Tag: Jason Flemyng

Black Mirror (2011) s02e03 – The Waldo Moment

“Black Mirror” creator and episode writer Charlie Brooker really loves mentioning Twitter in episodes. It’s practically a drinking game, and it at least makes some sense time-wise because most of this episode takes place in the present. During the end credits, just like last episode, we get a flash forward to show how our new modern age has gone awry, and Brooker starts beating each and every viewer over the head with the message.

Multiple epilogues are great if you’re good at them and have a reason for them. Brooker just uses them in a way I had to look up solipsism again. “Black Mirror” ostensibly takes place in a multiverse of endless shitty possibilities, but I’m pretty sure—at least based on a two-thirds of this season—they’re all just hard solipsists and don’t pay enough attention to anyone else to realize their perception’s whacked.

Anyway.

The Waldo Moment.

It’s mostly great.

It stumbles in the third act, real hard. Jason Flemyng somehow manages not to be able to play a perfectly realistic sleaze bag billionaire. It’s an incredibly easy part, but Flemyng is so absent charisma he flops. I’m not even sure Flemyng does a bad job; he’s just entirely miscast.

The episode’s already in some acting trouble thanks to lead Daniel Rigby. He’s been voicing this cartoon character Waldo on a TV show with a title seemingly spoofing “Last Week Tonight,” but it’s from a year before, so maybe “LWT” ripped off “Black Mirror.” Cool.

Rigby hates his job because no one likes him for him. They don’t like white British guys who can’t get any sun because it’s clear his skin would burn off; they like Waldo, an obscene, blue cartoon bear whose accent isn’t not Black. Waldo’s got a gold-capped tooth.

Anyway.

Just as Rigby’s having another crisis and being too needy with another ex-girlfriend, promising young woman Chloe Pirrie is interviewing for a position running as the Labour candidate. She’s not going to beat the slimy Tory (Tobias Menzies), but it’ll look great on her CV.

It all collides because Menzies has the dumb idea of doing an interview with Waldo, where Waldo offends Menzies, and then Menzies files a complaint. So Rigby’s producer—Christina Chong, who’s too likable to be cutthroat, so she’s utterly passive—decides they’ll take Waldo out in a van where Rigby can perform and taunt Menzies live on the campaign trail. Pretty soon, Waldo’s invited to the debate.

Oh, and Rigby seduces Pirrie.

Except politics is war, and all is fair in love and war.

After an auspicious start, which overcomes Rigby being too bland and Waldo not being a very interesting technological subject—it’s just a real-time animation thing. Like, Flash was already dying when Waldo came out. The reason there wasn’t a real Waldo Moment isn’t because the technology didn’t exist, it’s because politics was all bullshit at this point. Menzies is the soulless bullshit candidate, Pirrie is the soulful bullshit candidate, but what about Waldo….

Will billionaire Flemyng have a naughty idea? Will Rigby and Pirrie dance too close to the fire? Will there be animated bear wiener? Will any of it matter after the hard bellyflop finish?

No. It will not.

Good direction from Bryn Higgins. “Mirror” doesn’t flop because Brooker misses something with his scripts; it flops because of intentional choices. It’s obvious and craven.

Solomon Kane (2009, Michael J. Bassett)

I started Solomon Kane with a decidedly negative opinion of James Purefoy. The first twelve to fifteen minutes did nothing to change my mind. Then something happened. The script stopped being so expositive in its dialogue and all of a sudden Purefoy got really good. He kept it up until the end of the film and so did the script (for the most part–when it had problems again, they were of the predictable plotting variety).

I didn’t know where I was going to start with Kane. I thought I might start saying I spent the first eleven minutes ready to turn it off. It looks like, for those eleven minutes, a television movie from the 1990s, only with better CG backdrops. It’s an absurdly bad introduction to a character.

I question a lot of Bassett’s period dialogue but it ceases to matter once he makes it clear he’s making a Western set in 1600s England. It takes about fifteen minutes, maybe ten, because otherwise it could be about Purefoy defending Pete Postlethwaite’s family. But then it becomes a traditional Western.

It’s a problematic traditional Western, of course (Winchester ‘73, say no more), but it’s in a defined genre and it plays a little with setting and adds some zombies and mind-controlled bad guys (being faithful to the spirit of Howard and his ADHD plotting).

I loved Solomon Kane. I hope it rents well enough and Purefoy doesn’t have a real hit they make another (with Bassett back too).

From Hell (2001, Albert and Allen Hughes)

I had no idea Heather Graham was ever a lead in such a high profile project. I knew she was in From Hell, but she’s got a lot to do–and with an Irish accent. I suppose it’s the best performance I’ve ever seen her give, maybe because her character isn’t a twit and Graham tends to play morons. She does a decent job, even if her hair coloring looks unnatural, not to mention her general appearance not seeming very realistic for a Victorian era streetwalker.

From Hell‘s a solid Jack the Ripper thriller. There’s nothing particularly outstanding about it–the graphic violence, which I guess caused a stir, is somewhat tame (it’s a Jack the Ripper movie after all), but it’s solid. Johnny Depp has a fine accent and he’s a dependable lead in this one. It’s hardly a showy role–regardless of him being psychic, which doesn’t seem to help with with the case at all. Robbie Coltrane gets all the good lines as Depp’s sidekick.

The star of the film is really the production values. It looks and feels like one thinks the 1880s London would look and feel. When the Hughes brothers do sequences with visual flourishes, well… it doesn’t exactly work. Depp’s opium-fueled fantasies look a whole lot like someone running film through iMovie filters. They’re effective due to their content, not their presentation.

Again, it’s fine. It might be too hard to really get involved with a Jack the Ripper thriller; no point.

1.5/4★½

CREDITS

Directed by Albert and Allen Hughes; screenplay by Terry Hayes and Rafael Yglesias, based on the comic book by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell; director of photography, Peter Deming; edited by Dan Lebental and George Bowers; music by Trevor Jones; production designer, Martin Childs; produced by Don Murphy and Jane Hamsher; released by 20th Century Fox.

Starring Johnny Depp (Fred Abberline), Heather Graham (Mary Kelly), Ian Holm (Sir William Gull), Jason Flemyng (Netley), Robbie Coltrane (Peter Godley), Lesley Sharp (Kate Eddowes), Susan Lynch (Liz Stride), Terence Harvey (Ben Kidney), Katrin Cartlidge (Dark Annie Chapman) and Ian Richardson (Sir Charles Warren).

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The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003, Stephen Norrington)

There’s no doubt Stephen Norrington’s a lousy director but he’s not atrocious enough someone should retire from acting because he or she had to work with him–and Sean Connery didn’t even get the worst scenes in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. It’s a stunt casting of Connery and, when compared to the source material–it’s no surprise, but he’s really against good character work. He refused to let them write the character as anything other than an aged Indiana Jones.

The scenes with him and Shane West–West isn’t bad, but he’s not charismatic enough for the role; he’s sturdy and unexciting–play like a May-September bromance. In fact, when West shows romantic interest in Peta Wilson, it’s almost strange, because his character is so asexual.

Besides the two of them, Tony Curran and Jason Flemyng, the acting’s pretty atrocious in the film. Wilson’s awful, Stuart Townsend seems to be doing a (really bad) Johnny Depp impression, Naseeruddin Shah–and it’s not clear if it’s intentional–totally lacks personality.

The special effects range from bad video game quality–the car chase through Venice is awful and almost comical, it must have looked hilarious on a big screen–to tolerable. For whatever reason, the film has more success with Flemyng’s Dr. Hyde than, say, Ang Lee’s Hulk had with its CG creation.

And while Norrington is British, it feels like he doesn’t really get the possibilities of the concept. Worst, I suppose, are James Robinson’s one liners. They bomb.

Transporter 2 (2005, Louis Leterrier)

This film is actually dedicated to someone’s memory. Sort of offensive, isn’t it? Dedicating a crappy movie to someone’s memory? Peter Jackson dedicated King Kong to Fay Wray’s memory and there’s certainly some evidence she wouldn’t have wanted the honor (Wray didn’t like the idea of Kong being remade and turned Jackson down during his first attempt, in 1997 or whatever). It’s something to think about, I suppose.

There isn’t anything to think about in Transporter 2. I watched the first one, which I think is probably better–if only because François Berléand’s detective has more to do–and didn’t even bother writing it up. For some reason, the second one offends me. The first one wasn’t any good, but it didn’t offend. This one is somehow offensively worse. Maybe because all the acting so bad. Besides Jason Statham and Berléand, the best performance is from former supermodel Amber Valletta (who looks the right age to play Matthew Modine’s wife in the film, even if he’s fifteen years older than her). She’s not good, either. She’s just surprisingly not awful. The supermodel in the film–Kate Nauta–is possibly the worst actress I have ever seen… she’s actually that bad.

She’s so bad I used ‘that’ like I just did.

Maybe I was in a more giving mood last time, but Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen are awful writers. Besson’s written some crap, but not of this magnitude before–instead of directing films, he just writes them now and I’ve seen a couple others and they aren’t this bad. I can just blame in all on Kamen, who is–historically–unbearably bad. Just awful.

Statham’s still appealing and I’m perplexed he can’t catch on. Maybe he’s just been in so many bad movies he can’t get a real job. More likely he makes enough money from these turds he doesn’t want to get a real job. It’s too bad, because I don’t think I can sit through another one of these….