French spies! The Bureau reviewed #AmazonVideoPrime #TheBureau

Imagine an up-to-date Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy crossed with a French romance… and you’ll get something approaching the superior French spy drama that is The Bureau. Seeing the modern tricks of spies is fascinating in its own right, and then you get international politics and a love story thrown in for good measure. It’s engaging and compelling on a number of counts – there’s something for everyone really.

Our protagonist (let’s call him Paul, although he has loads of different names, and we’re never quite sure which is the real one) has just returned to Paris from a successful 5-year mission in the Middle East (Syria, Jordan and Algiers). He has to break up with his Syrian girlfriend (Nadia) while still in character as a French teacher before coming home. He feels bad about it, particularly cos Nadia is smart and has a cat-walk model’s body (is she a spy for the other side, a ‘honey trap’?). A week after dumping her, feeling guilty and alone, he phones her… only to find out (with delight and horror) that she’s in Paris!!! Apparently, she’s on a course related to her work. Against all protocol, Paul meets up with Nadia in secret, still maintaining his cover as a French teacher. He has to lie to his colleagues, and the lies have to get bigger and bigger. And, of course, he has to lie to Nadia, cos she doesn’t know he’s a spy for the DGSE (the French CIA, sort of thing). Paul can’t trust anyone. He can hardly trust himself. He’s bound to make a slip, it’s so tricky juggling his different identities every day. Then Nadia’s Syrian entourage start to get suspicious of Paul, and enlist Russian operatives to investigate.

The pressure and close-calls become unbearable. But what can Paul do?

It’s an exciting and entirely tense affair throughout. Gripping. And it’s not just done for the thrills. Being French, of course, the series indulges in philosophical ruminations about identity, trust, reality and sanity. Don’t let it worry you (English ninnies inevitably get put off by all things philosophical), cos you can ignore the philosophical bits and go get a cup of tea.

The series has a dud episode or two (episode 8 is just a rehash of 7 really), but it is entirely worth persevering with. The culmination of it all is unexpected but credible. And means you’ll be keen for the next series. 8.5 out of 10. So there. (By the way, I’m half-French, but you don’t need to be to enjoy said proceedings.)

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Bruce Lee would be proud! Superior political kung fu drama: Warrior #BruceLee #WarriorHBO

 

In the 1970s, Bruce Lee pitched a TV series called Warrior to Hollywood. It was to be the story of a kung fu master wandering the Wild West during the Tong Wars of the late 18th century. Hollywood turned Bruce down, telling him that a show with an Asian lead actor simply wouldn’t work. A year or two later, Hollywood put out the cult TV series Kung Fu, starring David Carradine – a white actor who ‘passed’ for Asian. Meanwhile, Bruce was back in Hong Kong making the genre-defining movies of Way of the Dragon, Enter the Dragon, and Fist of Fury. Sadly, his TV series was never made…

Until now! With Shannon Lee (Bruce’s daughter) as consultant to the series, Warrior has now been made and released by HBO! Not only does the series have as Asian lead (okay, he’s Japanese British), but also a wide cast of fully rounded Asian characters played by Sino-American, Korean and Chinese actors. It’s set in the San Francisco of 1878, just after the American Civil War. Boatloads of Chinese labourers are arriving, liberated African-Americans are moving from the south to the north, Irish navvies and policemen are unionising, and various mafia groups run different parts of the city.

This series has a lot of lovely period detail, wicked martial arts scenes (many a direct homage to Bruce Lee), a lot of flesh on display (it’s HBO, remember, who made the eye-popping Game of Thrones) and fiendishly compromising politics. It’s great. I love it, and fully recommend it! 8.5 out of 10 from me. And I think Bruce would like it too!

If it’s not motivated, it’s not Jessica Jones! Season 3 reviewed! #JessicaJonesSeason3 #Marvel @jessicajones #Netflix

[Guest review from Matt White, screenwriter, twitter.com/tree_and_troll]

It’s a cliche that being a screenwriter ruins the watching experience. And it’s also untrue… mostly.

But it has changed the way that I watch TV and films, in three very specific ways:

1) I check the running time – and I can call, usually to within a couple of minutes, when something important will happen

2) I usually know why I don’t like something now…

3) I’ll forgive anything if it’s motivated. By which I mean: no matter how outrageous an action or decision is, I can happily accept it if it makes sense within the context of the character doing that thing or making that decision.

And that last change is why I thought the second series of Jessica Jones was a disappointment – but the third series was ace.

The last of the Marvel/Netflix superhero stories, Jessica Jones series three continues the tale of our reluctant super/private eye, still reeling from the events of series two: she’s mourning her Mum, she hates her “sister” Trish for killing her. And she’s still drinking and cracking wise. But, thanks to a chance encounter at a bar – leading to a scene which left me both hungry and disappointed – Jessica is facing off against a psychopath with a serious dose of resentment and a penchant for portrait photography.

Cue the usual mix of quirky establishing shots, lots of leather boots and buzzing mobile phones. Oh, and intrigue, dilemmas and dark, dark moments – plus the usual supporting crew with some very entertaining new kids. And it’s great. Not as good as the first series – which is surely an all-time classic. But far better than series two.

So what’s changed? It’s not the bad guys: the antagonists in each show have been powerful, scary and pitched just right.

No, it’s Trish. Or Patsy. Or the Masked Vigilante or whatever. Jessica’s foster-sister, former child-star turned news reporter. In series one I felt she was pitched just right: eager to do well and change the world, and way out of her depth. But as series two developed, Trish lurched into a fairly cliched spiral of drug addiction and murderous do-gooding. And some flashbacks and an amazing Rebecca De Mornay performance wasn’t enough to justify it for me: for Trish to take such a screwed-up turn felt like it needed more investment.

But in series three that investment was there, and Trish’s motivation was much stronger. I’m not going into too much detail about what she does – and why – but she plays a huge role in the series, and has a super-satisfying arc. And it’s all because the writers put the time and space into giving her the motivation.

Keep the motivation coming and you’ll keep me happy at least.

A Vampire Comedy with Bite… What We Do in the Shadows reviewed #WhatWeDointheShadows @TaikaWaititi

[Guest review by Nadine West @andiekarenina]

There is a very specific Taika Waititi humour. If you’ve seen Thor: Ragnarok, you already know it. It revels in incongruity, wordy monologues that reveal more than the speaker intends, occasional pratfalls and the thwarting of best-laid plans and, if you like it, it’s entirely addictive. Call it a Kiwi thing; in the land where no tall poppy is safe from culling, prodding at the pomposity we all try to hide in our dark hearts is a sure-fire comedy winner. When the protagonists are immortal vampires, and the setting is the meek streets of Staten Island, What We Do in the Shadows comes dangerously close to being a comedy masterclass.

The FX TV series is based on, spun off from or otherwise riffs upon the 2014 film of the same name starring Waititi and his co-creator, Flight of the Concords’ Jermaine Clement. This original vampire-in-the-city film was set in Wellington, became a cult hit as a result of its dry humour and faux-documentary style, and seemed destined to remain yet another in the long list of underrated NZ films. (Full disclaimer – I used to teach several Kiwis who now work in the film industry and I am biased as all hell. Pay more attention to NZ creators, you fools.) When Waititi smashed Thor: Ragnarok out of the ballpark and had his moment as the darling of Hollywood, however, studios asked him what he wanted to do next. His answer? I’d like to make What We Do in the Shadows again, please. And I’d like to make it BRILLIANT.

And it is brilliant. Perhaps it’s just a happy coincidence of my humour and theirs, but I have not guffawed this much for years. The series is a single-camera reality documentary parody (and without going too full-film-nerd, the camerawork and lighting are impeccably 1992’s The Real World, with amateurish lighting, camera-swing and dodgy focus-pulling, but at night) following three house-sharing vampires, Nandor, Laszlo and Nadja, as they attempt to co-exist, dispose of corpses, host high-pressure orgies and, just perhaps, take over the world.

The burden upon vampire-kind to take over the world – or at least the New World – leads us straight to one of the pilot episode’s classic lines: Matt Berry’s Laszlo contemplates this sacred task. He is dressed in a black cape. His fangs glisten. He furrows his brow and waves one laconic hand – “Yes, conquer the New World…but as you can see…it’s fucking massive.” This series likes bathos. They like it a lot. Undercutting is what they do: every time Laszlo transforms into a bat the CGI is movie-standard and the magic is real, but Matt Berry has to awkwardly shout “BAT” each time, in the tones of a cricket umpire calling “out”. When Nandor decides to launch his dominion over humankind by controlling their leaders, he ends up at a Staten Island Borough Council meeting, trying to hypnotise grey, earnest bureaucrats who ignore him in favour of a discussion of zoning regulations. (“They cannot be hypnotised,” he notes, aghast, “because they no longer have souls.”)

The cast is uniformly excellent. Once again, a little bias creeps in, because the unimpeachable and glorious Doug Jones is here as Baron Afanas, a recurring guest starring role which allows Jones to flip-flop between deeply creepy and deeply silly, often within the same line of dialogue, whilst giving us one of those physical performances that no one does better, because Doug Jones is a god who can do no wrong and this is a hill I will die on. In the main cast, Kayvan Novak makes a delicious Nandor – slightly haughty, slightly baffled – longing for a homeland and delighting in glitter and “creepy paper”. Natasia Demitriou is a cheerfully demented Nadja, and Harvey Guillén gets huge mileage and moments of genuine pathos out of Guillermo, Nandor’s long-suffering familiar whose only wish is to be “turned” by his master.

There are, inevitably, one or two nit-picks. The energy vampire idea – despite the character of Colin being very well played by Mark Proksch – wears out by episode three and stays threadbare. (He doesn’t feed on blood, he feeds on energy! Like that awful guy at your office! And he wears a grey cardigan! Yes, still the same single joke, over ten episodes!) The “LARPing as a rich mine of virgins” joke is old, so old, pretty offensive, and hit repeatedly with a mallet for diminishing returns. And, well, I don’t get on with vomit humour in any form, never have, never will, and let’s just leave that one there before I go green again.

But overall, this is a genuinely brilliant tv show. It is knowing – the use of vampire lore and canon is impeccable – but it is not self-satisfied. It slips in cinema-quality effects that you will barely notice happening, because it gets mundanity so very, very right. It makes you laugh out loud, not just once, but repeatedly. It will make you want to take up a VERY specific kind of gardening.

What We Do in the Shadows has, cheeringly, has already been commissioned for a second series. FX has a winner on its hands and we can only hope that this one runs and runs.

John Wick 3 took more in the opening weekend than John Wick 1 did in its entire run! #johnwick #johnwick3 #KeanuReeves #HalleBerry

 

The John Wick movies have quite rightly earned a cult status. The fresh fighting style that’s used (I heard Keanu describe it as being based on ‘gun katas’), the cool Matrix stylings and intertextuality, the simple righteous revenge plots, the intriguing underworld and global hierarchy of assassins, the lack of fear when it comes to the body-count, and Keanu’s inimitable style of acting… all combine to give us a compelling, adrenaline-fuelled and screamingly addictive ride. And it’s a welcome ride that really has resurrected Keanu’s career, to boot!

The first movie in the sequence opened without much media fanfare but quietly grew in audience and fame. Now, with John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum, we have a movie that has taken more at the box office in its opening weekend than the first film did in its entire run. Added to that the fourth movie is already confirmed and a TV show spin-off called The Continental (named after the uber-cool, steampunk assassins’ hotel) is also being produced. Oo, and if you want my guess, the gun-toting Halle Berry character from the third film (along with her trained killer dogs) will also get a spin-off!

Regular readers of this site will know that this often grumpy reviewer was a massive fan of John Wick 1 & 2. So what did this often grumpy reviewer make of John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum? Well, indulge my grumpiness here, if you will. The title of the film itself is something of an indicator that the simple innocence of the first two movies has somewhat been lost. Things have become somewhat overloaded with new and contrived expectations. (For reference, Parabellum means ‘Prepare for war!’)

You see, the first two movies were based on simple revenge plots. In the first movie, John’s dog is killed by mafia types (and the dog was a gift from his wife before she died!) and his car is stolen. The mafia types have failed to realise that John is a notorious retired assassin… whom they have just brought out of retirement! Gulp! We cheer as the aggrieved and grieving John sets out for revenge upon the entire mafia. We are properly engaged, meaning that the action is emotionally compelling, no matter that it is overblown and not credible. It works morally and symbolically. The second movie is very similar… and that’s just fine indeed.

Yet the third film departs from the plot premise of the first two. It’s simply John on the run from all the other assassins because he has broken the rules of the assassins’ hotel/world. Hmm. Morally, we don’t feel much for John concerning this… after all, he’s a cold-blooded assassin himself. When we don’t care, the umpteen fight scenes become tedious rather than compelling. The refrain of the movie is ‘There are always consequences!’ but that is just a tautologous nonsense statement about the cause and effect nature of the world and basic physics, surely. The film struggles and strains to give itself depth… where before it naturally had it with simple elegance and without effort. Chapter 3 is by turns a dull and painful struggle to watch. Even the baddies in this third part aren’t properly bad. We have the Adjudicator character and her hired samurai, but they are simple functionaries, simply doing their jobs… and not actually evil for the fascinating sake of it. So we can’t even root for John based on his being more morally attractive than who he’s up against.

Look, true fans might be able to see past the inadequacies of the third film anyway, and I note the film has good scores from IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes, so maybe I/we shouldn’t talk too much more about it. Certainly, the third film does offer some new ideas and some extra world-building. And it’s setting up one helluva war for the fourth film! So let’s just say John Wick 3 is the equivalent of The Matrix 3, and leave it at that. I, for one, and no doubt one of many others, fully intend to watch the fourth movie and all future spin-offs – and maybe that’s the only real test of things! Onwards to war!

 

Skull face appears on international author’s beer glass while drinking in Jamaica Inn! The new Turin Shroud? #JamaicaInn #TurinShroud #DaphneDuMaurier

Behold!

I’m a Star Trek fan, so I live in hope – review of Star Trek Disco, season 2 #StarTrekDiscovery #Netflix

Guest review supplied by Nadine West @andiekarenina…

Let me be clear: I absolutely love the individual members of the cast and crew of Star Trek: Discovery. During Season 1, I was obsessed with “After Trek”, the Netflix banter-with-the-stars show that was available to watch once the episode of the week had aired, because Sonequa Martin Green, Doug Jones, Anthony Rapp et al were just all so darned adorable. Their respect and love for each other shines through, and the showrunners have made sterling efforts to craft a piece of popular science fiction that embraces diversity with true Trekkian IDIC fervour. I would squeeze every man, woman and tardigrade involved in the series, make them mojitos and cupcakes, and have their babies.

And yet. And yet. There is a big problem, and the problem is that now, at the end of Season 2, I am so unbelievably sick of this ponderous first person Star Trek that I could scream.

Let me explain. Just in case you don’t know, the designations of first and third person come from prose fiction: first person means a narrator who tells the story as “I”, like in Jane Eyre or To Kill a Mockingbird, and third person is where no one character is speaking, where the author can move more fluidly around the stories of the characters, who are “he/she”, like in Of Mice and Men or Harry Potter. First person means you’re deep inside one head, seeing only what that person sees, and you’re also a bit stuck there…and you begin to see my drift. I am so sick to the back teeth of being stuck in Michael Burnham’s head that I want to smash my way out of her fictional skull with a claw hammer and experience anything, ANYTHING, beyond her frame of reference.

Now I know Trek has always had central characters. Yes, there were more Spock episodes than Sulu episodes, more Picard episodes than Geordi LaForge episodes. And yes, there was a point at which the Voyager writers’ room forgot that any character except Seven of Nine existed, but I blame that on the hip-to-waist ratio hypnotism effect and forgive them. But broadly speaking, all previous Trek series have been confidently, vibrantly third person storytelling which allows us to see a full spectrum of characters’ lives – both those in our regular crew AND those we meet along the way. Some token examples amongst so many: in TNG, we saw more minor characters like Deanna Troi drive many episodes, delved into her complex relationship with her mother (all hail Lwaxana!) and even saw her involved with complex storylines like working undercover as a Romulan officer to aid Romulan defections (Face of the Enemy, TNG 6:14). In DS9, Quark, Dax et al drive several humorous and moving episodes: in Voyager, even the omni-tedious Tom Parris gets to be the star of his own Sliding Doors-style narrative in Non Sequitur, amongst many others. Even cameo characters – Joan Actual Collins, anyone? – are allowed room to grow and become firm fan favourites.

Let’s turn, then, to Season 2 of Discovery. If Season 1 was focused on Michael Burnham, then Season 2 developed a kind of Michael Burnham OCD which deformed everything else around it. Tilly’s genuinely interesting confidence growth arc? Sidelined. Ariam, a fascinating character with great story potential? Featured, corrupted, spaced and exploded in five minutes flat for dubious plot reasons. Stamets and Culber’s hideously painful reunion, separation and resolution? Nah, eight lines of dialogue across five episodes ought to do it

Stamets: Everything is super perfect now you’re back from the dead, golly gee.

Culber: I have seen too much. I am no longer the man you knew. We must break up.

Stamets: *sad eyes*

Culber: Now I shall have a fight with Tyler.

Stamets: *sad eyes*

Culber: I shall now go and work on the Enterprise for reasons.

Stamets: *sad eyes, melancholy astrophysics*

Culber: PSYCH! I shall stay with you now you are injured and we might die, love puppy.

Stamets: K. I’m very bleeding. I miss my spore drive.

I exaggerate. But honestly not by much. The writers clearly also have no idea what to do with Jet Reno, my actual favourite new Trek character in eons, so they just give her two lines of “generic acerbic lesbian bantz” every three episodes. As for everyone else on the bridge who’s not Saru, you would have to google their names before you could discuss them. Don’t pretend to me. You refer to her as “redhead who looks a bit like Willow from Buffy with the face-thing” too. Indeed, at the end of Season 2, Admiral Cornwell (Who? The one who’s been hanging around without much to do who isn’t Michelle Yeoh, that’s who) is summarily exploded by a photon torpedo in what is clearly intended to be a heart-rending moment…but since we know next to nothing about her, we simply go “eh, torpedoes” and shrug, before flashing back to yet another endless scene of Michael and Spock droning on about their feelings.

And droning feels like the operative work here: S2 Discovery was remarkably one-note from start to finish, because it abandoned episode variation in favour of through-arc. There’s no room for more light-hearted, positive, even fun episodes here, when everything is wall-to-wall Vulcan childhood trauma and looming apocalypse. (Sidebar: tv writers? Enough apocalypse already, guys. Seriously. Umbrella Academy, Sabrina, Thrones, Disco and sundry others – make us genuinely care about saving ONE life. I promise you faithfully that it will be more emotionally powerful than all your “oooh the world nearly ended but it didn’t” shenanigans, however much brass-and-string music you wheel out. Wrath of Khan, guys. Joyce on Buffy. Re-watch and learn.)

By far my favourite episode of this series was the most traditional Star Trek episode of them all, New Eden, closely followed by the next most traditional, Sounds of Thunder. In New Eden, the crew discover a human civilisation on a remote planet, living in prelapsarian harmony; our crew must wrestle with the dilemma of whether to leave them in their innocence or to tell them the truth some of them half suspect – that they belong to an advanced and intergalactic species. In Sounds of Thunder, we meet Saru’s species and their eternal enemies, the Ba’ul, and our preconceptions of the history between these two races are skilfully and enjoyably subverted. These two episodes stand out because they are the best of Trek: outward looking, full of the spirit of – ironically – discovery, and focused on exploring the universe and the moral dilemmas that arise as we learn more. In both of these episodes, I genuinely cheered at the intelligent writing and plotting that took me out of Michael bloody Burnham’s endless psychodrama and into the starry galaxy instead.

Perhaps next season, with the confirmation of a new showrunner and the option to re-boot a little, Discovery will begin to find its feet and its wider horizons. I’m sceptical, but I’m a Star Trek fan, so I live in hope.