From the Bishop's desk

The Bishop on Inception

2010-08-15T21:36:00.007+10:00

It seems Leonardo DiCaprio is the great white hope of the American acting world. The Bishop had avoided the at-that-time promising actor since What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, taking a wide berth ’round the monster that was Titanic, crossing paths again only now to find him solid, watchable, doing all the things that Denzel Washington does, only better, sans the latter’s self awareness and an inability to tone down the stoicism that infected even Training Day.

Inception, described here and there as tricky enough to warrant two or more viewings, isn’t, as long as one is not uptight enough to want to parse every situation that appears on screen. It is not especially deep, either, unless one believes that all new(ish) things are deep. What it is is a tight, inventive sci-fi construct with the discipline to stick to its own rules, well shot, well scored, and, for what it’s worth, well performed. It is also sexy, and there’s nothing wrong with that—Barbara Stanwick would have been at home here. It has the confidence of a performance by Rachmaninov, slim but dense: ever, perhaps, hinting that something will go slightly awry which never does. And finally, it is different at a time when little is, and that makes it a thing worth doing in and of itself.

The Bishop on Hard Candy

2008-08-03T16:19:00.009+10:00

That Hard Candy was going to pass out underneath the weight of stupidity shovelled into its creation would have been apparent immediately had the Bishop watched the special features included on the DVD before taking in the actual film. This is a work about that most impossible of subjects—paedophilia—for which its empty-headed writer, Brian Nelson, has taken for his inspiration Sarah Michelle Geller’s Buffy, perhaps TV’s most sexualised young-girl protagonist of the last ten years; known, in her first season, for fighting in dresses so short one could high-jump over them. Here is not a scribe to be taken seriously, and neither is this silly revenge-fantasy-by-proxy.

Indeed there is a worrying sense that the hapless audience member is expected to be wooed by the boyish, mop-haired suggestiveness of Ellen Page’s Hayley, though she is fortunately such an unengaging young actress that this is unlikely to take place. Nineteen at the time the film was made, she plays her fourteen-year-old fury as though those ages were reversed, muttering over-importantly with the asthmatic delivery of one of those horrid adolescent prodigies who show up on current affairs shows on slow news weeks. (In other words, we might safely conclude that this is no Jodie Foster.) Patrick Wilson, as the paedophile, is held in check and out of rhythm by his co-star’s unsteadiness. He may or may not have some ability, but in this piece he, like Page, does his best work typing out his lines in the picture’s chat-room prologue.

Even as a self-absorbed thriller Hard Candy fails, not least because the notion of an adolescent girl threatening a rather nasty piece of work with castration might need be addressed with something other the gusto with which a teenage boy sits down to play Grand Theft Auto. The narrative ceases moving forward from the moment Wilson's predator wakes up tied to a chair, replaced by an extended torture sequence which we might all like to inflict on this sort of person but which gains nothing from being filmed. The Bishop gathers there is some attempt to fill out the drama with the possibility that the accused may be innocent, but when a barely pubescent teenager is taking a scalpel to the testicles of a suspected murderer and pederast, surely there are more important things to do than bait the audience with the question of whether or not he did it.

There is probably a worthwhile story, here, but it needs a goodly deal more thought than this comic-book production team is capable of applying. The Bishop also has something of a concern that no-one involved, apart from Page, appears to be a woman, and given her relative youth and the strength of her work here it is questionable whether she is, either. Death and the Maiden is no masterpiece, but it has certainly dealt with Hard Candy’s victim-victimiser role reversal with considerably more maturity, not to mention plot, and when it comes to the difficult subject of underage obsession, your Anglican articulator humbly suggests that the dull minds at work here leave Valdimir Nabokov in no danger of being emasculated. Hard Candy is balls.

The Bishop on Iron Maiden: A Matter of Life and Death

2007-11-07T17:55:00.000+11:00

Straight up: Iron Maiden have not had a decent record since Somewhere in Time, nor decent anything at all since 1986, but for two covers of their own songs.* They really haven't even hinted at a reason to go on, except to sell out several hundred European gigs a year—which might be reason enough, but still . . . The Bishop, ever hopeful, puts his ear to the door every now and then to hear a peep of what the lads have been up to, but the result is always archly disappointing, like inching closer to what portends to be a juicy bit of gossip, only to overhear a conversation about tax returns.

Need the Bishop say A Matter of Life and Death is no different? No different at all. If the track snippets available on Maiden’s site are anything to go by, your liturgical listener can only be thankful the band’s latest tour is called Somewhere Back in Time. It is as if someone for who knows what reason had sat through the whole second side of Piece of Mind, and decided a whole album like that would be a good idea. And that person was Jon Bon Jovi.

The Bishop understands that rock and pop musician have a limited pool of writing capability—in most cases enough for one song (in Jeff Buckley’s case half a song)—and that with around two dozen wonderful tunes under their bullet belts, Iron Maiden have not done too bad. But c’mon boys—it’s been twenty effing years since you wrote anything that doesn’t sound like the Grand National on guitar. If you don’t have one more ‘Trooper’ or ‘Total Eclipse’ in you, isn’t it time to hang up the football socks and striped pants rather than go on being the focus group–approved version of your former selves?

*This will get the Bishop caned by some of his fellows, but the 1988 remakes of ‘Prowler’ and ‘Charlotte the Harlot’ are better than the Paul Di'Anno versions—the production is powerful instead of violent, the guitar better played and the drum sound less rushed (this from a chap who prefers Clive Burr's inventiveness to Nicko McBrain's uber-physical technicality), and like it or not a real singer (Bruce Dickinson) adds something Di'Anno, for all his charismatic laddishness (and laddish charisma) could not.

The Bishop on silliness

2007-11-05T00:43:00.000+11:00

28 Weeks Later, the sequel to you know what, is not exactly indefensible, but it is largely incomprehensible. Watch it if you like this sort of thing—it will pass the time. But be aware that almost no effort has been spared to eliminate anything that might make sense; not so much at the level of the story, which is workmanlike in the way council workers are, but moment by moment, shot by shot, action by action. One is not so much expected to suspend one’s disbelief as one’s understanding of the law of cause and effect.

There is little point in trying to list the many holes, as it is not so much a case of holes as one continuous gap, as though all the mortar had been removed from a brick wall. A single example of unintentional fun will suffice. It is made clear from the early going that the rage-infected zombies move relentlessly and at lightning speed. Yet, in a show of tension-building contrivance during the final chase, they can’t catch up to a young girl, a child and a woman with a limp. (The Bishop says 'final chase', but this is really one long chase, between film and audience.)

The direction and its partner in disinformation, the editing, leave no cut unjumped in proving that Juan Carlos Fresnadillo is exceptionally clever and has not a clue how to do his job. In essence, this is a ninety-something minute rock video in the nu metal, emo or some other over-painted vein, or would be, but that most rock video directors know to point their cameras at more than the ground, the foggy middle distance, and the bottom right hand corner of an actor’s face.

The performances are essentially harmless, but spongy, failing to hold water under even the slightest pressure. The Bishop had heard of Rose Byrne, but had never seen her before. Hopefully he will not again. Her army medical officer is supposed to be the film’s moral centre, which this self-important brunette interprets as an opportunity to pout and fawn. Imogen Poots is psychotically stunning, but something ungainly happens in the gap between her thinking words and actually saying them. Mackintosh Muggleton—cast, the Bishop assumes, primarily for his dome-headed pretty girl looks—is not a child actor to look forward to. Even Robert Carlyle can’t help much. He is engaging, as he often is, but his performance is so out of synch with the rest that it seems to be a hangover from an earlier, different and almost certainly more interesting version of the film.

The Bishop on fear

2007-11-01T16:05:00.000+11:00

'Long Distance Call', an episode of season two of the orginal Twilight Zone, looks to be for all money in its first five minutes more mawkish guff in the 'Night of the Meek' vein, as lackadaisically obvious as 'The Eye of the Beholder', akin 'The Lateness of the Hour' in taking far too long to get to nothing much at all—so much so that an impatient Bishop started fast forwarding it. This was a mistake. Charles Beaumont (here writing with William Idelson) was never one to let his audience down, and gently sinister goings on follow what turns out to be an aspartane rather than saccharine opening act.

But the real reason to watch this is a moment from archtypal (though mostly unheard of) sixties blonde Patricia Smith. Marvellously young and beautiful and free of any sort of acting, prepare yourself as hard as you like for the moment she picks up her son's toy phone. It does not so much chill the blood as the cerebral fluid and curdle the placenta of pregnant women.

The Bishop on Doctor Who: 'Survival'

2007-10-31T23:26:00.000+11:00

'Survival' isn't the worst Doctor Who story ever broadcast, but, like all the serials from the Sylvester McCoy era, it's close enough.

The TARDIS arrives in Perivale, so that the charmless Ace can catch up with her friends. It transpires that those friends have been kidnapped and taken to the planet of the cheetah people, so that the cheetah people can hunt them for the cheetah person equivalent of sport. It's a fine premise, really, but it all unfolds with the charm of a trip to the local two-dollar store. Rona Munroe somehow manages to make her dialogue both uselessly banal and not what any human being would actually say, a lot of it involving the expression 'survival of the fittest', made worse by flashes of what the Bishop assumes is intended to be funny. Whole scenes pass by in which events occur but nothing actually happens. The Doctor stands next to a poster of the musical Cats. It's no exaggeration to say a mildly talented child could have written it, and by the evidence on screen there's no reason to suppose one didn't.

McCoy is as needless and unconvincing as ever, and Sophie Aldred, an actress so clumsy her own accent sounds put on, is bamboozled by yet another Cartmel commission mistaking Ace for a character. The rest of the performers, with the exception of Anthony Ainley, should be ashamed of themselves.

And in the end, the Doctor rides a motorbike head-on into another character riding a motorbike. How does he survive? I don't know.

The Bishop gets lost in time

2007-09-24T23:44:00.000+10:00

Actually, having actually gotten the Doctor Who DVD boxed set Lost in Time—which brings together the various bits and pieces of serials left incomplete from the Hartnell and Troughton eras—some number of years ago, the Bishop thought it might be time to give them a proper watch and pass on his thoughts. This entry will get progressively longer as he makes his way through.

'THE CRUSADE'

Two episodes remain—'The Lion' and 'The Wheel of Fortune—which suggest a story as marvelous in its own way as 'The Talons of Weng-Chiang'. Indeed the comparison is just, because while Robert Holmes may have scripted all of Doctor Who's best lines, David Whitaker turns out to be the better writer of dialogue. His Shakespeare may be cod Shakespeare, but as every gourmet knows, fish and chips may make a fine meal when the stars are aligned just right. That some of that cod Shakespeare is being said by Julian Glover was never going to hurt, either, and the Bishop is once again impressed by an actor who never pretends, nor adopts a manner, yet is always exactly who he is supposed to be. Bernard Kay and others match him, and it is only the two regular Williams—Hartnell and Russell—who seem a little out of place on this collective stage: Hartnell does not so much forget lines as forget the point of them, and Russell doesn't really have the chops to match the likes of Glover. Still, Hartnell does the trickster as well as any, and one has to admire Russell's Ian, all no-nonsense pluck in the face of the dithering, tempestuous but ultimately wise king. Jacqueline Hill breaths a thoughtful calm which shows how very good she could be. Jean Marsh is unforgivably hot.

'THE CELESTIAL TOYMAKER'

Part four of this, known as 'The Final Game' at the time, is not near as bad as its reputation probably suggests. This is not to say it is good, but surreality in Who is like a blanket that can hide a multitude of sins. With Hartnell inexplicably missing for much of his scenes 'with' Michael Gough, the latter declaims as though he is reading off a cue card somewhere in his peripheral vision, and the game Steven and Dodo play is interesting much more for its camp eeriness than its dramatic immediacy. What is most intriguing, though, is the way the Toymaker's realm explodes instead of blinking out of existence—an illogical piece of direction which in the strange world of sixties Doctor Who is accidentally exactly right.

KEVIN STONEY . . .

. . . doesn't seem to be trying too hard in 'Day of Armageddon', the second episode of 'The Daleks' Master Plan'—much like the rest of it, apart from some wonderfully loopy costumes by Daphne Dare. This is a Hartnell that feels very much like a Troughton, and not in a good way. Still, Stoney has a way of keeping you interested in what he does, even when you have no idea why you're interested in what he does or whether he has done anything to be interested in. When he actually does do something, as in 'The Invasion', he is quasi-superb.

'THE UNDERWATER MENACE'

If you want to see when Doctor Who was crap, you watch the Cartmel years. If you want to see when it was awful, Colin Baker is your man. And if you want to see when it was stupid, ‘Time-Flight’ is as good a serial as any. But if you want to see what people who don’t get Doctor Who mean when they say Doctor Who is bad, you’ll always have episode three of ‘The Underwater Menace’.

There really isn’t much reason to watch this, unless you are the sort who gets a kind of kinky thrill from being slightly bored. The dialogue is functional at best and functionless at worst, and spoken by a cast of characters that, regulars aside, vary only in their tendency to psychosocial maladjustment. It looks—there really is no other word—shocking, and of the set and costume design, the Bishop can only be thankful that it wasn’t shot in colour. Of the tale itself, one scene sums this up. The dippy fish people at one point go on strike. These means, in essence, that they choose to do nothing for part of the story. This is filmed.

And yet there is a sense that this is exactly what Doctor Who is and should be about. A scruffy little man in a shabby frock coat getting up to surreal mischief with a cockney ab, a dolly mod and an eighteenth century Scottish highlander, in a setting that’s half fantasy, half Quatermass and weaves cod ancient Greeks, mad scientists, shipwrecked sailors and tinsel-skinned fish people into a, if not actually believable, at least acceptable, whole. There is also a second sense to this: that Patrick Troughton was and is the Doctor, by whom all others ’fore and since are simply variations on a theme; able without flash or show to paint some technicolour into this throwaway via the nooks and crannies of his marvellous face and a judicious helping of energy and pace.

The Bishop on Doctor Who: ‘Horror of Fang Rock’

2007-09-09T20:44:00.000+10:00

For a name so synonymous with classic Who, there is surprisingly little material on which to anchor the impact of Terrance Dicks. Though he script edited the program for nearly one fifth of its span, he wrote—or at least is credited with writing—only five stories. He had some involvement with ‘The Seeds of Death’, which is hard to sit through. He wrote half of ‘The War Games’ which, even had it been shorn of Mal Hulke’s other half, would still be far too long. After that, despite a four year period of not just steadying the ship but getting it to float again—there is no doubt the Pertwee era is much better than the Troughton one despite both having interesting leads—it’s hard to say how much influence Dicks had qua writing (or re-writing) good episodes; and post his role behind—or perhaps putting together—the scenes, he only penned four stories, of which three were the mechanical ‘Robot’, the fallow ‘State of Decay, and the five-out-of-ten-at-best ‘The Five Doctors’ (‘The Brain of Morbius’ coming mostly from the mind of Robert Holmes). Still, if Holmes’s reputation can stand tall on ‘The Time Warrior’, ‘The Talons of Weng-Chiang’ and re-writing all the dialogue for seasons twelve through fourteen, it’s only fair to judge Uncle Terry on his best work, ‘Horror of Fang Rock’. So how good, the Bishop wonders, is it?

It was certainly quite alright when the Bishop was twelve, and a little scary, to boot. (Is twelve too old to be slightly perturbed by Doctor Who?) The actors, who have been dressed up to the nines by the BBC costume drama department, thesp like they think they might actually be in a costume drama, instead of doing what they think supporting types are supposed to do in Doctor Who, and the equally attentive sets could fool one into thinking there are more than three. The direction does what Who direction should—point the camera at the actors and make Tom Baker behave. The lighting may not make a studio look like an outcrop but it does make a studio feel as isolated as one, and of the regulars, Baker, discourteous though he may have been to Pennant Roberts, needs no introduction, and Louise Jameson is probably the best thing ever to have been associated with Doctor Who. After watching her the Bishop, were he to uncover some forgotten tribe of leather-clad savages in the furthest reaches of the earth, would be surprised to find they didn’t speak with RP accents.

But what of Dicks's contribution? Well. There are some marvellous lines for the actors (Leela: ‘It is fitting to celebrate the death of an enemy’. The Doctor: ‘Not in my opinion’), though some naff ones too (‘Enjoy your death as I enjoyed killing you’ is too much even for Jameson to say), and how much of the former were added by Holmes is open to speculation. The plotting is tight but still feels an episode too long (should the shipwrecked crew have been there from the beginning?), and while the claustrophobia is exactly right, it seems like something we are asked to accept rather than something we should believe (rarely has an episode begged the question of why the Doctor shouldn’t go and retrieve some plot device from the TARDIS—and if they’ve mistakenly locked the Rutan inside the lighthouse then, well, leave). The Bishop knows this is Doctor Who, but the lighthouse-diamond-destroyed-mothership thing is a stretch.* And while the episode bravely runs the Hammer Horror Who gauntlet of making the monster a bona fide monster (the Beast of Fang Rock) and making it not, it doesn’t quite succeed: one can’t help but feel a little unsatisfied when one Rutan on an island is just a stand in for a much more terrifying fleet of them in space; by contrast, the mummies in ‘Pyramids of Mars’ were correctly subsidiary, while Magnus Greel in ‘Talons’ made one feel as though the fifty-first century and the late nineteenth were actually one and the same. (Of the current series, Steven Moffat more adeptly pulls off the iconic-horror-that’s-not trick in ‘The Empty Child’/‘The Doctor Dances’ and ‘Blink’.)

And that seems to be the thing about Terrance Dicks—it’s all a bit fifty-fifty, or perhaps six-of-one-half-a-dozen-of-the-other. While he’s no doubt a better contributor to Who’s success than his Target novelisation–hating detractors say, he’s also not quite as good his supporters would like us to believe. On the special feature on the ‘Fang Rock’ DVD, he is asked how he would like to be remembered. His answer: professional. And he is probably right. But while it’s always nice to know there’s a professional on hand to take care of things, most of the time if we want more than nice we need a little magic on hand to spice things up, too.

*Oh, and wasn’t this show-a-bit-of-fighting-spirit-and-they’ll-run-away climax already done in ‘The Sontaran Experiment’? For two species of war-obsessed aggressors who have conquered half the galaxy between them, the Sontarans and the Rutans don’t seem to have much pluck.

The Bishop on being a man

2007-09-03T01:10:00.000+10:00

Which is like being a kid in a candy store, only to find you are not allowed to buy any of the sweets.

As opposed to being a woman, which is like being a kid in a candy store, only to find that all they actually sell is Brussels sprouts.

Is it just the Bishop . . .

2007-08-30T15:27:00.000+10:00

. . . or do most human beings spend most of their lives in multifarious states of minor physical discomfort?

It was with sharp intake of breath . . .

2007-08-27T22:19:00.000+10:00

. . . that the Bishop stole himself and purchased two of the most expensive DVDs, pound for pound, that he is ever likely to shell out for. At ninety-four Australian dollars for the pair, ‘The Seeds of Death’ and ‘The Curse of Fenric’ come to the price of almost a whole season of new Doctor Who. The obsessive instincts of the collector aside, this may not have been the smartest money the Bishop has parted company with.

Your canonical critic had already watched ‘The Seeds of Death’, or done his best to watch it, and knew that it was bogged down by the usual things that bog the Patrick Troughton era down. Still, it has Pat Troughton, and Frazer Hines, and Wendy Padbury, quite possibly wearing a very short skirt. ‘The Curse of Fenric’, until now one of the few Who stories unseen by the Bishop, has Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred. And . . .

The first thing the astute viewer notices about ‘The Curse of Fenric’ is the plot. Much of it centres on ULTIMA, a translating machine a la Alan Turing, and it may well have gained some benefit from having been run through such a device itself. The Bishop does not know if it is extremely difficult to follow or if there is simply nothing to follow, but in either event we might expect the writer to invite us along for the ride, instead of waving manically as he speeds past. Ungainly pace aside, there is a sense that nothing really fits together, of a recipe that lays out the ingredients and neglects to work out how to cook them together.

The performances are, as they unfailingly were during the Sylvester McCoy era, among the worst acting jobs ever committed without irony to the screen. One gets a real sense these poor people thought they were doing adequate work, but an even realer sense that they were hooked on amobarbital at the time. Regards the regulars, the Bishop seems to have kind of gotten used to McCoy, as one gets used to the fact that trains rarely run on time—what can you do? With Aldred the task is much harder; the other cast members may as well be speaking Navaho for all she reacts to what they say. She is the very definition of hopeless, though slightly in her defence Ian Briggs may possibly have written his dialogue in Navaho, then translated it into English via Japanese, for all the sense it makes.

Admittedly, ‘The Curse of Fenric’ isn’t the worst Doctor Who story ever made. But it is still basically quite bad, really quite bad, and the Bishop has always wondered why so many Who fans see it differently. At first he suspected desperation; but now, having waded through it himself, he proposes that what many fans are actually regarding in this story is the large amount of money that seems to have been thrown at it—large by Doctor Who standards, anyway. The locations are pretty and the sets are remarkable by the standards of the show. The costumes and make-up convince, and the two girls playing vampires are unsettling in a Salem’s Lot kind of way—at least until they open their mouths and the Sophie Aldred’s voice comes out. The direction, if such a conceit should matter in Doctor Who beyond the camera facing the right thing at the right time, at least has a sense of élan. So too does the score; though, trying valiantly to tell us what the script hasn’t, it’s too much like a boorish party guest, herding the unwary viewer into a corner to wax overeager on its favourite subject.

As for the story’s supposed sophistication, the Bishop can certainly see that it was trying. But what it mostly amounts to is telling us that Ace hates her mother by telling us she hates her mother; that the vicar has lost his faith by having him say the words, ‘I’ve lost my faith,’; and that the Doctor’s battle with Fenric is a metaphorical chess game by having the two of them play an actual game of chess. Oh, and in case you missed it, the Doctor wears a dark coat. He also wears a nice pair of spats, though the symbolism of those is perhaps less obvious.

The Bishop has just heard a rather lovely tune

2007-08-18T01:31:00.000+10:00

'Foundations', by Kate Nash, who of course the Bishop, rapidly approaching middle age, had until five minutes past never heard of. An irresistible (and eminently shagable) voice she has, and one which with agility and sweetness sidesteps her obvious vocal gimmick. Apparently she's not unlike Lily Allen, whoever that is. All this sufficiently original track needs to be particularly good is arrangement and production.

The Bishop has just watched two Doctor Who stories featuring Peter Davison in the same day

2007-08-16T11:03:00.000+10:00

But never fear. The damage was less than expected, and he anticipates making a full recovery within the month.

Thoughts to come.

The Bishop on Doctor Who: 'The Pyramids of Mars'

2007-08-08T10:25:00.001+10:00

‘The Pyramids of Mars’ leaves a lot of questions unresolved; or, perhaps, unresolvable. Is Scarman the servant of Sutekh, or a cadaver taken over by Sutekh? Why does he first appear in the form of a black spacesuit, with Sutekh’s voice and personality, only to change for no particularly useful reason into Scarman, with Scarman’s voice and something resembling his personality. (So the kids can point at the screen and scoff? 'It's not the real Scarman, silly!') Why does Sutekh have to tell Scarman what to do when he could just control his body, as he does the Doctor’s? Ditto the service robots: why is Sutekh controlling Scarman controlling the mummies, when he could presumably just skip the middle man? Is Sutekh clairvoyant or not? He manages to spot and stop an explosion about to blow up his rocket, but doesn’t notice anyone planting the explosives, nor seem to realise when one of his telepathically controlled service robots is replaced by Tom Baker, hovering round like a sheepish schoolboy working up the nerve to ask a girl on a date. Why does Horus protect the ultra-secure entrance to his can't-be-broken-into-at-any-cost Martian base with question four out of Challenging Logic Puzzles for Clever Boys Aged 8 and Up? And what’s the deal with that little Egyptian fellow: does he realise that he’s in a story called ‘The Pyramids of Mars’, and sit down at the pipe organ to help out with the incidental music?

Oh well. ‘The Pyramids of Mars’ may not be the tightest Doctor Who ever, or the fastest, but it does feature the most chemistry between two leads since the invention of the galvanic cell. And, more importantly, Robert Holmes and Gabriel Woolf teaming up to produce this.

And this.

Damn, that’s the stuff.

The Bishop on the Doctor Who season that was

2007-08-06T21:22:00.000+10:00

For various reasons not really worth going into, the Bishop has been somewhat lax in commenting on the latest season of Doctor Who. Here are his thoughts in sum.

How well any given viewer copes with ‘Smith and Jones’ will probably depend on how much she likes unsuccessful camp humour and watching people run. It wasn’t that the straw and the shoe weren’t ‘scientific’, it’s that they weren’t funny, and if this it what he thinks passes for comedy, it seems Russell T. may have more in common with JN-T than the number of Y chromosomes he likes in a mate. In any case a flat joke is forgivable; a flat story is not, and this dramatic case of cardiac arrest needs more than a couple of doctors to revive it. Set on the Moon and with about as much atmosphere, it also has the inauspicious job of kicking off the tale of Martha Jones, a love song with one lyric. Bland as Martha is, though, Freema Agyeman makes her blander, and the best that can be said after a season of this unimaginative actress is she isn’t Matthew Waterhouse.

Surprisingly unappetising, ‘The Shakespeare Code’ proves that a TV script and a TV tie-in novel are not the same thing. Gareth Roberts, best of the New/Missing Adventures gang, writes a flavourless historical with a Shakespeare who’d be more at home on Knots Landing than Stratford-on-Avon. It’s not that Roberts can’t put a televised Doctor Who adventure together, and this is perfectly competent fare, but the flare of ‘The Plotters’ or ‘The Well-Mannered War’ is absent, as if he didn’t know what to do without the mannerisms of a William Hartnell or a Tom Baker to transfer into print. Add a by-the-numbers BBC-history-is-sexier-now cast, including David Tennant playing David Tennant playing the Doctor, and all we really have here is a comparative reminder of why ‘The Talons of Weng-Chiang’ was so fucking good.

There is nothing necessarily specious about a story set in a twenty-year traffic jam, but is it too much to ask that the characters you stick in it behave like they are? In the hands of, say, Steven Moffat—who, the Bishop is convinced, could put a working plot together with a plastic knife, a handful of marbles and an orange ball of string—‘Gridlock’ may have been tense, witty, claustrophobically chilling bit of telly. In the hands of Russell Davies, it’s like being stuck in traffic for forty-five minutes.

There are, of course, worse things than being stuck in traffic, and two of them came next. Helen Raynor must be just about the mediocre-est talent ever to bluff her way through the BBC scriptwriters entrance exam, and the only thing the Bishop has to say about ‘Daleks in Manhattan’ is that it was so bad he didn’t bother with the next one.

If only he hadn’t bothered with the one after that . . . No, that’s unfair. ‘The Lazarus Experiment’ was perfectly alright, in the same way ‘Terror of the Zygons’ was perfectly alright. That notwithstanding, though, the Bishop wonders why an immortal Time Lord so in love with the indomitable nature of the human spirit thinks reversing the aging process is such an inherently evil thing; and why this photocopy of a story conveniently proves him right.

The Bishop had always assumed episodes like ‘42’ had to come with a warning: ‘Contains only fifty-three per cent new material’ or some such. A thriller free of thrills and just about anything else, '42', like much of the season so far, mistakes character development for characters telling us they are developing; and with its humourless quasi-environmental mewling and even more humourless cast, it poses the curious viewer only one lingering question: to how many people does writer Chris Chibnall now owe royalty cheques?

You know who the villains are, you know how it’s going to end, and even the cliffhanger isn’t very good. But like all great Doctor Who it doesn’t matter: ‘Human Nature’ and 'The Family of Blood' are simply a collection of wonderful bits with a story to take place in. Fair enough, Paul Cornell is too obvious and far too sentimental, and there are one or two moments when his characters seem to know they are in a television show, but like David Tennant’s John Smith, this two-parter is charming almost because it’s not perfect. And while it concerns the Bishop that the tenth Doctor becomes more interesting as someone to talk about than someone to watch, that’s hardly Cornell’s problem. Harry Lloyd is a grand ham in the Henry Gordon Jago tradition.

Like a master chef, it isn’t just what sure-handed Steven Moffat can make a story with, it’s what he can manage to make one without. Here he is asked to throw together some three-quarter season filler with almost no budget and even less Doctor, and if ‘Blink’ is by a whisker not the most enjoyable episode of 2007, it is certainly the best. The Bishop is not sure the sort of closed time loops used here ever really make sense, but he is happy to suspend his disbelief if Moffat is going to whip up fare as inventive as this. Carey Mulligan, meanwhile, has the sort of smile that could break a man in half or put him back together again, and is effortless behind it.

The Bishop suspects that without the Master—or, more specifically, the brilliantly telegraphed fact that he is coming—‘Utopia’ may have been the sort of base-under-siege cardboard that could almost make ‘42’ seem palatable. But it did have the Master—two Master’s for the price of one—and a lovely chat between the Doctor and Captain Jack, which fooled the Bishop into thinking Torchwood might be interesting. Derek Jacobi gives a masterclass,* and even Freema’s not shit. Not quite shit.

You can find out why ‘The Sound of Drums’ was so much fun here. Which leaves us with ‘Last of the Time Lords’, about which the Bishop really doesn’t know what to say. It seems almost as difficult to analyse the failings of ‘Last of the Time Lords’ as it is to enjoy them; churlish to dismiss a vapour plot the little’ns no doubt loved; missing the point to spell out the narrative and thematic failings of the canis ex machina ending; and veritably nasty to suggest the one good thing about this disappointment was that Freema Agyeman was finally put out of everybody’s misery.** For despite running out of petrol here and there, Davies and co have done a pretty good job with new Who thus far; and as season three ably illustrates, sometimes one has to take the rough with the smooth.

*Until he becomes the Master, at which point, well . . . What happened there?

**Albeit only temporarily.

The Bishop of Torchwood: ‘Greeks Bearing Gifts’

2007-07-30T22:41:00.000+10:00

Oh god. Naoko Mori really is a nothing actress, isn’t she? Freema Agyeman should feel right at home . . .

The Bishop has by now had enough of Torchwood, the televisual soulmate of an 'ADD M0RE 1NCHES!!!' spam; and must point out that he is writing this brief commentary instead of watching ‘Greeks Bearing Gifts’, which is at the moment floundering and foundering and flailing away in the other room. So forgive him if he gets the following assessment wrong; though given that the one and only useful thing that Torchwood has been in consistent, he suspects it will be all too correct: ‘Greeks Bearing Gifts’ is crap.

The Bishop on footage of Metallica playing ‘Orion’ at the Rock Am Ring Festival 3.6.2006

2007-07-24T13:34:00.000+10:00

Well, you can’t half tell it was the first time they’d done that live.

The Bishop on Torchwood: 'Cyberwoman'

2007-07-10T11:34:00.000+10:00

Sometimes, and usually surprisingly early in their runs, the cast and crew of certain television shows come to the realisation that their program isn’t working, cease to take the exercise seriously, and enjoy the opportunity to have a little fun. (Melrose Place and Angel spring immediately to the Bishop’s mind.*) And often, before this happens, there appear one or two intermediary episodes which seem to collapse under the weight of their own inebriation, but are amusing all the same, for the reason it is often fun to watch one’s friends stumble around drunk.

With ‘Pterodactyl’, Torchwood has officially had one too many. We can only hope, then, that the time as come to kick back, watch everyone shag each other, and add one more program to the guilty pleasures list. Dallas-on-the-Taff, here we come.

*In fact, it now occurs to the Bishop, what better way to describe Torchwood than as the Welsh love child of Angel and Melrose Place?

The Bishop on Torchwood: 'Ghost Machine'

2007-07-04T02:21:00.000+10:00

The best that can be said of Helen Raynor, as a scriptwriter, is that she shouldn’t be. There is nothing too unfortunate about the plot of ‘Ghost Machine’, but its dialogue, which culminates in Gwen’s sage observation that the dawn represents ‘a new day’, would not be out of place hosting the Eurovision Song Contest. The blame for the episode’s cringe factor–ten sexual tension, meanwhile, can probably be laid at the feet of Russell T. Davies, who like a teenage boy is obsessed with it, and handles it about as well.

Eve Myles still has a terrific arse, but is beginning to grate; and the Bishop was disappointed to discover that her expression for 'shocked' seems to have been based on a goldfish. Burn Gorman, as Owen, becomes interesting, but as if to keep the Torchwood universe in balance, John Barrowman’s Captain Jack heralds less so. The Bishop appreciates Barrowman’s charm, but here he is laughably sleazy and a peg or two too camp: less the leader of a top secret organisation, more the director of a musical troupe.

And then there’s the small credibility matter that, if you believed you were going to die soon on a certain street, you’d probably steer well clear of it. Much like anything with Helen Raynor’s name on the credits.

The Bishop on Doctor Who: 'The Sound of Drums'

2007-06-28T20:32:00.000+10:00

One can only marvel at how clever Russell T. Davies is. So clever, in fact, that it took the Bishop almost twenty-four hours to realise that ‘The Sound of Drums’ is built on an untempered schism of its own. Which is this: If the Master can become the Prime Minister of Britain, he does not need the Toclafane. And if he can make use of the Toclafane, he does not need to become Prime Minister of anything at all.

Davies’ justification may well be that the Master is both Evil and Mad, and concocts these rather complicated schemes just for the hell of it; and there is a temptation to believe this is true. Or he might insist it needs no justification, and what the hell does it matter if everyone is having such good fun. Still: whatever the excuse for Davies plotting house of sand, ‘The Sound of Drums’ is great fun; and any Who fan of the older type who did not enjoy this (and ‘Utopia’, before) is deliberately trying not to. It is, the Bishop must reassure, far from perfect, but imperfect things have their charm, too, as forty-four years of Doctor Who have ably proved. The highlights for us ancients were of course the fanwank, and with this and ‘Utopia’, your canonical commentator finally believes that Davies loves this show. What he has done, with flashbacks to Gallifrey and a host of things besides, is bring to bare the Doctor Who we of the old school always had in our heads when we remembered what was all those years ago. Not a re-envisioning, but a simple putting on to screen of what was already there but never shown before.

The cast: The Bishop, as always, feels sorry for the extraordinarily pretty Freema Agyeman: she has been saddled with an imbecilic role, and to make matters worse she can’t act. Still, she is extraordinarily pretty. John Barrowman, as always, is unavoidably charming, and while David Tennant is doing nothing new, that he might now simply be referred to as the Doctor is about as high a praise as one can give. Colin Stinton, as the American president, plays an American president about as well or not as anyone on British TV ever does, and the rest are fine, though special mention goes to Alexandra Moen as Lucy Saxon: she is a find. It is not entirely clear whether Davies has scripted her as Lady Macbeth or Lady the Labrador, but she realises both, and each, and neither with ease. Performing sleight of hand with a face that’s as inscrutable as it is seductive, her performance leaves the Bishop happily lost for words.*

But of course it all comes down to the Master; and the Bishop cannot help but feel a fraction churlish in not being over-thrilled with John Simm’s best go. Reaction elsewhere has largely been that he is either painfully over the top or perfectly over the top, but while both of these are true, they are not the problem; rather, the problem with Simm’s Master is that there is nothing there—no reason to believe he’s all that. Roger Delgado’s Master was never the Doctor’s intellectual equal—despite what the scripts tried to tell us at the time—but had a quiet force of personality that saw him through; Anthony Ainsley had his manic deviousness.** If the Doctor was all cosmic wit and science, they in their megalomania were art bending science to their ends: the result, essentially, a draw. Simm, without the mesmerism of the former or the devilishness of the latter, is given nowhere to go but wide of the mark; his Master is simply an impenetrable nutcase who is very, very clever, and the only reason we realise he’s clever is because the story tells us he has done some very clever things. Even his one-liners, one of new Who’s superficial strong points, are tepid.***

In fact the Master’s absent presence tells us quite a bit about why ‘The Sound of Drums’ works. Davies, at the end of the day, for all willingness to turn convention on its head, and shock the hoi polloi with one ‘guess what?’ idea after the next, is basically just a very good writer of conventional mysteries. Given time and a universe to work with, he always leaves one wondering what’s next, but his worlds are made of light and mirrors; anyone who delves backstage to see how it’s done is sure to regret having asked the magician to reveal his tricks.

*Sadly, she is unable quite to salvage Davies’ typical indulgence in the final scene, but at least her white-girls-can’t-dance act managed to distract the Bishop as the tension wilted to the strains of yet another postmodern twentieth-century reference. Never has a lack of rhythm held such guilty appeal.

**Ainsley, despite generic fan opinion, was good; and, when on form, one of the very few acceptable things about the program’s eighties run.

***That Davies has conceived the new Master as the (Tenth) Doctor’s contrapositive is as obvious as it is dumb, and was never the engine of their relationship. Delgado’s Master, armchair theorising aside, was not the third Doctor with an evil bent. Nor was he the Doctor’s Moriarty. Nor was Moriarty Holmes’ Moriarty, which is exactly the point.

The Bishop on Torchwood: 'Day One'

2007-06-25T23:48:00.000+10:00

Can anyone actually say what was going on in episode two of Torchwood, ‘Day One’? There was sex in a toilet, heavy petting between two women (it’s nice to see Russell T. Davies hasn’t forgotten those straight men amongst his audience), a naked man handcuffed inside a prison cell, and sex in sperm donor clinic—all hung together by an alien creature that feeds of ‘orgasmic energy’ (the Bishop is surprised no reference was made to Wilhelm Reich’s orgone) via a story that seems to have been written as if Chris Chibnall was distracted having sex at the time.

‘Day One’, meant to be shocking and not much else, will shock no-one who has passed through puberty or knows someone who has. Filling in the gaps between the shagging is by far too much info-dumping, wherein the questioning Gwen Cooper seems not so much like a new member of the Torchwood team as an audience member who has wandered on set and asked to have a peek at the script. Writer Chibnall, who has been roundly slagged for his work on Torchwood elsewhere, is not altogether bad, though perhaps head honcho Davies might require next time that he finish what he starts.

Still, if one didn’t watch too interestedly (the Bishop himself was reading at the time), it made do with an hour, and the exercise as a whole shows signs it might be worth enjoying once it stops telling us about itself. Eve Myles continues to be a right little sort, and if your voyeuristic vicar might pass on a little advice to Davies et al: if you really want to shock us, having this pleasing lead actress get kit off (or rather, more of it than she already has) would be an excellent place to start.

The Bishop on Doctor Who: 'Vengeance on Varos'

2007-06-22T15:23:00.000+10:00

It was June 2007, and the Bishop had lately wondered whether he had been perhaps a touch unfair in not being 100% totally thrilled with the first half of the third season of the new era of Doctor Who. Then he watched 'Vengeance on Varos', and realised that he had.

The TARDIS runs out of power, stranding the Doctor and Peri inside for what seems like a week, most of which for some reason appears on screen—in scene after scene crafted solely to show Philip Martin can't write dialogue. Finding a small amount of spare back-up energy in an old broom cupboard, the dynamic duo head to Varos, there to refresh their supply of the extremely rare TARDIS-powering element zeiton-7. It transpires that the Varons are selling their extremely rare zeiton-7 extremely cheaply to a nasty, exploitative galactic mining company; which suggests that when Martin heads back to school to study scriptwriting, he should also brush up on the law of supply and demand.

Various hi-jinks follow, in an attempt to make some sort of allegorical point about the modern obsession with violent, badly made TV—wherein the Who production team don't so much throw stones in their glass house, as bring in a dozen sopranos to test its resonant frequency.

Much has been made of how poor old Colin Baker was doing his best with some of the worst scripts and production in Doctor Who history. The Bishop agrees with the second part. In C. Baker, we finally had a lead every bit as rubbish as the supporting actors around him - which is not to say those minor players were going to make his achievement easy. All they had to do was act wooden and hammy, and they couldn't even get that right. Lines are bawled as though the boom mic is in another room, and the entire 90 minutes features more missed cues than a pool hall playing host to a kleptomaniacs' convention.

Strangely popular with Who fans despite its intergalactic awfulness, much has also been made by them of the predictive power of 'Vengeance on Varos'; but what, exactly, did it predict? That people will watch any old crap you stick on TV? John Nathan-Turner and co only had to wait another four stories to find out.

The Bishop on Doctor Who: 'Utopia'

2007-06-22T13:10:00.000+10:00

That's more like it, Russell.

The Bishop on Celtic Frost at Manning Bar 13.6.2007

2007-06-22T12:41:00.000+10:00

Cultured though the Bishop obviously is, he has been known to dalliance within those slightly louder, slightly darker, slightly less un-asexual realms of rock and roll known as HEAVY METAL now and again. Yet while your musicological man of the cloth did enjoy his teenage ‘metal’ phase, and still retains a love for a select few early exemplars of the style (the present subject of discussion falling well within that category), he is in general largely baffled by the more extreme forms of modern metal—not so much that they exist (artistic experimentation always expanding to fill the available space), but that anybody can be bothered listening to them. What, however, the Bishop finds most baffling is the ability of serious headbangers to identify the line of demarcation between what they call ‘good’ and ‘bad’ black metal: how the latest Decimated Sphincter record—to the Bishop’s ears as musical as hail falling on a mine field—is the gateway to a musical Elysium ne’er dare dreamt of by mortals afore, while the new release by Axabalababathon—equally, as far as the Bishop is concerned, a battle between competing kinds of white noise—is considered rotting sonic vomit not fit to be thrown up after twenty-five lagers and a 3am kebab. Finally, though, the Bishop has acquired some appreciation for this distinction after watching two what could only, in undeserved fairness, be called ‘lesser’ bands take the stage before Celtic Frost.

The first of Chaotic Impurity’s litany of mistakes was to place the drum kit front and centre as the dominant feature of the stage, requiring their goblinoid grunt-vocalist to compete with it for attention. The second mistake was to hire said singer. Half-pixie, half-goat, and with all the presence of a rabbit caught in candle lights, he nonetheless provided the Bishop with some much needed amusement in regards his microphone technique: clenched as tightly as his malnourished fist would allow, held indecisively in front of his mouth as though about to stifle a cough. Noisy without being loud, belligerent without being aggressive, they would have been drowned out by a decent cough, and the sound would certainly have been preferable.

Whoever the second act were, the Bishop sends his thanks for their inoffensive 30-minute set, which allowed him to sit outside in moderate comfort and get ploughed. Having achieved said state of ratarsed-ness, the Bishop made his way inside to take in an hour or so of Celtic Frost, who surprised. Never the tightest of outfits, even on record, your canonical critic was pleased to discover they had, since their creative highpoint in the mid-eighties, been to the musical equivalent of a fine gentlemans tailor. Tailoring, too, seems to have been on the agenda for Tom Fischer nee Warrior, whose sensible overcoat, beanie and black hole starburst eye-paint was one of the more tasteful black metal get-ups the Bishop has encountered. Martin Ain, meanwhile, who looked mostly like a large amount of hair, proved that being middle-aged and fat is no barrier to being copiously metal.

Musically, the Bishop was reminded that simple does not mean simplistic, and that heaviness, like most musical qualities, is not an easy-to-define thing. Many bands since have been larger and louder (well, perhaps not larger than Ain), but few have been nastier or darker. Free of the idiotic double-kick assault that passes for Angry Young Metal these days, the lads just stepped onto stage and filled up the room. And after thoroughly enjoying a set list that included ‘The Usurper’, ‘Circle of the Tyrants’, ‘Procreation of the Wicked’, the misspelled ‘Into the Crypt of Rays’, and the adjectively excessive ‘Necromantical Screams’—as well as some interesting material one assumes to have been off the new record (thus all but leaving out the band’s flabby middle period)—the Bishop can only wonder why other musical ensembles can’t put on something this entertaining for fifty well-spent bucks.

The Bishop on truth

2007-06-04T12:30:00.001+10:00

The Bishop can only wonder how Daniel Dennett has made it in the world of philosophy. His most significant ideas come in only three forms: those that he doesn’t understand, those that are obvious, and those that are wrong. It is the latter two sorts that are at issue in Dennett’s latest on the free will problem, Freedom Evolves.

Ostensibly a layman’s summary of Dennett’s thoughts on the subject, the book does however promise something new; but the first half sees little more than Dennett re-repackaging his tired old arguments. As any bright twelve year old will tell you, free will doesn’t exist, and probably never could. Dennett, undetered though, soldiers on, comfortable with his tenured place in the What I Would Like To Be True school of philosophy. He begins by assuring us his argument is no mere linguistic trick, then spends the next 100 pages attempting to pull a rabbit out of it and saw it in half. Whatever hair-thin delineation Dennett intuits between the words ‘determined’ and ‘inevitable’ is not in any dictionary the Bishop is acquainted with.

One can usually deduce the relative merits of a philosophical argument by the amount of space it takes up, and there are no prizes for guessing which length is preferred. While the better proofs against free will (for there are more than one, all more-or-less equally valid) take up less space than this book’s copyright notice, Dennett’s musings dither all over the place, in an attempt to distract the reader’s – and perhaps Dennett’s own – attention from the gaping paucity of his position. In a manner that seems to have been nicked from Plato, Dennett sets up a counter-interlocutor ('Conrad'): literally a straw man, intended to offer the arguments of Dennett’s opponents, the better for him to counter. Disappointing, then, that not only are those arguments rather obviously and deliberately flawed – and not the standard arguments against free will – but that Dennett fails to address them successfully, too. And in a final desperate bid to salvage his jigsaw of logic, Dennett undermines the position of free will libertarians,* who he supposes more wrong even than his determinist opponents. But this is silly. If you think two plus two is five, and I think two plus two is six, the fact that I am even further off has little bearing on the fact that two plus two equals four.

For the book’s second half, which the Bishop declined to read out of general boredom, Dennett proposes that free will is something that evolved. (The clue is in the title.) This is a no brainer. If we have free will, or anything like it, of course it evolved. How else would it get there?

But at the end of the day, the worst thing about this book is that it is intellectually dishonest. It is almost certainly true that Dennett doesn’t believe in free will himself, and really just wants to show that the illusion thereof is good enough. Only an idiot could hold to the contrary, and Dennett, despite the clumsiness of this particular diatribe, is probably not that thick.

*Those that believe that free will is real because the universe is indeterministic; as opposed to Dennett, who believes (or claims to believe) the universe is deterministic but that free will exists all the same. (Go figure.)

The Bishop on Doctor Who: '42'

2007-05-23T10:19:00.000+10:00

Shit.

The Bishop on Babel

2007-01-12T19:07:00.000+11:00

Watching Babel, the Bishop sat expecting to overhear, from some perhaps less gifted member of the audience, a deep sigh—the sort of sigh that might be followed by, ‘You know, it really makes you think . . .’ It really made the Bishop think, too, your canonical commentator wondering if he could get some of his fifteen dollars back if he left halfway through.

Halfway through, with Babel, is about two days, but being overlong is the least of its portentous sins. The worst is earnestnest. Amongst the film’s Methuselan running time is not a single moment of humour—a sure sign of a burdened work—or at least no humour that has not been dipped in pathos and coated with a lesson in the woes that face our troubled world. Of course the world is troubled, and has been since long before the day director Alejandro González Iñárritu first picked up a camera, but that only leads us to the film’s next most egregious flaw: contrivance. The troubles, if we look, are there, they do not need to be manufactured. Babel, filmed in Morocco, Tokyo, and southwest North America, is more stage-managed than a Mexican wrestling match.

The Bishop will not bother to outline the plot; suffice it to say that Iñárritu and his partner in crime, writer Guillermo Arriaga, are in love with the idea of that there are all sorts of connections between people, and that one act leads to another, be it next door or on the other side of the world. This is no doubt true, but as an artistic theme about as startling or as worthy as noting that evil is bad or that some people have blonde hair; and as a cinematic trope, was well worn out in the pair’s other collaborations, the overrated Amores perros and the over-inflated 21 Grams.

With a name like Babel and two ardent symbolists at work, one would expect the film to have something to say about communication and the problems therewith. It does, but once again the revelations sit self-satisfied between the inane and the pat. Is it really such a surprise to learn that an Arabic-speaking Moroccan and an English-speaking American have trouble talking to each other? With so many languages at play, Babel offers subtitles; then, in its quest to impart Meaning, occasionally drops them, particularly at the end of scenes; all this as if to say, ‘What is being said here is obvious, it is in a language everyone can understand.’* This is exactly backwards. The artist’s job, at least in a work like this, is to challenge expectations, not fulfil them.

The acting is sufficient, though much less than Iñárritu no doubt thinks he has achieved. The characters are not. Two Moroccan children are brats of the first order. Early in the film they shoot at a bus, wounding a tourist. This is intended surely as a bit of reckless stupidity, but they are written with such rivalrous venon that it is hard to feel much about their subsequent fate. The Mexican nanny of two American children (Adriana Barraza), is expected to teach us about class distinctions, or at least the racism of the US Border Patrol. What comes across mostly is that she is rather dim. And Chieko, a deaf Japanese schoolgirl (almost realised by the watchable Rinko Kikuchi), is little more than an excuse for some of the most gratuitous nudity since Lady Godiva took up horse riding. Indeed, none of the characters are really characters at all, just bits of ‘serious acting’ demarcating, or decorating, this and that turn of the plot. They react to their environments, but their environments almost never react to them. If anything, the film may have chosen any one of these characters and, over a more modest length, told us of the distance between people. Instead it wants to be about the distance between worlds, and the result communicates about as well as an American tourist attempting to order a hamburger in a Paris café. Babble might be more like it.

The Bishop would like to make just one more pronouncement of his own, on Brad Pitt: who on earth is under the impression that this man can act? Some of our worst performances are wrought by those who merely mimic. Enduring Pitt time after time dole out his sole demonstrable emotion—petulance—one has the impression of an actor not yet even aping what his characters would do, but copying what another actor would do if he were pretending to do what his character would do.

*That, at least, is what the Bishop hopes; and not that the pair were simply substituting cheap mystery for illumination.

The Bishop on Extras: season two, episode one

2006-09-22T12:13:00.000+10:00

If the first episode is anything to go by, the new season of Ricky Gervais and Steven Merchant’s Extras augers faintly darker than what has come before. The sets, once relatively varied, here consist largely of the sets of the shows-within-the-show themselves; the shadowy, thrown together, do-it-yourself backstage of filmic artifice. The characters, by and large, are either nastier or even more hopeless—not only have they failed to grow, they’ve regressed. The mood is grimmer, the script less cheeky and more matter-of-fact. And if the Andy Millman of season one was David Brent on valium, this is season one’s Andy on more of the same—or maybe coming down: even less congenial, never suffering fools gladly and finding everyone, even himself, a fool. It is as if Gervais and Merchant are saying—ironically, given their own rapid rise to prominence—that failure doesn’t simply end with success.

In fact, this new season of Extras shows that an ending doesn’t always end with an ending, either. The arc, and the gimmick, of the show appeared to burn out—a little too quickly* for the Bishop’s liking—last year: Andy finding his way out of the shadows into the spotlight, Maggie (Ashley Jensen) getting her life together, the two consolidating their friendship and affirming their not-so-bad-after-all dependence on each other. But what Gervais and Merchant have done, cleverly, is fall back on an old idea—in a sense, Extras has now become The Office. Andy’s sitcom is being made, and he discovers that creating art is just as subject to bureaucracy and human failing as pushing paper at Wernham Hogg.

There are not many outward laughs here, but that doesn’t seem to matter. One or two friends of the Bishop found the pair’s first collaboration, The Office, too cringe-inducing to be funny. This is both fair enough and, of course, a matter of taste. But while Extra’s is—in tone—The Office–lite, it is important to come to both programs aware that they were never really meant to be funny; they are—if The Bishop may reclaim a related word made almost useless by those TV Guide–style critics—poignant. They are dramas of their time, because it is only now that we have made enough mistakes in pursuit of dramatic verity that we can build narrative out of not just small victories, but small losses and small draws as well. Few programs stand up to repeated viewings; both these shows demand it. This is not to say there are laughs missed the first time ’round; rather, contrariwise, there are nuances that warrant attention once one has gotten past the broader edge of the comedy.**

If observational sitcom humour entered the baroque phase with Seinfeld, Gervais has taken it into its classical period. Larry David, doing something very similar to this in his Seinfeld follow-up Curb Your Enthusiasm, never quite hits the same chimes of verity, because one is always wanting pull him aside and tell him to shut the hell up. Gervais’s Millman, by contrast, is a man who can’t be shut up, because, like most of us, he has, metaphorically speaking, already stepped in the dog turd and can now only wipe it off or pretend it isn’t there. Gervais is also a much better actor than David. His petulant shrug of the shoulders after being dressed down by his boss is so human you could shake hands with it; and when he walks off behind the ‘set’ in the last minute of this story, head slumped, unhappy with what his sitcom project has become, he is like the anti-Olivier, suggesting not that less is more, or more is less, but just-so is just-so.

If The Office was near enough the best there is at what it did, Extras is not quite so tightly wrought. There is, as with all British TV, a good cast (particular credit to Martin Savage, who plays the BBC Head of Comedy with the calm authority that comes from needing nothing but that calm—and the threat that it might, at any second, break), but Maggie seems as lost as-character as she is in character. Her hapless offsiding is in some sense integral, but became flabbier as last season progressed: neither foil nor counterpoint to Andy, or even mirror, but largely repetition. Here she has little to do apart from serve as psychic punching bag and make Orlando Bloom look a fool—though the latter is probably not such a bad thing to have to do.

There are also implausabilities. Despite its humourous potential, it is hard to see Maggie as the cible d'amour of a desperate Bloom; likewise Shaun ‘Barry’ Williamson’s catering table theft was well timed and amusing, but the stuff of early Simpsons and out of place here. Nonetheless, the Bishop was pleased to discover that Extras has found somewhere to go after so neatly—if hurriedly—wrapping up last year.

*And conveniently: your Lutheran locutor never really bought Andy’s sudden ability to sell his script, the excitement with which it was rushed forward by the BBC, or the idea that they’d cast a patently uncharismatic unknown in the lead. This may be similar to what happened in the creation of The Office, but that was real life, and doesn’t have to make sense. Drama—and even comedy—does.

**Gervais, in the guise of Millman, rails against ‘broad comedy’ in this story—a familiar trope if one has seen Gervais and Merchant speak on the subject. Yet there is broad comedy in both Extras and The Office—indeed, this is the source of most of the actual laughs. Merchant, in particular, with his sym-pathetic goggle eyes and abnormal height, cannot seem to help being broadly hilarious, and would not be out of place in Little Britain or The League of Gentlemen, shows with a style the duo are actively trying to eschew.

The Bishop on Curb Your Enthusiasm

2006-09-20T13:36:00.000+10:00

The Bishop would be doing little more than observing the obvious if he were to note that Larry David can’t act. And yet the very idea of Larry David acting, or not acting, is at the heart your humble heuristicator’s gentle enjoyment of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

The Bishop says David can’t act, which is not the same as saying he is not the right actor for this show. Acting (an overrated art in any case) would, in this case, simply allow our man the freedom to trek beyond his natural territories of piqued, bemused and nonplussed. But Curb Your Enthusiasm knows what it is and is what it is; and, like Ricky Gervais and Steven Merchant’s The Office, is not so much interested in freedom as restraint. Kenneth Tynan once wrote of Samuel Beckett that he showed us how much drama could afford to leave it out; David, if the comparison does not seem a conceit, is—perhaps unconsciously, perhaps not—doing much the same thing. Beckett’s problem was that his actors didn’t—and still don’t—know how to handle him. And, while one struggles to imagine the likes of David finding his way onto the serious stage, the Bishop can’t help feeling that in David’s reticent style—he never quite seems to be in the same scene with his fellow performers, never quite shedding the persona of the harried writer wandering, unwanted script advice in hand, onto the set—a suitable partner in crime. At least, one suspects, Beckett would have enjoyed David’s inability to get through most of his funnier scenes without breaking into a self-conscious smile.

It’s no overstatement to say that David has taken the dictum to write (and perform) what you know about as far as it will go. Apart from a not terribly successful stint on Saturday Night Live, David has written about almost no-one and nothing that isn’t, literally, himself (Seinfeld fans will notice elements not just of its four main characters, but even minor roles and walk-on parts in David’s various moods). Even more specifically, with Curb Your Enthusiasm we have, almost literally, a show about what David would do if he were making a show about what he would do if he were making a show about himself. The Bishop would hardly be surprised to see David’s next project open on David, sitting at his desk writing the opening scene of a series which opens on David, sitting at his desk . . .

In any case, David knows his subject matter backwards; the viewer’s amusement, then, rests solely in whether that viewer finds David a matter worthy of being subjected to. The Bishop does. And while the series’ other recurring characters are not so much—as written—characters as they are shticks, the series’ improvisational format (David writes a seven-odd page outline and the cast ad libs from there) allows them to find comic pathologies writers rarely do. In particular, the Bishop has been impressed by Cheryl Hines as Cheryl David, providing a foil not just for David-the-character’s quasi-misanthropic antics but David-the-actor’s rudimentary range; always grounding the couple in reality. With a face that would not have been out of place in Knots Landing (invitingly attractive, even pert, despite a certain duckishness), she seems neither naturally funny nor psycho-veristic; and that, perhaps—paradoxically—is why she works so well here.

A comment must also be made about the direction, which goes some way to showing that writing is not the only craft in which the cinema has been eclipsed by the TV. In episode two of season two, ‘Trick or Treat’, Larry Charles, who has worked previously on Seinfeld, makes a virtue of movement, duelling with David’s face and finding the nervous energy in his laconic physicality. In fact this episode is a treat all ’round, David human rather than obliquely acerbic (as he is for far too much of that season)—and reminding us—or the Bishop, anyway—that, outside the laborious, declamatory world of Arthur Miller, what we like to see is the loser win every now and again.

The Bishop on spin

2006-09-01T17:39:00.000+10:00

The Bishop has always had a bit of a soft spot for Al Gore. A two-time presidential hopeful, he is often derided by his critics as charm-free—and perhaps he is—but for those intellectually sufficient to follow what he says, his arguments take on a certain unprepossessing charm of their own. An Inconvenient Truth, then—Gore’s documentary-cum-PowerPoint presentation on global warming—could be seen as a wrestling match between who Gore is and what he says. The result is something of a draw.

There is no point in pretending, even for a second, that this is a documentary, or any other sort of film. Whether or not Gore chooses to run in 2008 (your pontificating pontiff suspects that he is tired, and won’t), this is campaign commercial, an advertisement for the issue and the man himself. There is nothing cinematic about An Inconvenient Truth, nothing that could make the experience of seeing it in-theatre different from watching it on TV; or even—but for a few charts and a moment of communion between Gore and a cherry picker—hearing it, perhaps in the car on the way to work, on CD.

As political piece, as with all forms of advertising, the only way to judge An Inconvenient Truth’s efficacy is in hindsight, via public opinion—and the reports have been, for the most part, and perhaps surprisingly, superb. (The website Rotten Tomatoes, which compiles the opinions of various mainstream and Internet critics in a yeh-or-nay (‘fresh’ or ‘rotten’) fashion, gives it a remarkable 92%.) The Bishop imagines left-wing liberals will (or, rather, have) adore(d) it, while for liberal centrists, the environment may, while the film is still warm, now take its place among more personally relevant Democratic issues: health care, education, employment and such. Pure centrists, or non-conservative sceptics (such as your ecologically-uncertain evangelical himself*), may be inclined to give the topic a second look. But for conservatives of all shapes and sizes, sitting up straight and paying attention will be a little like being cornered by one’s parents for a talk on the birds and the bees—only aged twenty-five, instead of the usual twelve.

Watching An Inconvenient Truth, the Bishop was reminded of a comment by Australian comedian John Safran: ‘You’re too stupid to be an atheist’. Unequipped with first-hand knowledge of the facts, and unable to make much of them even if we were, most of us can only take—or not take—what Gore tells us about the future of hurricanes, polar ice caps and the like on faith. And while, as philosophy, the scientific method can fall back on its rigorous standards (and certainly in opposition to non-naturalistic worldviews), we have only individual scientists' word that they have followed those standards—and that they have been successful in doing so. But this is matter of meta-heuristics, not one of politics, and in Gore’s favour he has the demeanour of one who is, as much as anyone can be, incapable of falsehood.

Indeed it seems, on face value, that Gore would make as good a presidential candidate as anyone likely to run for that office. He is a Southern Democrat, which means he can expect to give his party one red state.** He is religious. He is, in presentation, modest and self-effacing (though the Bishop can clearly see the necessary haughter of a man who believes he knows best. Many times throughout An Inconvenient Truth, he makes reference to this or that eminent ‘friend’, and the Bishop cannot be sure whether this is because he ever-so-slightly smarmy, or in order to assure us that he actually has friends). At almost six-foot-two and square-built, he has perhaps the ideal physiology of a president, and can add to his masculinity resume both high school football and voluntary service in Vietnam. He has immense experience in Washington, but grew up on a farm. And his intellect has never been in doubt. Why, then, has he struggled?

The Bishop suspects it might be that Gore—with all the self-awareness of a high-school hall monitor—has no conception of how to entertain. He knows what entertainment is—he’s seen as much of it as Tipper will allow—and yet, as any parrot owner knows, even a bird can be taught to speak without knowing how to talk. And faced with conclusive evidence that he is neither engaging nor funny, he stoops to compensate; but hearing Gore joke about his absent sense of humour, one can do no more than swallow hard and try to laugh, in much the same way one would if a terminal bowel cancer patient made a quip about feeling a little shit.

What Gore needs is Nick Naylor (Arron Eckhart), the tobacco lobbyist and spin doctor of Thank You For Smoking. Intelligently cast, Ekhart is just self-effacing enough—and surrounded by just enough other hustlers (he often approaches his contemporaries with the expression of a doe caught in headlights)—to come across as sympathetic as he is smooth.

Katie Holmes, by contrast, is ridiculously miscast; as a journalist who goes down to get the low-down on her subjects, Holmes brings neither the savvy nor the sex appeal to liberate anyone from their most guarded secrets—let alone the wily Nick. Even her physical details are wrong—twice it is noted that her stand-out bodily characteristic is ‘great tits’. (What the hell, the Bishop wonders, was the costume designer thinking, putting her in nothing but those loose, oversize shirts?) And it is disappointing that in a film which does such a snappy job of spelling out the secrets of spin, we get no insight—besides her insides—on how this bravura reporter plies her (rough) trade.

This film is one of scenes rather than story—like his father, Jason Reitman is too light—and prone to schmaltz—to fully sustain this high concept. But there are here and there laughs—and commentary—of a semi-original kind. One scene stands out. Nick is sent by one of his various bosses to pay off Lorne Lutch (Sam Elliot, useful), the ‘original’ Marlboro Man. Now dying of lung cancer, it is intended that such ‘generosity’ will see Lorne take his vengeance, and vehemence, out of the public eye. Clearly aware that Nick is full of tricks, he first refutes the offer, but when Nick, circumlocutorially, explains the consequences of not keeping the cash, Lorne—as though he had been punched drunk by Nick’s sure-fisted verbiage—changes his tune. How many such dextrous rhetorical inversions as this are Reitman’s, and how many come from the novel by Christopher Buckley, is a matter for those who have read it; but whichever one of them it is, he has perhaps a future in spin doctoring himself.

*For instance: Gore notes that the one constant global-warming relationship over the past forty years has been between atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and heat. While this is almost certainly incontrovertible, the climate is a frankly fickle (scientifically: chaotic) thing, and there is no reason not to speculate that, upon reaching what could be called a critical mass, carbon dioxide levels might have a different effect.

**Though failed to take his home state during his 2000 run.

The Bishop on The Proposition

2006-08-29T13:19:00.000+10:00

Like surprisingly many pretentious things, The Proposition is, intermittently, engaging, though whether this is due to its attempted gravitas, or the relief occasioned by its intermittent let ups from pretension (here, in the form of cleverly surprising snaps of violence), it is difficult to say.

Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone, miscast) captures outlaw Charlie Burns, and his younger brother, Mikey, and makes him an offer: go out into the desert and kill his older, far more criminally dangerous brother, Arthur, and the two will be pardoned. Otherwise, Mikey will be hanged. No convincing reason is presented for why Captain Stanley makes this pact, except to give the film its title, and its plot. Unless, sensing that he is in a film, he has some meta-dramatic awareness that Charlie is not all that bad.

No character in The Proposition could be said to bare any resemblance to anyone who ever lived. Guy Pearce’s Charlie Burns is a man of so few words, and not much more action, that the Bishop, at least, never really caught his shtick. Captain Stanley behaves according to the dictates of the plot, then frets about it; and Emily Watson, as Martha Stanley, is about as well-thought-out as she is tanned. David Wenham has in other roles displayed a knack for finesse, but it is soon clear that his Eden Fletcher is only here to be hated (perhaps writer Nick Cave felt his otherwise ‘grey’ characters would look greyer against a background of black). Wenham, with nowhere to go, revives the horrid Australian tradition of kooky kitsch, and it is only the actor’s unassuming charm that saves him. Arthur Burns, pasted into scene by Danny Huston, reminds the Bishop of one of those mute bikers from Mad Max II—even down to the way he is shot: head craned forward as if looking for something but not quite sure what, hair gusting back like the parting of the Red Sea. Again, like Wenham, he has a nip of charisma, but seems to have taken those acting classes where one pretends to be a tree (or, in this case, a rock) too seriously. John Hurt, biting into the superfluous, and supercilious, Jellon Lamb, is the only one present who realises that Cave intended to provide his thespians with poetry, and declaims accordingly. (Hurt should do more Beckett; always weathered, he is starting to remind your canonical critic of the face of a crumbling cliff.)

John Hillcoat directs with little enthusiasm or élan, but for an ability to quickly bring the violence front and just-off-centre from a background of calm—though this may simply be because his calm is too calm, almost as if it has fallen asleep. Still, praise where it’s due, and one or two moments deserve attention. One: Captain Stanley is startled from his slumber by the sound of gunfire. He jumps up, panics, and promptly runs into a door. Hillcoat leaves him in the background, keeping the focus on his wife, and the effect of this muffled shot is to share Stanley’s disorientation, as if we had run into the door, too. Later, Charlie is roused from a desert sleep to find his horse dead. The not-quite-competent Charlie looks around in every direction except that of an incoming spear. Pierced (pardon the pun), he looks up to find his attackers, a gang of aboriginal ‘rebels’, stationed on the rise like burnt trees. Then, still in long shot (and from Charlie’s point of view), one of them is shot in the head. The whole threat rising from these elements is greater than the sum of its parts; it is like watching dominos fall.

Cave, apparently, wrote The Proposition in three weeks, and it shows. Had he spent another three, he might have trimmed two unnecessary characters, and fleshed out the plot. Like A History of Violence, previously discussed by the Bishop, The Proposition is too lackadaisical to entertain dramatic tension—too self-consciously dark to establish empathy (could any viewer, for example, really care less if Mikey Burns is hanged or not?). Cave fails to realise one does not have to approve in order to identify, and so the film’s injustices become simply a pretext for contemplating, and committing, violence.

What Cave does do, however, is paint his characters in such an even shade of gris that his musings on the human condition are welcome, or at least tolerable—there could be no proselytising from these opportunists. And while they cannot speak for humanity—because they are cartoon figures with only the trappings of verity: cheap hooch, blood and stubble—one is at least aware that that is what they are supposed to do. Cave’s eye, too, is much better than he probably realises. He could, it seems likely, pen an astute screenplay—there are too many inventive touches here to believe otherwise—once he learns to link one encounter to another in the Aristotelian sense. And leave out the fucking poetry. A scene in which Martha Stanley recalls a nightmare to her husband was a painful for the Bishop as it must have been for her.

One final point, on the Australian outback as mythic landscape. The Bishop has never really found it equal to John Ford’s American West, or even Sergio Leone’s Italian scrub; with it’s strangled trees, deformed canyons, and scattered, greying rocks, it looks more like the place where, during the Creation, God dumped his rubbish. It is still a worthy backdrop, though, an opportunity to show us sunburn instead of sunset; a land of boredom, flies and matted sweat, there is a real sense that one could die there. The Proposition almost captures that, but the Bishop wondered why more was not made of the oppressive desert heat (the film is set at Christmas, during the Australian summer). The Burns gang take on mystical qualities among the indigenous population for their ability to thrive in no man’s land, but Cave and Hillcoat just assume their spiritual connection to the place—we never really get to see why.

The Bishop on A History of Violence

2006-08-25T17:04:00.000+10:00

The Bishop has learned something from A History of Violence; though it is not about history, and it is certainly not about violence. Instead, your Anglican adjudicator has discovered one interesting fact about David Cronenberg.

Cronenberg, according to the special features included with the DVD, does not storyboard his projects; he likes to improvise. This is not to say he doesn’t use a script. But, once he has read, and liked, and, presumably, got his head around the thing, he simply turns up on set and works the rest out from there. This explains a lot.

Cronenberg is a director who might be quite good if he ever chooses to make it up before he goes along. As it is—and irrespective of his disinterest in putting people in his films—he is a director whose haphazard technique struggles with the concepts of space and time. Any filmgoer with a functioning eye will have seen the way he is forever cramming people into shot (even when there are not that many people to cram), but here it is the chronological gaps he over—and under—fills. As the picture opens, we watch two (murderous) criminals checking out of a hotel (why Cronenberg begins with this patently unnecessary scene the Bishop does not know)—one goes inside to ‘pay up’; the other, slowly, brings up the car (we stay with the second). Waiting for the first criminal to return, there is a sense of bloated delay—this scene—suspense-less, because we have no background, even if it is clear the pair are up to no good—is taking far too long. And yet, hearing the first thug tell the second that he had ‘a dispute with the maid’, one’s immediate sense is that there has not been near enough time to get into a disagreement and shoot two people in the head. This is but one example of many; at no point is the drama navigated, vitally or patiently, by a sense of pace.

Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen) runs a diner in Millbrook, Indiana, and though the previews for the film will have already announced the contrary, we are asked to play along and think that that is all. One evening, the two aforementioned gangsters hold up the diner with intentions to kill; Tom, in an unexpected show of skilful violence, takes them out instead. His face now on the news, he is presently beset by more gangsters—bearing further ill—who believe he is Joey Cusack, a killer from their past. Is he? And if so, what does that entail? It is the task of the rest of the film to (partially) answer these questions.

It does not. There is certainly something to explore here, as thriller if nothing else (the Bishop doubts Cronenberg’s ability to make incisive social commentary; more anon), but there is not enough in this film to maintain any sort of tension, of either the dramatic or the psychic kind. Events unfold about as basically as they can; if one might imagine the ultimate mystery film, where every twist and turn is the last thing one expects, this is its opposite. And none of this is helped by the fact that Cronenberg, wanting to show us every attitude and skew on violence, really only demonstrates how much it turns him on.

There is a further lesson here, about the difference between the simple and the simplistic. Watching A History of Violence, your Anglican adjudicator was struck by the thought that Cronenberg—who the Bishop assumed had a hand in the script—should be writing comics. And what do you know? It turns out that A History of Violence was, originally, a comic. As an intermittent funnies fan, the Bishop knows rather too well the paucity of many modern, violent ‘adult’ comics; said writers’ inability to guide us through the grey minutia of life being rivalled only by their belief in their ability to do so. The idea of the grotesque creeping into the everyday was an old idea when David Lynch pretended to come up with it, and when it comes to delusions of one’s insight and originality, a scene in which Tom tells his young daughter there is ‘no such thing as monsters’, thirty seconds after another little girl has been cold-bloodedly shot, just about says it all.

There is some value in Cronenberg’s vision, but Josh Olson, adapting with ill-spent enthusiasm from the graphic novel, has no place writing scripts. His characters, his situations—particularly in his depiction of small-town life—and most of all his balsa-wooden dialogue—are about as fresh and sophisticated as those paintings of draught horses one is always seeing at community art fares. And even in this he gets it wrong (though Cronenberg is equally to blame); unsure whether he wants to point his ‘ironic’ pen at the muddy mundanity of everyday life, or at its faux–Hollywood innocence.

And yet, this is not a bad film. Perhaps it is Cronenberg’s fundamental cinematic talent—seeping, once again, through the cracks of his bovine intellect. Perhaps it is a previously undiscovered gift for staging action (ironic in the one film where Cronenberg cuts the violence quickly so as—in theory, anyway—not to glorify it) and Mortensen’s adept physicality (somewhere, it seems to the Bishop, between a sure-fisted boxer and an anxious whippet). Perhaps it is that the basic premise—is he Tom, or Joey, or both, or neither?—is intriguing enough. Or perhaps it is just that no moving picture featuring Maria Bello in that cheerleaders outfit could in truth be said to be completely wrong.

Monsieur Mortensen shall never be a genuinely satisfying actor—nor, though, is he a disaster. His difficulty is twofold. One: He has, of late, been cast in roles that are too big for him (though the Bishop struggles to imagine what he would do with the urgent necessities of a character part). Two: He is too busy thinking. Mortensen may be an intelligent man—even if his face bellies it—but he is stuck in the confusion between schizophrenia of surface and multifariousness of depth. At no stage is he ever really Tom Stall or Joey Cusack. Yes, he does affect a sort of transformation, but that transformation begins and ends with his face. And though, perhaps, a face is not a bad place for an actor’s transformation to be, we need something apart from Mortenson’s slightly grimmer, slightly more mechanical, slightly perplexed visage, as though we—and he—are watching his reflection in a broken mirror.

Fortunately, perhaps, there is no one in A History of Violence to show Mortensen up. Bello, clumsy, fails to finds the point to Tom’s wife, Edie, though she is sumptuous decoration as the perfect everywoman—which is to say that every man watching the film will probably want to fuck her. William Hurt is silly. And as to Ed Harris, he has never really seemed to understand what acting is, and probably never will.

The Bishop on Good Night, and Good Luck

2006-08-24T15:44:00.000+10:00

It is perhaps difficult for those who were not around—or present—at the time to appreciate an America in the grip of two red terrors—communism, in the form of the Soviet Bloc, and conservatism, in the form of Republican senator Joseph McCarthy. Among those too young to understand fully that time and place the Bishop must include himself—and, unfortunately, still must after taking in Good Night, and Good Luck.

There is an obvious parallel between George Clooney—who directs, co-wrote, and appears in Good Night, and Good Luck—and Robert Redford, who, though he tends not to appear in his own films, followed a strikingly similar star-cum-filmmaker path. In this case—beyond the duo’s similar good looks and public appeal—the parallel is well drawn. As with Redford in his better films—Ordinary People, Quiz Show—Clooney shows no lack of cadence with the camera; but, like Redford, he reveals no particular gift with it, either. As one might expect if, say, the works of Checkov were literally filmed—and in somewhat similar style to Clooney’s own acting—there is a charismatic directness to his choices: not understatement, but simply statement. Yet, unlike Checkov, his simplicity of presentation has no core; it is not in the service of the unexpected depths of life.

His writing (with Grant Heslov) is, again, agreeable, but without vigour. It is also—and this is the root of the problem—unfocused. As we enter the film, we spend perhaps two minutes circling—sans dialogue—a gathering of broadcast journalists—but the scene does little more than tell us that we are watching a film, and that the people there are having, more or less, a good time. From there we cut—via a speech by the picture’s central figure, journalist Edward R. Murrow—into the meat of the film; but here, again, there does not seem to be a story to follow.

The situation: Joe McCarthy, the Junior Senator for Wisconsin* is reaching the height of his anti-communist Senate hearings. Murrow, a journalist whose principles would normally eschew editorialising, is compelled to act when he believes the Senator has gone too far. Yet despite his own decision to step carefully over the journalistic Maginot Line, his straight-faced journalistic approach behooves him to simply present the facts, and let McCarthy damn himself. As commentary on modern-day broadcast news practice, the point is quietly clear—and well-taken—and one can’t help but hark back to a day when a newsman (and a senator) would quote Shakespeare—as well as enjoying that most civilized of recreations, a smoke—on camera. And yet we garner little understanding of these men—Murrow or McCarthy (playing himself via original footage)—their cut-and-thrust, or what it was like to be there at the time. Clooney should be praised for—like Murrow—refusing to editorialise, or invent drama, but surely there must have been some drama there to be found. Even if it is only there to say, as is more often than not the case, that sometimes the result is a draw, and that’s what happened here.

The players are all sufficient, which is all they can be—though the Bishop passes up no opportunity to praise the underrated Jeff Daniels and will do so again here. David Strathairn, as Murrow, is as authentic as the real McCarthy, but he is not properly a character and this is not properly a performance. Just two pieces of casting—and their related sub-plots—deserve comment. Ray Wise plays Don Hollenbeck, a journalist accused of communist sympathies who, under the stress, kills himself. Wise plays the role intimately, with an almost effeminate nervousness, but his fear seems, as must surely not have been the case, to come out of nowhere. Once again, there is no A-to-B, no invitation to discover why. And a romantic diversion involving the marriage of Joe and Shirley Wershba (Robert Downey Jr and Patricia Clarkson) seems mostly to have been left on the cutting room floor. There is nothing wrong with their performances, but given their scenes seem to have been included to take the running time from eighty to eighty-six minutes, perhaps Clooney might simply have dispensed with the whole thing.

*This full title is used repeatedly throughout the film, and presumably in Murrow’s original broadcasts. The Bishop wonders if Murrow, and now Clooney, were making one small nod to rhetoric in continuing to note—legitimately, if unnecessarily—McCarthy’s non-senior status.

The Bishop gets serious for a moment

2006-08-24T11:44:00.000+10:00

Cass R. Sunstein's New Republic article is a reminder of that too-often unacknowledged truth: at the federal (national) level, conservatives hold all the aces.

The evidence is obvious re: the US scene. Republicans have occupied the Oval Office for seven of the last ten presidential terms. At The New Republic (here, here, here or here), what commentator thinks any blue contender stands a chance against the likes of McCain in 2008? And consider this: would Democrats ever profit by proffering the slur ‘Kentucky conservative’ in response to ‘Massachusetts liberal’?

The logic is equally simple. America is steeped in paternal imagery—‘founding fathers’ and the like. The President (any president) no less—in spirit if not in competence—than those who came before. The upshot: the President is Dad. And as much as none of us look forward to his wrath when we write off the car, at the end of the day we all want the old man to be strong; not a pissant.

In the national eye—that silent majority of Americans not absorbed or engaged by politics—any Democratic Daddy is a pissant.

He’s softer on drugs; softer on crime; softer on ‘hard graft’ (who, when it comes down to it, do we respect more? The father who tells us to get out there and get a job, or the one who lets us spend all day asleep on the couch?). And, most of all, softer on standing up for house and home.

It is not that the 2004 presidential race was about character. Every presidential race has been about character. Thus Democrats, nee liberals, are rendered helpless by the very things they stand for.

What to do?

Democrats can only move so far to the centre before the very word becomes worthless. But if they’re serious about a serious national presence, they have to become hawks on national defence.

‘Tough on terror, fair on freedom’ must become their mantra. Their rhetoric must match—even out-match—the Republicans at every turn, while hammering the indisputable justice of centrist-liberal values re: the day-to-day at home.

There must be no nuance about this. No well-reasoned arguments. Just the techniques of oratory and mass communications that have served the conservative cause so well. We may look back on the days when our leaders would quote Shakespeare instead of spin doctors, but that is only because they had not yet seen they could achieve much more with much, much less.

Remember, as the present administration teaches, rhetoric is not action; that ends do, sometimes, justify means; and that the public memory is short. This may be a cynical view, but it is a cynical truth, and it is better to be led by a capable cynic than an incapable idealist.

The Bishop on 9 Songs

2006-08-14T18:11:00.000+10:00

The Bishop has often felt that there is something fundamentally ludicrous in the practice of sex. Not so much Lord Chesterfield’s observation—‘the pleasure is momentary, the position ridiculous, and the expense damnable’—but rather, outside the realm of well-crafted pornography, a lack of physical (or, indeed, emotional) grace. Of course, this does not make the carnal pleasures any less pleasurable, as few of us, during the act of intercourse, are actually in a position to see what’s going on; but as anyone who has, like the Bishop, contributed to the world’s oversupply of porn with a little home-movie action will know, rarely do those amateur productions captivating viewing make. A lot of this may be simple embarrassment, of the sort that safely prevents us seeking lessons from our parents or masturbating in front of mirrors. But there is also something crude about the gross-motor get-on-and-get-off act of shagging that makes scrutinizing it about as savoury as watching rhinos do the same.

This is the first problem with 9 Songs, Michael Winterbottom’s own attempt to masturbate in front of a mirror: it is not erotic. Filmed sexual activity may be, quite frequently, erotic; but when it is, it is for much the same reason that dramas are dramatic: because we have drawn from life, not photocopied it. Truth, in narrative, is not only—or, even, often—found in facsimile; else we would have no need of the facsimile. If Winterbottom were ever to have succeeded with this predictably ill-conceived project, he would have to have done much more with his subject matter than stick a camera in front of it and hope for the best. What we have here then, in place of a story, is a slightly embarrassed recording of a slightly embarrassing act.

Should eroticism matter, though? Winterbottom has stated, somewhere, that his goal was make a film about sex that was not erotic. (Perhaps he might have saved the Bishop sixty-nine minutes, and mentioned that he also wanted to make a film about sex that was not good.) This is a laudable (if slightly baffling) aim, but in eroticism’s absence Winterbottom has provided no reason for his sequence of intimate interludes. We watch this couple fuck; why? It tells us nothing about them—narratively, metaphorically, even physically—except that rather ordinary couples like to make out, too.

The use of non-actors works for Ken Loach; it does not work for Winterbottom. Margo Stilley’s Lisa is nigh-on unbearable: a self-absorbed prat played by a self-absorbed twat. He fares little better with his choice of the experienced Kieran O'Brien: his contribution to any film, on the evidence herein, could be little more than functional: he would be in it. Winterbottom doesn’t even have much luck with the bands; as shot by him, the Bishop can only wonder how they have drawn such enthusiastic crowds.

No script was written for this hour-long exercise in loitering, which the Bishop hears is typical of Winterbottom. That may be because this indolent director is incapable of writing one. In fact, Winterbottom makes only one concession to having thought about this dross for longer than it took to come up with the gimmick: that staple of films that are sure to be both ‘arty’ and dull: narration. At the movie’s beginning Matt informs us, amongst a string of platitudes and pseudo-allegorical drivel, that the only thing he identifies with the memory of Lisa is sex. The Bishop can only wonder, then, why on earth he remembers her at all.

The Bishop on Thumbsucker

2006-08-08T00:43:00.000+10:00

If the Bishop might be so bold as to posit one inclination far too common amongst the young independent North American writer-directors of the last 15, or even 30, years, it is an almost pathological love of restraint. No doubt this is a reaction to Hollywood excess; and as one who largely resists the urge to take the top off the cognac until the sun is at least a yard or so over the yardarm, the Bishop concurs that this is a laudable goal. But when it’s time to have a drink it’s time to have a drink, and all too often the cinematic result of this penchant is more un-statement than understatement—the dramas ain’t dramatic, the funnies ain’t funny—and, more often than not, watching one of these fillums is like walking through a friend’s front door expecting to discover a tastefully furnished apartment, only to find two cardboard boxes, a mattress and a lamp. Todd Solondz, Wes Anderson and, at his intermittent worst, Jim Jarmusch spring to mind.

A genuine knack for the less-is-more approach is probably as spartan a gift as one is likely to find; but if it can be taught, the Bishop directs the American moyen garde to the first nine-tenths of Thumbsucker, wherein a thing or two might be learned. Here is a measured single malt with just the splash of water, only in its final minutes succumbing to the urge to grab the Johnnie Walker Black and gulp the whole thing down with Coke. It is a cocktail of intentions not so much foiled as ill-formed, hopes not so much dashed as dismissed, and conversations not so much not finished as never really started.

Seventeen-year-old Justin Cobb is nervous, and sucks his thumb. This is irrelevant. He is diagnosed, rightly or wrongly, with ADHD, prescribed drugs, and gains confidence. He becomes disenchanted, throws out the drugs, and relents to a state somewhere in-between. He is, throughout all, deeply concerned that he, his parents, and just about everyone else is not quite happy enough; but it is clear that this is only the sort of teenage fussing one never really grows out of.

In the world of the film, almost nothing is given away. Yet there is always the sense that it is there to be given away—the cellar, not often visited, is not, as in Spanking the Monkey, Welcome to the Dollhouse and the like, dry. And, while the balance between au natural and eau du quirky is sometimes uneasy, filmmaker Mike Mills is not afraid, thank heaven, to do funny things in his quest to be funny.

The awarding of awards for ensemble casts is an idea so silly it could only have been thought up by committee, but if such a thing were ever useful, it is useful here. Vincent D’Onofrio is a refreshing, pleasantly uncertain vodka tonic to the twitching, Ritillin-infused OP rum he plays on TV, while Lou Pucci, with one of the most characteristically teenage-and-American voices the Bishop has heard, would make a fine young California Riesling: doing quite a bit with not much, generic yet somehow distinct, and lasting well enough over the stretch. It is only when he places the title thumb in his mouth that he seems to be acting. Kelli Garner, as his paramour, recalls for the Bishop certain of the recent Burgundies: airy, precise, and lovely. And the addition of Keanu Reaves teaches a singular lesson in casting. His slightly ridiculous, pontificating orthodontist works because one is always aware that this is Keanu Reaves, an almost charismatic actor who, when out of his element, just about defines the word ridiculous; here, with artificially deep voice, characteristic clumsiness, and good-humoured sense of self-awareness, he brings comic timing that beats in 5/4 instead of the usual common time—and reminds one that even a shandy is the right drink if the weather is fine. His character could have been played by no-one else.

Tilda Swinton, finally, must be congratulated as an actor willing to take risks. For much of the film she rings slightly false; this is because she has stayed altogether true. She seems, in the early going, too lofty or insufficiently daffy as a mildly dissatisfied, celebrity-obsessed suburban mother, but events bare her choices out. And, of course, a good red must be allowed to breath for a little while.

Speaking of which . . .

The Bishop on complete rubbish

2006-08-04T16:15:00.000+10:00

Or: What the Bishop was doing while the Doctor Who episode ‘Fear Her’ was playing in the other room.

In fact the Bishop won’t do as he originally planned and go into detail about all the shaving, washing up, sock-drawer arranging and general piss-farting around he got up to in lieu of subjecting himself to this poster child for tedium; not wishing to bore his readers in quite the way the team at BBC Wales saw fit to bore him. What he will note, however, for your hilarious amusement and open-mouthed disbelief alike, is how the episode ended.

The Doctor lights the 2012 Manchester Olympic flame.

Which, in the wonderful world of Russell T. Davies, shows what each and every one of us could do if we would only try to make difference like the Doctor. If we just gave it that ol’ college try, we too could slip past the planet’s tightest security, steal the centrepiece of an event the whole world is watching, and generally look as though we’re about to commit the biggest terrorist act in human history. All without anybody so much as batting an eyelid.

Or perhaps, like the Bishop, they had simply fallen asleep.

The Bishop goes from strength to strength

2006-08-03T20:37:00.000+10:00

It’s been a ripsnorting July for From the Bishop’s Desk, your encyclical enunciator’s electronic log receiving a site-record one comment—a percentage increase over this website’s prior average (and aggregate) feedback so large the that the Bishop would have to invent a whole new branch of mathematics in order to calculate it.

The trend has continued into August, the Bishop’s newly installed web tracker (free and care of the good people at StatCounter—there’s the kind of plug you’ve been looking for) revealing a mean of nearly eight visits per day over the last three days; though this number did go down a bit when you theistical theoriser worked out how to remove his own IP addresses from the total.

StatCounter also revealed many more interesting factets of passing note, such as the most common hyperlinks used to reach the Bishop’s Desk. Most ‘readers’, it seems, come across said journal by hitting the ‘Next Blog’ icon—a random way of stumbling over other Blogger sites (you’ll see it tucked away at top right-hand of screen)—this promptly followed by their hitting it once again. So far the Bishop’s longest visitor—friends, colleagues and disgruntled dinner party guests aside—has stayed for somewhere in the vicinity of six seconds. A remarkable feat, especially given that it’s just slightly longer than it takes for this site to appear on the Bishop’s screen.

And how will the Bishop celebrate this milestone? With half a bottle of Justerini & Brooks tastiest and a headache the next day, of course.

The Bishop on Doctor Who: 'The Invisible Enemy'

2006-08-03T16:43:00.000+10:00

One of the fascinating things about future histories is their nearly limitless ability to get the future wrong. Nothing the Bishop knows of predicted the Internet until William Gibson, by whose time it already existed. Metallic catsuits have yet to become the must-have item amongst the couture set, let alone replace the business suit. And, while, according to most sci-fi authors of the mid–twentieth century, we should soon be able to get a good second-hand spaceship, faster-than-light compatible and reasonably priced, they could usually imagine little more sophisticated than an electronic typewriter with which to design it. But the Bishop's favourite example is Dune, which sees the art of cloning perfected just a shade over 8,000 years too late.

‘The Invisible Enemy’ is only about half that far off. Except this isn’t cloning as we know it, with flocks of suspiciously identical sheep (if you were going to show off the wonders of modern biology, surely you wouldn’t pick a species famous as the very metaphor for being ‘all the same’). This is cloning of the sort the Star Trek universe could easily introduce, if they’d only spend two minutes looking at how those teleporters actually work. These ‘clones’ come complete with detailed memories, not to mention clothing, though surprisingly little rising panic at the thought that they have, according to the script, only fifteen minutes to live.

Serious Who fans will know, of course, that the finer points of genetics aren’t the only thing that writers Bob Baker and Dave Martin have ever gotten wrong. In ‘The Hand of Fear’ they showed they understand nuclear energy about as well as George W. Bush pronounces it, and in ‘The Three Doctors’, their particular brand of antimatter demonstrated a rather fickle reluctance to blow up on contact with the very matter-rich air. Presently, their script for ‘The Invisible Enemy’ reveals that, as microbiologists, their virology wouldn’t stand up under a monocle, let alone a microscope; and while the Bishop has no more experience with shrinking things or growing things than our dynamic duo do, he’s pretty sure there’d be a little more to it than that.

But this is Doctor Who, and none of the above would matter if what we had here was a rollicking tale of full of drama, humour, or just about anything else besides padding. Who fans regularly point out that this or that six-parter could have been four, or four two, but genuinely next to nothing happens in this story, and what does does so at a pace roughly that of the Equatorial Guinean Olympic swimming squad. The clones last but for fifteen minutes; if only this little ge(r)m of a story could have been over so soon.

The Bishop on the perfect dry martini

2006-08-01T12:25:00.000+10:00

Much like Richard Nixon on the subject of hotel visits, the Bishop would be the lying if he said he didn’t like to take the edge off with a snifter of C₂H₆O every now and again. Yet your discerning diocesic was frankly taken aback during a recent morning’s drinking session, when a friend and fellow al-connoisseur suggested the Bishop’s idea of the ideal martini asciutto was a few swigs from a recently refrigerated bottle of gin. It now behooves the Bishop to set his mind at ease and the record straight.

The Bishop’s favourite olive-drop has its roots in the work of no lesser souse than Ernest Hemingway, whose famous tract The Old Man and the Sea is known, amongst the cognoscenti of cocktails, not to be a coming-of-age tale or a ditty on the perils of fishing, but an allegory on the aging author’s burgeoning capacity for drink. Old Papa, of course, liked to order a Montgomery—fifteen parts mother’s ruin, one part vermouth—supposedly the odds at which its namesake general preferred to enter battle; and, while the Bishop prefers to make love with his glass, not war, this combination, when handled correctly, gives the spirit of 1832 a fighting chance.

Purchase for yourself two bottles of London dry gin (the Bishop prefers Queen Vic’s own jewel of Bombay, though the juniper juice is such a fine drop that most any of the more popular brands will do) and one bottle of vermouth (it matters little which, though most keen drinkers should find Noilly Pratt inoffensive enough). Make sure you have as much gin in the second bottle as you do vermouth, for reasons which will soon become apparent.

Pour out the vermouth. If one is taken by the ‘waste not, want not’ philosophy, perhaps one could make use of it in any upcoming renovations projects as a substitute for paint thinner. Rinse the bottle with chilled, distilled water, then, when you are satisfied that minimal vermouth trace elements remain, replace the contents with those of your second bottle of gin. From here, it is simply a matter of mixing your martini in your own preferred style (the Bishop seeing virtue in both the shaken and stirred sides of the debate and having nothing conclusive to say on the matter), using the aforementioned ratio of 15:1—the greater proportion of said ratio, need the Bishop make more than is already patently clear, being added from the virgin of the two containers.

Add olive, lemon or lime to taste. Enjoy with fine conversation and a Cuban slim panatela.

The Bishop on Doctor Who: 'Love and Monsters'

2006-08-01T01:53:00.000+10:00

Well, the Bishop wonders as he whips back one more belt of single malt to ease the pain: What the fuck was that shit?

It just doesn’t get any worse than ‘Love and Monsters’; and even Doctor Who saviour and ego-in-residence, Russell T. Davies, must have sat in front of his TV, 7:00pm, June 17th, 2006 wringing his hands and wondering what on earth went wrong. A task to which your humble critic would ‘love’ to lend a hand, if only he knew where to start.

It’s been said more than once that that phenomena to which even this unassuming observer has fallen prey, the blog, is just an excuse for no-one in particular to tell you nothing in particular about something involving his cat; and despite having found his own way into the confession booth of cyberspace, the Bishop can, for the most part, only agree. ‘Love and Monsters’, the video diary of Elton Pope, a man whose life has been ‘touched’ by the Doctor, is, literally—and little more than—a blog on camera, and just about as good; though one does find oneself dearly hoping for an appearance by the cat.

The cast are thereabouts as interesting as one suspects your average blogger would be in the flesh. There’s little point going into detail, and in any case that would require the Bishop to remember who any of them were. He will say this, though: Isn’t Camile Corduri terrific? Warm, deft, a lesson in simply acting; even, dare one say it, and despite a jowl or two, in need of a damn good seeing to. She can spill the vino on the Bishop’s robes any time. (Don’t feel you have to wash it out, though, love; he’ll suck it dry later.) Her ‘maternal’ presence even brings something resembling character out of whoever was playing Elton for a couple of minutes.

Steven King, according to Elton, once said that salvation and damnation are the same thing. Elton didn’t get it then, but now, apparently, he does. The Bishop’s still not sure; but he’ll certainly know what King means if he ever draws a parallel between ‘Love and Monsters’ and crap.

(Oh, and Rose,* the blue one you pour on the script.)

*Speaking of Rose, Davies—in a rather American show of earnestness bellied by his pre–Doctor Who work, but altogether in keeping with the relentless bounciness of this series—seems to have missed the irony entailed by that particular prodigal daughter letting someone else have it for hurting her mum.

The Bishop on the Surrealist's Advertising Slogan Generator

2006-07-28T17:26:00.000+10:00

I'm only here for the Surrealist's Advertising Slogan Generator.

Get more from the Surrealist's Advertising Slogan Generator.

That'll be the Surrealist's Advertising Slogan Generator.

The Surrealist's Advertising Slogan Generator prevents that sinking feeling.

Put the Surrealist's Advertising Slogan Generator in your tank.

The Surrealist's Advertising Slogan Generator Bars are on me!

Why can't everything orange be the Surrealist's Advertising Slogan Generator?

(Okay, now you’re just being silly.)

The Bishop on 2:46pm, Wednesday July 26th 2006

2006-07-26T14:46:00.000+10:00

Eh, but whadaya gonna do?

The Bishop on misplaced priorities

2006-07-13T17:13:00.000+10:00

In presenting a fellow contestant—balls ’n’ all, as it were—with the contents of the front of his pants, a certain nameless (and faceless) Australian Big Brother housemate appears to has got it—like the media and public at large ‘in the face’ of the issue—thoroughly arse backwards. For while his knowledge of what went on is, admittedly—and deliberately—limited, the Bishop can only wonder—as he sits back and enjoys a few cocksucking cowgirls in honour of the ado—why the hoopla has all been about whether Big Brother should remain on the air, and not whether at least two of its participants should now be in jail.

Of the first question, your otherwise thoroughly un-conservative commentator concedes that perhaps this sort of prick teasing is something small children shouldn’t see—at least so’s they don’t think it’s how the human mating ritual actually works (and thus preventing much confusion when they become—as children always have, despite the collective amnesia of our modern age—sexually active at twelve). Yet, at the same time, one hates to buy into that particular line of thinking, so common is it among certain evangelical sectors of the community, who obviously believe that if we simply stopped introducing sex to people as youngsters, they’d be less likely to practice it as adults. Regards the concomitant—and considerably more concerning—conundrum, the Bishop can only wonder why, having already locked up these Soylent sociopaths in a house away from the rest of us, they are ever let out again in the first place.

Your pontificating pontiff was also somewhat disturbed to hear that the 'face' of Big Brother, Gretel Killeen—half Vulcan, half scrubber, and a 'handsome' woman if ever there was one—apologised to the victim of what could only be described as sexual assault by calling her no fun. But given our erstwhile hostess comes across as the sort of rough trade who could get her kicks by straddling a fire hydrant, what else did the Bishop expect?

The Bishop on Doctor Who: 'The Girl in the Fireplace'

2006-07-03T12:21:00.000+10:00

The Bishop could probably spell out ten reasons why the Doctor should not be getting it on with historical personages; or, indeed, with anyone else. But what's the point, eh? Your canonical commentator is all too aware that the effort is futile; and will only earn him the scorn of those who praise the Time Lord’s newly awakened sex-drive in the vague hope their enthusiasm for the Doctor’s ‘bedside manner’ makes it look as though they’re getting some themselves. Let the Bishop merely say that, like father and daughter sharing the shower in an effort to save hot water, it somehow doesn’t feel right, and leave it at that. What, then, to make of ‘The Girl in the Fireplace’?

It’s pretty good. The concept is original, and one only has to put this next to Russell T. Davies’s painful ‘Tooth and Claw’ to realise who’s the real adulte terrible of modern British TV. Steven Moffat knows character when he writes it, has big ideas, crafts innovative plots blending surreal science fiction and iconic horror, and, in contradistinction to his hot-and-very-cold editor-in-chief, actually thinks them through. Yet, given the choice between a re-viewing of this and a fifth of cheap hooch, it’s bourbon and bloodshot eyes all the way.

The problem, the Doctor’s new-found interest in being Michael Chamberlain aside, is that the romantic core of ‘The Girl in the Fireplace’ is simply not something Doctor Who does terribly well. Yes, it’s a polished script with some tender touches (possibly to Madame de Pompadour’s right breast), but by the standards of good boy-meets-girl TV—to which Moffat himself is a renowned contributor—it’s nothing more than Men and Women 101.* Yes, from the point of view of your average sexless nine year old (and the below average sexless thirty-nine year old he’ll probably turn into), this is deep stuff; but then, you have to remember, these are some of the people who thought Ace’s season twenty-six line, ‘I’m not a little girl any more’, represented a crescendo of character development. Of course, Moffat’s in a different league (and possibly a different phenotype) to anyone writing for that horrible era of Who, but the whole thing just doesn’t really float the Bishop’s boat—and certainly not to the extent it’s floating the Doctor’s. Like the unforgiving malaise of an absinthe hangover, it’s all just a bit bleugh.

David Tennant is enjoyable in this when he’s not being a prat, which pretty much sums up his tenure so far (the Bishop having now seen his first eight stories). Billie Piper is sidelined for most of the episode—if only coach Davies could have kept her on the bench for the rest of the season. Noel Clarke is too good for his role and, possibly, this show. Sophia Myles, as the girl in the fireplace, is appropriately wooden, but not, unfortunately, either warm or hot; she grates like a more intelligent, but equally insipid, English Ashley Judd. When Tompall Glaser was writing his yokel-inspired country music classic, ‘Put Another Log on the Fire’, he may have had her performance in mind.

*See The Office for a much better example of requited, but unrequitable, love.

The Bishop on Doctor Who: 'The Idiot's Lantern'

2006-06-09T09:59:00.000+10:00

The Bishop has just finished watching ‘The Idiot’s Lantern’, written by Mark Gatiss, which features as backdrop the coronation of Elizabeth II, queen of England (and de facto employer of your Anglican articulator himself). The verdict: if this episode of Doctor Who were any more self-satisfied, it would fucking coronate itself.

Gatiss, as a Doctor Who writer, has never been without his troubles, and the Bishop would not be the first commentator to suggest his Who-fic can be a little on the bland side. In attempting to capture the ‘essence’ of Doctor Who, he forgets that that essence comes from the unfettered imaginations of its multifarious writers: it is not simply the average of their combined efforts. The result—something akin to a cover band doing their best with your favourite pop tune—is normally tolerable: much like that cover band, Gatiss has enough love for the original to mostly see it through; even if, unlike a good VSOP on a cold winter’s night, one doesn’t hurry back for more. But if there are two things a story (or a cognac) should never be at the same time, it is unambitious and smug. And oh boy is this porridge smug.

There are no characters in ‘The Idiot’s Lantern’; just people we are expected to admire, and people we are expected to abhor. Not unexpectedly, these stiff monotypes can’t be performed. Jamie Foreman’s Eddie Connolly is not so much acted as read through; Ron Cook, as Mr. Magpie, is two dimensions short of a solid; and it is hard to tell if Debra Gillett’s Rita has lost her face or not. Adding nothing to this nonexistent cast is Rory Jennings (Tommy Connolly), who looks like a reject from The Tomorrow People, and is a noxious little tit if ever there was one.

In fact, when it comes to beatifically good or despicably nasty, there are only two characters this ‘religious’ Doctor Who fan finds difficult to place. One presumes Gatiss and co want us to like the Doctor and Rose, but smarmy prats have never really been the Bishop’s cup of Irish tea. If it weren’t for the easy—though progressively more difficult—charm of David Tennant and Billie Piper, the pair would be like two days gone by without a double gin martini: utterly intolerable.

The one player the Bishop will raise his glass to, though, is Maureen Lipman. As the only alien lifeform to appear in the episode, she’s the most human thing here. A deliciously salacious performer who somehow locates the character Gatiss forgot to write, she has, dare the Bishop say it (of course he will): genuine ‘screen’ presence.

The plot is neither here nor there—Gatiss didn’t really bother with it, and neither should we. Something bad happens, the Doctor locates the source, then builds a contraption to fix it up. Woah, Mark, slow down there. If the Bishop might ask one question, though: Why did the Wire give a detailed account of its plan away to the one person whom it knew might be able to do something about it? Oh, and if your humble cleric never sees the sonic ex machina or the psychic get-out-of-jail-free card again, it will be far, far too soon.

The Bishop on Doctor Who: 'Tooth and Claw'

2006-05-24T15:35:00.000+10:00

Whatever the Bishop might think of the direction Russell T. Davies is taking with the new incarnation of Doctor Who, there’s really no getting around the fact that, in all but the most nostalgic respects, every new story is a cut above most of what’s come before. Here, finally, is one that isn’t.

'Tooth and Claw' is dull. To be tough (but fair—the Bishop always is), even the best original Who stories—with the exception, perhaps, of 'Inferno', 'The Talons of Weng-Chiang' and 'City of Death'—were two parts imagination, three parts chore. 'Tooth and Claw' is lumbering in much the same way, and irritating to boot.

The tedium stems mostly from a patchwork story, as spurious as anything that might have been produced with Terrance Dicks behind a typewriter: it’s hard not to glaze over watching a yarn that makes this little sense. An alien werewolf* seeds itself in a sequence of victims, generation by generation, until, via some contrivance of planning that would make the American Iraq–exit strategy look cogent, it has the opportunity to infect Queen Victoria. It’s nigh on fucking invulnerable—why not just head straight to London and bite her? An unrelated confusion of Eastern and Western monasticism proves Davies has seen The Matrix, and leaves the rest of us waiting for an explanation as to why these monks can fly. The wolf is vulnerable to mistletoe, so MacLeish Sr and Prince Albert construct a light chamber that would leave today’s best physicists bamboozled, instead of investing in Poplar shares. (Just why did the wolf let on that it was vulnerable to concentrated moonlight—or give away its plans to its victim’s consort’s best friend?) And the whole thing with the diamond simply beggars belief. Albert, presumably, knew the diamond’s function, so why didn’t he mention it to Victoria—or anyone else? Were he and Sir Robert’s father expecting a stray Time Lord to come along and figure it all out? Then again, why would Albert suspect Victoria would ever be anywhere near the light chamber in the first place? Why didn’t he just tell Victoria to stay away from Torchwood and environs entirely?

Speaking of dull, advanced publicity suggested we were supposed to get excited over the presence of Her Majesty; Pauline Collins, obviously, didn’t. Flat and uncertain, she offered nothing toward the character, and didn’t look as though she was expected to.

David Tennant, thankfully, stops acting up in this one, but in doing so he seems to vanish from the screen. Post a good start in 'The Christmas Invasion', he does either too much or here, for a change, not enough (the Bishop pens this having seen 'School Reunion' and 'The Girl in the Fireplace', though not 'New Earth').** He augered every bit ideal for a Doctor in the Tom Baker–mould, but perhaps he is too ideal, too obvious in his eccentricities. Billy Piper is still fine, but Rose is a problem, re-envisaged as little more than the Doctor’s doting mistress—your humble cleric keeps waiting for her to offer him a blow job. And while, yes, friends (or couples, or fuck buddies, or whatever these two are) do hug occasionally, it’s getting tiresome to watch the two embrace in a frenzy of self-congratulation every time Davies thinks of something clever for them to say.

Even the effects underwhelm. The man in the cage is androgynously chilling, but the wolf looks like something pasted out of a Doctor Who sticker book. Don’t worry, Rose, the Bishop will happily say it: We are not amused.

*A creature of horror becomes much less horrible when some disbelief suspending explanation is required to justify its scientifically ‘plausible’ existence. ‘Lupiform hermivore responding to certain frequencies of light’ (surely the Sun gives off all the same frequencies; it is where the Moon gets its light from) is not a patch on ‘man cursed to take on the form of the wolf by the light of the full Moon’.

**This written prior to the previous entry on 'New Earth'. And after a large scotch.

The Bishop on Doctor Who: 'New Earth'

2006-05-24T13:47:00.000+10:00

I’ve seen The Second Coming; I’ve seen Casanova; and there is no doubt in the Bishop's mind that Russell T. Davies is a TV writer of considerable skill. With ‘New Earth’, however, he does little more than take the piss.

Even in this story, there are moments of Davies flair. It isn’t so much Cassandra dying in her own arms that charms, it’s the way it’s foreshadowed: Cassandra, almost (but not quite) indifferently, watching a recording of her early, ‘human’, self; it’s the way in which it was the last night ‘anyone called me beautiful’; it’s the way the Doctor knew exactly what to do. It’s all very slick, of course, but it’s textbook slick, and Davies has read the thing from cover to cover. And speaking of textbook, the Doctor’s comment after the parting of the Face of Boe is postmodern deconstructive shtick worthy of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer—if, indeed, Buffy: The Vampire Slayer is the sort of thing that something else can be worthy of.

But apart from that and a lovely, almost balletic, turn by Sean Gallagher as the dying Cassandra (the dying swan?), there’s not a lot else here; at least not a lot worth taking any notice of.* Were it not for the budget, pacing, and a considerably higher dose of charisma, the story’s silliness alone would be enough to slot it straight into a convenient gap in season twenty-four (of course, your pastoral pontificator would be more than willing to lose, say, ‘Paradise Towers’ to create such a gap). Without dwelling on the fact that the supposedly disease-proof air does nothing to help the zombies, or that even the most virulent infections shouldn’t kill on contact—or that the zombies, infected with every illness known to man, should probably just keel over and die (plague carriers are always the last to go? Bollocks)—we have a resolution that would have stretched credibility if it had been offered as part of ‘The Mind Robber’. It’s not so much that you can’t just mix a whole bunch of different solutions together (while he was reading that textbook on slickness, Davies obviously skipped chemistry class); but that surely, if one did inhabit a world in which that sort of thing worked, you wouldn’t need the bloody Doctor to figure it out. And in a hospital full of doctors!

But wait, there’s more (or should that be less). Not content simply to challenge the old adage ‘No sex please, we’re Time Lords’, nor content even to rub the Doctor’s newfound sexuality in everybody’s faces, Davies has now made it the modus operandi of the entire sodding show.** ‘I LOVE travelling with you, Doctor.’ Hmm . . . I’m sure he was ‘great in bed’ last night, too. It’s enough to make an old fan sick to the stomach, I tells ya.

*Apart, that is, from Billie Piper's tits. The Bishop apologises for this oversight; how on earth could he forget?

**The Bishop writes this having seen ‘New Earth’ (obviously), where we learn that Rose is in love and Cassandra in heat; ‘School Reunion’, where we learn that Rose is in love and that the Doctor’s little sister, Sarah-Jane, may not have been his little sister after all; ‘The Girl in the Fireplace’, where we learn that Rose is in love and the Doctor gets a girlfriend; and ‘Rise of the Cybermen’, where we learn that Rose is in love and that the Doctor may have gotten over the loss of his girlfriend by nailing a waitress. Of course, that canny old bastard Davies might flip the whole thing on its head before the season’s done—apparently he’s very clever that way . . .

The Bishop on the Moon in 2018

2005-09-21T12:30:00.000+10:00

Many a science fiction writer of the mid-to-late 20th century will have been disappointed by NASA’s announcement of its plans to put man back on the Moon a mere 13 years and 100-billion dollars from now; confirming that space agency’s sluggish development of inertial dampers, light-cone drives, hyperspace-bypass override oscillotators and other highly anticipated means of achieving faster-than-light travel. The Bishop, on the other hand, was merely amused as the satellite feed between a NASA official and his Australian interviewer went down—twice—saying more than your ecclesiastical elucidator ever could on just why mankind in space is such a space-brained idea.

The Bishop, to be fair, is willing to admit a certain thankfulness for satellites and other space-race-driven technology—though he has never been a fan of the microwave oven, and figures that the magic ju-ju heaty-uppy box would probably have been perfected quite quickly and cheaply on its own, rather than as the sole useful by-product of several billion dollars wasted on something else. (‘Sorry, Dad, I wrote-off the Beemer, but in doing so I learned a valuable lesson about the function of red lights at intersections.’) However, having created those satellites and reached a stage where a mere five-percent of all space-travellers and an acceptable number of ground crew are killed in their development, installation and repair, one is compelled to wonder why the United States is so keen to return for a week of Moon-rock collecting, when stones and other useless bits of dirt and dust are one of the few resources we are unlikely to run short of anytime soon.

Is the Bishop merely accepting the mantle of neo-Luddite in pointing out that heading into space is something humankind was never really meant to do? After all, his opponents will say, man was never ‘meant’ to fly. In response, your humble correspondent notes than man was also never meant to play strip poker in piranha-infested waters and, sensibly, doesn’t. Space flight is exceedingly dangerous, highlighted most cogently by the fact that not only is it impossible to breath in space, but the act of holding your breath when you get there is fatal, too—causing one to blow up in a way normally reserved for helium balloons and Kirstie Alley. Indeed, putting people in a vacuum only goes to illustrate how very specifically tailored human beings are to life in one atmosphere of pressure, as the blood literally boils, for the same reason scalding water sprays the Bishop every time he absent-mindedly ignores the warning to wait before removing his car’s radiator cap.

Space is also very difficult to get to, especially for a species that has trouble making trains run on time. As anyone who’s ever put on a Superman costume knows, rising off the ground just doesn’t happen on its own and, in contradistinction to the graceful imaginings of sci-fi writers and twelve year olds everywhere, about all our space-flight technology ever looks like amounting to is pouring the entire gross domestic product of Qatar into a couple of pointy canisters and lighting a match. Then there are the g-forces involved, and the unfortunately life-disaffirming consequences of a slightly botched re-entry angle should give pause to anyone who baulks at the thought of a parallel park.

Add to this the costs of space flight, the simple keeping track of which may require higher order differential equations than the act of astronautery itself, and the Bishop is left asking the obvious question: ‘Where is my next drink?’ Followed by: ‘Is it really worth all the trouble?’

The Bishop on political stupidity

2005-09-07T00:21:00.000+10:00

George W. Bush’s response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster reminds the Bishop of an expression once coined on an episode of The Simpsons: to pull a Homer; or, to succeed despite idiocy.

Rivalled only by his famous fifteen minute ‘Hmm’ in reply to the 2001 World Trade Centre attack, the President’s reaction―Rothkoesque in its minimalism, if not its sense of forward planning―seems, once again, unlikely to affect his reputation as America’s best buddy. See, for example, a recent speech―somehow heard as apologetic despite shifting blame to state and local officials―the subtext of which read, ‘Hey, I know I kinda haven’t done much, but helping out after a national disaster is a complicated business. It’s not easy looking after all this stuff. Do you reckon you could do any better?’

Probably not; but, then again, the Bishop isn’t president; and one could be forgiven for hoping that the head of the free world might behave more like its head and less like its small intestine. The question, then, becomes: why is this sort of mumbling incompetence not only meekly accepted but, in some circles, celebrated?

The answer, perhaps, lies in our hated of that most villainous of modern archetypal figures: the boss. The Bishop knows only too well the cerebral circumlocutions each of us will go through to convince ourselves we’re best―for who among us wants to admit that that slick-dressed arsehole in the corner office is not, as cognitive dissonance avoidance reassures us, a brown-nosed turkey fit only to be served up at the next Christmas dinner, but in point of fact far smarter, more hardworking and, most unacceptably, more talented than us? What better executive officer, then, than a down-home, limp-brained limpet, leading his fellow lemmings to the levee as the floodwaters rise?

Forget Iraq; forget family values; forget the rise of the religious right. What the Democrats need on the next presidential ticket is a candidate that all Americans can recognise as clearly stupider than themselves. Which leaves only one small roadblock on the highway to victory in 2008. Who?

The Bishop on recursion

2005-09-06T12:42:00.000+10:00

To find out more, click here.

The Bishop on Martha Wainwright at @Newtown 2.9.2005

2005-09-06T11:44:00.000+10:00

According to several* what’s-on columns, pop-folk siren Martha Wainwright is one of the ‘must-see’ acts of recent weeks and/or months. So of course the Bishop had never heard of her—until your humble cleric’s girlfriend informed him they were going to see her play on Friday night.

Comedian Bill Bailey has noted the review-set’s strange obsession with entertainers’ appearances (apparently he’s taller and more bendy than you might expect); and, while the Bishop would like to lift himself above that trend, he won’t. Wainwright, who bears a striking resemblance to Lily Tomlin in her natural brunette, took the stage in red heels, denim skirt, partly ironed shirt and scrappy mid-length blonde hair quickly tied back—suggesting, perhaps, a cash-strapped, sexually-available bank teller on mufti day. As a bank teller, though, she has considerable stage presence, and the outfit would have gone a long way to saying forget what I look like, listen to my voice, if only it hadn’t gone such a long way to say forget what I look like, listen to my voice.

It’s good advice, though, as Waiwright’s voice is not so much a diamond in the rough as all diamond and all rough. She’s one of those singers whose vocal chords seem to have a life of their own, with more fire and smoky desperation than even her unbridled, knees-up, slap-and-tackle delivery implied. As to the songs, they sauntered back and forth between the lovely and the lovelorn; the latter, all too typically of Indy pop, substituting atonal silliness for genuine harmonic imagination (in other words, they need some work). The Bishop must also lament the over-reliance on added ninths and other ‘colour’ notes so common in acousti-pop circles. Speaking of added ninths, support act Josh Ritter was supportive enough in his I’m-mostly-in-this-for-the-chicks kinda way, with a couple of funny moments in between the earnest folkery.

A must see? Is there such a beast? If there is, this probably was—at least to let you say you were one of the ones who was there at the time.

*OK, one (that the Bishop knows of). But rhetoric, surely, permits a certain leeway.

The Bishop on political strife at home and a broad

2005-08-31T20:36:00.000+10:00

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA―The Bishop was caught somewhere between aghast and bemused to read the latest developments in the John Brogden im-brog-lio. Hoping to get his campaign for the next state election off to a pre-emptively flying start, the New South Wales opposition leader took a cue from his federal counterpart, Prime Minister John Howard. Noticing that Howard’s policy of jailing immigrants has earned him much electoral success, Brogden felt certain that calling former premier Bob Carr’s Malaysian-born wife a mail-order bride ought to net him at least a few points in the polls. His resignation and suicide attempt followed shortly thereafter.

In a further ‘twist’, Brogden’s method of choice in not-quite-successfully taking his own life was reported as ‘self-inflicted stab wounds’. Which means that, if nothing else positive comes out this affair, at least we now know why the New South Wales Liberal Party is so damned inefficient.

The Bishop on Less than Words Can Say

2005-08-30T22:15:00.000+10:00

Richard Mitchell, professor of English at Glassboro State College, bemoans the state of clear, effective English, its education, and its consequences for society, in a tirade which reveals an appalling understanding of society, and an only slightly better grasp of clear, effective English.

The Bishop is being pat, of course, if only to demonstrate said luminary’s own command of clear, effective (and, of course, remarkably clever) English. Mitchell was writing in 1979, a time at which human behaviour was believed to have more to do with jeans than genes. No wonder, then, that he posits that things would have been much better if only the Inuit had less than fifty-two words for snow. In any event, Mitchell’s diatribe begins carefully, and cleverly, enough, and it is worth breezing over the first three chapters, if only for his salient summarisation of why the French aristocracy would never let its collective tongue near ‘a barbarous babble like Russian’. Unfortunately, it soon takes a sharp right into volumes of ire rarely achievable in print (or heard outside of a Nuremburg Rally). And, while the barbs directed at grammatically challenged educational-grant seekers and other lesser life forms no doubt help let off a little steam, the whole thing is a bit like shooting fish in a barrel made of fish.

But hey―purchased from a second-hand bookstore it only cost a dollar; which, at a not unreasonable average rate of inflation over the last twenty-six years, is about right for Mitchell’s two cents worth.