Television

28 January 201623 August 2016

Boxwatch: The Return of Fox and Dana

By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17424488

The original run of The X-Files was not quite the appointment viewing that Law & Order was. When I did watch it, I thrilled to the case-of-the-week but quickly tired of the overall story arc — especially once I realised how that was progressed:

a witness reluctantly testifies to Mulder with potentially earth-shattering information;
Mulder leaps to the conclusion that this witness is The Key to the mystery or conspiracy he is trying to unravel;
the witness disappears or dies;
the witness’s uncorroborated testimony has a sliver of information that leads to another witness;
repeat from 1. above.

The above recipe worked a treat for the show but my viewing began to slip as I tried with less and less success to block out the conspiracy blah-blah and enjoy the case-of-the-week. The last I saw of The X-Files was the feature film Fight the Future which was two hours of conspiracy gibberish, made slightly passable by the gravitas of Martin Landau and Armin Mueller-Stahl and feature-budget SFX.

So… Mulder and Scully are together again, and the truth is still out there. As an audience member, I’m like, Yeah, nah. As a writer, it’s disappointing to see it hasn’t refreshed its find-witness-leap-to-conclusion-lose-witness recipe — I mean, after nine goddamned seasons and two feature films, don’tchathink the heroes would’ve learned to protect their witnesses better by now? And, shockingly, it suffers from say-my-name-ism — following is an exchange verbatim:

EXT. PUBLIC MEETING PLACE -- DAY

FOX MULDER exits a car and joins DANA SCULLY on a busy city street. It’s been years since they last saw each other.

SCULLY

(off Mulder’s mode of transport)

Uber?

MULDER

I hitchhiked.

(off Scully)

Relax, Scully, I’m kidding.

SCULLY

I just worry about you, Mulder.

Really? Haven’t they been reading my blog?

30 December 20158 January 2016

2015 by 4K and 720p

Ay caramba, that was quick.

“Sicario poster” by Source. Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia.

Enjoyed immensely on the big screen:

A Most Wanted Man
Top Five
Ant-Man
Love is Strange
Inside Out
Amy
Sicario
Exit Through the Gift Shop
Spotlight
Steve Jobs

“Top Five poster” by Source. Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia.

Honourable mentions to John Carpenter‘s remake of The Thing which was enjoyed with a bunch of millenials who were genuinely freaked out by Rob Bottin‘s 1980s-era SFX, Cartel Land, The Guest, and Warrior which I finally watched after years of ravings by the inestimable Mr Fyers.

Devoured with great pleasure on the small screen:

Justified S06
Transparent S01
The Americans S02
Game of Thrones S05
Mr Robot S01
Nurse Jackie S07
Catastrophe S01
The Good Wife S06
Arrow S02–03
The Flash S01–02

“Catastrophe (2015 TV series) title” by Source (WP:NFCC#4). Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia.

Honourable mentions to the CW’s one-two combo of Arrow S03–04 and The Flash S01–02, the not particularly innovative crime-fixer show Ray Donovan S03 which is made compelling by Liev Schrieber, Eddie Marsan and Jon Voight, Humans S01, and The Walking Dead S06E01–06.

“MrRobot intertitle” by Source (WP:NFCC#4). Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia.

So much good television and so little time…

29 December 20151 January 2016

2015 by Dots per Inch

I actually read stuff this year — 91 titles as a matter of fact, seven of which I didn’t finish for various reasons. This compares very well with 2014’s measly 24 titles.

Highlights, in no particular order:

Justified pilot script by Graham Yost;
Transparent pilot script by Jill Soloway;
Steve Jobs 19 March 2015 draft script by Aaron Sorkin;
The Fade Out issues 1–12 by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips;
Alex + Ada by Sarah Vaughan & Michael Luna;
Lazarus issues 1–20 by Greg Rucka and Michael Lark;
X-ed Out, The Hive, and Sugar Skull by Charles Burns;
Down Under by Bill Bryson;
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout;
No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy;
Cop Killer by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo.

Honourable mentions to The Ballad of Halo Jones by Moore and Ian Gibson, The Walking Dead issues 136–149 by Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard, Stefano Gaudiano, and Cliff Rathburn, and Ms Marvel issues 1–5 by Sana Amanat, G Willow Wilson, and Adrian Alphona.

I feel like I should read more text-only books but I suspect that’s my easily triggered inferiority complex.

8 July 201517 March 2016

KINGSWOOD: a workshop

Last weekend, the wonderful people at Titirangi Theatre granted the script and I a one-day workshop in which the script was read, scenes were stood up, and a number of passages blocked out for a semi-public (The Goddess joined us specifically) reading at day’s end.

Praise be to:

workshop director — and Titirangi Theatre president — Duncan Milne;
and the very game and generous Ian Harvey, Colin Mak, Patricia Wichman and Sandra Zvenyika who read aloud, questioned, acted and offered.

I am not worthy.

31 December 20141 January 2015

2014

Goodness gracious, that’s 2014 done already.

Boring stats first. My exercise diary is a little depressing: less than half the number of runs this year than I would/should have on average (see here for where it all began) — but if I add the number of brisk walks and bike rides, too… total mileage is only a third of my annual average. Goodness gracious me. Future selfies for the blog will be from the chest upwards only. (Update: 2014’s mileage was actually two-thirds annual average — human error in the spreadsheet formulae.)

On to what this post is really for: what I watched on big screen and small. 128 titles were watched, equating to just over 500 viewing hours — and here’s what stuck:

Features

Enough Said
Monsters, which made me want to see Godzilla (which did not disappoint)
a dead heat between 20 Feet from Stardom and Fire in Babylon
The Grand Budapest Hotel
Ida
Wreck It Ralph, with runners up The Lego Movie and Despicable Me
The Rover
The Lunchbox
Guardians of the Galaxy, with runner up Edge of Tomorrow
The Dark Horse

Television

Boardwalk Empire S04 — a shame about the truncated fifth and final season
Endeavour
Game of Thrones S04
Mad Men S07 Part 1
Nurse Jackie S06
Hannibal S02
Orange is the New Black S01–02
The Newsroom S03
Olive Kitteridge

Happy New Year!

14 September 20148 November 2014

Escape and Evasion

I was catching up on some small-screen viewing when I was presented with this:

[PREVIOUSLY: Our Hero has been investigating strange goings on when he is knocked out and thrown into a van by Mysterious Silhouettes.]

INT. VAN – NIGHT

Our HERO regains consciousness in the back of a VAN. There are silhouettes – one MALE and the other FEMALE hovering over him, passing streetlights zebra-striping them.

FEMALE SILHOUETTE

He’s coming to.

The Male Silhouette reaches down to our Hero --

MALE SILHOUETTE

Right then –

Our Hero swings wildly with his fist – despite the murkiness and shifting floorpan of the van he is rewarded with the thud and grunt of a kinghit!

He leaps to his feet, drags on a door handle and --

EXT. VAN + FOREST ROAD – CONTINUOUS

-- our Hero falls and rolls onto the grassy verge.

The van scrunches to a stop.

Our Hero scrambles to his feet as the van starts reversing.

EXT. FOREST + ROAD – CONTINUOUS

In the F.G. our Hero tumbles into the hollow of a LARGE TREE while --

-- in the B.G. the lights of the van come to a stop. The voices of his captors travel handily in the night-air:

FEMALE SILHOUETTE

Did you see which way?

MALE SILHOUETTE

We can’t just leave him –

FEMALE SILHOUETTE

He doesn’t know anything – let’s go!

Beat, then the slam of van doors and the van drives off.

Really? Someone’s looking into your highly secretive and illegal shit, you go to the trouble of abducting him, presumably to find out how much he knows and who he’s spoken with before you kill him and dump his body somewhere, but you don’t restrain him while he’s in your custody, so when your captive gets away from you, you go… He doesn’t know anything — let’s go!

Really?

1 January 20142 January 2014

2013 in Print

A terrible year for the reading diary: a meagre 72 titles passed through my grubby fingers.

Still — stand–outs were:

Comics

iZombie Volume 1: Dead to the World by Chris Roberson and Michael Allred
Beast by Marian Churchland
The Hive by Charles Burns

Books

World War Z by Max Brooks
The Good War by Studs Terkel
Glitz by Elmore Leonard

Scripts
Tyrant by Gideon Roff
Modern Family — S01E07 by Danny Zuker
Law & Order — S08E09 — Burned by Siobhan Byrne
Baghdad Baby! by Dean Parker
Midnight in Moscow by Dean Parker

Usually, whatever gets listed in these end–of–year posts is culled from a larger short–list of what made an impact. Not so 2013.

Late new year resolution: Read more.

31 December 201311 January 2018

2013 on Screen

2013 went by rather quickly, didn’t it?

Here’s my best–of, in no particular order.

Features

2013 was a year when, more often than not, the fifteen or so bucks I paid to watch a feature on the big screen felt like money well spent.

Zero Dark Thirty
Iron Man 3
The Big Year
Chronicle
The Guard
Utu Redux
Gravity
Unit 7
Martha Marcy May Marlene
Saving Mr Banks

Television

For Mr White and friends, it was the end of an era — long live the king. As life goes on, Florrick & Associates continues to pull strongly, the Houses of Stark, Lannister, et al, remain compulsive viewing, and Nurse Peyton prevails in her adventures with prescription medicines.

Arrow — Seasons 1–2
Secret State
Hannibal — Season 1
Top of the Lake
The Americans — Season 1
The Newsroom — Season 2
The Fall — Season 1
Run

In another box–heavy year, honourable mentions to Boardwalk Empire, Mad Men, Endeavour, Karen Sisco, Last Resort, Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD and The Fosters. Not perfect, some no longer with us, some not really my cuppa, but good, well–made telly.

Onwards, ho!

27 September 201327 September 2013

White vs Crawley

Fortress Mamea had been pretty good at hoarding recordings of the final eps of Breaking Bad, until loose lips in the real world threatened to spoil the surprise. A little bit of binge-watching has remedied this somewhat.

INT. SCREENING ROOM, FORTRESS MAMEA – NIGHT

Our WRITER and his GODDESS remember to breathe again as the end credits roll on ep 14 of “Breaking Bad”.

GODDESS

Oh what will we watch when this is over?

WRITER

Season four of “Downton Abbey” returns soon.

GODDESS

But not it’s not the same.

I suppose not.

16 September 2013

Legacy

Last month I was asked what kind of legacy I wanted to leave behind – that if I had ten years left in my writing career, what would I want to be known for – film? television? theatre?

I was stumped in that moment as the following questions fizzed and Twister-ed through my head:

did I want to keep writing for the silver screen?
or did I want to try a running jump for the golden-age-of-television train?
or was theatre – with all its in-built ‘Nam-movie-like flashbacks to the terrors of Sunday school – my metier?

All I managed in reply was a drowning fish impression.

The past few months has seen me more focussed than usual on a number of projects*. Whenever I’d stall encounter a problem challenge – like a question of plotting, or a certain character inconsistency, or finding the right typeface for the title – the question of a “D F Mamea legacy” would flick about my head like an annoying insect.

I can understand the motivational aspect of thinking about a legacy. I already know what I want to achieve in five/ten/twenty years’ time. For me, the thing about the question of legacy is that 1). it assumes a level of control from beyond the grave, and 2). it infers the kind of ambition that I don’t think I have.

I want to tell stories. I want to keep close around me the people I enjoy working with. I want to hold onto my loved ones because they’re a dream come true.

So. The plan is to a). continue writing whatever turns me on – and/or pays handsomely – over the next five/ten/twenty years, b). enjoy the process not just by myself but with my fellow creatives and collaborators, and c). persuade The Goddess that the installation of an half-ton AS/NZS3809-compliant safe is a heckuva deal for as many Kaimanawa ponies as she wants.

Legacy, schmegacy: write it – and if people like it, good.

* Winning a couple of awards is a wonderful intermittent reinforcer.