DaViD´82

If you are working with material (very loosely) based on true events about a not so well-to-do family starting from zero that sets up the first ever safari park in interwar Britain, you are vulnerable to about 101 pitfalls that can turn it into a shallow, sunny, overly sweet pitcher of lemonade hiding behind cute animals (and you don’t have to go far to see prime examples of this). But this is the BBC, so they of course managed to fight off that peril and did not create a rather naive melodramatic family series, but a series where “family" isn’t a pejorative classification, but a thoroughly flattering one. In essence this is a pleasant, nonconfrontational period series for the whole family in modern (albeit period) narrative style in a way that, in terms of current series, only the Brits have any talent at.

An obvious romance story dressed up as an adventure movie, wrapped in the beauty of the Scottish Highlands. It’s basically vary kitsch, but the type that belongs to its genre and has a place in the system of things. The plot is sturdy, the casting right, sparks fly between the main protagonists and thanks to the extensive production budget it looks and sounds good; on paper it comes across pleasantly. On paper. And that is precisely the problem - I don’t think there is currently any other series that would suffer so much damage due to its literary roots; or rather on the incapability of understanding that this is an audio-visual adaptation and not a radio play. The storytelling takes place ignoring images. Everything (unimportant is imparted by the main protagonist doing a voice-over quoting the original text. This is a millstone dragging it under in twice over; it is being read from a book where it becomes quite clear after a couple of sentences (if you didn’t know yet) that it must have come straight out of a romantic novel (e.g. over the top melodramatic sentences like "I wished it were a dream, but I knew that it wasn’t.") and things are driven to absurdity when we see a character with a sad expression and we already know why she’s looking sad on the basis of what happened previously, but then the voice-over tells us that she is looking sad and why she’s looking sad. The explanatory voice of the heroine even speaks during the sex scene (no ironic quips, but words of wisdom such as "Sex was our bridge back to one another"). This in combination with the nothing doing story lacking any oomph (a pilot could have replaced most of the series in a third of the time without loosing any relevant information) drives you up the wall. As the episodes go by, it gets slightly better, but it never completely rids itself of this curse. Or if it ever does, I’ll no longer be watching to see.

Judging by the name and the creators’ promises, I was expecting a tough crime movie building on the genus loci of Gotham City, which also happens to be about Batman, but which primarily is able to stand by itself as a gritty crime movie with a sturdy, non-superhero comic-book superstructure for adults. But the opposite is true. The genesis of Batman’s friends/enemies plays first fiddle and Gotham and the criminal aspects play second, which is a shame because those parts are the best that appear in the series. Both aspects hold each other back. The criminal parts are spoiled by the fact that anybody you come into contact with in Gotham will necessarily be someone from the DC Universe and the fates of each of these villains are restricted by the forced grafting into the Gordon storyline; the only situation this doesn’t apply is with the mafia. We see heavily stylized characters that have come straight out of Batman comics and series of the sixties alongside a serious storyline for adults which is taken extremely seriously, no tongue in cheek. It’s trying to catch too many rabbits using mutually exclusive styles and plus it is full to the brim with references to DC characters in every other sentence; which isn’t positive, because the result is something so unrefined and dumbly combined, it’s incredible (while Arrow/Flash is one of the few that can do the same with style). However, there’s no denying that it’s a pretty good watch if your brain is switched off, but that’s about all. Which, in the current plethora of quality series (even those based on comic books), is simply inadequate.

In a world of thrifty ninety-minute movies, this could have been a blockbuster trying for the title of “best part of the saga", there’s certainly enough material for it. For some mysterious reason this spuriously swelled to the length of two regular feature films and so each great minute/scene/wisecrack is alternated by two to three minutes/scenes/wisecracks that are boring, irrelevant filler (at best) or brought ad absurdum to kitsch infantility in Bay’s inimitable style (at worst and unfortunately most frequently).

The sponsor of the Fresh Film Fest offered us a shot of Irish whiskey before and after projection. But to be any help, the viewers would have had to drink a whole bottle before and two straight after to help him forget. Precisely the type of “art for art’s sake" which gives art a bad name. Probably just black and white film and two gay cowboys eating custard is missing. Otherwise this has all of the typical maladies of would-be symbolic art films, mainly a slow-motion, shaky picture (a l-i-t-t-l-e g-i-r-l s-t-r-o-l-l-i-n-g a-c-r-o-s-s a m-e-a-d-o-w i-n s-l-o-w m-o-t-i-o-n and all the time you are hoping to god that she hasn’t forgotten anything and doesn’t have to stroll back again) which has no other function than to draw out the movie another few (dozen) minutes.

While not admitting to being one, and better for it, this “remake" of the Ricky Gervais’ The Office, instead of paper pushers, picks fun at local government, bureaucracy and life in general. The would-be “documentary approach" and would-be “we take everything deathly seriously" style of humor remains unchanged. Furthermore, it has maintained a high level of quality (or in fact the level is constantly rising, since the first two seasons were the weakest, although not actually bad, just a bit shaky). Despite the really pleasant casting full of full-blooded characters, the series mainly leans on Amy Poehler who luckily thoroughly enjoys playing her central, incompetent, ambitious, optimistic politician who annoyingly observes the rules to the letter (and also rather a naive dumb blonde). And where Carrel is eccentric, she is nicely down-to-earth and, as a result, much funnier. In any case, if you didn’t like the humor of the original Offices, you will dislike this two-fold. It’s non-confrontational and in essence nicely friendly and you will more likely find the corners of your mouth turning up into a smile, rather than bursting into involuntary fits of laugher.

The things we do for a “better world”... Old-school to the core and typically "le Carréan"; i.e. not viewer-friendly, distant, real, minimally presented in mere hints and never literal. And yet, chillingly relevant.

First World Problems through meaningless prattle about nothing. But these nerds took the bit with the “meaningless prattle" too literally, because for all the good ideas and lots of tongue in cheek, it lacks the work of an uncompromising editor who would leave in only the parts that work. And there are pitifully few of those, perhaps the entire first season would have fitted into one single episode.

Forrest MacNeil reviews life as it is; are you curious to know what it’s like to be a racist, a junkie, to participate in an orgy, to be a registered FilmBooster user, to be Batman or even an Irishman, for god’s sake? Forrest undergoes all these trials for you, reviews it and so you find out if any of it would be worth trying... Veiled in the format used by real shows with a similar focus, it slams American values from top to bottom. And what else can you expect from a show from Comedy Central, who poke fun at political correctness as a matter of course? Each episode consists of two or three “reviews" and so it’s fairly clear that all of them maintain the same level of quality; it doesn’t start getting going (if you can say that about this type of format) until episode three. Luckily every episode contains at least (more than) one segment that squeezes all it can out of the chosen concept. And that is the main difference from the Australian original, which has good ideas, but doesn’t take them quite so far (although I only saw two episodes, so it’s possible that it got better after a while). The problem in many cases lies in Andrew Daly who is answerable for the whole thing. Because his demeanor so unusual that his spontaneity will either infuriate you or infinitely entertain you.

Technology is a good servant, but a bad master that will steal your soul, ok? It gives the impression that Pfister is a senile old man (while he’s so young) who would "ban all those internets!". And he decided to share this attitude with the world through this would-be “techno"-thriller where the attitude to everyday technologies is like that your great-great grand-father would have if you went back in time and tried to explain to him what the Internet, cloud computing, uploading/downloading is. This is all very unintentionally funny, little seen method, but this is paradoxically the most minor problem that Transcendence suffers from. Much worse it that in the second half, Pfister gains a thirst for pontification and so he starts preaching about the state of society, the world, the contents of your fridge, the heavens... Simply anything that happened to occur to him or bug him during filming. The only thing is that he’s really dumb in what he says and how he says it. If onto this “quasi-Malick-like" concept, you graft scenes like IT guys cum FBI agents jumping out of a tunnel in the middle of the desert, armed to the teeth to do a bit of ratatatat in the direction of some nano-zombies while spouting wisdom such as “don’t go near them or they will infect you with a virus and upload your mind to their cloud" (meant of course absolutely seriously), then there remains nothing else to do but shake your head in disbelief or beat the table with it or else just make cruel fun out of the creators. And that is the only level where Pfister’s debut works outstandingly well.