Movies - Shadow Dancer review

FILM REVIEW

Review Scoring Chart - 10: Masterpiece; 9: Outstanding; 8: Very Good; 7: Good; 6: Above Average; 5: Average; 4: Below Average; 3: Bad; 2: Awful; 1: Reprehensible; 0: Non-Functional.

  
SHADOW DANCER

Dir: James Marsh

Stars: Andrea Riseborough, Clive Owen, Gillian Anderson, Aiden Gillen, David Wilmot

Running Time: 101mins

Following in the footsteps of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Shadow Dancer is an absorbing period thriller about divided loyalties, instability in the British intelligence services, and the personal cost of political turmoil. Director James Marsh is best known for his acclaimed documentaries Man On Wire and Project Nim, but also directed an episode of the astounding television drama Red Riding. His first foray into cinematic fiction shows a confident command of his craft, steadily escalating the tension and never using words when visuals will do.

Where Tinker was coldly methodical in its approach to the genre, Marsh centres his story around a single Irish mother, Colette McVeigh (Andrea Riseborough), born into a family firmly rooted in the Irish nationalist movement, but forced to work with a British agent (Clive Owen) to protect her son.

   

Television - Futurama '31st Century Fox / Naturama' mid-season finale review

The strength of the first half of Futurama's seventh season (sorry, but that's the least convoluted phrasing I could come up with) has been consistency. Flashes of genuine inspiration have been in short supply, but the laughs have been coming at a steady enough rate to justify continued viewing. The writers evidently have evidently given up on devising coherent stories, but a few episodes have elevated themselves on the strength of individual gags. Fun On A Bun represents the high point for humour, while Near Death Wish showed the series still had some heart to accompany its increasingly cartoonish absurdism.

'31st Century Fox' and 'Naturama', unfortunately, bring the season to its midway break with not only its two worst episodes, but two of the worst the series has ever done. '31st Century Fox' scraped together a handful of chuckles, but its gags felt too forced to compensate for a meaningless, scattershot narrative which only seemed to exist to justify the lame 'joke' in the title. 'Naturama' took that same pointlessness and multiplied it while subtracting all the laughs.

 

Unfinished Business: Steam Sale Backlog - Bastion

[Unfinished Business is a feature where I take an unplayed game or unwatched DVD that has been languishing on my shelf and chronicle my experiences with it. THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR THE ENTIRE GAME.]
  

I feel like I should be more enthusiastic about Bastion than I am: it is a game with a great deal to recommend it and only some niggling control issues (in the PC version, at least) on the downside. Its hand-painted visual style and gently engaging soundtrack fuse a colouring book vision of a fallen utopia to the sounds and iconography of a frontier Western. As graphical technology slowly flattens out and developers scramble to include the latest lighting or physics effect to prove their game's superiority over its rivals, it's a welcome relief to find a game focusing so strongly on its artistic, rather than technological, identity.

The in-game narration is another neat touch, lending a trace of hope to the otherwise melancholy tone. In many end-of-life scenarios, books and stories are treasured as links to a better past, providing hope that such good days may come again with old mistakes learnt from and repaired. Bastion has the player creating their own story, setting out a legend of how the world came to be repaired following a fall, rather than how it reached that point. It's a subtle framing device, putting an original slant on a well-worn concept.
  

Television - Breaking Bad 'Say My Name' review

The way society perceives success is very odd. If someone is classified as successful, the term traditionally implies the person in question has plenty of money, significant status, an attractive husband/wife, many high-value properties, all the gold they can eat, and so forth. If someone lacks those things, but is fulfilled, with a stable family life and good understanding of their place in the universe, people may call that person many complimentary things, but rarely successful. Perhaps this is because material success has a quantifiable value, allowing it to be directly measured against other things and people, whereas 'spiritual' success (for lack of a less wishy-washy term) is subjective. Someone can say they're happy when they aren't, and there's not much anyone can do to disprove it, whereas no-one can claim to be wealthy when they're living on a pittance.

This materialist bias is necessary for society to function and grow: humans are tribal by nature, and if all anyone did was aim to make themselves content with their lot, nobody would strive for anything beyond the needs of them and their families. If people weren't competitive, eager to establish hierarchies and physical proof of superiority as a society or individually, the human race would either still be living in caves, or have been picked off by some bigger, deadlier animal with greater survival instincts. That desire to prove oneself and establish dominion has made humanity the planet's dominant species. Unfortunately, it also tends to create monsters like Walter White.

  

Retrospective: GoldenEye 007 (Gaming, 1997)

If you want to feel old, consider that today marks GoldenEye 007's fifteenth birthday. The seminal shooter of its time, few games have entrenched themselves so firmly in the memories of a generation: just imagine what teenagers of the late '90s might have achieved had it not been for Slappers Only in Complex, or Proximity Mines in Aztec. How many friendships might still have been going strong were it not for the unfairly diminutive Oddjob providing too great a temptation on the character select screen.

Though many of its players' fondest memories come from hours spent pretending not to look at their rival's quarter of the deathmatch screen, that pioneering multiplayer is only a small part of a legacy rarely acknowledged as fully as it deserves to be. GoldenEye 007 is a landmark achievement in game design, both very much the product of its time and a work whose influence is undeniably the source of the FPS-dominated gaming culture we play in today.

  

Television - Futurama 'Viva Mars Vegas' review

Futurama may not be as inventive as it was in its pre-Comedy Central heyday, but this season has seen the series' writers settle into a comfort zone allowing them to produce consistently solid episodes, occasionally elevated by the characters' inherent comedic strengths. Futurama's cast is more outwardly ridiculous than that of The Simpsons, perhaps explaining why the latter has so completely gone to pieces, forcing its characters to act in ways increasingly outside their established norm for the sake of generating storylines. Futurama is also a much younger series, of course, but eight seasons is nothing to be sniffed at these days.

'Viva Mars Vegas' was one of the season's less interesting episodes, especially following last week's sweet 'Near Death Wish', but managed to get away with its bonkers premise because of the inherently ridiculous rules on which Futurama is based.

  

Unfinished Business: Steam Sale Backlog - Deus Ex Human Revolution 'The Missing Link' DLC

[Unfinished Business is a feature where I take an unplayed game or unwatched DVD that has been languishing on my shelf and chronicle my experiences with it.]

Deus Ex: Human Revolution was one of my favourite games last year, managing to be both respectful to the groundbreaking original while streamlining some of its more unwieldy elements and allowing players a welcome degree of freedom in achieving their goals. The game tailed off at the end, slipping into thoroughly unwelcome modern habits of forcing the player down certain paths and attempting to disguise its diversion into linearity with meaningless, pre-set 'choices'. The game's greatest triumph came in its city hubs, vast urban spaces packed with sidequests, hidden pathways and locked doors. During the story missions, the game struggled to maintain that same sense of openness.

It's a shame that the Human Revolution DLC, 'The Missing Link', fixates on the weakest part of the game and mostly ignores the positives. DLC is not something I'm willing to invest in normally, but the opportunity of spending a few extra hours in Adam Jensen's world for a tuppence (damn your temptations, Steam Sale!) seemed as good a place to start as any. Unfortunately, it ended up summing up much of what is unappealing for players about the DLC model.

  

Television - Breaking Bad 'Buyout' review

'Buyout' feels like an episode which could prove pivotal in Breaking Bad's mythology, marking the moment when Jesse finally started to see through the layers of manipulation Walter White has been crushing him under, but also spinning its wheels a little as we approach the halfway point of the final season. For all its funny, tragic, and heart-stopping moments, of which there were plenty, there was a little too much which felt like the gang had returned to the breaking point they were at earlier in the season, with rebellion from the core members of the group against Walter White's unstoppable obsession with empire building.

At this stage, what seems most likely to happen is that this first half of the season will reveal the tiny cracks in the foundations of Walt's dream as they expand, before finally tearing the ground out from under him as the series enters its year-long break (boo!) until the concluding part of this final season comes to a head in 2013 and we catch up with a fifty-two year old Walt with a machine gun in the boot of his car and an unknown score to settle.

 

Movies - The Expendables 2 review

FILM REVIEW 
  
Review Scoring Chart - 10: Masterpiece; 9: Outstanding; 8: Very Good; 7: Good; 6: Above Average; 5: Average; 4: Below Average; 3: Bad; 2: Awful; 1: Reprehensible; 0: Non- Functional. 

  
THE EXPENDABLES 2

Dir: Simon West

Stars: Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Yu Nan

Running Time: 102mins 
  

The Expendables 2 is exactly what you want it to be, and nothing more. It's an extravaganza of big explosions, awful puns, ancient stars and barely-there plotting. Like all good ensemble pictures, there's an ample serving of cheese to pay off the audience's nerdvestment in the icons they came to see. Joss Whedon successfully recognised that fact with The Avengers earlier this year, as Stallone does here.

  
True, where Whedon's dialogue was razor-sharp and his CG-infused spectacle colourful and unashamedly comic book, Stallone's eye is directed at altogether trashier territory. The film stock is grimy, the dialogue creaks even before being delivered by ageing actors not recognised for vocal finesse, and the only flashes of colour come from bad guys being torn apart by bullets. It's fun in its own way, and despite struggling to find the iconic moments Whedon brought so effortlessly, a clear step up from its predecessor and a solid example of the giddy pleasures a straightforward actioner has to offer.

Television - Futurama 'Near Death Wish' review

'Near Death Wish' represented an anomaly among this season's episodes of Futurama. Where most have sacrificed coherent storytelling for one-liners and ridiculous sight gags, sometimes successfully and sometimes not, this episode downplayed the ridiculous humour in favour of something approaching a narrative. The result was a half-hour which never threatened to be among the year's funniest, but hit the right character notes and felt more gratifying as a result.

At this point, we've known these characters long enough that there's only so much new that can be revealed about them without seeming like arbitrary detail, added in for the sake of filling an episode before moving on without another word spoken. The revelation that the Professor's parents were still alive, albeit in a comatose state in the Near Death Star, will almost certainly never be mentioned again and at first seemed an excuse for the show to fall back on fan service in lieu of any original ideas. Fortunately, the detail added to the Professor's back story fitted in nicely with what was already known, while adding just enough to earn its sentimental climax.

 

Television - Breaking Bad 'Dead Freight' review

I've been reading through pages and pages of internet commenters nit-picking 'Dead Freight' for liberties it may or may not have taken in the sequence when Walter White and co. robbed the freight train. Honestly, it baffles me. Not that the train drivers never thought to glance behind them, or that a car didn't turn up sooner, or that no-one spotted the digger during the preparatory phase, or that there weren't biologists out exploring the desert (seriously). What baffles me is that even when faced with a sequence so suspenseful, intense and masterfully directed - right down to the train chugging along in time with the soundtrack - all people can do is complain. Yes, it's the internet, and complaining is at least twenty percent of what people do here (with the remaining eighty given over to social media and porn), but as a writer and someone who loves good writing, it's a habit which bothers me.

One person even said they were 'willing' to give the show 'a pass this time'. Well, that's generous. Breaking Bad has delivered four plus seasons of among the greatest drama ever televised, and that's just enough to earn a single 'pass' for not living up to some ridiculous standards of what passes for realism? Here's something complainant out there should know: realism is boring. Maybe it would be possible in the real world for a train robbery to take place, but showing all the steps needed to mitigate the various security measures and possible worst case scenarios which could happen would take up most of the episode, be unspeakable dull, and all to satisfy a handful of grumblers who want to feel clever despite openly displaying their inability to grasp the concept of fiction. Yes, shortcuts were taken, but when they make the ride this much more thrilling, there's no justification for moaning.

 

Television - Futurama 'Free Will Hunting' review

Not many shows would have the audacity to end on a main character celebrating a conviction for attempted murder, but it's one of the ridiculous sight gags which Futurama has been doing particularly well this season, often salvaging episodes which offered little as a whole. 'Free Will Hunting' was one of those, with barely enough plot to fill five minutes, let alone the running time's twenty-one, and relying on its individual jokes to get through. That's not always a bad thing, as proven by last week's often hilarious 'Fun On A Bun', but considering what a terrific premise was in place for this episode, the meandering felt like a missed opportunity for an entertaining exploration of a big philosophical concept.

What little genuine reflection there was translated into a handful of jokes probably funnier on the page than in action. Bender went on a search for free will because a judgment against him ruled his decisions were solely the result of his programming, but along the way was seen making a number of independent choices. The philosophical question remains open enough that some could argue this in itself was satire - it doesn't matter if we see Bender's choices or not, as there's no really saying whether or not it's still just his software talking - but given how the episode reduces the concept in one of its last and most successful gags, of Bender trying to shoot the professor, it seems unlikely the writers were trying to engage the question on any deeper level than was immediately apparent.

   

Unfinished Business: Steam Sale Backlog - Just Cause 2 (Games)

[Unfinished Business is a feature where I take an unplayed game or unwatched DVD that has been languishing on my shelf and chronicle my experiences with it.]

If The Void, last week's entry in my Steam backlog playthrough, represented gaming at its most artistic, this week's title is unabashedly ridiculous and trashy. Just Cause 2's sole aim is to indulge its players' every destructive whim, stripping away every one of the medium's pretensions to storytelling merit or depth in favour of a constant flow of gargantuan explosions in colourful environments.

Though hardly subtle in its aims, the game is powered by the kind of experimental streak so lacking in many of its peers. The third and first person shooting genres have mostly settled into a COD-inspired groove of reducing the player's interactivity with their surroundings to almost nothing, with their sole responsibility being to hold the analogue stick forward and press the firing trigger occasionally. Just Cause 2 is not a great game, but lays the right foundations for one to be created in the series' future.

 

Movies - 360 review

FILM REVIEW 

Review Scoring Chart - 10: Masterpiece; 9: Outstanding; 8: Very Good; 7: Good; 6: Above Average; 5: Average; 4: Below Average; 3: Bad; 2: Awful; 1: Reprehensible; 0: Non- Functional.

360

Dir: Fernando Meirelles

Stars: Jude Law, Rachel Weisz, Anthony Hopkins, Ben Foster

Running Time: 115mins

[This article was first published on Flixist as part of my London Film Festival coverage. It is republished to coincide with the movie's US and UK release.]

My coverage of this year's London Film Festival kicks off with the latest movie from Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles, whom many of you may know from his outstanding 2002 crime thriller, City Of God, or perhaps his 2005 adaptation of John Le Carré's The Constant Gardner. Meirelles takes his time choosing the right project, with a three or four year gap quite common between his movies. It is difficult to pin down exactly what he looks for, but common among his best known works are scathing looks at social and international problems - the influence of the favela gangs in City Of God, the West's use of Africa as a medical testing ground in Constant Gardner - seen through the eyes of vividly depicted central characters.

In that respect, it is easy to see what must have attracted him to 360, Peter Morgan's script (very loosely inspired by Arthur Schnitzel's play, La Ronde) about the connections people make in life and love. Like Meirelles, it has an international sensibility, spanning across the globe, and a strong romantic streak behind the central conflicts. Unfortunately, its storytelling is rather too mechanical and contrived to connect on the human level it so desperately aspires to.

Television - Breaking Bad 'Fifty One' review

The similarities between Walter White and the late Gustavo Fring were becoming apparent last week. Walt shares one of Gus' problems - an unruly subordinate who cannot be eliminated due to their vital role in the meth operation - but none of the self-control which allowed him to stay in control of a vast criminal empire for the better part of twenty years. As Mike noted: 'Just because you shot Jesse James, don't make you Jesse James.'

Gus let victory slip through his fingers due to one moment of bravado, allowing his anger to push him into declaring victory before crossing the line. That small miscalculation cost him his life. Walt is all bravado, all the time, and despite his former profession as a teacher, is not a man who learns lessons from past mistakes.

  

The Naked Truth - Anne Hathaway

[The Naked Truth is a feature celebrating the lives and careers of the most talented women that pop culture has to offer. The fact they're also all incredibly gorgeous is just a great excuse to post as many stunning images of them as possible. You can see more of this sort of thing at Flixist's Some Like It Hot feature. CLICK THE IMAGES TO SEE THEM IN FULL SIZE.]

The Dark Knight Rises may have slightly disappointed as the conclusion to Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, but the casting of the multi-talented Anne Hathaway as Selina Kyle was an unquestionable success. Following in such prestigious pawprints as Lee Meriwether, Eartha Kit (leave it, Pierce!), Julie Newmar, Adrienne Barbeau in the 1992 animated series, and Michelle Pfeiffer - Halle Berry's interpretation representing the runt of the litter - Hathaway hit a perfect balance between the steely but vulnerable Selina and her smoky, deadly alter-ego. Plus, she looked phenomenal in the catsuit. You'd better believe there's photographic evidence after the jump.

It's the latest step in a career which has seen Hathaway cement her place as one of the few actresses who can be both unashamedly sexy while still respected for her dramatic talents. Her versatility has stood her in good stead, continuing to employ her skills as a comic while bagging an Academy Award nomination for more serious work. She's flexible, fashionable and feline: Anne Hathaway, welcome to your Naked Truth...

  

Television - Futurama 'Fun On A Bun' review

A disregard for anything approaching coherent or logical plots has diminished Futurama since its move to Comedy Central, making episodes feel as though the writers couldn't care less about the integrity of the series' world or its characters, but 'Fun On A Bun' took that problem to such an extreme that it turned around and became funny again.

I still live in hope that, one day, the show will return to being able to channel its trademark absurdism through something approaching a coherent narrative - 'The Devil's Hands Are Idle Playthings' remains my favourite example of Futurama telling a completely bonkers story in a tight, logically structured manner, without veering off on ridiculous tangents for the sake of a few cheap jokes - but it's hard to complain when an episode starts with an Oktoberfest fallen victim to the unfortunate German urge to make things disciplined, respectable and cultured, before ending in a battle between spaceships and mammoth-riding neanderthals, firing sabre-tooth tigers from catapults and unleashing a giant sloth against a Jamaican bureaucrat (a fine example of an ancient joke being redeemed by brilliant timing).

 

Unfinished Business: Steam Sale Backlog - The Void (Games)

[Unfinished Business is a feature where I take an unplayed game or unwatched DVD that has been languishing on my shelf and chronicle my experiences with it.]

Another Steam Sale has come and gone, leaving my library drowning in discounted, unplayed games in its wake. Over the coming weeks, I'll be using this Unfinished Business feature to push through my backlog and chronicle my experience with each title. The first article, written prior to my summer holiday, covered this year's indie critical darling, Dear Esther. While this week's title heads even further away from the mainstream, future instalments will cover (not necessarily in this order) the likes of Just Cause 2, the Half-Life 2 episodes, Batman Arkham City, Deus Ex: Human Revolution DLC 'The Missing Link', Bastion, Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Football Manager 2012. In other words, there'll be a bit of something for everyone.

Whatever your tastes, it's unlikely a game like The Void will fit into them. When players or critics talk about 'art' games, the reference is usually to visually stylish games such as Ōkami or Viewtiful Joe, along with the occasional more appropriate example like the aforementioned Esther. Such questionable choices are sadly demonstrative of the industry's struggle to comprehend the nature of artistic expression, and how the gaming medium can fit into it. The former two examples are cited for their beauty alone, despite neither seeking to evoke any particular emotion or reflection from their players. If an artistic experience is solely measured by attractiveness, as such choices would suggest, Pippa Middleton's buttocks should perhaps be reclassified as a mobile art gallery. Dear Esther has greater depth (than Ōkami or Viewtiful Joe, not Pippa Middleton's rear), but scales back its interactivity to such an extent it can only debatably be called a 'game'. The Void, on the other hand, is one of the first games to have a legitimate claim to being a work of art in its own right.