Filmography

[the_lady_lily]

Elizabeth - The Golden Age

The sequel for the Elizabeth film I watched a few years ago, focusing mainly on Elizabeth's experience in defeating the Spanish armada and what she thinks about Sir Walter Raleigh. It's fairly light-weight stuff, although there's a bit of torture for political effect; the acting isn't bad, although I'm not entirely convinced by Cate Blanchett's characterisation of Elizabeth and the whole 'hi, I can't really manage the whole having relationships, being queen and being a virgin' thing. It's normally quite coherent but there are a couple of points where it shades into hysteria in a not entirely appropriate way - but then, they are the moments of greatest crisis and so are that much harder to pitch. Not bad, but not the most amazing thing in the world ever either.

Alien

No, I had never seen this before. It's aged surprisingly well, actually. It's a very taught, very sparse narrative of horror and fear, Us against the mostly unseen Other, that does some incredibly interesting things with managing atmosphere and creating tension. It also pares down the narrative to the absolute minimum necessary, which I quite liked as it kept it feeling very timely. Despite the general datedness of some of the computer technology, otherwise it still felt as if it had aged well. There's a whole lot there about women and the monstrous and stuff, but I'm not going to go into it in huge detail as other people have explored it in much more detail than I've got energy for here.

Aliens

The sequel. It has aged less well. It is much more obviously a 'war boys' movie, although with parts of that trope queered in interesting ways; that said, the Rambo-style of the approach feels very dated in comparison to the smooth lines of the original. The whole maternal instinct line is also pulled out much more into the main plot of the film, with some interesting results - I'm not a hundred percent sure about them, but thematically it makes for some cool connections with the first film. That said, I don't think I'm going to bother following up with the rest of the franchise, as I can see it's going to enter more trad horror territory before too long, and I don't think I'm particularly invested in seeing that.

Life on Mars, Season 2

I watched season one of this with mirabehn in one very packed weekend where we didn't do very much of anything else. It is compelling. I enjoyed it very much, and thought John Simm was excellent as Sam, the man catapulted back to the 1970s. I also quite liked how the series resolved itself and Sam's choice about which world to live in, especially because the last two or three episodes in particular managed to create a really painful tension between Sam's loyalties to the people in the 1970s and his desire to return to his own time. Questions of loyalty and reasonableness and what was right were played out in quite problematic and interesting ways, which made it rewarding to watch and see Sam struggle with the choices - although, that said, perhaps a little more struggling explicit might not have been a bad thing.

Also, Philip Glenister is awesome. I mean, yes, Gene Hunt is dreadful and far from a lovely character, but he's played with such joie de vivre that you can't help but enjoy him.

Ashes to Ashes, Season 1

Apparently the sequel series to Life on Mars is just as compelling, because I chewed through the first season of this quite quickly too (and am now started on the second - hurrah for Lovefilm instaplay). On this occasion, a policewoman specialising in psychology is transported back to the 1980s when she is shot; the question is whether she is alive or dead, and whether she too will return to her right time. This season revolves around her parents' death in a car bomb in the same year she arrives; will stopping it mean that she can go back home to her own daughter?

Philip Glenister is still awesome, and his interaction with Alex Drake (played by Keeley Hawes) is a lot of fun, because there are tensions there which didn't exist in his relationship with Sam, and they make the most of it. Alex Drake is also awesome and I have a lot of time for her. It's willing to push the edge of the box a bit more, to create a little bit more of a fantasia than Life on Mars did, and for the first series, that works quite well. (They carry it over in a different way to season two, and after one episode I am not yet convinced, but this is by the by.)

So, yes. More good, intellectually chewy television with a lot of car chases and silliness of the sort that I enjoy quite a bit.

20 - The Eagle - this will be reviewed Elsewhere in due course.

Comments

[sharp-blue.livejournal.com]

Regarding the Alien movies, the third is something like a second-rate remake of “Alien” and the fourth a third-rate remake of “Aliens” (and also the film that came closest to making me walk out of the cinema before it finished). I wouldn’t bother with either, unless you’re interested in seeing the ways in which “Alien: Resurrection” prefigures “Firefly”.