My Word Is My Bond

Of all the actors to play James Bond, you have to admit that only Roger Moore seems completely happy with having done the part. He's the only Bond to do audio commentaries for his movies (OK, Brosnan did one, but you get the feeling he was contractually obliged to) and the only one who seems to have enjoyed his time on the series with no regrets. Connery hates it, Lazenby regrets what happened, Dalton is reclusive about it, Brosnan regrets it. You may think he can't act, you may think he is too soft, but Roger Moore is an English gentleman. He is self-effacing, occasionally modest, tremendously witty and a real movie star.

His autobiography, consequently, reflects all of these things. Moore spends the entire book recounting mostly happy tales about his life which was predominantly good. He hardly ever has nasty things to say about people and when he does he leaves the identity of the person a secret (with the exception of David Niven's wife about whom he hardly has anything nice to say). His stories start from an interesting childhood (with some bizarre stories about circumcision) and continue to today, including his recent battle with prostate cancer.

Bond fans will have to wait til about half way through the book before he gets to the seminal character, but it's easy to forget that Moore had done so much more before those movies, including appearing in Ivanhoe, Maverick, The Persuaders and, of course, becoming the definitive Saint. Throughout this time we learn about his contracts with Warner and MGM, and with his hobnobbing with such names as Elvis Presley, David Niven, Tony Curtis, Audrey Hepburn, Joan Collins, Moore comes across as a true old-fashioned movie star. He was Hollywood glitz and glamour, and yet has such a down-to-Earth English attitude, he can draw you into that world and make you feel part of it.

It's hard to review an autobiography because at the end of the day all you can gush about is how well written and engaging the actual story is, but you have to be interested in Roger Moore to start with if you want to actually enjoy the book. If you enjoy Roger Moore, or are curious about some background details of his work, then this book will definitely give you what you are looking for. If not, you probably won't even consider buying it in the first place.

Knowing

Fifty years ago, a young girl wrote a continuous stream of numbers that predict the when, number of fatalities and where of every disaster for the next fifty years. With these in hand, one man tries to stop those forthcoming disasters...

Sound interesting? OK, well try this one.

A man finds a secret code that predicts the end of the world, but there is something missing. Tracking down the descendants of the woman who wrote the code, the man is desperate to find the missing piece of code that could save the world!

That one interesting as well? OK....what about...

The Apocalypse is nigh and the four Horsemen have arrived to collect the new Adam and Eve for a new Garden of Eden.

Knowing is actually all those three storylines thrown together with a great deal of personal angst for our main character. Now, for some, you may be thinking, that's an awful lot of stuff to have in a movie and one might arguably wonder if a story like this could lose focus somewhere along the line. And surprise, surprise, you would be dead right. Knowing has a huge number of brilliant concepts that would make a really fantastic movie, but it is the most poorly executed film I've seen in a very, very long time. The script is indeed the major problem here, requiring at least one more edit before it went before the camera. The best scripts are those where every action and every line leads towards something, be it resolution of tension, story or character. Knowing has too many loose ends. Rose Byrne's character, for instance, is virtually completely redundant to the film, providing no real forward motion for anything before leaving the story in a similarly pointless fashion.

Meanwhile, on the casting front, the movie also runs into problems. Byrne may not be too bad, but Nicholas Cage, unfortunately, is completely miscast. Cage has great difficulty in conveying a lonely father and is even more unbelievable as a research lecturer. Cage manages to engage on not a single level, leaving me completely disinterested in the entire movie, and more particularly his character. I don't care that he is estranged from his father, I don't particularly care about his home problems. And this surprises me because Cage is actually, generally, a pretty reliable actor.

By the end of the movie it becomes clear that someone was desperate to use up the CG budget and so we get some spectacular CG imagery, ranging from the destruction of Earth to a new Garden of Eden. Meanwhile the sound mixer had obviously decided that the dialogue was so inane that he was going to increase the volume of Marco Beltrami's score to drown out pretty much everything. Under normal circumstances this would be great, except Beltrami provides an absolute shit score.

I rarely come out of a movie feeling disappointed, but in this particular instance I really wish I hadn't wasted either my money or my time.

Friday The 13th

Hollywood has shown an absolute dearth of originality over recent years, taking all their non-sequel movie ideas generally from books, comics or old television series. Indeed, it has reached a point where they are now remaking old movies, and horror movies seem to be a goldmine, be it Halloween, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or My Bloody Valentine. Friday the 13th is the most recent in this series of remakes.

The majority of previous horror remakes have attempted to make them grittier and realistic, giving us deep backstories to explain why our favourite psychopaths the way they are. As a result, they are often a little demystified. Michael Myers, for instance, has ceased to be a disturbingly, motiveless, masked killer and is now an abused man who kills in the same mask his sister was shagged in by her boyfriend.

When it was announced that Friday the 13th was to be remade, there was a little concern, not least when it was altered to actually be remaking the first four movies, otherwise there'd be no Jason or hockey mask. But a lot of people were concerned at the thought Jason may become another tortured young child taking his revenge on society.

Happily he's not. Oh, sure, in the first five minutes we see Jason watching his mum get decapitated, but that's the extent of his motivations - exactly as it was twenty-seven years ago. In fact, for all the claims that this is a remake, the truth is there is pretty much nothing to mark this as a remake. Nothing contradicts earlier movies (although the original flashback is slightly different) and it easily flows on from Freddy Vs Jason. In fact, although Jason is a more intelligent hunter in this movie, you could argue that his higher intellect was amped up by Freddy when he left hell. So I'm happy to call this movie by it's Canadian title - Friday the 13th Part XII!

This is a homage movie, of sorts though. The dialogue is just as cringe-worthy at times as the original movies, and of the five girls, three of them get their boobs out as soon as possible, one for the most tenuous of reasons. It's all very Friday the 13th. The characters follow the stereotypes: a good girl, the rude slut, the naughty girl, the loving girlfriend, the geek, the annoying prat, the wild guy...they're all there. Even some of the killings pay a nod to the past with a variation of the sleeping bag kill and Jason himself getting strangled with a chain. And of course the ending...but let's not spoil that.

But what is curious about this movie is the couple of surprises in this movie. When five horny teenagers turn up and get slaughtered within the first twenty-five minutes and *then* the title card is shown, you get thrown slightly and realise that you're getting two little movies for the price of one. Equally, having been a great fan of horror movies for a long time, you get the hang of the characters and are able to pick which is the girl that's going to be the one to send Jason to hell. However, while I had in my mind exactly who it was going to be, when she was killed I was quite, quite surprised.

Most of the cast deliver what is expected of them, and the appearance of Ryan Hansen was a pleasant surprise, though it did confirm that he plays himself all the time. Jared Padalecki is good as the "good guy" in the film, mainly because he *gets* what the movie is about - an ever so slightly tongue-in-cheek horror movie. Meanwhile, the two lead girls - Danielle Panabecker and Amanda Righetti - are both wonderful and are instantly likable.

In my mind I had exactly what I wanted from a Friday movie, and this movie delivered all of it. At one point I was concerned we weren't going to get some mad old person preaching doom and gloom, but as soon as the thought crossed my mind, a mad old biddy told Jared Padalecki that all outsiders got killed. Nice. As a result I couldn't be more satisfied with this movie.

Watchmen

Watchmen was the most anticipated comic book adaptation ever. Never mind your Dark Knight's...Watchmen was the movie that fans have been hanging out for; that everyone has been hanging out for. Well, I say everyone, but I obviously don't include Alan Moore. Given the choice between Watchmen and Howard the Duck, I suspect Moore would settle on George Lucas' comic book epic over his own.

But Watchmen is first and foremost, in this media, a movie, so before we start looking at comparisons, let's give it the fairness it deserves and look at the actual movie.

It's 1985 and America, with Richard Nixon as third-term president, is on the verge of nuclear war with Russia. The only thing holding them back is the presence of the powerful superhuman Dr Manhatten, the last superhero left after "The Watchmen" were outlawed some years earlier. When one of the former Watchmen, the Comedian is murdered, the other Watchmen find their lives starting to come together to learn the reason behind the murder...and nuclear war grows ever closer.

Visually the movie is spectacular, looking brilliant in almost everyway, from some brilliant character design (most particularly Dr Manhattan, although looking at his nob gets a little boring after a while) to amazing special effects and a, quite frankly, breath taking structure on Mars, the budget is clearly seen on screen. The whole thing is expansive and epic, which is possibly to remind the audience that that is what director Zack Snyder thinks the movie is as well.
But some bizarre aesthetic choices and a script that doesn't entirely convince causes Snyder's vision to fall short. There is something just a little absurd about a giant blue man killing the Viet Cong to the strains of Wagner's Flight Of The Valkyries. I've always maintained that comic book movies need to exist in a heightened reality, but if that reality is pushed too far - such as Batman & Robin - you can't really take the movie seriously. Snyder comes close to pushing the reality in scenes such as the one I mentioned just beyond breaking point.

Equally the motivations of some of the characters seems very odd. The villain's plan (and it's not particularly difficult to guess who the villain is given the actor's and director's choices) seems reliant on the entire population suddenly deciding that they don't particularly want Dr Manhattan to hang around. When it is revealed that Dr Manhattan appears to have given three people cancer, there is no particular indication that the world believes this, and given that, later, the President is still waiting for Dr Manhattan to return and save them, one would assume that he is still in the people's graces, and they are hardly likely to suddenly turn on him.

The true problem with Watchmen, regardless of what anyone tells you, is that it is criminally boring. With so many interesting characters and a quite in depth story to tell, the movie just seems to drag on without actually engaging the interest of the viewer. The cheif reason for this is that, at the end of the day, not a single one of the superheroes is vaguely heroic.

The Comedian, Rorschach and Dr Manhattan are all supposed to be heroes that live, very much, in the world of gray, but one gets the feeling that Nite Owl and Silk Spectre (the second incarnations of both) are supposed to be more representative of what our ideal hero is - and yet both stand by and do nothing as Rorschach murders a criminal in revenge, and then look and each other and shrug as though waiting for a "da-na-na-nuh-na-nuh. NAH!" sound effect. When faced with a group of characters that you can't really sympathise with, let alone like, your movie suddenly runs into some difficulty.

The sad thing is that the acting is actually of a particularly high quality. Malin Akerman is very likeable as Silk Spectre (until her character does something bizarre), while Billy Crudup and Jackie Earle Haley are very convincing as Dr Manhattan and Rorschach. However it is Jeffrey Dean Morgan who steals the show, cast absolutely perfectly as the Comedian, giving us the sick, twisted individual that he is, complete with all the character flaws he possesses. That said there are two performances that are quite unbearable - Carla Gugino as the original Silk Spectre and Robert Wisden as Richard Nixon, both of whom are not even remotely convincing as their characters, and one wonders if it has something to do with the fact both are under prosthetics throughout the movie. The prosthetics are particularly unconvincing.

Unfortunately, actors can only deliver a script to the best of their ability under direction, and when the latter two elements are letting them down, there is not an awful lot the actors can do about it.

But what about the movie as a comic adaptation?

Zack Snyder said: "Worst case scenario - Alan puts the movie on his DVD player on a cold Sunday in London and watches and says, 'Yeah, that doesn't suck too bad."

Alan Moore's response to this was: "That's the worst case scenario? I think he's underestimated what the worst case scenario would be... that's never going to happen in my DVD player in 'London'. I'm never going to watch this fucking thing." It's perhaps worth noting that Moore lives in Northhampton...

And that kinda sums up Snyder's approach to Moore's work - focussing on getting the little details perfect (but not quite making it) while at the same time missing the overall point. It's a little like building a copy of the White House and thinking "I need to get the exact right shade of white" while missing the columns on the front, and not realising that it is where the American President lives.

Moore hates all his movie adaptations, including V For Vendetta, but that movie is actually a movie that is a very good adaption of his work. Despite the change of setting (and indeed because of it), the movie is very faithful to the work, realising what the story is actually about and trying to make that work in today's world - which includes making it relevent. The problem with Watchmen is that what was relevent twenty years ago is not so much now, and it's difficult to get an audience to connect to that. Watchmen is a reflection and a response to the time it was written in. Snyder sees it as a superhero story in the vein of X-Men - real people with real problems, despite having amazing abilities.
The movie isn't about superheroes coming out of retirement, it's about nuclear war and the sacrifices that must be made to stop the end of the world. Gay characters abound in the comic, at a time when homosexuals were hiding in parks thanks to Thatcherism. Funnily enough they've all disappeared in Snyder's movie.

The movie attempts to be faithful to the comic by replicating designs and staging, and some of the more cringe-worthy dialogue (keeping in Rorschach's journals are a painful reminder of how some things work in comics that don't work on screen), but strangely enough chooses to change the ending to one that doesn't work quite as well as the original. It feels as though Snyder has read the comic book and said "those scenes look great, let's recreate them - do what needs to be done to the script to link them all together".

It's hard not to sympathise with Moore about the disappointment he feels over his movies, and never more so in this case. Perhaps, at the end of the day, Watchmen should never have been made into a movie. It just doesn't work that way.

Doctor Who: The Rescue & The Romans (DVD)

The Rescue and The Romans are an interesting pair of stories to release together on DVD (or, more accurately, in a boxed set), but strangely appropriate, and not just because they follow each other consecutively in original broadcast. Obviously these are the first two stories of Vicki, and show her becoming a member of the TARDIS team, but more interestingly the stories are actually poles apart in ideology and design and yet are written by the outgoing and incoming story editors of the series respectively.

The Rescue is, on the audio commentary, described as a whodunnit with one suspect, but that is grossly underplaying the story and not terribly fair. While there is an element of the whodunnit about it, a better description would be a what-is-it, and this refers to Koquillion, the monster at the heart of the story. Doctor Who often plays with the expectations people have on it (in The Hand Of Fear, Sarah Jane wonders if the gravel pit they have arrived in is another alien planet), and it's interesting that at the start of the second year of filming (which The Rescue is), the series already starts doing it. Koquillion is, of course, a man in a costume, and any fan of the series is automatically programmed to accept that this is a monster, particularly the forgiving audiences of the 1960s. When it turns out to be, literally a man in a suit, the audience would no doubt have been surprised, its expectations turned upside down.

Of course, as previously mentioned, this is the first appearance of Maureen O'Brien as vicki, the replacement for Susan who had left in the previous serial. The production team clearly weren't that keen to stray too far from design, and little orphan Annie, I mean Tanni...I mean Vicki (!) is a girl from the future who, despite being the link for the younger audience, is out of touch with today's world. However, whereas Carole Ann Ford delivered a performance that was just the wrong side of normal, Maureen O'Brien grounds Vicki very much as an everyday young girl. As Vicki is essentially Susan in all but name, it is to O'Brien's credit that her performance makes the character vastly different to her predecessor, and a lot more human - which is entirely appropriate as she is.

The Romans also turns expectations upside down - following on from the serious futuristic story of The Rescue comes an historical that, rather surprisingly, plays it for laughs. This story highlights the difference between David Whitaker's approach to Doctor Who, and his successor as story editor, Dennis Spooner's. Whitaker wrote The Rescue, which was commissioned by Spooner, but for The Romans we have the reverse - Whitaker commissioning Spooner. Whereas Whitaker liked his historical stories to be about the times they arrived in, Spooner preferred history to be a backdrop to the story of people there, including some great historical figure, this time in the form of Nero. Once you have Nero in Rome, there's a certain inevitability about where the story is going to go, and so there's little surprise to see Nero playing his lyre as Rome burns around him.

Where this story works so well is in the cleverness of the script. Often described as a comedy, the actual high comedy doesn't really come into play until Episode 3, where Nero turns into Benny Hill. But throughout the rest of the story there is comedy to be found in some sparkling dialogue and witty scenes. William Hartnell particularly seems to enjoy this, stealing every scene he is in and, according to the production subtitles, improvising his own comedy into the story - notably in a wonderful scene set in the sauna where the Doctor is on the verge of stabbing Nero with a sword everytime he turns around. The banquet scene in Episode 3 is, for me, the greatest moment in the entire story, as the Doctor "Emporer's New Clothes" his way through a lyre performance by not actually playing anything. Derek Francis delivers a line with wonderful timing, but the icing of the cake comes when, though being interrupted and applauded, the Doctor pretends to finish his imaginary piece. Its a golden moment, and, despite the best efforts of the rest of the cast - and they really do put in brilliant performances - shows that this is really Hartnell's show no matter what.

Both stories have retrospective documentaries on them, which are quite enlightening, although The Rescue's is the only contribution by Maureen O'Brien to the extras, which seems a bit of a waste in a boxed set that is essentially about vicki. The Romans, rather uniquely, also sees other actors who have played Nero over the years - such as Anthony Andrews and Christopher Biggins - chat about the character. The audio commentaries, moderated by comedian Toby Hadoke (the man who wrote and performed the play "Moths Ate My Doctor Who Scarf") all feature essentially the same lineup - William Russell, Christopher Barry, Raymond Cusick and, in the Romans, Barry Jackson and Nick Evans. In The Rescue, Barry and Cusick spend most of the time moaning about how unimpressed they are with the new series, but in The Romans they talk a little more about the story, but the majority of the anecdotes are recounted both here and in the retro-docos.

Both discs have photo galleries and production subtitles, but The Romans also has a little segment where Christopher Barry displays Raymond Cusick's cardboard model of the set, and then proceeds to bore us to tears explaining the camera moves. The other two documentaries are infinitely more interesting - one focussing on Dennis Spooner and his work both on Doctor and on television in general (wonderfully Brian Clemens is interviewed for this), while the other doco sees various actors discuss the Who girls of the 1960s. This latter documentary is fabulous, but has some strange choice of interviews - Maureen O'Brien is not present at all to discuss Vicki, but Jean Marsh is on hand to talk about Sara, whose status as a companion - as Marsh points out - is highly debatable. To cap it all off, a Blue Peter segment about how Romans eat is also included.

The second season of Doctor Who was determined to shake up the format a little and these two stories highlight that. The good thing about them, though, is that they are both very entertaining stories and well worth the buy.

Quatermass

The true grandfather of science fiction is actually a doddery old scientist from the 1850s called Bernard Quatermass, who apparently managed to give Britain it's very own shuttle technology with his Rocket Group. Three times in the fifties he ran into alien menaces, fighting plant creatures, alien invaders and the remnants of Martians plan to genetically alter us. And then, rather sadly, he disappeared off our screens, handing over to another doddery old scientist - Doctor Who.

Nigel Kneale, the series creator and writer, never had a lot of time for Doctor Who, and so it's a little ironic that the final outing Quatermass was to have, in 1979, would be produced by original Doctor Who producer Verity Lambert. However, the landscape had changed, and while Kneal insured his creation hadn't, the young upstart who had usurped Quatermass was not being played by Tom Baker and redefining what the audience wanted out of television science-fiction, in the wake of the release of Star Wars.

As a result, even for 1979, Quatermass feels a little out of date. Chock full of hippies wandering around looking for aliens to take them away, the story is effectively the young vs the old, with Quatermass in the middle trying to find his granddaughter, before coming down on the side of the old.

The story is, however, quite moody and more than a little disturbing - groups of young people of the "Planet People" cult, are gathering at stone circles whereupon a beam of light disintegrates them all. The Planet People sees this as the rescue they have been searching for, but the government sees this merely as mass slaughter and after a shuttle mission is destroyed, Quatermass is called in to help.

At times the story seems to go nowhere, and all episodes end with the beam striking the planet which lends some predictability to the story, not in a terribly good way. The cast, however, are uniformly excellent, with Mills playing the part very well, initially as a confused old man only interested in his granddaughter, before finding a new cause and a new purpose in life.

The story is also shot magnificiently, and the feel of a London having fallen into a 'Warriors' style society is portrayed magnificiently. And while the story in general may let down the piece as a whole, the ending is really quite sad, but strangely fitting not only for Quatermass but for British science-fiction as a whole.

Always intended to be both a four part broadcast story and a 100 minute movie, the DVD set comes with The Quatermass Conclusion - the movie form of the story which hacks away about sixty minutes of material, mostly, one suspects, from Episode 3, in which the plot really goes absolutely nowhere. There is also a documentary on Stonehenge which, while quite interesting, has a very tenuous connection to the story it is released with.

Quatermass is a nice final hoorah for the Quatermass series, but sadly it lacks the warmth of its predecessors, feeling more Wickerman than The Quatermass Experiment.