The main and most frequently updated part of the site. Means nothing, impresses no-one. |
A summary of my world-view, which is built on a healthy foundation of bitterness, hatred and disgust. |
Welcome to James. |
Leave comments, say random things, insult me. Are things you can do here. I'm not telling you to. |
The types of media I'm talking about are revealed by the four blue headings below, and when clicked upon they'll take you to my guide to great stuff of that type. In the case of Television, this takes the form of an in-depth guide to all the best ones; for Music it's a ranking of bands with their best three songs named; for Films it's profiles of the twelve best films I've ever seen; and for Games it's a more personal list of the ones I've been particularly obsessed with, in descending order of greatness until it gets so low I wouldn't have anything particular to say about those games, and I draw the line at just listing stuff (I thought I heard the Music section cough when I said that, but it might have been nothing). The idea throughout is that, if your tastes overlap with mine, the stuff that's on my list but not on yours is stuff that - if you haven't already - you should investigate. It's also that I love writing about this stuff. Books are no longer included because my experience of them has been pretty selective, and I often forget to have a book on the go at all, or get bored of the one I'm reading, and thus don't get through more than about six a year. I spend more time writing books than reading them, and yet I've never actually finished one.
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My parents never let me watch daytime television when I was young, a rule that probably saved what sanity, decency and intelligence I have left today. It's also meant I never acquired the habit of watching TV for something to do or as a way to relax, and if you haven't acquired an insane and masochistic habit by a certain age, you come to see it for the insane, masochistic thing it is (smoking, for example). But I do very premeditatedly watch many specific things, sometimes things I've never seen before but which sound good, or are popular with the right kind of people, and thereby get into something new (or discover more crude, banal junk that I'll never watch again). This list details which programmes I love and why. This may seem like a strange and rather pointless thing to do at all, let alone go into such depth on, and it is. But the intended audience is the probably fairly large group of people who've seen one of these once or twice and not quite 'got' it or cared particularly one way or the other - if they agree about any of the stuff they do know well, maybe my recommendations of the others will count for something. I've got into a lot of stuff on other people's recommendations, and might have got into a lot more if recommendations from people I didn't respect had gone into detail and touched on something I liked the sound of. I also like comparing notes, so would want to read something similar by someone else. That's always sufficient justification to write something because the less you're like me in any given respect, the less I give a damn how well my website suits your interests. |
Alias is an espionage thriller series about a double-agent pretending to work for an arms and intelligence dealing organisation called SD-6 (where SD stands for Section Disparu - 'the section that doesn't exist'. You have to respect the French for having an adjective for 'doesn't exist'), whilst secretly working for the government organisation they claim to be a covert division of - the CIA. That much is revealed in the extra-long pilot, but from there the plot takes dozens of surprising twists, several of which seem patently absurd until you learn more about them, and ultimately the way they tie together dramatically simplifies not only the twists but also the basic premise - it's the kind of development process that you'd otherwise only find in really well-thought-out books. The twists form such a coherent and intelligently conceived story that it all sounds like the backstory to some future, bland series in which nothing very dramatic or well-thought-out happens. Basically, it develops like a book, like they know where they're going and have a story to tell, and the episodes serve to progress that story, rather than just think of something to show you for the duration and hope you'll come back for another one next week. In fact, I've been vaguely toying with the idea of pasting together all the episodes and cutting out the credit bits, maybe with just the ending screen between episodes to indicate a good time for an interval, and making it as one giant thirty-hour film. Anyway, to keep this from getting over-overlong, I'll list the rest of the great things about Alias in, frankly, a list: Marshall: Alias's equivalent of Q who, like every aspect of Alias that corresponds to some aspect of Bond, leaves me devoid of affection and enthusiasm for the Bond one. My enthusiasm for Bond had already more or less died before I got into Alias in a big way,* but I'm going to repeatedly point out just how badly Bond comes out from any comparison between the two. If you don't like comparing a TV series to a film series, merge every three episodes of Alias into films and you've got a film series. Anyway, Marshall is an absurdly self-conscious, nervous guy who mumbles everything he says, so it's anyone's guess why I should find him appealing.** He gets horribly carried away giving an example of how the object his ingenious gadget is disguised as would normally be used ("This, as you can see, looks just like an x, the kind you might use to y", where x is the object and y is the overlong and unnecessary example); he makes awkward introductions like "How are you?" (to a room full of secret agents around a conference table) and "Did anyone see that documentary on monkeys last night?"; he starts sentences there's no easy way to finish "I should probably call you director, because, you know, you're the..."; he's always doing something un-work-related when he's first encountered, and apologises profusely for it even though no-one else seems to care; and he makes poorly-received attempts to make people feel more comfortable like getting inflatable furniture and a candy jar; he works on making a pop-up book to help himself relax. In short, looking back at that list, he seems to be oblivious to the rather serious nature of his place of work.
Sydney: she's a well-balanced character who's blank enough to never get annoying, but exhibits just enough personality to be vaguely likeable. She manages to be both naive but not stupid and adept but not smug. Foreign Languages: both Sydney and her partner Dixon frequently have to pass as natives, and speak the local language with according fluency. It's cool enough that this covers dozens of countries, most of whose languages are minor ones, but the really great thing is that we get no subtitles. No subtitles! We don't know what they're saying. They're saying something, and it makes sense, and the locals are understanding it and thinking Sydney and Dixon are locals too, and responding, but we don't know what's being said. We have to infer it from what happens. It's nice enough that most aspects of Alias don't insult your intelligence, but this one actually compliments it. "Hey, nice intelligence." Disguises: the various get-ups Sydney and sometimes Dixon use to blend in on missions are eerily convincing - each one makes Sydney look distinctively different without just masking her. The Violence: something about the close combat is rather gratifying - it seems just a little more vicious and professional than... other programmes that involve violence. Luck: one of the things that makes most action films, especially Bond, so boring is that they don't bother thinking up intelligent ways to overcome the absurd odds they've stacked against their heroes, they just make everything go wrong for the bad guys and right for the good guys. Luck favours the guy to such a preposterous extent that the obstacles he has to overcome no longer seem relevant to the equation - nothing can stop someone that lucky, especially not something so unwilling to take its many chances to kill him. Alias is very good with luck, it doesn't stack it heavily either way - things often go horribly wrong for Sydney due to unforeseen circumstances, and none of her or anyone else's plans involve a lot of running under machinegun fire and not getting hit. Things do sometimes go right by chance, but the characters don't rely on it because it really could go either way for all they or we know. Jack: Sydney's dad. He's a serious, uncommunicative, often openly hostile character who, although he has most of the normal human emotions towards his daughter, never gets close to her because he can't open up. That much is fairly stereotypical, but what makes him so great is that a) there's an excellent reason for his guardedness, the exact kind of reason that really would change someone in this fundamental way, probably forever, and b) he's brilliantly played. The actor is just perfect, not just in terms of acting ability and style, but also his appearence - somehow I just feel real agents look like that; a bit odd, not entirely pleasant. Sloane: the director of SD-6. He's Ellis Loew from LA Confidential, and therefore the reason for my initial interest in the series. His level of greatness in this is acceptable for an LAC actor. Sark: Sark doesn't appear until late in the first series, perhaps the third to last episode. He's a high-ranking agent of The Man, and it's immediately commented that he's rather young for the position. He is, and something about that, and his voice, make him one of my all-time favourite bad guys. In a wonderful recurring theme, he repeatedly turns up in completely unexpected places, usually causing someone to say "Sark!", so I've inadvertantly developed the habit of doing this myself, then laughing at what a stupid thing to do it is.* It's also a great name, and he's one of the many politely evil bad guys I seem to have a weakness for.
Will: I never thought I'd have him on a list like this, because I hated him at first, but the subplot in which he investigates SD-6 is a great one, and after its conclusion - in the middle of which he says "Seriously?" at a hilarious point - he changes totally, and becomes a really likeable character. Series Notes: most of what I say above is largley about the first series, and it's that I'm so crazy about. The second series... it's not drastically different, so it's still superb, but every single change they made is wrong, sick and wrong. If these things were features of the first series, and then they got them right in the second, I could love both, but something nags about the fact that they changed the good stuff to bad stuff. First, quite literally, the introductory thing went from being stylish, cool and functional, to lame, stupid and annoying. One episode doesn't even start with the introduction sequence, and then they started taking out the opening credits and replacing them with the aforementioned black screen with 'Alias' on it, and then they forgot what they'd decided and started with a 'previously...' but no intro, then a few unrelated scenes that end at a dramatic point with the 'Alias' screen, then some related scenes that end in the credit sequence, then the actual programme. Plus one of these starts, and two other scenes in the series, have been Sydney-seduces-target-in-revealing-disguise ones. They did that once in the first series, but it was modestly done and only included because it genuinely made sense, and anyway, you should only get to do that scene once. Secondly, some liberties have been taken with the characters - it's subtle, but they're no longer the strong, solid things that defined the plot, but more passive, subject to change when they need to add a new twist. In the first series, plot developments would explain previous behaviour, but now the behaviour changes to fit their new story of what's always been the case. It's just less well-planned, and feels less natural. The production values have slipped, too - some of the location screens say stuff like 'Above the Atlantic' (the old ones would always just be a city or region name, not a description - it was perfect and exciting), and several times they've put subtitles up when they weren't even necessary. It all shows up glaringly because at heart, it's still just as good, they just forgot to act it right and... hey, what I'm describing sounds a lot like a change of director. Just getting all the little things wrong. If only they'd actually changed director, I could feel perceptive right now. Thinking about what's going on with the episode beginnings, is it possible they have the same director but on incapacitating quantities of psychoactive drugs? All this said, the very last episode of the second series - the latest episode at time of writing - ends on a spectacular, world-shattering cliff-hanger easily worthy of the first series finalé (which itself had a superb ending, one that took place in the last half-second of the episode). Being pretty engrossed in the plot anyway, the second series finalé had such an impact on me that I was still thinking about it three days later. It doesn't give you much to think about, it's just such an astounding idea that it leaves you feeling weird. I've played it up enough now, right? (Marshall is out of his element) Sydney: You okay? Marshall: (happily) Yeah, yeah, I- every few minutes I have to fight the urge to weep openly - I'm not really sure where that's coming from - but I think that's healthy, right? Clips: I don't have space to host these on my own webspace, so I've sent them to a GMail account. Go to GMail, and log on with the username jamesfiles and password pentadact. Clips bigger than ten megs probably won't be there - there's a size cap on individual messages. If you're a big scary company and would like me to stop promoting your show, reply to the offending e-mail and I'll delete the clips. freaking.avi |
The most brilliantly orchestrated sitcom ever, topping even some of Frasier's finest moments. It's about a pathologically antisocial bookshop owner, Bernard, who actively dissuades customers from buying anything or even coming in; his reasonable accountant/assistant Manny; and Fran, the owner of the trinket-shop next door. Somehow Manny manages to be the life of it, probably not least because he's played by Bill Bailey (although Dylan Moran (Bernard) is excellent, and the reason I wanted to catch the first episode (before I knew Bill Bailey was in it)), and the episode where he drinks so much coffee that he involuntarily becomes a cop is unequalled genius. Series Notes: the second series is largely unworthy of the first, which wasn't less than genius for a second. A few episodes live up, but many of the others are patchy and victimise Manny mindlessly. (Manny has run away) Fran: Manny was really something else, you know? You don't meet someone like him every day. Bernard: I met him every day. Today was one of the few days I haven't met him, and even then he still wrote to me and rang me. I'm expecting a fax any minute. |
Two different but related and similar series - The Day Today was a spoof news programme with Chris Morris and others, including Alan Partridge, while Brass Eye was a spoof documentary series which almost exclusively featured Chris Morris. Both featured imaginary stories with hilarious absurdities in them, but while most of The Day Today was just bizarre, Brass Eye was often bitingly satirical, featuring appeals from celebrities who were actually under the impression they were fighting against a flourescent yellow cake-sized narcotic pill called Cake, or 'heavy electricity' that could fall out of powerlines and crush villagers, or for an anti-drug agency called Fucd & Bombd. In the famously provocative paedophilia special, they had a radio personality testify that "A paedophile has genetically more in common with this crab than with us. It's a scientific fact. There's no actual evidence for it, but it's a scientific fact." Chris Morris is reknown for going too far - he was fired from the BBC for pumping helium into the ventilation system of a radio news studio during a report on a horrific pile-up; but with Brass Eye the obscenity was making a point - almost everything he did would have been impossible or humourless in a world where people had considered and reasonable views on everything. The Day Today gets equal mention because it was, by a narrow margin, actually funnier. |
Distinctly Simpsonsesque in its premise (lazy fat man and immediate family), but uniquely absurd in its content, Family Guy is the big ugly weirdo of the cartoon sitcoms. Peter is a worthy reinvention of Homer, and though his wife and two eldest children are pretty uninteresting, the plots seem to usually revolve around him or his baby, Stewie, and dog, Brian, both of whom are intelligent, cultured and, crucially, able to speak. Both of them are fantastic characters, Stewie the crazed evil genius whose articulacy is never aknowledged by the adults enough to indicate that they've heard him beyond the normal incoherence of a baby, and Brian a faintly depressed intellectual whose caninity is completely ignored by both characters and plot. It's not as consistent or satirical as The Simpsons, but its inventiveness and knack for the absurd produce at least one unbearably funny moment per show. It's also riddled with ingeniously inter-woven pop-culture references, many of which I don't get. Clips: I don't have space to host these on my own webspace, so I've sent them to a GMail account. Go to GMail, and log on with the username jamesfiles and password pentadact. Clips bigger than ten megs probably won't be there - there's a size cap on individual messages. If you're a big scary company and would like me to stop promoting your show, reply to the offending e-mail and I'll delete the clips. civilised.avi (5MB) coupon.avi (6MB) |
With the unique premise of a sitcom about Irish priests, Father Ted is about the title character, fathers Dougal and Jack, and their home help Mrs Doyle (whose first name remains as mysterious as Columbo's). They all seem to live in the same house (I'm never quite sure about Mrs Doyle - she's always there, but where does she sleep?), and get involved with various affairs of the church, which are numerous and strongly hierarchical in their part of Ireland, because nearly everyone is a priest. Ted is a fantastic character - polite, good-natured and long-suffering while secretly greedy, deceitful and bitter, and although Dougal's role as the weird idiot is a rather well-established one, never have the weirdness and idiocy been combined to such brilliant comic effect. Mrs Doyle is also a wonderful character, and the jokes that revolve around her are sharply satirical and often touching. The whole thing has a wonderfully remote, desolate atmosphere, and the humour found in the oddity, half-feigned conviviality and simmering resentment of the people stuck in it fits perfectly. |
A lot - indeed, all - of these programmes are genuinely great, but Firefly is really great. I want to put it in my top three, but it feels too weird to have something written by the same guy as Buffy The Vampire Slayer being one of my favourite programmes of all time. It's another sci-fi series, set in the 2300s, I think. The opening spiel summarises the background rather concisely, so I'll quote it for anyone who's never seen it (which is potentially a high percentage, because it's only in the first run of its first series in the US, and has never been aired in the UK): The Earth got used up, so we moved out and terraformed ourselves a whole new galaxy of Earths. Some rich and plush with the new technologies, others not so much. The central planets, them's formed the Alliance, fought a war to bring all the worlds under their control. Some idiots tried to fight it, among them, myself. Notice no mention of aliens. There are no aliens. This is a stroke of brilliance - one that I've always been poised to paint myself, were I ever spontaneously commissioned to write a sci-fi series. The new galaxy is comprised of countless planets - the human population must be hundreds of billions - but no aliens, and not even anything in the way of separate evolutionary lines taken by remote cultures (it's only three hundred years in the future). Who needs aliens? In other sci-fi shows, they all play human roles with a few crudely applied trends common to each species, which could as easily occur as traditions within a cut-off human society, of which Firefly's universe has plenty. And you don't have to lamely pretend a human in elaborate but wholly superficial make-up is from an alien race whose evolution shares nothing with that of ours. Another piece of intelligent sci-fi on the part of the creator is that there are no sound effects for the space-scenes. I keep wanting to say they take place in perfect silence, when in fact gentle guitar music usually plays over them, but the point is that this makes sense - even when giant laser cannons destroy a whole ship in a massive fiery explosion, no-one who wasn't aboard the target vessel could hear a thing - no air in space! No sound! Listen to a space-scene in Star Trek, and you'll notice even the noise of the Enterprise drifting by is a deafening roar. This intelligence is carried to every part of the vision, but there are other things that make Firefly great. As is kind of pre-requisite for any series I rate, the characters and their relationships are wonderful - Mal is a funny and inoffensive captain (sounds like mild praise, but it takes some doing), the enigmatic preacher manages to be witty about being a Christian, tough-guy Jayne (yeah) is oddly likeable, and Caylee the sensitive engineer is horribly endearing (especially her friendship with River in the later episodes, for anyone who knows them). The doctor, like virtually every sci-fi doctor, is the best character, but it's hard to characterise why - he's just inappropriately civilised and doesn't like Jayne. Although possibly if the pilot, Wash, got more screen-time in the right capacity, he could surpass him, but again difficult and pointless to say why (but to again attempt it anyway - he's friendly and phrases his observational comments hilariously). This was meant as a list of my favourite characters for people who knew them, but it's about 80% of the crew, so it might have been easier to specify the few I don't find especially interesting. Oh, and the mysterious 'hands are blue' guys are easily the freakiest, most unsettling bad guys in TV. I hope that even if we find out what The Alliance did to River, we never get told why their hands are blue. Lastly, it tries to be funny and is. This - and the captain's slight resemblance to Angel* - is the only link I can see between it and Buffy: Firefly is firmly funnier, but the humour is kind of the same vein, and I have to admit it's a vein to which I'm receptive. Relatedly, Joss Whedon has his own way of talking, and it's shared by virtually all the major characters in both Buffy and Firefly. In Buffy it's a little irritating because there's no reason for all these people to share the same quirks (many of them are friends, but the similarities aren't restricted to that group, and they already spoke that way when they met); but in Firefly it works well, because all the characters who use it are from some unknown civilisation that's evidenced in other ways - the history of war, anti-Alliance sentiment, and the oriental-sounding language they sometimes slip into.
Series Notes: there's only one series, and the last three episodes were never aired. Also, the two-part pilot was aired after the rest of the series, or rather what of the rest of the series they aired, and however much we all may despise Fox for this and all their other many, horrible crimes, I think we have to admit that the people responsible for all the fantastic programmes Fox has inexplicably cancelled would have gone with a different network if they could. In other words, they are the only ones prepared to show this stuff in the first place, so they're doing something, they're just doing it very badly. Anyway, more importantly the whole series, unaired episodes and everything, is now available on DVD, and hence on file-sharing programs. The DVD is around £20, $35, which is a total steal in my books, so I'm actually buying it. Also, I only recently got hold of a DVD drive. (Mal has inadvertantly been given a wife as part of a trade, and she wants to sleep with him) Preacher: If you take advantage of her in any way whatsoever, you are going to a very special hell reserved for child-molesters and people who talk in theatres. (Later) Caylee: Hi shepherd. Captain was just telling us about his kiss with his wife. Preacher: Oh, how... special. Jayne: We can't change that. We're getting all... bendy... Wash: All what? Jayne: Got the lights of the console... keep you... lift you up..... they shine like... little angels! (grabs at air, falls over) Wash: (stares at unconscious Jayne for a moment, then looks up) Did he just go crazy and fall asleep? Wash: A mind-reader, though? That sounds like something from science fiction. Zoe: You live on a spaceship, dear. Preacher: I just feel such a fool. Jayne: Yeah, all those years of priest training... taken out by one bounty hunter. |
Frasier is kind of the high art of sitcoms; most of the plots are farces, but they're so cleverly and carefully contrived that even the farcical elements (quite apart from the dialogue and characters) are entertaining and funny. Maybe that doesn't sound like much on paper, but in practice it's a novel feeling to actually give a damn about a farce, and not see the end coming. The core of Frasier's appeal is Niles, though, Frasier's neurotic, meek brother. I have to say his meeker-still and never-seen wife, and his secret crush on Daphne, were both great elements of the formula that no longer play a part - he's now married to Daphne, in one of those rare television 'events' (his crush was a secret for two-hundred and thirty-six episodes). But Frasier still has its great stylistic elements, including the easy jazz of the opening screen (and thereby the lack of a proper theme tune) and Kelsey Grammer's bizarre song at the end. Another great one is the silent screen that comes up to tell you the name of the next act (yes, it seems to have acts). Series Notes: whoa. I think we're in series ten now, there have been about three-hundred episodes. Despite what everyone says, it's not getting repetitive - I have some authority in this matter, in that I've seen every one of them, most of them two or three times. People have wildly oscillating opinions about the series, but I've never spotted any actual trends. One series, perhaps seven or eight, started with about five unusually good ones, but there are ten series, unusually good ones are going to turn up in big clusters now and then. (Niles is planning to 'get high on reefer') Niles: I'm particularly looking forward to a symptom called 'the munchies' stage. It's where you enjoy all kinds of strange food combinations; I'm thinking of pairing this Chiléan sea bass with an aggressive zinfandel! (Later, after Niles has left, Frasier inspects the wine-label) Frasier: Oh! Madness! Frasier: For you. Roz: Oh. Frasier: I know I'm not very good at picking up gifts for people usually, but when I saw this in the window, I knew it was perfect for you. (Roz finishes opening it and bursts into tears) Frasier: Still, maybe I should have gone with the shawl. Roz: No, it's not the purse. Although I do hate it. Martin: Anyway, she brought it up. Frasier: Oh, she brought it up! Bethany van Pelt - the head of the Junior League - brought up the subject of a hooker whose body was hideously dismembered and scattered all over an abandoned warehouse? Martin: Yeah, she said, 'Aren't these Swedish meatballs the messiest things you've ever seen?' and I said, No, as a matter of fact... (Frasier is giving up) Kirby: I remember a man called Frasier Crane who told me I could achieve anything I put my mind to, and the name of that man was you! Martin: I do, I... I like her from a distance. You know, the way you like the sun. Maris is like the sun. Except without the warmth. Daphne: Remind me again, which one of Kyle's eyes is really looking at me? Martin: The brown one. Niles: Say, a funny thing happened the other day: one of my patients had a rather amusing Freudian slip. He was having dinner with his wife, and he meant to say 'pass the salt', but instead he said: You've ruined my life, you blood-sucking shrew... Frasier: My producer told me you wanted an autograph. Uh, how should I make this out? Woman: You disgust me, you parasitic fraud. Frasier: Well, that's certainly different from the usual 'Best Regards'. Frasier: Well frankly, I don't care about your conscience. I don't need your approval, I don't need you to like it. Frankly, I don't need you for anything! By the way Niles, my car's in the shop, I need you to give me a ride home tonight. Niles: No problem. Frasier: I can't do that, he's counting on this trip too much. It was his dream, he was going to go on this trip with mom. Niles: Yeah, but she lucked out and died. Frasier: I have to talk to you about Niles: I got a call on the show today from a German woman whose husband is a fencing instructor she suspects is having an affair with his wealthy new client. Martin: And? Frasier: Don't you find that the least bit incriminating? Martin: No, I find it a coincidence. Seattle's a big city, I'm sure there's a bunch of German fencing instructors, each one with dozens of students. Frasier: Yes, but are they wealthy students? Martin: No, they're inner-city kids trying to work their way out of the ghetto with nothing but a foil and a dream. Niles: I turned on my heel, walked out of the house, got in the car and just started driving. Frasier: Well, I'm glad you ended up here. Niles: Actually, I ended up at the Oregon border check. I had fruit in the car so I had to turn back. (Niles reads from his diary) 05:00: Blissful confusion. Something's happened, but what? 05:01: Ah, yes. An overwhelming sense of emptiness and despair. 05:07: Wept uncontrollably. 06:15: All cried out. Hungry now. Ate entire box of Frosted Flakes, they're gr-r-r-reat! Frasier: I wish you'd start seeing someone about this bug phobia of yours. Niles: It is not a phobia. I have a healthy fear of our natural predators. It's us versus them and frankly I'm starting to wonder just whose side you're on. Niles: I see your Bartlett's is out. You're not pulling any punches! Frasier: Hardly. I go in swinging with Le Roche Va Coe: 'If we had no faults of our own, we would not take so much pleasure in noticing those of others.' Niles: Ouch! Frasier: And when I've knocked them reeling, I go in with a jab of Dorothy Parker: 'Wit has truth in it, wise-cracking is merely callisthenics with words'. Niles: Pow! Frasier: And when they're bloody and against the ropes, I go in with the kill: Twain, Wilde, Twain, Twain, Menkan! Niles: It's not a fight, it's an execution! Frasier: I specifically requested my macaroni and cheese al denté. Niles: I know, it's a culinary Hindenberg. Frasier: Niles, do you think it may be payback for your recent editorial: 'Cafeteria Of Shame'? Niles: They don't intimidate me. They'll never silence my pen. I could write an exposé on their bread rolls alone. Frasier: This is the hardest roll since Hamlet. Niles: Good one, Frasier. Martin: Ah, doctors never tell you anything, they're all just a bunch of over-paid quacks... Oh, I'm sorry, I don't mean you, I'm talking about real doctors. Niles: It seems our old gardener has passed away unexpectedly. Frasier: Oh, not Yoshi? Gosh, that's too bad. Niles: He had a heart attack when he was out trimming Maris' elaborate hedge maze. The paramedics never had a chance. Niles: Cancel the Millennium! Chez Henri has burnt down! Frasier: Burnt down? Niles: Yes! Apparently, Henri was caramelising a huge crème brûlèe in the shape of Puget Sound, when a sugar spark ignited a thirty foot paper maché Space Needle. They're already calling it the worst centrepiece disaster in the history of Seattle. Frasier: Henri built his reputation with that caramelising torch. My God, the irony of him burning down his own restaurant with it. It's worthy of 'Oh! Henry'. Niles: 'Oh! Henri' Frasier: Niles, please, it's too soon to joke. Niles: Frasier, did you mean to cut paragraph five of my monologue? Frasier: Gosh, I might have, Niles. I've just been so busy. What was the gist? Niles: The light-hearted lampoon of mental health care abuse. Frasier: Ah, yes I did, I was afraid that some fuss-budget might take offence at my jape about lobotomies. Niles: Well, I suppose it's best to play it safe, all though I did like the way you indicated manic depression with the slide whistle. Niles: We've tried distacting him before. We've taken him everywhere from the arboretum to the zen garden. Wait a minute, the zen garden is at the arboretum. Good lord, is it possible we've only taken him one place? Martin: If you ask me, he's the murderer. Daphne: Impossible, he's got an air-tight alibi. Martin: What is it? Daphne: He was killing somebody else at the time. You have to admit, this case has it all: sex, greed, jealousy, revenge, a monkey, hatred, deception... (Niles is reading what Martin's writing) Niles: You know, that's the improper use of a hyphen. Martin: Somehow I don't think Maurie Dingman will mind. Niles: Then I'm sure he won't notice that missing comma and that run-on sentence. Although this is a particularly glaring error. And it's best not to end a sentence with a preposition. (Martin scribbles out what he's written, writes one line and hands it to Niles) Niles: Not to be technical, but 'off' is a preposition too. Roz: Look Frasier, this is a very big night for me, so please, -please- don't spoil it by making fun of who I brought. Frasier: I thought you were bringing Brad McNamara? Roz: Well I was, but he got called out on a story at the last minute. Some hospital went up in flames. Do you know anyone who has worse luck than I do? Frasier: So, where's Maris? Niles: Well, we were just getting ready to leave the house, when Maris got a glimpse of herself in the hall mirror... Frasier: Niles, at the end of this story, will I roll my eyes? Niles: I did. Frasier: Poor Niles. You know, Dad, maybe I should— Martin: Ah, ah! Stop right there, I know what you're going to say. You want to call Maris and talk her into spending her anniversary with Niles. Frasier: I didn't realize I'd gotten as predictable as all that. Martin: Well, you have, and if you ask me— Frasier: Stop right there. I know exactly what you're going to say. I should mind my own business and keep my big bazoo shut! Martin: I was gonna say 'fat yap,' but you're in the ballpark. Frasier: Well, I finally came to a decision. Woman: Me too. I think us going out would have been really stupid. Frasier: (faking) Me too! Woman: It would have completely clouded things with my father, and you and I would never have been on a very firm footing. But you knew all that. You could have told me, but you just let me figure it out for myself. Frasier: Yes, I'm sort of like the Wizard Of Oz. Martin: You know, these things don't happen that often. It's like when I met your mother, it was at a crime scene. Hester was a psychiatrist, so every now and again the department would have her run up a profile on a suspect. I remember the first time I met her — it was over the chalk outline of a murder victim. She drew a little smile on the head of the outline, and I drew a pair of eyes, and before you knew it we were laughing like a couple of kids. Frasier: Dad, you're a ghoul. Martin: I was joking. We couldn't draw on the outline, they hadn't moved the body yet. Maureen: Wait a minute. Marty Crane? You're Martin Crane! Martin: You're wasting your time in traffic, you're quite a detective. Maureen: No, I mean I remember you when I was training. You gave this great lecture at the academy on how to deal with an armed suspect. Martin: Well, thanks. Maureen: How come you left the force? Martin: Well, I uh, got shot by an armed suspect. |
The joint creation of Matt Groening and someone called David X Cohen, and the second of my top-three. Futurama is about Fry, a pizza-delivery boy and loser, who falls into a cryo chamber on the turn of the millenium and is defrosted a thousand years later. He befriends a heartless alcoholic bending robot called Bender (it takes a few episodes to get used to the fact that one of the characters is called Bender) and a renegade career-implant officer, the one-eyed Leela. They find work as the illegally underpaid delivery company owned by Fry's descendant, the senile mad scientist Professor Farnsworth. Also in the company are Zoidberg, an incompetent lobster-alien doctor; Amy, a rich and clueless intern the Professor keeps on because she has the same blood type as him; and Hermes, a Jamaican bureaucrat. It's incredibly rare, even among these great programmes, for the main character to be my favourite, but Fry definitely is. He doesn't fit easily into any established stereotype - he's an idiot but not to the extent of Homer, he's a loser but not everything goes wrong, he's hopeless with women but dated Amy, and he's inept at everything except computer games. To me, he's a modern-day hero: vain and stupid whilst nerdy and unpopular. Another main component of Futurama's appeal is that it's set in the future - the world is richly imagined and exciting, which takes it to a completely different level to The Simpsons, which is almost as funny. Cleverly, the satire of The Simpsons isn't lost in the transition to the year 3000 either - roughly half of everything in the future is a comment on something in the present - and the humour itself is somewhere further in the senseless and crazy directions than The Simpsons, although there is an overlap (there are also a few shared jokes and inter-referencing: both depict each other's characters as toys in the background at various times. Bender even ate a toy Bart's shorts once). Lastly, the sideline characters that crop up in just a few episodes are among the greatest ever devised: most notably Clamps, Flexo, Morbo, the Robot Devil, the generic fat mechanic guy, Santa Claus, Horrible Gelatinous Blob, the Harlem Globetrotters, That Guy and Elzar. I think quotes do more good conveying the appeal of Futurama, and luckily I have thousands of them. Series Notes: the first three series are interchangeably great, then the fourth starts with a run of mind-blowingly good episodes, the premiere being probably my favourite ever, and so epic and exciting that it leaves me feeling like I've seen Futurama: The Film. It doesn't stay that good, though, and then series five has two, maybe even three episodes that are basically worthless. The others are as great as the old stuff, but those few anomalies don't even have a single joke in them that makes me feel bad about writing them off like this. Soldier: This is the worst part: the calm before the battle. Fry: And then the battle isn't so bad? Soldier: Oh, right. I forgot about the battle. (a crustacean confiscates Bender's cigar) Bender: Wait, I need that to smoke! (Bender is caught having stolen the priceless atomic tiara) Bender: Wait, I can explain! It's very valuable! Bender: (to a turtle) Maybe you'd feel better if I had a drink. Bender: (to a turtle) At least we'll die on our backs, helpless. Al Gore: And next up we have Professor- Professor Farnsworth: I demand the floor! Al Gore: Well, yes, it's your turn to speak. Professor Farnsworth: Well nuts to me! I'm taking the stage. Fry: Hey, you have no right to criticize the 20th century! We gave the world the light bulb, the steam boat and the cotton gin. Leela: Those things are all from the 19th century. Fry: Yeah, well, they probably just copied us. Fry: It's just like the story of the grasshopper and the octopus. All year long, the grasshopper kept burying acorns for the winter, while the octopus mooched off his girlfriend and watched TV. But then the winter came, and the grasshopper died, and the octopus ate all his acorns. And also he got a racecar. Is any of this getting through to you? Leela: We're going to deliver this crate like professionals. Fry: Aw. Can't we just dump it in the sewer and say we delivered it? Bender: Too much work! I say we burn it, then say we dumped it in the sewer! Leela: That's Zapp Brannigan's ship! Fry: The Zapp Brannigan? Fry: (confused) Who's the Zapp Brannigan? Leela: Stop it, Bender, we don't need to beg. Fry: So what do you suggest? A daring daylight robbery of Fort Knox on elephant-back? That's the dumbest thing I ever heard. Leela: Where's Fry? Bender: I didn't kill him. Professor? Professor Farnsworth: No, I've been busy. (Fry has Bender dig up his brother's grave to take back a lucky clover he stole) Bender: Paydirt! I got the clover, and his wedding ring. Sorry ladies, I'm taken! Hey Fry, you want me to smack the corpse up a little? Bender: (carrying pillows) These aren't very heavy, but you don't hear me not complaining. Bender: (locking Leela in the laundry room as part of a mutiny) Don't worry Leela, soon we'll be able to look back on all this and laugh. Ahahahahahaa! Bender: (the ship is going down with Leela, Bender and Fry still aboard) Leela, save me! And yourself I guess! And my banjo! ... And Fry! Zapp Brannigan: (explaining his military plan) If we can hit that bullseye the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards. Checkmate! (Fry is styling his hair in the exhaust of the ship's engines) Leela: Fry, do you have any idea how long it takes to reconfigure those engines? Fry: When you look this good, you don't need to know anything. (Leela is proposing staying at her artificially reduced age rather than returning to her normal one) Professor Farnsworth: (horrified) But you'll have no way to return to your normal age except growing up, as God intended! (Leela and Bender confront the Professor) Leela: We've got to talk to you about Fry. Bender: Yeah! We want some money! Wait, what's this about Fry? (Fry is staying with Bender) Fry: Where's the bathroom? Bender: Bathwhat? Fry: Bathroom. Bender: Whatroom? Fry: Bathroom! Bender: Whatwhat? Bender: Of all the friends I've had, you're the first. (Fry is preparing to revive his fossilised dog) Bender: A dog, eh? Interesting... no wait, what's that other one? Tedious... (Bender and the others are ascending the side of a hotel, Bender looking in on the guests) Bender: Get a room, you two! Man: We're in a room. Bender: Then lose some weight! Clips: I don't have space to host these on my own webspace, so I've sent them to a GMail account. Go to GMail, and log on with the username jamesfiles and password pentadact. Clips bigger than ten megs probably won't be there - there's a size cap on individual messages. If you're a big scary company and would like me to stop promoting your show, reply to the offending e-mail and I'll delete the clips. native.avi (12MB) rock.avi (3MB) |
Jonathan Creek I suppose could fit into the swollen genre of NotADetective programmes - that is, murder mystery series in which the main character, who solves all the crimes, is not a detective. Murder, She Wrote is the most shameless example: most of the others have some justification for why this central character is involved in so many murder investigations; Jessica Fletcher just hangs out with killers a lot. Jonathan Creek's reason is both appealing and sufficient, but admittedly not entirely believable: he works for a stage magician designing tricks, and his mind for the apparently impossible (and later his journalist friend's book on the cases he's solved) earns him a reputation that leads various people, often the police, to call him in when their problem is not simply who did it, but how it was physically possible. It's not always a murder, in fact, but then neither is it in Quincy. It's absolutely superb. What makes it great is, primarily, the final explanation of the mysteries - every time (except for the middle series) it leaves me thinking "Damn, I could have thought of that." They don't withold vital pieces of information that the crime-solver has, like other series - all you don't get that Jonathan does is what's going through his head when someone says something unrelated and he suddenly looks distracted. He'll then infuriatingly start to say what he's thought of but never finish, either because he trails off or something else interrupts, and you'll get twenty more clues from him as to what he's worked out, and you'll never get what it is. Then, when it gets revealed in the final few scenes, it's always plausible. It's imaginative, elaborate and difficult, but it could be done, and it would work. So why can't I ever think of it in advance? People have learned to be dismissive of elaborate explanations for things that happen on-screen, and often they are stupid, but they carry it over to Jonathan Creek, and it's completely unfair. Sure, given a murder, the explanation is unlikely to be that complicated, but you're not just given a murder, you're given an apparently impossible account of events. The reason why you get so many such situations in one series is given, and as I say sufficient, so in fact the explanation must be elaborate, and you can't think of one. The programme can, therefore the programme is clever and you - and I - suck. The secondary element to its greatness is the mysteries before they're solved - there's usually an unsettlingly sinister element to them. One time a whole series of people who'd stayed in a certain hotel room had died of a heart attack while looking out of the window at night, seemingly of fright. Another time a man voluntarily throws himself out of his fourth-floor window onto a patio in fear of something in his room. Lastly, and less importantly, Jonathan Creek is a good character. He has these two properties: a) he's a lot like more than one person I know in real life, and b) he's nothing like any on-screen character I can think of. Which means they've nailed a real character type that isn't well-recognised. That's impressive. It can be funny, but usually the humour is just a feature of the characters rather than a conscious attempt to add a comedy element, and the vague love interest is equally mediocre and appropriately unemphasised. It knows its real appeal is in the ingenious mysteries. Series Notes: for a long time this was my favourite programme ever, but then in the second series they felt the embarrassing need to get the two main characters together in an ill-conceived and humourless relationship, and the mystery part suffered too. It's now back for a third series, which is every bit worthy of the first. |
Despite being related to some liked stuff, King Of The Hill is strangely unpopular. It's very real-world and serious, and nothing completely crazy happens, but the consequent subtlety in its humour adds enormously to what fun can be had with feasible situations. It sharply parodies middle-age Texans, most obviously in the credit sequence (where Hank and his three male friends stand in front of a fence sipping beer in time-lapse), and that's a much narrower object of ridicule than The Simpsons or Family Guy, so it's kind of a specialised thing. But the characters are that much better-crafted and convincing that the whole thing is more compelling, and it's not like I have some special affinity with or knowledge of Texans that allows me to 'get' it. Hank: Bobby, if you weren't my son I'd hug you! |
It was hard for me to get used to the idea that something on at 18:00 that wasn't an animation could be funny and intelligent, but Malcolm In The Middle is far too good to overlook. It's an odd title for a show in which Malcolm is one of four children, but I suppose it conveys the idea that he's the sympathetic character trapped in a family of unreasonable people. They're not demonised, though - in fact, his whole family is incredibly likeable. His parents are particularly convincing: enough so that his mother reminds me of my own, and their relationship is both appealing and funny. Malcolm himself is a child prodigy whose only real desires are to avoid humiliation and parental rule, exasperated by the injustices of the world. His older brother Rhys is a manic bully, his younger brother Dewie is quietly innocent and impressionable, and the eldest Francis is, for most series, away in military school, and all his plot lines develop more or less independantly of the rest of the family's, far away. This works surprisingly well, as does Malcolm's to-the-camera style narration, which he often does mid-conversation. The other great thing about Malcolm In The Middle is its morality - most episodes feature some kind of injustice that, one way or the other, gets resolved, but on occasion the way or extent to which this is achieved is nothing short of glorious. Malcolm's best friend is wheelchair-bound and has to gasp for breath between almost every syllable he speaks, and the sublime first episode (just called Pilot, I think) ends with someone hitting him in the face, but it's so beautifully set up that this is actually the ingenious retribution of the episode. It's hard to explain how that's possible without giving away the plot, and it deserves to be seen unspoilt. Notes: the only two guest stars I've recognised on Malcom In The Middle have been Bradley Whitford and Jason Alexander, who play Josh in The West Wing and George in Seinfeld respectively: my favourite characters in each of those two series, themselves two of my all-time favourite series. Incidentally, Bradley Whitford was in Philadelphia, that film with Tom Hanks and Antonio Banderas. (Malcolm, Rhys and Dewie are walking along a corridor in their swimming trunks. Dewie is holding his nipples) Malcolm: They don't do anything, they're just there. Pool Attendant: I'm sorry, kids, I can't let you in the pool without an adult. Rhys: That's okay, they're with me. Pool Attendant: I'm sorry, no adult, no pool. Malcolm: That's stupid, we can all swim! Pool Attendant: Sorry, it's the rules. Malcolm: You're just not letting us in because you hate kids. Pool Attendant: No, that's just a happy coincidence. Casino Guy: Welcome to the Casino Royale, where everyone's a winner! Voice From Background: Oh God, I'm ruined! Ruined! Rhys: That's the good thing about cheerleaders: they stampede easily. Fluffy Blue Elephant On TV: Ask your parents to buy me, Dewie! (Dewie does, but is unsuccessful) Fluffy Blue Elephant On TV: Please, Dewie! You have to buy me! (Dewie tries again) Fluffy Blue Elephant On TV: Listen, I didn't want to have to tell you this, but if you don't buy me, you'll die. Make-Up Artist: You know, you have really pretty eyes. You shouldn't hide them behind no-make-up. (Hal - the kids' father - has rented a woodchipper to dispose of the tree he cut down) Rhys: Oh my God, that is the coolest thing I've ever seen! Hal: This? All it does is vapourise anything you put into it. (Dewie throws his lunchbox in) Hal: Dewie! What are you doing? Hal: Actually that was pretty cool. What else you got? |
The posters for Monk really annoyed me when I was in New York, but if I'd noticed its name in the TV listings back in England I'd still have watched it sooner. They said "Obsessive | Compulsive | Detective", which is annoying because it makes you read it like 'Detective' is an adjective, and as though Monk is compulsive, which is an odd thing to say about a person (it also makes you read it like he's obsessive, of course, but he really is, and that is an adjective, so that much is acceptable). He is, in fact, an obsessive-compulsive detective, although he's not really a detective because he had to retire from the force because of his obsessive-compulsiveness. Monk is sad, funny, often clever and regularly agonising, and each of these elements stems from Monk's mental peculiarities - he's not simply obsessive-compulsive, he's also quite autistic and completely brilliant. The detection is much like a cross between Columbo and Jonathan Creek - in Columbo, you see who did it, Columbo instinctively knows who did it, and all that remains is to see how he proves it. In Jonathan Creek, sometimes you know who and sometimes you don't, but the mystery is always how; most of the crimes seem impossible, and that's why Jonathan Creek was called in. In Monk, although we seldom see who does it, Monk soon becomes sure of who, but can't work out how right until the end. Whereupon, Jonathan-Creek-style, some unrelated observation triggers an expression of realisation, and he says something hilariously obtuse like "If he's thirty-eight, I know how he [an enormously fat man, medically incapable of walking] did it [a crime many miles away]." Neither Jonathan Creek or Columbo are sad, though, and Monk definitely is. Monk was only a little quirky when he was an actual detective, but when his wife was killed by a car-bomb probably intended for him, he didn't leave the house for three years. In a tacky-sounding but in fact quite reasonable twist, that's the one case he can't solve, and he returns to it whenever a current one stumps him too. But if the difficulty there were intellectual, he would eventually solve it as he does every other perplexing case - instead, the difficulty is overwhelmingly emotional. In one galling episode - her birthday - we find out he suffers massive memory loss about the case; he suddenly makes a startling revelation that leads him to look up a psychic woman he believes is connected, and on meeting her she asks "Don't you remember me? You come here every year, about your wife." The agonising parts are generally down to the excellent directing - somehow every misplaced cushion, misaligned pencil or crooked object comes to bother the viewer as much as it does Monk. And since he's frequently in delicate situations, we frequently have to watch these anomalies go uncorrected for minutes at a time, until Monk himself can bear it no longer. But ironically, the other agonising moments come not from momentarily sharing his disorders, but from the exact opposite - watching him write his name on a blackboard in Mr Monk Goes Back To School probably only takes about a minute, but it's the longest scene you'll ever watch. The directing is excellent, the writing is almost always excellent (see Series Notes), but the acting - particularly that of Tony Shalhoub, Monk - is in a league of its own. Shalhoub seems to get offered consistently brilliant parts - the extravagant lawyer Freddy Reidenschneider in The Man Who Wasn't There, and the bizarre transporter technician in Galaxy Quest spring to mind - but his uncanny abilities more than do them justice. Monk's nervous ticks, occasionally breaking voice, modest sensitivity and intellectual arrogance all come out uniquely and unforgettably. Most people, though, are going to find Monk's assistant Sharona irritating. I have no idea why I don't - I can instinctively tell that she is irritating, she just doesn't irritate me for some reason. I even find her rather likeable most of the time - she gives up a lot to accommodate Monk, serving as his mediator to a world that would otherwise interpret his disorder as an attitude of superiority. Series Notes: curiously, it's only some of the very early ones of the first series that aren't particularly impressive. One or two of the mysteries are foregone conclusions, and thereafter that's never the case. I preferred the theme tune from the first series, which was replaced in the second one by It's A Jungle Out There by Randy Newman, presumably partially because the line "I could be wrong, but I don't think so" vaguely matches Monk's sometime catchphrase, "Unless I'm wrong, and, you know, I'm not..." It's not a terrible song, though, and there's now a welcome inter-splicing of clips from both series with the regular title sequence. Jesus, why the hell am I talking about this? (Monk is standing on a table to avoid a possible snake) Captain Stottlemeier: I thought you were afraid of heights? Monk: Snakes trump heights. It goes germs, needles, milk, death, snakes, mushrooms, heights, crowds, elevators... Captain Stottlemeier: Okay, okay! Clips: I don't have space to host these on my own webspace, so I've sent them to a GMail account. Go to GMail, and log on with the username jamesfiles and password pentadact. Clips bigger than ten megs probably won't be there - there's a size cap on individual messages. If you're a big scary company and would like me to stop promoting your show, reply to the offending e-mail and I'll delete the clips. opera.avi (1MB) |
A lot of people hate Seinfeld, including Brian from Family Guy and, by inference, that show's creators (and it's often mocked independantly of any characters, by a cartoon Seinfeld popping up and making Seinfeld-esque jokes. In fact, it gives you some idea of the fidelity of Family Guy's references that all the mock-Seinfeld appearences I've seen have been lines from his real show). I see why - Jerry has a nasal voice, and plays himself, and the humour is easily characterised: some very specific and hard-to-name phenomenon happens to one of them, and in talking about it they name it cleverly and amusingly, and then over-analyse it and what the reasonable responses to it, treating it with more gravity than people typically would. To me, it's not merely Great, but Important. It teaches a whole new way of communicating with each other, invents a language tailor-made for (rich, western, adult, single, predominantly white) modern life, that makes it easy and funny to talk about things that matter to our small-scale, privileged existences. It intelligently discusses them and raises ethical points. It admits that no-one in our culture who doesn't give away everything they don't absolutely need to live to charity has a right to act like they're not small-minded, selfish, inconsiderate and ultimately evil. And you know what? I like the stand-up bits at the start and end. He's a great stand-up. George is easily the best character, and one of my all-time heroes (short, bald, heartless, selfish, sick, insecure, miserly, petty, bitter, proud, inconsiderate and an ingenious liar), and the conversations between him and Jerry make up most of the greatest dialogue. And his reaction to the death of his fiancée - itself brilliantly random and senseless - was total genius. (Jerry is on the phone) Jerry: No, I'm not interested in changing my long-distance phone company. ... What? ... Okay, well listen, I'm a bit busy right now, so why don't you give me your home phone number and I'll call you back later? ... You're not allowed to? Oh, I guess that's probably because you don't want people calling you at home, huh? ... Well, now you know how I feel. Jerry: Elaine, look, I drew this triangle freehand, it's a doodle, and look, it's perfect! Elaine: So what? That's easy. Jerry: Easy? (Later) Kramer: Hey, that's a nice triangle. Jerry: (Proudly) It's isoceles. Kramer: Ooh, isoceles... you know, I've always loved the word isoceles. If I had a kid, I'd name him Isoceles. Isoceles Kramer... (Jerry is despairing that he's stuck in a kiss-hello relationship with so many people) George: You know, I've got mine down to one. Jerry: One kiss-hello? George: Yeah, my aunt. Jerry: Really? I admire that. George: Really? Jerry: What? George: It's just you've never said you admired anything about me before. Jerry: Yes I have; I admire your hearing. George: Ah, well... Jerry: No, really, you have excellent hearing. (Jerry is about to leave his apartment for the night. George is there) Jerry: You rented Home Alone? George: Yeah. Jerry: Didn't you see that already? George: No, that was Home Alone 2. Jerry: Oh, yeah. Didn't you hate it? George: Well, I was lost, I didn't see the first one. Jerry: Okay. George: So listen, d'you mind if I watch it here? Jerry: Why? George: Well, if I watch it at home, I'll feel like I'm not doing anything. If I watch it here I'm doing something, you know, I'm out of the house... (George has just introduced Jerry and Elaine to his new girlfriend, and they've now left) Elaine: Oh my God Jerry, she looks exactly like you! Jerry: She does not! Elaine: Meh, maybe she doesn't. What do I care? Jerry: (Genuinely confused) Why would I want to help someone? (Jerry was in an accident, and the doctors had to give him some of Kramer's blood) Jerry: I can feel his blood inside me, borrowing stuff from my blood... George: (Of himself) People this stupid shouldn't be allowed to live. Elaine: He's vibrant. You'd like him. Jerry: Why do people always say that? I hate everyone. Elaine: Oh, I asked that girl if she likes you. George: Really? What did she say? Elaine: She likes you. George: Really? That's great! Elaine: Yeah, she said looks weren't important to her. George: She said what? Elaine: What do you care? She likes you. George: Are you kidding? I'd rather she hated me and thought I was attractive. This is terrible! (He leaves) Elaine: Jeez, I thought he'd be relieved. Jerry: Ah, he'll be relieved when he's dead. (Kramer, Jerry and Newman are on a stakeout) Kramer: What's today? Newman: It's Thursday. Kramer: Really? Feels like Tuesday. Newman: Tuesday has no feel. Monday has a feel. Friday has a feel, Sunday has a feel. Kramer: I feel Tuesday and Wednesdays. (George's scheme to make himself appear funnier to his girlfriend when Jerry is around has backfired) George: Jerry? Sheryl: I'm very attracted to him. George: You think the person you were talking to was him? That's not even close to him! He's funny! Sheryl: No no, he's dark, and disturbed. George: Dark and disturbed? His whole life revolves around Superman and cereal! I convinced him to act like that so that you would think I was funnier! That's how disturbed I am! You want disturbed, that's disturbed! You can't find sickness like that anywhere else! You think sickness like that grows on trees? Nobody is sicker than me! Nobody! He's pretending, I'm the genuine article. Sheryl: You're telling me Jerry's whole thing is an act? George: Yes! I put him up to it! I'm sick! I'm the one who needs help! Sheryl: I've got to go. George: Should I call you later? Sheryl: Please don't. George: But... but I'm disturbed! I'm depressed! I'm inadequate! I got it all! (George's scheme for how Jerry can switch girlfriends - by suggesting a ménage a trois in order to repel the current girlfriend and attract the new one - seems to have gone even better than anticipated) George: She's into it? That's unbelievable! Do you ever just get down on your knees and thank God that you know me and have access to my dementia? Jerry: What're you talking about? I'm not going to do it! I can't, I'm not an orgy guy! George: Are you crazy? This is like discovering plutonium by accident! Jerry: Oh shut up, you couldn't do it either. George: I know. |
I don't think anything general needs to be said about what The Simpsons is or why it's great. My favourite characters in alphabetical order are: Chief Wiggum, Comic Book Guy, Lenny and Carl, Lisa, Lou (the black cop), Moe, Professor Frink, Sideshow Bob and his brother,* and Smithers. I like it less when it's just about the immediate Simpsons family (except Lisa-centric episodes) and least of all when it's about Marge and Homer's marriage, because the closer they get to that the more repulsive Homer becomes and the crueller the whole necessarily unchanging affair is to Marge. I feel similarly about Family Guy.
Series Notes: it's more or less been getting better from the start, and the latest series in particular is completely crazy and brilliant. Lenny: Sending some outgoing mail there? Carl: You know it. Lenny: Ah, I'll probably send some out next week. Carl: I hear that. (Bart has been demoted to the 'catch-up' remedial group) Teacher: Now kids, today we're going to continue our work on the letter 'A'... Bart: So, we're going to catch up with the other kids by going slower than them? Professor Frink: Oh my great good God! Gentlemen your attention please, I'm detecting a gigantic amphibious life-form... it's eighty meters long and it's heading this way- oh, good guyvin it's on my shoe! It's... a small frog. Get off! Stupid machine. Oh, wait a minute... this isn't the Monsterometer, it's the Frog Exaggerator! Comic Book Guy: Oh, a sarcasm detector, what a useful invention. (Sarcasm Detector explodes) *
Carl: That's too clever, get him too! Someone: What is it, Doctor? Dr Nick: Nothing expensive treatment can't prolong. Chief Wiggum: Come on, move along now people, there's nothing to see h- oh my God, a huge plane crash! Gather round everyone, come on, don't be shy! Dr Hibbert: I can't possibly solve this mystery. (pointing at camera:) Can you? Chief Wiggum: Well, I'll give it a shot, I mean, it's my job, right? (Principal Skinner is explaining to Lisa the town's plan to introduce a species of snake to erradicate their unwanted bird-eating lizard population) Lisa: But then won't the town be infested with snakes? Skinner: Ah, we're way ahead of you. There's a bird of prey that lives on these snakes. Lisa: But won't they prey on the local wildlife too? Skinner: Well yes, but then we introduce the mountain gorilla to get rid of the birds. Lisa: But what about the gorillas? Skinner: Ah, well, that's the beautiful part. Come winter time the gorillas simply freeze to death. (Homer has angered God) Moe: I say we skin him then set him on fire! Carl: Yeah, that'll appease God! Moe: Appease who now? |
Probably the only modern, English sub-culture sitcom. It's not about twenty-somethings getting into relationships in Manhattan - it's about a skateboarding comic-book artist (Tim) who spends his life playing Playstation games and his positive but hopeless wannabe-journalist flatmate (Daisy). It's also about their drunk landlady, the obssessive and psychotic artist who lives below them, and Tim's military-obssessed childhood friend. Tim and Brian (the artist), are two of the funniest and most important people in British comedy (although that's not to say I can remember Brian's real name), and Spaced is probably the best thing they've been involved in. The appeal is partially the ability to relate to the lifestyle and the culture, but primarily it's the humour, which is difficult to describe. Series Notes: the second series is actually every bit as good as the first. (Brian and Tim are looking at one of Daisy's party decorations) Brian: I see it as a tribute to Christo, the artist. Tim: I see it as a waste of Baco, the foil. (Daisy answers the phone) Daisy: Oh hi Mike, yeah he's here. (To Tim) It's your boyfriend. Tim: He's not my boyfriend! (Takes it) Hi babe. Mike: Hello Timmy! Tim: Where are you? Mike: (looks around) Uh, Sheffield. Tim: What're you doing in Sheffield? Mike: I fell asleep on the tube. Tim: The tube doesn't go to Sheffield. Mike: I know, I must have changed at King's Cross. (Marsha has been arguing with her teenage daughter upstairs) Marsha: Sorry about the noise. Periods. Her dad's left. Daisy: Didn't her dad leave when she was two? Marsha: Yeah, she is milking it slightly. |
DS9 is more than just the best Star Trek series, it's the whole reason I'm a trekkie. I'm a second generation trekkie - I've never even slightly liked the original series, and I don't even slightly like the new zeroth generation, Enterprise. But I like a lot about The Next Generation, a lot about Voyager, and love Deep Space Nine to the point of completion, which with a hundred and eighty-two episodes - a hundred and twenty-one hours twenty minutes - is no small feat. The reason it's a great flagship for the second generation Star Trek ethos is that, at best, they're about galactic politics and the role of a more enlightened, benevolent human race in that environment. Deep Space Nine has more politics, in the form of an ongoing multi-faceted political storyline that openly analogs an alternative post World War scenario in which the Nazis are still a world power (albeit a reformed and mildly apologetic one), therefore it's better. It also has better interpersonal relationships - probably because it has better characters - and it's the one between Doctor Bashir and Chief O'Brien that first lured me in beyond just liking the cleanliness of the sets and the quiet hiss of the doors. In most series, friendships get obscured either by jokes or events - either the people just make jokes at each other for our amusement the whole time, or all they ever talk about is what's going on in the plot. Bashir and O'Briens was one of the first I ever saw in which there was an actual friendship in addition to those elements, and it gave the whole universe the lustre of realism. That's the appeal of sci-fi in general, to me and a lot of other people - moments where you can suddenly see the whole imagined universe as real, and imagine being in it. Aiming for that effect turns sci-fi from its original form - someone imagining something that could happen in the future, and other people finding the idea interesting - to a bona fide artform, where style and richness of imagination combine to make an impossibly exciting, visionary universe, laced with endless amazing possibilities. You can have an idea for a film or TV series, but you can't have an idea for a sci-fi one; you have to design everything about an entire universe, it just wouldn't be worth it if all you had was an idea. Deep Space Nine is the one on the space station, which makes it different from the other two in more and bigger ways than those in which they differ from each other: it's stuck in one place; the station itself is a Cardassian one, so no Starfleet style; there's a nearby planet that forms the focus and recurring theme of much of the plot; there's no exploration involved, no-one boldly going anywhere; about half of the characters aren't Starfleet; and its running plot takes up about half of the episodes, making it half a series and half a serial (Alias is entirely a serial, and The Next Generation is entirely a series. Voyager's a series too, but there's something very serial-esque about the fact that the plotline started in the pilot gets resolved in the finalé of the last series). Not being set on a Starfleet ship would count against it (no clean design and quiet doors) if the station itself wasn't so amazing - its shape is described in the books (how do I know this? Shut up, that's how) as a circular spine, and it's every bit as weird and cool as that sounds. More importantly, the docking bays are on the tips of the ribs, which is great in a way that you can only appreciate by seeing it, and even then only if you're a demented sci-fi freak who gets excited about things like where the docking bays are. If I'm really being honest, I find just the words 'docking bay' exciting. 'Cargo bay' is even better. The running plot is excellent, and although a lot of the very best episodes come more under the 'series' category, DS9 is more consistently great when it's unravelling the Dominion invasion, and the roles of Cardassia and Bajor. The Dominion is an even better and more menacing threat than The Borg ever were, and Cardassians have always been Star Trek's greatest race. Most sci-fi races just take one human quality and exaggerate it (Klingons war and honour, Vulcans logic, Romulans evil logic, even the wonderful Ferengi are obviously just materialism (but if you've got to choose just one quality to exaggerate, that one has wonderful results, whereas most of the others get boring after you've met two of their race (in fact, I've noticed an interesting correlation between the over-use of one word among a race and how boring their common personality traits are: Vulcans don't actually use the word 'logic' that often, and some of them are pretty interesting, whereas Klingons use the word 'honour' in every god-damn sentence, and all of them are achingly boring. Ferengi barely even have a key word, but it's probably 'profit' and they only mention it when it's strictly relevant (Vulcans call a lot of stuff 'logic' that actually has nothing to do with it, and Klingons... I think the universal translators may be translating about fifty very different words as 'honour')))), but Cardassians have a complex psychology that's distinctly inhuman without being a simple extreme. But its real appeal is in the individual characters, of which Garak - played by Andrew Robinson, the brilliant murderer in Dirty Harry - is the clear star. I started to like him for the same reason I started to like DS9 itself - Bashir and he have an appealingly intellectual, and appealingly polite, friendship, despite Bashir being a straight-shooting and ambitious Starfleet doctor, and Garak being the three-faced exiled Cardassian spy turned tailor (which I think is a John LeCarré reference) who denies even the things he's already admitted to. He's a great character just by virtue of his new, superficially legal persona, but his old self also comes through now and then, seamlessly turning him into a proficient assassin, strategist and hacker, and then back again as soon as anyone notices. "I must have picked it up somewhere." The other especially great ones are as follows: Quark: the Ferengi barkeeper, Ferengis being the orange aliens with the crazy ears, and the second greatest alien race in the Star Trek universe. Other than their unapologetically materialist ethos, the best thing about Ferengis is that, when they think they're in danger, they scream like girls. Odo: the pleasingly neutral and uncorruptable shape-shifter security constable whom everyone says I look like. His inexplicably coarse voice (the actor himself doesn't speak like that - he's in Frasier for a few episodes, and turns up in other Star Trek roles, and he's normal, and rather good; and it shouldn't be a feature of his race, because he's a shape-shifter, he's emulating human form (a little odd in itself - shouldn't he be emulating Bajoran form? I don't think he even saw a human until the occupation ended)) and sceptical, unswayable nature give him the air of a strict but reasonable teacher, who you'd probably like if you met socially. Also, it'd be cool to be a shape-shifter. Weyoun: weak eyes, but excellent hearing. He's a Vorta, the middle-man race of politicians engineered by the Founders to oversee the Jem-Hadar (the actual fighting troops) and handle inter-species relations. All Vorta are superb, but Weyoun is, happily, both the best and the most prominent. He's incredibly genial and persuasive (not to mention wonderfully acted, by another multi-role actor; Jeffrey Combs (if you know the characters but don't yet know the actors, you probably won't believe me when I say he's also Ferengi Commerce Authority official Brunt)), but unlike Garak has a vicious side that he can toggle at will, making it all the more scary. But his best moments are when he laughs; he has a brilliantly superior, mocking laugh that out-evils any straightforwardly evil ones. In the episode Waltz, where he only appears as a figment of Gul Dukat's imagination, he mocks Dukat with the most crushing and indelible speech, and it's given an even sharper sadistic edge by his relentless, lilting laugh. Keevan: another Vorta, only appearing in two episodes (making a rather gruesome exit). In terms of convincing eeriness, and in terms of just sheer evil, he actually beats Weyoun, only losing out because he's so horrible that he becomes unpleasant to watch. See below. Even with a hundred and seventy-six episodes, it's easy to name the best because they're each so memorable. Thus, I present my top three: 2x14 - Whispers: I usually don't like the crew-members-acting-strange type of episodes, simply because there are so many of them, but this one is chilling. A lot of Deep Space Nine episodes are mysteries, too, but none so mysterious or compelling as Whispers. I can't talk a lot about it without letting slip the ending, so if you've seen it, you can click here for a measly few more words. Keiko and Odo's roles are particularly unsettling, and the meal scene has a nameless horror about it that sticks with you. Not as scary as that TNG episode where an officer walks out of sight round a corner, a horrible scream is heard, and Geordie finds her stuck halfway in the floor, facing the direction she came from,* completely motionless, with this expression on her face... eee. Nor as freaky as the Voyager episode where people that only Seven can see are sticking metal instruments in the crew's faces and toying with their DNA until they die from the mutations. But Whispers is probably the most sinister Star Trek episode ever, and definitely the best.
6x19 - In The Pale Moonlight: a political cloak-and-dagger thriller told reterospectively by Sisko, and mainly about Garak. Probably his finest hour, in fact, and on top of the brilliantly engrossing and genuinely twisty plot, there's one scene of terrifyingly great acting (on the part of a Romulan. If you've seen and remember it, that should be enough to specify which one I mean). (Bashir has just finished telling Garak the story of the boy who cried 'wolf') Bashir: The moral of the story is that if you keep lying, people won't be able to believe anything you say. Garak: Are you sure that's the moral, doctor? Bashir: Well, yes. What else could it be? Garak: Never tell the same lie twice. O'Brien: (after ordering another double-strong, double-sweet Jamaican-blend coffee) You're drinking too many of these things, O'Brien. But I need to stay focussed, O'Brien! (Quark finds the latinum has been extracted from his one thousand bricks of gold-pressed latinum) Quark: There's nothing here but worthless gold! (Bashir has failed to persuade O'Brien that he's destined to fall in love with his great-grandmother while in the past, and become his own great-grandfather) Bashir: Alright, but I can't wait to get back to Deep Space Nine and see your face when you find out I never existed. (Nog has offered to try to obtain needed equipment to a deadline) O'Brien: Alright, but don't do anything I wouldn't do. Nog: Chief, I can't work under those kinds of restraints. (Weyoun is in exile, Odo wants to know why) Weyoun: Let's just say I fled Cardassia because my life was in danger. Odo: From who? Weyoun: Everyone. Odo: Aren't you being a little paranoid? Weyoun: Of course I'm paranoid, everyone's trying to kill me! Clips: I don't have space to host these on my own webspace, so I've sent them to a GMail account. Go to GMail, and log on with the username jamesfiles and password pentadact. Clips bigger than ten megs probably won't be there - there's a size cap on individual messages. If you're a big scary company and would like me to stop promoting your show, reply to the offending e-mail and I'll delete the clips. rescue.avi (5MB) |
The Tick is an inept yet effective superhero, in a town full of inept and ineffective superheroes (except one, American Maid, who is neither inept nor ineffective). He's giant and blue, with an enormous upper body and no neck, and his only special ability is that he's basically indestructable. His sidekick, Arthur, wears a white moth costume, with wings, even back when he worked as an accountant and had no superhero aspirations. It's a great cartoon because it misses even the unconventional stereotypes - The Tick isn't a failed or pathetic superhero, he actually saves the day a lot of the time (except when Chairface Chippendale wrote 'CHA' on the moon with a giant laser*), he's just weird. And a wonderful character - he has a noble passion for protecting the city, but when the criminals escape in a blimp, he says "They have a blimp! Cool!" (a quote that comes up on the news that night). He also lectures both captured bad guys and his sidekick with pun-laded lectures and his incoherently metaphorical interpretation of events respectively.
Interviewer: So can you destroy the world? The Tick: Egads, I hope not! That's where I keep all my stuff! (The Tick has been assigned The City as his city to protect) The Tick: Ahh, The City. My The City! The Tick: I hate broccoli. And yet, in a certain sense, I am broccoli. (Arthur has an industrial spy's nose pinched in the tweezers of a giant Swiss Army Knife) Industrial Spy: That hurts quite a lot! (The Tick wants Arthur to join him for Hobby Night instead of going on a date) The Tick: Look Arthur! Our duck is nearly complete! It's a masterpiece in macaroni! Arthur: Why are you making this so hard for me? The Tick: Why are you making this so easy on evil? (The Tick, Arthur and Arthur's girlfriend Carmelita have just been swallowed by a giant sprinting whale. Someone sneezes) The Tick: Gusenheit. Arthur: I didn't sneeze. Carmelita: Me neither. The Tick: Jonah? Old Man: No. Arthur: Captain Ahab? Old Man: No. Carmelita: Daddy? Old Man: Pumpkin? The Tick: Quel coincidence! Carmelita: Daddy, what are you doing here? Old Man: Well, when a man reaches a certain point in his life, he says "Yeah, I invented a lot of stuff, but what do I do next?" I decided to walk across the country. So, I'm out on the highway walking, and then I get swallowed by a whale. (A crazy guy has lined up all the greatest inventors from history) Crazy Guy: ... And finally, we come to the inventor of the wheel, whose name has been lost in the mists of time. So, what is it? Cave-Woman: Wheel. The Tick: Oh come on, be reasonable. You can't destroy everything. Where would you sit? Clips: I don't have space to host these on my own webspace, so I've sent them to a GMail account. Go to GMail, and log on with the username jamesfiles and password pentadact. Clips bigger than ten megs probably won't be there - there's a size cap on individual messages. If you're a big scary company and would like me to stop promoting your show, reply to the offending e-mail and I'll delete the clips. polar.avi (700k) |
The West Wing is the surprise winner - despite being utterly unlike anything else I like in theme or type (it's a White House drama (you might think that's obvious from the title, but if so you're probably American - I've still never heard of the West Wing outside of this series)), it's quite literally the greatest thing ever, by a clear margin. Only one thing even goes e thing about it goes some way to explaining the anomaly, though - it's a fantasy. I imagine people who keep up with politics could have a nasty experience trying to swallow its picture of a government in which a near-perfect tension between pure democracy and what is fundamentally right decides policy, and the people in power are all heartbreakingly good-willed and astonishingly talented. To call it arrogant for that is like accusing Star Trek of exaggerating our space-travel capabilities. Not a documentary! Fiction is where they tell you a story and, while knowing the story isn't true, you follow the plot and maybe enjoy it. Where did we get this idea that art's supposed to just record what things are like? That's a talentless, menial task; art should be fantasy, it should use imagination to show how things could be and get people excited at the idea. Beyond entertainment, that's its only task, and it's a much loftier and more important calling than commenting on how things really are. Anyway, when I first saw it (and it's one of the few things that grabbed me immediately, rather than me suddenly realising it's great the twelfth time I see it), what hit me was the dialogue - the characters talk as fast as air-traffic controllers, only the jargon is not so much jargon as a mix of brilliantly argued moral points and hilarious exchanges. The political situations are eerily like recent real ones, and the action taken - of which you always learn (i.e. if it's the politics you're interested in, you get it) - is a compelling compromise between liberal and what people actually believe in: the Democrats are in power, and president Bartlett (played by Martin Sheen, incidentally) is a particularly left wing (and underlyingly geeky) one. Every issue is discussed with a thoroughness and fairness (not to mention articulacy and, an unavoidably recurring word, intelligence) that impresses even me, a sceptic philosopher derisive of the attempts of any other discipline to even argue coherently, let alone exhibit any kind of rational intelligence. But the issues are very much secondary to the characters, for me - there are perhaps five who aren't fantastic and compelling and vividly human, so to do the others full justice, I will list ten of them by first name in descending order of greatness: Toby, Josh, Will, Sam, Donna, Margaret, Leo, CJ, Charlie. Detailing what I like so much about each of them would be a mammoth (though strangely tempting) task, so I'll just skip over some highlights: Toby is just fantastic all the time - grouchy, brilliant, and absurdly restrained when he's happy; Josh and Donna's relationship - she's his assistant and they have a horribly touching combination of superficial spite masking genuine affection; Margaret is Leo's assistant, but gets very little screentime (given that Donna is Josh's assistant, and Josh is Leo's deputy, and Donna gets so much screentime she's in the opening credits), but she's so great that she transcends this - largely for her perfect deadpan conversations with Leo. Series Notes: the first two series are relentlessly brilliant, with several of the best ever episodes in the second; but then the third starts off with three or four... not bad episodes as such, just a bit grim. It's all struggle and hostility, whereas no other episodes before that had ever lost their good humour and multi-facetedness. Shortly into the series, though, it gets great again, and stays at the old stellar standard. Then the fourth series... wow. It's like The West Wing Plus: everything about it is even better, and the energy and pace of it is completely exhilerating. As for the finalés, the first series' was fantastic, the next two weren't really cliff-hangers or even very interesting, but the fourth is another explosive one, taking four long-running plot-lines to breaking point and leaving them there, and also featuring two remarkable firsts: one of the characters running (it's not usually a very athletic programme); and a white ending screen (every other episode has a black one). Huh. I now discover the writer, Aaron Sorkin, also considers the fourth series the best, and that he's never, ever going to write another episode. There'll be a fifth series, but to me this is basically the end of the programme; writing is always everything, and no-one in the world writes like him. This makes the cliff-hanger nature of the ending of the last Sorkin episode more irritating than tense. (Donna is pressing Leo for official word on the news that the president crashed his* bicycle) Leo: He was swerving to avoid a tree. Donna: And what happened? Leo: He was unsuccessful.**
Jed: No. Christian Right: Really? Jed: I do think five dollars is too high a price to pay for pornography, though. (Leo and Jed are approaching a plane whose engine is roaring loudly. Leo has just finished a phone conversation with Bruno and Hess) Leo: I just got off with Bruno and Hess. Jed: I'm sorry? Leo: I said I just got off with Bruno and Hess. Jed: You didn't say 'Michigan sucks'? Leo: No sir. Jed: I thought you said 'Michigan sucks'. Leo: I'm standing very close to the engine, so it may have sounded like I said 'Notre Dame is going to get the ass-kicking they so richly deserve'. (Donna has finally found Josh a flight that doesn't involve a change at Atlanta and booked him on it) Josh: Cancel it. Donna: Why? Josh: I need a layover in Atlanta. I need to get there around an hour before an eight o'clock flight would take off. Donna: That would be around seven. Josh: Well, I haven't done the math. CJ: Duchamp was the father of Dadaism. Toby: I know. CJ: The dadda of Dada! Toby: It's like there's nothing you can do about a joke like that - you see it coming, and you just have to stand there. Leo: I think your wife's not going to like it. Toby: My ex-wife. No, she's not. Why do you call her my wife? Leo: It bothers you. Toby: Everything bothers me; you pick that? Josh: Leo, ask me how long a Martian day is. Leo: No, I don't think I will. Sam: I need you to tell me everything you can about the superconducting supercollider. Physicist: How much time do you have? Sam: About ten minutes. Physicist: If you pay close attention and stay very, very quiet I can teach you how to spell it. (Some women protested against Abbey Bartlet by turning up to one of her speeches in aprons and with rolling pins) Sam: Why were there rolling pins? CJ: Brenda Swetland: At this moment you're not licensed to practise medicine, correct? A. Bartlet: At this moment I'm just a wife and mother. Sam: I don't see it. CJ: You've got to want it. Sam: Oh. I see it. CJ: Yeah. Sam: What're we doing? CJ: Well, I wanted my office to issue a statement saying "You're annoying, shut up," but Bruno said to wave at it, and he's right. Jed: Toby, why are you smiling? Toby: Happiness is my default state, sir. (Toby is reading what Sam's typing) Toby: That's good... good... okay... Sam, you're going to come to a verb soon, right? Sam: Okay, you know what this is called? Toby: Bad writing? Sam: Imagery. Toby: I'm not coming in the car? Jed: No, you know why? Because you made fun of the guacamole. Toby: I didn't! Jed: I could tell you were thinking it. Toby: Fair enough. (Toby is trying to come up with a statement for the press secretary to give in defence of their nomination for attorney general) Toby: He's tough on crime, fair on justice, say that. On no account say that. What is that? He's tough on crime, fair on justice, wears a moustache, sings a song? What's happening to me? Josh: Was it a good game? Sam: You know what I'd do if- no, it wasn't a good game. You know what I'd do if I had a hockey team? Josh: What? Sam: I'd hire a sumo wrestler. I'd give him a uniform, transportation, five-hundred bucks a week to sit in the goal, eat a ham sandwich and enjoy the game. My team'd never get scored on. Josh: Your team would get scored on constantly. Sam: Yeah, but we'd sell a few tickets. Josh: Yeah, because sumo wrestling always sells out in hockey towns. Sam: My idea's totally inviable? Josh: Well, you're a democrat. Donna: (talking about a Chinese satelite) It was in what's called a degrading orbital path, and it's now dropped off their radar, suggesting it's started a rapid descent towards Earth's atmosphere. Charlie: Cool. Donna: It's not! What's the matter with you people? Charlie: What did I do? Donna: A thing the size of a garbage truck is going to be in a two-thousand mile-an-hour freefall and no-one knows where it's going to hit! Charlie: I'm rooting for Zurich. I've had it up to here with the Swiss. Toby: I need you to back up Albie Duncan. Andy: Is he crazy? Toby: No. No, no. No. A little bit. Andy: Toby? Toby: He's Albie Duncan, he was in the Eisenhower State Department, he's brilliant, he's respected; if he's crazy, I don't want to be sane. Andy: You're not. Toby: Excellent. Josh: I'm getting subpoena'd again. Delores: Oh I'm sorry dear. D'you want a cookie? Josh: Thanks. Senator At Alcoholics Anonymous Meeting: Okay, I haven't chaired in a while; what do we do next? Agency Director At Alcoholics Anonymous Meeting: Now's when we usually start drinking. Other Senator At Alcoholics Anonymous Meeting: Actually there is one thing I'd like to talk about before we start. Senator At Alcoholics Anonymous Meeting: If you're going to try and get me to fund that idiot-ass airplane that can't fly... Other Senator At Alcoholics Anonymous Meeting: It can fly. Senator At Alcoholics Anonymous Meeting: Yeah, it can fly, it just can't land. Federal Judge At Alcoholics Anonymous Meeting: That's a small price to pay for being able to fly. Clips: I don't have space to host these on my own webspace, so I've sent them to a GMail account. Go to GMail, and log on with the username jamesfiles and password pentadact. Clips bigger than ten megs probably won't be there - there's a size cap on individual messages. If you're a big scary company and would like me to stop promoting your show, reply to the offending e-mail and I'll delete the clips. hammer.avi (15MB) cat.avi (5MB) stiletto.avi (37MB) |
Obviously the best way to see what kind of music I like is to look at the list, and in all likelihood you'll have never heard of any of them (except Belle And Sebastian) and will think "Egh," which is as fair a reaction as I could hope for. In terms of characterising the genre-theme, should you find such classifications meaningful, I like the genre-name Alternative because it accurately implies that people into it reacted to dance and classical music with something along the lines of "Uh, do you have anything else?" And the world said, "Hmm. Well, I suppose there's always the Alternative." But I'm actually more Indie than anything, because Alternative covers too much metal to represent the kind of thing I like. Only a couple of genres are entirely devoid of merit, but you might notice my favourites are almost never found in any of about six, and I was once called a musical nazi for my somewhat absolutist attitudes towards the medium. Interestingly, even though that was about five years ago, I haven't become any more liberal since. This is because I was right all along. Thus, a big band list classified into four sub-sections follows immediately, and below that I name and justify the genre exclusions. |
Belle And Sebastian (Sleep The Clock Around; Le Pastie De La Bourgeoisie; This Is Just A Modern Rock Song) Delgados (Favours; The Light Before We Land; Witness) New Pornographers (The Laws Have Changed; A Testament To Youth In Verse; Chump Change) Sparks (Pulling Rabbits Out Of A Hat (Plagiarised Version); Bullet Train; The Rhythm Thief) |
AC Newman (The Town Halo; Miracle Drug; On The Table) Ballboy (Nobody Really Knows Anything; Where Do The Nights Of Sleep Go To When They Do Not Come To Me?; I've Got Pictures Of You In Your Underwear) Clinic (The Magician; Welcome; Thank You (For Living)) Decemberists (July, July; Angel Won't You Call Me?; The Soldiering Life) Gomez (Do One; Catch Me Up; Rex Kramer) Low (Canada; Starfire; Immune) Radar Brothers (You And The Father; Shifty Lies; Rock Of The Lake) Seedling (The Upshot; Endora; High On The Downside) Sleater-Kinney (One Beat; Sympathy; Start Together) (Smog) * (Feather By Feather; Lazy Rain; River Guard) Stereolab (Speedy Car; Captain Easychord; Cybele's Reverie) Yo La Tengo (Moonrock Mambo; Damage; Autumn Sweater)
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Add N To (X) (Party Bag; Hit For Cheese; Metal Fingers In My Body) Air Miami (Dolphin Expressway; I Hate Milk; Sweet Little Heartbreaker) Aluminum Group (A Blur In Your Vision; Two Lights; Rrose Salivy's Valise) Architecture In Helsinki (Like A Call; Scissors-Paper-Rock; Souvenirs) At The Drive-In (One-Armed Scissor; Alpha Centauri; Pattern Against User) Belly (Super-Connected; Untitled And Unsung; Now They'll Sleep) Ben Folds (Not The Same; Rockin' The Suburbs; Annie Waits) Ben Folds' Five (Army; One Angry Dwarf And Two-Hundred Solemn Faces; Narcolepsy) Black Box Recorder (Girl Singing In The Wreckage; Goodnight Kiss; Weekend) Camera Obscura (Lunar Sea; Eighties Fan; Teenager) Cat Power (Nude As The News; Maybe Not; Speak For Me) Cinerama (Health And Efficiency; Love; Superman) Clint Boon Experience! (Comet Theme Number One; Only One Way I Can Go; Seventeen And Over) Cuban Boys (Cuban Boy 2000; Disco Boy; Kenny) Dirty Three (No Stranger Than That; Sea Above, Sky Below; Hope) Flaming Lips (Race For The Prize; Slow Motion; The Gash) Fun Lovin' Criminals (Swashbucklin' In Brooklyn; All For Self; We Are All Very Worried About You) French (Porn Shoes; Canada Water; The Stars, The Moon, The Sun And The Clouds) Godspeed, You Black Emperor! * (Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven!**; Moya; Blaise Bailey Finnegan III) Goldfrapp (Tiptoe; Lovely Head; Horse Tears) Hefner (The Sweetness Lies Within; The Sad Witch; Wicker Girl) Interpol (One; Obstacle One; Obstacle Two) Jeffrey Lewis (The East River; The Chelsea Hotel; Springtime) Jim O'Rourke (Movie On The Way Down; Something Big; Through The Night Softly) Ladytron (He Took Her To A Movie; Flicking Your Switch; The Way That I Found You) Modest Mouse (Life Like Weeds; Doing The Cockroach; It Always Rains On A Picnic) Múm (Green Grass Of Tunnel; Weeping-Rock Rock; I'm Nine Today) Nena (?; Just A Dream; Rette Mich) Pavement (Roll With The Wind; Elevate Me Later; Unfair) Pernice Brothers (Number Two; Seven Thirty; Weakest Shade Of Blue) Pram (Penny Arcade; Mother Of Pearl; Track Of The Cat) Primitives (Laughing Up My Sleeve; Nothing Left To Say; I Almost Touched You) Prolapse (One Illness; The Government Of Spain; Cacophony Number A) Quasi (Better Luck Next Time; I Never Want To See You Again; A Case Of No Way Out) Radiohead (Sit Down, Stand Up; Fog; Dollars And Cents; nothing pre-Kid A) Sigur Rós (Svefn-G-Englar; (01); Vidrar Vel Til Lofturasa) Ted Leo And The Pharmacists (Me And Mia; Walking To Do; Where Have All The Rude Boys Gone?) Telstar Ponies (A Little Cloud; The Fall Of Little Summer; Sail Her On) Trembling Blue Stars (St Paul's Cathedral At Night; The Ghost Of An Unkissed Kiss; Haunted Days) Ugly Casanova (Hotcha Girls; Barnacles; Parasites) Virgin-Whore Complex (Wise And Mighty Emperor; Unrequited Love; I See More) Wilco (Jesus, Etc; Theologians; Company In My Back)
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Aereogramme (The Black Path) Air (Run; Radio Number One; Talisman) Alex Lloyd (My Way Home; Black The Sun) American Analogue Set (Baby Julie Come Home) ... And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead (Relative Ways) Arab Strap (Girls Of Summer; Love Detective) Bad Plus (Heart Of Glass) * Bearsuit (Drinkink; Hey Charlie, Hey Chuck; Minerals Made Me) Beck Bjork (Bachelorette; Unison) Black Heart Procession (A Light So Dim) Buffalo Daughter (Big Wednesday; Discotheque Du Paradis) Breeders (Huffer) Coldplay (Clocks; Spies) Dandy Warhols Delakota (The Rock (Beautiful Evening Edit)) Doves (Pounding; There Goes The Fear) Eels (What Is This Note?; Soul-Jacker Part One) Enya (Anywhere Is; Orinoco Flow) Erin McKeown (Slung Low; La Petite Mort; Blackbirds) Essex Green (The Late Great Cassiopia; Julia; Lazy May) Feeder (Buck Rogers) *** The Folk Implosion (Someone You Love; Natural One; One-Part Lullaby) Franz Ferdinand (Take Me Out; Tell Her Tonight; Michael) Grandaddy (Miner At The Dial-A-View; Laughing Stock; Jed's Other Poem) Half-Man Half-Biscuit (Bob Wilson: Anchorman) Hives (Hate To Say I Told You So; AKA IDIOT) Ivy (US) (This Is The Day; Undertow) Ivy (UK) (Avenge) JJ72 Lambchop (Up With People) Les Rythmes Digitales Madness (Victoria Gardens) Matt Skiba (Good Fucking Bye) Meanwhile, Back In Communist Russia **** (Morning-After Pill) Mo-Ho-Bish-O-Pi (Vacuum; Hear The Air) Moby (Run On; The Rafters) Mogwai (Two Rights Make One Wrong; Tracy) Molasses (Five-Hundred Miles From Baltimore; Insomnia) Moondog Junior (Ice Guitars; Waiting 'Till You're Gone) Morcheeba (Blindfold; Part Of The Process) My Bloody Valentine (When You Sleep) New Radicals (Mother, We Just Can't Get Enough) Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds (Fifteen Feet Of Pure White Snow; As I Sat Sadly By Her Side; God's Hotel) Offspring (The Kids Aren't Alright; Total Immortal) PJ Harvey (This Mess We're In; You Said Something) The Polyphonic Spree Portishead Postal Service (The District Sleeps Alone Tonight; Recycled Air) Preston School Of Industry Readymade (The Block Alone) Reindeer Section REM (All The Way To Reno) Robyn Hitchcock (Uncorrected Personality Traits; The Yip Song) Royal Trux (The Exception; Small Thief) The Shins (New Slang) Sodastream (West Forty-Fifth) Soulwax This Is Serious, Mum (I Might Be A Cunt, But I'm Not A Fucking Cunt; Denial Works For Me) Tindersticks (Say Goodbye To The City; Until The Morning Comes) Tori Amos (Bliss; Hey Jupiter) Velvet Underground (White Light / White Heat) Veruca Salt (I'm Taking Europe With Me; Volcano Girls)
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Hip-hop: songs should, of course, be judged individually, but I'm starting to wonder if there's any point to giving hip-hop a chance. It seems to be defined by the absence of any appealing features - if it involves more than one instrument, or the lyrics indicate an ability to communicate at an adult level, it's not hip-hop. It's like they thought "Hey, let's take the music out of music, and replace it with grotesque egotism and empty spite!" I could like something in a genre that had exclusively moronic lyrics if it was a genre that contained something other than lyrics. I mean, if you're just going to write out your pathetic fantasies in nursery-rhyme consonance, include some music to distract people! Otherwise they'll find out. Metal: I used to be heavily into death metal, and probably still would be if I hadn't been haunted by the nagging suspicion that I really preferred the infectious seventies rock my sister was listening to at the time (Sparks). Now I like very little of it - it's not the anger, because I love a lot of At The Drive-In and ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead, it's just that when the sound is so heavy, it's hard to get a lot of variation or different moods in there, and when the screaming becomes incoherent and common to every song by a band, it's like listening to the same song over and over, and not an especially effective song at that. It's not that I can't tell the difference between the songs, it's just that the differences aren't usually very interesting ones. I still think Maynard James Keenan has an astonishing voice, but the music that features it no longer really does anything for me. Soul: nothing against the concept or theory, and probably some soul stuff is great, but I've heard a lot of it and so far, all of it has been a woman singing about how badly her boyfriend treated her. Maybe it's touching and real and deep if you're like the people who write it, but to me it's kind of like every song in a genre being about how much it hurts when you smash your fingers with a hammer. None of this would matter if the music was great, but it seems to mostly be long wails or ululations - maybe this is technically impressive, but it never did anything for me musically. Reggae: reggae I'm much less critical of, because it's based on a great ethos and teaches ideas more intelligent than any religion I've heard of. But both musically and lyrically, I can't help thinking of reggae as more a song than a genre - it's a pretty good song, but there's no need to re-write it so many times. I think when making a reggae album, people could spend the songs singing about different and interesting things if they just had a printed manifesto in the liner notes explaining that: a) We shouldn't attack each other. b) This has happened in the past, and it was bad. c) Jah is unreservedly great, and Zion is somehow involved in this. d) Love. Dance/Trance/Garage/Drum And Bass: again, by no means devoid of worthwhile content, but good stuff coming under any of these categories is always kind of a shock. My usual problem with this stuff is the mindless repetition. Repetition can be fantastic when it's been put in there by geniuses like Stereolab or The Velvet Undergound (guess which song), but the morons who write most of the stuff in these genres use it as a way to have fewer ideas per minute. It needs to be progressive - one or more instruments need to be building or going crazy somewhere. Straight repetition is a terrible thing in all its forms: adverts; dumb films; dance music; the chorus of Scooby Snacks by the Fun Loving Criminals (they seem to be reciting it more than singing it); and the second time I saw The Matrix. That links quickly in to the exceptions - great films are good many times because they have subtleties and details that you didn't notice the first time. A single beat or irritating sample doesn't have that in itself, it needs to be recombined in interesting and multi-layered ways to be worth hearing again. Classical: being the kind of person who hates a lot of things, and no matter how many of my tastes make me seem prematurely middle-aged, I sometimes find myself having to convince people that the reason I hate a certain mature thing is not that I'm immature, it's that it sucks. I never succeed, but so far the only time I've later realised I was wrong was about the Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles bad guys - I was sure I'd always like them. Among the still-not-mature-enough-to-like things are driving, Shakespeare, beer, having kids, and classical music. It's just inane, flat, directionless, cloying, empty pap - a couple of sickly what-a-delightful-tunes strung mindlessly together and played alternatingly over-quiet and over-loud; oh, who would have thought it could go so loud after being so quiet! That trick'll never get old! Even after a hundred years. It's frivolous and fancy and pompous and mindless and we've got better at music. I love orchestral instruments, too, it's not like I'm a guitar freak. Lots of my favourite bands use orchestras or are themselves orchestral, it's just that classical composers were all lame. They made music for before we had any actual music - pleasant-, delicate- and opulent-sounding, suitable for impressing guests at formal functions and fulfilling their primitive artistic needs. It's like the decor of the time: if you can make that a little more wavy, and cover it in a little more gold, it'll be that much better a show of my wealth; if you can make that violin a little gayer, the drums come in louder or more suddenly, it's going to be that much more impressive to people who've, like, never heard music change before. Ah, so how do I explain its popularity? It's pop for grown-ups: catchy and easy to digest, but unlike young pop, inoffensive and conformist. Mozart was on the same long and terrible line of successful mediocrity that more recently brought us people like Britney Spears. Most people have lives outside of music, and the more that's true for you, the easier and more comforting you like your music. Then the only determining factors left are age and social position. Boogie-Woogie: imagine the most humiliating thing that could happen to world-hating nihilist: it's probably not as bad as suddenly one day realising you love boogie-woogie music. The name is so agonisingly silly - the founders of the genre couldn't even contain their overflowing enthusiasm for life long enough to give it a one-word or unstupid name, or even start with a real word - and it's compounded by the fact that a freakish number of boogie-woogie songs not only mention the genre name, but use it repeatedly in the chorus, which is repeated, sometimes to the exclusion of any actual verses. It's criminally guilty of my reggae criticism - the genre is basically one song re-invented over again - but when it's a song like that, what can you do? Jazz: the other genre excluded for a good reason* is jazz, but that's not because I don't like it. I discovered I did a few years ago, but still haven't really found my way around it yet. I've investigated some of the accepted greats: Coltrane, Davis, Peterson, Stitt and Hancock, and I've liked something by all of them (less so Herbie Hancock, and I've outright hated some Oscar Peterson stuff), but the things that have really grabbed me have both come under 'avant-garde' in Audiogalaxy's jazz section (in fact, non-coincidentally, that's how I got into both of them): The Vandermark 5 and The Lounge Lizards. Last Call by the former is a particular favourite, and so another Vandermark project - School Days - has gone down well too (espcially the insane first track (on In Our Times), Another Double. It takes nearly half a second to realise how crazy that song's going to be when you first hear it). The Lounge Lizards can basically do no wrong, (even on - especially on - Do The Wrong Thing) and I think Bob The Bob by them is maybe my favourite jazz track. Although usually I'm bigger into the escalating, crazy stuff. Crazy. E-mail me if you've got any recommendations based on what I've said here, and I'll... I don't know, give you a flower or something. Oh, it's not included because a) what do I know? and b) I don't think it should be measured on the same scale as normal music - I perfer jazz when I'm in a jazz mood, the rest of the time I prefer normal music. Crazy.
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Just so no-one thinks the title is modified from the film of The Rules Of Attraction, which I hope never to see*: it is of course from the much nerdier Deep Space Nine, specifically the Ferengi's Rules Of Acquisition. In fact, if you look closely at the two of them, you'll see it is that. The title is the only similarity, though - it's now a breach of copyright to write down the Ferengi Rules Of Acquisition that are mentioned in the series because they published a book of them. I think it's called The Rules Of Acquisition or something.
Morality: music piracy is wrong, because if everyone did it the artists would never get any money, and no-one could be a musician by trade and very little music would ever get made. Worse, the first types of music to die would be the good ones: indie kids are, by definition, way cooler than everyone else, and so more hip to file-sharing programs, and their (our) music would be wiped out. But! There is a lot wrong with the record industry, and 75% of what you pay for a CD goes straight to the shop you bought it from anyway, and most of the rest goes to the label. So, why not pirate music and then send half the album price to the artist? You get it half price, they get like thirty times what they would have got for a single sale, the shop goes out of business, but who cares because you don't need it to get music this way, and the record company goes out of business but that just means artists release their songs on the internet in the first place, which saves the environment because all that plastic doesn't get made. That's a great idea and everything (Tom's a genius!), but it doesn't actually save the world. Call me a perfectionist, but when I come up with an idea I like to toy with it until it actually saves humanity itself. So, what if we gave the album price to the Red Cross? Music dies out, but millions upon millions of lives are saved - isn't that better? I mean, once everyone's safe and has the medical supplies they need to stay alive, and once we've abolished things like countries and religions so that there can't be any more wars, then we'd be okay to set up a system whereby we pay the album price to the band, and music would be able to start up again, in a much freer, more diverse, progressive and inventive way, a wider range of people would be able to make it, and voluntary donations would be introduced so that the creators of really great music that has a profound effect on people become the new rockstars, rather than those who appeal to a lot of people just enough to get them to buy the album. Bands could record extra secret tracks that only donators get access to. And no-one would be able to steal those by file-sharing because file-sharing has become extinct because music-purchasing is now a fair and reasonable system that benefits those who deserve it and costs the end user much less. But the sad truth about both these ideas is that people just aren't fundamentally good enough to do any of them - we'd all rather millions died than we had nothing to listen to. So instead, we need to come up with one that doesn't really require any effort, expense, strength of character, good will, decency, compassion or kindness: the kind of plan that humans are actually capable of. So, I suggest changing your will to leave everything to the Red Cross. Passing your money on to your offspring never does them a lot of good - they're too upset to enjoy it; they can't have been depending on getting it because they didn't know when you were going to die; and even if neither of those things were true, they sure as hell don't need or deserve it like the third world do. And it's not like we're talking about the same benefit for your kids versus the third world - there's no comparison. However, here's a comparison: the money will not save your kids' lives. It will barely improve the quality of their lives. Given to those who most need it, it will save countless people from painful sore-ridden pestilent death for them and their children. Also you'll be dead anyway, so you won't even know what happens to your money; you might as well pledge it to what's obviously the best cause. Then you get to feel righteous about earning a lot of money, not giving to homeless people, and stealing what you can easily afford to buy. The more you have when you die, the more good for the human race you do! With this system, almost anything is moral if it gets you enough money. This is the benefit of having done a philosophy degree: you can just keep talking about something until it turns out that you can - nay must, for the sake of humanity - do almost nothing about it. Getting: should you want to 'share' music, I hear Soulseek is the best thing out there. I wouldn't know, of course, since I'm giving my money to HMV instead of starving children. Getting Into: other than friendly recommendations, I get into everything I get into via John Peel or The Onion. John Peel is a British radio DJ with an alternative music programme between 22:00 and 0:00 on Radio One three nights a week (the middle three week-nights, if that makes any sense), and The Onion is a satirical newspaper that has the only competent cinema and music reviews I've ever seen. The Onion is free in New York (further evidence that New York City is the best place on Earth*), costs a small amount elsewhere in America, and is prohibitively expensive for the rest of the world, but luckily they put nearly everything on their website, including all of their reviews. The best time to use either of these sources for music recommendations is around Christmas, when John Peel announces the results of his Festive Fifty, and The Onion's AV Club ask their reviewers to each give top-ten lists of the best music of the year (they also do this with films, and that list is even more reliable. If a film occurs in more than two different reviewer's lists, see it by any means possible). Between Christmas and New Year's Eve, I choose the reviewer whose tastes best coincide with my own (there's one guy who's basically my God, but I always forget his name**) and get everything on his list, and everything in John Peel's Festive Fifty that I don't already have (happily, I seem to already have more and more of it each year. I'm getting cooler), and then listen to it all on one big list, deleting stuff I don't like and getting other stuff by the same person for the stuff I do. I think about 40% of my favourite music was found this way. Other than that, hmm... where might you find a really big list of great bands and song recommendations? Maybe Spain?
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I was really into action films until I saw LA Confidential, because until then I'd never actually seen anything intelligent, so my criterion for success was just spectacle. It's pretty sad, really. Anyway, my first love is now complex films: if it's hard to understand I'm probably going to love it, although that doesn't go for foreign films. I'm pretentious, of course, so I do like a lot of foreign films, but there's a ceiling to how much I can: even with the subtitles, you don't know which words of the audio correspond to which words of the meaning, so you miss everything like emphasis and inflection. In fact, most languages are so tonally different to English that you can't even tell the character's mood: angry and tired are still easy calls, but for anything else you have to rely on their expressions, which you can't concentrate on all the time because you're having to read what's being said. So yeah; complex and cerebral, but generally not foreign. And preferably not too surreal: I've got a David Lynch film in my top five, but it's one that has the almost unique characteristic (among his films) that it can be rationally understood - something even the more intellectual critics missed, because we're all so accustomed to his films being fundamentally nonsensical. All of my favourites are also funny at some point, but none of them are primarily comedies. I have nothing very intellectual to say about that, but it probably means that I'm better than you in some way. |
Genre: noir thriller. Stars: Guy Pearce, Russell Crowe, Kevin Spacey, Danny DeVito, James Cromwell, David Strathairn, Kim Basinger, Ron Rifkin. Plot: three coloured* kids are arrested for a coffeeshop massacre, but neither the straight-arrow arresting officer nor the violent colleague he hates so much think the case has been solved. Meanwhile, a reknown but low-ranking cop with ties to a popular TV show investigates a smut lead he can't work out, but which he's starting to think is connected.
Not only is it based on a trilogy of James Ellroy books, where your average James Ellroy book would traditionally take a trilogy of films to depict the first few chapters, it's a superb, Ellroy-esque version of them, despite not being written by James Ellroy. Ellroy himself commented, in very much his own words, "I can't fucking believe it." Ellroy-esque means mind-bogglingly complicated, subtle and dark. Typically for him, LA Confidential hinges on human weakness and corruption, scandal, drugs, ambition, revenge, hollowness, regret, and anger. The three leads and James Cromwell are incredible - the best performances of his and Kevin Spacey's careers, perhaps the only good one of Crowe's, and a close second to the Memento from Pearce. In fact Cromwell is probably the star of the film, as the brilliantly conceived Captain Dudley Smith, the only common thread in the three books and perhaps Ellroy's biggest character. His key moment in the film - you know it if you've seen it - is extraordinary cinema. The 40's LA atmosphere is impeccable, and the whole thing has an amazingly sylish elegance. Scandal-Rag Journalist: Patchett's what I call 'twilight': he ain't queer and he ain't red. He can't help me in my quest for prime sinuendo. Coroner: Stomach of the week from a motel homicide: the unemployed actor had frankfurter, french fries, alcohol and sperm. |
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Genre: psychological thriller. Stars: Guy Pearce (apparently in Neighbours at one point), John Pantoliano (the traitor in The Matrix), Carrie-Anne Moss. Plot: an insurance claims investigator loses the ability to form new memories when he's hit from behind during a struggle with a man he finds raping his wife, and tries to track down the second man with notes, tattoos and the help of a suspicious policeman friend. Half of the scenes are shown in reverse order, so that the film ends in the middle of its plot's timeline. Why It's Great: The actual plot is astonishingly complicated and mind-blowingly clever. The intricate and beautiful scene-splicing interacts with the web of deceit and confusion brilliantly, unpicking it lie by lie. The two main characters are superbly written and are acted so compellingly that I still find them fascinating now, having seen it at least eight times. The fact that every scene starts with you having no idea what came before it mimics the protagonist's condition cleverly, unravelling the plot in all the right backwards steps without keeping you in the dark about anything he knows. Although the themes are dark and even chilling, the atmosphere is mainly just exciting, and the dialogue and even plot are hilarious in parts. |
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Genre: uh... romantic hitman comedy? Stars: John Cusack, Minnie Driver, Dan Ackroyd, Michael Cudlitz, Alan Arkin (Catch 22), Joan Cusack, Hank Azaria, Jeremy Piven. Plot: a hitman is hired to do a job in his hometown at the time of his ten year high-school reunion, and on the advice of his psychiatrist decides to attend and try to reconcile with the girlfriend he abandoned for a decade without a word, and maybe not kill anyone for a while. Why It's Great: John Cusack. Both the electronic score by Joe Strummer and the all-eighties soundtrack are fantastic in their own rights, -and- brilliantly used. I Can See Clearly Now makes the opening credits and first scene unforgettably cool, and later on Mirror In The Bathroom, by The Beat, accompanies a fight scene brilliantly. It also features The Violent Femmes, The Clash, The Specials and Nena. Assassination is inescapably appealing, and several of the gunfights are great - especially the final one, which features a frying pan. You'll notice a second Cusack in the cast listing - there are actually four Cusacks in it altogether. I haven't worked out who Bill is yet, and Ann's appearence is very brief, but Joan is brilliant. She often plays significant roles in John's films - even playing his character's sister in Say Anything - and no-one cries nepotism because she's really, really good. Michael Cudlitz is always great, but this is his best character ever. I know you haven't heard of him, but he was in the horrible Very Bad Things, and you'd probably recognise him if he was pointed out to you. His quotes aren't so good in themselves (hence no quotes section for this one) but when he says them, the "Ten years!" and "I was looking for a little validation on my life, but I guess I came up short" lines are some of the best in the film, and it's a film of great lines. Clips: I don't have space to host these on my own webspace, so I've sent them to a GMail account. Go to GMail, and log on with the username jamesfiles and password pentadact. Clips bigger than ten megs probably won't be there - there's a size cap on individual messages. If you're a big scary company and would like me to stop promoting your show, reply to the offending e-mail and I'll delete the clips. school.avi (2MB) |
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Genre: forget about it. Stars: Nicholas Cage, Meryl Streep, Chris Cooper (the homophobic dad in American Beauty). Plot: tempting to say 'forget about it' again, but I'll give it a go: a woman writes an article about a guy who steals rare orchids from nature reserves. The article is very popular, and a publisher asks her to adapt it into a book. She does, and calls it, like the article, The Orchid Thief. The book is very popular, and a producer asks screenwriter Charlie Kaufman to adapt it into a film. He tries, but can't capture what he likes about it, and obsesses over his failure, ultimately writing first the entire history of the Earth, then himself, into the plot. Meanwhile, his admiring, friendly brother Donald takes up screenwriting himself, after attending a quicky course on it, exasperating his brother by coming up with lower-brow ideas typical of modern cinema and seeking Charlie's approval. It'd take me about another paragraph of that size to explain the rest of the plot, then two or three more to qualify how much of it is actually true, and that the film he's writing is in fact the film he's in, which evolves dynamically as he, the character in it, makes decisions about how to save the screenplay he's writing from either pretentiousness or never being finished. Instead, I just told you the plot of the plot summary I'd write if I was going to write the rest of this plot summary, but I did it rather cleverly within the plot summary itself, so perhaps I should have included the plot of the above plot summary before the plot of the rest of the summary, which doesn't exist. I think I'm sooo goddamn clever. By the way, I wasn't just mocking myself there to mirror the relentless self-deprecation that consumes Charlie Kaufman when he realises what he's done, I really do think what I did there was pathetic. If I wanted to mimic his self-deprecation, I'd do something like... well, see the last section called 'Something Like...' Why It's Great: Well, check out the plot. Nicholas Cage - I'm so confused about how I feel about Nicholas Cage now that I can't even remember how I used to; was he the annoying guy who always seemed to choose great films, or was he the basically decent actor who always got stuck in awful ones? Now that he's been in Bringing Out The Dead and this, and I realise I really do like Con Air, I think I just plain like him. He's fantastic in this, as both Charlie and Donald Kaufman, who spend a lot of time on screen together. You can't make yourself believe for a second that they're the same person, even though no attempt is made to distinguish them appearence-wise, beyond their wearing different clothes. The two roles would make a good litmus test for actors in general - can they make two identical-looking characters unassimilatably different? He can, and it's a spectacular film, so he must be good. It's hilarious. Not just Charlie's self-loathing and Donald's awful ideas, but the insane turns it takes toward the end, and the whole absurdly self-referential interaction between plot and genre. A Quote: "Oh my God, I've written myself into my screenplay." "That's kind of weird, huh?" "It's self-absorbed, it's narcissistic, it's solipsistic, it's pathetic! I'm pathetic! I'm fat and pathetic!" Something Like... Oh my God, I've written myself into my plot summary. It's smarmy, it's arrogant, it's demeaning to the film, it's pathetic! I'm pathetic! I'm stupid and pathetic! |
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Genre: surrealist psychological horror. Stars: Naomi Watts (American version of Ring), Laura Harring, Justin Theroux (apparently an Irish bad guy in the second Charlie's Angels film). Plot: a partially failed actress is dumped by the girlfriend who got her the few roles she ever had, for a man, and hires a hitman to have her killed. In her grief and guilt, she tries to reimagine her life in Hollywood with showbusiness gloss, but her dreams are haunted both by reality and terrifying symbols of death and dementia. Why It's Great: The plot is more complex than the top two films combined in some sort of really complex way: it's probably not possible for a human mind to grasp it on first viewing, and because of that it - like any David Lynch film - has been made artistically beautiful enough to work as a rationally unintelligible surrealist piece. Dream is entangled almost inextricably with reality. Dozens of ingenious crossovers and quirks crop up once you make sense of it. |
Genre: like a tortoise in the mist, it is lost. Stars: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Tom Cruise, Julianne Moore, William H Macy. Plot: a man who runs a mysogynistic seduction self-help course is called by his alienated, now-dying father's nurse to visit him while he still can; an earnest, simple-minded cop develops a crush on a domestic incident perpetrator; a child prodigy is exploited on a gameshow run by the dying man's company; an ex-child prodigy famous from the same show in his day desperately wants the money for dental surgery he doesn't need; the host of said gameshow is in ill-health and tries to reconcile with his daughter - the domestic incident girl; while the wife of the dying man starts to feel bad about how she treated him. You don't get into my top five without defying synopsis, but I have to write a synopsis of you to include you in the list - it's the ultimate paradox! Why It's Great: While the inter-connectedness of the plots is (clever, but) not as meaningful as the narrator would like to think, the desperate, wild nature of the plots themselves is beautiful. Philip Seymour Hoffman is even more wonderful than usual. The soliloquys on regret during the chaotic crescendo of the film are amazing. The whole thing has a large-scale complex rhythm to its composition and pace, switching between plots as if in time to a Godspeed, You Black Emperor piece. Every one of the characters is fragile or broken and with sensitivities and neuroses seldom found in fictional characters. |
Genre: thematically it's a little like Home Alone 3: Lost In New York, and coincidentally its star even has the same last name. Stars: Kieran Culkin, Susan Sarandon, Ryan Phillipe, Claire Danes, Amanda Peet, Jeff Goldblum, Bill Pullman. Plot: a pretentious seventeen year-old drop-out bums around New York for a while. First things go well, then they go badly, then he and his brother kill their mother. Why It's Great: The arrogant character Igby starts out as makes it funny throughout. The way it develops makes it unexpectedly emotional by the end. Igby: Well, that could be a slight snag. I haven't even got around to taking my GED yet. Suki (rhymes with 'cookie', not with 'spooky' or 'lucky'): So take it. Igby: Nah, I've got to go to Hackensack. Suki: So go! Stop procrastinating, it's almost Christmas! Igby: Not going to New Jersey isn't procrastinating, it's common sense. Igby: It's ironic; the first time I feel any real affection for her is after she's dead.* Ollie: You beat up her corpse. Igby: Yeah, after that.
Igby: She's a dancer who doesn't dance, and her friend's a painter who doesn't paint. It's like a BoHo version of Island Of The Lost Toys. Igby: She's stronger than she looks, too. There are two other things I'd like to quote, but can't; in one case because the joke takes a lot of lines to run its course and works better once you like one of the characters a bit, and in the other case because it would spoil the joke when you see it in the film. So for reference, they are: the conversation about Suki's rolling style; and the series of phone calls Igby makes near the end of the film - particularly the timing of the scene cut. Here's a pointless screenshot: |
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Genre: existential family drama. Stars: Kevin Spacey, Wes Bentley, Annette Bening, Thora Birch. Plot: a tired middle-aged man blackmails his boss, quits his job, buys drugs from his daughter's boyfriend, gets the car he's always worshipped and tries to rekindle his marriage to a failing estate agent who has has simultaneously discovered new excitement herself, but, well, she has an affair and he gets shot. Why It's Great: The acting is uniformly brilliant, making it incredibly compelling to watch. Ricky's aesthetism is inspiring. The story is simultaneously funny, compassionate and existentially wise - an entirely unique combination. |
Genre: crime. Stars: John Travolta, Samuel L Jackson, Bruce Willis, Uma Thurman, Ving Rhames. Plot: a gang boss's most trusted hitman accidentally shoots an interrogatee in the face; loses his partner to religion when they miraculously survive a hail of close-range fire; nearly causes his boss's wife's death when she mistakes his powdered heroin for cocaine and snorts it; and then, by chance, is shot to death by a boxer he's sent to kill after a fight that his boss rigged doesn't go as arranged. When the gang boss unexpectedly meets the boxer in the street, a bizarre chain of events leads to the boxer saving him from being raped and possibly killed by a demented cop and a gunshop owner respectively, and their conflict is forgotten. Why It's Great: The time-jumbling is done excellently. Surely Samuel L Jackson's defining role, and John Travolta and Uma Thurman are each unusually good. The dialogue is Tarrantino's best, and dialogue is his strong point. Jules: We'd have to be talking about one charming motherfucking pig. I mean, he got to be about ten times as charming as that Greenacres motherfucker. |
Genre: psychological thriller (or, if you like, homoerotic barefist boxing). Stars: Ed Norton, Brad Pitt, Helena Bonham-Carter, Meat Loaf. Now I come to write it down, it's hard to believe there's someone called Meat Loaf. I mean, sure, he wasn't born with that name, but doesn't that make it all the stranger? He had a regular name, but decided that people should instead refer to him as 'Meat Loaf'. Plot: an insomniac office worker meets an extravagant new friend on a plane journey, and ends up living with him after his own apartment is blown up. Both frustrated with the numbness of modern life, they start a bare-fist fighting club which becomes immensely popular. Things go bad, however, when his friend hooks up with a female rival of his, leaves her, starts a new and sinister terrorist enterprise, and finally reveals something impossibly surprising about himself. Why It's Great: Ed Norton is brilliant. It has an extremely ambitious plot twist. It has a wit that's almost Woody Allen-esque in places. Many of the Norton-Bonham-Carter conversations reveal themselves to be subtley ingenious on second viewing. (Ed Norton and Helena Bonham-Carter have decided they can't both go to all the support groups they currently attend) Ed Norton: I have forgotten this line. |
Genre: crime romance. Stars: Robert DeNiro, Uma Thurman, Bill Murray, David Caruso. Plot: a meek crime-scene photographer kinda saves a gang boss's life and falls in love with the kinda prostitute the boss sends him to ease his conscience. With the help of his bizarrely fearless cop friend, he tries to free her of her obligation to the gang boss, or maybe kinda buy her. Why It's Great: The casting guy was either on drugs or an anti-typecasting campaign when he worked on this film, because DeNiro is the meek photographer and Bill Murray is the crime boss. I'm not saying Bill Murray should have been the photographer, I'm just saying, like, I don't know. It's the only screen romance I've ever seen that felt like a real one - not just that the actors exhibit chemistry, but that it's sensitively written. Both the gang boss and the photographer's friend are hilarious. It's DeNiro and Scorcese. |
Genre: psycho romance. Stars: Adam Sandler (wait! Don't go! He's just an actor in this, he's not trying to be funny), Emily Watson, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Luis Guzman. Plot: the neurotic floor manager of a strange company devises a scheme to exploit the air miles offer on a brand of pudding, is blackmailed by a phony phone-sexand also slowly falls in requited love with one of the many people one of his many sisters sets him up with, as they each come to realise how psychotic the other is. Why It's Great: Adam Sandler is unexpectedly brilliant, as the bizarre and wonderful protagonist. The incidental music is so wildly chaotic and intrusive that it adds a mounting anxiety to mundane scenes that brilliantly enhances the empathy with Sandler's character, whose stress levels spiral out of control at the smallest things. The mechanics of the romance are so alien and hyper-sensitive that this plotline becomes much more tense than the blackmail one - another great empathy trick, because usually we find the action engaging and couldn't care less about the romance, while the character's emotions are wired rather the other way. It doesn't waste this cleverly orchestrated empathy, or punish you for caring about the characters (so much artistic and intellectual cinema seems to childishly savage your emotions once it's acquired them as its plaything - I'm all for blindly lashing out at strangers, but I resent cruel films for injuring only those who care about them. Incidentally, none of the ones in this list screw you over like this - a lot of the characters die, and two of the top five have far from happy endings, but none of them are vicious about it. I mention it for the benefit of those as emotionally fragile as I am: I'd like to hire someone callous to cruelty-test films for me before I watch them). |
I saw professional pseud Melvin Bragg on the worth-watching-for-Sanjeev-Baskar The Kumars, and by way of trying to ask a stupid question Sanjeev said "You're a patron of all the arts, of course - literature, painting, music, theatre... what's the best one?" To his credit, Melvin Bragg thought this was a perfectly valid question and said "Music." Wrong! It's games. You can just count the dimensions - paintings: 2D, music: 2D (count 'em!), sculpture: 3D, film: 3D, 3D films: 4D (I know!), games: 5D. Therefore, games > all else. Flimsy, of course, but that little piece of sophistry is exactly the reason games are better than everything else, and also the reason they're harder to make than anything else. Creating an interactive world is not only inherently more complex, difficult and exciting than all the other artforms, it actually includes them all. I've gawped at the paintings on the walls of mansions I'm infiltrating in games. I've hummed the Deus Ex theme all day. I've read dozens of books in Morrowind, and got more out of them than the average real-world book. Our achievements in games so far mostly conceal the potential of the artform, but it's occasionally manifested in there. When you try the first level of Deus Ex four different ways and get completely different reactions from your brother - one of which is to flip out completely and shout at you - you realise you're looking at something deeper and more remarkable than anything a flat or linear artform could achieve. This is the one in which you could fall in love. This is the one in which your own actions could horrify you, in which you can feel a whole spectrum of emotions that are completely precluded in every other medium simply because most emotions relate to yourself, and you're not a part of what goes on in those. I've already felt all these things in my gaming life, but games have got a way to go before that can be true of less nerdy people. So where might you find these remarkable experiences? Well, I'm glad you asked. Deus Ex and Morrowind. But for more, and for why, read on! I can't quite believe I just wrote that. |
Developer: Ion Storm Austin. Genre: wonderfully over-long futuristic stealth/action RPG in which the number of options when confronted by any given obstacle is of an entirely different order of magnitude to any other type of game. Setting: a dark future in which the majority of the human race is infected with a fatal disease called The Gray Death. A vaccine exists, but is in short supply. You see Liberty Island, Hong Kong, Paris, an underwater base, a detention facility, a missile silo, and Area 51. Your Character: a nano-augmented agent for the UN Anti-Terrorism Coalition, fighting terrorists who try to steal the vaccine earmarked for government personnel. You and your brother are the first and only agents of this type, and as such everyone wants you on their side. Gravelly-voiced, certainly, but in conversation he's an entirely reasonable and curious fellow, respectful of people who don't share his attitudes and polite to a fault. Great Moments: The first time I realised this was anything more than an extremely difficult shooter - I knew two enemies were around the corner, but in a straight firefight I would die or be very badly injured. I had a fire extinguisher on me, so I tried jumping out, spraying it in both their faces and then - as they choked - shooting them each once in the head at point blank range. No game in which I cannot do precisely this - or in which this is not a good way to get past the situation - will ever knock Deus Ex off the top spot. In Deus Ex 2 headshots don't kill, so that eliminated itself immediately. In other games there are no fire extinguishers, or the ones that are there cannot be sprayed in people's faces, so they all lose too. Using the flamethrower. Every game and its add-on pack has had a more graphically impressive flamethrower, but Deus Ex's makes them all look rubbish because it's the only one that fatally ignites almost anyone in the game within half a second of pressing fire. Sorry, other games - you lose again! How about that? Hacking into a ship captain's computer after killing him and reading an e-mail from his ten year-old son. Not 'Great!' I suppose, so much as "Oh, man." Any time you successfully rescue the hostages in the subway is a hell of a thing, because that stuff is neither easy nor necessary, and failure is extraordinarily dangerous. Any time you lose both your legs and live to tell the tale, and walk again. I hardly need to explain that those tales are invariably hilarious. My first was actually in the training mission - after familiarising you with the basics, they give you a typical game situation with many solutions in a controlled environment - blow up the bot, sneak past it, swim through an underwater passage, find the keycode for the bridge, hack the panel, etc. I tried to sneak past the bot, was detected, the bot hammered me with machineguns, I dropped the explosive crate I was carrying, blowing up what was left of my legs and also the bot, fell into the river, crawled back up the side and dragged myself with my hands up the slope to the comm station where my boss congratulated me on passing my initiation. Finally killing everyone in and outside The Hilton without my brother dying, on the stupid logic that this would mean he wouldn't be dead when I woke up in jail, and discovering that - even though what I'd done was damn near impossible and you'd never even try it in any other game because it's so obvious the game just requires your brother to be dead for the rest of the plot - he really does survive if you do this, recovers from his health problems and is with you for the rest of the game to give you advice. It turns out this isn't the only way to make him survive, but I prefer to believe it is. Similarly, realising I could just run straight past the hardest boss in the game, only to find he turns up two more times in the game if you spare him, with new and brilliant dialogue recorded solely for weirdos who try this stuff. The voices for the main character and for this bad guy are both superb. Meeting my brother after the first mission, having killed everyone - including the person I was sent to interrogate. He has different responses to you depending on how you handled the job, but usually these don't come up until after his greeting. If you kill everyone, it's a different story. "You're a complete jackass! What the hell do you think you're doing?" The twist moment, of course, was mind-blowing. Some people claim you see it coming - you don't. You see that Walton Simons and Bob Page are evil in the intro, and after the first mission you see that Walton Simons, on behalf of FEMA, is exercising some authority over UNATCO. That's not the twist, and it doesn't take you anywhere near it. The twist and its ramifications are about completely different people, and their ramifications are far more spectacular. I'd also like to note that this isn't a twist that's been done before or since, and it will probably never be done again. The game was once banned because of it (and, relatedly, because the skyline you can see from Liberty Island at the start doesn't feature the two towers, despite the game being released a good three years before 9/11. If you read every datacube and newspaper, you'll eventually stumble across the one that explains they were both destroyed in a terrorist attack. Creepy). |
Developer: Looking Glass Studios. Genre: wonderfully over-long sci-fi action RPG. Setting: a single enormous spaceship whose crew have all been killed or turned into zombie-esque hosts for a parasitic alien worm. Audio logs recorded by crew members during the takeover of the vessel are scattered all around, retelling the story in amazing human detail even while your own plot unfolds. Your Character: you don't really know - you wake up in an augmentation chamber, and are told you volunteered to be turned into a cyborg type guy, but your memory was lost in the transition because of the alien invasion. Other than the lame ending cut-scene, you never say a word or get to see what you look like. Great Moments: In a game that so heavily features beating zombies to death with a wrench, it's tricky to choose. Every time you find some Cyber-Modules - the things you can use to upgrade your body in different ways - is a great moment. Getting the Laser Rapier. |
Developer: Bethesda Softworks Genre: mind-numbingly vast RPG Setting: a mind-blowingly beautiful island, easily the most beautiful virtual world I've ever seen, on which you're free to walk anywhere you please, easily the biggest interactive environment I've ever played, and which features so many characters that the world actually has politics. Great Moments: Walking down that gangway to the island for the first time, and having to fill in a form stating my species. Seeing a silt strider for the first time - they're giant long-legged insect things that can actually be used for fast transport, but at first look terrifying and surreal. Hearing the lapping of the shore under the intermittent strider groans in Seyda Neen. Actually, these are my first three experiences of the game, and the next few I was going to put here were my next few experiences. It's possible a Great Moments list would just be a blow-by-blow account of every minute of the many, many hours for which I've played Morrowind. It's responsible for my longest-ever stretch of uninterrupted gaming: eight hours. I forgot I had a real life.
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Developer: Blizzard. Genre: a genre unto itself - calling it an action-RPG or an RPG-lite misses the point completely: Diablo was a better RPG for being realtime, polished and accessible. And it's not just the interface and combat - the fantasy world itself was designed with a brilliantly logical infra-structure that allowed you to understand its inner workings almost immediately, and thereby get excited about the things you discover in it because you adequately appreciate their rarity, power and importance. The fact that it was more perfectly formed and intelligently designed than most RPGs shouldn't marginalise it. What could marginalise it is that, while it did have one, the plot was told simply through what Cain said when you got back to town after killing the latest thing. For involvement in a story, see Morrowind. For gratifying combat, impossibly exciting items and an ace magic system, stay where you are. Setting: you start in a rainy camp of Amazonesque archers, an uninspiring moorland and an odd choice to start a game full of such exotique locales. It might just be to make it all the more breathtaking when you reach Lut Golhein, a stunning desert city with a Moroccan flavour. The best-looking but least enjoyable of the lot is the overgrown rainforest ruin of Kurast, decked out in a Mayan style. Then, perhaps inevitably, came Hell, which was actually not so bad after all. Pretty drab, but you got to go back to Heaven to restock after each foray, so you take the bad with the good. The diversity of the four different locations, each with their own town and local characters, was a big reason Diablo genuinely surpasses its predecessor. Your Character: another big factor: the Barbarian, Necromancer, Sorceress, Amazon and Paladin each had three unique skill trees, with logical interdependencies. These gave each more personality than their scant speeches, and the Necromancer in particular was defined solely by his gruesome options at each level-up. I was more excited about Diablo 2 than I am about Half-Life 2, so I'd read up on all the characters and their skills long before the game was out, and knew I would be a Necromancer, only and forever. I love the idea of a weak but cunning character who uses dark, weird and frankly sick powers to destroy much more powerful enemies. In fact I couldn't handle the Necromancer at all when I started out, so for years I played as a dumb Barbarian. It was only going back to it recently that I'd become a versatile enough gamer to cope with the unusual dynamic of being Necro, and I finally created Pentadact - the name I always reserve for the character that most suits my normal in-game persona, and had therefore never applied to a Barbarian. He was glorious. I played through the whole game with him, alongside flatmate Rich playing as a Barbarian, and as he became more powerful and better kitted-out, he conformed ever more closely to the Necromancer dream I had. Now he's level 33, and has a devastating hireling Barbarian and his choice of three equally horrible golems to do his dirty work. Better still, the severed head he carries in one hand gives him the Confuse Curse, causing huge mobs of enemies to attack each other in a frenzy of insanity. He randomly skewers the chaos with devastating Bone Spears, and the second the first corpse appears he detonates it into a huge cloud of poisonous fumes, immediately killing many more and allowing him to detonate even more corpses into even more toxic gas. Should anything come near him, he's always got his wavy orange Malay dagger, technically called Pentadact's Blood Horn but - in my heart - forever The Screaming Dagger Of Horrible Agony. Modest in actual damage, it injects a little poison and, almost inexplicably, instills the victim with an abject terror that causes them to flee immediately, usually with Pentadact in tow, stabbing down again and again into the back of their neck. The poison damage mounts up, or the victim runs into one of Pentadact's lackeys, and it's all over. Great Moments: Aforementioned Poison Explosion chain-reactions facilitated by the death-fuelled antics of the Necromancer. Your arrival in each of the new locations - finding the local trader, gawping at his high-level items and then venturing tentatively into the wilderness, infested with new creatures. Every level-up - new skills are impossibly exciting, and improvements to existing ones were actually noticable. Co-op battles - with more than a couple of people, particularly if one of them is a Necromancer, they're more like wars than fights. |
Developer: Epic. Genre: sci-fi tournament shooter. Setting: don't look at me. Some kind of sci-fi place. But with space Egypt. And space castles. Your Character: I play as the woman with the yellow-green armour and yellow-green hair - Prism? Looks like Blackjack, except for the hair. Prism I think. I love that yellow-green colour, to the extent that I created a City Of Heroes heroine solely to wear it (The Citrus Punch - her elaborate backstory explains the colour, which I matched rather well I thought). Great Moments: Wait a minute, I haven't got to the important bit yet: this is not just UT, it's the mods too. They count as part of UT because I'm talking about games here, the kind you buy, and you only have to buy UT to get all of these. In particular, the ones I can't live without are: Chaos UT, Jailbreak, and the Bullet Time and Ninja Rope mutators. Unfortunately Ninja Rope doesn't mix well with Jailbreak (CTD when you get 'arrested'), but avoiding that I play them simultaneously - UT mods stack. It's a testament to UT's superb archetecture that this is possible, and that's one of the reasons I have no qualms about Epic getting some of the credit for mod-maker's hard work (mods were treated as separate from their host games in the PCG Top 100 to prevent this). It's also an extremely compatible and amazingly efficient engine, and every aspect of its design exhibits an understanding of - and even affection for - the player. In-game tips take into account your custom key settings. When you get in a car, the license plate changes to an abbreviated version of your name. The first patch removed the CD-check. The bot skill levels genuinely range from easy-for-beginners to hard-for-pros, with plenty of degrees between (I'm on Adept, gratifyingly). And as for supporting the mod community - other developers give them tools too, but so far only Epic has actually given them a million dollars and the license to use their next engine for a commercial game. That's support. Oh yeah, great moments: Shock Rifle kills - it takes a lot of hits, and if you're doing it from long range and holding down fire, the fact that you keep hitting them again and again until they die actually feels cruel - a huge lance of power prodding them hard and repeatedly no matter where they run, jump or hide. Headshot! Double-Kill! Multi-Kill! Mega-Kill! ULTRA-KILL! Unstoppable! M-M-MONSTER KILL! LUDICROUS KILL! LUDICROUS KILL! LUDICROUS KILL! LUDICROUS KILL! G O D L I K E! In Chaos UT, if you draw your sword in the middle of a gunfight, the bots are gentlemanly and will draw their melee weapon too. The Gravity Vortex. I wondered what it was like, so I pressed fire. It killed me. Then it killed everyone else in the room. Then it killed everyone outside the room. Then it killed me again. Then it killed everyone else again. You never quite expect to find a weapon more devastating than the Redeemer. Crossbow bolts - and this shows up best in Bullet Time - thunk into things with just the right noise, and actually quiver for a moment after they do. They're just perfect. Not to mention that they stick in people. Dodging razors and rockets in Bullet Time - you actually have time to jump, duck or move left or right as you see fit, then twist to watch them glide by, a whisker from your face. The Vengeance Relic - it causes you to explode on death, with Redeemer-esque force. In one particularly exhausting round of Chaos Bullet Time Jailbreak, I was the last free member of my team, and though I was blowing up the enemy team with guided rockets again and again, they kept freeing each other. The hardest skirmish had me jumping between bridges to avoid razorblades, blowing up one, two, three, four, five of them, with three more to go, when I realised that the relic my last victim dropped had an orange skull in it. He'd been carrying the Vengeance relic when I killed him. Bullet Time gave me the thinking space to realise that jumping wouldn't be fast enough, I had to dive straight off the bridge for maximum descent velocity. I surfed the shockwave downwards, centimeters ahead of its damage radius, as it annihilated the remaining three blues and my legs crumpled to within 2 points of death, then stood stunned in the shallow river as lumps of burnt meat fell out of the enormous cloud of smoke above. I freed my team moments after that, and we went on to win. The Ninja Rope is the best in a 3D game ever - the one that professional studio Irrational spent months adding to Tribes looks like a half-baked mod next to it. This ninja rope is simple, elegant, intelligently designed, versatile and rewardingly physics-oriented. Intelligent because pressing fire shoots the rope into something, but also starts retracting immediately, lifting you off the ground and giving you thrilling momentum. Versatile because you can shoot it in a tree, pause the retraction, then walk around the tree six times, and it'll wrap. Physics-oriented because if you then it retract, you'll spin round the tree as it unwinds. Better still, you can shoot it into people and it does damage proportional to the force you exert on them. Hook someone on a cliff, then throw yourself off the cliff and the jerk will kill them - you just have to unhook from them and rope into the cliff face before you hit the ground. Then their corpse falls past you. The simplicity of the control - in which detaching your current rope and roping to a new location is a matter of double-clicking - allows you to master it quickly, and once you have the results are spectacular: tarzan-roping through Bridge Of Fate is ridiculously good fun. |
Developer: IO Interactive. Genre: dark, open-ended assassination sim. Setting: the real world, mainly Europe and Asia, but a real world in which it's hard to imagine anyone smiling. Your Character: a genetically engineered bald assassin with a barcode on the back of his neck and a piece of wire with which to strangle people. Great Moments: The Invitation To A Party mission - your objectives are to assassinate a general and steal a suitcase from the ambassador's safe. The great part is that there's also a Spetznats agent assigned to this second objective, and you have to either beat him to it undercover, get the suitcase quietly and get out; or wait until he gets it and then massacre him and the dozens of bodyguards who'll catch you doing it. Once I had the happy chance to shoot a guy in the side of the head as he ran past me, toward the place he last heard a gunshot, and the ragdoll physics meant his legs swung up in front of him as his head was nailed to the wall by the shot, and he fell on his back. Spectacular deaths are commonplace in Hitman 2, and the ragdoll physics are so convincing that when something odd-looking happens, you're inclined to think it would probably have happened like that in real life, and the only reason it looks odd is that you don't see the black humour of death much in films. |
Developer: Ion Storm Austin. Genre: criminally over-short futuristic stealth/action RPG in which, to an extent I've seen only once before, you get to drastically alter the plot by your actions. Setting: your classic divided dystopia - rich live in safe, clean enclaves, while the poor die in unsafe, dirty slums. It's a dull, done-to-death idea, but at least this time it's not trying to make a painfully over-simple and banal political point - you're given both reason and oppourtunity to sympathise with the enclave-creators, who believe progress has to start this way, then expand to encompass everyone. Also, the enclaves are totally nice. Your Character: you seem to have joined a sort of security training and recruitment program, where you got trained in special ops and were about to get hired by a company. You can play as a woman or a hideous, hideous freak. Great Moments: Walking through Upper Seattle for the first time - one of the super-nice enclaves. Tranquil and futuristic. Batoning people in the face. One time, in the demo this was, I opened a door on two hostile guards, and wasn't really ready for them, so I backed out and shut the door, just as one of them threw a flash grenade. From behind the closed door, I heard "Oh God, my eyes!" and "Aaaah! I'm blind!" from the two guards, so I opened the door again and, er, batoned them in the face. This counts as a batoning in the face moment, doesn't it? Pop star NG Resonance's holographic AI representations - they're in every good bar or café, and chatting with them slowly reveals that they're rather more than a gimmick for the fans. They're authorised to pass on relevant information gathered from confiding customers to the authorities, and even ask trusted 'fans' to investigate local goings-on for a 'citizen's bonus' reward. It soon becomes obvious that she's basically a global surveillance network for the WTO, and anyone who played the original in any depth will realise that she's actually the next generation of the hovering blue face that calls itself Morpheus - itself a development of the Echelon protocol. A night-club manager offers you a VIP membership if you assassinate a corrupt lawyer for him, and tells you to say you're there to see him about the weapons shipment he's expecting, in order to get into his apartment. If you do, you can then talk to the man, and when you falter in your lies about the shipment, you can cover by saying you're really representing his new supplier, and this new supplire requires a good-faith payment. The lawyer gets angry, but pays up. You can -then- talk to him again, come clean about the fact you were hired to kill him, and he offers to pay you off if you kill a black-market trader who deals from the night-club's VIP lounge. You don't have a VIP pass, of course, but you can climb up a ledge and jump to a balcony to get in. You can kill the trader, return to the lawyer for your reward, kill the lawyer and his bodyguard, then return to the night-club manager for your original bounty and VIP membership, which you no longer need because a) you've already found a way into the VIP lounge and b) everyone in the VIP lounge has been mysteriously assassinated. By you. |
Developer: The A-Team. Genre: a modification for multiplayer Quake 2 similar to Counter-Strike for Half-Life, but preceding it and much, much better. I hate multiplayer-only modifications, and I hate Quake 2, and yet this remains to this day the single greatest multiplayer game I've played, and I've been playing it regularly for six years. Setting: mostly contrived urban environments, with the odd rocky landscape. Your Character: I use the 'terror' model, a small guy with a bullet-proof vest and a balaclava, and the 'black cop' skin, basically just plain grey colouration. Great Moments: Every AQ2 player will tell you every headshot is a great moment - the game has a special noise for it, a horrible squelchy crack (or 'puck!' as it tends to get called) - but virtually every knife-kill is also euphoric, and one of the greatest gaming highs it's possible to experience is getting more than three flying-knife kills in the space of about fifteen seconds. I had six once, and I had to go and lie down. |
Developer: Crytek. Genre: modern FPS - by which I mean an FPS with all the elements we've seen work in the genre, and want to see again: vehicles, sniping, stealth and grenades you can throw without switching to them. 
 I love Far Cry, and I think it's because this is the first time a developer with any artistic vision beyond that of an angsty school-kid has had a cutting-edge engine in which to realise it. Looking good is not a superficial quality in a game. Perhaps it seems like that if you mistake an impressive engine for good looks, because engines date quickly. But looks are forever, and rendering a whole nation of gorgeous tropical islands and various times of day is an artistic vision we can all get behind. And it's rendered in an engine that looks cutting edge now - six months after release - and will still look current-generation in six month's time, sitting next to Source. The aching beauty of the setting is a huge part of the appeal - it's the best real-world escapism out there. If I could mod, I'd make a Far Cry one in which all you could do was sit around and drink cocktails as you watch the sun go down. 
 
 So many. Most involve crashing a boat into a pier and screaming and spraying M4 fire down on the mercenaries below as you sail over them. Others involve crashing jeeps into helicopters, shooting down helicopters into boats, crashing jeeps into jeeps, then blowing them up with a boat. I would also accept having your own boat blown up by another, after you've mown down the man who fired the rocket and the driver, sailing through the air from the explosion and landing in that of your dead enemies' and puttering off, their corpses flopping out into the water next to the flaming wreck of your ex-boat. A couple of missions, River most notable among them, featured the most enjoyably difficult sequences in videogame history. River was faintly amazonian - jungly banks and muddy water - and saw you zooming past a long sequence of ever less sane challenges. A few mercenaries at first, then a turret, then a two mortars and a sniper, then a turret, a low-flying helicopter, a rocket-launcher guy on a bridge, another turret and five mercenaries. Then a helicopter, a hut, a jeep on a bridge that blocks your path but is composed of modular floats conjoined with breakable chains, and ten mercenaries. I think I missed 'crashing a boat into a jeep' from my summary above. I would play this sequence perhaps thirty times at a stretch, dying again and again in ever more spectacular ways. Far Cry's vehicles are so brilliantly engineered, and appear so fequently and in such clever combinations, that their use transcends a mere FPS-with-vehicles. This is a vehicular FPS, perhaps the only single-player one. |
Developer: Team 17. Another area where the nostalgics (people who seem to think everything is getting worse all the time, all creative people are shadows of their former selves, and worse shadows than you used to get) can go to hell - Worms 2 is much better than Worms 1. It had the Handgun, the Old Lady, the Ming Vase, Pasty's Magic Bullet, the Parachute, the Salvation Army, all the weapons were fully customisable, and the Concrete Donkey was spectacular. It also had smooth, satisfying graphics, exotic locales, re-roping, mid-air shots, retreat times, dud mines, sixteen-worm teams, a built-in map designer and a great online mode. In case I failed to mention this earlier, I reserve the right to ignore my category format and just freestyle where appropriate. Great Moments: Dropping a Ming Vase while parachuting over an enemy team. Also, I was known for my mad re-roping skills. |
Developer: Monolith. Genre: first person shooter plus giant-humanoid-robots game. Setting: a beautiful and faintly Japanese future, full of clean and well-lit buildings, interesting scenery and yes, giant, giant robots. Your Character: a mech pilot guy with, I don't know, some kind of girlfriend or sister and her dad who's evil or whatever. The plot was pretty interesting at the time, especially since it wisely made use of the loading screens to give you little sections of rather purple prose, but now, nothing. I can't even remember the twist, although I can for some reason remember the line that came immediately after it: "You knew, and you didn't tell me?" Thanks, brain. That'll be useful one day. Great Moments: I was in a kind of games company once, and even though we weren't really registered as such we blagged our way into the European trade show one year. Shogo was one of the games I played there, and they had to tear me away from it to give the press a look. The concept is that the on-foot and in-giant-robot sections are implemented in the same engine, so while in the giant robots you're always having to spot tiny people on the ground so you can crush them like insects before they do no damage with their guns. The great moment related to this was the one time that you're on foot and your enemy's in a giant, giant robot. She was this psycho girl you kept running into who never died. The first time I died; I thought it must be a bug - I was at full health when they shot me - but in fact it was just the first time any game had ever made any kind of sense: getting shot in the face kills you! Not only that, but a game becomes incredibly tense, tactical and dramatic when you let it mirror reality in that respect. There are some other great moments lost in the mist of time, because this game is so old. Here's what I do remember: The time I finally got past that bit where I first died, with a lot of ducking behind walls to reload, then twin-pistol charges to flush the enemy out for my comrades to mow them down. Accidentally shooting a mother and my friend Pete saying "Kill the kid! Don't leave orphans!" Some fat or bearded guy who follows you around on one mission, after climbing dozens of flights of stairs, said - I think it was this - "Sure are a lot of motherlovin' stairs." This one bit where all these guys run in behind me and I was all boom, boom with the shotgun and in the end they were all dead but I was still alive. Missing a train in the rain. |
Developer: Lucasarts. Genre: point and click adventure. Setting: sleepy piratey Carribean Mélée Island at night, and then later unknown tropical Monkey Island in the sun, and hell. Your Character: Guybrush, an extremely young wannabe pirate who looks more like a flooring inspector. Note: Monkey Island 2 was one of the very first PC games I ever played, but I only acquired the first one just recently, and was surprised to discover that even with all my nostalgia on 2's side, the first is just better and funnier. Great Moments: The fights in the governor's mansion. Suddenly realising the bizarre lateral-thinking solution to the stuck-underwater puzzle and knowing it would work before I tried it. Indeed, that whole puzzle was fantastic. Blowing up your ship. Running through Mélée at the end with the grog soda-spray, and solving a lot of very difficult get-past-ghost puzzles by killing them. "I can't believe your audacity!" "Well, I can't believe your stupidity." "Well, I can't believe your mobility." "Well, I can't believe your enormity." "Well, I can't believe your alacrity." "Well, I can't believe your atrocity." "I tire of this." |
Developer: Lucasarts. Genre: adventure game, but unlike previous Lucasarts adventures you control your character with direction keys and not the mouse. Setting: a fantastically stylish film-noir interpretation of the Mexican folk lore Land Of The Dead: everyone is a skeleton or a demon, but they wear fifties suits and smoke. You even start a casino later on. Your Character: Manny, a travel agent who's been getting a conspicuous lack of good clients. 'Good' in a universal sense: he needs a nun or something to get the comission from the golden train ticket she'd be entitled to on her journey to the afterlife. Great Moments: The whole pointless quest for a metal detector is the funniest puzzle ever, and involves an ingenious piece of interactive humour. The wonderfully authentic atmosphere of the start of Chapter Two. Every time Manny changes outfit he looks even better than in the last one. After Glottis fits your hotrod hearse (with flames painted down either side and a big steel engine sticking out of its bonnet) with telescopic wheel mounts, Manny says: "Phew, I was worried our transportation wasn't ostentatious enough." Terry the worker bee trying to articulate the axioms of communism. Interactive beat poetry in the jazz joint: the limitations of the game mean that the audience can't artistically judge your poetry, of course, but it doesn't matter because they're all pretentious beatniks and hate everything you do until you prove you're not a 'tool'. Looking at the moon down by the docks when the sailor is there, and then again after he's gone. I don't know what that is they quote, but it's a great moment anyway. Trying to use the Bust-All - a pneumatic drill that can bore through anything - on the door to a bird cage. "That might be overkill, considering it's not locked." |
Developer: Adeline Software International. Genre: beautiful French adventure game with an astoundingly lovely orchestral soundtrack. Setting: a brilliantly surreal alien planet controlled by a facist government under the giant, evil Doctor Funfrock. Your Character: a timid Quetch, the suspiciously human-like race, with a pony tail, a blue robe, a magic ball, a wife, and some kind of religious destiny. Great Moments: Being part of the Rebellion's assault on the military installation in the Hamalayi mountains (any resemblance to real mountains living or dead is entirely coincidental). Robbing a museum at night with a jetpack. Passing out in a snowstorm, waking up and them almost immediately winning a snowboarding championship. Seeing that... thing, in the second cell when you go back to the prison on the first island. That freaked me out. |
