I want to say to-day's episode of Doctor Who was about Ashildr and Clara playing Doctor but you'll get the wrong idea. Written by newcomer Sarah Dollard and featuring a show changing event--surprisingly given that the episode isn't written by showrunner Steven Moffat--it's not bad and has a slightly Harry Potter quality.
Didn't the Harry Potter stories have a hidden Elizabethan street like this? I don't remember, I've never read the books and I haven't seen the movies in years. Anyway, there's a definite sense of magic in this episode rather than alien science, even though the latter is what it is.
Oh, that coat. This is it, this should be Twelve's costume, it took us a while to get here but now I think it's settled and we should stick with this. Okay? Okay. I guess part of me did kind of like the shark t-shirt from the beginning of the episode.
So, no, the episode isn't about Jenna Coleman and Maisie Williams exploring each other's bodies (though wouldn't be nice?) but about the two of them trying to be incredibly clever in laying plans and making one little mistake that leads to things going tragically, horribly wrong. I won't weigh in on whether I think this was the best way for this to be settled because I suspect it won't truly be settled until two weeks from now.
The episode also sees the return of Rigsy from last season's episode "Flatline". He feels like a completely different character now with a wife and newborn child, no mention is made of his graffiti art. The actor, Joivan Wade, is still pretty flat but the absolute lack of personality he has in this episode seems to indicate he probably won't become a companion. At least I hope not. I did like the dialogue between him and Clara, though, as she slowly convinces him that her extremely dangerous idea is just an every day bit of strategy. Listening to the two of them talk it's rather hard not to become very, very worried.
The climax of the episode was painful, Capaldi is great, subtle, and restrained, Coleman is good and I liked how at the end she didn't seem to become super wise, compared to the Doctor she really is a kid who's in over her head. I loved when she tells him she never asked him to protect her and he says, "You shouldn't have to ask."
It turns out Charles I and Oliver Cromwell would've been great friends if it weren't for the Catholic Church, at least according to 1970's Cromwell. It's hard to imagine a more softball rendering of the English Civil Wars with both Cromwell and the King portrayed only doing the most sensible things with each given time to explain with what great reluctance they initiate the more controversial actions for which they're well known. But with Richard Harris as Cromwell and Alec Guinness as the King along with a solid supporting cast there's plenty to enjoy about this film in terms of performances. The story is put together rather smoothly, too, albeit dishonestly with a rather striking anti-Catholic sentiment.
Cromwell spends some time explaining to his friends how great and right it is to obey the King when suddenly he finds some noblemen are demanding his servant's arrest for what they've decided is poaching when the man had merely been hunting on common lands. Cromwell rides up and takes responsibility and angrily derides the King who would proclaim such laws. This is rather similar to how the 1938 Robin Hood begins, actually. It's the last time you'll see Cromwell in the film being angry with the King about anything other than Catholicism.
We're introduced to Charles taking a meal with his family where he uncomfortably reminds his Catholic wife, Queen Henrietta Maria (Dorothy Tutin), that he doesn't want their son praying with her because England is a Protestant country. Later on he angrily shows her the death warrant he's just signed for the Earl of Stafford and says, "Look what you made me do!"
Tutin as the Queen spends the film moodily strutting about with narrowed eyes while Alec Guinness conducts himself with melancholy dignity, forced by his wife to welcome a Catholic bishop into his home and by extension forced to attempt alliances with Catholic countries to enlist their armies in fighting against the good Protestant people of England.
No mention is made of Charles' taxes to fight foreign wars, his dissolving of Parliament mentioned off hand. When Cromwell dissolves it later, it's because everyone but him is clearly a villain--the film completely omits any mention of Cromwell's campaign in Ireland and a lot of other things, making it look like when Cromwell's not delivering impassioned speeches about the rights of the people or courageously leading the New Model Army (which seems to spring from nowhere) against arrogant, Papist Royalists, he's at home on the farm in peaceful study.
It seems difficult to make a film about this subject in England without ruffling feathers, this one seems to be trying desperately to avoid offending anyone (except Catholics) and in the process renders the whole conflict as tame and inexplicable. But it has nice performances and shooting locations. The Wikipedia entry has a nice list of the things the film omitted or got wrong.
Twitter Sonnet #812
A pitch cascade delivered stitch to steel.
Inside the box there were electric dogs.
Unseen the lawyer passed his suit as real.
A wardrobe cooks cravats on neck tie logs.
A Caspar costume vaulted time and place.
Respect descends upon unasked for wheat.
Interrogations dims behind the ace.
The hunted stag or doe could not be beat.
A washboard's wardrobe played like soap.
An amorous new antler entered lists.
A tangled transmission restrained our hope.
The bullet points won't yield to desp'rate fists.
Surfeit of honey came too cheap to miss.
No hummingbird has ever found his bliss.
Manhattan has become an enormous prison, the President of the United States gets trapped inside, only a lone criminal can save him. Nothing about that really makes sense but all together are what make John Carpenter's 1981 film Escape from New York so great. Part of the same period of cinema that produced other great dark, dystopian city films like The Warriors and Blade Runner, Escape from New York brings to the table the dynamics of a Spaghetti Western and the same leftover embitterment about that Vietnam War and Richard Nixon that inspired First Blood a year later.
Kurt Russell as Snake Plissken is both a homage to Clint Eastwood and an anticipation of Rambo and, of course, something quite unlike anything else. His imperturbable surliness and confidence don't crack much to allow sentimentality to seep through, here's a movie where, in spite of all that happens, the protagonist doesn't change all that much by the end.
A former soldier, now in chains, he's called in by Spaghetti Western veteran Lee Van Cleef who's in charge of the team trying to figure out how to save the president from the gang that runs the former city. Plissken is his solution to the fact that the gang holding the President says they'll kill him if they see troops.
I love how dark this movie is. As Plissken stalks down the grimy, messed up streets, you completely lose sight of him sometimes in this movie's copious shadows. There were a lot of movies like that made in the 70s where it seems like the visible portions of the image are just a handful of little cut-out patches in black. I really miss that, it's so much better than to-day's typical obsession with making sure everything's always visible. With darkness comes a real effective disorientation and helps convey a sense of constant threat.
Every character Plissken meets in the city prison is almost as larger than life as he is--There's a cab driver played by Ernest Borgnine who is the epitome of the old stereotypical New York cab driver, in no small part due to the fact that he's managed to stay in business even after the city's been turned into a prison.
There's a genius who's a legend in the city called Brain played by Harry Dean Stanton and his girlfriend, Maggie, played by Adrienne Barbeau, follows him around displaying copious, fantastic cleavage at all times.
With Isaac Hayes as the Duke, the leader of the gang holding the president, and Donald Pleasence as the president, there is not one weak note in this cast. Everyone plays it big which is just right for this story.
A life spent perpetually hunted by monsters, forced to live in a dark, subterranean place, that's the lot of two young parents and their little daughter in 2015's Hidden. This claustrophobic, post-apocalyptic film is an effectively suspenseful story of people trapped by an implacable, unrelenting, and unseen force.
Through flashbacks scattered through the film, we see a past of bright suburban homes where Ray (Alexander Skarsgard), Claire (Andrea Riseborough), and their prepubescent daughter Zoe (Emily Ayn Lind) led ideal lives. But we meet them in an underground shelter where they've lived for a year.
Flashbacks show quarantine signs and helicopters, people being evacuated from the town en masse and, in the present, Claire repeatedly has to remind Zoe not to talk about the "Breathers", the things that would hunt them and hurt them if they knew where they were hidden.
The film wisely keeps our perspective inside the shelter with the family most of the time, drawing tension from ominous contemplations of the heavy hatch leading to the outside world, reinforced by chains but which seems vulnerable to the superior strength of the beings outside. A rat somehow finds its way in and threatens their food supplies and Zoe has bad dreams.
With her sooty old doll she reminded me quite a bit of Newt from Aliens but Emily Ayn Lind gives a much better performance as the little girl in Hidden. It's truly one of the best child performances I've seen in years, her face communicating so much to the audience of tension and she manages to go places emotionally I was surprised to see in someone so young.
A lot of the dread is also established by the techniques the parents use to comfort their daughter. Her father's practice of describing places while she closes her eyes to calm her down and her mother's strict rules about what can be talked about along with her pragmatism, much colder than her husband, all give us an ambiguous but effective sense of the terrible thing that remains on their minds at all times.
There's a twist in the film's ending I was able to predict about halfway through. It's an interesting twist but it feels almost unrelated to the other 80% of the movie which is much more an exercise in well crafted suspense.
Now here's a strange hybrid; a misfit youth film noir and a comedy, and one might say a precursor to the Kitchen Sink dramas of late 1950s and early 1960s British film. 1948's London Belongs to Me imports Richard Attenborough when he was known for playing teenage hoodlums into the world of a Sidney Gilliat comedy, albeit a more humanistic one than his later screwball comedies. It's a mixture that works, united by beautiful photography and an understated gallows humour the film might have done well with indulging in more.
Attenborough's not a comedy version of his typical teen crook characters like the one in Brighton Rock. He plays Percy Boon perfectly straight and his getting caught up in double crossing a car thief has complete sincerity and sense of threat. His heart is vulnerable in two ways--he loves his bedridden mother and desperately wants to woo pretty Doris (Susan Shaw) who lives downstairs with her parents.
Everyone in the building is an important character to the story which is emphasised with the film's introduction which tracks the camera over windows from the exterior to show the different lives in each flat and introduce each character. Doris' father (Wylie Watson) has just retired from a long career and is a meek and industrious man, dominated a bit by his humourless wife (Fay Compton). There's also an older woman who's always late on rent and begging people for money and a strict but somewhat naive landlady named Kitty (Joyce Carey).
Like most good films noir the film involves a murder, which we may get a hint of when Alastair Sim shows up as Mr. Squales looking like Death itself.
He's not actually death, he's a medium, or rather a conman pretending to be one, and poor Kitty falls for him hook, line, and sinker, and soon he's living there rent free. He's also there when Percy comes home late one night and is the sole witness to something dreadful.
Like Brighton Rock or They Live by Night, the film features the 1940s conception of the troubled youth, who seems to helplessly slide from one crime to another as part of a desperate scheme to find love and acceptance. This is nicely accompanied by the vibrant rendering around him of a complex and charmingly human community of people each with their own issues--it's not unlike Shadow of a Doubt, like having an antihero in a Frank Capra movie.
The end of the film is a bit muddled and disappointing though it has an interesting courtroom scene with an argument among jurors that seems to imply Britain had no concept of manslaughter in its laws at the time. It also lacked a crucial scene at the end to show a character's reaction to an outcome of the film's love triangle--Percy, Doris, and the cop who investigates Percy's crime. In attempt to wrap things up neatly, the film creates a lot of problems, but everything that precedes the end is well worth watching.
Twitter Sonnet #811
The signs of transport came with falling stones.
An empty hand withheld the trim arrest.
Opaque adhesive pinned a pebble's bones.
Distracted courts of finches flew abreast.
A blank receipt replaced the bill at cost.
The radiance diffused upon the tide.
Alone, the crimson apple's never lost.
But ripples run through seas both strange and wide.
A whitened spring through mazes black as night
Atop the bright inspectors coughed for breath.
The sand was stuck in ancient grooves of right.
A vain invasion passed the watchful death.
Tripped ankles spring compound forage.
Impositions requisition knowledge.
Oh, Ash, when will you learn it's never, ever a good idea to read from the Necronomicon? Though it did lead to the best thing about Saturday's episode of Ash vs. Evil Dead, this demon Ash and cohorts unwisely summon to solicit its advice:
It's like something from a Guillermo del Toro movie. Again, when was the last time we saw anything like this on a television show? Not even Game of Thrones gives us such stylish design. I liked the subtle effect of its mouth staying in place while the rest seemed to quiver, too, like a broken video image. I also loved that the only advice he had for Ash was to die quicker.
By the way, I only realised a few days ago we're five episodes into a new Monogatari series, this one called Owarimonogatari (終わり物語), literally "End Story". This one is a big step up from previous series, much of the visual design very strongly reminding me of the original Bakemonogatari series, perhaps not surprising since it appears Akiyuki Shinbo is sole director on this one.
I've only watched the first two episodes but so far I'm really digging it. Another new female character is introduced, Oikura, who's known Araragi since middle school and much of the story seems to concern her deep hatred for him, the causes of which are completely mysterious to him. She complains of "water that thinks it boiled by itself," and for explanation will only complain about how she hates people who are ungrateful and believe that it's possible to get through life without help from others.
Much of the story so far is Araragi investigating the mystery with Ogi, the possibly supernatural being who calls herself the niece of Araragi's mentor from season one, Oshino. There are so many nice stylistic flourishes in this season, I loved a quick flashback explaining how Araragi and Ogi ended up at his old middle school in their investigation that shows Araragi and Ogi in some strange storybook cat school where pairs of apples drift along the paths.
It's hard enough being the niece of a hated and deceased nobleman but on top of that Rosalind is kicked out by the Duke or the head of the student council or whatever the fuck he was supposed to be in another production of a Shakespeare play moved to a different time and place. A production of As You Like It I saw to-day in a pretty nice venue, a really small theatre in the round with only about five rows of seats so everyone was very close to the actors. Mostly I think I enjoyed myself, the actors delivered the lines well, but I disliked or was ambivalent about every creative departure from Shakespeare's play.
The actors were all young, I felt like this may have been some kind of student production. This was a particular problem for the character of Adam who is supposed to be elderly, and most of the dialogue about him is rumination on being old. The actor wasn't given even a little ageing make-up. This may have been partly due to the fact that he played two other characters and had to change costume quickly, another problem with this production which may not have been the fault of the people making it, maybe they just didn't have enough money to pay actors. But they might have at least not had the guy who brings news of the Duke's epiphany and conversion at the end be the same guy who played the Duke. Maybe it was a statement about identity? Who knows what that statement is.
Several male characters were cast with women, including Corin the shepherd, Le Beau the courtier, and Jacques, the melancholy nobleman who has the "All the world is a stage" soliloquy. The female Jacques was played by Amy Blackman, an English actress so I wondered if she was related to Honor Blackman. She wasn't bad, playing the role as a sort of beatnik psychoanalyst but the directer decided to insert between scenes odd interludes where Jacques slowly chases a woman wearing a deer hear and white dress with an arrow in her thigh. The scenes were sort of pretty but seemed very out of place with the rest of the production, the deer apparently being the one referred to in dialogue as being watched by Jacques and then later it's implied that it's the stag that was killed.
Daniel Petzold was okay as Orlando, Ally Carey was a flat, one note as Rosalind. The 1950s setting never had the slightest resonance with the story, it didn't match up with the dialogue literally or thematically and was obviously just an indulgence, especially since the musical arrangements for the songs, which ejected most of Shakespeare's lyrics, sounded more like Adam Levine than Ricky Nelson, or any other musical style native to the 50s.
I don't mind the gender swapping (though why no female characters cast with men?), for the most part I don't think it made any difference, but, and this may have been more a problem with the creative setting, it was a little unclear exactly what Corin did. They refer to her as shepherdess but she was dressed in scarf and straw pork-pie with a little blazer like, well, a college student. Her talking to Touchstone about working with sheep was like watching Jennifer Aniston describe what it's like to plough a field.
I was fully expecting to-day's Mark Gatiss scripted episode of Doctor Who to be lousy. And indeed it wasn't very good though it wasn't as intensely annoying as "Robot of Sherwood", at least Gatiss didn't choose this time to write the Doctor like an angry four-year-old in the back seat during a long car trip. It was cool hearing Peter Capaldi recite from Macbeth.
I think I have about a 15% success rate at predicting how stories are going to unfold and yet I predicted just about every "twist" in this episode. I'm not in love with twists for twists' sakes but, when the episode's concepts are "monsters made out of the sand in your eyes" and a found footage style, if the episode also fails to surprise there's not much left to hang its hat on.
When the cameras are absolutely everywhere it kind of negates the point of the found footage style anyway. The limited point of view that creates the inherent sense of confinement and helplessness of the found footage style is undermined with rather typical switches to high angle shots and frequent cuts from one perspective to the next, pulling back for wide shots and coming in for close-ups. Though I suppose it probably didn't seem worth the effort of rehearsing for long takes for this script.
Really, the episode is riddled with problems--as the Doctor himself observes--and then an ending that essentially says, "I meant to do that! Wasn't that scary?" Not really, no. Can this please be the final Mark Gatiss episode?
I'm looking forward to next week and that suede burgundy coat of the Doctor's that's been teased since before this season began. That really is what Twelve needed, an outfit that really works. Not that I'm so against the Magician look, which they seem to have backed away from, but this upcoming coat is just keen.
Twitter Sonnet #810
Irrational the argument was pop.
A soda commandeered the dialogue.
The crude removed to fuel a greener stop.
A devil's mountain switched to analogue.
Ren's Kylo Xylophone had crossguard hilt.
Rewookieed carpet bundled canine souls.
Go Han Solo, to smuggle where thou wilt.
Droids mix restrain devices in the bowl.
Unheard barefooted dust returning sings.
The peace of watchers sits above the wine.
For fancy starving debtors come on wings.
Unravelled wisps of darkness stray from line.
The dust of concrete holes escape the air.
Deterred, a step has paused upon the stair.
I spent a few hours reading this afternoon and went back to the computer to find out what had transpired in Paris and news is still unfolding about the series of attacks throughout the city which has left at least 158 dead, according to reports as I write this. At least 118 dead reported from the Bataclan, a concert venue in Paris where earlier the situation had been described as a hostage situation.
Eye witnesses quoted on The Guardian said that the attackers at the Bataclan had Kalashnikov rifles and that they'd opened fire on the audience who was there to see an American band called Eagles of Death Metal. Other witnesses of course describe initially mistaking the sounds of shots for stage effects related to the show and I couldn't help thinking of attacks in American cinemas where gunshots were similarly misidentified at first. When killers take advantage of an artistic display to maximise the number of victims it reflects a disregard for the fundamental practices and beliefs of a culture in more ways than one. People who don't respect art lack empathy and imagination which explains why they would carry out actions that clearly have no ultimately constructive ends. "Who will play the violins?" the Doctor asked last week on Doctor Who when pointing out to a potential killer that this kind of violence takes no thought for the world that will be created in the unlikely event of success for the killers. But of course, for the committed killer, the future is irrelevant, or defined too narrowly to admit anything so complicated as society and culture.
Rice is sacred to a Senegalese village in 1971's Emitai so when French occupiers try to commandeer the harvest for supplies during World War II the villagers hide it. This roughly shot film stars mostly non-actors to its detriment but being shot in an actual West African village with its actual inhabitants gives the film a nice documentary quality.
The story, from a few decades before the film was made, was probably familiar to the people on film as well. The rice is only the latest imposition by the French Commandant and his officers who've been press ganging men of the village into fighting for the war. Now the village is mostly made up of women and elder men.
The women are forced by the French officers to sit in the sun in a village square for long periods, held hostage while the council of elders debates what to do about it. In addition to debating, they also make animal sacrifices and an actual chicken and a goat were harmed and killed in the making of this film.
The goat is particularly hard to watch as its screams sound like a human child's.
Director Ousmane Sembene also departs from a purely documentary style to take us into the perspective of the elders as participants in a ritual. In parts of west Africa, certain individuals wore masks and became the gods, speaking as the gods in order to give council and render judgement in village disputes. Sembene puts a magenta filter on the lens and has half the council suddenly vanish and then the masked gods pop into existence one at a time.
The demand for rice is the symbolic last straw and the council and the gods refuse to yield. Sembene was also an author and I read one of his books, God's Bits of Wood, for the African Literature class I'm currently taking. The difference in how characters are crafted between Sembene's prose and cinema endeavours is enormous. Both stories deal with groups of people rather than focusing on individuals but God's Bits of Wood takes time to establish distinct and complex personalities. Emitai feels more like it stars a crowd of extras, the women don't seem emotionally invested in the defiant songs they sing and the village elders yell their lines at each other without much sense of reacting to one another. But on an obviously low budget Sembene comes up with some nice compositions with the natural beauty of Senegal and the artistry of the resident culture.
A man drags a coffin through a muddy grey town. This is a Spaghetti Western, not a Hammer horror film, but it's the introduction of Gothic horror imagery and atmosphere into a Western that explains much of the appeal of 1966's Django. The second half of the film is in some ways less interesting, becoming more of an action film, but really the whole thing is a nice combination of action and a sense of doom and chaos created by themes and visuals.
Like the earlier A Fistful of Dollars directed by Sergio Leone, Sergio Corbucci's Django owes an unmistakable debt to Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo, though it doesn't follow the plot of the Kurosawa film as closely as Leone's. Corbucci does essentially borrow the opening title sequence which played Masaru Sato's strident theme for Sanjuro, the protagonist of Yojimbo, while the camera used close, low angles of the man carrying his sword over his shoulder and close-ups of his feet while he walked, conveying the impression of a legendary figure. Corbucci's protagonist takes on an even more mythic quality for the fact that he pulls a coffin along and, typical for a Spaghetti Western, he's stylishly dressed, wearing an overcoat and scarf in the middle of the desert.
The theme music by Luis Enriquez Bacalov was later reused by Quentin Tarantino for his Django Unchained and, in fact, anyone more familiar with the Tarantino film will spot many familiar melodies in the original Django.
There's a whip in the original Django, too, as the opening credits end with Django (Franco Nero) coming across a beautiful woman, Maria (Loredana Nusciak), being whipped by a group of Mexican bandits. The film adds a racial element to the Red Harvest style, two sides played against the other plot of Yojimbo. Django has a group of Mexican bandits versus a proto-Ku Klux Klan group who wear black clothing with red scarves and sometimes red hoods.
Though Django doesn't really do much to exacerbate the conflict between the two groups, rather than trying to get the two sides to wipe each other out for pure altruism or, perhaps, boredom, Django has the quality of an avenging angel, his theme song telling us how he's lost his lover who we presume occupies the coffin though, when asked at the brothel, this film's version of the inn where Sanjuro made his base of operations, who is in the coffin, Django answers, "Django."
I love this shot where he waits for the Klan-ish group behind a fallen tree that looks like a dinosaur bone. The film has a lot of really nice visuals.
Unlike Sanjuro, Django only teams up with one of the factions, the Mexicans, to help them steal some gold. Sadly at this point he stops wearing his hat and cloak, for some inexplicable reason they never return. The climax of the film is pretty satisfyingly brutal, though not as brutal as Corbucci's later, wonderfully subversive 1968 Spaghetti Western The Grand Silence.
Twitter Sonnet #809
The paper fans have floated plans for wind.
No-one has asked the blades if they'd cool down.
A jet's tin foil wing has made a mend.
Sombreros bouncing heaven's heads rebound.
Unlike star systems shine on drowsy eyes.
Forgotten lids just watch above the lamp.
Inflection changed the purposes of whys.
A radioactive Caesar makes camp.
Garbanzo ballast learns to bean for dip.
Detergent vicegerents grant faith to soap.
Balloon facsimiles of heads can sip.
A false oesophagus can use some rope.
A Nero trades his death for fiddle veins.
Emerging hands assault the window panes.
"Two million?" the uninformed portion of you might be saying. "Are they actually going to broadcast from space now?" Well, it's not perfectly clear what the high price tag is about. Mystery Science Theatre 3000, for the smallest portion of you, who never heard of it, was a television series that ran for over ten years, from 1988 to 1999. It began on cable access before moving during its first season to The Comedy Channel which later became Comedy Central and was later moved to the Sci-Fi Channel where it was finally killed by Sci-Fi's notoriously bad decision makers. Hodgson was a prop comic and he created puppet robots Crow T. Robot and Tom Servo, the three of them every week "riffing" on a full length "cheesy movie", real lousy movies mostly from the 40s, 50s, and 60s. The three of them would appear in silhouette in the foreground and comment on the film.
As you might expect from a show that began on cable access, it looked really low budget. But eventually it occasionally would draw considerable expense as, with increased popularity, rights holders for the films chosen for riffing tended to not let their gems fall into comedic hands so easily. So that's an explanation offered for the two million dollar price tag though similar projects by former MST3k writers and performers, Cinematic Titanic and Rifftrax, have not been so costly. In the case of Cinematic Titanic, it's because the crew selected mainly public domain movies, and for Rifftrax, many of their riffs do not include the original film, requiring the viewer to sync up sound from an audio file with a normal copy of the film.
Still, two million seems a bit high to me, especially since this relaunch looks like it's going to have an entirely new cast with Hodgson only confirmed returning as a writer. He and unspecified other past stars and writers are said to be up for participating, and one could argue that in its original run the cast did change--Joel left the show in its fifth season and was replaced as host by Mike Nelson, Trace Beaulieu, the original voice of Crow T. Robot, left in the seventh season and was replaced by Bill Corbett for the rest of the series' run, and many people don't know that Kevin Murphy replaced J. Elvis Weinstein as the voice of Tom Servo in Season Two. Of all of them, Murphy held his role for the longest, from the second season to the final season, and yet I suspect it's sensitivity to conflicted ownership of roles that is preventing old cast members from returning to those roles.
As the two competing post-MST3k projects imply, there was a factioning of the creative staff, mainly divided between people who left the show during its run (Joel Hodgson, J. Elvis Weinstein, Trace Beaulieu, and Frank Conniff on Cinematic Titanic) and those who were on the show right up to its final cancellation (Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy, and Bill Corbett on Rifftrax). Only Mary Jo Pehl, a writer and castmember towards the end of the run of MST3k, has appeared on both. Jim Mallon, director and voice of the robot Gypsy, has appeared on neither and the impression I get is that everyone is in agreement in hating or at least disliking him--he was the principle reason Hodgson left the show, as Hodgson has said in interviews. Mallon somehow obtained primary ownership of MST3k which I thought was the reason the show hasn't been able to come back except in lame animations on Sci Fi Channel websites sporadically over the past fifteen years. Mallon's name isn't mentioned on the Kickstarter page, so I wonder what changed. Hodgson offers only this explanation:
Even though we've always wanted to bring MST3K back, it wasn't that easy. Thanks to the Last Will and Testament of one eccentric old heiress, the rights were tied up for years. It took time to work those issues out, but with the help of my friends at Shout Factory, a special chokehold I perfected in WuDang that I like to call “The Persuader,” and a night I had to spend in a haunted house as a term of the the old lady’s will, we succeeded.
This summer, we finally got all of the rights cleared up… and now, like Orpheus, we can now descend into hell to hang out with a couple of wisecracking robots.
Despite the factioning, relations seemed to have been mostly amicable. I saw all of them together (minus Mallon) at the MST3k anniversary panel at Comic Con a few years ago. Rifftrax is offering both Joel and Mike episodes of MST3k as of to-day, Bill Corbett and Trace Beaulieu, the two Crows, have even performed two man shows together. Obviously, Beaulieu, Hodgson, and Weinstein no longer wish to distance themselves from the show as they did in the 90s, so who should be the stars of a relaunch? Weinstein represents himself as the original voice of Tom Servo despite having the role for just one season. Personally, it's hard for me to accept the idea of anyone other than Kevin Murphy in that role, not only because he occupied it for so long but because he's just so damned good. Beaulieu had a better range of impressions than Corbett but both worked fine as Crow. Murphy, though, with a voice like an old fashioned trained broadcaster could sing, scream, and commit to his lines better than anyone else on the show. But how do you say that to J. Elvis Weinstein? How do you say that to any of them? "You're good but we're going with this other guy." Could you put it to an audience vote? That would probably be even more awkward.
The Kickstarter is already at $756,993 of the two million goal and seems to go up a grand every--oh, it went up another grand before I could finish typing this sentence. So if it keeps it up, it should easily meet its goal within the next thirty days. But will it really be the show people are keen to fork over money for? Mike Nelson, who replaced Joel as host in season five, had been head writer on the show from season two, certainly his involvement would be crucial for a proper relaunch but his name isn't mentioned on the Kickstarter page. More than anything, it's strange that the Kickstarter campaign is presenting three complete newcomers in the main roles. I can only hope this will change once the funding goal is met but I can't help thinking what the project really needs is a Stanley Kubrick to ruthlessly choose between Joel and Mike, Bill and Trace, and Kevin and Elvis.
A Disney movie about coal miners in 1909 Yorkshire? It could only have come from the 70s, generally considered the period where Disney's powers were at their weakest. But 1976's Escape from the Dark is surprisingly good though I suspect unappreciated by Disney's target audience.
As is often the case for a live action Disney movie of the period, there are child protagonists whose ideals and desires are dismissed by cynical adults so it's up to little Dave (Andrew Harrison), Tommy (Benjie Bolgar), and the daughter of the boss, Alice (Chloe Franks), to save the loyal pit ponies who are destined for slaughter to make way for new mining machinery.
Dave and Tommy are sons of a dead miner and are adjusting to stepfather Richard (Peter Barkworth) who in the second half of the film leads the strike I suspect the under fifteen year old section of the audience had trouble appreciating. The kid gang story takes up a rather small portion of the film but I found myself engaged with their efforts. This is really helped by the beautiful locations in the film, actual moorlands in the north of England, and I'm a bit sorry I watched this movie on VHS in pan and scan.
I guess it was nostalgia that made be stick with it in this format, I got excited by the old Disney video introduction I hadn't seen since I was a kid.
De-luxe!
The kids work together to get an old lift working and like the locations all the equipment looks rather credible.
This was the last film role for Alastair Sim who, fittingly, as he often had earlier in his career, received top billing despite appearing in only a few scenes. He's the boss of the boss, a blissful aristocrat who has little idea as to the realities of day to day life working the mines and doesn't seem to understand why anyone would mind the ponies being killed.
I actually found the strike stuff interesting. The child actors aren't great but not bad and the whole thing is a nice enough little adventure despite a too tidy ending and no mention of black lung.
