More A Way Of Life… Look, this is just between you and me

Deathly Hallows Part 2

Not a review, just some thoughts.

Took a couple of weeks, but we got along to see this on Friday evening.  It's slightly weird to think that the series is over, but also slightly a relief.  The kids aren't kids anymore, and catching part of a TV screening of Prisoner of Azkaban on Saturday when they all still looked REALLY young really brought home how the last few films have been having to stretch credulity.  The epilogue looked like very little effort was required to make the leads look parent-age.

Anyway - it was a good end.  Hit all the key points of the book without letting some of its less dynamic sections slow the film down, and at least all the grim stuff with whining Ron and the never-ending camping trip was got out of the way in Part 1.

As a climax, it did the spectacle well, though the chaos of the battle scenes was a bit too chaotic.  It was often hard to see what was happening, and to whom, as the camera flew around, so a certain amount of the emotional impact of the events was lost, but obviously that's where the books have it easy.  If Rowling has to tell you that random supporting character X is being hit by a bad spell you can't help but know whether you should care, and how much.

We went to see it in 2D, obviously, and as with practically every other film with a 3D option I've seen, it's hard to imagine what extra 3D would have brought to it.  As it was, for all that the books became annoyingly self-indulgent over the years, even with the splitting of the Deathly Hallows in two, the films have tended to be a leaner and therefore more purely entertaining series, and I think they did themselves proud with this last one, in all its two-dimensional glory.

Review – Much Ado About Nothing

In London, it's not just the buses that come along all at once - this summer, two separate productions of Much Ado About Nothing landed.  I didn't see the version at The Globe, but having seen David Tennant and Catherine Tate's first official announcement that they were starring in a version, there was absolutely no way that The Mrs and I weren't going to be seeing this.  I mean, come on - it's The Doctor and Donna.

We've debated the point of non-period productions of Shakespeare before.  Broadly speaking, The Mrs disapproves.  Less broadly speaking, I disapprove sometimes.  I actually avoided letting on that this wasn't period beforehand to avoid any issues, but in the end I didn't need to bother - the production itself won him over.

And actually, it IS period, just not its original period.  Director Josie Rourke transplanted the setting to early 1980s Gibraltar, making the conflict from which Don Pedro and his men have returned The Falklands War, and setting up a convincingly insular kind of world in which the well-off drift around the place in swimwear with drinks in their hands.  It's all helped by a really clever set design based around only four columns and a lot of use of the revolve.

Cast-wise, (before we get to the inevitable) I'd call it about a 90% success.  Don Pedro and Leonato work well together, and Claudio and Hero make a winning couple, if a somewhat wet one, though to be fair that's in the writing more than the performances.  Dogberry, meanwhile, comes close to stealing the show.  Conversely, a couple of the actors in minor roles don't seem very bothered, and a couple of others seem a little ill-fit.  Don John, in particular, looks at times as though he's being played as if Mark Heap had been cast in the role but wasn't actually available.  Arguably, having the conniving villain also be the screaming closet case should itself make me more annoyed, but mostly I was too busy enjoying other stuff to care.

Much of this other stuff comes from Tate and Tennant (I'm getting there), but also from Rourke's admirable decision to play this comedy as actually funny, rather than just witty and arch, which is what you usually get.  There is plenty of background incident (Tennant's initial arrival in a golf cart sets the tone) and broad verbal delivery, but most obviously there are scenes of out-and-out slapstick that work brilliantly.  I've certainly laughed frequently in productions of this play, but I've never laughed as much as at this one, and judging by the clearly delighted audience, I wasn't the only one enjoying it.

But of course we're not here to see all that, we're here to see Tennant and Tate (well, mostly, it is after all a brilliant play on its own accord ) and they don't disappoint.  Tennant plays Benedick broadly, with his own natural accent, I was pleased to note, and conveys a clever, honourable man playing the clown as much for effect as for real.  Tate's Beatrice on the other hand, feels authentically sharp and weary of men - though importantly never bitter or shrewish, if certainly 'shrewd', as she's described more than once.  Their interplay feels exactly like the re-commencement of an ongoing sparring match that just went on hold when he went off to war, and they instill the relationship with more than enough authenticity.  Whenever they're on stage together, the energy level rises, and both make much and effective use of non-verbal communication - there's a moment the night before Hero's wedding when the 'stag' and 'hen' parties cross over and Beatrice and Benedick spot each other that's played totally wordlessly and is totally priceless.  They make you want to know what their life beyond the end of the play will be like, which must be seen as a victory.

The sense that this cast is just having a bloody good time is highlighted in one detail that we have to assume isn't a nightly occurrence, though what marked last night out I don't know.  The was a lot of unplanned laughter on the stage.  At one point, confronting Tennant covered in paint, Tate had to make three efforts to get her line out through the laughter, glaring at the audience as we laughed at her hysteria (which made us worse) before exiting to a huge round of applause.  Brilliantly, it was on a line which Benedick then repeats when alone, giving Tennent the chance to ad-lib the triple repetition and causing Tate to come back on stage to glare again at both him and us.  Later, by the closing scenes, Claudio couldn't complete a line through his laughter.  It's all a bit unprofessional, of course, but honestly, when they were giving us such a good time, I think everyone present was probably willing to let them off with enjoying themselves.

This is the second production of Much Ado I've discussed on this here blog.  The last, back in 2007, was one of the best productions I'd ever seen.  The Rourke/Tate/Tennant version, while entirely different, probably tops it.  And makes me want to see the stars keep on working together - imagine them in something by Wilde, or Noel Coward...

Review – The Impossible Astronaut

It's become something of a tradition in the media to look for any sign that the returned Doctor Who is going off the boil.  So the online reporting following the first episode of the new series (Series six of 21st Century Who or series 2 of Matt Smith depending on how you're counting) pounced on lower overnight ratings than last year and announced that this will 'probably be the least watched series opener since the return'.  And probably even once time-shifted viewing is taken into account it will be, but it's still out-performing practically everything that's not a soap.  And in other news this week, the first episode broke BBC America's previous record audience and Matt Smith was nominated for a BAFTA.  I think any effort to suggest that the bloom is off the rose is a little premature.

So what about that episode?  Well, it's hard to review without giving a major plot point away, but the gist of it is that Amy, Rory, River and apreviously unseen old man are summoned to the middle of nowhere in the USA by The Doctor, where something unimaginable happens.  The rest of the episode's running time is given over to the fallout and an effort to understand what the hell is going on.

This two-part season opener has all the feel of a two-part season finale, which is at least partly its stated aim.  It feels epic in scope, dramatic and emotional in content, and strangely climactic for the start of a thirteen episode run.  The epic feel is helped by the filming in Utah, and judging by the trailer for part two that gets even more use there, and the very direct involvement of President Nixon lends a sense of import to the proceedings.  The dramatic and emotional is covered well by reactions to the unimaginable thing, by some major news from Amy, by the increasing mystery around River, and by the cliffhanger, which falls just the right side of overwrought.  Add to that a truly creepy new set of villains, the return of something unexpected from last year's episode The Lodger, and some sterling interplay among the regulars (and Mark Sheppard, who frankly feels like a regular after half an episode) and honestly it's hard to find major fault.

Minor faults are that River's big scene about her worry arising from the temporal weirdness of her relationship with The Doctor managed to confuse even me, and I thought I was pretty clear on at least the mechanics if not the detail, so god knows what less well dug-in viewers thought; and there's some terrible acting among the Secret Service agents in evidence.

Highlights are most of the interplay between River and The Doctor, including a slap that looks like it should have taken Matt Smith's head off, the brilliant creepiness of the Silents, the opening scenes of The Doctor having fun in history, and the development of the TARDIS family that having everyone around represented.

The Impossible Astronaut got the series off to a rousing start, managed the odd juxtaposition of being both epic and a romp, and set up what could be the darkest, most complex season arc so far.  I'm prepared for each series to throw up at least one clunker, but fortunately, this wasn't it for this year.

New Who – Spoiled/Not Spoiled

So Doctor Who came back on Saturday, and lo, there was much rejoicing across the land (well, our bit of a the land for certain, and almost certainly others).  I attempted an episode-by-episode review a few years back which didn't work.  Can I make it this year?  Who knows, but I will at least try.  I'll do episode one in a bit, but as a general intro I thought it worth noting that every now and then a Who fan demonstrates that we're every bit as capable of ridiculous excess as those Trek people.

Background:  The issue of Doctor Who Magazine which previewed this first two-parter ran four alternative covers with photos of The Doctor, Amy, Rory and River, and the headline promise that one of them would die in the first episode.  Lo and behold, one of them did - no I'm not saying; spoilers!  Possibly contrary to expectation it didn't happen at the end, it actually happened about ten minutes in, and its ramifications began to be played out through the rest of the episode.  Executive Producer Steven Moffat said in an interview that he had the thought that he'd open the series with a story that felt as big and important as the series finales have been since the programme came back, which I think he managed nicely.

To summarise: the officially licensed magazine of the show produced a preview of the new series which promoted the first episode with a dramatic headline, having agreed all its coverage with the show's production team and included Moffat himself in said coverage.  It's how TV series get promoted, and it's all how the people who make the programme wanted it to be.

So on Saturday night, poor, abused DWM editor Tom Spilsbury notes on Twitter that someone's announced they are "incandescent with rage, depressed and filled with raw anger and hate" over the spoiling of the episode by his magazine, and starts going on about 'formal letters of complaint'.  Looking at the Twitter feed of the person who is so incensed makes for depressing reading, and to be fair, obviously that's lacking a lot of context.  But when you post publicly about things you have to deal with the fact that people reading only see and know the words on the screen/page, so that's what I'm working from.

And doing so, the thing I'm most puzzled about is that it was only when he watched the episode that he decided to be offended by the 'spoiler'.  Indeed, I *think* he's suggesting that based on the covers and the trailer following the Christmas special he'd worked out exactly who died.  But this only seems to have become an issue when he was proved right.  He'd been looking at the cover for a couple of weeks, he'd seen the trailer four months ago, and nothing anywhere had said "Person X dies in The Impossible Astronaut".  So in the first place I'm not sure a teaser counts as a spoiler anyway - surely a spoiler is a specific plot point that's revealed in advance - and in the second why did he only decide to kick off about it on broadcast, not when he was first 'spoiled'?

There is, by any standard, a fine line between promotion and spoiler.  And everyone promoting a film, book, TV series, etc treads it carefully all the time.  I was in the supermarket at the weekend and noted the Eastenders-centric covers of this week's regular TV listings magazines; one suggests a character is going to commit suicide, a couple of others that a new relationship is going to be starting, and alongside that, how various other series' plotlines will peak over these seven days.  This is how it works.  You tell a potential viewer/reader/listener that something dramatic is going to happen to encourage them to see how it pans out.  If the cover of DWM had said exactly who died, in what circumstances, and what it all meant, I'd allow that the episode had been spoiled.  If they'd revealed more than the production team wanted them to, rather than worked with that team to get the promotional level right, I'd allow that they'd crossed a line.  But just creating some anticipation of something that *still* came as a huge shock because of its timing and circumstance?

That's not a spoiler.

Insert Corny ‘Farewell’ Line Here

There's a weird thing that happens when famous people die, where some members of the group known as 'the rest of us' get almost more overwrought than if a close personal friend had died.  The extreme of this is obviously Princess Diana - oh lord did I see some extraordinary sights in London that week - but it happens with far less famous people to varying extents.

I confess I always feel a mix of stunned amusement and mild despair at the way people sometimes create apparently deep emotional connections to figures they don't really know, and allow that connection to affect their reaction to that person's death.

And yet.

Elisabeth Sladen died yesterday.  And I'm feeling very emotional about it.  I met her twice, both times introduced only in passing by people who knew her far better than I, who I assume are even more emotional this morning.  I couldn't possibly claim an emotional attachment in any personal sense, but she's been there in my life to some degree since I was less than ten years old, when she first appeared in Doctor Who, and given how emotionally attached to that series I've always been, it seems that Lis gets it by osmosis.  But it seems, ONLY Lis.  I've lived through the deaths of three Doctors and only recently The Brigadier, and while noting it sadly, never really felt a bit teary the way I have on and off for the last twelve hours.

I guess it's that, at a time when an impressionable kid is still young enough to wish that The Doctor might actually turn up and whisk him away, the 'audience identification' figure in the series takes on a greater importance than usual.  It helped, of course, that she became iconic in a way that most other companions hadn't/didn't, and so there was always someone else (even among those who didn't regard themselves as upper case Fans) who would remember her and be able to share a memory.  And the whole Doctor Who 'industry' kicked off around that time, meaning she was a fixture at conventions, that fanzines and DWM were around to keep her in our minds.  So she never really went away.  And then, amazingly, she came back anyway.  Unlike a lot of people, I knew that she was coming back a long time before the word was officially out, and it immediately felt so right it was almost ridiculous to think people weren't already just assuming it would happen.

I've blogged about School Reunion here, and at the time called it my favourite episode of New Who.  If I'm completely honest, it isn't that any longer, because, well, almost everything with Donna in it, basically, but it's still extraordinarily special.  And this morning I listened to Russell T Davies' tribute and everything I felt about Sarah Jane, and Lis Sladen, at the time I first watched School Reunion so clearly reflected the way he felt making it, I got a bit emotional again.

I started writing this on the train this morning and have been in meetings, so I'm posting it very nearly twenty four hours since the news hit.  And right this very minute the terms 'Elisabeth Sladen' and 'Sarah Jane' are both still trending on Twitter WORLDWIDE.  I'm sure I can't be the only one who finds that both astonishing and 100%, satisfyingly, gratifyingly, right.