The Lady lacks a little Iron

                As a progressive it’s never going to be easy for me to present an objective view of a Margaret Thatcher biopic, especially one selling itself to female audience as Sex in the City with politics. Mercifully that’s not the case as the insipid scenes, prominent in trailers, of The Iron Lady at a hair salon or defiantly defending her peals are kept to a minimum. Instead the film is more of a tragic retrospect of Thatcher’s tenure from the perspective of her as a dithering old woman. Filthy, stinking liberals like myself will struggle to engender sympathy for and increasingly demented woman struggling to come to terms with the modern world with only the comfort of a posh house, armed guards and nicest man on the planet Jim Broadbent. However as a framing device for the telling of Thatcher’s life it’s tired, slow and almost jarring in contrast. The Iron Lady feels like two separate movies, a melancholy human drama about a ghoulish old woman desperately clinging on to her public persona and an empowering rose-tinted look at the first female Prime Minister.

                In fairness to the film though the rose tint never goes as far as to paint Thatcher in a purely positive light, Lord knows it lacks the conviction for that. Instead the film blurs both sides of the argument showing Thatcher passionately arguing against self-interested unions as they strike for reasons that are never made clear and harassed by protestors without ever explaining their motives. Likewise Thatcher’s fall from grace is condensed down to a single instance of scolding an underling for failing to put together a proper timetable. Yes, I don’t approve of the way some employers treat their staff but I also think that my government should be capable of producing a fucking document without typos.

                Really though I shouldn’t be surprised at mollycoddling from this kind of self-important Oscar Bait. Last year I sat through The Help a film which condensed the defiance, passion and outrage at the social injustices against African Americans into the story of a pretty white girl trying to get a fancy newspaper job. But as with The Help the subject matter of The Iron Lady deserves serious analysis or at least better analysis than this film dares to offer. If Maggie Thatcher was right to close the coal mines then show us why, it actually isn’t that hard. In 1984 the National Coal Board was costing the UK taxpayer £1 Billion in tax subsidiaries, nowadays liberals are outraged that banks and oil industries are offered these kinds of tax breaks. While most of us like to paint Maggie as the villain it is possible to look at the facts and frame her in a positive light.

                Or better yet show both sides of the story, the reasons why Thatcher made the decisions she made and why the opposition fought so hard against them. Show us the lives lost in the Falklands War, soldiers British and Argentinian bloodied and demoralized. Do not show us a montage of Meryl Streep sat at her desk writing condolences. Show us the people and communities impoverished by the closures of mines, the sad march of union workers back to their financially woeful families.  A woman who makes random decisions resulting in a vague amount of backlash is not interesting. A woman who agonises over difficult choices regarding the lives and well-beings of millions and then enduring the consequences is moving, powerful stuff.

                But alas, this is all to miss the point, The Iron Lady is the story of a person not a politician and we the audience can go fuck ourselves if we want otherwise. As such a story it’s certainly well made, the flashbacks draw you into a believable version of Britain through the Eighties, Seventies and even the Forties and Fifties. While an Oscar-winning performance is par for the course for Streep the real revelation is Alexandra Roach as the younger Margaret. Margaret Roberts has all the strength and conviction required for movie politics but also the vulnerability of a young woman. Roach shifts seamlessly from a dutiful daughter to a proud Tory and finally a devoted mother but as she grows the traits of all three incarnations still appear. Crucially though it isn’t until she steps into Parliament that she becomes becomes Thatcher the woman, and while Streep is as powerful as ever the performance carries nothing from Roach’s commendable start. It has to be said also that Thatcher the invalid is far more hit and miss, at times quaint, funny and very tragic but otherwise downright agonizing, an elderly relative you can’t wait to get away from.

Black Mirror: The Entire History of You feels exactly that long.

Imagine all the interesting and horrifying uses of memory grain implant, a kind of infinite external hard drive that allowed you to record and rewatch memories at will. Detectives would be able to analyse interrogations LA Noire style, stalkers could rewatch chance glimpses of their victims and your memories could be hacked by strangers to be used for their own pleasure. And all of these uses, these perversions of our own private treasured memories, would be a far better way to open The Entire History of You than the dull, generic office 'appraisal' Jessie Armstrong decides to go with. It's a bog-standard personal development-style interview utterly devoid of emotion, intrigue or humour. Everything's worded so vaguely it's difficult to even tell what line of work the protagonist is in and never provides the context of his personal investment in the job to allow us to empathise with him. The scene only serves to establish the various everyday use of the memory grain and doesn't even have the decency to simply show this then pull back to reveal Liam watching it in the back of the cab. That sums it up really, it's a scene which wastes both our time.

The worst part is there's more of this clumsy style of story-telling to come, it shares 15 Million Merits's problem of fumbling in the first act. However last time it was merely a murky stain which left things more difficult to assess here it feels more like a shit streak across a large part of the episode. The dinner party is one of the most pivotal sequences in The Entire History of You and also the most excruciating. The sexual tension between Liam's wife Ffione and former oily lover Jonas is beaten about our heads with exaggerated laughing at unfunny jokes and clammy body language. It’s something Neil Marshall got across much better in the first five minutes of The Decent which leads me to wonder how between a quiet mediation on cyberstalking and a film about girls hacking cave monsters to death the latter is the more subtle.

As far as fleshing out the social and cultural impact of the memory grain Armstrong's writing is hit and miss. To its credit The Entire History of You does a lot with very little time, showing the variety of uses for this new technology from enjoying old memories to picking apart the quality of hotels to being reviewed at airport security. It’s even permeated the language, words like 'redo' and 'gauges' are as commonplace as 'Facebooking'. There's even a mild bit of controversy about going 'grainless' which brings me to the decidedly more miss issue of 'gouging' a weird combination of physical violation and phone hacking. We're never told exactly why someone would want to steal the memories of others but the dinner party guests act so casual and saccharin about the whole thing it's disturbing. Everyone seems to have been taking charm lessons from Piers Morgan and it reaches a cringe-worthy peak when the oily Jonas takes pleasure in stroking the gouge victims scars, the equivalent of rubbing a rape victims tearing’s, and everyone coos like it's a kitten with dwarfism.

Naming the protagonist Liam means an analysis of him will inevitably sound self-flagellating, which is a good word to describe him. The memory grain is primarily utilised to torture himself about past failures and fuel his paranoia. Insecure doesn't begin to cover it. Yet for all his vulnerabilities it takes still takes a while to warm to Liam as he continues to drive a wedge between himself and his wife. It becomes contrived when he makes the leap from impotent beta male to the violent jealous husband after never previously showing any undercurrent of hostility.

Despite this the peak of Liam's paranoia actually propels The Entire History of You straight out of shittytown and into a good show. Both the infidelity drama and the technological aspect go perfectly in sync rather than simply running parallel. As Liam physically forces Jonas to erase all memory of his wife his finds some more recent than others, specifically around the time their daughter was conceived. With more evidence thrown onto his suspicions he transforms into something we can generate sympathy for. The memory grain gives him moral justification but takes everything else, his wife, his child and all semblances of warmth and humanity from his life.

Not being entirely driven by its ideas about technology The Entire History of You finds itself the weaker of the three episodes. It could have benefitted from a better look at how this idea could impact the world rather than affect one family. Yes we can all relate to a domestic drama but there are meatier stories to be found in the memory grain. Perhaps future episodes can take a stab at it because, in spite of the criticisms, I want to see more tales from the Black Mirror and in a world where we're surrounded by screens, I think we need to.

The Black Mirror is turned to talent shows in 15 Million Merits

The second part of Charlie Brooker's anthology series is a much harder beast to assess. While The National Anthem was a tighly constructed 24-esque thriller, 15 Million Merits is a more whimsical exploration of a culture driven society. The story of Bing (Daniel Kaluuya), a frustrated young man living in a world surrounded by screens, his sole distraction from the monotony of daily labour. The world of 15 Million Merits is apparently dominated by a series of exercise bikes powering a fully automated world where even a dab of toothpaste comes from the click of a button.

Booker does an excellent job of showing how this horrifying world breaks down for the average individual, from the CBBC style rooster that serves as Bing's alarm clock to the pause function that activates whenever he tries to sheild his eyes from the endless series of obnoxious adverts. In this world colour is demonised and the obese are the underclass. The only hope of escape is an X Factor style talent shot Hot Shots and its trio of judges held up as god-like figures, the only flesh and blood in a world of internet avatars (or dopplers).

Enter Abi (Jessica Brown-Findlay), a young woman with an angelic voice who approaches Amanda Seyfried levels on the Naifometer. Bing sees in her talent beauty and authenticity and immediately wants the best for her, offering up his titular merits to buy an audition on Hot Shots. This is where the story fumbles in comparison to its fast paced predecessor. It necessitates introducing Bing, exploring his world and the beginnings of this tentative romance, though a sweet romance it is. For this reason the first half hour never flows as smoothly as The National Anthem, monotony may be the point but that doesn't mean it has to be monotonous to watch.

You might recognise Daniel Kaluuya from BBC Three's supernatural drama The Fades and whatever you might think of that show Kaluuya's easily the best thing in it. Here he shows he can do a lot even when given very little, though it does help matters later when allowed more dialogue. In the first half hour he never sounds off against the constant barrage of screens or his drab work wear, like all dystopian drones he's far too comfortable but the dissatisfaction is in the performance. Knowingly awkward, hoping for better Bing carries the limb first half and downright shines in the climax.

Ah the climax, once things go tits up with Abi, finding herself in a thinly veiled Babestation parody, Bing spirals into depression and eventually righteous anger. Determined to set things right he scrimps and saves to earn a spot on Hot Shots and when he's there, with the millions watching, he sounds off against the injustice of it all. Then what happens...is probably the hardest thing assess, not because it’s not good but because it's been done before. The judges at Hot Shots find a way to package and distribute his anger in a daily broadcast, a carbon copy of the plot to the 1976 film Network. Brooker himself has commented on the film, comparing Peter Finch's descent into madness to roughly anything Glenn Beck says. In this day an age you can't call fault using the ideas of another work but it leaves bitter stain on an otherwise clever turn of fate.

Not as tight, nor as funny as The National Anthem, for all its flashy surroundings 15 Million Merits is one of the bleakest things you are likely to see this year. It's a fully fleshed out dystopian future which brilliantly reflects our modern day screen addiction but in terms of story it unfortunately comes out half-measure even if it's still the most intelligent thing on telly right now.

Black Mirror: Assemble for The National Anthem

If you read this blog then chances are that, like me, you know who Charlie Brooker is i.e. the most biting and blackly funny TV Critic working today. But there are few critics capeable of writing so well in a medium they frequently condemn (Mark Kermode has vowed never to try). It takes work to write good television, truly engrossing stuff, especially something that can tear me away from my smartphone. I watched the first installment, a satire on mass media and the court of public opinion, without pause. Compare to any given episode of Torchwood: Miracle Day, which I would repeatedly pause and you see the importance of being able to grip an audience.

The first edition, entitled The National Anthem, does this within the first few minutes. The setup, like the best, is simple but with complicated consequences and distinctly Brooker in its grim absurdity. Princess Susanna, the nation's sweetheart, has been kidnapped and will be killed unless Prime Minister Michael Callow (Rory Kinnear) has sex with a pig. Sounds like a joke and the PM thinks so too, but outside Whitehall the wheels effortlessly turn to drive this 'joke' into the only option.

Over the course of the show we see the media supressed despite the situation already trending on Twitter. The information age is allowing every Tom, Dick and Harry to give their view regardless of how intimate the issue or foul their opinion. While the public supports the PM in the early stages when the grim reality sets in the tide turns. In one glorious scene Lindsay Duncan as the PM's Press Advisor lays everything clear. If Callow does not sacrifice dignity to save the life of a beloved young woman he will be destroyed. The press will condemn, the public will riot and no one will be able to garuntee his safety or the safety of his family.

While it is interesting to watch how the freedoms of Twitter, Facebook and other social media have lead to this shift in the influence of public opinion over politics The National Anthem still struggles with the plausibility of it all. When massive outrage and rioting cannot influence a descision of tutition fees how can we believe a Prime Minister would sacrifice anything just because the world calls for it. Almost makes Brooker sound naive but the man's genius is not in creating a believable scenario but in crafting a world driven by its absurdity. The story takes on a national scale encompassing politics, the press and members of the public all of whom act exactly the way you'd expect in such an event. Every character stands out as entertaining, pitiable, funny and above all real. They carry The National Anthem from start to finish culminating in a beautiful montage of mutual disgust.

The first installment of Brooker's trilogy definately deserves a watch, more thrilling than 24 and darker than Tramadol Nights, it sets the bar high for next weeks reality satire 15 Million Merits.

The Three Musketeers get the Transformers treatment (i.e they're the C-Story in their own movie)

                Oh come on people, we both know this film is a piece of shit. If this was even a passable bit of popcorn schlock we wouldn’t be watching it in the fucking fall. The Three Musketeers, stupidly, is the story of one little shit who has little to do with the Musketeers themselves. In 17th Century France the young and cocksure D’Artagnan (Logan Lerman) travels to Paris to join the elite band of mercenaries known as the Musketeers only to find that the titular three have fallen from grace. What’s worse is that France all but under the rule of the sinister Cardinal Richeliue who plots to drive the country to war with England by convincing the young King Louis (Freddy Fox) of an affair between the young mini-Queen (Juno Temple) and the Duke of Buckingham (Orlando Bloom). To save France D’Artagnan must embark on a swashbuckling adventure and force the Musketeers to become the heroes they once were. Also it involves motherfucking Steam punk Airships, sounds like a good movie to me!

So what went wrong?

Effectively the worst things that can go wrong with a movie, starting with leading man D’Artagnan.  Lerman masters the arrogant shit aspect of the character quite well but fails to imbue him with any semblance of vulnerability, making it actually very satisfying to watch the villains wipe the floor with him in the first act. The problem gets worse when it becomes apparent that his story is to overshadow the marginally more interesting musketeers in their own goddamn movie. This brings us to the second problem; improper use of resources.

 The core of the film is predominantly ignored for the overuse of its supporting elements. Milla Jovovitch is overused as action-heavy titiliation in the director’s never ending quest to make us drool over his ridiculously hot wife in slow motion. James Cordon is overused as the comic relief which is especially damning since the film already has that in spades. As the Musketeers Athos (Matthew MacFadyen), Aramis (Luke Evans) and Porthos (Ray Stevenson) share a strong, funny chemistry that is rarely seen but carries the film’s clumsier elements. Also saddled with the undignified comic relief role is Louis, a childish caricature of French Royalty which cripples much of the film as he becomes integral to the story. That’s right folks, the driving force behind this so-called ‘plot’ is a petulant, effeminate fop worried that his teenage Queen doesn’t want to hold hands with him.

Also it’s distractingly weird that Buckingham is implied to have some past liaison with the Queen when she looks friggin Twelve. I know it’s just because Juno Temple apparently had her pituitary gland removed but it still doesn’t help. And while I’m on the subject, man Bloom is surprisingly good as Buckingham. He walks that difficult balance between menacing and comical better that most villains and while it’s not enough to help the film is certainly shows he can do a lot when offered a role with a little colour in it (even if it is the colour purple).

 While there’s still much to be said of the clumsy, witless dialogue, the vacuous romance between D’Artagnan and his standard issue love interest, and seriously Anderson stop it with the slow motion, the real nail in the coffin is the plotting. Too much time is spent in the prologue, too little on the Musketeers and especially Louis if he’s intended to be so goddamn important. Much of the second act is a joyless guerilla siege with no payoff and, in the most wishful example of franchise baiting, the story is convoluted with a series of secondary villains. As a result it’s difficult to tell who the big bad is actually supposed to be, making the third act feel like a prelude to something bigger and ending on a hollow note.

Has Torchwood lived too long?

                So Torchwood: Miracle Day…bad times. See it wasn’t always like this, in season one Torchwood was just stupid. It took a lesson from Enterprise in how to be more mature, i.e. by being more juvenile (sex addict aliens and the like) but you could see hints of a good show underneath. Season two…well I didn’t really watch season two, lost interest, nuff said but in 2009 something weird happened. See 2009 was the year I really began paying attention to the reviews around TV, Games, Comics and when I stumbled across all the praise for Children of Earth, the five-part Torchwood mini-series, I was flabbergasted. Suddenly the show that was described as ‘Scooby-doo with cumshots’ was being hailed as the science fiction event of the year.

 And you know what? It earned that. Children of Earth was a gripping science fiction thriller intermingled with heartbreaking human drama. While it’s premise may have been that aliens were using human children as beer helmets it was still a horrifying moral choice, excellently paced with standout performances and a shockingly believable insight into the lengths our government would go to in order to protect itself. So when it was announced that the show would return with another miniseries helmed once again by creator Russell T Davies and backed by and American studio, I was pumped. I was skeptical, but also excited.

                One of the things that excited me most about Miracle Day was the premise. One day nobody dies, people still get sick, they still get injured but no one dies. The boost in the human population causes a massive drain of resources, food, water, medicine and soon the human race will no longer be viable. I’ve often considered how most contemporary issues are caused by population, issues like pollution, unemployment, the waiting times in hospital all caused by an excess of people. Like it or not we need people to die to survive as a race. So how would the human race fare when you took death out of the equation?

                Well according to Miracle Day we’d handle it pretty darn well we’d just (Spoiler Warning) bung ‘em in the oven. Towards the end of the series there’s a massive two month leap into the deathless world and nothing’s changed. Where were the larger implications? Where were the two mile cues for water and food rations? Where were the public protests at the Category One camps? Where’s the suffering, the looting, the public backlash? Russell T. Davies I know stuff like this is expensive to show but seriously, make it happen. Cut out a few explosions, redress extras, hell maybe even call upon your fanbase to help but we need to see the impact this would have on the world. 

                One of the biggest problems with Miracle Day is its inability to keep up pacing through its ten-part structure. One of the issues with a mini-series is that everything has to be condensed as much as possible each episode has to take a dramatic turn and move the story along significantly. So why do so many episodes here feel like padding? The series kicks off great, introducing the conflict, dragging our characters in and throwing in plenty of action. Even the second episode keeps things going well even though it’s largely set during a ten hour plane flight. But then the plot really seems to meander through inconsequential territory. Even the episodes set at the death camps go on for far too long and never amount to much in terms of the big picture. A good mystery should be like a jigsaw where each piece is rationed out one at a time. Logically each episode should provide you with a nugget of information that makes the audience feel like they’re getting closer to the truth. Here though we spend entire episodes feeling like the plot is going nowhere. Even the death camps, as terrifying a prospect as they may be, feel like merely a symptom when we should be looking at the cause.

                Then there’s the characters, first off Gwen and good old Captain Jack Harkness are great. John Barrowman and Eve Myles are obviously having a lot of fun being back in action and really bring home the emotional conflict between them. Unfortunately the new characters do not fare so well, CIA agent Rex Matheson’s specialty seems to be either collapsing or barking orders. He constantly undermines Torchwood at every turn yet does little of value to the plot himself. And the cherry on top is that he's not even particularly interesting to watch. Esther Drummond seems to be the most human of the group a CIA analyst caught up in the whole thing and now out of her depth. However given the scale of the situation her inability to cope feels less like a fish out of water and more like the pathetic whining of a scared little girl. She never grows as a character throughout the entire series and what’s worse is that she’s seen has having some romantic fixation on Rex. Needless to say the two share little chemistry with almost no scenes showing them as friends as well as colleagues.

                It’s not all bad though. PR mastermind and satanic redhead Jilly Kitzinger may be as inconsequential as half the series but she’s always fun to watch, even if she’s saddled with the disturbingly uninteresting Oswald Danes. On that note, Jesus Bill Pullman, way to phone it in! As a child murderer who survived his own execution thanks to the Miracle, Oswald Danes was hyped up as a Lector-esque artisan killer. But Pullman never sells the role, he's neither frightening nor electrifying and it's made all the worse when the scene demands him to show some semblance of energy. Finally the one good note is CIA bigwig Allen Shapiro played by John de Lancie best known for his role on Star Trek: The Next Generation as the omnipotent Q. While there isn’t much to the character he certainly is entertaining to watch and gets the ball rolling, even if it’s too little too late.

                I do realise that writing this review after the show’s been broadcast will seem a little redundant. Anyone who’s seen Miracle Day will have seen it and BBC Wales along with Starz Entertainment are going to have all the info to decide to keep going. All I can say is that, if Torchwood does return, we need to wait. Just ignore it, unplug the TV, smash your broadband router, just wait until the reviews come out and see if it’s any good. If it’s good, enjoy it. If it’s bad then forget about it. After all for a series about immortality, Miracle Day might be the best evidence that Torchwood has lived too long. Maybe Children of Earth was a last death rattle that got it on life support and if so it might be time to pull the plug.