Was it the same cat?

So here's the thing.

One of the highlights of my week is my regular visit to the film society. Every Monday night, they have a free film screening, and I try to go to those screenings knowing nothing about the film I'm going to see - not even its title. Sure, I check the year's schedule when it's initially released, and look for particular must-see films that I take care not to miss (this year, I've got the screenings of OSS117: Cairo: Nest of Spies, Swing Time, The Motorcycle Dairies, To Have Or Have Not, and Some Like It Hot marked in my calender), but other than those films, I try to walk into each film society screening with absolutely no idea what I'm about to watch. These days, every film you see is so promoted and spoiled and discussed that before you see a film your expectations are already well-formed. So it's nice to watch a film with absolutely no idea what to expect, and to just assess each film on the quality of film-making in front of you. Sometimes this lack of expectations can be surprising and thrilling (discovering that we're about to watch a Korean adaptation of Les Liaisons Dangereuses - a novel that I really enjoy - or unexpectedly seeing the name of a favourite actor in the credits); occasionally it can be disorienting, demanding effort just to work out what it is that you're watching (it once took me a good fifteen minutes to realise that week's film was a documentary). Occasionally, a film may be dire, causing me to wish I had read up about the film in order to know in advance to avoid it. But other times there are films that I might have skipped because they sound awful in the writeup, but in fact prove to be an exhilerating experience. The key thing is that I have no idea what to expect.

Of course, sometimes you may just have a nothing response to a film. For instance, a couple of weeks ago, the film was a French documentary called Back to Normandy and, to be honest, I didn't care too much for it one way or the other. The filmmaker had, thirty years earlier, worked on a film based on a true crime from the 1830s where a young man murdered his mother, sister, and brother. The film had been shot in the region where the crime had actually been committed, and many of the local residents had been cast in the main roles. In this film, the filmmaker revisits the region and interviews many of the people who acted in the film, as well as showing us clips of the previous film and giving some background to the original case. And as I watched this film, my response sadly was "why does this even exist?" It seemed to have no purpose or reason for being. The writeup on the film society website talked very high-mindedly about how "the director’s sidelong, subtle approach has teased out modern-day parallels to the issues that surrounded the Rivière case," but if so, the approach was too subtle for me. I saw no real parallels, just a bunch of brief interviews that never seem to go anywhere.

Had I read up about the film before the screening, I would at least have been forewarned about the very first shot in the film - a closeup, fully-on-screen image of a pig giving birth. There are many things that I enjoy seeing on the big screen, and a few things I do not enjoy seeing. A pig giving birth would most certainly fall in the latter category. I did not need to see that. I would have been quite happy to never see that again. Later on in the film, we watched a pig getting a blow to the brain with a hammer, then having its throat cut and its guts removed. It was too much for at least one person, who I saw quickly leaving the cinema at that point, but I stayed. After all, I made it through watching the pig birth - the least I can do is watch how bacon is made.

But what they showed of that farming operation seemed very similar to what we imagine a traditional pig farm looks like, how they've probably operated for many many years. Certainly the pig farm I found myself watching the following night seemed very different. I'd been rewatching the TV version of the radio documentary This American Life over the previous week, and had coincidentally reached episode 6, "Pandora's Box," which featured a story about how the efforts of genetic science to breed particular characteristics into pigs has radically changed the process of pork production. There were images of the crew undergoing an extensive sterilisation procedure prior to entering the pig farm, because the pigs were so vulnerable to contamination. There were the expected images and issues - pigs in pens on metal floors, people questioning whether they could continue to eat pork having seen how it's produced these days, people discussing whether the supposed improvements introduced by genetic science have been advantageous. And then, all of a sudden, there was a closeup, fully-on-screen image of a pig giving birth. For the second time in two days, I found myself watching a pig giving birth. I ask you, what are the odds of that? When was the last time you saw something like that in a film?

Earlier that same night, I'd been watching Battle Royale, a Japanese film I'd heard a lot about. The film was about a group of schoolchildren who, under an officially-sanctioned programme, are kidnapped, put on an island, and then forced to kill each other under a only-one-person-survives-or-you-all-die system. The film was suspenseful and interesting, but I felt it was rather a disappointment. The explanation for how this bizarre situation arose didn't make any sense at all - exactly how picking one class at random from all of the country and forcing them into a fight-to-the-death would manage an out-of-control youth population just isn't clear, especially since the kids don't seem to have any prior knowledge of the existence of the Battle Royale that might motivate them to moderate their behaviour. The film definitely seemed like it was trying to say something, but I was never entirely clear on what exactly that was. Was it a commentary about how the older generations often view youth culture as something threatening? Perhaps, but if so that's a line that is abandoned pretty much as soon as the introduction ends and the battle begins. Is it some kind of Lord of the Flies situation? But there's a difference between that novel, where the inherent savagery of human nature is brought out without external influence, versus this film where the kids are only killing other kids in order to avoid dying themselves. I don't know that it's a big revelation to learn that, if forced into a kill-or-be-killed situation, some people would rather choose to die, others would kill reluctantly, and a few might enjoy killing. I'm also not sure what's gained by exploring that idea. So it was an interesting and enjoyable film, but frustratingly its message was so muddled that I couldn't help thinking it was just an excuse to justify a film where lots of under-age kids commit bloody and gory acts of violence against each other.

There was one scene that I found particularly interesting. A group of boys had banded together to try to fight back against the adults who captured them. One gives orders. "You, get some fertiliser. You, find some molasses. We're going to build a bomb." Shortly after, of course, all of them are dead, killed at the hand of the psycho who voluntarily came on the battle for fun. But I found it interesting because, while we obviously hear references to "fertiliser bombs" every now and then, I've never really understood how fertiliser ever actually gets used to make a bomb. But now I have (just a little bit) more information on the subject. Apparently molasses, a syrup formed during the refining of raw sugar, are involved in the process somehow. Just how, I have no idea (and I'm not going to look it up on Google for fear of accidentally ending up on some watchlist), but apparently those two substances somehow interact when combined in some way to create an explosive device. Who says movies aren't educational?

An hour later, I was watching the TV show Leverage. That week the show, an fun if inconsequential show about former criminals who perform heists to redress wrongs committed by other people, had our heroes trying to recover money stolen from various characters, only to discover that the stolen money was being used to fund the activities of a militia. Two of our heroes are captured by the militia but escape, before realising the significance of the strange smell at the militia camp. "Fertiliser and molasses. They're going to build a bomb."

Now I realise references to fertiliser bombs, if not common-place, are certainly not unique. And given the fact that I'm a guy, and guys like shows with explosions in them, it's quite possible that I might get a coincidental reference to fertiliser bombs in several programmes in a short space of time. But such references always focus on the fertiliser component of the bomb. I cannot remember the last time I ever even heard the word "molasses," let alone referenced in the context of trying to make a home-made explosive. To get two such references in the same night must be at least improbable.

The following night, I sat down to watch another Asian film, this time from Korea. The film, called The Host, was an enjoyable movie about a creature that mutates after chemicals are dumped into the river. The creature wasn't absurdly huge, running rampage and knocking over the high-rises of Seoul, but nor was it small. The thing was about the size of a truck, and could easily catch and hold people inside its mouth. The film itself was well-made, by a director (Joon-ho Bong) whose work I've discovered over the last year and with whom I've been quite impressed so far. His films seem to cross a wide variety of genres, but are always skillfully made and deliberately constructed, and this film, essentially a modern take on the classic Asian monster movies, was no different.

Finishing the film, I started to watch a new episode of Mad Men, the excellent drama about an advertising company in the 1960s. In one of the more memorable moments in the episode, the show's main character, Don Draper, goes out for a night on the town with the firm's financial officer, Lane Pryce, getting drunk, and then going to the movies. Now, I thought they had gone to see Godzilla, but it seems it was actually Gamera they were watching (my knowledge of the 60s-era Japanese giant monsters is evidently pretty poor). In any case, an on-screen appearance of a classic Asian monster movie (in a show like Mad Men, of all things) immediately after watching a modern-day variant on such films is definitely noticeable.

Now, I realise all these coincidences are meaningless. There's no significance to it. And, as a friend of mine said, when you watch as much television as I do, occasionally you get coincidences. (Indeed, I remember one night last year where, on two different programmes, I heard Europe's "The Final Countdown" played on a ukulele and a brass band. How improbable is that?) But it actually doesn't happen that often - that's why each of these coincidences in and of themselves were noticeable. When you get that many instances in such a short space of time (and remember, all of these took place in the space of three days), where different documentaries and movies and television shows, produced over a period of ten years in a total of four different languages and all different genres, all happened to be watched by myself in the same short period of time, where they all had distinctive elements that resonate with each other, that is unusual. It's not just a coincidence, it's a coincidence of coincidences.

Or perhaps it's not a coincidence. Perhaps someone somewhere is trying to warn me and prepare me. Who knows, perhaps one day we'll be attacked by a giant mutant pig giving birth to smaller mutant pigs. If that ever happens, I'll know exactly what to get from the garden-supply store and the wherever-the-hell-you-get-molasses-from store in order to destroy the monster.

Or perhaps it just means I watch too much television. Gee, I hope not.

Let's see what you can do

So here's the thing.

I'm looking at the Stuff website, and I come across this article. Now, I realise this is just an entertainment article, and we can't expect too much from such articles, but still, I was shocked at just how appalling it was. An extraordinarily pointless article lacking in any focus at all, jumping from topic to topic, seemingly just throwing any vaguely-relevant information into the text in order to pad the word-count out.

Here's what I mean:

'Hit Girl' in killer new role
By NATALIE HAMBLY - Sydney Morning Herald

Chloe Moretz, the young teen famous for playing a foul-mouthed assassin in Kick-Ass, will next appear on our screens as a vampire.

Okay, first question - how is this news? It's been several months since Kick-Ass was released, it's been ten months since her casting in Let Me In was announced, and it's several months until the film is actually released. And really, reading through the rest of the article, there is almost nothing that I can find in this article that could not have been written four months ago. So why is this supposed news article being written now? I read this thinking it was going to be about a new piece of casting, not one that happened last year.

The 13-year-old actress is starring in the Hollywood remake of the Swedish horror hit Let The Right One In.

I'll just say right now, Let The Right One In is a phenomenal film. It's chilling and haunting, and sweet in a disturbing way. It's also an interesting example in how a story changes between book and film, even when the film tries to stay close to the book (as Let The Right One In does). I finished the film with a very clear understanding of the story being told. But then I read the book by John Ajvide Lindqvist (which is also very good), and it completely changed my interpretation of what happens in the story. While the original film stays very close to the book in relation to the actual events during the main timeframe (albeit with one major subplot omitted), it does leave out pretty much all of of the backstory, particularly in relation to the vampire's 'father,' and that backstory actually meant that I interpreted the entire story differently to how I'd interpreted the film. Anyway, back to the article.

Based on a novel, the film follows the relationship between a bullied and lonely boy and his unusual new neighbour (Moretz). Around the same time the young pair meet, their quiet neighbourhood is reeling from a spate of grisly murders.

Now, I have two points to make about this paragraph. Firstly, note the first four words: "Based on a novel." I ask you, what does that vague generic barely-informative phrase actually have to do with anything? The original novel never gets mentioned anywhere else in the article - the rest of the article focuses solely on the remake and the original film. Now, the fact of the novel could have been relevant to the article - they could have mentioned, for instance, the fact that the remake's director defends the film by talking about it as a new adaptation of the book rather than a remake of a film. But they don't. The novel is irrelevant to anything else in the article, but still it's mentioned. And as you'll see, that's one of my problems with the article - the article, at least initially, appears to be about Chloe Moretz playing this role, but there's so little substance in that article idea that the writer starts throwing every piece of available information into the text to pad it out without considering what that information has to do with anything else in the article.

Secondly, pay attention to that paragraph. We're definitely talking about the remake right now - notice the reference in this paragraph to Moretz playing the neighbour. Now, watch what happens next.

The movie, described as dark, atmospheric and cold garnered rave reviews. The Sydney Morning Herald said: "At once quietly complex and profoundly creepy, this extraordinarily resonant work ... manages ... to breathe life into the oversaturated subset of the horror genre, the vampire film."

Wait - how are there reviews of this film already? It's several months away from release. I'm confused.

In David Stratton's review for At The Movies, he was dismayed that it was getting the Hollywood treatment.

But this film is the Hollywood treatment, so how... ohhh, he's talking about the Swedish film now. So when exactly did we make the transition from the Hollywood to the Swedish film? Can anyone point me to the place where they clearly and unambiguously switch from discussing the remake to the original?

"I'm horrified that they're going to make a Hollywood remake, because they're going to complete ruin it ... but it's really worth seeing," he said.

Okay, let's be generous and overlook the "completeLY ruin it" typo. Let's just ask, what does this sentence actually contribute? It's a Hollywood remake of an excellent foreign film, so we can all just assume the critics are, at this stage, against the remake. But the key point is, they haven't actually seen the film. It's just an assumption that the remake will be inferior - a justified one, because most remakes are. But there are occasionally good remakes of foreign films - Infernal Affairs became The Departed, Seven Samurai became The Magnificent Seven, Christopher Nolan's remake of Insomnia, all come to mind. So it's possible that this may actually prove to be a good film. The key point is that, right now, the critics have no idea whether this will actually be good or not. It's just speculation on David Stratton's part that they will ruin the film. And besides, what does any of this discussion about the merits of remakes have to do with Chloe Moretz, who I thought was supposed to be the subject of the article?

The Hollywood version has been renamed Let Me In and is directed by Cloverfield's Matt Reeves.

Young Australian actor Kodi Smit-McPhee (Romulus, My Father) will star opposite Moretz as the ostracised boy.

"Hey, we haven't mentioned the name of the remake, who directed it, or who plays the other main character. Find somewhere to cram that information into the article."
"Should we mention the Oscar-nominated actor playing the girl's 'father'?"
"Who? Richard Jenkins? Who cares about him? Besides, we don't want to have too much pointless information in this article. It'll lose its focus."
"Wait, this article has a focus?"
"Yeah, it's about Chloe Moretz."
"You mean the actress we haven't mentioned in four paragraphs, because we've been discussing how good the original was and how bad a remake will be?"
"Yeah. Actually, throw in a reference to her so that we can get the article back on track."

Moretz became famous for playing Mindy Macready, aka Hit Girl, in the film Kick-Ass.

Okay, the first sentence of the article already said that she was famous for her role in Kick-Ass, so we already know that. The only thing this sentence adds is her character's name, but if you've seen Kick-Ass you know who she played (there's only one foul-mouthed 11-year-old girl in the film), and if you haven't seen the film, knowing that the character's name was "Mindy Macready, aka Hit Girl" is useless information. So why is this paragraph needed again?

She was the subject of much controversy because her character was an 11-year-old skilled assassin who was prone to profanity - notably the f- and c-words.

My favourite story about Kick-Ass is that the original comic had the line with the c-word, but the script omitted the c-word (presumably because it would involve an 11-year-old actually saying the word). Moretz's mother was apparently reading the comic, thought the line played better with the c-word (which is probably true) and so talked the director into including the word. I repeat: the girl's mother had the c-word put into the film. Nothing to do with the article - I just find that amusing.

Parents were warned against taking their children to the film and questions were raised about whether a young actor should be asked to perform such a role.

Moretz is now 13 but there has so far been no controversy about her playing a murderous vampire.

And now we can see the point of the article. They're trying to draw people's attention to this film in order to create controversy about her playing a murderous vampire. The question is, what is the controversy they're trying to create? Is it (as with the alleged controversy around Kick-Ass) about a young girl like Moretz playing this more-adult role? If so, having made it through Kick-Ass seemingly well-adjusted, the role of the vampire is by comparison rather tame. Is the controversy over concerns that parents may need to be warned so that they don't accidentally take their young kids to see "that film where that nice girl from Kick-Ass plays a vampire," and are then shocked to discover that she does vampirey stuff? Or is it a controversy over the general audience being harmed by seeing a young girl doing scary stuff in a horror? If so, we'll just have to hope no-one in Hollywood ever reads The Exorcist, because that would really be a disturbing film.

And incidentally, the saddest part of the article is the fact that they now have to explicitly state that she's playing "a murderous vampire". I remember a time before Twilight when the word "murderous" didn't need to be used as a descriptor of vampires, because it was pretty much taken as read.

Let Me In is due for release in October. A trailer has been leaked on YouTube.

Strangely enough, this may actually be the part of the article that annoys me most. A trailer has NOT been leaked on YouTube. The trailer was officially released by the studio, and then posted onto YouTube. This is not some cloak-and-dagger surreptitious action of someone trying to release secret information. This was part of the official promotional campaign of the film, and to say that it was "leaked" is a patently transparent and pathetic attempt to add a little bit of excitement to a nothing story.

Look, I'm aware that it's silly of me to hold Stuff to any standards in its entertainment section. By definition, pretty much any article that ends up there is almost certainly not going to be news by any objective standard. Right now, the site is featuring articles about how Jennifer Aniston is enjoying single life, or how Zac Efron went to a strip club but didn't like it. And I realise that, as someone who probably went into journalism with dreams of being the next Woodward or Bernstein, it must be dispiriting work for the reporter to have to write articles about the career choices of a 13-year-old actress. So I realise how strange it is that I would be made so angry by this by such a small unimportant article. But that's exactly why it maks me so angry. This article wasn't tucked away in the Entertainment section of the website. It was given prominence on the front page of the website - you know, where real news is supposed to be posted. And yet, when I finished the article, my response was "why does this even exist?" And that's not a good thing.

Listen, Stuff, I've complained about your website before, and to your credit, you have thankfully stopped highlighting the CuteStuff articles on the front page. (It's still there on the site, and it's still pointless, but at least these days it takes several deliberate clicks to find.) [EDIT 4 August 2010: I spoke too soon. I hadn't seen it in a while, but guess what was up on the Stuff website today. Sigh.] But if you're going to claim to be a news website, the one thing you need to do when highlighting an article on the front page of your news website is ask yourself "Is this article news, or are we just publishing it to make it seem like there's something new on the site." If it's the latter, by all means use it to pad out the Entertainment section, but don't waste perfectly good, and limited, space on the front page of your website drawing attention to it.

And one last thing. I know last time I said how much I hated your "if our team don't break stories first, there are consequences" campaign. I take it all back. Please please please bring back the campaign, if only because I desperately need to know what you would do to the person responsible for posting a news article ten months after it took place.

By request

So here's the thing.

I first became familiar with the work of Steven Moffat late one night back in 2004. It would have been about 11:30pm; I was flipping through the channels during an ad break to see what else was on, and stopped on some British comedy programme. Less than a minute after I paused there, I found myself watching a beautiful blonde woman walk up to the counter of a science-fiction memorabilia store, smile at the guy behind it, and observed "isn't it exciting that they've found episode 2 of The Daleks' Master Plan?" (Ten seconds later, the guy behind the counter woke up from his dream.) But that scene made me take notice of the show. At the time the discovery of the previously-missing episode was still recent news, it had only taken place a couple of months earlier (we still hadn't actually seen it, since it wasn't released on DVD until the end of the year), so it was a surprise to me to see it referenced so soon. Whoever wrote this is clearly a Doctor Who fan.

So I stayed watching the show, which was called Coupling. It was certainly funny, and later in the week when I noticed a rerun of an older episode on UKTV, I turned it on. And it was that episode that turned me into a fan of the show. Literally half the episode revolved around a single scene where two characters try to have a conversation even though they speak different languages. The show presents the scene twice, once from each character's point of view. It was so perfectly written, the intricacies of the communication break-down and misunderstandings so carefully worked out, that I was genuinely impressed. As I watched the rest of the show's run, I discovered that it regularly broke free of the basic sitcom formats. Entire episodes were presented in split-screen, or chronologically took place before the previous episode, or contrasted drunken flashbacks against the reality, or replayed the same short period of time telling the stories of different characters in the bar. It's not so much that these are especially original ideas, but they're certainly not commonplace in the typical sitcom. Steven Moffat was clearly a talented writer who wasn't just content to write jokes, but was instead testing the boundaries of the sitcom format, trying to find something new to do with the form. And I liked that. It also helped that Moffat is a very very funny writer.

Meanwhile the revival of Doctor Who, under the control of lead writer Russell T Davies, was in production, and Moffat was announced as one of the show's writers.

Much spoiler-filled discussion of the last 5 1/2 years of Doctor Who (including detailed comments on the finale to the most recent series - Matt Smith's first) follows after the jump.

Revenge of Suspense, Laughter, Violence, Hope, Heart, Nudity, Sex, Happy Endings... Mainly Happy Endings

So here's the thing.

It is rather an impressive feat to manage to be a jerk even when you are explicitly trying not to be.

Last year, I posted about my experiences while queueing for film festival tickets, and my annoyance at these two guys who parked their car on the forecourt in front of the ticket office, sat in their car for a couple of hours, and felt that this entitled them to take the front position in the queue. I also mentioned how angry I was, both at them for being jerks, and at myself for letting them take that front place in the queue. So this year I was ready, I've spent the last few weeks psyching myself up for this. If they did the same thing this year, I would wait until they left their car and tried to claim front place, and then I would refuse to accept their claim. I would send them to the back of the queue, with (I assumed) the support of those around me. (I would have discussed it with people ahead of time.)

So it was 6am, I was walking to the ticket office, I could see it at the end of the street, and it was empty. Not a soul was visible, no cars, nothing. And then, as I watched, a minute away from the ticket office, a car pulled up, but not on the forecourt. A guy got out and put some box-shaped object on the ground in front of the ticket office, then went back to his car and brought another out to stack on top of the first object. As I walked up, I saw that he had two stereo speakers, one on top of the other, and he was putting a jacket around the speakers. And sure enough, this was one of my mortal enemies, and look, there's my other mortal enemy sitting in the car.

So the guy looks at me and comments that this was their "person," that they decided "not to be jerks" this year by parking on the forecourt, and rather they had made this person as their stand-in holding their place while they sat in their car in the car park a few metres away. Well, I wasn't expecting this exact situation, but I was still mentally prepared to take a position on this issue. "No," I said, "you cannot save a place with a stereo. If someone wants to wait in the queue and save a place for someone else, that's one thing. But inanimate objects do not get to save places for people." I told them how annoyed I was at their actions in the past, and I felt that their actions this year were just a further example of inappropriate behaviour.

So they tried to defend their actions.
"But it's cold," they said.
"I know it's cold. I know because I'm cold."
"Well you could bring your car and wait in it if you wanted," they said.
"No, because that's just not how you queue. Plus, if everyone queued in their car then pretty quickly we'd have thirty cars and a bicycle lined up in front of the ticket office inconveniencing everyone."

So they went, and they sat in the car. Meanwhile I stood out in the cold, standing by the two speakers. I had made my position clear - I did not accept their scarecrow saving their place, and I was planning on moving it out of the way, but I wanted to wait for someone else to come along before I did so. (I felt that I wanted someone else in the queue to support my position that their claim had no validity.) But after five or ten minutes, they must have had a change of heart. One of the two got out of the car, put the two speakers side-by-side to form a makeshift chair, and sat down, where he stayed until the ticket office opened. "Victory," I thought.

Here's the point where they actually became jerks. Since the guy sitting outside was now not in the car, he couldn't listen to the music they had playing. So the other guy opened the doors, turned the stereo up, and proceeded to play some really bad music really loud (certainly much louder than should be allowed at 6.30 in the morning). So here I am, trying to listen to episodes of This American Life on my iPod, but since the show is mostly just talking, even with the volume turned right up, it was hard to focus on Ira Glass's voice with the constant barrage of noise coming from the car. The guy who wasn't in the queue started doing something around his car (I wasn't paying close attention, but it seemed like he was cleaning the windows, which seems like a weird thing to do), before eventually driving away about 7am, only returning shortly before 9am to pick up the speakers and then leave again.

Meanwhile I waited, happy in the knowledge that I had actually won, and at 9am, I bought my tickets. This year I'm going to either 22 or 24 films (depending on how you count them) which makes this the most films I've been to during the festival however you count them. I'm going to be seeing:

* Inside Job

* The Illusionist

* The Concert
* Animal Kingdom
* Four Lions
* The Housemaid
* Once Upon A Time In The West
* Exit Through The Gift Shop
* Cell 211
* Please Give
* The Most Dangerous Man In America
* A Prophet
* The Ghost Writer
* Oceans
* The Two Escobars
* Farewell
* Winter's Bone
* Cyrus
* Splice
* Carlos (Parts One, Two, and Three)
* The Double Hour
* The Red Shoes

There's a lot of films that I'm really excited about. I'm probably most looking forward to Once Upon A Time In The West. I've actually owned it for about five years, purchased solely on the basis of reputation, but just never got around to watching it. But I recently watched Once Upon A Time In America (another film I've owned for years but never actually watched) and loved it, and that reinforced my need to actually start watching Leone. And now I have the opportunity to see one of his best films at the Embassy? That is exciting.

And speaking of classic films, I've also never seen The Red Shoes, which is supposed to be extraordinarily beautiful, and with a new restoration should be a great experience.

I'm also excited to see The Illusionist, the new animated film from the director of the incredible The Triplets of Belleville. That film was quite openly inspired by the comedy movies of Jacques Tati (indeed, in one scenes the characters watch a Tati film), so it's especially exciting that in this film Sylvain Chomet is working from an unused script written by Tati.

I will admit that I am conflicted about including Polanski's new film The Ghost Writer. A friend and I had a debate last week about the film - my friend saying that she would take a principled stand against Polanski (who has, admittedly, done some rather unsavoury things in his lifetime) and refuse to see anything he does. I'm not a big Polanski fan in any case (although Chinatown is really is phenomenal), but The Ghost Writer (which had most of its post-production undertaken by Polanski while on house arrest) has a great cast and has received some really excellent reviews, and if the film were from anyone else, I wouldn't hesitate to see it. And so I don't really see the point in refusing to see the film. I don't really think Polanski cares whether one person in New Zealand refuses to see his film because of something that happened thirty years ago, and for me to refuse to see it would deprive myself of a film that I might enjoy in order to make a point that no-one would notice or care about. And what would be the point in that? So I'm seeing it.

The Two Escobars is a film I would never have thought about seeing but for a coincidence of timing. Although it's not mentioned in the programme listing, the film was produced as part of a highly-acclaimed series of 30 sports-based documentaries intended to commemorate ESPN's 30th anniversary, and the day before the festival programmes came out, my favourite TV critic previewed the upcoming screening of the show in the States with the comment that "It's an incredible film, arguably the high point so far in a series that's been full of award contenders."

Similarly, the programme description of Winter's Bone doesn't sound too fascinating, but a week ago I heard several highly-praising references to the film, first a brief reference in the Firewall and Iceberg podcast, and then an entire segment dedicated to the film in the AV Talk podcast, so I'm excited about that one.

I was toying with the idea of seeing Predicament, the New Zealand film that is having its world premiere as the official opening night film. But when I realised it would clash with Inside Job, the documentary about the recent financial crisis (because yes, I am that boring), my decision was made for me. If Predicament turns out to be any good, I'm sure I'll have other chances to see it.

Then there's the Carlos the Jackal biopic, Carlos. I was uncertain about seeing the film - it's actually three films totalling 5 1/2 hours, and a film at that length can be daunting, especially if the film doesn't work for you. But a quick Google search brought up a lot of rave reviews from the Cannes festival, so it should be good.

Back in 1999, Vincenzo Natali's Cube was one of my favourite films of that year's festival. I don't think I've seen anything of his since then, so it will be interesting to see Splice and get an idea of how he's developed as a filmmaker, especially now he's working with (I assume) a bigger budget.

And then there are the rest. A Prophet is supposed to be incredible, The Double Hour sounds fascinating (although I am anxious about seeing it at the end of a day that features the marathon Carlos), Exit Through the Gift Shop is supposed to be a lot of fun (although I know even less about the film's subject, graffiti artist Banksy, than most people), and the rest of them just sound like they should be enjoyable movies. And then there are all the films I wanted to see but can't get to because of time clashes (a lot of those this year) or just needing to keep the number of films down to a reasonable level. It's been a particularly hard festival this year to make my film selections - and that's a good problem to have.

For me there are two real disappointments around the festival. Having attended the Live Cinema event the last few years (where they screen a silent film with live musical accompaniment), I was a little disappointed by this year's Live Cinema film, which doesn't interest me at all. Still, I wasn't too disappointed until I discovered that, in Auckland, they are showing Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr - one of the best films from one of the masters of silent comedy. Now that would be a great film to see, but sadly the Wellington festival isn't getting it.

The other disappointment is around a film that isn't screening anywhere in the festival. The first time I ever saw Metropolis, it was at a festival screening of the then-new restoration back in 2003. Of course, since then, the complete uncut print of that incredible film has been discovered and, with it currently screening in US cinemas, I had my fingers crossed for a festival screening of the complete Metropolis. Sadly, the film is nowhere to be found in the programme. I was hoping for my first viewing to be on the big screen, but it seems I'll probably need to wait for the Blu-Ray release later this year.

Still, with such a wealth of potentially enjoyable and possibly great films ahead of me, I can't be too disappointed. I'm anticipating a good festival this year. I have my tickets, now I just want it to start.

Rarrrrrrrrrrrrggghhh!

So here's the thing.

I think I may be a monster. I'm worried that I may be a horrible, cruel, unsympathetic person.

Let me explain: this whole thing has arisen out of an episode of the This American Life radio show. I've written in the past about my love for the show, and two years on from writing that post, I remain utterly fascinated by it. I look forward to hearing each new episode, I'm still working my way through the 400-odd episode backlog of the show, and it still hasn't lost its hold on me. I love it, and if you've never heard it, I strongly encourage you to go to the website and just start listening. It's really great.

There's one story in particular that I would encourage you to listen to. It's from episode #363: Enforcers, and the story runs from 5:30 to 35:30 in the episode. So it's a long story (half an hour), but it's worth it. Feel free to go away, listen to it, and then come back.

Okay, so hopefully you've listened to it. If you haven't here's a quick summary. These three guys run this reverse-scam on someone running a Nigerian email scam. The three guys pose as a church, and then when the person running the scam (who incidentally really is Nigerian) asks for money, they tell him that if he travels to the neighbouring country of Chad, the representative from their church's mission will be able to meet him there to give him the money. Now, bear in mind, as far as the scammer knows, he's stealing from a church, taking money that is intended to help the people of the region. So the scammer travels across the border into Chad. But then the church's representative supposedly has difficulties getting to to where the scammer is, so the scammer has to go further to find the representative. And so slowly they draw the guy deeper and deeper into Chad, further and further away from home until finally he's 1400 miles away from home, in a city on the edge of Chad less than 100 miles from war-torn Darfur. In other words, this is a bad situation for the scammer. And then they left him there. For weeks, months even, constantly emailing him "it won't be long" to keep him around in this very dangerous situation. And he was apparently in real danger, but still he waited and waited for his money to come. Eventually the three guys got bored with him, so they emailed him and told him they had heard that his mother was dead. The scammer no doubt had a few moments of horror, but eventually got in contact with his family and discovered it was not true. And so the story ends, the scammer knows he's been played, goes home, and resumes scamming people.

Anyway, I loved that story, I genuinely think it's a fascinating story. In fact I told it to a few friends of mine, none of whom expressed any concerns about the story until I reached the part about the dead mother. Then people tended to speak up - "Oh, that's gone too far, that's not funny at all." Which I don't understand - I mean, I realise that hearing that your mother is dead is not good news, but it's not like she's really dead, and as soon as he gets in contact with his family (which you know became his first priority on receiving the news) he'll discover the lie. But the other thing I don't get is why it's the dead mother story that goes too far. I mean, why didn't my friends say anything when they abandoned the guy in a dangerous town right beside a war-torn country. Now, my friends all claimed that they had been concerned at that point, they just hadn't said anything. Maybe. But it was the dead mother story that prompted them to speak up, which would suggest that they thought that was worse than leaving the guy in Chad to begin with. And that I don't get. I don't see why telling an easily and quickly disproved lie, even one as personal and upsetting as "your mother is dead" is that much worse than putting someone in a life-threatening situation.

Anyway, there a reason why this has come up again, a couple of years after the episode aired. An interview that TAL host Ira Glass recently did has been posted on the show's website, and there's one point in the interview where they ask about instances where someone thinks they'll be the subject of a positive story, and it turns into a negative story. Ira's response?

It was a story we did about those guys who - you know those Nigerian e-mail scammers? There are guys who reverse-scammed those scammers, and a bunch of them got in contact with the radio show, saying "we're doing this really funny reverse-scam against those Nigerian scammers", and the reverse-scam basically involved - they tried to get one of those guys into a war zone in Sudan, and he nearly died, and it wasn't funny at all, and the guys seemed like monsters. But they didn't seem able to tell.

I remembered the show well, and I remember that at the time Ira wasn't entirely impressed with the guys - he clearly felt they had gone too far - but "monsters"? Really? Had the story been that unsympathetic to the reverse-scammers, had they really been presented that badly, and I completely missed it because I was on their side? So I listened to it again, and indeed the reverse-scammers really were presented very negatively, pretty much as monsters - laughing as they read his emails about his difficulties and troubles in Chad. And I missed that, because I had no problem with anything that they did.

Now, it's not like I'm entirely devoid of sympathy. Admittedly I don't have any sympathy for the scammer, nor to be honest do I have any sympathy for the scammer's victims (most of whom are, to be honest, fooled by their own greed). But listening to the story, I felt a lot of sympathy for a lot of people, chiefly the people who have to live in the town normally, whose lives are in this horrible dangerous town. I can't imagine how terrifying it must be to have to spend your life there, knowing that the prospect of a violent death is that close. So I do have sympathy, I just don't feel any sympathy for the scammer. This is a guy who came to the town, and then chose to stay there knowing it was dangerous, because of his own greed. The three guys baiting him didn't force him to stay, they just held out a choice, "our money or your life," and he wanted the money. He could have left at any time, but he chose to stay because he wanted to steal from a church money that was intended to help people. And he made it out alive - I would probably feel differently had he died in this situation, but since he didn't, so I don't need to worry about moral issues about responsibility and can just enjoy the story. So I can't understand why this guy gets any sympathy. Why are the three guys baiting him monsters, am I a monster to being on their side, and why is the thieving bastard trying to steal money intended for charitable purposes not a monster? I honestly can't understand it.

I mean, there's a little coda to the story where the scammer actually manages to do worse than try to steal charitable money from a church. Some time later, the guys are contacted again by the same scammer, and this time they pose as a father with a sick child. At one point, the guys tell the scammer "I need the money for an operation to save the life of my child," and the scammer says "give me your money, and the money you make will pay for the operation." The scammer was actively trying to steal money believing that without that money a child would die. And I don't see any ambiguity about that. That is evil. Pure evil. And from my point of view, someone as evil and hateful as that deserves everything that he went through. Every single moment of terror, of pain, of grief, all deserved. And I find it bizarre that anyone would argue that there is anyone else in the story that deserves the label of "monster". And yet the guy who makes the show that raised the whole issue thinks I'm viewing this story from the entirely wrong point of view.

So this is what I'm grappling with. Who are the monsters in this story, and if it's the three guys (which it seems is the position of both Ira and those friends that I told the story to), then what does it say about me that I am on their side? Does that make me a cruel and unfeeling and vindictive monster because I can't see how terrible they are? I like to think I'm a generally good nice person, and while I occasionally joke about hating all of humanity, I don't think I'm that bad. But who knows, perhaps my grumpy-old-man act isn't as much of an act as I thought it was. Perhaps it's hardened me to the point that I can easily dismiss the suffering of another person with a response of "he deserved it, the end." And the thought of actually being that person scares me.

1202 minutes

So here's the thing.

It was a big surprise when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced back last June that they were going to be having ten Best Picture nominees for this year's Oscars, rather than the five nominees that have been standard for the last sixty-odd years. The main reason for the change was to address concerns that the films being nominated just had no popular appeal, and that the nominations were going to more elitist films rather than popular entertainments. Just look at last year, when nominations went to films about a gay local politician or one guy interviewing another guy, while at the same time a well-made and hugely popular Batman film was completely ignored. Reduced viewerships for the Oscars were blamed on that fact - no-one is watching the Oscars because most people haven't even heard of Slumdog Millionaire, while not even the host of the Oscars saw The Reader, and therefore no-one cares enough about the films being nominated to see which one wins. Hopefully an expanded list of nominees would allow for some of the bigger popular films to get on the list, and therefore hopefully prompt fans of these films to watch the ceremony.

And it does seem to have worked - of the ten nominated films, five have grossed over $US100m. While the list does feature a number of the usual smaller, lower-profile films, there are a lot of films that people will have heard of and most likely seen. But the funny thing is that it wasn't necessary. It's easy to identify the five films that would have been nominated in any normal year, and of those five films, two (Avatar and Inglourious Basterds) were genuinely popular hits with a substantial fanbase. In other words, they expanded the number of nominees to allow for the inclusion of more popular films in a year when the popular films were going to be nominated anyway.

[Comments on all ten Best Picture films - Avatar; The Hurt Locker; Up In The Air; Precious (Based on the novel 'Push' by Sapphire); Inglourious Basterds; A Serious Man; Up; District 9; The Blind Side; and An Education - after the jump.]

Conspicuous consumption

So here's the thing.

I've written in the past about my excessive consumption of V energy drink, and my tendency to accumulate large numbers of bottles at my desk because I can't be bothered walking the 24 paces to put the bottles in the recycling bin over by the kitchen. As a result, the bottles would tend to only ever get thrown out when my manager told me that I need to get rid of them.

However, for most of last year, I actually became very good at removing my empty bottles daily, always aware that if I failed to, my manager would remind me that I needed to do so. All of a sudden, it was rare for a bottle to sit on my desk overnight. On one occasion she even praised me for having improved so much in the regular disposal of my bottles. However, my manager has been away for the last few weeks, and without her watchful eye, I sadly fell back into old habits.

So this is what my desk looked like when my manager returned from her break.



You see, it seems that while I am too lazy to expend a little amount of effort to dispose of my bottles, I will go to great lengths and expend a large amount of effort in order to not throw out my V bottles in a timely manner. For the last ten or eleven months, I was not disposing of my bottles in the recycling bin. Instead, I had a dedicated hiding place right by my desk where I would stash each day's empty bottles. (There were a couple of times when my manager actually walked into the room while I was in the middle of hiding that day's bottles, and I was certain I was caught, but apparently she never noticed a thing. Although the hiding place would move for a few weeks after each of these close calls, just to be on the safe side.) Then every couple of weeks I would call into the office out of hours, put my accumulated bottle collection in a box, and take them home to store in my garage, waiting for the day when I would cover my desk in V bottles. Fortunately it was timed perfectly, so that I had the exact number of bottles that I would require right at the point when my manager took a sufficiently extended break for the joke to work. (I know there is that one empty space on the desk, but it was always the intention for me to leave just enough room for me to work at the computer - the whole idea of the joke was that I was still trying to work in these severely constrained circumstances.)

When it came time to actually execute my plan, I realised that, since my intention was to drop the bottles off in the recycling bin close to my house once the joke was finished, it would be neccesary to rinse all the bottles. (Always rinse your recycling, kids.) Unfortunately, this was an aspect of the plan I hadn't previously prepared for. So, last Saturday afternoon, I sat in my lounge in front of the TV with a bucket of water, and slowly removed the lids of every bottle, rinsed out the inside of each bottle, put the lids back on each bottle, dried the bottles, and reboxed them all ready for the big event. That took five hours. Add the half hour that it took just to load my car with the boxes, and the nearly an-hour-and-a-half it took to actually set them all up on my desk, and we're looking at a good seven hours of work in just this last weekend for this whole thing. (Plus there's all the time involved in the extra weekend visits to the office to pick up that fortnight's bottle collection, and so on.) All this effort for a five second reaction. Clearing the desk was much faster - they were all gone after about fifteen minutes, although I did have help from the only other person in the office that knew in advance about the plan. (To give her some credit, the whole idea of doing all this came out of a conversation I had with this co-worker, when we were bouncing different ideas around for things that I could do if I started collecting all my V bottles. I'm not actually sure which one of us came up with the idea of doing this, but at the very least she contributed to the idea.)

And I do want to be very clear about one point. This really is my desk. I did this to myself. I didn't inconvenience anyone else but me. And, since my manager gets into work earlier than me, I ended up coming into work much earlier than normal in order to be there before she arrived, and I (rather awkwardly) did some work while I waited. Plus I had my desk cleared by the time I would normally start work, and I then worked a full day from that time, so none of this even took time away from my work. (If anything, it saved time at work, since over the past year it was faster to hide the bottles than it would have been to take them down to the recycling bins if I had been throwing them out - I saved fifteen seconds every day that I could put towards the office's work.)

The thing I liked about the idea was, firstly, the fact that it was in my view a very funny image. I laughed out loud when I actually finished setting it all up and stepped back to look at what I had created, I laughed again when I came into work this morning and saw it all set up. The photos don't quite capture the sheer absurdity of the scene. It really looked silly. But I think it also works because it shows my manager exactly why we need her at work to keep us/me under control, and reminds her exactly why she needed a break from us.

So how did my manager react? Well, her reaction wasn't initially positive - in fact, her first words were a much-more-serious-than-I-expected "you need to get those off your desk NOW," which had me worried I had gone too far. (In fact, I was wondering whether she thought I was planning on trying to work for the whole day with my desk like that. That was never the plan - they were always going to be cleared away pretty much immediately. And trust me - I was trying to work for a while before my manager arrived, and it was pretty difficult with all those bottles constraining your movement, so there is no way I could have lasted a full day.) Later she came into my office and, when I tried to prompt her to admit that it was a little bit funny, she stated that she couldn't possibly say that - but she was smiling at the time, so I don't think she was entirely unamused. (Incidentally, my manager is almost certainly going to read this so, welcome back to work, we missed you, and are glad you're back.)

And, if anyone is curious, there are 413 bottles and 31 cans on the table. (You can see the cans on the middle raised tray to the left, but what you can't see are the cans that are under the phone-book holder, which isn't high enough to fit any of the bottles underneath.) Almost all of these are of the sugar-free variety, but there are 4 normal V and 4 lemon V bottles that I bought on occasions when the stores were out of sugar-free. This equals 152.3 litres of V consumed by myself over a period of a little less than a year. Wow. That's rather a lot. And assuming a price of about $3.00 per bottle (a little lower than the standard price in order to allow for any purchases on special pricing), that means I spent... wow, I could have bought my laptop on one year's worth of V drinks. Hmmm. Something to think about. And then forget about.

And if you're wondering why none of the bottles have labels on them - well, the reason for that predates this whole plan. For some reason, back in late 2008 I just started removing the labels and sticking them together, wrapping each label around the top of the previous labels. Some 15-or-more months later, I now have the thing to the right. It's big, solid, and surprisingly heavy. I still have no idea why I made it, but every time I drink a extra bottle of V outside of work, I still take the bottle in to work just so that I can add the label to this thing, because it would be a waste to throw a perfectly good label away. (And it still annoys me every time I look at it and see the point where they changed the label design.)

Well, if you'll excuse me, I need to go. Countdown are selling bottles of V, 3 for $5 - that really is a great price. Plus I need to go to bed. For some reason I've been having terrible difficulty getting to sleep lately.

I'm with Coco

So here's the thing.

I'm not quite sure why I find this whole late-night NBC situation so fascinating. I mean, it doesn't affect me at all whether Jay Leno or Conan O'Brien host the Tonight Show, or what time they air. The only late night show we get in NZ is The Late Show With David Letterman, and while I used to watch his show every night for years, I've only been an occasional viewer for the last few years. I saw a couple of episodes of Jay Leno's Tonight Show a few years ago, and wasn't impressed at all, but I have liked the little of Conan that I've seen, both on Late Night and The Tonight Show. But really, all this doesn't affect me in the least. So why am I so interested by it?

Maybe it's just because it's a fascinating story. For those of you that aren't familiar with what is going on, for the last 55+ years The Tonight Show has aired on NBC at 11.35pm. When Johnny Carson left in 1992, after 30 years hosting the show, there was a really ugly changeover - David Letterman (who had been hosting Late Night at 12.35am) had long been presumed to be the person who would take over the show (and he was well-known to be Carson's preferred heir), but Jay Leno managed to get NBC to contract with him to take over the show. In fact, the whole saga resulted in a really excellent (and sadly out-of-print) book, as well as a TV movie. After losing The Tonight Show, Letterman left for CBS in 1993, and former SNL and Simpsons writer Conan O'Brien took over as host of the 12.35am Late Night show. Conan was not an experienced performer when he started (in fact, his first couple of years were notoriously awful), but he grew into the role and eventually became a rising star in the late-night talk-show world. So, back in 2004, Conan's contract was up for renewal, and he was receiving offers from competing networks offering him an earlier timeslot. At that time, Conan discussed these offers with NBC, which was understandably concerned about losing one of their big stars. But Conan was interested in The Tonight Show, which makes sense because it is one of the iconic television institutions in the US. Like almost every comic in America, Conan grew up watching Carson on The Tonight Show and dreaming of hosting it one day. But NBC obviously couldn't give The Tonight Show to Conan, because Leno was hosting it. So NBC went to Jay Leno, who agreed to resign in five years time and let Conan take over The Tonight Show. In a press release at the time, Leno is quoted as saying "In 2009, I'll be 59 years old and will have had this dream job for 17 years. I felt that the timing was right to plan for my successor and there is no one more qualified than Conan."

We come to 2009. NBC is generally and accurately reckoned to be a mess - which is disappointing because as a network it shows some of my favourite shows airing today (The Office, Chuck, Friday Night Lights, 30 Rock, etc). Meanwhile, Jay is reconsidering his decision to retire. He's committed to leaving The Tonight Show, but he doesn't want to. NBC panics that they might lose Leno to another network, and so offers him a talk show in primetime from 10pm to 11pm five nights a week - an opportunity that Leno jumps at. Meanwhile NBC is happy because it means that they don't lose Leno and they need five fewer hours of original programming a week - one whole week of Leno costs the same as one single hour-long drama series, so NBC saves a lot of money. Of course, a primetime talk show doesn't get as many viewers as the original dramas or comedies that used to air at 10pm but that doesn't matter because, even with lower viewer numbers, the reduced costs mean the 10pm hour is more profitable to NBC than previously. But reduced viewer numbers at 10pm means that there are much fewer people still watching NBC at 11pm, which is when the various NBC affiliates (that broadcast NBC shows in different regions) air their local news shows. And the 11pm news shows are huge money earners for the affiliates. Lower ratings at 10pm mean lower ratings at 11pm for the news shows. So NBC is saving a lot of money by showing Leno instead of original programming, but the affiliates are losing a lot of money and start to revolt. Meanwhile, Conan's ratings aren't great - Leno consistently beat Letterman in the ratings for the last 15 or so years, but they replace Leno with Conan and suddenly Letterman wins late-night. But that's inevitable - Conan needs time to build his audience at the earlier time, especially since his comic sensibility is so different to that of Leno. (And remember that Leno's ratings were also awful in his first couple of years - and he was already known to the Tonight Show audience, as he had guest hosted frequently, while Conan and his comedy style was entirely new to Tonight Show viewers - but Leno was given the time and opportunity to work and shape his show into something that did succeed.) Plus, if the affiliates' argument (that low ratings for Leno mean low ratings for the 11pm news) is true, logic dictates that those low ratings for news shows must also feed into low ratings for Conan. Plus, adding yet another talkshow to the mix means that the limited audience for NBC talkshows is further divided between Leno at 10pm, Conan at 11.30pm, and Jimmy Fallon at 12.30am (plus Carson Daly is there somewhere at 1.30am). In other words, Conan's low ratings are due in part to Leno's continued presence and failure in primetime. Besides, Conan was never going to start out with the same ratings on the Tonight Show as Leno was getting at the end of his run, and to expect that would have been unreasonable. Putting Conan in the show should have been about securing the future of late-night talk on NBC, and he needed to be given time to build the show into the success that it would have been, and should have been.

Unfortunately NBC panicked in the face of the affiliates' unhappiness, and so last week it announced that they are taking Leno off-air in a couple of weeks, and putting his show back to 11.35pm where it will air as a half-hour show. Conan keeps The Tonight Show, since he is contractually entitled to that, but it now airs at 12.05am, with flow-on effects for the even-later-night talk shows. Now, Conan is not happy, understandably. After all, The Tonight Show at 12.05am is actually The Tomorrow Show. So he puts out this awesome press release (which really is a must-read) in which he states that he will not host a Tonight Show that starts after midnight. He talks about the impact of this decision on the historic show, as well as the wider impact on the following late-night shows. It's a brilliant statement, and really forces NBC into a position where they need to make a decision between Leno and Conan. The whole thing turns into a complete fiasco, with pretty much every talk show host on television ripping into Leno and NBC - Letterman's discussions of the situation were tinged by his well-known hatred of Leno and NBC for taking The Tonight Show from him back in 1992, Craig Ferguson burnt all bridges with NBC by calling them "lying rat bastards", and Jimmy Kimmel proved more awesome than I ever would have imagined by performing his entire show as Jay Leno. (Two days later, when appearing on Leno's show, Kimmel hilariously ripped into Leno - in my favourite moment comparing Leno to Lucy pulling the football out from Charlie Brown - while the host just stood there plainly regretting the decision to invite Kimmel. It was awesome.) Meanwhile Conan, seemingly accepting that his time on the iconic Tonight Show is over only seven months after it started, basically went rogue, openly and angrily attacking Leno and NBC. Even just watching all this stuff in brief online clips on YouTube, as a viewer this whole fiasco has been phenomenal and resulted in some of the best television in a long time.

But how do I feel about all this? Not that it actually matters where one single unimportant person living in New Zealand thinks about this situation, but personally, I'm fully on the side of Conan. It's partly because, from the little I've seen of Conan, I think he is genuinely funny, and I don't think Leno is. Plus, Conan was involved in the completely brilliant Conan/Colbert/Stewart feud, which was the only good thing to come out of the 2007/08 Writers Strike, and which ended in a fight that was the single funniest moment of television that year. But mostly, I just think that what has happened here is wrong. Everything that I have read on this topic says that Leno chose to retire. It may have been a decision that he was asked to make by NBC, but ultimately it was Leno's choice to resign, and based on what is publicly known it seems disingenuous to suggest (as Leno has been doing lately) that NBC fired him from The Tonight Show. And Conan basically put his entire career on hold on the understanding that Leno had resigned and would be gone by the time he took over The Tonight Show. But Leno changed his mind once it was too late. Usually, that would just be tough luck, but instead, NBC kept Leno around, in an experiment that pretty much everyone that isn't an NBC executive knew was doomed to fail - as it did. But having Leno stay around also critically undermined Conan's ability to perform as expected.

And now it looks like Leno is going to be rewarded for all this. Current reports sound like Leno is getting The Tonight Show back at 11.35pm, and Conan is out of NBC, probably with a huge payout and the freedom to go to another broadcaster to make a new show. I hope this is incorrect, I really hope that Conan does get to keep The Tonight Show, but it really does look like Conan will be out of NBC in the next week or two. And if so, that result is wrong. Just wrong. And I feel this very strongly. The man who spoke so strongly on air back in 2004 about the show being a dynasty that you have and then you pass it on, and how he wanted to avoid all the in-fighting and ugliness that accompanied his taking over the show, so here you are Conan, here's the show - this guy changed his mind, he failed in his new project, so he's now given his old job back, and the guy to whom he passed on this dynasty is thrown out. The insane thing is that I suspect this whole fiasco has badly harmed Leno. When he does come back after the Olympics with his new Tonight Show with Jay Leno, I suspect that this mess will have tainted Leno to a degree that NBC hasn't predicted. He's lost the "everyday nice guy" public appearance, instead becoming the guy who bullied the new guy out of a job, and I don't see Leno's Tonight Show ever regaining the position as the number-1-rated late night talk show. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Leno rates lower than Conan did during his run. But by then it will be too late, and NBC will be stuck with Leno while Conan establishes himself over on Fox, and hopefully does well.

But, in my view, here's what NBC needs to do. They can't just make decisions based on this week's ratings, they need to look at what will put them in the most secure position in the long term. And the best long-term decision for them would be to drop Leno (or else give him a daytime show - I hear their daytime schedule isn't that great), keep Conan on The Tonight Show, and just accept that ratings will be down for the next while. Leno's no threat, since if he does manage to get a show on another network it will be close to a year before he goes to air, and in the meantime Conan's Tonight Show will have developed its audience and Leno will have lost many of his habitual viewers. And in a few years time, when both Letterman and Leno decide to retire (this time for real), you've got a polished show and an established host in Conan who will then be in a position to rule the 11.35pm slot for the next however-many years to come. But I don't see NBC taking this approach, because it requires them to consider the long-term consequences of their actions - and if recent actions have shown us one thing, it's that NBC doesn't know how to look long-term. Instead, they'll dump Conan in favour of Leno, and in a few years time run into a real succession problem when Leno does decide to retire. Who do you get to take over this pivotal franchise, when you've lost Conan, and none of the other people currently working on late-night quite seem to fit.

So there you are, NBC, some free advice on how to resolve your late-night programming dilemma. You're welcome. And if you don't take it, don't say I didn't warn you.

All Visuals Aside, There Are Real problems

So here's the thing.

I've had a few people ask me why I had problems with Avatar, and in some ways the answer comes back to one question - "Why the wheelchair? Why exactly is the main character paralysed and in a wheelchair? What does that contribute to the story?" - that points to a larger problem with the film.

The curious thing about Avatar is that I find myself recommending the film, although I have real issues with it. I wouldn't normally recommend a bad film just because of great special effects - I'm never going to suggest people see Transformers, no matter how good the robots look. But in this case, I have to encourage people to see the film, and in 3D if at all possible. The effects work is phenomenal, and just as ground-breaking as we've heard. CGI characters have never felt this real, this convincing, so tied to an actor's performance. The design of the world of Pandora is exquisite, detailed, and the 3D perfectly accentuates the world - it's not a film that is constantly reminding you that it is in 3D, it's just a film that uses the 3D to make the world seem more real. (I've previously mentioned my appreciation of such a use of 3D.) Plus, Cameron is one of the best action directors of all times, and in Avatar he gives us some phenomenal action scenes and some indelible moments. (There's one incredible moment in particular where a character gets into a mecha suit and jumps out of the ship as it explodes around him.) And it is for those merits - the beautiful world creation, the stunning effects work, the restrained but brilliant use of 3D, and the masterful execution of action sequences - that I strongly recommend the film. Just don't expect a good film.

My problems with Avatar really come back to the story. (And it's here that I'll start discussing spoilers for the film, so if you haven't seen it, be warned.) At the core of almost any good film, you need a good story. And I don't think Avatar has one. It's a very derivative story - guy goes to alien culture, is treated with suspicion but redeems himself, eventually feels more at home in the other culture than in his own, he falls in love, and finally fights alongside his alien brothers against his own kind. Change the blue aliens into Native Americans and you've basically got Dances With Wolves (and I hated Dances With Wolves). It's a fairly typical story of guilt over the assimilation of indigenous cultures, and Cameron seems simply satisfied to have disguised the story in science-fiction trappings, never trying to do anything different with the story's direction. Since I'd seen this exact plot with these exact developments saying the exact same thing in a dozen films (most of them better-written than Avatar), I never once found myself surprised by anything the film did, and that's just not a good thing.

Adding to my frustration is the fact that, for all the imagination poured into the creation of the world, there's very little put into the the culture of the Na'vi people that populate this world. Cameron had a linguistics expert help him create the Na'vi language (I noticed him mentioned in the end credits), but that's about all. They're very "in tune with nature", in the tiresome two-dimensional way that less-technological populations are usually portrayed as whenever a filmmaker wants to preach to the audience. In fact, they're so absurdly in tune with nature that the end of their ponytails have these strands that can apparently act as a form of USB connection, allowing the Na'vi to share their thoughts with the other animals of Pandora - this means that when riding a horse or a giant bird the Na'vi can simply think "Turn left" and the creature would respond. (Incidentally, these ponytail strands also seemingly function as genitals - they're used when two Na'vi mate, and early in the film, there's even a "Don't touch that, you'll go blind" joke about the strands. This makes one uncomfortable when thinking about the relationship between the Na'vi and the other Pandoran wildlife where such connections were made, especially as (if I remember correctly) similar phrases like being "bonded for life," are used to describe both Na'vi/Na'vi mates and Na'vi/wildlife connections. Let's not even think about what is actually happening when such a connection is forced on an unwilling animal, which we see happen several times.) Anyway, back to my point, this is the sole piece of information we have about the Na'vi - they are in touch with nature - and the film doesn't seem that interested in otherwise exploring the lives of the Na'vi tribe to any great degree. This all creates a rather hollow culture on which the story rests.

But it's not just the Na'vi that are the victims of shallow characterisation. Pretty much everyone in the film, from the tough military colonel to the geeky scientist workmate, is a two-dimensional figure. Possibly the worst example is Giovanni Ribisi's role as the head of the mining corporation - a character written as such a cliche of an evil corporate guy that the very first moment we meet him he's practicing his golf putting in the middle of a busy monitoring room. Remember in Aliens how, when we first meet the Paul Reiser character, he seems like a corporate jerk, but he manages to win Ripley over and seems like he might be a nice guy, which made his eventual betrayal that much harder. No such ambiguity or uncertainty of characterisation here. Ribisi starts the film self-centred, money-oriented, and callous to the Na'vi, and through the film he continues to be self-centred, money-oriented, and callous, until the end of the film, at which point we find him self-centred, money-oriented, and callous, although mildly humbled by being on the losing side.

Fortunately some of the actors (particularly Sigourney Weaver and Stephen Lang) are at least able to create interesting characters out of the minimal material they're given, and Zoe Saldana's performance as the main Na'vi character Neytiri is easily the best performance of a CG character since Gollum, but most of the actors seem to struggle in making their characters seem like real people. Sam Worthington in particular falls short here. I've never seen him before, although he seems to have been appointed as the "next big thing", with main roles in Terminator Salvation, Avatar, and the upcoming Clash of the Titans. And based on this film, I'm not sure why. He just seems like a blandly-good-looking passable-tough-guy, able to play the part of the typical action-film leading hero but without the charisma and personality of an actual star. In neither the moments where we see Sam Worthington on screen, nor when we see him as interpreted by the CG-artists creating his avatars, does he seem like he has any personality at all. Perhaps he does better when he has a good script and a real character to work with, but from what I see in Avatar, I just can't see anything about him that holds the eye. Even his admitted good looks come across as pretty generic - it's significant that, while the avatars are modelled on the actors playing them and the other actors are instantly identifiable, I can see nothing obviously Sam Worthington in his avatar, even when the two are on screen at the same time to facilitate direct comparisons between the two. (Not that I'm criticising his looks - he's a hundred times better-looking than I ever will be, but then I'm not trying to be a movie star.) The fact is, based on this film, I struggle to see anything in Worthington that allows him to carry a film and a role like this.

But I'm getting off-track from my main problem with Avatar, which is with the core storytelling in the film. I come back to the question at the start of this post - why did Cameron decide to put Sully in a wheelchair? In the first couple of minutes of the film we are presented with two core pieces of information. Firstly, our hero Sully is a Marine who was paralysed in conflict - this I knew about in advance. The second piece of information surprised me - it seems that his twin brother was actually working on the avatar program, but he was mugged and killed shortly before the film starts. Fortunately since Jake Sully is a genetic match for his identical twin, he is therefore compatible with his avatar, and therefore the company hires him to fill the space and ensure the expensive avatar made for his brother does not go to waste.

Now, when I first discovered that the main character was paralysed, I thought that could be quite a good idea. What would it be like, having not walked in years, to find yourself able to walk again, but in an alien body and not your own? That seemed like an area that could be interesting to explore. But I don't think the film ever actually goes there. Now, there is one moment when some people say the film does go there - this would be Sully's first scene in the avatar, where he gets excited and starts running and jumping - but to be honest I don't see it, for one very simple reason: if I, as an able-bodied person, was to suddenly find myself in a 12-foot-tall alien body, the first thing I would do would be to run around, jump, exclaim how great and how cool this was, and generally test the body out. I can see nothing in the scene that actually shows that this is what it is like for Sully as a person with a disability walking for the first time in years, as opposed to an able-bodied person just trying out this cool new experience. Now, ordinarily, I would give the filmmaker the benefit of the doubt, in fact probably credit the filmmaker for being subtle in making such a point. Except that the Cameron that made this film is not a subtle filmmaker. Pretty much every point he tries to make in the film is clumsily stated outright - if you're lucky, you'll at least get the point made in actual dialogue, but too often he resorts to either an ever-present voiceover or one of Sully's videologs to hammer home his point. (For example, in one moment, Sully's avatar is flying his banshee, and the camera pans up to show this huge dragon creature flying above. A good filmmaker would leave it there, but Cameron needed to include a voiceover spelling out the obvious point that "there's always a bigger hunter." And there are many more examples of excessive and unnecessary explanation throughout the film.) The simple fact is that the Cameron that made this film would at least have had Sully record a videolog to talk about how strange it was to be walking again after living for so long with a disability, and the absence of that scene doesn't point to Cameron's subtlety as a filmmaker, but rather suggests he failed as a screenwriter to make use of one of the defining characteristics of his main character.

Speaking of Cameron's failings as a screenwriter, don't forget the complicated backstory that can only get Sully into the avatar program by inventing a deceased identical twin brother. Introducing an identical twin brother is rarely a good sign of a well-developed plot, especially when the brother is so unimportant that we never even get to meet him (except as a corpse being cremated). And why is this backstory necessary? What does it achieve? It gets a military-trained person on the avatar program, and it ensures he has no prior training on the Na'vi culture, thus making him a blank slate that the Na'vi can work with. But if that's all that you are trying to achieve, then there are other ways you could achieve that without going to the complications of creating an elaborate backstory that involves an identical twin brother that is never referred to after ten minutes. It's almost as though Cameron invented the rules for how the avatar program, and then realised he needed a complicated backstory to achieve what he wanted within the constraints of those rules, rather than just modifying the imaginary rules for the imaginary avatar program to better facilitate the story he was telling.

Plus, this backstory means that Sully arrives in the programme with an explicitly stated and restated lack of training - which makes his initial avatar experience somewhat difficult to accept. Remember that the avatar program involves a person entering the body of a twelve-foot-tall alien. That has got to be disorienting - so disorienting that even his experienced co-workers must ease into using their bodies, conducting tedious finger-to-thumb-touch exercises each time they use their avatar. But Sully? Literally two minutes after entering his avatar body, a body so new to him that he's surprised by his tail, Sully is running and jumping across a courtyard. Are there any consequences for him? Does he eventually stumble over his unaccustomed long limbs? Does he push his new body to its limits because he doesn't know better? Of course not. Let's put this in context. I once bought a pair of shoes, and didn't notice until afterwards that the soles of these shoes were thicker than I was used to. It was a subtle difference - it added maybe a couple of millimetres to my height - but I could definitely feel it, and for a day or two actually had to focus on my walking to avoid stumbling. All because of a couple of extra millimetres of height. This guy Sully instantly adjusts to a body twice as tall as his normal body. And don't forget, he hasn't walked at all in however many years. Now, imagine that they repaired Sully's paralysis and somehow magically removed all the substantial muscle wastage in his legs, so that he was in the exact same condition as prior to the injury. He would still require months of work just to learn to walk again in his own body. But he has no problem at all walking, running, jumping, in an alien body twice as tall as the average human. Does this seem unbelievable to anyone?

Which brings me back to Sully's paralysis: if (as I believe) the film doesn't explore how the avatar experience affects Sully as a paralysed person, does his paralysis come into play in any other ways? No, not really. Sure, Col. Quaritch promises to give Sully his legs back if Sully helps him, but there's a whole heap of other things Quaritch could offer a non-paralysed Sully that would achieve the exact same end. The simple fact is, you could amend maybe a half-dozen lines in the film and in so doing pretty much remove Sully's paralysis from the film without anyone noticing, because nothing in the film ever relies on his paralysis. And that's a sure sign of an unnecessary plot element.

There is one other moment where Sully's injury does get referenced, and it brings me to possibly the most dramatically significant moment in the film, and one that Cameron flubs spectacularly - the moment of "the choice". This is the moment where Sully has to choose between his own interests and those of the Na'vi people. Cameron rather strangely manages to both have that moment too early and as a result doesn't have that moment at all. Here's what I mean. Quaritch comes to Sully at one point, says "You've done well, I've arranged for you to have that operation, you'll be out of that wheelchair in no time." Now, at that moment, Sully says, with seemingly genuine sincerity, "Thank you. I just want to go through one last ceremony, then I'll be a member of the tribe and convince them to leave their home like you want. Then I'll come back and get the operation." In other words, when he's offered a chance to get his paralysis fixed, there's never any doubt that he's siding with the humans. By the time he does side with the Na'vi, he's not put in a moment of conflict where he has to decide whether to betray the Na'vi in order to benefit himself and get his injury repaired, or betray the humans and spend the rest of his life as a paralysed human living vicariously through his avatar. Instead, his decision to side with the Na'vi comes in an instant, he responds instinctively to the situation, at least partly because there's a bloody great big tank about to run him over. By the next time he meets up with the humans and Quaritch, he's already burnt his bridges - getting his legs back is no longer a possibility. As a result, we never actually get a moment where Sully considers the personal consequences of siding with the Na'vi and chooses to do so anyway. From a dramatic viewpoint, that's a major problem.

There's also a scene that gets replayed several times through the film, where one character disconnects someone else from the system while they are in their avatar body. Several times we are told "You can't disconnect someone while they're in their avatar, it's dangerous." Just how and why it's dangerous is never clear, because it happens several times with no obvious ill-effects to anyone. (Compare that to The Matrix, where we actually see people die when they are disconnected while in the matrix.) Once again, it seems like Cameron came up with the rules - it's dangerous to unplug someone - but then it was never convenient in his story to show just why it was dangerous, so he didn't and just left these vague undefined references hanging there because those are the rules of this world. As a result, unplugging someone from their avatar ends up seeming like pulling out a USB drive without going through the "safely remove" process - you know you probably shouldn't do it, but nothing ever happens if you do do it. Whenever you unexpectedly rip someone out of one body and force them into another body when they are not prepared for it, there should be consequences, the audience should feel as though there is some risk to such a procedure. And the fact that by the end of the film there is no sense of danger when someone is once again disconnected is another pointer to the half-hearted poorly-developed nature of Cameron's writing of this story.

So I've gone a long way to make my main point: James Cameron seems to have become so caught up in imagining every detail of Pandora, down to the characteristics of the rocks, and so caught up in trying to achieve (admittedly impressive) advances in the creation of CG-characters, that he's forgotten to really work on the script, which feels very much like a first draft. The characters are never alive, there are interesting ideas set up but then either abandoned or just never used to their dramatic potential, and if you strip away the effects, you're left with an underdeveloped film that just failed to hold my interest.

Ultimately, my main problem is that I feel like I've been to see Oz the Great and Powerful, but behind the smoke and booming voice there's just a pathetic man hiding behind a curtain. And I'm deeply disappointed that this is my reaction to the film, because I wanted it to be great. I had been keeping an eye on the film for the last decade, and was thrilled when filming finally started. I had a friend who was working on the effects for the film, and it took everything I had not to ask about it every time I saw him. On Avatar Day a few months ago, I got up early to download the trailer and watched it several times before work, then took an early and extended lunch break and queued for an hour to get tickets for the free 20-minute preview of the film. And that preview really had me buzzing about the film, convinced that it would be as incredible as I had been hoping. But that preview had just been short snippets of the film, mostly action sequences - Sully's avatar being chased through the forest by a large creature, or taming the banshee - that didn't really give much sense of the story itself. Seen in context of the whole film, those moments are still as brilliant and thrilling as they were in the previews, but the film surrounding them is sadly flawed.

It's frustrating to look at the box-office results at the moment, and see that such a difficult film is on track to finish as the second-highest grossing film of all time, (behind another problematic James Cameron film, Titanic.) It's frustrating because as much as I like Cameron (and I really do), he's not such a great a filmmaker that he deserves those spots, and especially not with these two films (which are probably his two weakest). I just get the sense that, while there is a small core of people like me that feel disappointed and frustrated by the film, most people are just so wowed by the spectacle that they are blind to its failings as a film. One of the most shocking things about Avatar is just how often I've heard people compare it to Star Wars. I just don't see it. The simple fact is, for pretty much every effect-heavy film, the effects will eventually look bad, and then you're left with every other aspect of the filmmaking to determine the place of that film in cinematic history.* We still watch Star Wars because the characters are great, the story is gripping, the dialogue has a few clunkers but is generally well-written, and the action scenes are phenomenal. Only one of these factors is true for Avatar, and I don't think great action scenes are enough to overcome the film's many other flaws. It's not that it's a bad film, necessarily, but it is a deeply deeply flawed film. And this is why Avatar was easily the most disappointing film of 2009 for me.

* (There is one exception to this rule. I don't know how they did it, but forty years after it was made, the effects in 2001: A Space Odyssey are still incredble and convincing. Fortunately, the film itself is still great as well.)