the place is pretty quiet.  We stop off and look at the set for Match of the Day, and as people pose on the sofa for photos I slip off and have a look behind the curtains.  Back here there are thousands of VHS tapes containing god knows what.  Who knows what could be on these?  I'm reminded of the old policy of deleting programmes to make space for new ones, resulting in the loss of many classic moments in TV, from episodes of Doctor Who to the BBCs coverage of the moon landing (I mean c'mon archivists, that seems important).  This enormous pile of obsolete media seems like a neat little symbol for why the BBC are leaving.

I was so tempted to start randomly flicking switches.

Television as traditionally produced here is becoming like the VHS tape, an anachronism unsuited to the modern era.  For most of the building's existence this was the undisputed hub of mass-communication for the country, but now this power has been redistributed to the public.  Rather than having 3 or 4 channels of television to choose from, we have a panoply of both professional and user-generated content to pick from.  This shift leaves enormous television complexes not obsolete, but at least riding a wave that's already crested.    You can see this in the prehistoric looking dials and switches hiding behind curtains, in the way the heating pipes gently clank and in the way everything is chipped and scuffed.

"It's an Ood! Oods are good.  Love an Ood!"

This isn't to say that I didn't have a wonderful time here.  As you turn corners you're confronted with holy relics of from the annals of the BBC.  There's a Ood!  There's an entombed Gordon the Gopher!  The bust of Queen Victoria from the Queen Vic!  A ripped open chest cavity from Casualty!  I'm glad I got to see the place up close before it closed down, it deserves to be treasured and sensitively preserved, but all this heritage can't stand up to the steady march of progress.  This is a monument to 'old' media, lumbering dinosaur-like towards an inevitable extinction.