Game of History

"I watch it for historic reasons, to try to understand what this world was based on before I got here. I like to know how we got from there, to here, and the similarities between then and now." - Snoop Dogg, a.k.a. Snoop Lion, on why he watches Game of Thrones.

I like Snoop Dogg so I like to think he was kidding around. But this does bring me back to my suspicion that people are taking Game of Thrones as actual history, or at least reflective of it. He seems somewhat taken aback in this clip where someone points out to him that the only black dudes on the show had their balls and possibly their dicks cut off.

Here's a tender moment from last night's episode where the recuperating Grey Worm is attended by Missandei, who he's falling for despite his lack of equipment. That the two are unquestioningly obedient to their white emancipator sometimes reminds me of the "Abraham" musical number from the 1942 Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire film Holiday Inn where a black serving woman and her child sing rapturously about President Lincoln.

But the Unsullied aren't the only black people on the show. Some of the former slave masters are black, including one who's witness to two more dumb ideas from Daenerys.

Spoilers ahead

First she arbitrarily imprisons all the heads of great families in Meereen after the gold mask Klansmen killed Ser Barristan, then she randomly executes one of them whose name and personality whe never hear anything about, then she decides to propose marriage to Hizadr, one of the family heads, in the hopes of making an alliance that makes her part of the society. That should sit really well the former slaves who were pissed off when she summarily executed a former slave.

In addition to actually establishing personalities and positions in society for the heads of the great families, the show would also do well to take a few notes from the aftermath of the American Civil War. How are former slaves adjusting to life in freedom? Are they finding work? Where are they living? Are the former slave owners finding their businesses crippled? The impression the show gives is that all the slaves were butlers, valets, maids, and concubines. All the vagueness while Daenerys paces in her palace wondering what to do makes the show feel like a hypothetical history discussion among libertarian high school students.

Where did George R.R. Martin get the idea that castration turns people into willing slaves? To be fair, Varys isn't like that, but the consistently stupid story of Reek and Ramsay sure reflects this. A lot of last night's episode was given over to the Bolton story. I'm hoping it's going to end up with Sansa somehow bringing all the Boltons to destruction, finally making good on her makeover.

But there were two progressions of storyline last night liked, Jon Snow's story and Tyrion's story.

I love the tension in Jon needing to bring peace between the Wildings and the Night Watch. Even more, I enjoyed Tyrion and Jorah sailing quietly through the ruins of Valyria, reciting a poem that seems to have been inspired by Lovecraft's "The Doom that Came to Sarnath". A wonderfully moody section of show. It's a very effective world building moment, the fact that Tyrion and Jorah both know this story and they're seeing the ghosts of it in these ruins.

The episode, directed by newcomer to the series Jeremy Podeswa, had several very nice visuals.

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The King's Pineapple

Is it better to indulge in life's sensual pleasures or to seek a life of self deprivation in the service of others? 1995's Restoration raises the question and forgets about it completely, oddly seeming to say by the end that hedonists and Quakers are the wisest of men and whatever Robert Downey Jr. does is the wrong thing. Despite an incredible cast, the movie drowns under some really beautiful production design.

The title of the film refers to the English Restoration that took place in the 1660s when Charles II took the throne after England had experienced a decade without a king. Importing decadence and periwigs from the king's exile in France, the English aristocracy went as far in the opposite direction as it could from the ten years of Puritan rule.

But the average citizen suffers about the same and Robert Downey Jr. plays Robert Merivel, a physician who attends them somewhat reluctantly while pursuing a life of pleasure in his off hours. His colleague, a Quaker named John Pearce played by David Thewlis, disapproves especially because he sees an extraordinary inner strength and brilliance in Robert which the story lazily manifests as Robert somehow intuiting that the contemporary medical practice of bloodletting was counterproductive.

Robert attracts the attention of Charles II (Sam Neill) who is visiting the hospital in secret and is witness to Robert being the only physician with the courage to touch the beating heart of a man with an open chest wound. So Charles takes Robert to the palace and asks him to heal his dog.

This is where the movie starts to get dumb. Robert stays up all night with the dog and the next morning, finding the pooch inert, places his ear to the animal and calls for a coffin. Cue the dog waking up in the coffin to Robert's astonishment. I don't care if Robert's the worst physician in the world--and we're supposed to believe he's brilliant--he ought to have known the difference between a dead and a sleeping dog.

Anyway, this wins the king's favour and he decides to marry Robert to his mistress as a cover. The movie never shows or even mentions the queen. The fact that the women the king sleeps with are all mistresses is all that seems to imply the existence of Queen Catherine. The woman Robert's to marry, Celia Clemence (Polly Walker), is presented as the king's true love and it's Robert's folly for eventually trying to woo her himself.

Robert's story of redemption starts to feel more and more like a dopey romantic comedy not helped by the eventual appearance of Meg Ryan as an Irishwoman in a Quaker sanatorium. But it does supply us with the image of Meg Ryan dancing with Emperor Palpatine:

That's Ian McDiarmid who played the Emperor in the Star Wars films. Almost every cast member of this film is recognisable--Robert Downey, Jr., Sam Niell, David Thewlis, Polly Walker, Ian McKellen, Hugh Grant, and Meg Ryan. The director, Michael Hoffman, is one of those directors who's made a string of unsuccessful, not particularly interesting films with big casts of popular or respected actors, I'm guessing he's the front of a quiet system for keeping money flowing to the right people.

Trials of a Thyme Lady

Katy Manning is best known for playing the Third Doctor's companion Jo Grant on Doctor Who, after which she famously posed nude with a Dalek for a magazine. I wonder if the latter is in any way related to her being cast as Iris Wildthyme in the Doctor Who audio plays, two plays in which the character makes an appearance I listened to over the past week.

Wildthyme was originally created for print media by author Paul Magrs who, according to his Wikipedia article, did his doctoral thesis on Angela Carter, which may explain why Wildthyme has apparently become a very postmodern character. But in the two audio plays I listened to this week, The Wormery (2003) and Excelis Dawns (2002), she doesn't seem at all aware she's a fictional character yet. Paul Magrs wrote both plays--The Wormery was cowritten by Stephen Cole--and Iris seems simply to be a straightforward, hedonistic, drunken cabaret singer Time Lady who's constantly trying to seduce the Doctor despite the fact that she was apparently a lesbian in her first novel. Her TARDIS is a double decker bus that she and the Fifth Doctor attempt to take over rough terrain in Excelis. But I listened to The Wormery first, before backtracking to Excelis.

A Sixth Doctor adventure, The Wormery involves a cabaret connected to various locations in time and space, it offers some interesting perspective on the Trial of a Time Lord arc and Wildthyme is an amusing and endearing character. The play also manages to be effectively eerie.

Excelis Dawns, the first in a three part series featuring Anthony Stewart Head as a character who meets three incarnations of the Doctor, was a bit better, though. It's told in first person by Stewart Head's character who is some kind of grandstanding barbarian warlord, his narrative politely interrupted several times by the Fifth Doctor, which was funny. They encounter Wildthyme in a nunnery of all places with no memory of how she got there. In one of the more interesting moments, she and the Doctor discuss the death of Adric. The Doctor ascribes the seriousness of his current incarnation in contrast to the Fourth as being at least partly due to Adric's death, to which Wildthyme enigmatically asserts that such a thing would probably make her less circumspect.

She's identified as a Time Lady in The Wormery but in Excelis she seems to speak of herself as belonging to a group of Gallifreyans distinct from the aristocratic society into which the Doctor was born. Which made me reflect again on how vaguely civilisation has been outlined on the Doctor's homeworld for something that has been established for so long on the show. It did always seem slightly odd, though, that the Doctor's species would be be called "Time Lord". But, then again, we call ourselves "homo sapiens."

The Might of the Buffoon

When your betrothed is kidnapped by Cossacks it's good to have an overweight, drunken nobleman looking after her. Actually it's a variety of clownish characters who take centre stage in 1999's With Fire and Sword (Ogniem i Mieczem), an adventure film set amidst a seventeenth century conflict between the Polish commonwealth and several Ukrainian groups at a time when Poland and Ukraine were so culturally linked as to consider themselves "brother countries". It's not hard to see why the film didn't gain traction in the west--its broad slapstick comedy combined with wartime drama is something western audiences no longer respond to but it is an entertaining, inventive film with beautiful costumes.

It seems at first like the star of the movie is going to be Michal Zebrowski as Jan Skrzetuski, a young Polish knight we meet stopping his men from killing the apparent leader of a group of bandits because the man is dressed as a nobleman. It turns out Skrzetuski has inadvertently saved Bohdan Khmelnytsky (Bohdan Stupka), leader of the uprising Cossacks. It's a favour Khmelnytsky is soon able to repay when Skrzetuski is captured as part of an envoy, but not before stopping at a manor where's he's smitten by the Princess Helena Kurcewiczowna (Izabella Scorupco).

I loved how much of Skrzetuski's and Helena's personalities come across in such a short period in the beginning of the film. I loved a scene where, after meeting Skrzetuski, Helena dances alone in her room, admiring herself in the mirror before glimpsing her altar of the virgin Mary behind her and covering it in horror.

But the main story begins when, while Skrzetuski's in Cossack custody, another Cossack, the villainous Bohun (Aleksandr Domogarov) raids Helenas home in an attempt to kidnap her. It's only through the quick thinking of the portly tavern dwelling nobleman (Krzysztof Kowalewski) Bohun had brought along as a witness to Helena's mother promising the girl's hand that Helena manages to escape.

The two, Helena and the nobleman, whose name is Zagloba, begin a dangerous journey across the countryside, Zagloba having to use his wits again and again as each possible safe haven they head towards is taken by Cossacks.

Three other seemingly comic relief characters move most of the rest of the plot--Skrzetuski's cowardly valet, a fastidious general in the Polish army, and a big, dim-witted knight named Longinus (Wiktor Zborowski) who's taken a vow of chastity until he can cut off three heads at once with his crusader ancestor's huge, medieval longsword.

Although a Polish film, no side is presented as smarter or crueller than the other, aside from Bohun being an obvious villain. I was a bit surprised by the less than flattering portrayal of Polish cavalry whom you'd think could at least catch a break in a Polish film.

Many copies are available on YouTube with English subtitles. There's a high def one but the subtitles get out of sync--this lower quality one works better:

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Age of Isolation

*

Unimaginably powerful beings battle over the fate of the world, millions of people are directly threatened by incredible destruction, a woman possibly has an issue with unfulfilled maternal urges. It's Joss Whedon's and various unnamed Disney and Marvel Executives' The Avengers: Age of Ultron, a movie I thought was an entertaining season finale to the grand Marvel television series played out on both the big and small screens.

I think back to how people said you couldn't have done the sprawling multimedia campaign an accurate adaptation of Watchmen would have required but ten years from now I wouldn't be surprised if such a Watchmen would really be called for. Right now, the new Avengers movie is actually our insightful commentary on popular superhero media. As Kyle Buchanan points out at Slate, the new Avengers film is kind of a "fuck you" to DC (I'm paraphrasing), most specifically Man of Steel which portrayed Superman engaged in massively destructive conflict in a crowded city with little apparent concern for the innocent people being killed by collateral damage. It's hardly surprising to me that the director of that movie, Zack Snyder, would fundamentally fail to grasp the point of Superman. It's equally unsurprising to me that Joss Whedon does get it. As he says in the Slate interview:

Something that Kevin and I talked about from the start was that we’d seen a little bit of a trend in movies where the city gets destroyed and the heroes say, "We won!" And I’m thinking, Define "win."

. . . get back to what’s important, which is that the people you’re trying to protect are people. We knew that we wanted to play with a lot of big, fun destruction, but at the same time, we wanted to say, "There’s a price for this." So we got very specific about it, because whether the Avengers are heroes or not is called into question in this movie, or whether the hero as a concept is still useful for society.

There's also a continued dialogue with the Dark Knight films--Ultron even has a line where he says something like, "You rise only to fall!" which sounds like a reference to a repeated line in The Dark Knight Rises--"Why do we fall? So we can rise." But more prominently, the Avengers continued to explore the concept that The Dark Knight has so far expressed most perfectly, whether there's any point in helping inevitably doomed humanity and combines this with Whedon's favourite supervillain idea--the same one Loki had in the first Avengers--that to save the world you have to dominate or destroy it, which goes back to the finale of the penultimate season of Whedon's television series Angel and was also important in Serenity, the follow up film to his television series Firefly. One of the ways Whedon sets up the conflict between human and inhuman, life and death, is to set up a contrast between family and self-imposed isolation through destruction. Family not just in terms of the Avengers team as a sort of work family but also in a long, lingering scene on a hidden farm where Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) keeps his wife and kids, the sibling relationship between Quicksilver (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), and budding romance between Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) and Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson), who envies Hawkeye's lovely family.

But wait a minute, a million voices have been crying over the past week. Natasha can't want a family--she's a woman!

To understand the logic here, one needs to backtrack through a path of confusion and resentment. I think Mark Ruffalo may have said it best in this interview, "The guys can do anything, they can have love affairs, they can be weak or strong and nobody raises an eyebrow. But when we do that with a woman, because there are so few storylines for women, we become hyper-critical of every single move that we make because there’s not much else to compare it to." Natasha wanting to be a mother hasn't been earned, essentially, because there haven't been enough women who don't want to be mothers--wanting to be a mother is a traditional role of the sidelined female character in movies like Swiss Family Robinson, also by Disney, though over half a century ago.

But there is evidence that directives from Disney now, from a sheer marking standpoint, are behind a disappointing lack of good female characters in the Marvel and Star Wars universes. A former Marvel employee writes at Mary Sue about unambiguous coordination in Disney to only market properties like Frozen to girls and Marvel and Disney to boys. But I didn't need that post to tell me, it's been clear from watching Rebels, the follow up to the pre-Disney acquisition Clone Wars which featured a variety of characters including a female character, Ahsoka Tano, whom many consider to be the best new Star Wars character created in decades. It was apparently only with reluctance that Ahsoka was finally included on Rebels which focuses on a dull father and son relationship where female characters are sidelined into mother and girlfriend roles.

So I can see why people would think this about Natasha in The Avengers. However, in this case I don't think the criticism is justified in terms of the actual content of the story. Let's look at the problem in the way this review by Marlow Stern examines a crucial scene between Bruce and Natasha:

Later on, Romanoff is describing her origin story to Banner. Like the comics, it involves her taking part in a ballerina/black ops project as a young child (think: Black Swan crossed with the fraternity of assassins in Wanted). She complains of being sterilized by her captors. She turns to Banner and somberly says, “You’re not the only monster on the team.”

But Stern fails to point out the reason Natasha brought up her sterilisation is that Bruce had just told her he could never have children. An article on io9 by Meredith Woerner and Katharine Trendacosta criticises the same scene, saying, "The greatest loss is motherhood. That’s why she’s a monster like the Hulk. Poor Black Widow. She leaned in, and where did it get her? She’s a lonely, incomplete, monster." The unselfconscious irony here is that in trying to argue how Black Widow is not like the male superheroes, the authors actually say she's "like the Hulk".

But Natasha isn't calling herself a monster because she can't have a child any more than Bruce is calling himself a monster because he can't impregnate a woman. It's that the reason the two of them can't have children is similar. Bruce can't because when he feels strong emotion he turns into a furious killing machine, Natasha can't because she grew up in a system designed to make her into a furious killing machine. In both cases, by the nature of what accident and design had made them, they are isolated, they are excluded from that "together" Captain America talks about and both find self-fulfilment through destruction.

The movie ultimately brings a message of how things are beautiful for being ephemeral, ironically while connexion and togetherness are honoured, the inevitable loneliness of existence cannot be stopped. Paul Bettany as the new character the Vision doesn't want to kill Ultron because, he says, Ultron is "unique" and yet it is ultimately necessary because Ultron is killing everyone.

I thought James Spader did a great job as Ultron, I love that his delivery was just reminiscent enough of Robert Downey Jr.'s performance as Tony Stark. It was a reminder, too, that they're both former members of the Brat Pack. Maybe what we need is a superheroine played by Molly Ringwald.

*Screenshot suggestive of oral sex nicked from The Daily Mail, naturally.

The Inflated Skeleton of Romance

Now that's a hat. Underneath it is Viggo Mortensen as the title character of 2006's Alatriste, the Danish actor showing off his fluency in Spanish in this Spanish language adventure film about a soldier in the first half of the seventeenth century. The film is pure fluff though it swaggers like it thinks it's The Godfather. At times it's entertaining, at times the lack of depth makes the two and a half hour film a bit tedious. The action sequences aren't particularly impressive, the film would probably be unbearable if it weren't for Mortensen's performance and the beautiful costumes, locations, and sets.

Though it is one of those movies where everything is either blue or orange which has the effect of shrinking the feeling of scope. We meet Alatriste on a dangerous mission in the Netherlands where a comrade of his is killed and Alatriste agrees to take care of the man's son. The Netherlands is blue and Spain is orange.

He becomes adoptive father to Inigo (Unax Ugalde) who stars in the film's subplot about doomed young love. The music by Roque Banos is lush, sustained strings reminiscent of Bernard Herrmann's Vertigo soundtrack or Wagner's Tristan und Isolde--the latter probably being the conscious reference as the poor son of a soldier falls for a noblewoman named Angelica (Elena Anaya).

The feeling is mutual but she lacks courage to leave her life of ease and comfort. Despite the music and the extreme closeup kissing and words about risking everything for love, Inigo seems strangely indifferent about the whole thing, seemingly more an accident of the filmmakers' than anything else. They just seem to have forgotten to give him dialogue about how he's heartbroken, most of his scenes having more to do with helping out Alatriste.

Alatriste also has some star-crossed romance, falling for a popular actress named Maria de Castro (Ariadna Gil) who unfortunately has also caught the eye of King Philip IV. Mortensen manages to make you feel something for their romance but there's nothing in the dialogue to help you understand how his feelings develop for her. We see them hanging out in her quarters a few times and then suddenly he can't live without her.

More time is spent on action sequences as Alatriste carries out various jobs for Spain, above and below board, and grumbles about how he and is men often aren't paid. There's a lot of sword fighting with impressive posing but very little actually effective fencing.

Mortensen's understated performance gives the film a little fertile ground soil but otherwise the film is like a bouquet of plastic flowers.

Over Smashed Human Bones

Happy Cinco de Mayo, or as alt.latino is calling it, Cinco de Morrissey. If you follow the link you can listen to the alt.latino host interview two singers in Morrissey cover bands, both of Mexican heritage, talking about the strong influence of Morrissey in northern Mexico and among Mexican U.S. communities. This isn't news to me--having been to several Morrissey concerts I could see just how much of the crowd was made up of Latinos. When my friend Trisa and I went to see Morrissey in Yuma, Arizona, I remember Morrissey suggesting everyone in the audience had travelled from San Diego to which several people cried out, "Mexico!"

In the alt.latino interview, the guests briefly discuss the similarity Morrissey lyrics have to classic Ranchero songs, similarities I hadn't failed to notice as I've listened to more Ranchero music over the past few years--mainly Jose Alfredo Jimenez and Lola Beltran.

I sure wish I could find versions of these movies with English subtitles. I've learned to google for "letra" for these songs and then to put the lyrics through Google translate. The lyrics for this song translate as:

I do not want to hear your name
I not even want to know where you're going
and you told me that night
that black night of my evil.

If I had told you not go
how sad I expected the future
if I had said no, do not leave me
My own heart was going to laugh.

So it was that I saw so quiet
walk quietly under a more than blue sky,
After you see, I hold me to where I could,
crying profusely finished where I did not see you.

If I had told you not go
how sad I expected the future
if I had told you not leave me
My own heart was going to laugh.

So it was that I saw so quiet
walk quietly under a more than blue sky,
After you see, I hold me to where I could,
crying profusely finished where I did not see you.

If I had told you not go
how sad I expected the future
if I had told you not leave me
My own heart was going to laugh.

Which certainly doesn't seem far from Morrissey songs like "Back to the Old House" or "Late Night, Maudlin Street". The title of the above song is "La Noche de Mi Mal" which I would guess means something like "The Night of My Bad"? Yes, that's what Google translate says. It's funny how words can be used in different configurations in different languages. You can say "Viva Mexico" but "Live Mexico" sounds wrong. I took two semesters of Spanish in high school, you'd think I'd know more. I'm pretty sure I only knew what "mal" meant because of the scene in Firefly. Well, and the Morrissey album Maladjusted. Possibly from malevolent. I guess the Romans did conquer England once.

Maybe when I'm finished with Japanese I'll finally take a serious crack at Spanish. Now I know what I'll be doing in 2040.

You know, it occurs to me I forgot to commemorate Star Wars Day yesterday. Shops are really starting to jump on it. The Coffee Bean I went to yesterday had lightsabres around the register and themed drinks. Tim, who was with me, told me they had something called "It's a Trap-ical Storm". The Disney Store had 30% off all Star Wars merchandise. How badly would Disney like this to be a real holiday?

Incidentally, this is a good time for me to mention I'm excited about James Earl Jones appearing as Darth Vader in the upcoming Star Wars: Rebels season. Especially if he kills Kanaan and Ezra.

I don't really like the stylised frown face they give his helmet. There's something much more sinister about the ambiguous black skull face of the live action version.

Also to look forward to this season, as the trailer shows, things are starting to look more Clone Wars with the introduction of not only Ahsoka Tano but also the clone troopers. I was really hoping to see a story about surviving clone troopers post-Revenge of the Sith though it kind of wrecks the propaganda vibe of their stories on Clone Wars. Still, I hope this means Disney is going to bring in more Clone Wars writers and give them free rein after the misguided original trilogy and kid's show pandering of season one.

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Thrones are the Only Seats In Town

It seems like only yesterday little Keisha Castle-Hughes was inspiring her community by riding whales, now she's soliloquising about a life of killing in the new Game of Thrones. Wearing that new nipple breastplate people are complaining about, too. I didn't really mind it--I do agree a less form fitting breastplate is more practical but people don't always aim for practicality in their breastplates. What's silly for Batman may not be silly for this family whose other members have been established as living for physical pleasure. Let's not get puritanical.

Spoilers Ahead

Speaking of, the new episode features the Sparrows being militarised and raiding the brothel and brutalising people for being gay. The victims are people like the prostitutes--it is depressing seeing beautiful naked women terrorised--and Margaery's innocent brother Loras who's imprisoned just for having sex with men. The Sparrows also derisively call a guy in the brothel a "boy lover" which I like to think was a very oblique jab at 300 where the Spartans used the same term to refer to Athenians, Frank Miller and/or Zack Snyder injecting and endorsing homophobia in ancient Greece of all places.

But there are other victims conveniently passed over by this show made for and by the so rich and privileged they seem to have no consciousness of the old fashioned sense of the word "privilege"--the show gives faces and names to the people the Sparrows attack. But we also saw the Sparrows feeding the impoverished masses of King's Landing who, if you think about it, have a right to be angry that there's such a conspicuous divide between the rich and poor. That the ignorance that comes with extreme poverty has made some intolerant is certainly part of the tragedy--but now we're talking about matters too complex for Game of Thrones. To those who suggest such complexity would make for lousy art I'd recommend watching Princess Mononoke.

Meanwhile in Meereen, the Sons of the Harpy, the show's version of the Ku Klux Klan, takes on trained soldiers. The Sons are armed with knives and the soldiers have spears and shields. But the soldiers are inexplicably massacred. I will point out the real Ku Klux Klan--we'll talk about the post American Civil War incarnation--had to wear hoods which, as Quintin Tarantino amusingly pointed out, could inhibit eyesight. The Sons somehow have been able to churn out identical gold masks in secret and still seem to be able to sneak up on people wearing them. It's a good thing Arya's not seeing this or her training might start to feel rather pointless.

Lest it sound like I have only complaints, I loved Tyrion and Jorah in the boat, how Tyrion is able to put together Jorah's whole story without Jorah saying a word. I love Cersei's manoeuvrings, and I love poor hapless Tommen caught between his mother and Margaery.

Oh, and Bronn has a kukri! They're starting to get pretty mainstream though I love seeing them still. If people are wondering where the trend started, I would point back to Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula in which Van Helsing wields one--though it was actually Harker who had a kukri in Bram Stoker's novel.

A Kingdom for Sack

Shakespeare's Henry IV has two kings and people plotting to take over the monarchy but most people agree the best character--possibly the best Shakespeare ever wrote--is Falstaff, an aged, overweight knight who'd rather be drinking than fighting. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly has Clint Eastwood as an iconic hero, Lee Van Cleef as a seemingly unstoppable killer, but most people generally agree (as did the film's director) the best character is Eli Wallach as Tuco, a crass man of average skill with human pettiness and human needs. Shades of both these great characters manifest in 2013's brilliant A Field in England, a film of the English Civil War that's not about kings or revolutionaries in castles and cathedrals but five average men in an anonymous field. This is one of the best movies I've seen of the decade.

Ben Wheatley directed, Amy Jump wrote, and the two together edited this black and white film which begins in a hedgerow where clumsy violence between five men gradually ends after a zealous officer is killed and the rest of them get to talking about how there's an ale house just over the hill and doesn't that sound like a better place to be? Together, like Falstaff, they exercise the "better part of valour" and head off.

Three of them, Jacob (Peter Ferdinando), Friend (Richard Glover), and Cutler (Ryan Pope), are average peasant soldiers, the fourth is Whitehead (Reece Shearsmith), an alchemist's assistant who was on the field to track down O'Neill (Michael Smiley), an Irish nobleman who was assistant to the same alchemist until he absconded with the master's notes and sundry other possessions one day.

There's also a Samuel Beckett quality to the story though it's not as explicitly abstract. The existence of the sought after ale house is never certain, the location of the field is obscure and Whitehead and Friend speculate on the possible distance to Gloucester and Essex. When they do run across O'Neill he takes charge of the group by the authority of his two pistols and possibly his fine hat and cloak, arbitrarily putting Cutler in charge of the other three and using some kind of divination involving hallucinogenic mushrooms to turn Whitehead into a stumbling human divining rod to find buried treasure.

If nothing else, Friend observes to Jacob, they manage to dig a very fine hole and O'Neill can't argue with that after they've spent hours digging in the spot Whitehead had indicated. They pause when Jacob has some aggravation from nettles he'd fallen into while trying to defecate earlier. Whitehead examines him and makes a poultice.

One can read the relationship in the group as a reflection of the larger politics at play in the kingdom--O'Neill's authority asserted by show of force like the New Model Army taking over Parliament, the signs of aristocracy in his person automatically inspiring fealty like the tradition that backed King Charles. Mostly he's just a man who wants to get rich.

And that's the brilliant thing about this movie--these aren't monuments or superheroes, they're just people looking for the best way to fill their bellies and lose some of the pain of existence. This point is reinforced with some visual irony as they actors occasionally stand still in tableaux, as though they're figures of legend despite instead chomping feverishly on mushrooms or inspecting a fellow's genitals for signifying sores.

Doctors and Dragons

It's kind of a drag when the Brigadier's not the Brigadier. My main complaint about Doctor Who's fortieth anniversary special, the 2003 audio play Zagreus, is that the various guest stars don't play the characters they originally played on Doctor Who.

The story follows up from the previous Eighth Doctor play, Neverland, which ended with the Doctor being possessed by a Time Lord fairy tale devil called Zagreus. Just as it looks like the Doctor and his companion, Charley, are about to have a genuine romantic moment, the devil takes over and he actually hits Charley. So she spends the rest of the story hiding and running from him in the TARDIS. Which mostly feels like the writers are really, really shy and a bit spooked by the mushy stuff. Though it was more likely a conscious decision to keep things in the old fashioned platonic zone.

In order to help the Doctor and Charley, the TARDIS creates a hallucinatory world, using the physical forms of past Doctors (only Five, Six, Seven, and some old recordings of Jon Pertwee for Three) and their companions. The TARDIS manifests its own consciousness in the form of the Brigadier and Nicolas Courtney does a nice enough job, though not spectacular--the guy was perfectly cast as the Brigadier and not hearing him actually as the Brigadier would be disappointing even if it weren't the anniversary special. Only John Leeson as K-9, Louise Jameson as Leela, and Lalla Ward as Romana were actually able to play the companion characters they'd played on the show. Leela and Romana's chemistry as the two teamed up to help from outside the TARDIS felt a bit like Leela and the Fourth Doctor if the Fourth Doctor were a lot snippier and the comedy was a lot broader. They do the old routine where one person (Leela) thinks she has a mortal wound and starts getting dramatic and the other person (Romana) says something like, "Actually, it missed you and you only have a scratch." But nevertheless I'd like to hear some of the plays where the two of them are the stars.

Zagreus was definitely not one of the stronger audio plays. At least the three past Doctors were able to revert to their old personalities at one point--I liked the cracks Six and Seven made about their deaths, particularly Seven: "Didn't see that one coming, did I?"

While eating lunch to-day, I read the new Sirenia Digest in which Caitlin R. Kiernan included a new story about her recurring character, Dancy Flammarion. In this case she faces a Pterosaur--the story's called "Dancy Vs. the Pterosaur"--and, maybe even more vexing for her, she faces an evolutionist, a girl named Jezebel. An entertaining and sort of adorable story with a new angle on Dancy's continuing quest through a possibly partly hallucinatory reality of angels and devils. Someone trying to advocate evolution in the presence of Dancy, who takes orders from a seraph, certainly seems to have an uphill battle.

I'll leave you with some pictures I took at this year's Fantasy Faire in Second Life, which ends to-morrow. I heard to-day they raised over three million lindens--that's $24,000 American dollars--for Relay for Life this year.

Twitter Sonnet #742

Basket hilt epithets indict the steel.
Normal Orbison illusions call clowns.
Yellow emptiness tips over the wheel.
Operas open armies of awkward nouns.
Raccoon recordings condemn spiral books.
Deposit slip haircuts harangue the star.
Dusty umpires sigh at buyer rooks.
Every dancing satyr got in the car.
Faded penguins amble into the cell.
Twisted spines melt by lagoons armed to soak.
Beaches etch an enviable dumbbell.
Crackers cancel answers accorded broke.
Duty's tsuyu soaks through Moses fishes.
Melting entropy made pepper wishes.

The Human Muppets of the Civil War

It's comforting to know that nowadays if Peter Capaldi's head was chopped off he'd just grow another one, though it wouldn't be him. Nevertheless, he was strikingly good casting as Charles I in a four part, 2008 series called The Devil's Whore. Not that he has a big part, Dominic West plays Oliver Cromwell nicely but his part is smaller than it ought to be, too, because most of the movie is for some reason concerned with the fictional Angelica Fanshawe who, for all the time she's given, never manages to display any particular personality traits and certainly never shows us why all the men are in love with her. She is really beautiful and actress Andrea Riseborough does a decent enough job--that's her at the bottom of the screen.

Again and again, the series puts people's heads at the bottom, possibly to signify the forces of fate and government as the heavens dwarfing the poor mortals but it's so overdone it's just distracting. It usually feels like the camera is trying to direct my attention away from the actual point of interest. Lazily repeating a device is not a solution to talking heads.

We meet Angelica as she's about to be married to her childhood friend and cousin, Harry Fanshawe (Ben Aldridge). The King who attends their wedding. It's here she finally starts to figure out people are upset with the King though all of her servants seem to know and try to keep her from talking to a pamphleteer's wife. Angelica also inexplicably has visions of the Devil which are never tied thematically to what's going on, the periodic appearances of a man in costume consequently just coming off as ridiculous.

For some reason her husband won't let her call him Harry, somehow apparently feeling this makes him a little boy in her eyes. Meanwhile, the grizzled and mysterious Edward Sexby shows up to serve them--and instantly falls in love with Angelica, of course, and gladly stands by her side at the bottom of the screen.

He's played by John Simm, who's really good in the role, very different from his take on The Master on Doctor Who which may have been my least favourite take on one of my least favourite characters on Doctor Who. Sexby, based on a real man who, as depicted, served both sides in the English Civil War, wants only to fight until Angelica somehow demonstrates there's more to life.

Who else is on the bottom of the screen? Why, it's Michael Fassbender as Thomas Rainsborough, wearing one of the very cool hats all the men were wearing at the time.

His relationship with Cromwell is one of the most interesting things about the series, watching them spar over the ideals of their revolution--Thomas the leveller idealist who envisions a country without inherited hierarchy and Oliver who is too weak to attempt creating a government not based on a monarchy of some kind. Unfortunately, a lot of time is wasted in Thomas falling in love with Angelica.

The series definitely has its political sympathies against Cromwell but it does spend some nice time showing the difficulty of fighting for a free country knowing that if the people were allowed to vote they'd reinstate the old monarchy. This four hour work contains a nice one hour story in between Angelica's saga of men falling in love with her and her not really doing or saying anything in particular despite everyone treating her as though she's infuriating or brilliant.