Yep: the almost inevitable American remake, The Killing, from one of the Cold Case writer-producers. We watched the pilot and second ep and were hooked. It was the same, but different. It had brains and paid the audience the compliment of being subtle.

Things began to slip away from the third ep onward, until the credits rolled on the season finale and The Goddess and I looked at each other in silence, unable to quite formulate our thoughts without lapsing into potty words and descriptions/threats of GBH.

Some internet trawling tells me that the perpetrator won’t be revealed until the end of the second season. Closure after twenty six freakin’ eps? Not even Murder One took that long. Suggesting Twin Peaks invites potty words and threats of physical harm.

The New York Times captures my thoughts exactimundo: “What we’ve been watching is actually a 26-hour-long episode of Law & Order, and we’re only halfway through it.”

Thank you, but no.

A nice mix of mainstream, European and indy this year.

  Asterios Polyp – David Mazzuchelli
  Britten & Brulightly – Hannah Berry
  Chance in Hell – Gilbert Hernandez
  Doing Time – Hanawa Kazuichi
  Fun Home – Alison Bechdel
  Hellcity: The Whole Damned Thing – Macon Blair and Joe Flood
  The Lagoon – Lilli Carre
  Maybe Later – Dupuy & Berberian
  Powers: Z – Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming
  Shaolin Burning – Ant Sang
  The Third Musketeer – Jason
  Walking Dead: No Way Out – Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard

Scripts

Hm. According to my reading diary, I read the average annual amount of these this year but very few have wowed me like I want to be wowed.

  Billy Elliott – Lee Hall
  The Good Wife: Pilot – Robert King and Michelle King
  Lone Star – John Sayles
  Manhunter – Michael Mann
  The Straight Story – John Roach and Mary Sweeney

Maybe it’s just me.

Books

Some ah, research led me to more non-fiction reading that I would previously readily admit.

  Armageddon – Max Hastings
  Nemesis – Max Hastings
  Striptease – Carl Hiaasen
  True Grit – Charles Portis

I’m tempted to try the Demi Moore vehicle that started out once upon a time as a film adaptation of Striptease but… ‘m afraid I mayn’t survive it.

Features

  13 Assassins
  Animal Kingdom
  Another Year
  Born into Brothels
  Buck
  Chugyeogja
  Contagion
  Frozen River
  Get Low
  Leaves of Grass
  Please Give
  El secreto de sus ojos
  The Social Network
  The Women on the Sixth Floor

Television

  30 Rock: Season 1
  Go Girls: Season 2
  Breaking Bad: Season 4
  Downton Abbey: Season 1-2
  The Good Wife: Season 3
  Justified: Season 2
  Monroe: Season 1

There were some shows that were real… curate’s eggs that I wanted to try and be objective about but then I remembered that Sunday School chestnut about pointing fingers and the other three pointing right back at you. (Yeah, I chickened out.)

The latest Mission: Impossible instalment is around the corner and I’m kinda interested, kinda excited, though not because I’m a fan of either the franchise or Tom Cruise hisself – it’s for the directors who’ve gamely signed on (and the first one doesn’t count because Nobody knew)*:

  –  M:I-2 by a post-Killer, pre-Paycheck John Woo;

  –  M:I:III by the insanely prolific J J Abrams;

  –  and now Ghost Protocol from Iron Giant and Incredibles maestro Brad Bird.

… Yeah, I’m in.

Although somehow, somewhen along the way, whenever I think of the M:I franchise, I always flash on this:

* Disclosure: I’ll watch anything by Brian De Palma. Anything.

(Fedora-tip: Lew by way of Dim-Post.)

Back in the day, I was an occasional watcher of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Thanks to Wiki, I know that I started watching from the middle of season two onwards, and I don’t know whether it was the vampire killer schtick, the witty asides and/or the realistic interactions that kept me tuning in.

And then… a character who seemed established and part of the Scooby Gang freakin’ died. I hadn’t experienced that in serial television in, like, forever.

What. The. Frak?

As I found myself mourning the loss of a character along with the characters on the little screen, I realised a couple of things:

- there’s some serious shit you could do with television drama (and a horror fantasy to boot); and

- they made me freakin’ care.

WTF, indeed.

The first sex scene does not begin until twenty minutes into the episode. Its a lesbian scene, and it only lasts one minute and ten seconds. The next sex scene happens some minutes later. Its a boy/girl scene and it lasts two minutes. Both sex scenes are shot and edited like an action scene from a Michael Bay movie. Nothing graphic happens. In fact, besides the nudity, they are just as tame as what you’d see on network television.

From a user review of Femme Fatale, a 21st century version, it would appear, of Red Shoe Diaries.

We’ve a terrible backlog of films and shows, but we’ve begun scraping away at that mountain.

– In Plain Sight Season One is interesting in that it doesn’t really work for either myself or The Goddess but I’m still watching it (alone from ep five onward). Nope, it’s not the blonde lead (hey it’s Whatshername from The West Wing!). I think, for me, there’s comfort in the cop show formula, and the twinkly dialogue between the marshals is sometimes entertaining. I’ll see it through to the end of the season at least.

– Sopranos Season One is a cracker. Someone has very generously lent us all six seasons of this sucker, and it’s great television. But not exactly must-see telly. I suspect the fact that the boxset sat almost forgotten under my desk for three months has given us a certain complacency in getting around to watching it.

– Go Girls Season Two is a hoot. Two years ago, if someone had listed the component parts of this show to me and told me that I would like it, I would’ve broken both their legs and laughed uproariously while doing so and yet… rarely an ep goes by without me chortling happily beside The Goddess. A great New Zild show. I’m looking forward to the third season which finished screening recently.

And that’s just the legit stuff. Speaking of which, I shan’t be listing any more shows which haven’t been officially made available in New Zild. Probably at year’s end as part of the annual round up, but day-in, day-out, as a citizen, It’s Not Really Legal, and as a scriptwriter, It’s Not Right.

Once the chuckles abated, I had to search hard to find out what kind of storytelling device this is: a how we got here trope.

I used to think this device/trope was a nicely grabby way of starting off stories until Battlestar: Galactica killed that enjoyment with overuse in its second season.

I inwardly groan whenever I see such a title card now. For me, it’s become an unnecessary obstacle a film or show has to overcome for me to continue watching. Grinning and baring it has been occasionally rewarding – Breaking Bad and Band of Brothers come to mind – but for the most part, deservedly or no, a time-travelling title card provides an excuse to stop watching and move on to the next show.

And how would yours truly do it?

In film, Memento and 21 Grams have shown the way in forcing your audience to work without title cards.

As for TV, I wouldn’t use it in a pilot*. I was going to say it’s been done to death but I’ve gone back three years in my viewing diary and haven’t even been able to make a list of five. I blame BSG for my sensitivity.

And as for Battle Los Angeles, I enjoyed it immensely despite health advisories from Mr Ebert and Mr Slevin. Maybe my low expectations carried me over that title card hurdle.

* And yet… a pilot script of mine starts just like this – though, in my defence, it doesn’t have a title card.

I’ve huzzahed those that we’ve enjoyed. And I haven’t named names of those we haven’t – hey, I’d like to keep my options open on working in this town, thank you very much.

There were some New Zild titles I looked forward to last year:

– The uninspiringly titled This is Not My Life sits unwatched on the harddrive – pushed aside I suspect by the international film fest, getting The Goddess hooked on The Wire, and feeding another addiction*.

– Go Girls‘ second season came and went unwatched – but again: thank goodness for voluminous harddrives.

– Yes, it was Outrageous Fortune‘s final season, but we’d tried the series way back when and we hadn’t clicked. (Snippets caught in the intervening five years whilst channel-surfing have provided intriguing glimpses of the chances they’ve taken – chances I’d like to watch; luckily the local have the full run.)

– I have seen something homegrown: I’ve finally just started watching Rural Drift – it jumps the abovementioned queue ’cause there’s personal connections there.

Sooo… what’s there to look forward to this year?

There’s The Almighty Johnsons but I’m struck by the similarity of it’s promotional photo with another production’s pic I bitched about, and I’m not talking about the trees.

… Um.

There was a point to this post.

Can’t for the life of me remember it now.

* I’m a bit gutted it hasn’t been renewed for another season. Where’s the love, hm?

Which brings me to three reasons why I’ll be trying Minds spin-off Suspect Behaviour:

1. Janeane Garofalo for whom I’ve carried a film and TV torch since The Truth About Cats and Dogs and The Larry Sanders Show;

2. Michael Kelly who first dirtied my eyeballs in The Shield as a nasty wee serial killer, and then showed smarts and compassion as one of the few sympathetic officers in Generation Kill;

3. and Forest Whitaker. Nuff said.

The title may be an awkward mouthful. It may be a spin-off of something I’m dubious about (with dubious reasons, yes). Don’t know who’s behind the camera, or who’s writing it.

But talent like that, in one show, is something I’m not passing up.

* The Wire has largely ruined my cop show enthusiasm – I can now only watch running, shouty, gun-drawing homicide cops with the same detachment that I enjoy Hellboy, The A-Team or Transformers.

** A rather scathing Vidiot review of Cold Case put me off sight unseen (can’t find the link, sorry).

*** L&O cops may have always got their offender, but sometimes they still got away with it in court.

Riddle me this: when you talk with your partner/lover/friend – acquaintance, even – who you’ve known for a minimum of six months, do you say their name with every sentence directed at them?

Didn’t think so.

Then why do I keep seeing it in homegrown drama?

Why can’t exchanges just be:

Better Off Ted – Season 2
Breaking Bad – Seasons 1-3
Defying Gravity – Season 1 (a pox on whoever described it as “Greys Anatomy in space”)
The Good Wife – Seasons 1-2
Glee – Season 1
Justified – Season 1
Little Dorrit (fedora-tip to The Big A for putting us onto this)
Modern Family – Seasons 1-2
Nurse Jackie – Season 2
The Unusuals – Season 1 (fedora-tip to MC Ash for the ah, tip)
The Walking Dead – Season 1

A toast to Better Off Ted, Defying Gravity and The Unusuals, all cancelled, and all sorely missed.

Breakout television for 2010? Zombies, natch.

Film

The American
Boy
District 9
Green Zone
I Love You Phillip Morris
Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work
Kenny
Let the Right One In
The Men Who Stare at Goats
Once Upon a Time in the West
The Road
Sherlock Holmes (2009)
A Single Man
Star Trek (2009)

Film of the year? Boy. God damn your eyes, Waititi.

As if.

The second season of Fringe fell by the wayside earlier in the late last year but we can catch up with Dunham and co at our leisure now. Unless we’re already belatedly catching up with Dexter (about to start season three) and Burn Notice (couple of eps from the second season finale). Or (re)watching the first seasons of Scrubs and Green Wing.

It should only be for June and a bit of July: the fifth season of The Closer and the fourth season of Mad Men open next month.

Meantime The Goddess has Radar’s Patch to chuckle over while I have Treme all to myself.

We’ll get by.

There is some common ground. Queen, Maisey Rika and Phoenix Foundation. Better Off Ted, Modern Family, Breaking Bad, The Good Wife and Mad Men. (Yes, these last coupla years have been big box-watching years.)

She likes relationship stories while I like kill-my-dog-and-I-shall-lay-waste-upon-the-land-until-vengeance-is-mine stories. Her viewing threshold is a lot lower than mine – q.v. The Cult – but my excuse is that all viewing is a learning experience.

So we like different things. So what.

Were it not for Her, I would not have had the pleasure of Grand Designs, the River Cottage series, Pieces of April, and King of Kong. And were it not for me, She would not have had the pleasure of Mad Men, The Good Wife, Lars and the Real Girl, and In Bruges.

I suppose it evens out in the end. And because I do like to quote the good doctor,

  It is important to always try new things.

I readily confess to not having watched the last eight seasons as fanatically religiously as the preceding twelve, local broadcaster scheduling notwithstanding. It has been comforting to know that it continued to chug along as I took up with the likes of Miss Marple, Wallander, Orange Roughies, Dexter, The Closer, The Shield, and The Wire. A nice warm glow was almost always guaranteed when chancing on a L&O episode whilst channel-surfing.

Alas – until we start rerunning the show down here – no more.

Its been an institution. Its time has come.

Time for more of the same – but different.

The same goes for whenever I rewatch films like The Constant Gardener or television shows like The Shield where the endings are not happy.

Why do I subject myself to this torture?

It’s the execution. It’s the characters. It’s being taken by the hand for a half-hour or hour or ninety-plus minutes or days and returning to the real world short of breath, my heart thundering in my chest and a lump in my throat.

This is not a new discovery. Romeo and Juliet will never grow old. Rick will always have Paris. Rachel and Deckard will never have certainty.

And I think to myself:

  Someone wrote that shit.

  I lapped that shit up and begged for more.

  I want to write like that.

There are doubtless innumerable posts in the ether about what makes a piece of art resonate.

For me, it’s a singular interpretation, execution and vision that transports the viewer.

I have no idea where David Simon and Eric Overmyer are going with Treme but I am so there, man, because I’m hooked. Same goes for the recently concluded 100 Bullets from Messieurs Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso – each trade paperback left me floundering as a reader but I’d still make enough connections between the many, many plotlines and goddamn if it wasn’t a hot little page-turner. And then there’s The West Wing and The Walking Dead. And The Good Wife and Ex Machina. And Mad Men. … I could go on.

With the exception of Treme, all of the above are easily categorized genre pieces.

Each title resonates not just because they’re so different from everything else out there that they’re essential reading/watching – they’re the creators talking directly to us the audience at an individual level. They’re connecting.

That’s resonating.

• Screenwriter J D Shapiro apologises for Battlefield Earth.

  (Fedora-tip: WGGB Blog.)

• This. Is. SHATNER!

  (Fedora-tip: Alex Epstein.)

• Homicide: Life on the Street and The Wire scribe and producer, David Mills died suddenly last week. I didn’t know – I should’ve, really, but I didn’t know – that he was the one who penned the Homicide “Bop Gun” ep (the one with Robin Williams and a teenage Jake Gyllenhaal). This forty-plus minutes of free-to-air television truly opened my eyes to just how much more you could put into a police procedural.

  His and David Simon‘s latest television series Treme opens in a few days. I can’t wait to introduce The Goddess to teevee a la Simon et al.

Peace out.

It’s largely negative critical reception in the UK may sum up the show best but will never explain why I persisted with these five hours of ‘entertainment’.

Nothing a self-respecting screenwriter won’t already know but nonetheless a recommended and refreshing Mametian reminder.

(Fedora-tip: WGGB Blog.)

FADE IN:

INT. FAVOURED LOCAL CAFE – MID-2006

GODDESS

I just read this great story about sentient misanthropic parking meters!

Our Writer tears his eye from a public library copy of “100 Bullets: The Hard Way”.

WRITER

That’s nice, Dear.

GODDESS

It’d make a great T.V. series.

But Her mortal is already back in the Land of Azzarello & Risso.

CUT TO:

INT. FORTRESS MAMEA – CHRISTMAS 2007

Our Writer pulls from his CHRISTMAS STOCKING... a BOOK on sentient parking meters with anger issues and histories of substance abuse.

WRITER

Oh. A book on -

GODDESS

I know! You should read it!

CUT TO:

EXT. BATTLEMENT, FORTRESS MAMEA – LATE 2008

Our Writer stifles a smile as he turns the last page of his Christmas 2007 gift. He looks at his Goddess surrounded by well-thumbed books, magazines and clippings on renovation, gardening and animal husbandry.

WRITER

That was fun.

GODDESS

(off Writer’s book cover)

I knew you’d like it.

WRITER

It’d be expensive -

GODDESS

But it’s got everything: actuary tables, scene examinations, car chases, gun fights, love scenes -

WRITER

Love scenes?

GODDESS

Just checking if you’re listening.

Writer smirks and thumbs through the book. Just in case.

CUT TO:

INT. HOME THEATRE, FORTRESS MAMEA – MID-2009

ON TELEVISION as credits roll and a ‘mute’ symbol appears in the corner of the screen. We hear a SIGH O.S. as --

-- our Writer sits on the couch, a glazed look on his face, and heaves another sigh. His Goddess looks up from Her innumerable colour charts, chips and samples.

GODDESS

At least everyone involved got paid?

(beat)

You’ll never get that hour back?

(beat)

But it was character building, yes?

She puts down a colour card with with names like satin road, sulu, deep blush and royal heath.

GODDESS

Say something.

WRITER

(slowly and painfully)

A monkey with both hands super-glued to his genitals, blind from antifreeze addiction and with incipient Parkinsons could have banged out a better script on an Underwood missing half its keys.

GODDESS

And what are you going to do about it?

The Writer pulls out his POWERBOOK and opens it up.

INSERT POWERBOOK SCREEN

as the following is typed in: “THE PARKING METER – When broken yellow lines are ignored and P5/P30/P60 signs are used as trophyware, who you gonna call?”

FADE OUT.

• The last swords-and-sandals epic I saw was Gladiator. Since then, Troy, Alexander, Rome and 300 have come and gone with nary a flicker of interest on my part. But The Incomparable‘s review of Rob Tapert and Sam Raimi‘s Spartacus has sparked a guilty, pulpy, what-the-heck kind of interest:
  …Spartacus won’t win any awards for the originality of its premise. Hunktacular warrior dude loves his superhot wife, but is reluctantly called away to battle for the good of his people. Hunktacular warrior dude is betrayed by sleaze-weasel Roman general and branded a deserter. Hunktacular warrior dude escapes and is reunited with his superhot wife just in time for them to be captured (notably, while in the altogether) by sleaze-weasel Roman general. Sleaze-weasel Roman general sells hunktacular warrior dude into the employ of agreeably amoral gladiator owner. Hunktacular warrior dude must wage a muscly, well-oiled, tiny-pantsed struggle up the ranks of the gladiator circuit to find his beloved wife and gain his whoa that guy just took a giant axe to the face!
• The always excellent xkcd webcomic has this heads-up for those writers out there putting the final touches on their denouement:

  

• And go here – now – for the rest of this brilliant bat-take on Memento:
  
  

– how could I forget Messrs Murphy, Falchuk and Brennan‘s brilliant and irrepressible Glee?

That show is responsible for my Goddess‘s growing unease at seeing/hearing how many showtunes I can belt out.

It’s been so long since we’ve rolled into 2010 I won’t bore you with -0

This is my blog – and in the world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Hooah.

2009 was really a year for the goggle box –

– but cinema had some new – and old – pleasures –

– and when not glooed to a flickering screen, there was always –

I won’t be disclosing stats because they’re pitiful and I have no excuse. But if you break my run of comment spam (three figures and rising this past month) and ask nicely, I’ll consider it.

2009 was an okay year for watching and reading – a better year for writing – and 2010 awaits my conquest domination attention.

Overall rating: Satisfactory – but must try harder.