Generation Kill
Channel 4
True Blood
Channel 4
As a patriotic tube-lover, I find few things more galling than fellow viewers who boast they “only watch US imports” because American televison is streets ahead of our home-grown output. While this is patently absurd (at its best, British TV is superb and is sold around the world), you can sometimes see what they mean. Just now, for example, the BBC is pumping out safe and pointless costume revival Emma, while Channel 4 has imported two new hard-edged drama series from that hit factory in the United States, HBO.
The more serious of these, Generation Kill, is a bleak vision of the army which invaded Iraq, filtered through the memoirs of Rolling Stone journalist Evan Wright and the scriptwriters of cult cop show The Wire. (Im)pure entertainment is the mission of True Blood, part of the current revival of interest in all things vampiric and designed for laughs as much as titillation.
Both dramas share the maxed-out cynicism, amoral humour and explicit sex and violence currently in vogue – especially among the under-30s. Both have the benefit of scripts which clearly matter to those who created them – in the case of True Blood, the writers of rich and strange past drama Six Feet Under.
It pains me to say it, but too often British TV scripts give the impression that their writers are coasting (same old sitcoms), slumming it (would rather be writing a novel or filmscript) or – thanks to nervous and blinkered TV executives – running scared of causing offence to anyone or anything. That’s not to say that most US scriptwriters are literary geniuses. We only see the cream of the crop, after all.
Among British TV scriptwriters just now, some, such as Peter Bowker (Occupation and Desperate Romantics) and Toby Whithouse (Being Human), do seem to be tuning in to a new and edgy zeitgeist. Cutting their teeth on obscure digital channels seems to encourage the creativity of US scriptwriters. Let’s hope it is having the same effect over here.
In the meantime, there’s a blast of raw testosterone coming our way from Generation Kill, where the grunts spout the most offensive dialogue imaginable, at the
expense of peace-loving faggots, tree-hugging transsexuals, inferior races (that would be all of them) and even the all-American school kids who write them letters of encouragement, only to become the butt of paedophile innuendo. “Hey, buddy – it’s 10 in the morning, you should change out of your pyjamas”, calls one soldier to an Iraqi civilian as his Humvee sweeps past. “Marines don’t need a PX”, opines another, “we’re about to loot and pillage a country.” Officers are uniformly complacent and negligent or obsessively deranged, Catch-22-style, worrying more about their men’s personal grooming habits than the lack of armoured cars and other vital equipment.
It may have a sharp bite, but how accurate is all this? You do find yourself wondering: were the Marines playing up to the presence of an embedded journalist? If not, it certainly explains a lot.
True Blood is light relief after all that. A feast of smart and superior trash TV, it is pitched somewhere between Twin Peaks and Torchwood. In the near future, the invention of synthetic blood has enabled the world’s vampires to come out of the closet/coffin, demanding their civil rights along with other oppressed minorities.
In a hick town in the American Deep South, the redneck inhabitants are far from convinced. When vampires move into town they are targeted first by “fang-bangers” (ladies and gents who fancy a nibble) and then by violent thugs hoping to sell real vampire blood (eh?) as an aphrodisiac.
Psychic waitress Sookie (Anna Paquin, the moppet from The Piano) falls for sexy vampire Bill (Brit actor Stephen Moyer), which causes no end of strife. Everyone – straight, gay, black, white, vampire, human – seems to have the hots for everyone else. There are lashings of sex and nudity, along with an air of dreamy, creepy, sleazy unreality. Now then – don’t all rush for that TV remote at once. l
Helen Chappell
The devil you know in Heath Ledger’s curtain call
The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus
Director: Terry Gilliam
Pontypool
Director: Bruce McDonald
Considering the dramas that bedevilled its production off-set – the sudden death of leading man Heath Ledger – Terry Gilliam’s typically overstuffed fantasy-extravaganza The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus, while far from the director’s best work, is also by no means the disaster many had predicted.
Although it runs out of steam some way before the end, there’s much to like about this loopily episodic fable about Dr Parnassus (Christopher Plummer), a 1,000-year-old mystic who arrives in modern-day London – he lodges amid the spectacular industrial ruins of Battersea Power Station – with a horse-drawn, portable mini-theatre that possesses magical powers. Those who pass through a flimsy-looking stage-mirror find themselves transported to the weird universes of their own wildest imaginings. These shenanigans are somehow connected with a bargain struck between Parnassus and the Devil, Mr Nick (Tom Waits, having fun in bowler-hat and 1920s-St-Louis-dandy garb) – a Mephistophelean deal involving Parnassus’ teenage daughter (Lily Cole) that is drawing imminently close to pay-up time.
The emergency casting strategy implemented to mask Ledger’s absence from the shoot – whereby his amnesiac character, a possibly nefarious charity-organiser named Tony, is played in various alternate-reality sequences by Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell – works sufficiently smoothly that you’d be forgiven for presuming it was always the plan. And whereas Ledger’s accent wanders waywardly from “Cockerneeland” to Australia and back (his demise preventing the industry’s now-standard post-synching of dialogue), the stand-ins keep much tighter diction control. Depp’s cameo in particular is a deftly disarming delight – so much so that it’s a bit of a shame he only gets a few minutes of screen time. And while the picture falls apart during the longer Farrell interlude towards the end, that’s a failing of the script rather than the actor.
Among numerous diverting details, one particularly pleasant surprise is the contribution of model-turned-actress Cole, whose winsomely pre-Raphaelite looks belie her spirited, invaluable dynamism – crucial in what’s too often a flabby, unstructured rodomontade. The nebulous nature of the whole millennium-hopping Faustian-pact premise means it’s frequently hard to work out what’s going or why. And it’s regrettable that while the film harps on about the importance of imagination and free-thinking, it does so while recycling countless fantasy-picture ideas and tropes dating back at least as far as Jack Clayton’s Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983) and even George Pal’s 7 Faces of Dr Lao (1964).
Indeed, many aspects are naggingly over-familiar from previous Gilliam enterprises from The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988) to his previous Ledger collaboration, the similarly wayward The Brothers Grimm (2005). In the present decade, Tarsem Singh’s The Fall (2006) and Dave McKean’s MirrorMask (2004) exuded more genuine originality and more nimbly transcended their budgetary limitations. That said, neither of those films managed to find much of an audience, lacking the tragic circumstances that threatened to derail this particular enterprise but also (a slight silverish lining to a pitch-black cloud) ensured it enormous inadvertent publicity.
Sneaking into a much smaller number of cinemas than – and with only a fraction of the hoopla accorded to – Parnassus, is a movie rather more deserving of your cash. From Christopher Plummer’s homeland of Canada comes Pontypool, an admirably inventive low-budget horror comedy from director Bruce McDonald.
McDonald’s previous features made little splash beyond the film-festival circuit, and his CV is chock-full of small-screen work. Now 50, he’s unlikely to eclipse David Cronenberg among Canadian auteurs – but with the ‘”King of Venereal” Horror’ increasingly concentrating on more mainstream projects, such as Eastern Promises, there’s a gap in the market for offbeat and gruesome chillers from the frozen north.
Based on a sophisticated script by Tony Burgess, who has adapted his 1998 novel Pontypool Changes Everything, the showcases an irresistible turn from veteran Nova Scotian thespian Stephen McHattie. A craggy-faced supporting-player in Hollywood fare such as Watchmen, McHattie was memorable as the older gangster in A History of Violence.
Here, granted a rare leading role – half the movie consists of close-ups of life-worn features under a snazzy cowboy hat – he rips into his lines with barnstorming gusto.
This fits his character perfectly: Grant Mazzy is a larger-than-life, eloquently erudite (he quotes Roland Barthes – on air) former big-city DJ now broadcasting – from a station in a former church – a breakfast show to the folks of Pontypool, a real-life town “100 kilometres from Toronto”.
The setup nods to John Carpenter’s masterpiece The Fog (1980), but whereas Carpenter intercut his DJ sequences with action-scenes unfolding in the surrounding area, McDonald prefers the cost-cutting approach of keeping his cameras almost entirely within the station walls. Pontypool might actually function best as a War of the Worlds-type radio play and an edited version of the soundtrack has been broadcast in Canada.
As well as mining some rich, deadpan-droll humour from the mechanics of live radio – the interplay between presenter, producers, technicians and guests – this claustrophobic, verbal-centric method leaves the viewer to imagine (in a throwback to previous genre classics of cinema and literature) the horrors that are engulfing the hapless townspeople, as relayed to Mazzy by his team of roving reporters.
Discovering the exact nature of these horrors, and experiencing the gradually escalating nature of the cataclysm, is part of the fun. The infection is spread by a manner so weird and unusual it doesn’t really matter that it doesn’t quite make convincingly plausible sense. Suffice to say that McDonald and Burgess manage to find new angles on the clapped-out zombie sub-genre, while also endorsing the title of a well-known 1986 Laurie Anderson track. It’s all very amusing midnight-movie fun, although the score is somewhat over-emphatic and, as sometimes happened with early Cronenberg, things do fall apart in the final act.
Neil Young
