Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Listening to Fear

“Because it is a killer snot monster from outer space. I did not say that.”

I’ll be honest; this is the weakest Buffy episode for some time. That doesn’t mean it’s awful, just not up to the current excellent standard. If anything, that’s a testament to the quality of this season. Certainly, we get an awful lot of arc stuff going on.

This episode is essentially about Joyce’s illness, showing us how serious it is, and graphically demonstrating the effects of serious illness on people and their families. This week’s monster/metaphor is the demon that preys on people with mental health issues. It’s shocking for us to see Joyce switching between lucid phases and nonsensical ranting. To see a mother figure reduced to this, a childlike dependence, is terrifying for us, especially as we see it from the point of view of her two daughters.

This in itself puts pressure on Buffy to the extent that her college work appears to be slipping alarmingly. This, together with patrolling, is too much. This stressful confluence of events highlights how she instinctively does not confide in Riley. She doesn’t love him. Riley, meanwhile, is establishing contact with his old mate Graham from the Initiative and his gang of soldiers. He is also, of course, still visiting his vampire brothel. This can’t end well.

It’s nice, among all this foreboding, to see such a lovely scene between Willow and Tara in which they come up with silly names for constellations. These two, seem to have no problem between them. They’ll be happy ever after, right?

It’s fun to see the metatextual fun the script has by teasing us with the fact that the demon arrives in a meteorite. We’re made to ask whether or not to expect a science fiction based threat in this fantasy show. This seems to confuse the characters as much as it confuses us.

We end with two interesting events. Joyce, now lucid still remembers that Dawn is not real, but still loves her as her own daughter. Worryingly, she makes Buffy promise to look after Dawn should anything happen to her. Foreboding much? We also learn more about Ben, the hospital orderly, who turns out to have summoned the Queller Demon. He does it “because I’m cleaning up Glory’s mess, just like I’ve done all my life.” What does this mean? If this isn’t enough drama to end with, Joyce is about to go in for brain surgery. I love this season.

Mary Poppins (1964)

“Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!”

 

Yes, I really am doing this. All these horrors and I go and blog Mary Poppins. What can I say? It amuses me. I won’t pretend this sort of thing is usually my cup of tea, but I actually rather enjoyed it. In fact, I’m full of regrets about waiting until the age of almost thirty-six to see it. This is the perfect film for children, with everything about it firing the imagination of the child within us all. It’s forever deriving fantasy from the mundane and ordinary. A simple bag becomes a magical repository of all things. You can jump into pictures and become a cartoon. Plus there are songs and that. Julie Andrews is captivating as our heroine, and her voice is extraordinary.

The one thing everyone knows about this film is that Dick Van Dyke’s “cockney” accent is said to be awful by all. In fact, it is far more jaw-droppingly atrocious than I would have had the power to imagine. I would be very much surprised if this were not the worst accent in the history of cinema. Having said all that, I worry that I may have underestimated just how bad it is! It’s a pity. Van Dyke is actually pretty good when it comes to the actual acting, giving us a likeable and charismatic Bert, but you’re far too busy laughing at the accent to take any notice of what he’s doing.

This is very much a tourist friendly version of London and, for that matter, a version of 1910 which has been sanitised for the children of the 1960’s. Knowing that this is a Disney film I was looking for reactionary sentiments throughout, which was an interesting exercise. One of our first songs appears to mock the Suffragette movement, and the character of Bert portrays the hard life of Edwardian poverty as not only bearable but positively fun. This may appear to show conservative attitudes to both gender and class issues, but, these are interestingly subverted at the end, where Mr Banks’ patriarchal authority is undermined by both of these things.

The whole look of the film is a bit of a jolt after so many more modern films in a row. The tanned faces, the technicolour picture quality and the matte painting backgrounds give the film a retro charm that contemporary audiences would have never seen.

Mary Poppins herself is a force of nature. Yes, we see this in her interaction with the children, but the best moments for the character are those in which she wraps Mr Banks right round her finger. She is, essentially, the perfect Edwardian woman- unflappable, infinitely capable, sexless, and maintaining the very stiffest of upper lips in the silliest and most surreal of circumstances. This, of course, is what makes her so damned charismatic.

Some of the social attitudes are fascinating. It’s only 1964, but the film shows a strangely modern hostility to fox hunting. I never knew, though, that apparently foxes can be Irish! I raised an eyebrow, given the bastardry of banks in recent years, at their negative portrayal in this film. A run on a bank is a rather more alarming thing to see nowadays than it would have been at the time.

This film is quite, quite mad. We have an Admiral who keeps his house like a ship and shoots at chimney sweeps. We have a carousel where one can ride the horses away. We have animated fireworks that look like something out of Yellow Submarine. We even have an Englishman who pronounces “niche” as “nitch”. Grrrrr! The ending is simultaneously reinforcing of the patriarchal family structure and subversive of it, a nice touch. Mary Poppins buggers off as the wind changes: this apparently orderly and conservative figure is, underneath, capricious and chaotic, and brings whimsy to all she touches. I never thought I’d say this, but I love this film.

Alice in Wonderland (1999 TV Film)

“Chop, Chop! Blood everywhere! Proud to be Queen!”

It’s both odd and refreshing to watch such a straight adaptation after Tim Burton’s Whimsical and action packed version. It’s such a wonderfully straight adaptation, even though this means it’s rather long. The whole look of the production has an ineffable late ‘90’sness that recalls many television films from the period. It has a gloss and a picture quality which, though they have dated slightly, look gorgeous.

The cast are as glittering as can be, so much so, in fact, that it was an agonising task narrowing down those cast members who would appear in the tags. Nevertheless, the stand out performance is from the young Tina Majorino, who gives us a likable and realistic Alice while maintaining a flawless British RP accent throughout. The other stand-out performances are from Miranda Richardson as the Queen of Hearts and Martin Short as the Mad Hatter.  This Queen of Hearts is gloriously eccentric and wonderfully homicidal, and perfectly cast, given her performance as Queen Elizabeth I in Blackadder II fourteen years previously. This Mad Hatter is arguably the best version I have ever seen, at the same time utterly mad yet unthreatening and child friendly.

The special effects, courtesy of sparing use of CGI and the muppetry skills of the late Jim Henson’s Workshop, are superb and a huge contribution to the success of the film. Some of the choices made are intriguing. The caterpillar is made to look very SGT Pepper, while the Queen of Hearts, as my girlfriend noticed, is carrying what can only be described as “The Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch”. It must be said, however, that the Griffin looks uncannily like a raggedy Big Bird.

Perhaps this could be said equally of the book, but, well, this is in no way druggie, is it? I know this is hardly the most original observation, but, well, a hookah smoking caterpillar (in no way a reference to opium); mushrooms that make you grow or shrink; and the general sense that the logic of stoned conversations applies here…Well!

The ending, with Alice having gained confidence from her experiences, is mainly fun because of the chance to see all the same actors out of character, per se. It has to be said, that the film is bloody long, but there is certainly value in a thorough version. The only moment where the film flags is the sequence with the Griffin and the Mock Turtle, where Gene Wilder somehow fails to capture his usual charisma. I admit, I’ve only seen two, but this is my favourite version of the story.

Creep (2004)

“It’s like a penis, only smaller”

 

This is a textbook example on how to make a bloody good film about potentially expensive supernatural themes on a low budget.

Step one: Hire a largely unknown cast. The only person in this whom I knew of was Ken Campbell (I bet you read the name in his voice, didn’t you?). The cast performed superbly, however: it isn’t only stars who can act.

Step two: Make sure the music is good and eerie, and preferably Nine Inch Nails inspired. The Insects provide the perfect soundtrack for a modern, claustrophobic horror movie. It is becoming noticeable that movies like this have particularly strong soundtracks, often in this style. I approve.

Step three: Disguise your low budget by providing a dimly lit, claustrophobic environment and shooting it stylistically. The London Underground is the perfect setting for a film like this, and the directorial style is superb. The opening titles instantly tell us that the film is going to look great, and much of the effectiveness of the horror comes from glimpses, suggestion, and clever use of focus. Recently, I have criticised recently made horror films for containing gloss at the expense of scares. This film is as scary as they come while being thoroughly modern. It can be done.

I’m not entirely sure that the nature of the monster is fully explained, but then, as I keep on saying, the unknown is intrinsically scary. The film has an unobtrusive message about homeless people in The Underground. Kate is wealthy enough to be handing out twenty and fifty pound notes left, right and centre, and is clearly from a very different world to Jimmy and Mandy. And yet, even with her affluence, she ends the film sat on an Underground platform receiving money from commuters, indistinguishable from a homeless person. The message seems to be that this could happen to anyone. One nice touch is that the security guard, with his callous attitude to homeless people, dies horribly.

I have to admit that my girlfriend and I thought the rats were cute. The main “villain” was suitably scary, however, like something out of a Tool music video. So much so, in fact, that I suspect this may have been an influence. The most horrific sequence of the film is the surgery performed on Mandy, and the threat of this happening to Kate and George raises the stakes for the rest of the film. The creature, at the end, with all the blood on its face looks sort of like a clown, which deepens the scariness.

This is an excellent little film. If you haven’t heard of it, I recommend you see it now.

Dollhouse: Needs

“Don’t think of them as children. Think of them as pets.”

We begin with a revealing dream sequence; Ballard obviously rather likes Caroline/Echo in a sexual way and seems to have subconscious fantasies about protecting her, which is a little ironic. Out of the two of them, he seems to be the one who needs protecting.

This is a rather clever plot. After last episode, in which DeWitt and her staff were all druggie and vulnerable, this time she takes control and seemingly solves the problem of unrest in the minds of certain actives by allowing them to be themselves and to enjoy the illusion of freedom for a short while. The actives concerned- Echo, Sierra, Victor, November and Mike (we may never see him again) wake up with no personal memories but are entirely their own personalities. This episode is about control and how easily it can be illusory. The actives are not truly in control. Then again, it is questionable how much control the Dollhouse has over the actives. This episode’s actions seem unlikely to solve the “problems” experienced by the actives.

Most interesting, of course, is the further light shed on the “voluntary” contracts of the actives. Caroline, acting, rather interestingly, far more in keeping with the personality as shown in the flashbacks of her pre-Dollhouse life than with her life as Echo, seemingly finds herself in a position to demand the freedom of herself and the others. Adelle’s response is fascinating. She refuses to tell Caroline why she volunteered in order to keep a promise she made to Caroline herself. We more or less know what it is that Caroline cannot bear to remember, and we see that November is in mourning for her daughter, a similar situation. More disturbing are the implications that Sierra is only an active because she refused sex to a rich bastard. This is people trafficking.

Interestingly, Caroline manages to leave a message for Ballard. The Ballard plot-arc will run and run. Dollhouse is getting better and better with every episode.

Dollhouse: Echoes

“You and I have been doing this dance for almost two years.”

At last, we get the backstory for Echo/Caroline. This episode begins intriguingly, in flashback, with Caroline, in conversation with DeWitt, about to sign away five years of her life, seemingly of her own free will. This sharply parallels the final scene in which DeWitt makes an identical offer to Sam. The actives, it seems, are indeed volunteers. But it seems that there is usually a catch.

We have only seen Caroline, thus far, in brief snatches. Here, we get to see her personality as a loud, extroverted force of nature with a powerful social conscience and a deep-lying idealism. She is as resourceful as Echo, but much more impulsive, and this is her downfall. It is strongly implied that her covert activities against the dastardly Rossum Corporation leads to the death of her boyfriend, Leo, and that this is the unbearable memory which she seeks to erase.

Obviously, there is an “A” plot, involving the release of a nasty drug within a university, and much fun is had once it spreads to the senior staff of the Dollhouse. The highlight of the episode is a stoned conversation between DeWitt and Topher during which they get the munchies. You would expect this of Topher, but to see DeWitt like this is both hilarious and a testament to the superb acting skills of Olivia Williams.

The Ballard sub-plot thickens as he gets more and more attached to Mellie, with the dramatic irony thickening all the time. We know it’s a trap. Ballard may be a gentleman of Leisure (or Leesure, as he said!), but he hasn’t given up, whatever DeWitt may seemingly expect.

This episode maintains the high quality and addictiveness of the previous one. Right now, Dollhouse is a class A drug.