Random reflections on my recent viewing

[tree_and_leaf]

I just watched the swingers episode of Life on Mars; generally rather repellent atmosphere, though extremely well done. Mind you, I shouldn't have laughed at my mother for greeting virtually every appearance of Annie in civies with a cry of 'I had one of those!' (sometimes followed by 'I don't know what I was thinking'), because when Sam got the camera out for surveillance purposes, I was gratified to recognise my first SLR (inherited from my grandad, who must have bought it sometime in the early seventies. A good camera, incidentally, though rather heavy; I ought to get it out again and finally do some black and white work again, though dark room access is problematic).

I've also been catching up om the first half series of Heroes, which I completely missed. Am enjoying it very much, though Mohinder's soliloquies on Creative Evolution are really starting to get on my nerves. He's Weston from Out of the Silent Planet with better dress sense and nicer manners. And, to be fair, a more reliable moral compass in practice if not in theory. But I like him more when he's not indulging in reheated Bergsonianism...

I went to see My Blueberry Nights with some friends. Don't bother, unless (a) you fancy Jude Law or (b) you are so keen to see David Strathairn and Rachel Weisz give excellent performances as an alcoholic and his ex-wife that you can put up with an awful lot of tedium elsewhere in the film; they were the best thing in the film, but not quite enough to rescue it for me. Also, Norah Jones is awful - I'd say she should stick to singing, but she butchers "Harvest Moon", which is one of my favourite Neil Young songs.

ETA: I should note that Wikipedia says that the "Harvest Moon" cover was actually by Cassandra Wilson; I apolgise to Ms Jones, but that doesn't help the film.

Comments

[lucullean.livejournal.com]

"Mohinder's soliloquies on Creative Evolution are really starting to get on my nerves. He's Weston from Out of the Silent Planet with better dress sense and nicer manners."

Do you really think so? He's not evil or cast in that way, just misguided somewhat.

[tree_and_leaf]

Ethically, no, but his initial philosophy is out of the same school (at the end of episode three, for example he muses on destiny, evolution, and evolution demanding† that the creature do things they find repellent - over shots of Nikki disposing of the corpses. Actually, he isn't in practice amoral, but that's something of an inconsistency, though one that does him credit.

† A definite Y HALO THAR PROFESSOR WESTON moment!

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

Annie's initial outfit seems very close to something Sarah Jane Smith wore in her first season, at the start of the long trajectory that will take her from professional-woman-as-understood-by-Terrance-and-Bob (probably not that far from Gene Hunt's view) to overgrown eight-year-old in dungarees.

The thing about Life on Mars is that it's all just on the edge of my memory; I'm not quite Sam, as he's a couple of years older than me, but his metaphorical shoes almost fit.

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

Agreed on both counts.

[tree_and_leaf]

My mother assures me that the clothes were spot on - she was in her first year of work in '73, so would be about the same age as Annie. It's all long before my time - I'd be interested to see if anything in 'Ashes to Ashes' rings a bell, but it's probably both too London-centric and just too early for me.

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

Ashes to Ashes covers more familiar territory to me, though it also gives me an opportunity to hear the pop music I screened/shut out when I was ten or eleven. It cheats somewhat in introducing a lot of motifs that belong to later in the decade - such as the red-braced yuppie this last episode, or indeed Markham in the first episode, all of which I associate much more with the 'big bang' era of the mid-80s. In 1981 Britain was looking for direction - it's the era of the SDP after all, and for a while it looked as if the most likely result of the 1983 or 1984 election (it was usually assumed that an election would be held as late as possible, so unpopular were the Conservatives) would be an Alliance or Coalition government headed by Roy Jenkins - and there's not much hint of that uncertainty in this series.

marginally off-topic

[overconvergent.livejournal.com]

Now I am thinking of a scifi show which had a Prime Minister called "Jeremy" ...

Re: marginally off-topic

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

...and, a couple of years later, addressed the prime minister as 'Madam'... (a strand of fan lore insists that in Doctor Who, Britain's first woman prime minister was Shirley Williams).

Re: marginally off-topic

[tree_and_leaf]

The near future was better in the past...

Re: marginally off-topic

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

I've been known to think that rather more than is healthy...

[tree_and_leaf]

Yes, the promotional material I've read seems to suggest that they were slightly anachronistic. Which I suppose could be justified on the grounds that it's Alex' idea of the eighties, not the decade themselves - but it seems a little lazy all the same.

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

If it's not Alex's idea of the eighties, it could be some sort of collectively-imagined world; if it's meant to be a prosaic representation of 1981 then it fails from the outset, and I'm fairly certain that it won't be.

[tree_and_leaf]

Yes, that would also be a plausible possibility.

[rivrea.livejournal.com]

ayumie, hisoka44 and I once proposed a Heroes drinking game, with a sip of alcohol for every time that Mohinder says "destiny" or "evolution". Then we decided we were far too fond of our livers to try.

[tree_and_leaf]

*giggles*

Smart move! Even by the standards of drinking games, that one would be a bad idea...

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

What is / was the SLR?

[tree_and_leaf]

A Zenit. Not sure that it was exactly the same model, but they look very similar:

http://www.sundive.co.uk/lifeonmars/images/s2ep4/camera.jpg

Something of a brick, but a decent camera - very reliable light meter (better than my brand new Nikon compact, but that's probably more the limitations of digital in contrasty light than anything else.)

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

Mmm, I think my sister had one of those. A good camera, as I recall.

I bought an Olympus OM-2N a couple of years ago, and I've been delighted with it.

[lareinenoire.livejournal.com]

Ah, Mohinder. They really do like hitting the audience with him when it's not necessary at all. He does get better though, towards the end. And he's utterly fantastic in my two favourite episodes.

[tree_and_leaf]

I quite like him when he's not being anvillicious!

[fpb.livejournal.com]

"reheated Bergsonism"? Don't you think you are ascribing them far too much reading? This is Hollywood, after all: "they only know one two-syllable word there, and it is fillum".

As for LoM/AtA, the point with making these kinds of stories - though I will admit that these were clever - is to congratulate ourselves on how much better we are now. Hence the repulsive atmosphere, heavy machismo and ignorance (like we live in the Renaissance now?), carefully recreated absurd clothes along with complete absence of real period politics. As parrot_knight points out, the dominant atmosphere in Britain immediately before the Falklands war was what we called Alliance at the time, and the Tories were monumentally unpopular. But it will not do to point out that the country was as middle-of-the-road PC then as it is now, because the historicistic notion that we are all getting better, wiser and more humane would then be shot out of the sky, and where would we be then? At any rate, I do not recall fifteen-year-old kids murdering each other professionally in London in the early eighties.

[tree_and_leaf]

I haven't seen any of AtA, but I think with LoM it's more complicated than that - yes, some aspects of the seventies were portrayed as repellent (though my comment on the atmosphere was mostly directed at the swingers' scene, and what was disturbing there was not, actually, the overplayed details of the dreadful food and drink, but the creepy atmosphere surrounding the participants), but in the end Sam chose the seventies over his present, which was portrayed as aseptic, cold, and somewhat dead. I think Sam, and by extension the modern world is depicted as having lost something, though it's difficult to say how they could be recovered without also having the faults of the dream-seventies too. I do think that LoM is a lot more ambiguous than its creators intended it to be, though that's writing for you!

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

The Wikipedia article on LoM indicates that the abandoned Neil Morrisey version planned in the late 1990s would have been very smug and sneered at the 1970s for comic effect.

[tree_and_leaf]

Oh dear. I'm glad it didn't get made then, then. Though I don't like Neil Morrisey, anyway.

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

Far too ubiquitous as a lead in the late 1990s... now happily subsumed into an ensemble cast in Waterloo Road.