I’m breaking with tradition just to write a short personal blog about a young singer songwriter who makes me feel woefully inadequate. Kiran Leonard – 17 years of age – take a bow. (Link to his entire album above)
I heard the quite brilliant ‘Dear Lincoln’ – a song about mental illness which is a very personal subject to me – a couple of months ago after a random Twitter tip off and when I saw that it was written and performed by a 14 year old I decided that I needed to do something with my life. Unfortunately, two months later all the efforts I have put in to changing every aspect of my being for the better have come full circle and I’m back to where I began. Where I began was Kiran Leonard and so I looked on his own website to find his full album ‘Bowler Hat Soup’ was there. So I listened all the way through. And it is amazing.
Highlights include: ‘Port Ainé’ wouldn’t seem out of place on a Ben Howard record such is the slickness. ‘Smilin’ Morn’ is a joy of a song with the slow build to a crescendo of some of the best Rufus Wainwright has offered with infinitely more weirdness to boot. ‘Geraldo’s Farm’ brings in a distinctive electronic feel to proceedings and the fast rock-infused ‘There’s No Future In Us’ builds upon this constantly changing theme as the second half of the album delves in to experimental anarchy mixing previous songs on the album to create a mash up that no one signed to a big record company would dare to attempt. The final song, ‘A Purpose’ is a beautiful gem as Leonard changes styles once more back towards melancholic Rufus Wainwright territory. It is all over the place and yet a 17 year old pulls it off to make a wonderful album. It is impossible to describe the genre as it is heavily influenced by too many artists on each song. What you can say is that Kiran Leonard is a music obsessed young man with serious passion and even more talent.
Kiran Leonard deserves to be a huge name and after listening to this amazingly complex, soulful and imaginative album I have full faith that he will be some day. Until then at least I can feel that I have achieved something by hearing him before the masses descended upon him and killed his experimental music…it has begun…
I’ve made a huge mistake…Arrested Development Season 4 hits Netflix all at once on 26 May. I am going to be at a Wee Brain wedding for Les Cousins Dangereux and my party piece will be walking over a pool of water and setting fire to the bride, again, so I will listen to my hermano and be a Motherboy for a day. *claps like a chicken* yes I know I sound like ‘Frightened Inmate #2’ when I should open my big pink mouth to say, come on! then go and watch The Trial of Captain Hook with a loose seal but ‘family love Michael’ so I must open the family chequebook one more time rather than go to Phoenix, work for Sitwell Enterprises or even use my Aztec Tomb to escape to the Milford Academy where I’m seen and not heard, so I can watch some Caged Wisdom in the peace and quiet of The OC (don’t call it that)… worse still the wedding is in Reno, so it’s a huge, tiny mistake…
…so, yes, if you’ve never seen Arrested Development before that first paragraph is the most convoluted nonsense written since Dan Brown’s Inferno was released the other week *zing* and if you have seen it but thought ‘meh’ then I’m sorry, Ted? Is it Ted? Did Ted make an appointment? No? Well, then, Ted can get the hell out of this office! YOU GET THE HELL OUT!!!! And that’s how you keep out unwanted visitors…so that’s enough of the quotes. I have demonstrated I am a hopelessly obsessed fan of seasons 1-3 and the only people left are you, me and the tumbleweeds.
Arrested Development is unique. It is written, by Mitch Hurwitz, as a fly on the wall documentary comedy without a laughter track based around rich, spoilt, obnoxious and deeply unlovable characters who have fallen from grace as their greed and power has broken the law in a nationwide scandal that has ruined the company they own. And yet you can’t help but love them. This is because the comedy is so slick that the people you perceive to be arrogant end up as hilarious parodies of the type of individuals you see in real life. It’s like watching The Apprentice in an actual sitcom style and it works wonderfully well. And it is basically a bunch of posh knob gags. And it is impossible to fail with that.
Of course, it would never have been cancelled if this were true. The sad fact is that it requires a lot of attention and patience to watch AD. There are literally hundreds (slight exaggeration) of in-jokes per episode and the sheer amount of call backs demand that you watch each programme in order of broadcast to fully appreciate the comedy that flows. Indeed, I have watched all 3 seasons of AD approximately 6 times now and each episode brings me a new joke that I had not spotted before, whether it be in the dialogue, an extra in-joke, the visual background or a reference that I had previously ignored. The richness and depth of AD makes it an immediate cult classic and that is why I love it so much. It is also why it was cancelled due to a lack of popularity – that and poor marketing.
As well as the brilliant writing the main characters are all fantastic. It is impossible to go in to depth or wax lyrical with enough justification so here is a one line overview of the best of them:
Michael Bluth – fulcrum of the family: reliable, kind and handsome yet selfish, arrogant and vindictive when it’s as plain as the Ann on egg’s face
Lindsay Funke Bluth – Michael’s ‘twin’ sister and supposed activist in a sham marriage to Tobias and an unhealthy obsession with men, money and herself
GOB Bluth – failed magician and self-loathing womaniser with a unique interpretation of how a chicken dances
George Michael Bluth – nervous, obsessive, obedient son of Michael who yearns his father’s approval in exactly the same way as his father seeks his father’s approval. Loves his cousin
Buster Bluth – Motherboy who cannot escape the confines of his childhood due to constant panic attacks, crippling self doubt and various contests with his adopted brother. Dates Liza Minnelli
Tobias Funke – possible closet homosexual, never nude, actor, author, sometime Blue Man, doctor with cat-like reflexes, Analrapist and an insatiable thirst for unwittingly scandalous double entendres
Maeby Funke – compulsive liar and rebellious daughter of Tobias and Lindsay who is probably the most successful and smartest character in the family
Lucille Bluth – drunken matriarch who hates her family but can’t survive without them in spite of her protestations
George Bluth Sr – overbearing selfish patriarch guilty of tax evasion who has committed multiple affairs and attempted escaped from prison on many occasions
Narrator – Ron Howard, an integral character to keep the flow of the show and link each segment
Oscar Bluth – George’s hippy twin brother with fabulous hair like a lion and an obsession with Lucille
Carl Weathers – Carl ‘fucking’ Weathers…baby we got a stew going
Ann Veal – George Michael’s plain, dull Christian girlfriend with a hot mum
Annyong Bluth – Korean adopted by Lucille to teach Buster a lesson
Barry Zuckerkorn – George Bluth’s terrible lawyer with a questionable personal life and even worse ability to practise law
Kitty Sanchez – George Bluth’s crazy secretary who tends to all of his needs and likes to show you her breasts as long as you don’t look at them
Wayne Jarvis – replacement lawyer for Barry Zuckerkorn. What a pro
Bob Loblaw – replacement lawyer for replacement lawyer. Lindsay wants him badly
Marta Estrella – GOB’s Colombian or Mexican or whatever girlfriend. Famous actress
Franklin Delano Bluth – GOB’s puppet. Has much in common with Michael Jackson and likes to knock people out
Steve Holt – STEVE HOLT!!
In conclusion, Arrested Development is amazing. The writing is uniformly superb. The characters and acting crazy, varied and brilliant. The storylines are surreal, silly and yet so complex they demand repeat viewing. If you’ve never seen it before don’t watch season 4 yet. Go and buy seasons 1-3 (or watch them on Netflix I guess) watch them all at once, laugh yourself silly and then join the cult. If not you will essentially be pulling your own arm off. And that’s why you always leave a note.
The second part of the 7th (33rd) series of Doctor Who has been uniformly good. From claustrophobic haunted house episode, ‘Hide’ to much derided fantastical sentimental ‘The Rings of Akhaken‘ – which I hope is reconsidered as it resonates beautifully with the final episode journey of Clara – they have all been strongly written by Steven Moffat, Neil Cross, Neil Gaiman and Steven Thompson with Matt Smith continuing to be terrific as The Doctor and adding so many dimensions (sorry) to the performance that it does not get repetitive or jarring while Jenna Louise Coleman continues to impress in her burgeoning role as someone The Doctor does not fully understand.
The final episode ‘The Name of the Doctor’ was terrific. The opening montage of Clara being The Impossible Girl who is meant to ‘save The Doctor’ was poignant and well done. The Doctor was forced in to travelling to Trenzalore – the one place he could never go, his own tomb – to save Vastra, Jenny, Strax and Clara from the Great Intelligence. We were told we would finally get to know his real name. We were excited. We were anticipating a huge reveal. The ONLY way to enter his tomb was to say his real name – or all of his companions would have their hearts tickled to death (we were never quite clear about that) by the Whispermen – henchmen of the Great Intelligence. It had to happen. Then and there. Yes. Finally. The name of The Doctor. Doctor Who? DOCTOR WHO? DOCTOR WHO!?!?!?!?!? We still do not know. We did not get it. A copy of dead River Song post ‘Silence in the Library’ suddenly appeared to say his name off camera to gain access to the tomb of The Doctor (a massive TARDIS by the way). Normally this would create an almighty backlash as the fans would feel cheated. However, this was a terrific episode and lays bigger storylines.
**********SPOILER ALERT**************
The Impossible Girl was impossible. She was a regular girl who saved The Doctor to rescue all of the universe from a vengeful Great Intelligence who had entered The Doctor’s dead body (his entire living history contained in the form of a giant time travelling lava lamp, apparently) to contaminate his past and kill him before he could win his past battles. So all of his history would be rewritten and the universe would be taken over by Cybermen, Daleks and those little pieces of fat in boxes that had Sarah Lancaster as a babysitter. With The Doctor dying in front of her eyes along with history being rewritten and destroyed Clara followed the Great Intelligence and was instantly splintered in to millions of realities to save The Doctor, every single doctor.
*************BIGGER SPOILER ALERT**************
At the end we found out that Clara did not die. River was there and The Doctor (ridiculously) was able to hold her and kiss her despite the fact she did not exist in reality in what was a very moving scene where the hurt of love took its emotional toll on both her and the ‘God’ she could never truly have. So The Doctor followed Clara in to his own dead body (bit weird) and joined her in a reality of all previous 11 Doctors…or so we thought…standing in front of them was the twelfth doctor…John bloody Hurt…as what was implied to be a war-mongering Doctor who murdered his way through life. The darkness begins here…? The speculation certainly will begin furiously as to who, what and how. All I can say is bring on the 188 days (I looked it up ok) until the 50th Anniversary Special.
I may never forgive More4 for shamelessly losing the rights to The Daily Show with Jon Stewart – I still cry about it every night – but it has recently started to quietly invest in quality shows. The superbBoss began its unfortunately short run last night (Thursday 11pm More4) with an incredible tour de force in acting by Kelsey Grammer, who plays Mayor Tom Kane of Chicago, suffering from a degenerative illness. Exhilarating and chilling in equal measure his performance is something not to be missed in a show which is scheduled for a film to conclude two seasons that I look forward to completing quickly. The smart, powerful and uncompromisingly brutal writing from Farhad Safinia serves to enhance the programme from being just another political drama or a vehicle for ‘Frasier’.
Nashville (Thursday 10pm More4) is another quality recent addition. TV shows based around music do not always have great reputations for drama (see Glee, Smash, Hannah Montana) but this has excellent pedigree. Written by Callie Khouri, who also wrote Thelma & Louise, it should come as no surprise that the main protagonists are two strong, successful and well rounded women fighting against the patriarchal society that they inhabit. The always excellent Connie Britton plays Rayna James, a faded country music superstar in, you guessed it, Nashville. Her fight is in trying to stay relevant when her family need her, her age is against her and her husband is determined to run for political office with the aid of her tyrannical father. Hayden Panettiere plays Juliette Barnes, the Taylor Swift-like young, arrogant superstar who has the looks, the youth and the following but lacks the respect that she so desperately craves. Add in Clare Bowen as the naive, scared but supremely talented waitress Scarlett O’Connor and there are three women occupying the three main roles on a US TV show not called Girls. Wonderful stuff. (And this song gave me goosebumps)
And then of course you have the mainstays of More4. Father Ted, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Time Team, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Come Dine With Me and wonderful documentaries. I will never complain about seeing Father Ted reruns, you hear me, NEVER. And my mum will never complain about seeing Time Team reruns, you hear me, NEVER (except for last night when she bemoaned the fact that they will no longer be making it). Of course Curb is pretty, pretty, prettay good and Come Dine With Me is always good for a cheap laugh or two. The documentary strands including Cutting Edge, Dispatches and Britain: My New Home (Friday, 9pm More4) are always thought provoking and well made.
As with any channel there aren’t always programmes to your taste. I’m not a fan of Grand Designs, Location, Location, Location or any of the aspirational property TV but they are big viewer favourites and you always need them to support quality drama. If you like those then good luck to you. And if not, there’s always Kelsey Grammer.
In The Flesh is a new zombie drama on BBC Three (Sunday 10pm or repeated a lot). However, it is not about zombies. It is about love, fear, discrimination and intolerance. It has far more in common with This Is England than The Vampire Diaries. It is also not the too awful for words hip ‘yoof’ nonsense you can get on BBC Three. What In The Flesh is is a very good and unique drama something that is to be commended in this day of televisual saturation.
We see the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse and how people are being treated for this illness. In fact that they are not ‘zombies’ but suffer from ‘Partially Deceased Syndrome’ (PDS) an excellent touch of bureaucracy added to political correctness and humanity. This is a wonderful twist to the traditional and, frankly, done to death concept. You don’t see much zombie killing action; instead we are treated to the human side of something which has been portrayed as monstrous in every interpretation up until this point.
Already the writing has provided some chillingly brutal and moving moments (without giving spoilers away some characters doth protest too much, methinks) where my heart was racing. After just one episode that is some achievement. The writer Dominic Mitchell deserves high acclaim for his script as it has managed to create a range of characters that you can relate to.
The beautifully innocent Kieren Walker (Luke Newberry) is the PDS sufferer who is brought home to his parents after rehabilitation – including copious amounts of brain stimulating drugs, fake tan and contact lenses to make him look normal. His family ratchet up the fear factor superbly well, while The HVF (Human Volunteer Force) could just as easily be seen protesting against immigration, taxes or budget cuts as the ‘rotters’ who are being introduced back in to their community. Their HVF leader Bill Macy (Steve Evets) and Vicar Oddie (Kenneth Cranham) have a menacingly dangerous charisma that will surely only lead to increased problems and danger within the neighbourhood but you are engrossed in how they will do so.
Only one episode has aired and yet it already has the feel of something which can last far longer than the three parts afforded to it. George A Romero has spent a lifetime making zombie movies and yet a simple twist like that employed by In The Flesh has breathed life in to a stagnant genre.
I am a 27 year old male who had NEVER bought a copy of FHM. Seriously. Never. I had read parts of it before from friends’ copies and a very lovely woman once bought me an issue of it many years ago, extolling the virtues of said magazine – I think Jennifer Ellison was in it if anyone remembers when she was famous. As I was going on holiday I wanted to purchase Empire magazine (big film fan, obviously) to read and as I’m always looking for a bargain I saw this offer for Empire and FHM for £5 and decided, what the hell. I’m not the type to shit all over something without giving it a chance (unless it’s called Splash!) so I actually sat down and read pretty much every word in the March 2013 issue of FHM. Now that I’ve alienated all human beings with this first paragraph I’ll continue with a review.
Yesterday was International Women’s Day and what better way to celebrate than by reading something which is so empowering towards women… In fairness there is some good stuff in FHM and I will start by highlighting that:
Jobs Down Under – about relocating your life from UK to Australia and tips from 4 or 5 separate people who have done so successfully
The Greatest Summer Holiday - a section devoted to approx 10 destinations that will see you have the best holiday ever possible
I have actually torn these pages out and will keep them. There is some genuinely good advice and I might very well use them for myself. Even so I have a couple of issues. Firstly, all of the people in Jobs Down Under are men with their partners briefly alluded to. Secondly, all of the holiday destinations are male with the emphasis on booze, birds and beach.
Now the bad – and there is a lot of bad. I’m even going to split it in to insulting towards women and not abusive towards females. I’ll save the invective for later:
Adverts – as with all magazines the proliferation of adverts to articles increases throughout and I know the target audience is male but Jesus Christ there is a lot of metrosexual shit.
Designer clothes, James Bond, posh alcohol, clothes again, more clothes, men’s perfume (aftershave I think it’s called), vitamins, watches, shoes, clothes again, film ad and shampoo ad featuring a footballer. Every single advert feels like it is targeted specifically towards a mid 20s-40s rich, middle class London yuppie type and it just seems depressing to me.
Adverts within articles – half of the actual articles are basically just adverts for products.
Some examples being an article about Dan Ackroyd’s new vodka range morphing in to a celebrity alcohol advert, a coffee making piece which merely sought to sell a range of expensive accessories, and 14 (yes 14!) pages of style tips for cunts men which was just a very long advert.
Dull attempts at funny stuff – there are a few articles about Pancake Day for men, a man’s best friend: dog vs. mate and The Bloke Test.
This month’s ‘bloke’ was Danny Trejo who just seemed dumbfounded to be asked such questions as “have you ever followed through on a particularly exuberant fart”. I found them uninspiring and tedious rather than utterly offensive but, hey, maybe some guys find that funny. Each to his own.
Other articles I won’t talk about because you could find them in any magazine include: an interview with an astronaut and a footballer, reviews of film, video games, theatre, readers’ letters, biker gang stories – none of these are particularly bad or good.
However, there is a whole long list of articles offensive to women:
Scantily clad women in insulting terms – men buy these magazines to look at soft core porn. That is the first thing I will say. I am not going to criticise for the ridiculous poses because it’s clichéd and is there for titillation. Is it wrong? Yes. Will it change? No.
What I take offence to is the actual language highlighted in these articles, “I’m quite old fashioned. It’s the man’s role to look after the woman” says Chloe Cummings who is famous for being Abby Clancy’s cousin and is “a bit of a psychic”. Setting the women’s movement back a hundred years there Chloe. The actual interview is too boring and depressing to even repeat on here.
Get A Massive Crush On Alicia Vikander – she was nominated for BAFTA rising star award this year and has been awarded the Kermode Award for best actress for her role in the sensational, A Royal Affair. Here she is reduced to a picture in an article NOT EVEN ABOUT HER.
This article is actually an interview with Adam Deacon (winner of BAFTA rising star last year – in a tenuous link to Vikander) where he is promoting his new film on DVD. If I was Deacon I would be insulted. If I was Vikander I would be insulted.
Close The Deal With Beautiful Women – I am shit with women. It is a fact. Just ask any woman I’ve ever dated and they’ll tell you. I can do with some advice but fuck me this was a depressing read. 7 pages of tips for men to get women in to bed! This made me angry.
They dressed women up in scantily clad outfits reducing them to mere caricatures and then proceeded to label them in specific terms which men could access via following the advice written on the page. I mean really? I just found this insulting to my intelligence. I can see how there is some well-meaning advice in there (hidden very well admittedly) but it is just dumping women on a plate and saying, “There you go guys, come and fuck us. This is how to do it. It will definitely work.” It made me feel ashamed to be a man.
Win a Date with Georgia, Franziska or Rosie – this is another 8 pages of nearly naked women but this time it is self promotion for the world renowned FHM 100 Sexiest Women 2013 edition (vote now!)
Again, I have no problem with the naked women as that’s the purpose of the magazine. I also have no problem with FHM promoting their magazine’s 100 Sexiest Women as that edition is presumably the biggest selling of the year and to use wrestling parlance (since they review wrestling games in one of the articles) is the equivalent of Wrestlemania. My problem is them giving a date away with one of the 3 models they’ve chosen to flaunt in their lingerie. Once more women have been reduced to objects for no real reason. What is the purpose of this? Does anyone reading think they will get an ACTUAL date with someone they’ve never met and who probably have boyfriends in any case? Is the magazine trying to drum up business by using aspirational techniques? Are they sex slaves who will fuck anyone on command? I just don’t know.
Judd Apatow: FHM Hero – I like Judd Apatow films. They are blokey in a geekish, immature but appealing way. This interview I did not like. Not because of Apatow but FHM.
In Empire magazine Apatow was also interviewed about his new film This Is 40 which also happens to star his wife, Leslie Mann. They are both interviewed together in a funny, bickering and informative format that is well executed. Good job Empire. In FHM Apatow is interviewed alone with lots of blokey references to his past films and upcoming films (pretty much all of which star Mann in some way). So why is it that Leslie Mann gets no reference until paragraph 11 out of 12? And when she does get a mention it is thoroughly condescending, “Spot [Mann] in This Is 40, in which, if you can prize your eyes away from Megan Fox rolling around in a bikini, she plays spouse to Paul Rudd…surely directing your own missus in a sex scene with a good friend is kinda weird, right?” Ugh. Everything about that wants makes me want to punch the page, the writer and myself in the face. Leslie Mann is pretty much shot down in the tiny piece of an article she is afforded. Terrible.
Great Sexy Moments In Life #12 – this is the last thing I’m going to moan about but it’s basically page 3 but 3 pages from the back.
What is the purpose of this? Beth from Manchester is just eating some grapes answering inane questions. ‘A pretty girl nibbling on some grapes’ it says in the sub-heading. Yes, that is it. That is the purpose. To have a pretty girl. There is no substance to the questions. There is no reason for it to be there *sigh*
Ok, well I hope anyone who has read this is as thoroughly depressed as I am. A couple of redeeming articles will not make me buy this again. It is insulting to women and also to men I would suggest.
I like Stephen Poliakoff – I really do. And I am a history graduate with a love of the changing race relations and politics of the early 20th century. I should have loved Dancing on the Edge.
I was a big fan of Shooting The Past, Perfect Strangers, The Lost Prince, Gideon’s Daughter and Joe’s Palace to name a few. I even defended him on Twitter after the negative backlash of the first episode of Dancing on the Edge. I love his lazy, laid back and deliberately slow style. It always makes his work stand out and it feels like you are watching a real event rather than just some show. And for £8.5m budget you would expect so too.
However, even I gave up after the second episode when nothing had happened in 2 and a half hours. Sure he had his normal royal family obsession, Nazis, garden parties, obsession with dark rooms and beautiful cinematography but is this enough? No.
From what I’ve read in the brilliant Guardian episode by episode blog nothing happened in the last 3 and a half hours either.
A superbly twisted thriller with a somewhat unique outlook on our future selves, Utopia was heavily propagandised by Channel 4 during Christmas and New Year with our screens constantly awash with the garish yellow nightmare normally associated with **SPOILER ALERT** Beatrix Kiddo in Kill Bill. Has it lived up to the hype?
In the first 5 episodes – the final one to be screened tomorrow – it has grown from an out and out murder a minute see how many ways you can make me have nightmares you complete and utter bastards to a labyrinthine plot of devilishly complicated metaphysical concepts allied to a sinisterly simplistic solution to all our coming woes. If all this seems complicated, sorry, it is a bit. But please watch it because it all makes sense when you see this shit going down. Or just read the plot here.
The writing by Dennis Kelly is superb as he uses throw away popular cultural references with these entangled plotlines to keep the viewer engaged when it would be so easy to lose everyone amidst a sea of nonsense (Damon Lindelof, Carlton Cuse and J. J. Abrams on Lost I’m looking at you! And by the way whatever happened to that Abrams guy…?) and in doing so the show hurtles along at such a pace that you barley notice that an hour has gone. Even the most simplistic of lines, ‘Where is Jessica Hyde?’ takes on a menace one cannot possibly have imagined when the chillingly brutal Neil Maskell utters it to his next victim.
Which brings me to the acting. Some superb performances, not least by Maskell as ‘Arby’, Alexandra Roach as the wonderfully foul-mouthed drug dependant ‘Becky’, Fiona O’Shaughnessy’s strange-accented antihero ‘Jessica Hyde’ and Nathan Stewart-Jarrett as the morally conflicted heart of the story ‘Ian’. My favourite performance though must go to Adeel Akhtar for his wonderfully unhinged ‘Wilson Wilson’ so good they named him twice. A character who could so easily fall in to parody or seem like a comic book geek but has been given such a rounded performance that he is hilarious one minute, ominously vulnerable the next before becoming a terrifying presence soon after. Superb.
Utopia has certainly lived up to the hype in my opinion. Very rarely do you get such a complex drama that can also entertain the masses on British television as the budgets cannot always accomplish everything the writers set out to do.
Groundhog Day meets Speed meets Quantum Leap – this is how best to describe the fast moving, confusing and ambitious film that is Source Code. Luckily I’m a big fan of all three and so I also adore Source Code. Duncan Jones has just been announced as the director of World of Warcraft and Source Code has its UK network premiere tonight so the timing for this review is perfect.
The film is about Captain Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) who awakes on a train in Chicago. He has no idea how he got there or what he is doing there – his last memory was flying a helicopter in Afghanistan – but the passenger opposite him Christina Warren (Michelle Monaghan) knows him and calls him ‘Sean’. We eventually realise that Stevens is in fact in the body of teacher Sean Fentress – Quantum Leap style – in a parallel dimension and that he has to find a bomb that is on board the train – Speed style – before it blows up. However, every time it does blow up Colter awakes in a capsule as himself with only a camera link to Captain Colleen Godwin (Vera Farmiga) and Dr Rutledge (Jeffery Wright) as company. We are told that he has a repeated eight minutes – Groundhog Day style – inside the ‘Source Code’ (a kind of time realignment device) to find the bomb and bomber to stop an impending attack in this world. Both worlds alter slightly on each occasion as time is running out to save the world from the catastrophe. Following? No? Tough. Watch the film. It’s a unique and intriguing movie dealing with time, space and string theory in about as simple way as possible.
At the heart of this complex film is a burgeoning love story between Colter and Christina as these two slowly evolve an eight minute relationship which takes place over an hour and a half of film time. This is where the film excels as Colter is forced to come to terms with the reality of his situation within his own world with Godwin and Rutledge as company.
Gyllenhaal is one of my favourite actors and gives a superb performance with a constantly evolving character who has to deal with so many things. Likewise, Monaghan and Farmiga give good performances in roles which are very constrained due to the nature of the film but are crucial to our perception of the worlds.
Director Duncan Jones, meanwhile, does a fantastic job of balancing the claustrophobic and paranoid elements with the requirements of an action film as there are only really three major locations throughout the movie. It runs at such a fast pace and yet manages to keep the audience involved because of the emotional investment and character driven essence of the performance. You can see elements of his previous film Moon in this as that has similar constaints of space and dealt with paranoia and claustrophobia as a main theme.
Other films you can compare Source Code to include Looper, Deja Vu and Inception as they are all thought provoking, intelligent films that you can invest in because of how the material has been handled with a loving care that blockbusters all too often fail to follow. Some people will interpret the ending in a different way to that of the writer and director (available on the DVD commentary) but that is the beauty of the film. It is not the greatest film you will ever see but I defy anyone to watch it and be bored or dissatisfied as it reaches out to you with action, love and an intelligence that encompass many different tastes.
Put simply Dead Man’s Shoes is a revenge movie in the tradition of Straw Dogs, Mad Max, Death Wish and Once Upon A Time In The West but set in the rather less glamorous location of Matlock, Derbyshire. One man avenges the poor treatment his handicapped brother suffered at the hands of a drugs gang by exacting a concerted, bloody revenge. In these times of heightened feelings towards gun crime in America, following the Sandy Hook massacre in Newtown, films like this are all the more likely to be studied and castigated for their portrayal of a romanticised violence and yet those who condemn it are missing the point.
The director Shane Meadows is a particular favourite of mine. His localised Midlands stories have a charm to them that is very unique, very personal, very British. He tends to cast original actors for their raw energy and character rather than actual ability. Sometimes it works (Paddy Considine, Vicky McClure, Joe Gilgun) sometimes it doesn’t (most of the others) but in this particular case the lead character of Richard (Considine) is perfectly cast as a disturbed ex-soldier who shows no fear or remorse. He becomes consumed by this need for revenge and nothing or no one will stop him as he is accompanied by his brother on this journey.
Considine himself also wrote the script with Meadows and long-time Meadows co-contributor, Paul Fraser and this is shown in the performance as Considine’s own personal influence seems to shine through. The thoughtful musings and conversations between Richard and his brother Anthony (Toby Kebbell) were a chance to show the character as loving and relatable when the fact that he was murdering people should have disconnected the audience with Richard. The mob mentality often displayed by young groups of males is to the fore as these men tormented a young disabled boy and yet when confronted by their own mortality seem to be scared, remorseful and almost affable. It is up to the viewer how they wish to react.
This is a film about vengeance but it is also a love story because of two strands: Richard and Anthony as well as Mark and his family towards the end. These bookend the film as the viewer has travelled from violence at the beginning through copious bloodshed to the end. Dead Man’s Shoes does not preach or glamorise violence. It just shows all actions have consequences and that revenge is not always what you wished.
