The Orphanage (El Orfanato) 2007

The Orphanage (El Orfanato) (2007) Directed by Juan Antonio Bayona

Remember the last time you were scared? Like, properly terrified, panting for breath in fear of the next horror to pop up onscreen? I mean, in exchange of, say, laughing your ass off at the stupidity and ott-ness of all the violence befalling characters who, like, rilly deserved it anyway.

All right, there WAS a movie that accomplished this. In 2005, the Descent (Dir. Neil Marshal) gave horror a wake-up call. It was fast, brutal and big on yoinking genuine screams from the audience. Awesome.

In the other extreme is the creepiness that makes your heart actually pound, your breath shorten. Sweating in anticipation of the worst, you really, really don’t want bad things to happen to the characters. Dread permeates every frame. Fear is borne from actual emotion – and the icing on the top?

It makes you think.

While I can more-than happily enjoy the gorefests by Eli Roth, the Orphanage is a freak-you-out ghost story with a lot more to it. It plays on our worst fears – losing your child is an emotion difficult to be cynical about, and this film uses it chillingly but never, ever sells it cheaply. On this thread it draws comparisons to the magnificent Don’t Look Now and resonates powerfully with the harrowing, real-life case of missing Maddie.

In brief – Laura (Belen Rueda) lived in an orphanage by the sea, until a couple adopted her. Many years later, she returns to reopen the place as a home for young children, along with her adopted son, Simon (Roger Princep) and her heavy-sleeping husband Carlos (Fernando Cayo). Simon is playful and imaginative, and she protects him from his fear of the dark with stories and games. Soon he’s making friends with little boys in caves. Then one day, he vanishes entirely. Anguished but determined, Laura strives to find him, no matter what awful truths she uncovers on her journey.

The film never shies from the reality of the missing child situation, but it also keeps the ghostly gloom at full pressure throughout. Initially I was concerned that it wouldn’t manage to creep me out at all. It doesn’t take long, though, for the tension to build into a scary, but very satisfying story. I cannot recommend this highly enough, especially in a if you watch with many other people hugging one another in the dark. Brave your fear of subtitles (I hear this can put people off a movie – so the remakes are your fault!) , and go along before THIS gets remade starring Jennifer Connelly and one of the Dakota Fanning kids.

Oh, and it was produced and helped along in no small way by Guillermo del Toro. Surely that’s recommendation enough? All on its own, this heart-wrenching tale of terror deserves to be a brilliant hit.

March of the Mad Men

Mad Men

New TV series are starting everywhere right now, and I think this would be a good time to start reviewing them again – before we finally decide that the little time-sucking box underneath the TV is no longer our friend, but one of those hangers-on that encourages you to do the wrong thing. Many, many hours later; you emerge shuffling, like Jack Nicholson in Cuckoo’s Nest, and wondering where the hell your evening went.

But this being a new season – March already, bloody hell – the evil little box has some new temptations ahead. I’ve sampled a few of them, but let’s start with the most, ahem – respectable.

Mad Men is brought to us by the writers who worked for the guy who used to make the Sopranos. You know – it must be good, right? It highlights the lives of a group (or should that be ‘grope’…? Please insert your own LOL) of cocky ad men working from a slick skyscraper in 1960s-shaded New York. Their problem for this episode is that the Reader’s Digest has just announced that cigarettes are actually bad for you, and Lucky Strike are urgently seeking an advert to smooth over this PR disaster. Only problem is, their top man – a rugged Andy Garcia lookalike – has contracted major ad-writer’s block.

Don Draper (Jon Hamm) puzzles over his latest ad for Lucky Strike

Perhaps it’s because this is the sum-total of the plot that this first episode seems to drag on – forEVER. It isn’t helped by its group of characters who have about as much personality as the guy in the red shirt from Star Trek. It’s not quite Down With Love, although I don’t mind it if I’m in the mood for it. All the same, none of this felt real enough to escape its 60s staging – and I do mean staged. There are issues balanced on top of this smug little piece of work that scream ‘plot instead of character’. These days, that just bores me to tears.

I’m willing to allow that the characters will bed in – and bed each other – and then things will become more interesting. Hopefully. They also don’t swear often, if at all, which means to my jaded ears that this ISN’T REAL ENOUGH. I suppose it could be because it’s on AMC not HBO. Call me desensitised, but it confuses my sense of these being down-to-earth people, or even people we can recognise. Characters are staying hidden behind their suits and pastel skirts, wrapped up in cliché armour. They have a closet gay guy, another guy who’s only marrying a girl for her trust fund, and a repressed mousey girl who promptly goes on the pill and gets warned by her doctor not to be a slut.

Colourful cast: Roger Sterling (John Slattery), Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss), Don Draper (Jon Hamm), Joan Holloway (Christina Hendricks), Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser – Connor in Angel!!! Looking about 12!!!)

So, everything is gearing up to a theme of ‘this is what they were like in the 1960s, but – LOOK, WE’RE ALSO LIKE THIS NOW! But it’s a small wonder that the BBC have picked it up, instead of Channel 4 or even Sky – because to all first impressions, Mad Men is a just a period piece set in the 1960s, with a slightly higher budget and better aspirations than, say, Heartbeat. It covers issues like homophobia, racism, and blatant sexism in the first 20 minutes. Unfortunately, with these ‘issues’ underlying the whole thing it feels too deliberate to be truly enthralling. So far, none of the characters have managed to exceed that either. Which is a shame.

This show has had rave reviews so far, but judging from the first episode, I just don’t see it. It could grow and I’m willing to give it another two episodes to get to grips with it – but it could be one of those series that’s more fun to watch with the sound turned down. It’s hard not to compare everything to the Wire, or the Sopranos, or even the peerless Buffy. In this case, I’m just grateful that it isn’t another Ugly Betty – but I am afraid that the characters in Mad Men could slip into clean-cut good and evil roles, and it’ll have to pedal pretty hard to avoid this. The set-based footage doesn’t help either – some real atmosphere is sorely needed to energise the cast and to keep us immersed. So add a little more speed, and a lot more wit, and then we might have some believably mad men.

Addicted to digital repetition

Are we Addicted to the digital rush?

Is being addicted the new way to connect in modern life? Or is this just a symptom of the urge we all have to acquire, only twisted into commercial idealism which replaces real achievements?

Take computer games. They provide moments of satisfaction, and the best ones make you feel that you’ve actually earned it. But even the greatest games, unless you’re playing professionally, for money, may offer little more than a realisation you’ve spent twenty-five hours on your sofa collecting coins or blowing up Nazis.

Escapism is important. Games can brilliantly provide this. Playing games – particularly with the Nintendo Wii – give a communal experience and even the glow of exercise. But what room is there, creatively? Games are created to encourage your addiction to them, to push on a little further, to press the right button and get the yummy treat of a cut scene. And sometimes it’s worth it – if there’s a story involved.

A group meet in virtual World of Warcraft (pic: Games Digest)

But what do we actually accomplish? Even in the more sociable online games, like City of Heroes or that giant of them all, World of Warcraft. There’s a sense that playing these games leads to a form of guilty escapism. You know there are better things to do – more constructive, more solid pastimes – but it’s hard to beat that rush of achievement when you destroy an entire legion of bad guys. And the lights are ever-so pretty.

I haven’t played WOW, but I was briefly addicted to City of Heroes, and that was a great way to lose all your evenings. Being in a little group and killing bad guys felt great. The graphics were immersive and the idea was great fun. Sadly, I decided that if I was ever going to get any writing done I was probably better of not repeating my subscription. Perhaps I’m more of an all-or-nothing personality. It just seemed more and more likely that the predictable pleasures of the game were taking away my brains’ ability to come up with fully rounded stories.

Yes, I am aware that now I’m typing about it. So think of this article as part-therapy for my brief addiction to video games, and an inoculation against the other distractions out there, like satellite TV, and downloading from iTunes. All of these become avoidance techniques to actually achieving anything substantial.

After all, I may have just complained about distractions and addictions for the last five paragraphs, but I do now have some writing in front of me.

There’s definitely nothing wrong with playing or reading or watching TV for a good while. I think it’s the ALL OR NOTHING problem that makes it difficult to cut it down to a level where it’s killing a couple hours, not intruding over your whole goddamn life.

To borrow from Norman Bates, “A Hobby is supposed to pass the time, not fill it” and it’s becoming a worry that, just maybe, the digital age will provide more distractions than any creativity.

It’s not all doom-laden apocalypse, though. The act of blogging, while not particularly useful in itself, it at least lets people share thoughts online and gives an insight into worlds that you’d probably need a 12-month subscription for.

Pictures, media, the ability to rip up and reshape DVDs, music and re-edit any image you like, sometimes seamlessly, has given many of us more of a stab at creativity and reshaping the world from the internet up.

It could also be argued that it’s just basically regurgitating the same-old, same-old until it looks sort-of new. You Tube is a very visible example of these platforms. In many ways, it’s fabulous because it allows some bright sparks to give themselves the version of a film or TV show they actually wanted, like this remix of the Heroes finale (which regular readers may know is a pet peeve)!

(above) A very interesting remix of the fight in the Heroes Finalé

The guy (or gel) cut a minute from this, and you just DON’T miss it!

And has anyone noticed that Sylar is better dressed than Peter?

Ahem.

Heroes-ending-rants aside.

Consoles are also open to hacking, with almost none of them free from chipping or in some cases, people emulating old games so they’ll work on the new consoles. This site illustrates how a thing called homebrew allows people to mess with the new Nintendo DS.

And is all of this unoriginal? As everyone shares the same experiences, media and imagery, does our pool of experiences get teenier, or more impressively vast? Are we limited to what we can find on google?

The answer is always to find moderaton in some things, and occasionally go overboard on others. Our experiences may be enriched by sharing them, and by sharing our abilities through YouTube or on fanfiction sites or blogs, we get to connect more rapidly with people who we won’t necessarily bore to death with our (often!) weird obsessions.

On the other hand, it cuts down the likelihood of wandering into a secondhand bookshop and finding you really like Huckleberry Finn stories (for example), or picking up a cheap copy of Miles Davis in a record store and discovering it all for yourself.

Those aren’t personal examples, but you see where I’m heading with this? Computers can take the randomness of discovery out of life. And Amazon recommends is just NOT the same. It’s moving towards being able to browse the books in person, to get inspired to buy it by a review, or an appealing blurb, but it’s much more likely you’ll try a book on a personal recommendation from someone else.

To pull it back to my original point – are we all going to be writing blogs about blogs in fifty years’ time? I doubt we’ll be quite so insular. There are blogs about real life that aren’t just the shared Starbucks experience, or the problems of finding childcare (which is fair enough). There are people from Iraq, and ex-pats in Spain, and militant vegans out there.

All we can hope is that these experiences are shared in an interesting way.

In a century that seems intent on splitting people apart, and binding them with branding, is blogging the only thing able to truly pull our experiences together? Are we going to be divided between those whose shared experiences are virtually identical, and those who live in the grittier end of online reality?

Will everyone have broadband (or hopefully better) in twenty years?

And can we really interact with each other any more truthfully if we meet them through google than if we run into them face to face?

I know I’ve borrowed a lot from You Tube lately, but I find that it and wikipedia is the best place to find out that other people think the same – only, case in point, in a interesting and often hilarious new way. We all want to make sense of our surroundings, and our awareness of them have gotten a lot bigger lately.

I suppose it makes some sense that we’d really want to limit them in some way to the level we’re able to understand.

To borrow from Ghost in the Shell, “The net is vast and infinite“.

I think the final word should come from this guy. Thank you for reading:

Kanye West vs Daft Punk vs Animé Legends!

Kanye West vs Daft Punk

Kanye West’s new song and video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZd1Js0QaOI&mode=related&search=

Heavily samples Daft Punk, although apparently with their blessing. They not only appear in the video, but Kanye references Akira (and some of the video for the Daft Punk song this samples). So, their shared love of animé is very clear here.

The Akira scene used in the video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cig0SjaAB8&watch_response Original Akira Video, thank you You Tube

Trouble is, I think the song itself sucks. Daft Punk’s original (and I have no idea HOW many samples they may have actually used themselves) is a glorious blend of techno and sounds, with a far more elegant video too!

Kanye West’s version of this is so slow and dull, and the rap is unispiring, and frankly his video is a blurry mess. It was interesting enough to convince me to both watch it AND make a blog entry on it – but only because it draws together two things I already love. Kanye himself is NOT the main attraction.

It’s still great to see awareness of anime on usually boring-as-hell (and hell probably is quite dull, cos it’s hell) music channels. It’s a relief from the ‘girls in their pants’ school of music vids. Why else doe Gorrilaz do so well! There’s something more there, people, and a story will sell a million times better than anything else.

Except, possibly, for Rhianna’s voodoo rain song, ‘Umberella’.

This is number one for three – THREE months and hasn’t stopped raining (in the UK)

Thanks a lot, Rihanna!

I’m soooo mean…

Walls fall down AKA: Why Jericho (2006) is totally worth a look

Jericho – Walls Fall Down

The pretty, and rather good, cast of CBS’ Jericho.
Image thanks to: http://entertainmentnow.files.wordpress.com/2006/09/jericho2.jpg

AS EVER, HERE BE SPOILERS

MAINLY BECAUSE THIS FINISHED RECENTLY AND HAS SINCE BEEN RENWED WITH ENOUGH EPISODES TO TIE IT ALL UP.

THIS IS A GOOD THING

AT LEAST THEY’D BETTER TIE UP MOST OF THE LOOSE ENDS. IT WOULD BLOW IF THEY FAILED TO SATISFY WITH THIS SECOND CHANCE.

READ ON TO FIND OUT WHY

It didn’t start off that well.

Seeking to plug the Heroes-sized gap in our TV schedule, and having seen trailers for it just after Psych on the Hallmark Channel, Best Beloved and I decided to obtain a copy of the first few episodes and give it a go.

We found, at first, quite an intriguing premise. The pilot episode introduces the main protagonist, Jake Green (Skeet Ulrich), returning to his home town, Jericho, after a five year absence. In Grosse Point Blank style, he tells everyone he’s been doing a different thing in absentia. Incidentally, several reviews have picked up on this, and I’m pretty sure it’s because we’d all like to try this one day!

So, Jake faces up to his estranged family. His father’s a tough but fair man, who’s the mayor. He’s also got an election coming up and is worried that his wayward son may be a liability. Jake’s younger brother Eric seems to be an upstanding figure in the community – even if the cad is having an affair with the barmaid for reasons that mystify me. At least Jake’s mum’s glad to see him. We also meet Emily, a blonde bombshell who has a history with Jake. She has a fiancé now.

There are a few other lead characters. A female IRS agent sent to close down a farm, and a schoolteacher. The most notable is a guy named Hawkins, who’d arrived a couple days before with his wife and two kids. The family have cover stories, so you just know that something weird’s going on. While we’re meeting this fairly average bunch of characters, it becomes clear that larger events are happening outside of this little town.

The President is about to give a speech which everyone seems to be ignoring. By the end of the day, Jake is tired of arguing unsuccessfully with his family for financial help, and drives off in his big black car (which I suspect he stole from the Winchester brothers). When he drives off, a school bus takes a short cut, people go about their day, and the Sheriff’s children play tag outside the family home.

That’s when it happens.

BOOM

One of the best shots in the whole damn series –a small boy stands on a roof, watching the mushroom cloud expand over distant hills.

WOW

Naturally all hell breaks loose – though rather more organised hell than you might expect. The first thing Jake does is almost crash his car into the car driving opposite – apparently seeing a mushroom cloud immediately makes you forget about the brake pedal.

In town, people go from WTF to Holy Shit. Then they start robbing the local store and the gas station. Mayor Green works hard to keep people thinking clearly, and worries about his son. Jake has been keeping busy rescuing the children from a crashed school bus, while his ex-sweetheart, Emily, is trying to protect herself from some escaped convicts.

What happens over the next 22 episodes is the town’s reaction and efforts to survive. They survive the deadly fallout in the rain, and everyone worries about getting enough to eat. For a while, though, nothing really happens until around episode 14. It takes a long time to get going – soap opera elements tend to drag down the more interesting storylines uncovering what the hell happened.

These stories tend to revolve around Hawkins. He does a terrific job of being a conflicted family man with a deep dark government past. Both capable and realistic, he helps out Jake and shares some secrets that give the final moments of the show a real edge.

Then it ends. On a huge cliffhangar.

The good (and bad) people of Jericho may surprise you. If a terrestrial channel ever picks it up in the UK, it’s certainly worth a good look. Be patient, and you’ll find yourself racing breathlessly towards an exciting finale involving characters you suddenly, convincingly care about. The situation they’re in is also one that you identify with, from the most basic ‘what would I do?’ angle.

It isn’t Heroes, but it did manage to pull off an ending that was, if not wholly satisfying, at least made a great case for its renewal.

Fergie molests Peter Petrelli

Not that I’m bitter.

As an object of interest to would-be Heroes fans and people already under Mr Milo’s doe-eyed spell, here he is snuggling with Ms Fergilicious in a refreshingly sweet piece of pop angst. And why isn’t this on UK iTunes yet? I want Milo at my fingertips! Even with lots of tats and a weird little ponytail. I can work with the ponytail…

I’ve said too much, so enjoy the video. If not, hey, there’ll be other posts.

Heroes on BBC2 July 25th!

In addition, and if you still haven’t seen it, this may be important for you. Heroes will be showing on BBC2 on 25th July 2007.

Hey, Wikipedia says it’s true. As I’ve been avoiding BBC2 because of the tennis (the endless Tennis…) I have no idea if they’re even trailering it yet. They’re going for a Wednesday showing, I guess.

However, a quick search has revealed a BBC site already to go. So it’s certainly on its way, with a show alongside it that’ll be a bit like ‘Doctor Who Confidential’. Only, less Welsh. With apologies to the Welsh.

Update: Further confirmation is at the Radio Times website. There will be a double bill shown from 9pm until 10.30 pm, as it runs on the American version of an ‘hour’ – about 50 minutes.
The last ten minutes will be the little features show I mentioned above.

What are the chances this will be spoiler free? At least you’ll have a chance to not watch it if it does. The Sci Fi UK channel did have a silly habit of trailering the next episode about 5 seconds after the current one had ended…argh.

Everyone enjoy, you’re in for a fantastic story. I may even watch it again. Remember, no idents!

Heroes – Last Episode Volume One – 2007

All pictures courtesy of http://www.heroes media.com or http://www.heroes-tv.com

The Heroic and the Stupid

Last Episode of Heroes Volume One

I caught this ending a little while ago thanks to, er, well, if you know you know. Anyway, we couldn’t wait to see the end and found ways of skipping through them all at a much faster rate. It was almost worth it, too.

Heroes has been compared to that other show featuring super humans. I haven’t seen the 4400 at time of writing, but I can say that from my impressions of it, it differs from Heroes by having many more characters introduced each week. Heroes, by contrast, concentrated on the fortunes of a smaller group of regular characters. It occasionally devoted whole episodes to only one, such as the history of Horned Rimmed Glasses guy, Mr Bennett.

Heroes has had a great deal of success largely thanks to this small but cleverly interlocking group of characters. Beautiful effects and clever camerawork kept the show afloat, even when it stumbled now and then in the first half. I’m incredibly grateful I didn’t have to hang on through the months of hiatus that American fans had to endure.

So, now it’s all over, the bomb has…

SPOILER CENTRAL

IF YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW, PLEASE DON’T READ

READY?

YOU SURE?

OK THEN

Peter really IS the bomb. The events of this first volume have been promising a bloody great explosion in the middle of New York City. The likelihood increased as we were introduced to Ted Sprague, whose radioactive powers kept going out of control. He killed his wife by accident, unaware of how dangerous he was. So, at first it appeared that HE would be at the centre of it all.

Enter Peter Petrelli. The doe-eyed empathic hero discovered that he absorbs the powers of any hero he meets, generally without knowing it. Sometimes, they can overwhelm him, and it took some brutal training by Christopher Ecclestone’s wonderful invisible man, Claude Rains, to stop him going kablooey. So, it seemed that Peter might be able to control it. After meeting Sprague at the end of the last ep, it looked like he could control Sprague’s lethal power within seconds.

Enter Sylar. He’ll eat your brains…braaaaaaaiiiinsssss

The murderous psychopath spent the entire season stealing the powers of ‘those who don’t deserve them’. After a flash forward to ‘5 years in the future’ we see that he’s managed to become Nathan Petrelli – and US President. He blames his old name for the explosion. But, it was actually Peter. In the present day he paints a picture of a man blowing up, and believes that it will be he who destroys New York.

And here’s where it falls apart.

In Five Years Gone, everything’s gone to crap. No one’s saved the cheerleader and the world is at the mercy of evil Sylar President, who wants all heroes on the planet wiped out by his pet Professor Mohinder Suresh.

As a side note, why does Mohinder always end up working alongside the very guy who murdered his father? That’s pretty screwed up right there.

Our little group of heroes have turned into more badass versions of themselves. Little Hiro is a wanted terrorist, a scarred Peter Petrelli is having super-moody relations with a super-miserable pole-dancing Nikki. And they all hang around in Vegas now, as you would.

Future Matt Parkman. Now a git.

Oh, and Matt Parkman is now a git. A mind-reading git. Time to get out the tinfoil hats! (see above)

This was all an interesting way for the characters to go. The episode signed off with a showdown between an uber-powerful Peter Petrelli, and Sylar shedding his human disguise to face off against the only man who can really match him. So far, so good.

Then, Hiro and Ando bugger back to the present day, and are determined to stop these events. Everything that transpires after this suddenly seems so…

Dull wouldn’t be the right word. It’s still a show that’s leagues ahead of anything else right now. No, I haven’t seen enough of Lost to compare it to that. From what I have seen of that, it would annoy the crap out of me. Basically, the thing with Heroes is that the plot MOVES beautifully. It gave us hints, and rewarded us when we watched closely, and patted our tummies when we realised what the paintings actually meant. Yes, it’s called ‘not pulling plot out of your arse’ and it was perfect for 20 glorious weeks.

I was even willing to let the appearance of Malcolm MacDowell pass. Once upon a time, he was the no-good droog from Clockwork Orange. Now, and a Tank Girl movie later, he just seems to dodge the whole acting issue altogether. His scenes with Nathan Petrelli were downright embarrassing, as the delectable Adrian Pasdar acted him off the screen. Died in a cool way, mind you. Yowch.

So I could forgive the lacklustre Linderman. I can get over the fact that the 5YG timeline didn’t entirely make sense once Hiro had gone back and Peter had saved the cheerleader.

I can forgive the spontaneous appearance of Hiro’s dad to teach him ‘Samurai techniques for dummies’ over the course of about two minutes.

What I can’t forgive, yet, is this:

SFX August 2007: Spoiler Section

The Creator Speaks

So why exactly did Peter need Nathan to help him fly anyway? Surely he possessed that power himself?

“You know,” says series creator Tim Kring, “theoretically you’re not supposed to be thinking about that. The real explanation is that we wanted Nathan to show up and save the day! Yes, I will admit that there’s a very tiny window of logic thdre, but what can I say? It requires the proverbial suspension of disbelief.”

So, basically, he was hoping that no one would wonder this. When it’s been the most heavily analysed show on the internet since about the end of the first episode. Since they’ve been building up the bomb to suggest that it either goes off, or Peter dies, or Nathan definitely dies.

What do we do?

What did they do?

They missed the only thing that would have made sense – that we wanted and expected to happen. All it required to mend this plot hole was a moment where Peter yells “I can’t control it!” and if Sylar had managed to fight back, instead of standing there like a pillock for the duration, it might have been believable. Sylar has Sprague’s power by now! Okay, he didn’t have the ability to regenerate. He didn’t appear to care all that much at this point.

What we had, it hurts me to say, is Sylar meeting all the Heroes and just standing there. He just stood there and took it, letting Nikki whack him with a parking meter (looked great though), Peter to hit him with the same parking meter…and Hiro to slice him through the middle with a – massively brilliantly delivered “Yatta.”

So Sylar’s, just, dead. And then Peter’s suddenly going ‘oh no! I’m about to exploooooooooooooode!!’ cute emo bangs and everything.

He wants poor Claire to shoot him in the head, so he’ll stop blowing up. This makes no sense. It would traumatise Claire and probably make him explode even faster. Second, he made no indication that he couldn’t now deal with more than one power at a time. Third, well, why did he need help to fly, if this wasn’t the case? Why did Nathan have to carry him up?

There’s a term called ‘fanwank’ that isn’t quite as filthy as it sounds, and it applies especially to cases like this. This is where the scriptwriters haven’t just left a small window for people to suggest their own theories; they’ve left half a barn uncompleted which requires major fan scaffolding to hold it together.

I hope they learn from this. I hope they remember that Sci Fi fans, at the best of times, are total pains in the arse when it comes to things like this.

I’ll end this bit on a plea: Please get Volume Two to work!

Why a world needs a Mulder

Has the 21^st Century been outFoxed by Jack?

All opinions about the actual threat felt by the public at the time are to be taken tongue in cheek. Shit was going on, but there wasn’t this constant dread in the media which is so ingrained right now. I miss it.

Remember the 1990s? For many of us, compared to now, they were total salad days where all the evils of the world had learned their lesson. Nothing could interrupt the sense of safety where suddenly things were a whole lot better. From a day-to-day point of view, the worst the news had to offer which affected us was Bill Clinton’s little incident with an intern. There were nasty things going on, but both as a teenager and an observer of the news, it was all a very long way from British and American shores. There was less sense of impending death and imminent annihilation from popular news sources. Even the IRA’s peace process was looking like a full-blown success.

The only things we were afraid of were the sinister machinations of our government s, and alien invasions (Independence Day). People were openly reading Fortean Times on the bus. These fears were brilliantly encapsulated in Chris Carter’s X-Files. Every teenage boy wanted to be Mulder, and lusted after Scully. Girls tended to want the same things but in reverse. UFO magazines were everywhere, and no one quite believed the government’s side of things.

Wikipedia’s X-files article quotes:

According to Glen Morgan, the writers were inspired by a glowing New Yorker review noting the show’s exploration of “suburban paranoia”, and planned for more thematic unity in the second season: “the whole year was to be about the little green men that you and I create for ourselves… because there’re not nuclear missiles pointed at our heads, you can’t consolidate your fears there anymore.”^[33] However, the plan fell through quickly due to the pressure of the network TV schedule.

So, remembering Mulder. Here we have the least likely hero. He’s an openly porn-loving, basement-dwelling, paranoid loner who grudgingly takes on a capable, beautiful, sceptical partner. Between them they work to uncover the Truth behind things the government wouldn’t like us to know. It’s no surprise that Jack Nicolson’s ‘You can’t handle the truth’ speech seemed to be used only slightly less than ‘show me the money!’ during this decade. The decade before Tom Cruise went to crazy religious-ville, when he still made decent flicks.

Let’s flash forward to now. Our most popular hero, at the time of writing, is CTU agent Jack Bauer. Not so much a hero as a trained pitbull. Initially, at least, he’s a family man who’ll come after you if you get his pizza delivery wrong (insert youtube vid). He’s got an S&M streak a mile high, but there’s nothing truly quirky or potentially as filthy as Mulder’s video collection.

Bauer races around within a strict format. The style of 24 has been much-imitated on youtube, with parodies and music videos cut around him. He focuses on discovering the truth, too. He just tends to find it faster than Mulder. The X-Files cheerfully spent season after season pretending to set up things to reveal later on.

Like Mulder, Bauer uncovers layers and layers of conspiracies designed to destroy mankind. Unlike Mulder, Jack Bauer tends to hurt a lot more people on the way. Who knows, if Mulder had just grabbed Cigarette Smoking Guy and busted his kneecaps until he started crying for his mum, he might have figured it all out by the end of series 2. Or, he would have been immediately killed by one of the alien bounty hunters. Maybe Bauer IS an alien bounty hunter. That would explain a lot.

We need Mulder again. The ambiguity and hopefulness of the Mulder era has been replaced with a paranoia that allows for very little reflection. In 2007, it’s Us or Them, and feels much more like the pre-1991 era of Cold War unmask ‘em and shoot ‘em. Only this time, there are no other certainties, no one person who is necessarily good or bad. Jack Bauer doesn’t hope for anything, except to die with a purpose (his mantra at the start of series 6). He is a government puppet, who only questions his purpose at the end of the line. And even then, we know he’ll keep doing what he does best.

Mulder’s screwed-up family life is what drives him. He lost a sister, and over the series’ course his parents, too. But he has Scully, a friend he earned and respects. And knew that he needed to believe in something real. Mulder tended to use his cell phone more than his gun, and rarely came up with a definitive explanation for all the weird shit he and Scully uncovered in the Vancouver woods.

Jack Bauer is an unstoppable force, and he’s become a legend, and a parody. He’s also a blank sheet on which to crib your own ideas of life, liberty and the American way. The X-Files went through similar stages, but Mulder’s legacy is a far deeper warning. He warns us to distrust the government, to always question your orders, and to look for your own way out. There are still some similarities. And differences.

For example:

	Jack Bauer	Fox Mulder
Betrayed by	Everyone	Almost everyone
Family life	Daughter	Loses everyone
Google Hits	2,960,000	1,580,000
Government agency	CTU	FBI
Iconic Status	Millions of you tube parodies	Influenced everything from Buffy to Lost
Kill rating	185	NOT 185
Kinkiness	Handcuffs	Snogging sneaky Krychek
Location	LA	Vancouver (as entire USA)
Paranoia rating	10	10
Resolution?	Every series	Millions of puzzled fans…after 10 years
Savagery	Bit through terrorist’s neck	Beat up Skinner after LSD poisoning
Sex	Strictly out of office hours	Huge porn collection
Surname means	Pawn – German	Unknown, Dutch name
Theme	Terrorism	Little Green Men
TV Network	Fox	Fox
Who can you trust?	Chloe O’Brian	Dana Scully
Who’s Behind it all?	Anti-American Terrorists	The Government, or CSM, or…

Both 24 and the X-Files are equally far-fetched. The X-Files was about paranoia in “The suburbs”. Jack Bauer is both more international and more insular. Threats all come from outside, but they generally boil down to the good government and the bad terrorist, with everything into between either un-American or unquestioning. And no, the heavy-handed ‘both sides’ argument said by various characters in 24 series 6 doesn’t really count.

Jack Bauer’s point of view is summed up rather nicely here. He’s perfect for some reassurance of certainty during these difficult times. But we should always listen to the Fox Mulder part of us that refuses to believe the facts are exactly what we’re told.

Not everything is a conspiracy. Or is it?

Edit: Sci fi in our teenage years has also been covered in Monday 9th July’s TimesOnline, thank you, Caitlin Moran

Jacked Off…I’m SO sorry….

End of 24.

SPOILERS! GET THE DVDS! OR DON’T BOTHER FOR THIS SEASON! WAIT FOR THE MOVIE! WATCH HEROES!

It truly is over, folks.

It sucked.

To begin with:

• Jack Bauer somehow failing resolve things with his evil-evil-evil father (who should have been played by his real dad, Donald Sutherland, but isn’t for reasons only conspiracy theorists can comprehend).
• Brainy geeeeek hotty Chloe falling over, then falling pregnant. Okay, probably NOT in that order…
• Jack turning up at catatonic Audrey’s house about ten seconds after falling off a helicopter into the ocean
• No Tony Almeida, even though I hadn’t heard the rumours until afterwards. We need someone back who we actually CARE about, damnit (take a drink)
• We still don’t know what price was paid for Jack’s release from China
• Decisively turning Jack back into the season 4 asshole who got people killed and killed and hurt people randomly
• Will he jump? Won’t he? Of course he bloody won’t, he’s signed onto 24 for THE REST OF TIME!

Note that these are just things I had a problem with in the FINALÉ. For the reasons I outline in my previous post, this series sucked. A lot. Anything after the first nuke going off was patchy at best, and when they actually got the bad guys about six episodes before the 24th hour, it became clear there were problems. Then the production team actually admitted it. Then we kept watching, because we’d already watched it, and wanted to find out:

• Is Jack’s nephew actually his son?
• Is he going to get one over his evil-evil-evil father?
• Will he get over his imprisonment in China (well, he did. Really soon)?
• Is there another big bad at the end?
• Do we even care about poor Audrey?

And the answer is……

Go on. Work it out. Sorry, but this was just a huge waste of time!

I repeat my plea to let the writers have a break, (oooh, writer’s strike soon), and then make the movie okay (and not The Sentinel 2). And then, just, enjoy yourselves. Please.