The Anti-Villain

More movie/TV crap as opposed to 'proper' blogging... Because, watching Law Abiding Citizen last night, I found my expectations (based on the trailer) thoroughly confounded. Here's the setup: Family falls victim to home invasion, father forced to watch as bad guys torture and kill his wife and daughter. Somehow, the evidence is shakey (all DNA evidence was magically inadmissable) so the prosecutor makes a deal with the most vicious of the villains to get the other one - who barely did anything - sent to Death Row. Former family man is Not Happy. Takes ten years to plot a very elaborate revenge. Starts killing everyone involved in the case. Turns out, he's a Q-analogue - that is to say, he builds deadly gadgets for the Government and Military, so undesirable, hard-to-get-at targets can be eliminated cleanly. Hijinks ensue.

Now, given that the 'perpetrator' in this film was himself a victim - not just of a home invasion, but of a very lazy prosecutor and a very obvious miscarriage of justice - I was surprised that he was actually treated as the villain for most of the movie. If anyone had a case for gaining the sympathy of the audience, it was him.

All the while, I was expecting it to turn out that he was playing a game designed to let the Prosecutor discover The Truth - for example, that the home invasion was part of a Government/Military plot to keep the tinkerer in check, and that the killings of anyone involved in that 10-year-old case was part of a greater cover-up. Eventually, it would almost certainly transpire that he was being framed all along... and that the Prosecutor was being used by some shady puppet-master.

And yet we, the audience, were meant to side with the Prosecutor who thought more of his conviction record than his client's need to see proper justice done. We're meant to be horrified when people connected to the case are killed by the myriad complex devices the killer has created, because it's part of some insanely twisted revenge trip...

Maybe I missed something important in the plot or the dialogue, but I think it's strange - not to say exceptionally brave - for Hollywood to portray the victim as the villain on such a grand scale. His family are viciously abused and killed, the so-called Justice System fails him because of a risk-averse Prosecutor, so he takes matters into his own hands. In most other movies, he'd be the hero.

I have to say, I was impressed by all the gadgetry - the single-shot cellphone gun was a genuine shock and left me stunned for a good few minutes - but as the intricacy of the gadgets increased, the tinkerer's insanity became more apparent. His revenge had gone beyond justice and become a jihad, in the worst possible sense.

Painting a victim in that way basically wrecked the movie for me. He had been betrayed, so his vengence was - in Hollywood's usual terms - entirely justified. Sure, it might have been getting rather excessive - I'd have settled for offing the home invasion killer and the Prosecutor (or, for poetic justice, his family), but the Prosecutor was set up as the hero of the piece, despite having so comprehensively failed his past client. Blowing up the paralegals was over the top, and trying to destroy City Hall was just taking the piss, but my confusion over who should have been the protagonist was what really messed up the movie. It could have been making a statement about the abuse and ruin of the US legal system, but it dallied too much with Saw's mechanical trickery, and the gratuitous horror of the so-called 'torture porn' genre (though either it didn't actually show as much as those movies generally would, or it was substantially edited for TV). I thought the clever legal tomfoolery used by the 'victim' was designed to prove that he wasn't actually involved... Turned out it was for his own convenience.

On a vaguely similar note, last night's Being Human was the first real disappointment of series 4, if only because it seemed to recycle old material (Annie's alleged 'blandness', and the suggestion that people find her irritating which, if I remember correctly, was first posited by her murderous former boyfriend). Sadly, it didn't end there... It utilised that dull old device of the new arrival playing divide and conquer, and used Annie's 'special powers' as deus ex machina. It's more than a little frustrating that Annie's poltergeist tendencies are so often touched upon, but are yet to be explored in any depth.

Playing on the character's old insecurities and 'zapping' the villain with her 'magic' is bad enough - not to mention a complete waste of Lenora Critchlow - but coupled with a situation where a new arrival is somehow more trustworthy than existing friends (however tenuous and new the friendship) just seems lazy. It's not just that it's retreading ground that was covered with Mitchell and George, but that it's suggesting no-one has learned anything from their experiences together. The one almost believable moment was Annie telling Hal that she didn't want to know about his past, but even that was muddied somewhat by her assertions in the last couple of series that Mitchell's past wasn't important, only for her to be horrified when his past caught up with him, and he turned out to be every bit the monster he'd warned her he was. To have gone through that, and then deny Hal the opportunity to be open was foolish, and - going by the end of the episode - is signposting upcoming events.

As a minor note, I find it unfathomable that someone as houseproud and family-focussed as Annie would not know Tom's birthday, which was another linchpin for the fractures that occurred in this episode.

In fact, versus their behaviour in previous episodes, all three of them behaved like children, and without the common sense that they've displayed in the past... And, sadly, the Scooby Doo reference made by the villain of the piece was all too accurate.

The other thing that bugged me - and has bugged me since it first turned up, casually, in the first episode of this series - is the idea of werewolf blood being toxic to vampires. Pretty sure that hasn't been even mentioned in any of the preceding three series... and the vampires have never before shied away from shedding the blood of werewolves without the use of protective gear, so it came across like an obvious plot device. Now the purpose of that device has been revealed, it seems all too convenient.

That said, I have confidence in Mr Whithouse... I'm still not certain of the apparent direction of this series, but I hope it can return to form next week... when another old friend shows up.

Covert Activity

There's a running joke in my family about my father's memory, specifically when it comes to Bond movies. Since one of the main UK television channels will run a 'Bond Season' at least once a year (traditionally in the run-up to Christmas because, y'know, Bond is full of seasonal good cheer), and the peripheral channels seem to run the movies pretty much all year, it's almost impossible to avoid Bond these days.

Nevertheless, whenever someone is foolish enough to announce that a Bond movie is running on any given day, my father will say "I don't think I've seen that one..." and look most hurt when my mother tells him not to be so ridiculous, he saw it in the cinema when it first came out, and it's been on telly almost every year since.

ITV4 currently seems to be running all the Bond movies and, today, I've been sort-of watching From Russia With Love. What has struck me is that I know for a fact that I've seen each and every one of the Bond films at least once (the other running joke in my family is that, despite our certainty that he's already seen the movies and that there's something we haven't seen on another channel, we almost invariably ended up watching the Bond movie anyway) I can't remember anything about most of them either.

I remember certain scenes - I defy any heterosexual male to forget the scene in Dr. No where Ursula Andress comes up out of the sea onto the beach, and then not cringe at Die Another Day's foul and unnecessary duplication with Halle Berry - some characters, a few gadgets or cars and occasionally a few elements of plot... but, by and large, I don't remember Bond films.

So... everything I remember about the Bond movies, in order:

Dr. No (1962)

• Ursula Andress... Oh my, yes
• "Underneath the mango tree/Ma honey and me..."
• Superstitions about a fire-breathing dragon on an island
• Large, black sidekick, portrayed as loyal but a bit thick
• Dr. No has prosthetic hands and is clearly a caucasian guy with winged eyeliner
• Underground base, possibly in a volcano, where Bond and Ryder are given new clothes and a nice dinner

From Russia With Love (1963)
Watching that now, so that'd be cheating but - honestly - I remembered virtually nothing about it. The only familiar scene was the bit with the couple enjoying their punting on the Thames, and Bond saying "I couldn't agree more" before pouncing on Sylvia Trench, only to be called away by Moneypenny. He tells her he has been "Looking into an old case" and, when Trench intrudes repeatedly on his phone conversation with her, Moneypenny opines that the old case "sounds interesting".

Goldfinger (1964)

• Woman gets painted gold and dies due to dermal asphyxiation. (Myth Busted, thanks to Kari Byron)
• The plot has something to do with gold...
• Bond gets strapped to a table for a laser-castration
• "Do you expect me to talk, Goldfinger?" "No, Mr Bond. I expect you to die."
• Theme song about "Miss-Tah Goooooldfingaaaaah... he's the man... the man with the Midas Touch"

Thunderball (1965)

• Nowt

You Only Live Twice (1967)

• 'Bond' is killed at the very beginning, but it's not really him
• "You only live twice, Mr Bond" is the villain's comeback to one of Bond's smart-arse remarks

On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969)
Only watched this recently, so it's reasonably fresh in my mind... still...

• Bond's informant will only give up the information if Bond agrees to romance his daughter (really?), played by Diana Rigg
• The song "We Have All The Time In The World" turns up in almost every scene
• Multinational cast, none of whom speak very good English apart from Diana Rigg.
• Bond gets married, wife gets shot in revenge, Bond is in denial when the police arrive. "It's alright, you see... we have all the time in the world..." - actually quite a sad moment, and proof that Lazenby wasn't the ruin of the movie.

Diamonds Are Forever (1971)

• Shirley Bassey theme!
• Diamonds being used for some kind of laser?

Live and Let Die (1973)

• Paul McCartney theme
• Jane Seymour as a fortune teller whose powers only work because she's a virgin
• That is, until Bond comes along with a stacked Tarot deck - every card is 'The Lovers'... and the fortune teller didn't see that coming?
• Roger Moore being smarmy
• Yaphet Kotto as the villain... who gets killed by being inflated by super-compressed air from Bond's secret rebreather?
• Spooky, seemingly indestructible voodoo guy with top hat and no trousers.
• Guy with prosthetic arm, courtesy of crocodiles... Was there a Peter Pan joke? A crocodile that had swallowed a ticking bomb?

The Man with the Golden Gun (1974)

• Christopher Lee as an assassin who never misses
• He misses Bond. A lot
• A hall of mirrors
• The little guy from Fantasy Island
• In fact, wasn't this one mostly set on Fantasy Island?
• The golden gun is disguised as a cigarette lighter
• Little guy tries to kill Bond as he escapes with Bond Girl. Silly little guy

The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)

• Nowt

Moonraker (1979)

• Richard Kiel as Jaws - falls in love with cute, geeky looking blonde. "Oh well, here's to us" is the only line he ever speaks, toasting their happiness as the space station collapses around them
• Some kind of Egyptian labyrinth?
• A spacecraft that looks remarkably like the Space Shuttle, in a movie made at least 2 years before Columbia's maiden flight (though, obviously, development of the shuttle had begun long before Moonraker!)
• The villain has a beard

For Your Eyes Only (1981)

• Sheena Easton theme song

Octopussy (1983)

• Bond sneaks into the villain's lair using a submersible modelled on a crocodile - this has since been referenced in the Metal Gear Solid games, where Snake can wear a crocodile head mask and a white tuxedo
• The villain refers to her pet octopus as "my little octopussy"
• Its tank gets shot out
• Is the villain's lair a women-only island?

A View to a Kill (1985)
I remember more about this because it was the first Bond movie to be turned into a multi-platform home computer game which, true to form (broken by Goldeneye on the N64, 12 years later), was shockingly bad... still...

• Christopher Walken overacting as the villain... Riding around in a personal blimp.
• Grace Jones was the scariest Bond Girl ever, but strangely one of the most memorable
• Something about blowing up the San Andreas fault (though I only remember that because of the game!)
• Car chase in Paris with half a Citroen 2CV?
• Oh, God... Duran Duran did the theme!

The Living Daylights (1987)

• Tim Dalton's first outing as Bond
• Shooting Maryam D'Arbo in the hand, then making some quip along the lines of "it scared the living daylights out of her"
• Riding down a snowy mountain in her cello case
• Theme by A-Ha

License to Kill (1989)

• Awesome stunt with the capture of the villain's plane at the beginning, which neatly links to Felix Leiter's wedding, as he and Bond arrive by parachute
• Leiter gets eaten by a shark, and yet somehow survives mostly intact
• "He disagreed with something that ate him" on a note pinned to his body, proving that Bond doesn't have a monopoly on stupid one-liners
• Leiter's new wife isn't so lucky - she's killed, rape may have been implied
• Even so, by the end of the movie, Leiter is having a laugh with Bond from his hospital bed
• Robert Davi is the drug-baron villain, who's moving his cocaine dissolved in petroleum
• Benicio Del Toro is his psychotic sidekick
• Bond's license to kill is revoked, and he's told to stay away from the villain, but has vowed personal revenge
• Features one of very few references to Bond's marriage in OHMSS
• Another loyal-but-thick large, black sidekick, mirroring Dr. No
• Someone gets exploded in a decompression chamber
• Bond Girl had a lazy eye
• Gladys Knight theme song

Goldeneye (1995)

• Tina Turner theme song - almost as good as Shirley Bassey
• Sean Bean as another Double-O agent
• Lots of Russians, one of whom played by Robbie Coltrane
• Some kind of EMP weapon, fired from space
• The tank chase
• OMG - what a twist, the villain is another Double-O agent... why hadn't that been done before?
• Pierce Brosnan was actually quite cool as Bond
• "You're a sexist, misogynist dinosaur... a relic of the Cold War" - Judi Dench as M says what we've all been thinking since Roger Moore took over as Bond, and the movies got steadily sillier
• Judi Dench is the best M evar!!!!111!!!!1!!
• A villain called 'Onatopp'? Really? And she kills by crushing people with her legs, often during sex?

Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)

• Sheryl Crow theme song - shame the movie wasn't as good as the song!
• Villain is a news mogul who makes his own headlines happen
• Teri Hatcher was only ever seen from the chest up, or from behind, as she was heavily pregnant at the time of filming
• Michelle Yoeh as an awesome, arse-kicking Chinese agent who manages to repeatedly out-spy Bond (weren't there rumours of her getting a spin-off series?)

The World Is Not Enough (1999)

• Shirley Manson theme song, played over a title sequence featuring lots of oily naked women, cluing you in to the fact that oil will be a major part of the plot
• MI6 building gets a hole blown in the side, where a vault is located... which somehow links to the Quartermaster's section so Bond can steal his tricked-out fishing boat and launch it through the hole out to the Thames to give chase to a sniper who - for no obvious reason - was watching from her boat.
• Desmond Llewelyn's final outing as the curmudgeonly Quartermaster: "I've always tried to teach you two things, Double-O Seven. First, never let them see you bleed." "And the second?" "Always have an escape plan." This can actually bring a tear to my eye now, since he delivers the line while going down on a small personal elevator platform, and he died shortly after the film was completed.
• Robert Carlisle was the villain... or was he?
• 3D hologram indicating a bullet lodged in his brain - Bond mimes picking it out
• Denise Richards as Doctor Christmas Jones? Are you taking the piss?
• "I thought Christmas only comes once a year" Ah, right. That's why the stupid name. Grow up, scriptwriter!
• "The world is not enough" is apparently the Bond family motto

Die Another Day (2002)

• Madonna's terrible theme song... that wasn't even really a song.
• Bond had the crap kicked out of him, and had been left for dead when a mission in Korea went wrong
• Long hair and beard is not a good look for Pierce Brosnan
• Halle Berry turns up as Jinx - awesome character, rumours of her own spin-off series
• Innuedo-filled conversation about ornithology on the beach
• Hovercraft used on land
• The invisible car... WTF?
• The ice palace
• The guy with diamonds embedded in his face - caught in an explosion (caused by Bond) during indentity-changing surgery

I won't go on with the new, Daniel Craig ones... but it just goes to show how unmemorable some of these films were. I remember Pussy Galore, but couldn't tell you which movie she was in. I remember Oddjob, but couldn't place him either. I'm pretty sure Jaws was in more than one movie. I remember a climax set on a volcanic island somewhere near Japan, and Sean Connery was made up with winged eyeliner - "Now you look like real ninja!" ('ninja' is actually the Japanese word for 'spy')... A bit where a spacecraft gets swallowed up by a larger spacecraft, where the Russians believe the Americans are behind everything, and the Americans believe the Russians are behind everything... I remember Sean Connery with a jetpack, and a mini-copter. I remember the Lotus Esprit that could turn into a submarine. I remember the bit where Roger Moore's Bond jumps a car over a broken bridge, and it does a barrel roll. Loads of odd little bits that I can't tie to any particular movie.

I suppose you could say that it shows how good an agent Bond was that even eyewitnesses have trouble recalling his exploits... but, let's face it, many of the movies just weren't very good... Once Sean Connery left the series, they got sillier and sillier, focusing more on the cheap innuendo and gadgetry than any kind of spy work. Things got back on a slightly better track when Pierce Brosnan took over, but there was still too much played for laughs and, much as I liked Samantha Bond's Moneypenny, it was all too obviously an attempt at empowering a long-downtrodden and neglected character, and showing up Bond for the dinosaur he was. Part of me rather hopes they bring her back with Daniel Craig, because I get the feeling they could reignite the magic that Connery and Lois Maxwell shared. Maxwell's Moneypenny knew exactly who - and what - Bond was, and her 'pining' was as much a shared joke between colleagues as it was genuine attraction... Probably more so. Daniel Craig and Samantha Bond could bring a new dimension to that, I suspect.

The Wasted Journey

So there's me, champing at the bit, getting all excited about picking up The Last Story today... and, when I got back to the shop with which I placed my preorder, I learned that their stocks had been cancelled. Not just the Limited Edition, either. The game, it seems, is unlikely to ever be stocked there.

Undaunted, I tried another shop... Same story.

I was advised to very quickly order the Limited Edition online, so I came straight home and did just that - thereby wasting my train fare completely - but it seems that HMV might have had it in stock... Which is a bit of a bugger, as it means perhaps I could have been playing it now, rather than whinging about not having it because the specialist retailers have had their allocations withdrawn.

In other news, my PC's external powered speakers have been getting increasingly flakey - the power button won't stay depressed. Thankfully, I have a couple of other pairs knocking about - not to mention headphones - so it was just a case of swapping them out. Of course, my powered replacements have a similar, push-button on/off switch, so it may only be a short time before they're knackered in exactly the same way. That said, the button is on the top, rather than the front, so it's less likely to be accidentally jarred.

On the downside, they lack the 'bass boost' function, leaving my PC's output sounding sometimes a little tinny, but that's bearable. I think I can adjust the PC's audio output to compensate somewhat...

In other news, it seems I was needlessly worried about my dubious boiler. Each time it dropped from 1.5 bar to 1.0 bar, it took about 30 days to do so - no shortening this time round - and now the weather seems to have improved, I've actually had the central heating off for a few days, so it's functioning just as it was during last year, when I only had it on for hot water. Good news, since the last thing I need at the moment is to have to shell out for a new boiler, or even further repairs.

On the subject of boilers, though, I was woken up early this morning by the sound of drilling. Turned out to be next door who, by the looks of things, are having a new boiler fitted. And possibly a new gas meter. Nice of them to warn everyone that noisy would would be taking place first thing on a Saturday morning.

Just started watching the old comedy version of Casino Royale... I remember catching the very end many years ago, and I still haven't seen the very beginning - switching on about 15 minutes in - but I'm already struck by the number of exceedingly dodgy Scottish accents... That, and SMERSH attempting to destroy Sir James Bond's 'celibate image'. Har har...