atconsul Reviews

Dopesick (2021)

Nuanced, but probably not enough to prompt the full self-examination needed.

[8/10 · 2 May 2024]

Nuanced, but probably not enough to prompt the full self-examination needed. Too much left implicit in the words and action.

As soon as I saw the Sackler name chiselled into limestone in Roman Italic above the gallery entrance I had only one thought. The signs are always there when ordinary flawed men are elevated so. How had another rich self-righteous git made enough dodgy money to buy a temporary and doomed attempt at eternal respectability. As the adage goes, money can buy you fame, but it can't buy you to be well thought of, especially in a mini-series (vide Getty).

At the time I didn't know what Sackler had done, how the money had been made, but I did know that things like the ones portrayed in this miniseries must have happened. For a moment in that gallery nice people, who in a righteous system would have done what they were about to do anyway, were going to stand under a Sackler banner and give Sackler the credit for curating great art, too.

The reality is that there was never anything noteworthy about what the Sacklers and Purdue Pharma had done, other than that they had found a neat way to market old oil. Opium is opium however it is spun. Let a patient use it for more than a short intervention and for some it is destined to become their only friend, albeit a false one. Humans experience pain. Taking opium to relieve pain will extract a high cost that is only justified in some circumstances. None of this justifies crediting that damn family with anything.

But as I've just also binge-watched Drop Out I couldn't help remembering the words of George Schultz there, "It's not that I couldn't admit I was wrong: I just chose not to see it. Isn't it amazing how far decent people will go when they're sure they're right."

So I have to admit that, despite the wholly justified fervour of the retrospective clamour to lynch the Sacklers, the fact is that these people were tapping in to a real need, and the reality is that, albeit fuelled by their own training in superiority, entitlement and privilege these highly-educated medical executive sons of medical and pharmacological executives will, at least at first, have believed that their self-interest was enlightened, and that it was a non-zero-sum game in which everyone gained in a new world where humans no longer have to put up with the misery of pain. Like the addicts they created, they were locked into the rewired brain that perpetuated the line of thought even when evidence mounted for its doom. Likewise the regulators. And the politicians. And the ordinary doctors. And the rest. For the Sacklers and SOME of the others, of course the money drove the whole process into American Overdrive.

Thus I deeply regret that the production team has chosen to take the easy line that thinks a lot about Evil People and often portrays them as comic cardboard cut-out characters in a gothic melodrama. True this series has many redeeming features and many nuances. Michael Keaton has created himself a great part, one such (Will Poulter) emerges from amongst the Oxycontin sales force, but we scarcely see conflicted people amongst the regulators and politicians and that just can't be right. There is so much more to understand about why good people stay silent or don't see clearly in such circumstances. Addiction to the money, and NDAs, are only part of the picture.

Here's a few questions the whole thing stimulated in me, some still TBD:

Why didn't the salesman sign the NDA and take the $75000 on offer, and why didn't he follow through in the space he had negotiated himself? Was re-training as a lawyer his method of defending himself, of fighting back or of a path to moral redemption? TBD

How can a legal system that takes itself seriously allow NDAs to silence the reporting of lawbreaking? TBD

Why are free market societies repeatedly prepared to allow private capital to take all the gain but have all the downside socialised? I guess it's considered an acceptable cost of having exuberance. TBD

Why did no researchers, doctors and medics, regulators or anyone else not do what any undergraduate would have done and verify the single source Purdue cited about percentage of patients who became addicted? Actually I think the series misrepresented this one. There is respectable primary research to support the Purdue position too, although the research on both sides is still surprisingly and disappointingly poor in total. Sorry if that's too much nuance for some.

Why did none of the targeted market of doctors, hospitals, universities and their support systems unpick the dubious research that Purdue had funded? Because it's cleverly done and, inconveniently for the main story, often with the best of motives that are genuinely blind to the source of funds, and some of it will turn out to be true, too. Again, sorry if that's inconvenient.

I did like Michael Stuhlbarg as Sackler. Often quietly spoken, the silent assassin that characterises the educated elite megalomaniac who so often emerges at the top of such regulated industries, uninterested in hearing bad news, less still personally dealing with it, taking all the sales credit, admitting none of the cost of sales blame: that is the game.

As another reviewer observes here, the executives are "deliberately unlikeable characters with no redeeming attributes, and every other scene with them is shot in some extravagant mansion or at a cocktail party."

Yes that's true, but that's because it IS true. The megaritch actually ARE like this: stuffed, empty, sociopathic, used to being attended to, served, fawned over and told how great they are, swathed in a cold carapace that admits little enduring humanity, and unable to break through to feel the lives of others even in their own 'social' circle, let alone that of ordinary people, especially the customers so many of them extol but so few can serve (as in wash the feet of I mean).

The problem with all these portrayals is you have to pitch this Master of the Universe act so carefully. Hollywood actors shouldn't have too much problem, as they meet enough of them, and some of them actually are them. But who wants to convey a part with no normal human feelings? And how DO you do it without turning it into a melodramatic pastiche, or a witless comedy caper act like the Walgreen exec's in Drop Out or Tom Hanks in Bonfire of the Vanities? Not so easy, and I think Stuhlbarg has more or less got it here, understated and clear.

There is a reason the series has a jumpy timeline that some have found annoying. Despite the material, it needs a gimmick to keep this mainstream, yet still run to more than SEVEN hours TV. I guess most folk don't really want to engage any deeper with what's wrong with NDAs, light-touch regulation, funding of pharmaceutical research, revolving door appointments in public service and so on, so the only way to liven this up is to mess with the timeline and sprinkle in a few canards, like the nature of freedom in Eureka Springs. These distractions partly obscure the truths behind the headline: that there is a trade-off between the benefits of pain-relief and the risks and costs of dependency. There is a line and for sure Sackler exuberance stepped well beyond it, and so did the USA, from whom the rest of the world surely have nothing to learn in this respect.

Overall I can't fault this series too much even though I think it's a shame Rosario Dawson didn't get even more screen time. I liked the little compare-and-contrast thing, where her passionate intense and direct prosecution of her cause faces off against Stuhlbarg's sang-froid intense and direct pursuit of more sales, with every one else looking on wishing they'd be more compromising. Unlike some 'campaigning' based-on-fact miniseries this one largely seems to have avoided dividing its audience down familiar US party lines and, despite a few addicts of free markets still struggling with cognitive dissonance, has attracted an extraordinarily high score across the spectrum of viewers, as it has from me.

Oppenheimer (I) (2023)

Restrained, wordy, and thoughtful if loud

[7/10 · 27 July 2023]

Great news: there are none of the usually-mandatory cliche deep-penetration synth bass drum booms banging out the backing track in feeble attempt at punctuating excitement here.

Less great news: this is still one of the loudest films I've been to. It's not a spoiler to report that there's a nuclear explosion in here, but that's not the noisy bit.

I'm so pleased Christopher Nolan made this film. It has integrity. It tells a true story accurately. It sets its period tone perfectly. It helps me feel how it would have been there. It runs at a stunning pace for three hours even though it focuses only on person and processes, not the project. It is a biopic that navigates a thin dramatic thread between dullness and inaccessibility. Great performances are drawn from a rich cast. Intense internal moments are vividly drawn into view (often by sound). Conflicted and flawed people are seen wrestling with their demons. The arc of the man is drawn from young scientist to feted A-list former megastar. In style it is Nolan, in substance it is Oppenheimer.

I'm fascinated that Nolan has achieved this despite avoiding fiction (sure some of the ideas are turned into set piece imaginatives) and despite eschewing some of the tastier material on offer, for example the extent of Oppenheimer's indiscreet promiscuity (and that of some of the other notoriously randy scientists), his mystical spiritual and metaphysical excursions, the million-person scope of the military-industrial machine needed to make all that uranium, plutonium and all the rest, and the true results of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A lot of chat has centred around Nolan tropes, but in reality it is very conventionally told (spoiler: Tristram Shandy is not a linear narrative either) albeit with great skill, and wordy enough to be the screenplay son of a stage production. I've no idea how it benefited from IMAX 70mm film or the absence of CGI: it seems like the folk that marketed the film have gone with what they thought it would be rather than what it is.

I would perhaps have liked Oppenheimer to have been more fleshed out in other respects, for example to demonstrate his unexpected ability to see the big picture in complex science and engineering problem-solving, his powers of comprehension of the top physics questions of his day, his own insights and contributions to hard science (his work in the foothills of black hole discovery is hinted at), the many Nobel laureates he taught, and the duality of his open polymath/swaggering dilettante reputations. But perhaps this film is just an invitation to further discovery and discourse. It's a film that walks a delicate line that declines to peer too far into the scientific thinking of professional science thinkers.

My companion tells me that there was a lot of hard concentration to do in the detail. I agree there are a lot of qualitative aspects of astro, nuclear, and quantum physics here, although most people will be pleased to know this is accomplished with Absolutely NO Equations (Ok there are some on the blackboards). I thought there were a lot of famous physicists to absorb, too: gosh - those guys were at Solvay too: amazing to think that Oppenheimer was once at University with Heisenberg, Pauli, Fermi and Dirac and all the other idea-loaded personalities just out of view, some of whom, like Bohr (Kenneth Branagh) are played almost for laughs, although Teller (Benny Safdie) is depicted carefully without caricature.

Nolan chooses to tell much of the story through the lens of the process, led by Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) man Strauss (a very different, smoke-filled room operating, Robert Downey Jr), that withdrew Oppenheimer's security clearance in 1954, thus ending his career as a practising nuclear researcher. This acts as a narrative device that summarises Oppenheimer's career and places its trajectory alongside that of Einstein's, with the old man (Tom Conti) a more crumpled and humbled laureate than we often see. I enjoyed the Einstein contrast, but the AEC process places Strauss's ambition and revenge at centre stage in Oppenheimer's movie, which is not a perfect result and, like any film this long, would benefit from a sharper edit that could well focus on the 'courtroom' (AEC and Congress) scenes. Perhaps Mr Nolan needs a best mate.

Cillian Murphy is marvellous throughout. Learner, thinker, teacher, lover, activist, decision-maker, director, leader, triumphalist, doubter, lobbyist, defendant, emeritus, celebrity ... he owns the sweep.

One more reservation I have is that I don't sense anyone will come out of the cinema deeply moved by this. I think that's intentional, it is certainly a result of Nolan's method here: it doesn't manipulate our emotions like it could, and doesn't open us up much to self-loathing regret. If Nolan wanted this he would emote on the human story of the atrocity that was each of the bombs dropped. But he doesn't linger, and I for one preferred it this way. I don't need to wake to the horror, I've always lived it. Perhaps though, those younger than me will need the awakening, and I wonder if they will get it.

Whilst with the benefit of time I doubt this will be rated a truly great movie, I do think this is as good as a historical biopic can get, has added Factor Nolan, includes the virtue of restraint, and hence overall is easily worth a 7, even if my own personal jury is out on the sound design. Those of a similar disposition should consider taking earplugs.

The Rig (2023– )

Oil rig eats promising production team

[2/10 · 11 January 2023]

Oil rig eats promising production team

Not sure why some people thought the scenery was Dr Who cardboard with actors green-screened in. Despite the woeful CGI there is a real rig starring somewhere in here, complete with deck plates, pipework flanges and strings of open-tread stairwell, typical wear and ageing, grease marks, puddles and the multitude of work-related signage, notes and tools stuck in all the old familiar places. Just like the ones I worked on more than 40 years ago, with flat-screens (well, computers even) -and women- retro-fitted and apparently still no fixed line comms to shore. It's the best part. Only the control room and the video screens looked cod: they were fake.

Unfortunately the production still fails to deliver the requisite atmosphere for three main reasons: it sounds wrong, the acting mode is wrong and the procedure is missing. Oil rigs make a lot of very distinctive and continuous noise, even during production shutdowns. NO-ONE with a radio ever says "Kinloch Bravo to Coastguard" be they armed forces, tanker fleet or local bus company do they! It's "Stonehaven Radio this is Kinloch Bravo:" only a cheap TV luvvy and a pot-boiling script hack team with tin ears, not listening to their technical advisers, fail like that. That's just a basic example. People at war or at work speak instrumentally, and all the best dramas tune into the functional argot. Surely the Line of Duty people know this? People at risk in action or in danger don't wear their feelings - or their fear - on the outside like this, above all if they are in charge. They don't open their mouth and look aghast, they freeze and become gritty, staring and expressionless, especially when the peril continues over an extended period. Our director here seems to think that won't make great drama, but this way is definitely worse and it is not how tension is built. Yes, as another oilman has said here, there is some banter, but it's contrasting, minimal and doesn't affect the tone. Whilst we have no difficulty sprinkling the F-word, we go the whole series with no Scotsman taking a pot at the English or vice-versa. This never happens.

Oh yes, and even in a dead calm with fog, in reality it's always howling on the helideck and comms tower, and the swell will keep anyone away from the 50 foot level, let alone from landing by lifeboat: it's in the middle of the raging North Sea for goodness sake, not next to the Newhaven harbour wall. The real emergency process for transferring from boat to rig - craned by personnel basket up to the helideck - is much more dramatic. Shame the writers didn't know that.

Location: 9, plot, acting, effects and everything else 2 or less. Dross. Great shame as offshore installations can make for brilliant atmospheric drama. PS tip to fellow reviewers: scoring it a 1 spoils your vote: it will be discarded with the 9s.

Da 5 Bloods (2020)

As Flawed as Many a Spike Lee, but Still On It, and Worth the Long Watch

[8/10 · 11 July 2020]

Stunning lead from Delroy Lindo as a man with a hot wire strung through him, reliving the time that turns out to have defined his difficult life.

And a sweet cameo about an underwritten black leader with a posthumous Purple Heart.

If you don't have any goodwill towards this movie you aren't going to stick with it, and I recommend you don't: it's a long watch you shouldn't bother with unless it's working for you, but it did work for me.

Yes it's confused and full of plot holes and odd devices that are sometimes awkward and sometimes fail. Yes it has a particular political slant that you will already know.

And yes, for sure, it does tell the story with a black man's lens, and Good say I. Why did so many black US soldiers die in Nam? Why do so many black health workers die fighting Covid19? Same answer, racism. No not some high-blown theory of the superiority of one race over another (well, other than the white race over the yellow people anyway), but a casual everyday tale of survival in which the in-group use their defacto control - without even thinking - so as to have the effect of pushing the marginal elements to the front rank to take the big risks and to be unable to push pack.

So in the sense of that narrative there's nothing confusing about this film at all: its central thread is the unbroken theme that black lives haven't mattered much to white people, but frankly Lee throws up so much chaff - and so much humorous diversion and hunt-the-homage excursion - that the idea is scarcely in your face at all, despite what so many amateur critics have written here. I loved the several diverse cameo sub-plots about the effects of age, of difficult relationships with children, of a continuing French dimension in Indo Chine, of Vietnamese ambivalence to returning GIs, of the roles and tensions in exchanges between local and tourist, of American ignorance about Europeans, and so much more.

Neither did it bother me that the ages of the generations didn't fit with the technology incidentals (the present date is never clear). Nor did I find the flashback scenes with the OAPs playing themselves in 1970 wrong: it is to me a novel and effective device that the survivors age but the dead stay young (for they shall grow not old....). It worked for me. And I loved it that Ali and Luther King and others popped up in newsreels making just the right observations.

But if you come expecting a linear narrative, a slick and authentic war story, or a mainstream movie that won't rub your face in white privilege ... move on.

The Con is On (2018)

Sad

[5 July 2018]

To think I once watched Tim Roth on stage in the lead of Metamorphosis, and now he has actually turned into a dung beetle. Uma Thurman has quite a pedigree, too, and Steven Fry is an electric performer, even it it's not obvious what kind of role he should try acting in.

Put them together in a comedy and it's bound to be a romp, right? Er, no. Cobbling a few ideas together from the Pink Panther, add some merry pranks in drug- and alcohol- fuelled craziness and get Roth to say the F-word in every line staggering around as a stock lush, let Uma do a camp version of her femme fatale forte, and sprinkle in Fry with a pet boy,.Hilarious yes? No. Add a little gratuitous violence and some lesbian action to make sure we're up to date. Can't fail? Yes it can.

The only question left is, does this review contain spoilers? No idea as I'm not sure what if anything was left to reveal as the plot (?) unfurls (?unravels?).

Clearly the producers share my view of their awful investment, which is why they have tried to release this film in only a few places which, lacking British English native speakers, may even think this was funny to British English native speakers. Also no.

One star because I laughed once by accident. I misunderstood a gag and it seemed funny till I realised.

Hidden Figures (2016)

A Winning Film about Maths, Black Women and the Right Stuff

[8/10 · 18 February 2017]

If you're going to make a film that honours the contribution of people to rational hard science, you have to respect hard science, and one sure thing is that it has always been global, and that engineers and scientists have always found it at least necessary to pay proper due to those who achieve in their field. Of course newcomers have always invited derision, but those who succeed win the approbation their peers.

Thus NASA became a social opinion leader as well an engineering pioneer, and even in Langley, Virginia, where segregation was a way of life, winning the Cold War demanded full, effective participation and utilisation of the available talent, as any economist would endorse.

The biggest negative with this film - and this portrayal was as accurate and intended as the cinematography and corridor shots that deliver it - is that it reminded me too much of the worst side of being at work, where people hold themselves still and aloof, seldom say what they think about you, especially to your face, and create lots of alienated tension.

The other side of work is that, as relationships develop and trust builds, people do break this down and even mathematicians can learn to enjoy each other's company - outside of work, even. Unfortunately we don't see this in Hidden Figures at all: the 3 black women come to the film in a delightful, but fully-developed, socially-dependent relationship, we see none of it at all from the white people, and over the course of two hours nothing develops. The closest it gets is when Octavia Spencer rebuffs the hopelessly stilted Kirsten Dunst's approach of, roughly, 'despite what you think I do see things from your point of view' with 'I know you think you do.' There is no prospect of release from the remorseless imperatives of employment, and certainly no hope for humanity here! How about some real human stories, then? Did the Civil Rights movement and the promise of a modern rational society really spring from an animal that behaves like this? Could neither faction FEEL what it's like to be trapped in being the other? When one is cut will the other never bleed, nor when one tickles will the other never laugh? I find the cold consequences of a life like this render the gains of the oppressed frankly futile, and whilst the stories of the women are momentarily uplifting, they seem destined to be dashed by the failure of all to imagine what it is to be a whole society. Thus we have darkness at midday, and I wanted to implore our mathematicians to 'think we are already there,' too, as Costner implores Taraji Henson to do about the Moon.

We also have Costner's motivational speech on why the US is coming second in a race with two competitors. Since they're not smarter than us, and they don't want it more than us, we mustn't be working hard enough. Now that's a great starting point for a plot development in the world of science and engineering but, in the best traditions of Redneck America, it's just taken as a given. After all, whilst there probably is a direct, if not linear relationship, within quite wide limits, between desk hours and achievement for a human computer, the same does not hold true for an applied mathematician seeking the new insights Costner is imploring. Thinking creatively to find new methods, new approaches and new solutions does not necessarily require the cancellation of home life and, ironically, that is perhaps the problem any insurgent workgroup has in making real inroads into the incumbent dominant class - finding the recreational space to develop ideas. Burlington Burtie plays at maths and has insights in the bath, whilst the oppressed are too often too tired, working to survive, or to save us from the Commie threat, to think much at all.

Actually, it turns out that the solution to coming first in the Cold War was about freedom to be diverse, and think, interact and act, the freedom that allowed Thomas J Watson Jnr to develop IBM into a great computer, that encouraged Noyce, Moore and the modern entrepreneurs to express their exuberance in ever more valuable components, and that motivated graduates and their professors in their thousands to think a thousand thoughts around every open challenge. So it's a pity that we couldn't have Janelle Monáe delivering an inspirational soliloquy rather than just the rhetorical devices she uses on the Judge to persuade him to let her go to engineer night-school, and rather than the white man leader who does declaim all the idea fertilisation.

In short, dear filmmaker, make your characters CONNECT with each other so that your audience can follow their journey and connect with them.

Also, every minute of run time over 90 needs justifying, and there isn't enough to say about Euler's method and the elliptical to parabolic transition to justify all the extra 35 here, which unnecessarily left some of my party seeing themselves already at the exits. Convincing the Western masses that maths is a chat topic is tough enough anyway, without pushing it.

And where were the white women? Women have always made excellent computers and computer programmers, and they were not absent from NASA. This audience mostly doesn't know who Grace Hopper was either.

But having got all that out of the way, Hidden Figures is (and are) revelatory, charming, often slick, crowd-pleasing and profitable so, for all that could be improved, this is rightly a winner.

Secret in Their Eyes (2015)

Glossy but Indie-Leaning, Story out of Context

[7/10 · 16 January 2017]

All the reviews I've read here compare this film to its progenitor, which is pointless to the film-goer. The first question must be, as with any film, is THIS creation any good?

Well, it has its limitations, that's for sure. More of that below. But it does have something. There is some clunkiness, some awkwardness, some unease, that makes it more interesting than mere genre. How much of this is intentional, it's hard to tell, but that's part of the draw: it is quite unaffected.

For a start we have Julia Roberts playing a tragic, frumpy, charmless plain sourpuss with dark bags under the eyes, cracked lips and no makeover. The neat part about this is that if you're as used as her to glinting those perfect teeth to the camera, this role isn't likely to be convincing. But she does pull it off, and it succeeds partly because we look into her eyes and see that, within, there is absence (is that what the title is about, by the way? it doesn't come across otherwise). We all think we know our Julia, glamour and presence, so when we see her like this we can readily feel her loss, and imagine her private journey into hell all the more. Take an unknown actress in the same role and you'd have to do half an hour's prior character development to get close to the same effect.

Now Nicole Kidman and Chiwetel Ejiofor, the clumsy preppy princess and the black pauper, avoiding copulation for the duration. I'm not sure we glimpse how they feel or what they do, it's so understated it's invisible, and we have to fill in the gaps. Spoiler alert: it probably never happens. Or maybe it does, it's just offscreen. At the end the husband says Chiwetel's been in the marriage all the time. Not showing the passion on screen: we're definitely not playing this for the box office now are we? He walks her to her car. They like it, they do it again... Unless of course the film had come out twenty years earlier, in which case the studio would have cut the risky interracial. So is the editing and production timid, self-conscious, affected, innocent, playful, teasing, post-modern ironic or just botched? Well it comes out unresolved, and it worked that way for me.

There's some arty/independent touches to the general production too, including a garish single-take swoop into the LA baseball stadium that may be commonplace in the age of drones and CGI but is still more ambitious than the average Hollywood gloss thriller.

And Alfred Molina as the DA. A much more acceptable rendition than the usual growling apparatchik in this role, but Alfred is still playing a stereotype of himself, I fear. This is fine for the picture but bad for Alfred, who deserves better, and has proved it when allowed.

Finally, unfortunately, we come to the story. There are good aspects of it, that's for sure. We have a striking morality play in which the personal tragic consequences of consumption by hatred, and inability to forgive, are played to the female hilt, with consequences that eventually spill out of her own torment and tortures into the death of a fellow cop, a segment that is again thoroughly understated compared to the genre norm.

But as to the central plot, I'm very sorry, but the postulate is preposterous and underdeveloped, this time in a way that doesn't work. Cop's daughter gets killed, but criminal is protected from pursuit because he is undercover working on the LA 911 plot? No,sorry. There are NO circumstances, including the terrified post-911 panic, when such a CONSIDERED conspiracy to prevent a murdering rapist - especially one who has perpetrated his deeds against one of the City's finest - from being brought to justice, would be contemplated in any Western liberal state that practises even imperfect, and sometimes somewhat corrupt, justice and equality under the law, let alone be tolerated by ANY police department. Repeat, no circumstances. This is such a strong and true instinct that it became impossible for me to suspend disbelief through the action, at which point I was left only with the consolation that perhaps it might just work if we reset to where justice for cop-family killers is less instinctive. Is there such a place ...

One Child (2014)

Some sense of China, but quite a lot of nonsense

[5/10 · 3 March 2016]

An unlovable drama, unless you are looking for a glossy vehicle to reinforce stereotypical visions of Chinese justice, or the buds of a modern polemic against capital punishment.

Mei was adopted as a baby because, under Chinese One Baby policy, it enabled her mother to keep her son. Mei ended up in England with western adoptive parents, and is happily studying Astrophysics until the call to help comes in from Guangdong, where her brother has been framed for the murder of a Nigerian outside a nightclub, by a rich playboy. Thirteen witnesses testify that brother did it, including brother's best mate.

Thus Mei travels into China to meet her birth mother, and the few friends and activists trying to get her brother free. Although filmed entirely in Hong Kong, the settings suggest a Guangdong credible enough that most westerners can glimpse another world, including the unexpected dimension of a significant Nigerian community.

I will grant a little goodwill here. The mother and daughter reunion is done well, and I believed it, starting with total, interpreted, awkwardness and unwillingness of gesture, eye contact or touch, through to a little language and a proper reconciliation in three episodes. But the plot starts to unravel as it unfurls, and whilst it's obvious that Mei is likely to be putting herself at risk in her endeavours, somehow it isn't that exciting to watch.

The brothel party scene is just not credible. Mei suddenly goes from upright young student and plucky protester of her brother's innocence to the point where she has to have sex with several men in a few hours just to get evidence that can be used to pressurise witnesses. An ordinary girl needs some plot development to get there, and we're not invited to glimpse her reckoning. If the central idea is for Mei to be the bridge character who's western enough for us to identify with, this scene blows it away in an instant, as so few of us could do this even to save our brother.

The investigator suddenly and neatly gets all the witnesses to retract their statements. It's all too neat and lacking in narrative interest or drama, with just a hint of what it's like to be in the Nigerian community here. Above all we don't really have any experience in how this counter-persuasion might work, based on our knowledge of ordinary people in our culture, yet we sense this is possible in China and other places where justice is arbitrary, or a rich man's game. This is where the human interest would lie. The script has to help us understand the coercive, cognitive journey that makes people do what they do.

It's just too clunky. It doesn't flow dramatically, but it isn't awkward either: in the second episode Mei and the activists dismantle the false evidence fabricated by the powerful local family and their stooges in the local administration without any dramatic tension at all. It just happens. Is there to be no fightback? Is anyone in the state apparatus watching? Is the rich family closing against them? The trouble is, you're thinking, "there's no fightback? It should all come down on them in a minute – or maybe it won't and this is another rubbish BBC drama out of its incredible depth." So your options are, you give up without watching the last episode, or you risk watching, knowing it must all come down on them unless it is it utter pap. Either way there's no excitement: the plot has been navigated into sterility, and the final counter-counter persuasion by the rich guys doesn't have any impact.

Finally, Mei goes to see the murderer at his Daddy's pad. She knows he did it. He knows she knows he did it (I think). But he still makes a play for her, and she goes much of the way along with it, allowing herself to be entertained out with his friends. Well, by now perhaps I should change my view of this woman. Perhaps she really is ice-cold inside enough to do this too. But – well, no, again it's just not credible, and I don't blame the actress. It's just no, as in no real hole-free plot. Oh, and by the way, some rich playboys in some corrupt dystopias can kill without feeling of guilt or remorse, but I dare say this isn't the norm, and his plot and character doesn't smell credible either.

Oh-hang on: another thread. Now Daddy offers her a deal: brother's mate swings for the crime instead. But this time our ice-maiden doesn't take it. Too moral I suppose, but no overt thinking displayed apart from some doubt depicted by hesitance on a flashy escalator. After her earlier actions have so committed her, you can't really imagine why she would baulk at this even though she has met the mate and his parents. To a rational moraliser it is at least a philosophically reasonable deal: either way an innocent man takes the rap: this way it's not your brother, but it's your action that causes it to be the mate instead. Discuss. And why doesn't Daddy offer one of the Nigerians, the traditional outsider fall-guys, instead? This would make sense, especially as it's said to be pressure from the Nigerian consulate this time that demands a head for a head rather than the more conventional financial restitution. So the Nigerian ex-pat community are everyone's fall guys, but the Nigerian Government holds enough sway to demand a framing. Hmm. That would need some explicit plot development to convince.

And the questions you really want to know are, does the supposed Chinese system of supremacy of the collective will over the individual really force all these individual actors to behave like this, and how do real people feel about such arbitrary justice? Unasked in this non-drama, I fear.

Oh yes, and what about the activists? All jailed bar one. No hint of their stories?

John Wick (2014)

Exploitative, cynical, mindless, and above all miscategorised

[1/10 · 31 January 2016]

Awful. But I'm happy to concede that there are plenty of folks out there who want to escape with just the kind of strong feelings this work will conjour.

It's just a pity it had to happen in my living room, and the people to blame for that are the Western European censors, who presumably are working to definite guidelines in rating this film suitable for medium-sized teenagers to watch. Why is this? Why is this gratuitous violence, that has no redeeming features at all, certainly no artistic merit, rated suitable to stream into living rooms full of ordinary young people? I can perhaps understand a 15 rating in a cinema, because the well-run cinemas I know are not lax enough to allow smaller adolescents in to this, but to rate this a 15 for home use is to confuse it with gentle, memorable and even great works that don't get a 12 for one difficult scene or one awkward adult plot line. This, though is R for every scene, even the one or two where Reeves just drives.

I do understand why people want to make films like this. There is money in them. I do occasionally watch them myself, although I didn't make it all the way through this one, because the plot was so flimsy it just got blown away along with the first wave of carnage, and you knew there would be no more story after, what: 20 minutes? (does that amount to a spoiler, telling you that there's nothing to spoil?) I limped on and dipped in and out after that, so at least I'm confident that I'm being fair.

If there is any idea that arises (difficult to credit, really) it is this. People do things to us that instil strong feelings of revenge. But we cross the line if we allow ourselves to act instinctively in response. The message I would urge upon both the film-maker and his audience: he shouldn't have allowed himself to succumb and actually make the nasty little film, and you should have ignored his plea to help him recoup his investment. The alternative is nothing but dead puppies, some of them human.

Dancing on the Edge (2013)

Good-looking sets, slipping accents, floppy plot, lost opportunities

[5/10 · 26 February 2013]

Exactly five out of ten.

Lots for fabulous staging and sumptuous settings, from the Duchesses' own immaculate toy working class village, through the decaying stone and lime plaster of Wilton's Music Hall, past the glittering Deco ballrooms to the antechambers of the minor fascist royals and their fawning courtiers, to the perfection of Angel and Louis' stage costumes. Only the new London suburb let it down, because it had to look new, and it didn't.

None for the Jazz/swing thing, although at least it protected the BBC from its achilles heel of selecting the wrong music altogether.

Few (or is that less?) for the accents. Only Anthony Head nails it, with Jacqueline Bisset just behind. The others, the youngsters, must understand that speaking old fashioned posh English is our specialist subject. The would-be upper class actors should go and lock themselves away with tapes of the old Prince of Wales and the young Queen until they never slip into the strangled and dipthonated Estuarian that escaped at so many unfortunate moments that would each have cost them any reputation in refined society at that time.

Picky? Maybe to some, but these are the criteria this SIX HOURS of drama demands to be measured by. After all, what else does it offer?

• A low-grade murder mystery with a thoroughly low-grade plot. Think: since Louis knows he didn't do it he must realise who did, so why would he let a savage and dangerous knife attacker just hang around his band? And those who believe him must also follow the same line. A little plot development could have saved this storyline from itself: not confronting the person who did it should become a true tragedy: his own inaction the failure that leads to his being framed. But that's not the story here.

• Zero suspense. If we suspend disbelief on the above, why is there no tension drawn out of the presence of this threat in the midst of our odd little group of fellow jazz travellers?

• Minimal characterisation. Some of the cast get enough detail to demonstrate humanity, perhaps most notably Janet Montgomery's conflicted and tragic white immigrant Sarah, and John Goodman's plutocrat with a soft-touch Masterson, but the rest are just comic-book paste-ups, except for the black men who are, apart from Louis and the angry manager in episode 1, entirely absent verbally and visually. Apparently they are real musicians.

• Incredible characterisation. Could anyone get to be a zillionaire Wall Street Crash capitaliser by behaving like Masterson? You buy a going concern, invest in it heavily, hire all your new pals, and on day 1 they all turn up to work late, hang around demonstrating no dynamism and don't focus on your enterprise. That's not Conrad Black over there, even if his most beloved pet project is under even more threat.

And does anyone get to be a murderous psychopath because their parents were cold and stiff upper class fascists, which seems to be Poliakoff's stated thesis? If they do it needs more substance to make it credible.

So why as many as five stars out of ten? Well mostly because my partner is black and doesn't take to all the white nonsense at the BBC too kindly unless it is staging fine architecture, but did stay the distance with this and pronounced it Very Good.

We both thought Chiwetel Ejiofor's Louis painted a solecistic picture of great presence, that demonstrated a heroic dignity whilst working out whom to trust, eschewed most of the patronising pitfalls Poliakoff had laid down, and does, despite the writing, allow us to see the world through his - Louis' - eyes.

The broad image of the 30's was engaging, although it would have been good to better draw out the upper class xenophobia/xenophilia contradiction. The Prince of Wales can dance with the showgirl in private, but what else follows? This is surely the central question. You start with the idea that certain families are born to rule, that all white families are born to dominion over all black ones, then create a social mix. Some find themselves forced to stay loyal to their clan despite love, and some betray their caste because of passion for the logic of justice. Poliakoff's way is not soliloquy or wordiness, and that is to the good, but does he really lay down enough for us to live the feeling of time, or to see how fatal are its flaws? I don't think so. In the end it is the crafty white boy, Matthew Goode's Stanley, who offers us the only suggestion of hope of future opportunity and enlightenment.

Given John Goodman and Mel (Muck and Brass) Smith to work with, to name but two, something much more powerful than this was possible. Would it be unkind to suggest that this production demonstrates that British drama in general, and the BBC in particular, places too much emphasis on the individual genius of the writer/director and too little on the team? You imagine a modern classy US production of this would find it distinctly underwritten, busy itself with building much more detail onto this succulent framework, especially of ambivalence, plot and character and in passing, without much effort, find work for black actors beyond standing behind trombones. That doesn't require an HBO budget, just more attention to detail in the thinking of the writing and production.

If we build that way, we can find a proper role for BBC drama that will survive the rust on the Crittals and the breakage of cut glass accent production at RADA.

Not Only But Always (2004 TV Movie)

Eery, Compelling, Sad, Lingering.

[31 December 2004]

If you're middle-aged like me, Pete and Dud were always there, from the new dawn of 1963 when Cook almost single-handedly turned Supermac into Silly Old Mac, and we felt meritocratic Britain had arrived, to the cynical exploitative desperation of Derek and Clive 1976, after Python had run its course, and alternative vision looked just as wonky as all the other optical aberrations.

In between, Stars were real talents that burnt brightly and radiated electromagnetic energy. Miller was Renaissance man, Bennett the new literato, Cook debunker-in-chief and Frost the entrepreneur of a new Britain in a way that oddly pre-parodies New Labour as if Cook had written the ending. And Dud was Pete's mate.

As for America, who knows why Beyond the Fringe worked there: we learn nothing from this piece.

In fact we learn nothing much to form the setting I describe, which I think is what makes this film eery and sad, a portrait of a fading person rather than his timeless talent. Like all such men, Cook's contribution to the canon of British culture is more than the sordid banality of his flawed life, except in the realisation that such works have always demanded the time and pressure at the typewriter that breaks all but the most powerful personal bonds. Or that to be this much of a funny djinn maybe you do have to be vapid on the inside. Above all, I think the production should have followed Cook's own monochrome observation and started at the end. Sad lives that end chronologically in bathos, as most do, do not mean sad work. Vapid? Yes, Dud, I am a man who reads his reviews with the Thesaurus beside me. But I only fleetingly reveal my lack of relationship with my parents even to you.

I can't decide whether it's a flaw of the film. Surely you have to have been there to feel what it means? And surely that doesn't include the magnificent Ifans and McArdle, which makes our surrogate comics' contribution all the more stunning: they hadn't left the nursery long before Bo Derek gave Dud back the ego Pete had wrung from him. But I do wonder if "...but Always" in itself makes Cook accessible to a new generation, and perhaps that's a shame: it would have been easy enough to sew in two or three complete sketches so that we can gauge for ourselves how it works, after all the *writing* at least stands timeless, even if the performances and the man are gone.

As it is, we just had repeated, diminishing echos of MacMillan and the one-legged man, echos that mean something only to those who were there for big bang. Whilst this can make good art it also loses most of the potential audience and is therefore by definition elitist.

Speaking of elitist, Peter Cook was clearly as haughty and arrogant as any, but the Cook portrayed here is a snob of the worst kind to boot, and sneers at Moore and Bennett for being mere Grammar School boys, or is any ammunition acceptable? Well, lack of legs is, so perhaps none of it is as alternative as we might imagine. The Private Eye of Ingrams, Rushton and buddies, into which Cook fitted so deliciously, was only too willing to admit that, satirists or not, the new generation Establishment was merely reinventing itself, irreverent but irrevolute, and irrelevant if wildly entertaining.

Overall, this one could just run. Just because it tantalises, presents an image for the curious, leaves unanswered questions about the man's work for a new generation, portrays a dazzling spectacle of a person nearly in view, perhaps it will invite new interest in his writing and performance. Or perhaps there's nothing there but the ghost of a time long gone, by a savage critic also gone.