I won tickets to see Battlestar Galactica!

I apologise to my regular readers (yes, all four of you) but this post is:
a) Extremely geek-like
b) Meant more for fans of the new Battlestar Galactica.

I know it's poor consolation, but I promise not to make it a geek convention type thing.
But I did say I wanted to talk about TV more, and I reckon this might be a good way to start this off.

Or not.

Anyway.
The Lords of Kobol be praised.

I won some tickets to a free screening of the new Battlestar Galactica at my local cinema. It was a contest to promote the series, which is being screened in Asia for the first time. If you’re ancient – like me – then you might remember the cheesy toaster oven Cylons and Egyptian-motif Viper pilots from the original series. But Ron Moore (who wrote Star Trek: First Contact) has done an amazing job of re-vamping the entire series. There are a lot of sites out there that cover how good it is and it scary detail so I won’t go into it here.

I think it’s good Cinemax is bringing the series in. I liked watching it on the big screen (even though the show was formatted for TV). That said, I don’t think everyone can tolerate a 3-hour screening of what was to their minds, still a TV show. And I think your TV mode is different from your movie mode. One couple walked out during the disc changeover (prolly a DVD) but the rest were ok.

It’s still a very nice show to watch though. But then again, I’m a fan.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy

Director: Garth Jennings (music video director. Have you seen Blur’s Good Song or Coffee & TV? That’s him).
Starring: Sam Rockwell, Mos Def, Zooey Deschanel, Martin Freeman

Very quickly: Just before Earth is blown up (people just hate us don’t they?), loser Arthur Dent is saved by his friend Ford Prefect who it turns out is a travel writer for a kind of Intergalactic Lonely Planet.

So easy to fuck up, this one.

The books were just hilarious and the stuff that made it so was Douglas Adam’s ingenious (and frequent use) of what I call the VCR effect of books. You know, when a nuclear reactor’s about to go critical and you press the mental pause button so you can explain how the scientific process works. Hitchhiker’s was funny cos Adam’s would write 2 pages of rather unrelated nonsense and then something explodes/dies/jumps into hyperspace.

Well, the clever clogs at Shynola (they do loads of music videos and TV commercials) solve most of that stuff with cutaways showing animated cartoon sequences of the Guide explaining say, what a Vogon is or how a Babelfish translates.

Visually, the movie’s quite nice. Jim Henson’s creature fellows did a smashing job with the Vogons (see, you can have a nice movie without CGI) and Marvin is the anti-C3P0. In fact, the human characters seem pretty much incidental. Nobody really turns in a notable performance; Martin Freeman’s a good Arthur Dent, but ain’t straining since he plays pretty much the same character in The Office, lotsa people said “Why Mos Def?” I say, didn’t make a damn difference i.e. no harm done, Sam Rockwell has lotsa fun though with his rock star-like President of the Universe.

And now I get all selfish and talk about the extremely cute Zooey Deschanel. Whom I never noticed before but will now. That tracksuit thingie she was wearing was very 80s Buck Rogers but hey, who the fuck cares? She’s hot. Damn.

Ahem. Right. Moving on.

Movie’s alright. Mostly flat. They do some interesting things (musicals, mixed medium stuff including one weird ass sequence where the movie becomes into a stop-motion sock puppet film). An dthe bit where they show the factory floor of Magrathea where they manufacture planets is very nice. But mostly, a smirk every now and again with no real nice feeling at the end. The end incidentally, probably isn’t because you smell 'sequel' long before the credits roll.

Zooey Deschanel however is very, very cute.

Batman Begins

Starring: Christian Bale, Liam Neeson, Michael Kane, Katie Holmes, Gary Oldman, Ken Watanabe
Director: Christopher Nolan (Memento, Insomnia)

By now, everyone knows the story.
Rich kid gets orphaned by armed robber in alley.
Has aversion to winged rodents.
Never actually gets over it and dresses in tights beating up on crooks.

And yet this is the second time in the series they tell us how Bruce Wayne becomes Batman. I'm sure there's a marketing reason for this (connecting with a new audience etc) but the reason it got made at all is because there's a built in fan base. I mean, it's Batman.

Action-wise, it's the best Batman yet. That Batmobile is badass. The previous ones were all stylish but couldn't do squat except rocket down conveniently straight alleys (one movie actually has it rocket up a fucking building). But this. This is the only Batmobile, the only Batman movie for that matter to have actual chase scenes. Crashing-into-things-live-footage-from-the-news-crew-on-a-helicopter type chase scenes. It's like World's Craziest Police Videos with a ma-fuckin' tank.

Look wise, it's also the least cheesy looking Batman. Gotham's nicely decaying and corrupt and the villains are actually villainous for once, not some Halloween rubber rejects (nice work with the Scarecrow, guys).

Now for the bad bits.

The whole becoming Batman phase feels like the first third of the show. It was way draggy. And too much on the Bats. Ok! They're scary! So he becomes a bat! We geddit!

Christian Bale starts raging and changing his voice every time he gets in a crook's face. Batman is supposed to be cynical. Sneaky. Suspicious. Calculating. Calm.

And this part to me, is tough to forgive. Bats gets his weapons from Morgan Freeman? Doesn't that mean anyone with enough moolah can be Batman? C'mon, Batman makes his own stuff!

Big name guys with no big roles. Liam Neeson doing the mentor thing. Morgan Freeman doing the mentor thing, doing Q in James Bond. Gary Oldman as a cop who doesn’t do much. And Ken Watanabe’s character isn’t even a role – it’s a cameo.

The right look, the right players, the right gadgets, just not the right combination.

But I’m going out and buying me one of those Batmobiles. I’m sure Hasbro makes them. That thing is badass.

Mr. & Mrs. Smith

Starring: Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt
Director: Doug Liman (the guy who directed The Bourne Identity)

There’s actually very little reason not to see this one. Plot’s dead simple: two assassins marry, and they get hired to take each other out. Angelina and Brad look good together, there’s chemistry and there’s lotsa action to be had.

It’s a story of a loveless marriage taken to comic book extremes. The dialogue’s pretty nice (that opening sequence where they’re at the marriage counselor is hilarious) and Brad’s as close as you can get to Hugh Grant funny without actually being well, Hugh Grant. It hadn’t hit me before, but Jolie’s actually the only bankable female action hero in a very long time. I mean, Sigourney Weaver was bad ass as Ripley, and Linda Hamilton looked like she could fuck up you up some but they weren’t really action heroes. They weren’t cool.

And there’s enough cool to go around. You got your 007-like gadgetry, your Alias-like ops teams who help you set everything up and so you can just fly somewhere with your shampoo-perfect hair and shoot people with a laser-sighted rifle. So yeah, it’s not revolutionary, but it’s fun. There’s a nice freeway chase, bullets, car crashes all while Brad and Angelina start fessing up about the lies they’ve told each other (“I was married once,” says Brad before the Mrs bitch slaps him).

I liked it.

Let me just say that that scene where some bad guy’s getting his fetishistic ass whipped by a riding crop? The man’s not acting. I’m sure of this.

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge Of The Sith

Director: George Lucas
Starring: Hayden Christensen, Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman


It is the last in the saga.
It has not one, but two prequels to atone for.
And regardless of your opinions, everyone wants to see how it all ends.

Long before its release, Lucas made it clear that this would be the darkest Star Wars ever. And it couldn’t be any other way. Anakin’s fall from grace is the tipping point, like Lucifer deciding he’d rather reign in Hell than serve in Heaven. But before he could turn, something had to break him. With all that on its shoulders, Revenge Of The Sith had a lot to deliver.

But Sith doesn’t do that. Not even close.

The Emperor / Palapatine’s seduction of Anakin is clumsy and transparent, as is the Chosen One’s uncertainty before deciding to betray his Jedi brethren. It didn’t have to be gradual – men have turned faster, and for lesser reasons – but it had to be compelling. Nobody – not the Jedi Council who ignores him, nor the manipulative Emperor - betrays Anakin sufficiently for his corruption, his hatred to be so complete.

When Anakin is sent forth to implement genocide he seems more like a young punk with a light sabre out to bust some heads – he is literally, a boy in a hood. Not the general Obi Wan spoke of to young Skywalker who “helped the Empire hunt down and destroy the Jedi knights.” The Jedi are slaughtered, but it is not the ethnic cleansing-style massacre we envisioned for years, and disappointingly, it is not led by Anakin.

Sith doesn’t lack for impressive set pieces: A blistering opening sequence where Obi Wan and Anakin rescue Chancellor Palpatine is perhaps the most exciting of all six movies; three major light saber battles (one between Obi Wan and a multi-limbed General Grevious is a vintage chinese sword fight given a Jedi spin); and full-scale war on the wookie planet. All of which fail to save how hollow Sith feels. Though Lucas wisely tones down the heavy-handed Bollywood romance of Clones, the script still makes you cringe in too many places. Forget cheesy lines. Some of the dialogue is downright lazy and at many points the movie turns into an ILM animator’s show reel / wet dream – ironically, a lesser evil. Not to mention a misguided attempt to be topical with Anakin echoing Bush’s own edict in his war on terror: “If you’re not with me, you’re against me.”

The movie’s one solid character is Obi Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor still having fun, and still can’t wipe the smirk off his face during fight scenes). Obi Wan is the only one who seems to have matured through the prequels bringing him closer to Alec Guinness’ version than any Anakin to the Big Black we know and love in Episodes IV-VI. It is Obi Wan who feels the sting of Anakin’s subversion, who has to marshall the resolve to kill his student and friend, and the one who has to endure a life of exile while watching over the infant Luke. Not enough though. Natalie Portman is given nothing to do except cry; Samuel L. Jackson is well, Samuel L. Jackson; and while Vader was one badass motherfucker, Anakin merely acts like a spoilt brat whining about how he’s being disrespected and ignored. Hardly the stuff that turns a Jedi prodigy into the Dark Lord who has kept a tight grip on our consciousness.

It all ends in tears, but only because we mourn the loss of a childhood dream. When Anakin rises as Lord Vader for the first time, it might as well be the Frankenstein monster (you’ll see). The circle is now complete. And we will have to live with it.

Old Boy

Director: Park Chan-Wook
Starring: Choi Min-Sik, Yu Ji-Tae, Kang Hye-Jeong


Guy calls family to say he's coming home.
Gets knocked out.
Wakes up in a room and is held hostage but kept alive. For 15 years.
Then, he's released and given help by his kidnappers to discover the reasons.
They want him to know. But not all at once.

With this scenario setting up Old Boy, the audience and main character Dae Su (Choi Min-Sik), become one.
This is the movie's main device. You are strapped in with Dae Su. You only know as much as he does, with none of the "meanwhile...in the next room" cut-aways you get in normal movies. The clues he gets are the ones you get. And if he doesn't understand it, you'll never figure it out on your own.

On the way, he meets a waitress who becomes his sidekick after nursing him back to health after a bad Korean kimchi episode (know this: that octopus was alive, and it was real). The sequence of events that unfold from then on are sadistic and graphic. One fight scene in the hallway is a one-take-no-cut 4 minute tracking shot of a slaughter with its slow, maddening security camera style pan. But as excessive as it seems to get so many points (dentist's chair, pliers, you make the connection) it is also madly economic story-telling. You only know enough to get to the next scene and if you feel you don't know where it's going, that it's all gonna end in fucking tears, it's because it is. And it does.

Not since David Fincher's Se7en has a movie's ending been so downbeat, so downright cruel yet so well conceived. Even ask you look in horror and ask "How could this be?", your gut tells you "How could it not?"

Kingdom Of Heaven

Director: Ridley Scott
Starring: Orlando Bloom, Eva Green, Liam Neeson, Ghassan Massoud
Time: 145mins

Try as he might - and he does try - Bloom is still Legolas. Fortunately, Ridley Scott's tale of King Saladin's historic siege on Jerusalem overcomes this, with Scott wisely shifting the focus to events rather than a main character as he did in Gladiator.

Bloom plays Balian, a blacksmith who soon discovers he's the son of Godfrey, Lord of Ibelin. Balian follows his father Godfrey (Liam Neeson, playing master jedi Qui-Gon Jinn all over again) to Jerusalem where he hopes to find salvation for his deceased wife and child, the former condemned to hell because she committed suicide. Newly knighted, Balian quickly finds himself caught in all manner of camel doo: hatred from resident bastard Guy de Lusignan (Marton Csokas), lust from his wife Sibylla (Eva Green) and respect from the king himself (an uncredited and unrecognizable Edward Norton).

After a failed truce and a battle led by Guy turns into a massacre, Balian finds himself leading a small vassal of soldiers, defending the holy city against King Saladin (a scene-stealing Ghassan Massoud) and oh, just about 200,000 Muslim crusaders.

Scott's comfort with epics is evident and the scale of it all - the sprawling towns, hordes advancing across the desert - comes through in every frame. But Kingdom seems like a patchwork of things we've seen. The fight in the forest and Balian's first time in the city echoes Scott's own Gladiator, and the scene when Saladin's forces assault Jerusalem is a daylight version of Saruman's orcs laying siege to Helm's Deep.

Kingdom's theme is one of tolerance. And though its sentiments are post 9/11 (Saladin and Balian both deride the use of God's name to sanction slaughter), its imagery is pure Gulf War. The nighttime sequence where Saladin's catapults launch flaming projectiles at Jerusalem triggers memories of those ghostly images broadcast by CNN of Scud missiles and tracer fire as Baghdad was bombarded back in Gulf War I.

Scott keeps the pace relentless and almost claustrophobic so you hardly feel the 2 1/2 hour running time. But Kingdom's resolution is too sudden, too abrupt, feeling more like a white-flagged surrender rather than the stalemate of two unwavering causes.

Kingdom of Heaven is a spectacle, no doubt. But it falls far short of the legend Scott surely intended it to be.