TV I'm watching...

I've got a mate who comes around to watch new episodes of Doctor Who as soon as I've got them - this year, with only four Doctor Who specials being produced, we've sought out other TV shows to keep us occupied. Craig has not seen Deadwood or Arrested Development, and so I'm taking great pleasure in watching those shows again with him. We're up to the start of Deadwood series 2, and about halfway through series 1 of Arrested Development. But these shows are not why I've taken to the keyboard to write a post...

Two years ago, several friends started telling me to watch Dexter. "You'll love it," they would assure me. I was unconvinced. A show about a serial killer? Sure, it was fun and naughty when Hannibal Lecter walked off into the sunset to audience applause in The Silence of the Lambs, but isn't it time we moved on from turning serial killers into cult heroes? My housemate watched series 1, which was given to me - almost forced on me in fact - by a mate, and said it was very good. Still I didn't watch it. I bought my housemate series 2 on DVD for his birthday, and I've been watching it with him.

Well, call me a convert. I think I imagined something more "funky" like NCIS, full of flash frames and jump cuts and obsessed with forensic work. Instead, it's a supremely engaging character drama with a terrific cast and compelling writing that never fails to draw me in. Michael C. Hall - so good in Six Feet Under - is equally good here in a completely different role. And pretty easy on the eyes, as well! I'll be checking out series 1 after I've finished the second series for sure.

And I've just seen the first episode of series 5 of Lost, a show which was so promising, so full of potential in the early days, potential that has been squandered and diminished in direct proportion to the amount of ideas the writers have been dragging in. Lost stopped being compelling a couple of years ago, usually due to the writers (I really hate these guys) seeming to believe their silly mysteries are more interesting than their characters. The cast are great, and the production values are top notch, but the contrived manner in which characters in the show don't reveal things to each other in order to keep secrets from the audience has gone beyond wearying. I've kept watching however - there have been individual stand out scenes and even episodes, and Michael Giacchino's music is so wonderful it usually helps carry me through the rest of it. Having just watched series 5, episode 1 however, I wonder if maybe it's not time to give up. The two words that kept coming to mind throughout the episode were "dull" and "senseless". The time travel shenanigans here seem as if the writers (those bastards again!) saw Stephen Moffat's episodes of Doctor Who and tried to appropriate the ideas without an understanding of how to make them work or how to make the audience care. I'll give it another episode or two but I doubt I'll make it through to the end of the series.

On the bookshelf: Dracula, by Bram Stoker

I'm re-reading Bram Stoker's classic Dracula for the umpteenth time - I read it at least once every few years, and it never fails to captivate me. I wouldn't have thought it possible - I've killed the impact of many of my favourite books through excessive re-reading (I have to rest 'Salem's Lot, The Shining, and the Dune series for a goodly number of years before I pick them up again) - but I'm enjoying the Stoker novel more than ever. I own the hardcover edition of the book illustrated with the wonderful paintings of Greg Hildebrandt (see above) - and although on this reading I'm encountering an irritating number of editorial errors ('from' is frequently typed as 'form'), it's not detracting from my enjoyment. I love the contrast of the highly literary device of telling the story through journals and diary entries (a device which was old-hat even when Dracula was first published in 1897) with the almost hysterical alarm at wanton female sensuality. Of course, cinematic adaptations and derivations of Dracula are legion, and enjoying the book as much as I am prompts me to recall my favourites and thoughts on other major adaptations.

Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (F. W. Murnau, 1922) can seem badly dated - certainly it has no-hope of frightening a contemporary audience. But it's imagery, once seen, is indelible, especially the grotesque Count Orlok (the legendary Max Schreck), and many of the special camera effects are still arresting. All the characters in the film were given new names in the flimsiest of attempts to disguise the unlicensed adaptation, which didn't pull the wool over the widow Stoker's eyes. She was very nearly successful in having every print and negative of the film destroyed. I've never owned the DVD, due to the bewildering array of versions of this public domain film on the market, some of them lacking the colour tinting, some looking like the print was found in a trashcan, some with poorly translated intertitles, some with horrendous new scores... the list goes on. Rumours of a forthcoming Blu-ray release excite me - surely whoever is taking the trouble to create a High Definition disc will be trying to get it right. It's been some years since I last saw this film so I'm sure to enjoy it even more for the wait.

Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931) is not a particular favourite of mine, despite Bela Lugosi's cold, commanding Count. Like Nosferatu I haven't seen it in a while, but it always seemed stiff and stagey to me - perhaps the result of it being more directly adapted from the hit play by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston than the novel. I'm probably due for another look at this one - Philip Glass wrote a score for it in 1999 which is available as an alterate audio track on the DVD, and that at least is worth checking out.

The 1958 Terence Fisher Dracula is another one which is a little lost on me. Hammer Films, the UK studio responsible for this, the 50s Frankenstein films, and scores of other horrors to keep Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, and Vincent Price in work for years, brought brilliant Technicolor design, dollops of gore, and busty vampire brides the like of which would never have been allowed in the 1930s, but the waste of Christopher Lee's mellifluous voice - Stoker's verbose Count is given only a handful of lines in this film, and a couple of the later films give him no dialogue at all - is a major liability to me.

One of my favourite versions was made for British television by the BBC in 1977. The two part Count Dracula was the first time I'd seen Stoker's story accurately conveyed on screen. It's a strange beast, part po-faced BBC period drama (the props, locations, and costumes were no doubt staples of many a Jane Austin adaptation), part Doctor Who (the use of video-tape for interiors and what would have been at the time cutting edge video effects but are now quaint oddities). But for once, most of Stoker's vision hits the screen intact, and the cast is brilliant, particularly Jack Shepard's Renfield and Frank Finlay in the definitive interpretation of Van Helsing - so good he would play the role again as Dr. Hans Fallada in Tobe Hooper's terrible but highly entertaining 1985 sci-fi/zombie apocalypse fiasco Lifeforce.

John Badham's 1979 Dracula was based on a hugely successful revival of the Deane/Balderston play, and like the 1931 version the role of the Count was played by the same actor who had played him on stage. This time Frank Langella dons the cape, and it is one of my favourite versions, trumping the 1977 BBC version through lavish big budget production values. It's generally not as highly regarded as the Bela Lugosi or Christopher Lee adaptations, although I don't understand why. Langella's magnetic Count is given terrific support by the likes of Donald Pleasance and Laurence Olivier (the latter positively hamming it up as Van Helsing), with Kate Nelligan a standout as the progressive Victorian Miss who comes under the vampire's spell. The photography and production design are gorgeous and the whole package is wrapped up in a lush score by John Williams which is equal parts horror, romance, and action - a score that would surely be as highly regarded as his work for films such as Star Wars (1977), Superman (1978), and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) but for the fact that this version of Dracula remains a barely remembered box office failure.

There's one last important adaptation of Stoker's novel which I'm going to discuss here, and of course it is Bram Stoker's Dracula (Francis Coppola, 1992). My excitement grew in the months leading up to the release of this film - were we to finally see a good version of the story that remained faithful to Stoker? It certainly seemed so - from his name in the title to the inclusion of all the main characters (most other adaptations usually collapse Lucy's three suitors into two characters, if not one, and Lucy and Mina swap names randomly at the whim of the screenwriters) it looked like Coppola and screenwriter James V. Hart (riding high on Steven Speilberg's filming of his screenplay Hook, in that period of grace where no one had yet seen the film) were determined to bring Stoker's novel to the screen. And the cast was a terrific line-up, never mind the dubious casting of Keanu Reeves. The lurid mess which ended up on the screen saw an attempt at a faithful re-telling crowded out by an invented romance between Dracula and Mina, here depicted as the re-incarnation of his centuries dead sweetheart. The way James Hart crowed about this plot addition, you'd think he'd written Hamlet - no matter that exactly the same ploy was used by a 1973 television version starring Jack Palance as the Count. What is the point in trying to include all of Stoker's story and then having to rush through it to make room for a Count with a bleeding heart? Stoker's eroticism is as cold as the grave - Dracula refers to Mina as his "wine press" - but Gary Oldman's Count can hardly bear to bring himself to inflict the fatal bite upon Winona Ryder's Mina, so rent is he from his love for her. If you didn't need a sick bucket for the gore, you'd still want one handy for the romance. The performances from the aforementioned stellar line-up seem to come from ten different films, every actor encouraged by their indulgent Uncle Francis to find the histrionic madness in their character, with the result that Tom Waits as Renfield - the one bona fide madman of the text - seems sane beside the shrilling of everyone from Reeves and Ryder to Anthony Hopkins and Richard E. Grant. And the crying shame of it all is that so many good, even great, qualities are in this film, from Eiko Ishioka's stunning costumes and Greg Cannom's exceptional make up work to Sadie Frost's vampish (I'm sorry, there's no other word for it) Lucy and the darkness and power of Wojciech Kilar's score, by turns lyrical and brooding. With so much that is so right, it's amazing that the film as a whole is so wrong.

Diminishing returns and 'The Lord of the Rings' trilogy

Damn, The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) is a fine film. A careful, respectful film. The pressure was on: generations of Tolkien fans were anxious to see if co-writer/director Peter Jackson could pull it off. Rumour has it almost the entire budget for the planned trilogy was spent getting the first film finished, and that the additional funding to complete the next two films would be dependent on box office takings.

Even in a three hour film, Peter Jackson had to race through Tolkien's narrative, honing in on following the journey of Frodo (Elijah Wood) and the Ring. The most sorely felt loss for many Tolkien readers was the omission of Tom Bombadil, but for the most part the narrative compression was done with great care and skill, imbuing the story with a terrific sense of urgency.

The finished result won critical raves, played to huge - and adoring - audiences, and delighted all but the most hardcore of Tolkien's fanbase. Those that went looking for things to quibble about could find them, but they were more likely to be disputes about Elvish dialects rather than genuine problems with the adaptation. Some purists protested elements such as the involvement of Arwen (Liv Tyler) in events her character wasn't part of in the book, as in when Frodo journeys to Rivendell. Others found the use of Gimli (John Rhys-Davies) as comic relief ("no-one tosses the Dwarf!") objectionable. And for the most literary minded, no film could capture the beauty of Tolkien's prose. Of course, these people made up the tiniest proportion of the cinema going audience, who largely had the time of their lives - the aforementioned line from Gimli never failed to get a huge laugh whenever I saw the film at the theatre, which was probably five or six times.

It's a genuinely thrilling and moving film, sure footed from the first moments to the last. One walked out of the cinema already anticipating the next film, and knowing that there was a genuine Christmas present coming for audiences for the next two years. Peter Jackson showed a gift for maximising the drama of the story - the encounter with the Balrog being the best example, a sequence deliciously drawn out as the Fellowship descends gigantic crumbling stairways in flight from the as yet unseen fire demon. The excitement is cranked up to a pants-wetting level before the reveal of the magnificent CG creation, until now only glimpsed in a brief shot in the trailers. The tactic worked again for the following films - the Ents in The Two Towers (2002) and giant spider Shelob in The Return of the King (2003) were also cleverly withheld from being overexposed in promotional material. The only way to really see these beauties in action was to buy a ticket.

The production was unique - the three films were shot over an extended period of many, many months, a time frame which encompassed the release of the first two films. After the box office success of the first film demonstrated what a gold mine the trilogy would be, the only limitations on the resources allocated to Peter Jackson were those of completing the films in time for the release dates. Scenes were shot, reworked, and shot again, sometimes in a genuine two way dialogue between film makers and audience. When Tolkien fans responded negatively to news that sequences featuring Arwen at the battle of Helm's Deep had been shot, the relevant material was reshot without her. Enthusiastic response to the Dwarf tossing gag meant that the humorous aspect to the Gimli character was emphasised in the subsequent films.

The release of the extended version of Fellowship on DVD was a new revelation, the already great film enriched by the additional material, the narrative more fully rounded, although such was the cleverness of John Gilbert's outstanding editing work we never saw the rough edges in the shorter version.

The Two Towers was released the following year to an even more enthusiastic response than the first film, with the remarkable creation of Gollum - an unprecedented fusion of performance and character animation - a particular favourite. I enjoyed the film enough, but felt something was amiss. It wasn't until after a couple of days thinking about it that I came around to the conclusion that I loved it. My friend Kate remarked that it was a common response to the film among people she knew, with her take being that it took a couple of days for people to put a positive spin on the film. I disagreed at the time, but I now think Kate's comment was pretty astute. The screenwriters have again grafted new elements onto Tolkien's story, but unlike the first film, some new story threads seemed out of place here. The warg attack which leads to Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) being separated from his fellows on the way to Helm's Deep is the best/worst example. In a film which already had a few too many fake-out character deaths (did anyone really think that Billy Boyd's Pippin was trampled to death by that horse?), trying to wring emotion from the notion that Aragorn falls from a cliff and out of the story was a bit much.

This fight sequence provided an action beat on the long trek to Helm's Deep, but the main raison d'etre for the narrative detour was to rope Liv Tyler's Arwen back into the story. She appears to the wounded Aragorn in a vision, spurring him to fight for life and resolving his feelings in the romantic triangle with Arwen and Eowyn (Miranda Otto). Tolkien's famously laddish adventure has no time for love triangles - Eowyn pines for Aragorn but there is never even a hint that he would reciprocate - and I can't help feeling that there's an element of cynicism here, a conscious attempt to make sure that the female half of the audience remains engaged amongst all the Orcs and battle cries. Viggo Mortensen seemingly concurs with Tolkien, as his Aragorn never offers more than undying friendship and respect to Eowyn, and as a result the whole sequence feels more like screenwriting than an organic progression of the drama. The net result of the plot detour is essentially nil - Aragorn ends up making his way to Helm's Deep after all, giving Peter Jackson an excuse to indulge in another lugubrious reunion scene, with the Elf Legolas (Orlando Bloom) behaving more like a wife to Aragorn than Arwen ever did.

Elsewhere, Peter Jackson and co-writers Fran Walsh and Phillipa Boyens include character and plot points at 180 degree reversals from Tolkien: in the novel, the Ents decide to take war to Isengard, yet in the film the Ents decide that the matter is not their concern, with Treebeard (voiced by John Rhys-Davies) only changing his mind when witnessing first hand the devastation wrought upon the forests by Saruman (Christopher Lee). And Faramir (David Wenham) proves resistant to the temptation of the One Ring in the novel, but here takes Frodo (Elijah Wood) and Sam (Sean Astin) along with him to the besieged city of Osgiliath with the intention of turning the Ring over to his father Denethor (John Noble). In a difficult middle act film with no real beginning or ending, this allows Jackson an excuse for further action near the climax, as well as the opportunity for an encounter with the flying Nazgul which is frankly too close to believe.

In The New Biographical Dictionary of Film - fourth edition, film critic David Thomson - writing in 2002, when only the first film in the trilogy had been seen - wonders 'whether the frighteners in the Rings might not get out of hand before the series ends'. His writing was prescient - look at the sequence where Frodo, Sam, and Gollum (Andy Serkis) cross the Dead Marshes. What is haunting and poetic in the novel is here reduced to the stuff of a ghost ride, green ghouls leering out at the audience, in a sign of Peter Jackson's propensity to crank everything up to eleven.

However, I judge the extended edition of The Two Towers to be the most improved from the theatrical cut. The cross cutting between the three major story strands is better handled here, somehow more balanced. And the battle at Helm's Deep does not dominate the final half of the film as much as it does in the shorter version.

The Return of the King has a lot to get through, even with major sequences (such as the Scouring of the Shire) omitted. There's some set up here, but the film is mainly comprised of big climaxes and extended farewells. In the rush to get to the action, the wrap up of Saruman - a role which had been played up in the first two films - was reduced to a single line referencing the unseen character, to the vocal displeasure of Christopher Lee. This film has - for me at least - the most damaging deviation from the novel, when Frodo - swayed by Gollum's treachery - sends Sam away on the climb up to Shelob's lair. In a Screenwriting 101/Robert McKee sense the writers have upped the ante here, turning the screws on character conflicts present in the novel to maximise the conflict. In story and character terms, it's a betrayal of Sam's character - the finale of the first film was predicated on the notion that Sam's loyalty to Frodo and determination to stay with him know no bounds. And it robs the characters of one of their great moments in the novel - facing the horror of giant spider Shelob together. Sam ends up a johnny-come-lately to his biggest moment of heroism in the entire story, getting his moment in the spotlight in the superbly realised fight with the monster, but leaving at least this Tolkien reader wondering if an important beat with the two characters had been skipped or short-changed.

Of course, by now I probably sound to you like one of those Tolkien fans quibbling over Elvish dialects. Or maybe I passed that point three or five paragraphs ago. Far be it from me to argue with a bazillion dollars at the box office and a record number of Oscars - the three films comprising The Lord of the Rings are all wonderfully made, acted with heart, gripping, and exciting. There were maybe turns taken that I would have preferred taken another way, but the crank-it-up story sensibility that I bemoan when it takes the story on certain paths is the same sensibility that made many sequences so wonderful. So the good definitely comes with the bad.

The extended DVD version of The Return of the King is a strange thing. The expansions of The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers were both improvements on the shorter edits, especially with the second film which saw some rushed storytelling clarified. The longer version of The Return of the King seems to me to be on exactly the same level as the shorter edit, with no overall improvement to the film as a whole. A lot of good - and necessary - material has been restored, such as the final confrontation with Saruman. Other additions which might have been expected to smooth out some trouble spots are less effective. Take the restored scenes at the Houses of Healing, for example. The theatrical edit of the film has a moment in the first of its many endings where we see Eowyn standing beside Faramir, indicating a healing of her unrequited love for Aragorn as well as a redirection of those feelings to Faramir. The reinsertion of the Houses of Healing scene - wherein Eowyn, recuperating from battle, begins to notice Faramir noticing her - should have provided the linking material in the relationship, but somehow it fails to gel. This perhaps highlights an inherent problem in trying to construct a contemporary style cinematic narrative from Tolkien's novel - this beginning of a romance becomes lost amidst the culmination of so many other story threads.

Elsewhere, and for the first time in the extended versions, The Return of the King contains redundancy, most notably in the new sequence at the start of disc 2 where Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas conquer the Corsair ships with the aid of the Army of Dead. Maybe it's churlish to deny Peter Jackson and his department heads their additional cameos as the crew of the ship, but the use here of the visual gag of the Army of Dead materialising behind the sword-wielding Aragorn diminishes the impact of the same image later in the film when the ships arrive at Gondor. Can I reiterate here my complaint about haunting prose becoming an fx spookshow in the Army of the Dead - more glowing green ghouls, Peter?

I may be giving the impression here I don't like the films, which is far from the case. The collective trilogy makes great viewing as a six part mini-series - one disc a night. It's easy to talk about the greatness of the enterprise and the excellence in every aspect of the productions. Not many people talk about alterations to the narrative which may be less, rather than more effective. What's interesting here is not so much passing judgement on decisions made by Peter Jackson and his team as seeing how they reflect changes in storytelling and audience expectations. Is Aragorn a more interesting character with a more compelling arc because the films have given him a measure of self doubt to overcome before he fulfills his destiny? Do we find the Hobbits more relatable because they've been transformed from the overgrown garden gnomes that Tolkien artists have been depicting for half a century into a quartet of hot young men? I'm not convinced myself. I think the perfect adaptation of The Lord of the Rings is yet to be made, and it's more likely to come in the form of three seasons of episodic television, taking the time to enjoy the journey as the novel does instead of rushing from one event to the next.

Now, a little aside about sexy Hobbits. I like my men - as Hannibal Lecter would say - 'roomy', although hotness does come in all shapes and sizes. Sean Astin's Samwise Gamgee became my definition of 'sexy' for a couple of years after seeing The Fellowship of the Ring. This probably lasted until I saw Aaron Eckhart carrying an extra 30 lbs. and a 70s porno moustache in Your Friends and Neighbours (Neil LaBute, 1998) - va va voom! Anyway, meandering back to the point - the casting of the Hobbits did have the side effect of making Tolkien's strong bonds of friendship and love look totally gay, and the fodder for an astonishing amount of slash fiction. Now look, my mind is as filthy as the most ardent writer of slash (usually women, the heterosexual male fantasy geek is alienated enough without authoring homoerotica - and I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions about the level of alienation the homosexual male fantasy geek experiences) - in my mind, of course those randy hobbits are buggering each other in the bushes whenever Gandalf isn't looking. And I'm pretty sure Merry (Dominic Monaghan) tried it on with Boromir (Sean Bean) at least once before the Orcs came along and ruined it for everyone. But I'm gay - I'm allowed to think dirty thoughts when Sean Astin and Elijah Wood look deeply into each other's eyes. It's unfortunate that everyone who saw the films thought 'gay' whenever the Hobbits got too lovey-dovey. Perhaps if they weren't pretty boys? Or maybe what we're seeing is an indicator of our society's inability to look unembarrassed at deeply felt male friendship without resorting to the protective ironic distance of sniggering at innuendo? But hey, this post is long enough without opening that can of worms...

Rented last weekend

Only three posts in January. Must... try... harder...

What to say about the remarkable WALL•E that hasn't already been said? I didn't see this one at the theatre, perhaps a little wary after Finding Nemo, which felt to me as though the mechanics of Pixar's storytelling were starting to show. WALL•E truly lived up to the rave reviews. The animation is so detailed and lifelike that it's easy to lose sight of the fact that you're not watching live action. I was completely enthralled from the opening minutes to the end. It's worth mentioning that this is the only time a film or television show has used Richard Strauss' 'Also sprach Zarathustra' as a reference to 2001: A Space Odyssey without making me groan.

Hellboy II: The Golden Army was less satisfying. I liked Hellboy enough, but I think I was mainly just overjoyed to finally see some decent Lovecraftian monster gods in a movie. The sequel is a classic Hollywood-blockbuster-empty-spectacle, with a fabulous menagerie of fantastical creatures and one of those aggressive soundmixes that needs to be noticed constantly, topped off with Danny Elfman phoning in another superhero score.