Category: [Films & TV]

New Who, then…

Fuck the haters, I LIKED “Space Babies” (though I will concede it’s probably the worst episode title since “Dinosaurs on a Spaceship”). The consensus on Bluesky appears to boil down to “Ncuti & Mille great, otherwise WTF” (I don’t know what the consensus on Twitter is, but I presume it’s something like “ugh, darky poofter”), so I was more curious than usual to see it… and I kind of agree with some who said it was an odd choice of story to kick off the new series, but fuck it, I had a ton of fun with it. Babies running a space station is quite an idea, and people seem to be going on about it as if the show’s never done this sort of conceptual weirdness ever before… cos the fucking Land of Fiction back in 1968 was the very apex of hard SF, wasn’t it?Whatever, I enjoyed the thing.

As for “The Devil’s Chord”, consensus on Bluesky before I downloaded the episodes was “one of the best episodes ever but why couldn’t they get actual Beatles music”… quite apart from what would’ve been the ludicrous expense of such a thing, the point of the story, of course, was that there WAS no Beatles music, or any music at all in this version of 1963. Probably not even John Smith and The Common Men. The main debate about the episode seems to be was Jinkx Monsoon riotously over the top as the villain Maestro in a good way or bad way; I’m inclined to the former though it certainly is an extreme performance…

…but if you could watch “The Happiness Patrol” and accept THIS fucking thing, as we did back in 1988, well…

Anyway, as I also said, pretty much everyone seems to agree on Ncuti and Millie and so do I. Both terrific. I said of his first appearance in “The Church on Ruby Road” that he WAS the Doctor immediately, and he continues to be. No doubts about him as the Doctor whatsoever. And I like the idea that this Doctor has finally cast off the self-loathing that has kind of plagued the entire series since 2005:

RIP Roger

This one hurts. I know that, in his own way, Corman was as much of a production-line churn-’em’out factory as any of the actual Hollywood majors, and frankly the quality of the movies he oversaw was generally probably questionable at best, but so many people in the American film industry from the 60s onwards started out in the “Roger Corman Film School” that the face of Hollywood would’ve looked vastly different without him. I mean, some of those figures may have made it by themselves, but what if they didn’t? No Coppola, no Scorsese, no Jack Nicholson, no Ron Howard, no James Cameron, no Robert Towne, no James Horner… lots of Big Hollywood just never happens. So yeah, this is a sad one; Corman was just there for so long—in a bit over a week’s time it will, in fact, be 70 years since his first film (as producer), Monster From the Ocean Floor, came out—that, even though you knew he couldn’t last forever, it’s still a shock somehow. Still, no one will ever accuse him of not having lived his life to the fullest… this is Dark Corners Review’s look back at that life from about a year ago:

Something I only noticed tonight

And I suspect I’m not the first and therefore this is not an original insight (few if any of my “insights” are), but you know how vertical video has been a thing since Vine, and now lives on as Instagram reels, Tiktok, Youtube shorts and whatever else? For some reason it struck me tonight that it goes back a lot further than that…

…And I mean RIGHT BACK to the invention of television. That there is John Logie Baird with one of his televisors. You might notice the shape of the screen. Vertical.

And that’s from one of Baird’s Phonovision discs, so you can see the picture it recorded was indeed upright (aspect ratio of 7:3, apparently). I wonder why Baird went for this rather than a squarer format like cinema (and isn’t it interesting, too, that even when Baird was experimenting with TV, cinema had long been experimenting with going wide rather than tall). I don’t know why this only hit me tonight, I can’t remember what pages I might’ve been looking at on the Interwebs that made me have this sudden realisation, but there you go, vertical video has a heritage going back to the 1920s. So if, like me, you’re not actually a fan of vertical video, well, sorry…

Those teeth are a bit loud too

Found this via one of those Tumblr archives I’ve got downloaded. I’ve seen a lot of complaints in recent years about the loudness of TV ads compared to the shows, but clearly this is not a new phenomenon… took a bit of effort to track down exactly when this issue came out, but I now find the year was 1959. So the “loud” commercial thing has been an issue since then at least (I wonder what the “facts” were; the US has laws against ad volume exceeding program volume but that’s only been since 2012) and it’s not even remotely a new thing, which is interesting. Well, to ME at any rate…

A historical flashback from Tumblr

Seeing this while going over Tumblr this evening was one of those “fucking hell” moments. I’d actually almost forgotten the whole “freedom fries” bullshit, which… I don’t know what that says about my memory and/or the world as it’s changed (?) in the years since Iraq II: Weapons of Mass Boogaloo… But it did also remind me that, somewhat less long ago, I watched this film:

That’s one of John Ford’s few surviving silent films, Four Sons from 1928. Not a film I was especially impressed by when I saw it, but I was struck by one scene… it’s set mostly during WW1, with one of the eponymous sons making his way to America before that breaks out, and when America finally enters the fray he’s fighting on the US’ side… you know, against his brothers. Anyway, there’s a bit where, once America’s joined in the war, the “German-American Delicatessen” in the small town gets rebranded as the “Liberty Delicatessen”, which has obvious resonances with the freedom fries silliness. I’ve never actually researched whether or not anything like this actually happened in reality, but I presume it must have done somewhere in the US cos that’d be a really weird detail to have invented for a film, especially when something similar did happen in reality 75 years later…

In which Ritchie Blackmore gives no fucks

I’m going through some old recordings of Rage to pick out music videos for the video collection, and the one I’m editing just now featured this here TV performance of “Fireball” by Deep Purple. Or should I say “performance”, cos whatever show this was done for clearly adhered to the common practice of bands miming (I think Gillan’s voice is the only actual live element). And there’s always been a sort of kayfabe thing about this, the audience knows what they’re listening to is playback but we never talk about that fact, but there have been some notable instances of miming musicians making it obvious…

…but I was particularly struck by this Deep Purple TV clip, cos near the end the camera captures R. Blackmore “playing” the back of his guitar. As being blatant about miming goes, this is kind of magnificent in its contempt. Paice doesn’t look like he’s putting in much effort on the drums either, but to be honest I can’t tell for sure and I may well be wrong; he’s certainly not as obvious as Blackmore if he is pretending…

Man no longer on fire, alas

Grant Page having a normal one in Mad Max (1979)

News of Grant Page’s passing is starting to come through, just heard about it via an industry friend on Facebook who worked with him on various projects. The greatest stuntman in Australia cinema somehow lived to be eighty-five, when by rights he probably shouldn’t have lived past 40 or so; he was one of the stars of Not Quite Hollywood by Mark Hartley (who seems to have first broken the news of his passing), at the premiere of which he set himself on fire cos, you know, that was the sort of thing he did for a living. It still astonishes me that he made it out of the 70s alive when you look at some of the things he did (cf. the Don Lane Show stunt in the video below), with his most recent stunt co-ordinating credit being from just four years ago. Good rest to you, sir, you worked for it.

RIP David Bordwell

SHIT. One of the good guys of film criticism has left us. I was very much one of those film students who grew up on Film Art: An Introduction, the third edition of which was one of our assigned books when I did Theatre & Film Studies at UNSW back in the 90s; we never got assigned the film history book, though that’s only because him and Thompson didn’t actually write it until many years later… I was particularly delighted to discover that at the local library some years ago, and I still think it’s probably the best example of a general film history book out there. Matt Zoller Seitz offers a solid appreciation here.