Well, huh…

Due both to a debilitating but entirely undramatic injury and the drugs associated with I won’t be writing a proper review of this week’s Mad Men, but I will throw out some assorted thoughts and allow an open floor for discussion. This is both the best and worst week for this to happen because The Crash is an episode that I could write and write about, but its also one that can never be entirely contained by synopsis or criticism and nor should it. Hell, i’m not sure that my mind can much understand it. Its like a dream, a flu-driven dream more lucid and real than you can remember reality ever being, but one that you have to repress in order to go on with the day once you wake up. Lets talk now about The Crash and then forget it ever happened.

(And no, this isn’t an attempt at performance art; though Alan Sepinwall nailed that in his intro.)

Like watching a car crash, this isn’t Mad Men; its in media res action sequences phone calls cut so quick I was left dizzy, Don externalising emotions and the exteriors of all in the SCDP office showing the damage that they feel within. For one week the repression is all gone, its all out in the open and that changes everything about the show.

This episode, this hour of David Lynchian direction, shows us why Mad Men is so special; why that subtlety, slowness and small scale are so important to its success and it does it by comparison, by having the world speed up – the running, dear god Don running – and blow up in ways too weird to fathom.

The dramatic debauchery of the office’s lost weekend does something similar for Don, letting him hit a deeper bottom even than in The Suitcase and thus maybe allowing him to now make a longer lasting rise from the ashes. Speaking of ashes, did Roger just die? There was some real ominous foreshadowing in there for him, and though this isn’t the first time his death has been hinted at it was one of the most direct.

the episode also marked the zenith of the season’s mother/whore symbology, just throwing it out there blunt force four or five times over: from Ken learning tap from either one or the other, from Don first having sex with the first woman to mother him, from the clinking-bagged homeless lady. That’s not to say though that those moments can be easily boxed up as metaphors for this, they are that and also weird beyond imagination.

I’m very glad that this isn’t the show we have every week but by god if I wasn’t willing the episode not to end and if I don’t doubt that next week will struggle to follow this hour up, as horrible and shark jumping and unredeemable and amazing as it was, whatever the hell it was. I feel like i’ve been injected with speed, did the ‘Next Week On…’ clip loop back for anyone else? I think i nee to crash.

Pedophilia and the related abuses of children are thought of by most people, by ‘the public’, as a clear-cut issue even in this day and age of moral relativism and ambiguity. If you were to say that someone was ‘evil’ for being a homosexual than the public would label you hateful – a label I would not contest – but say the same about a pedophile and you will likely be met by uncomfortable nods and murmurs of agreement, even from those who lean deep to the left. The Hunt, in its way, disagrees with this simplicity; seeming to state that there is more at play in these cases then a mere moral judgement can convey. It presents pedophilia as a matter of perspective.

Primarily it does this by putting us in the shoes of someone accused of having the trait. We as a society are almost taught that when we hear about an accused paedophile we should think ‘How sick. I hope he suffers’ and then think nothing more of it; paying little mind to the truth of the matter, not wanting or willing to dig into the details. That is what Writer/Director Thomas Vinterberg seemingly aims to have us do here, to look at the many lives an accusation lives – even one built on a lie – and the many live it can ruin. The film falls short of doing this though, it’s too conscious of our comfort (the main character Sidney Poitier-ed in his inherent goodness) and so although its inverted the truth of this case is just as obvious and the emotions just as powerful as any pulled from the news; so we cry for justice of a different sort but we still never really get beneath the surface of the issue.

That’s not to say though that there aren’t some interesting ideas scattered throughout the script. The film, for instances, presents an interesting take on contact with children, on how it too is a matter of perspective. The film’s protagonist Lucas is constantly touching children as a part of his job, even at times in private places and it is seen as entirely appropriate there, in fact he is adored for it. Parents too touch their children; they pick them up, they play with them. The difference between this and pedophilia, while obviously massive, is a mental one; ‘appropriate’ is shown to be a societal establishment. There are also intriguing hints towards a discussion on social willingness but that never really eventuates into anything. We understand that the town is overly willing to believe, but why are they?

The other question you will find yourself asking throughout the film is something along the lines of ‘Why are they all so stupid?’ Characters on all sides of the conflict act with an inordinate dumbness, the whole thing avoidable if only one of them had stopped to take sensical action; in fact the film at times feels most like a farce and is surprisingly almost funny enough to work as one. The Hunt isn’t itself dumb, but it is a film where such intellectual inquiries are left aside, because while it is maybe a missed opportunity in terms of tackling the central issue it does still take you on an intense emotional journey. One which ticks of most of the ostracized violence tropes along the way, rarely straying into new territory despite the singular premise.

Mads Mikkelson gives a great understated performance as Lucas: convincing as the world’s most beloved bachelor, harboring enough coldness to allow some validity to the town’s conviction and excelling at the violence and vitriol that the role eventually requires. In fact the whole cast is very strong, though his was the only face and name that I really knew: both Thomas Bo Larsen as the best friend and Anika Wederkopp as the girl stood out as strongest among them. Vinterberg’s direction is also damn impressive: as an ex-Dogme member his approach is obviously gritty and intimate and that lends a real oomph to affairs, rather than resulting in something lackluster like the style can. You tighten up whenever Lucas is around the kids, get so tense over every touch; you feel trapped when figures flitter by the window, terrified when the rocks and bullets hurl and bruised yourself by the time the credits roll.

But perhaps this tightness hurts the film too because as a result of it the perspective is stuck. We see only what Lucas sees, hear only what he is told and while this is necessary for us to feel that the town is terribly tyrannical, it also restricts the film to a single layer of depth. How this happened is fascinating, but we only see that it did. What drove Ole to squeeze the confession out of the girl? Why was her mother so willing to believe it? And what would make all the other families fall in step so suddenly? To go so far as suggesting their own sexual abuse? I can’t help but think a film that addressed, rather than skirted, those sorts of questions would have been the more important one.

The Hunt is brave to stand against the mob and pitchforks, but in its own way it still tries to crowd-please; more melodrama than message movie. It’s fantastically effective as the former, but I’m not sure that this warrants wielding such a strong topic over. That is my issue though, as much as it is the film’s own. I was worried for a while there that it was even going to go so far as to finish with a happy ending but instead it closes with both the haunting idea of a simmering hatred beneath civilization that can’t be removed and an assertion that the truth will rise up above all. It’s a rather balanced answer to a question rarely posed with any delicacy from a potent, provocative picture; so while it may not be perfect that is probably enough to warrant The Hunt its praise.

While reading Black City - almost voraciously enough to warrant watching over a webcam – I couldn’t shake from my mind a set of twinned Tom Waits songs: We’re All Mad Here and Everything You Can Think of is True. I was initially slow to the realization that, despite major musical differences, they are in fact the same song; the same sets of creepy,carnivorous and carnivalesque stories and images, just seen from two different sides of the mirror. Like those songs Black City is a book both familiar and strangely new; the same but so, so different. The most evident example of this has to be that it’s published by Gestalt, Australia’s self-proclaimed ‘premier graphic novel publishing house’ – a title to which I can only attest – but it’s a prose piece; as in without pictures, as in only words.

It’s made instantly apparent by all of those words that the book’s author, Christian Read, brings with him a radical new voice; his writing brisk and irreverent but ironclad in its intelligence and poetry. With those words, and in that voice he tells a horror story that is more often than not hilarious. It’s a tale that has been told many, many times before – tropic in its topics and more than half homage – but because of the temperament which which he tells it the resulting read is like nothing else you’ve experienced. Around that story the words build a world, one in which every kind of magic ever seen in a story exists, but its wielded in ways we havn’t seen before: the supernatural stuff seeping into street violence, through the arts ( literary, visual and … culinary) and even effecting economics. Black City then is both a book and a place wherein everything you can think of us true; even, fittingly, that mythological creature known as Tom Waits.

Books aren’t windows to wonderful worlds inside your head. They’re the hilts and triggers to weapons, they’re snares to secrets and whispered conspiracies. Books are the most dangerous things in the world…

Given their proven track record and stable of stunning artists it is initially a bit surprising that Gestalt would have received this pitch from Read and released it as a novel; based on its concept Black City would seemingly have sat nicely next to Torn, Unmasked or The Eldritch Kid on the shelf. It’s also something of a risk because here, in Ebook form, Read has nothing to hide behind: none of Gestalt’s trademark publishing prowess ( only Archaia can compete in terms of print quality) or the potency of a good painted panel to disguise or distract from his dialogue, his storytelling. It was a risk well worth taking though because a comic simply couldn’t contain this many words and as prose writer Read really understands the power of words.

There is that critical cliche that a stories setting can really become a character within it; while that is certainly true of this book’s anonymous, atrophying cityscape the saying applies more to its words. Here characters are literally characters and language the lifeblood of both good guys and bad; its a tale about text. More literally though it’s a merger of gaudy old-world occult tales – like Maughm’s The Magician or Lovecraft’s [Anything] – with the more modern grit of urban ganglands: in this town, the titular Black City, you wear the colours of your cult, you deal enchanted crack and splay your coat to hock counterfeit artifacts whose magic, like an unreal Rolex, will keep ticking just long enough for the dealer to get out of town and you to get into trouble. Magic doesn’t change society in the city, it just makes it more dramatic.

The right book bites you, seduces and tattoos you.

Read’s writing style is pulpy in the best possible sense of the term; which is to say not shallow or simple, but pointed. His phrases are heavily punctuated, a ful stop every few words, so you swallow them by the handful with a rapid, rabid rhythm; and split into paragraphs only several sentences long the pages of this book fly by just as fast. The form of Read’s prose obviously very functional beneath the hard-boiled poetics of its facade; so that it becomes near impossible to put the book down once you’ve begun, each end of chapter tempting you to come back for just one more. The combination of noir narcissism, wordplay wit and a well-indexed imagination that Read’s narratorial voice conveys leads a lot of these lines to kill: comedic, chilling and oh so cool. Their structuring though is sometimes so unstressed that the odd sentence will come across as clunky, or a line of dialogue will be only ambiguously attached to its character for the sake of spiking pace but these flops are few and far between; the book’s overall hit:miss ratio making the choice of distinctive voice an easy one.

Though it is written in short sentences Black City has no shortage of large ideas. The city has a whole, sordid history to it that unfolds slowly before us; past bloodshed’s blooming an thickening. As he did in The Eldritch Kid Christian Read creates concepts worthy of complete stories and tosses them out as asides, as single stitches in the dark tapestry that is Black City. This approach lends the novel a meaty richness that it could otherwise have lacked, but it also means that sometimes the tale lacks clear direction, that its focus is somewhat askew. These sections that leapt from the perspective of our protagonist Lark to that of other, tertiary characters were not as well distinguished as I feel they could have been; the novel’s voice too consistent to legitimize the change in perspective. Simply having a strong, singular voice is almost too much to expect of a debut author, so asking for several is an insane standard; my issue then is mostly a structural one. Traditionally pulp thrillers are linear accelerations but Black City loops, slows and doubles back, almost rhyzomatic in shape.

“Come on. I’ll show you the ways a Magician can make money in this town.”

Though it is to be expected of a noir the plot that begins as a simple investigation grows more and more complex as it progresses, with conspiracy stacking on conspiracy; the cops, the robbers and civilians all creating chaos for the PI in the middle of the mess. It’s a tried and true approach but combined with magic it becomes something of a harder structure to swallow; when the crimes and schemes are no longer restricted by the rules of our reality the levels of complexity become infinite an Christian has an imagination up to the task of depicting that. So even though there is plenty of time spent in those aforementioned asides establishing the laws of magic the logistics of certain actions are still lost in the fray. Fictional magic ( as opposed to what?) also has that unfortunate feeling of frictionlessness to it that can be hard to overcome; when one can simply wave away concerns with a few words consequences can become negligible; with great power comes no responsibility. Read does a decent job of dealing with this, by making magic hard and binding it to tenets of reality; here it is another sort of science. There are times though, towards the end especially, when he writes characters out of corners with the stuff in a way that didn’t feel completely earned or necessary. Its spectacular enough, sure, but still something of an anti-climax.

So there are some flaws here, some fumbles, but they are in the scheme of things all very small ones. I devoured this book in under twenty-four hours without any effort or intention to rush through it; it’s cliche but I simply couldn’t put it down and that, I think, says more than the previous thousand words. Also telling is the fact that I’m already ready to go a second round and based on that ending it feels like Read is too; hedging his bets for a sequel and perhaps a whole series of city-set Lark stories. I truly hope that he does return to this world, which is already so fleshed-out and full of potential, because he has laid out the groundwork here for something truly special, something unique. Black City is then an origin story in two ways; both as as our introduction to an intriguing new author and as the first entry in what will hopefully be a franchise. In both cases its the most potent and exciting creation that i’ve come across in many years – cementing Christian’s name alongside that of Warren Ellis – and with a bit of work, a slight finesse, a sequel can easily surpass that. I believe this and thus, it is true.

Strange Attractors is, like Primer, the sort of story that stresses the science section in its genre classification of Science-Fiction: mashing and merging as it does concepts like chaos theory, The Butterfly Effect and fractal mapping into a plot that never once resembles a text-book, despite its deeply educational exposition. The book takes its title from a mathematics term whose definition is near meaningless to me, with my mere High School education in the field (An Attractor is a set towards which a variable, moving according to the dictates of a dynamic system, evolves over time and earns the ‘Strange’ suffix for featuring a non-integer dimension or chaotic dynamics…yeah) and based on the occurrence of those words – which I understand solo, just not in syntax – within it I daresay that its plot was derived from the very same.

So I shouldn’t have got it, the book should not have spoken to me since the science was so over my head; yet it did, deeply so, and the reason for that is instantly obvious once you open the lushly contoured cover – Archaia once again doing an amazing job of producing their books – and actually begin to read. Charles Soule, in his introduction, doesn’t once mention science – specifically or even vaguely- instead he spends those several hundred words wistfully explaining what it is about New York that made him want to write Strange Attractors. His speech suggesting that it was the city, and not those heady concepts, that came first, the city that stands at the core of the book and even though I am an Australian this was a concept that I could not only understand but connect with.

People have these ideas about cities, namely that they are both big and busy; made up of millions of individual parts that are near constantly in motion. This assumption, though technically correct, is a pen-and-paper simplification, because in practice the reality of a city is far more complex: parts break, parts change paths, parts exit and new parts enter. A city is not a closed, constant or controllable system; at least, not outside this book they aren’t. The characters in Strange Attraction develop the idea that maybe, with the right math, they can control the seemingly chaotic ebb and flow of such a city in New York. It’s an impossible idea, for those reasons stated above, but also a gloriously idyllic one; for with flawless future-sight comes a flawless future.

I’ve only been to New York once, unfortunately I’m not a local, but because of the time I spent there this book meant something different to me than it otherwise would have. I stayed there for a month which was in many ways a mistake. I believe that you can see New York as well as you can any other city in the two-to-three days that a tourist tends to afford a location; that’s long enough to see the sights, any longer and you start to see what is down the side-streets. During my stay I found that I was adding new events, experiences and locations to my ‘To Do’ list faster than I was crossing them off; the trip to each one would take me past five or ten more must-see stops, the place expanding exponentially, never still, never completable. That chaos, the cities constant construction and daily deconstruction, really drives the concept of this comic home; it’s a perfect pairing.

Now, you may well be thinking that this is even less of a review than usual, but that’s because the book in question is itself less focused on the traditionally reviewable aspects of a comic, the instinctual pleasures, and more on those that you instead respond to intellectually: the ideas, the concepts. Admittedly Attractors suffers somewhat because of this: those after adrenalised action, deeply described characters or a story on an epic scale should maybe look elsewhere, but the ground-level reality inherent in the scripting of this story struck me as singular in the industry today: whether it be talk of bands or brutal shootings the book is always believable, even with its insane premise. There is a truth inherent in its telling.

The thanks for that truth should be directed as much at Soule as it should be at his team of artists. Greg Scott’s linework is a befitting allegory of the book as a whole; his backgrounds big and complex systems (be them internal or external shots) while his figures flitter somewhat impressionistic-ally in and out of intricacy. Colorists Rat Lyon and Matthew Petz present a pair of potently contrasting approaches to their task: one (as the pages are not numbered in book I’m unsure who is who) approaches the art with a detailed authenticity while the other codes their panels in sharp colour-washes. Primarily this later approach is used during moments of stress to the system and as such the scenes are flooded red, as red is the colour of chaos in the comic’s equation. It’s a subtle but effective subconcious que. Then there is Robert Saywitz’s work on the complexity maps which are wonderfully engrossing but, like the science that they represent, somewhat over my head; that four-page pull-out though was a great surprise.

Strangely enough, given my thoughts coming into the comic, as an exploration of those heady concepts I wasn’t entirely satisfied by Strange Attractors, it was perhaps too short - I can’t help but think that there is so much more potential in this plot and so many more magical moments possible with it in mind (many of which are hinted at by the small activities in the book, but the results never stated strongly enough) – but as an emotional experience Attractors delivered something unlike anything that I have read before, it was an utterly unique experience and in this day and age of proliferate superheros that boldness covers over a lot of cracks in a comic. So on that basis alone I would recommend picking the book up.

There is something of a theme to this edition of Trailer Trash: auteur-driven, indie-scale science fiction films that you might not be excited for but surely should be. There is though one obvious exception to this rule that I included because, well I had too; besides the existence of a new season of said show is strange enough to me that seeing the trailer almost felt like a glimpse into an alternate reality. Onwards.

The Congress is a film that you may not have heard anything about before this week, but one that won’t escape your attention over the next one. The film is Ari Folman’s first since Waltz With Bashir brought him to the attention of most movie fans, the animated feature pushing the boundaries of what we would class a ‘documentary’ and telling a devastating story besides. Not one to succumb to the novelty of a single trick Folman is taking his trademark style in a stunning and strange new direction here that you kind of have to see to understand.

So… that looks weird, huh? A heady mix of Cold Souls and Cool World this short glimpse of the film went from feeling a little flat at first to leaving me utterly fascinated. It’s far too short a snippet to try and make much of the footage but it sold me on seeing this film as soon as possible, even though it may yet be a massive mess. Whatever the case critics will be seeing it very soon, the film debuting at Cannes almost as we speak and I’m keen to hear their reactions. Plus, was that Jon Hamm in there as the animated hero? I hope so.

The next clip needs no real introduction, Arrested Development is back and based on this trailer it hasn’t lost a step. The number of references and callbacks dropped over these two minutes alone was hilarious, nevermind the surely long an complicated that they came up with making an entire season in a vacuum. I cannot wait.

Richard Curtis is rarely regaled as an auteur or artist, his films are often seen as schmaltz that should be lumped in with those of Gary Marshall or McG but for me he is one of the rare Writer/Directors out there able to make the Romantic Comedy genre work and not only that work in a way that pleases both the plebs and the pretentious. Love, Actually is arguably the best the genre has been since Wilder worked fifty-odd years ago and so I was sold on seeing his next effort regardless, but the premise that he came up with for the film is actually quite a promising one and the execution more daring than I had expected.

http://movies.uk.msn.com/trailers-and-clips?videoid=c54a8c46-9990-4f4f-9fa2-cda680b95981&src=v5:share:sharepermalink:&from=sharepermalink

Sure it’s so sugary sweet that you can barely taste the time-travel but Domhnall Gleeson impressed in the insipid Anna Karenina and his chemistry with both Bill Nighy and McAdams seems strong here and if the script is as smart as suggested then this may be another winner from the Brit.

Finally comes a film that I have been looking forward to for far too many years. Alfonso Cuaron blew everybody away with Children of Men, crafting a science fiction masterpiece out of a sort of unlikely story. After seeing it I immediately raced to IMDb to see what other film he had made and what was coming next; it was a disappointing search. Though his oeuvre is extensive and well worth exploring Men was his first real foray into science fiction and it has taken now seven years for him to step back into the genre but by all accounts he has made something worth the wait in Gravity.

It’s easy to see shades of both Sunshine and A Space Odyssey in its beautiful, brutal and bafflingly real depiction of space; those special effects were jawdropping even on this small screen. I have no idea what the actual story of the film will be, what was scripted before shooting began or how it will fill the requisite feature length and I almost don’t want to. I just want to go to the cinema, experience this thing and be overwhelmed like I was by Children of Men.

Once again I wonder what you think of these trailers? Any of them seem worth a watch? Any that I’ve missed?

As a writer Nathan Edmondson is known to me, and surely many others in comic circles, for crafting intensely real action stories: the consistent traits displayed in each are his eye for blunt truths, his ear for technical terminology and a mind manipulable towards intense research. His is not then a name that I could cohesively connect to a book about dreams and magical Dream Merchants. Those prior series he scripted – Dancer and Jake Ellis, for examples – had sci-fi twists to their stories, yes, but these were there to garnish hard-boiled military stories that would have worked more than well enough without them. This dish though is one built on a base of [insert preference of metaphorical seasoning here, lets say parsley] and made palatable by thin shavings of the bloody protein we had been served in the past; it’s not then as far a leap of faith as one might think, the elements of a classic Edmondson tale are still here, the ratio’s have just been twisted in a tantalizing attempt to keep things fresh.

For those who failed to follow that admittedly over-ambitious and occasionally ambiguous culinary metaphor: don’t worry, i’ll go back through it using relevant terms. Though the concept of the comic is seemingly outside his comfort zone, depicting as it does the life of a man who is cursed with constant dreams and an inability to identify them as such, once it kicks off the story is structured like many of Nathan’s past series; focused as it is on innocent fugitives running from intense powers. That’s not to say though that book is an entirely safe project, sure the surface is similar but the angle from which it is approached differs drastically.

Though we see these characters in familiar sorts of situations to those of Jake Ellis the context surrounding them is new and thus the final content is altered. To put it simply the storytelling here is more subjective than objective, it focuses on the emotional instead of the intellectual: so instead of a rundown of past ops we are shown the protagonists tragic childhood as an introduction, instead of seeing his military skills showcased in cold synchronization we are given the vaguer and more obtuse scenes of him dreaming, that is his talent, and instead of inter-team camaraderie we see some good old fashioned romance from the two leads, who make a cute and compelling couple.

The art which is done entirely by Konstantin Novosadov is as colourful as his name suggests and although this too seems contrary to what I had come to expect from Edmondson it really reflects the style of the script. His figures have features that are more cartoonish than lifelike, the palette is stylistically bi-polar, bouncing from naturally unlit blacks to vivid pastel washes as the world twists, the backgrounds depicting which are bare to impressionistic and the linework as a whole loose and fluid. Though it’s instantly stunning his work feels at first like something better suited to belonging in a Brandon Graham book, which is initially a shock given Edmondson’s stable of strong, strict detail-orientated artists but without this woozy, alien vibe in the visuals the book would be missing so much of what makes it special

If I’ve not been entirely clear during this review its because I’m still not set in my opinion on Dream Merchant, I can’t quite get a definite grip on it (like, say, an ended dream). What I can say for certain though is that I’m glad it premiered with a double-length issue because my uncertainty was strongest during those first few pages when nothing was pegged down. I loved a lot of it, most of what I said should be classed as compliments, but I had some issues: the narration’s mysticisms were occasionally to obtuse to have any real meaning, the dream world in which we are taken is a little too undefined to potently impact and there are a few too many cloaked characters for my reading convenience but many of these may be intentional or addressed in the future.

So after fourty-four pages I can say that the plot is at once confusingly new and cliche (in the right ratio), that the characters are both mould-cut and fuzzy edged (which is fascinating) and that the mythos merely hinted at here appears majestic in scope. It is a comic that could go any number of ways from here’ it could excel or fizzle, the potential for both is there, but knowing Edmondson I trust it to take the most interesting of the many ready routes, as he certainly has in writing it.

There is something alienated about The Fall, it always feels one step further removed from its events than a traditional British crime drama would – and I use that term intentionally, the show shot and set over the Irish Sea from most of those that you see coming from the BBC. We see this in the plot, which isn’t the simple crime and casework cliche that a synopsis would suggest but is instead a sort of investigation into an investigation; the protagonist brought in by the local police as internal oversight on a high-profile murder case that has stalled. That same synopsis would tell you that the show marks the return of Gillian Anderson to the sharp slacks of a power suit, but interestingly she isn’t actually the lead, at least not yet; here the cop takes a backseat to the killer.

In all of the press for the program Anderson has spoken about the adult nature of the material here, and one way in which it is adult is the fact that the lead is a sexually liberated woman. Initially I took this as a bit of bait for the fans who were a little too frenetic in their viewing of
The X-Files but it turns out that it actually has some bearing on the show as a whole. This episode open the series with the first of multiple sequences showcasing a woman’s private preparations; here Anderson’s Superintendent preparing for a trip, for a fresh start by cleaning up her bathroom and herself. It’s an informative moment sure, showing us how overkempt her character is, but its not until later that you realise why its so long.

Throughout the pilot Director Jacob Verbruggen uses his camera almost as Powell did during the seminal Peeping Tom; its not just capturing the picture, its like the physicist says, its observation is Penetrative. The show seems so unsettling because through most of the pilot the camera it was shot on is, for lack of a better term, a pervert and thus we are too. The camera is constantly watching: watching women undress to their underwear, watching creeps break in to women’s houses to steal their underwear and then when it shakes and steps forward to later watch again it makes us wonder if it’s the creeps perspective that we’re seeing or simply that of the show’s camera, but either way we are where we shouldn’t be seeing what we shouldn’t see, either way we are the creep.

Its more than a stylistic decision though, this skewered sort of scoptophilia, since watching is so inherently important also to the script. As Anderson’s investigation is based solely on the work of other officers she is forced to sit and see the facts as shown in a stack of files and, since this is the modern day, we also get to watch her watch a video shoot of a crime scene, one featuring the nude corpse of a once attractive woman no less; stepping us back through another layer of sex and screens. This is not a trait that she alone displays though; the killer, who we also follow, shares her penchant for photos, for note taking and for the drawing up of precise plans only he gets off on his; there is then a meticulous psychology to the show.

Psychologically speaking the most disconcerting element of the show for me was the fact that we spend so much time with said sex-obsessed slaughterer: both because this means that the episode spends more time exploring the fetish than condemning it, but more so because he is thus the lead through whose eyes we see the world of the show and they are ofttimes empathetic eyes. A family man at home – father of two – and couples councillor in the office – a constant opportunity to observe women in a private state while staying safely removed – he is a frighteningly human figure and his flaw is one that we all share, albeit on a different scale. To an extent one can see the appeal in what he does, in watching, we are after all enjoying watching him do it are we not? Whatever the case I’ll be watching the rest of The Fall to see where the series goes from here, because it was a very intriguing start.

It’s somewhat fitting that an episode built around repetition would borrow so heavily from the thematics of the hour that preceded it, but it doesn’t make it any less of a pain to write this review. Man With A Plan was the kind of episode that showed the screenwriters in the room clearly have one, probably up on a big board somewhere that they would have returned to again and again during the writing of this hour; doing what Ted termed an old fashioned technique, research. To mirror the plots core premise, the overpopulation of the company’s post-merger offices and the repetition and redundancies that come with such, the episode weaved in a number of references to episodes past; scaling from the blunt to the subtle. It’s no coincidence then that this is the episode where Pete’s mother is first shown to have some form of Alzheimer’s; she forgets but the show never does. Matt Weiner is the man with a plan and we best trust in it.

Unfortunately I’m not the sort of fan – of this show or any other – who can recall production codes for scenes four or five seasons back or the colour of the coat that a character wore the last time they saw this or did that so episodes like this can often go mostly over my head; some of the callbacks my subconscious will catch, as Peggy’s perhaps did that fact about margarine (provided that she wasn’t doing secretly planned research beforehand so that she could impress in Ted’s ‘rap session’) but others I only notice when more careful minded critics than I point them out. The most blatant reference came at the closing of the episode with the shooting of Bobby Kennedy, an attack which mirrored both the recent assassination of Martin Luther King and the earlier event with his brother in Dallas; but this, like the second firing of Michael Gaston’s ill-fated accounts man, was more of a shallow nod than a meaningful wink.

Just as it takes the firm’s pair of star creatives an juxtaposes them as mirror images, the episode also steals scenes from episode’s past, perverts them slightly and represents them: like Don trying to get Ted drunk as he once did Roger or Bob taking Joan to perhaps the same hospital she once took Don. One of the smaller touches, one that many will likely miss during the episode, is that the office Peggy is presented during her second orientation at the SCDP offices (given her familiarity the fact that she feigned ignorance and fear for Ted speaks volumes of her manipulation of that man) used to belong to Pete and more specifically that it contains the pesky pillar that once caused the man so much comedic trouble. This is a callback because the episode in which it last featured was directed, as this one is, by Mr. John Slattery.

Given that he was the man behind the camera its no surprise that Plan is something of a fast paced and funny hour; neither the stabbing banter nor the sight gags have ever been as sharp as they are under him, but the almost Bergman-esque character placement and controversial song selection (that closing credit sequence is bold) speak of him also having a set of talents beyond those of Roger Sterling.  He is a consummate professional but here, for the first time, I had some issues with the work: sometimes though the cuts come a little too quickly, the scenes seeming to skip one from the next without the usual smoothness of the best Mad Men hours, an issue exaggerated by the somewhat split tone of the stories content. I don’t know who exactly to blame but it seems like someone failed to plan something during the shoot.

Given that the title highlights plans it seems important to pay attention to just who in the episode has one and how they work out. Joan has the floorplan of the new office in her hand as she stands upon the stairs but it does her no good; the fresh meat has no feeling for her: they don’t know who she is, what she’s done or that she’s not a damn to be trifled with and so she hands it off to her double, the Joan of CGC and slips off instead with a friend. Bob Benson, the strange, smiling specter that seemingly haunts the halls of SCDP takes her in later, seemingly by accident but his brown-nosing is so beneficiary that one must be suspect about whether or not he had somehow planned it all along, so to Ted’s totally charming behavior in the boardroom. Though of course he couldn’t know that Joan would be sick or that he was so close to severance, these occurrences were unplannable.I talked extensively in last week’s review (HERE) about how characters in the show attempt to control things only to have their plans curbed by the chaos of the world around them. That theme was repeated this week, though in some interesting new ways. Don, whose life has always been split into two equal parts, found the office a flustering flow of people and files and Dawn, his one calming influence, his codex of control, mysteriously disappeared and so he attempted to wrestle complete control of his romantic relations. Megan is meaningless to him, drowned out by an internal melody, and so he heads to Sylvia, sticks her in a hotel room and tells her to stay completely still when he is not around. He wants her in a vacuum, he wants her to be an island, he wants a world like the one in videogames where people only act, only exist, when you are around to awaken them, but that kind of control is just creepy and so like all of last week’s individual thoughts it blows up in his face.

Don’s rivalry with Ted, which I’d never really brought before now, shows another side of this same story; just as it shows us another side of Don, we are so used to his drinking and ducking out of the office that Ted’s strict timekeeping and inability to imbibe at the same pace come as something of a shock, the whole CGC team offers something of a mundane opposite to the drunken arrogance of SCDP. When he asks his friend what to do about the conflict Ted is told nothing: he is instructed not to plan and not to fight, to leave things in the hand of the universe and simply let Don tire himself out fighting against them. That approach, interestingly given by a man who has seemingly been shafted by said universe, works wonders; Don flinches and Ted walks away the happy man, the man who people like working for, the man that Don wishes he was but never can be; the grass somehow greener in the mirror’s image.

(If you are reading this line then the following is more rough thoughts more than an actual review. I’ll update and refine it as I continue to listen to the CD in question)

Trouble finds us all sometimes. Everyone has stories of those times that they screwed up, cracked up or got caught up in some behavior that was less than their best; even us critics. Trouble finds us too, and double-quick when it comes time to try reviewing music; arguably the most porcelain and personal of artistic mediums. An example of my having made such a screw-up was my active disappointment in High Violet, the last album that The National released. A mistake that I didn’t plan on making twice.

VIolet didn’t strike me much at first, nor did it stick with me after the first few spins and so i sort of just gave up on it; until it was released to rave reviews from the biggest audience that the band had yet seen. So I tried it again and came around a little, just in time to see the band live where the new songs clicked into place perfectly, to the point that it is now one of my favorite of all their records and some of its songs still the most spun in my stereo. So with their latest I’m hesitant to make any grand qualitative declarations, but I will say that I again struggled to access the album despite definitely appreciating many of its individual aspects.

So what makes Trouble Will Find Me an underwhelming album? Firstly, I should know them better than to call it that and I should live in salt for saying such …whatever that means, but I will nevertheless because after all the hype an expectation the record begins with its weakest tracks, off the track from the get-go. After the album opener that I just liberally quoted come the two previously released tracks Demons and Don’t Swallow the Cap which never really sung for me as singles and open the album as slowly as Terrible Love and Sorrow did High Violet, but they’re also much smaller and more understated than those two songs; as the album is as a whole. There is nothing inherently wrong with the songs, in fact they each have some strong moments scattered through them, but they lack an impact.

Then comes Fireproof a short, simple and quiet sort of interludal track that starts slow and kicks up just before it closes. It works as a sort of tendon, stringing together that first section of the album with what comes next. Sea of Love is a sort of centerpiece for the album: it hits the first hook, seeds the title in its lyrics and sets the album off. Graceless follows up on that momentum soon after, another strong mid-tempo track ( which is about as fast as one should expect to see from this act). Even the more somber songs separating these two have a certain tempting intensity to them; this section was the stand out over my first few spins but with speed comes shallowness and so these songs have failed to strengthen much with further listens.

Even so I’m not sure how well any of these songs would stand solo; the album as a whole lacking any obvious ‘singles’. Of course for a band like The National singles aren’t the artistic aim of any studio sessions, but its telling I think that none resulted; so too that there are four or five different tracks that they are trying out in the press and publicity. In compensation for this the album flows much more from song to song, serving more as a single monotonous unit than their last effort, which was a sensational scattering of tracks more that it was a whole. In this way Trouble represents a sort of return to the structure of their earlier album Alligator after two albums of more audience friendly material.

Heightening this sense of cohesion is the fact that the album serves a sort of concept; a character mentioned in one song returns in another and may even be the protagonist of others. For the first time ‘character’ actually feels like an appropriate word to use in relation to Matt’s lyrics; appropriate because while most of the songs strut out the same topics of love, self-loathing and substance abuse that have been the soul of all his work, here he sings about them from the perspective of people other than himself. Sure its not new for The National to mention names, to sing about people, but here he sings as them and this is interesting. The trait is most obvious and most effective when that person is off the opposite gender, as is the case during most of the later songs. The meaning of all this will however require more time with the record.

I think there is something quite telling in the fact that so many of the stories told are of or about women; it lends a certain femininity to the tracks, despite Matt’s metal baritone. The gentleness, the smoothness that this brings to the band separates their work here from the rough and chaotic masculinity of earlier releases. The sorrow on show here is of a different sort and I think that is why I struggled to sync in with it initially, why the album may seem overly understated, but during the final stretch of tracks – especially the Humiliation / Pink Rabbits double, coincidentally my favorite section of the record – he really lets this style shine all the way through and it leads to a new sort of sound for the band, an intensely intriguing one that I wish the whole album had.

Perhaps explaining the shift in emotion – a shift towards subtlety and softness, away from the scale and sharpness of past songs – is the birth of Matt’s daughter. Many of the loving lines that he lets out during the album seem either directed at her or about his experiences raising her which, while cute, lacks some of the edge that he normally handles so well. Afraid of Everyone suggested that she could still be a source of great songs, the fear and tension brought on by the shift in lifestyle fascinating, but as time has passed his personal life has seemingly only gotten more stable and thus his inspiration maybe a little stale.

The album also employs a strict, yet inconsistent rhyming scheme during sections of certain songs; which is at once weird and what drives many of their better moments. When he starts to stress his songwriting skills with adhering to this structure it lends the lyrics a certain energy and the band plays up to match it, but for the most part you can hear when a word has simply been used for the sake of the scheme, which isn’t what I want from him as a writer.

I’m similarly torn on the length. Arguably the more of National that we get the better but this album seems almost too big – it’s their longest yet by a considerable amount of minutes – and it feels bloated as a result. Thirteen tracks is a lot, but more than that each track here is, like recent Strokes songs, structured as two-to-four small sections into themselves; each with distinct tempos, melodies and lyric structures. It is then a big album, a bold album and yet an album focused on a very narrow niche of style so it only makes sense that it is a tough one to take in but i’ve been trying and have found that I’m liking it more and more the more time that I spend with it. Maybe it’s just Stockholm syndrome but I’m steadily falling for Trouble despite its flaws (which are comparatively minute; a below average National album is still so much better than nearly all else out there), so when you get it I recommenced doing the same, embracing this and letting Trouble find you.

During the first few scenes I thought that this might be exactly what the strangely unpunctuated Star Trek Into Darkness would deliver, opening as it does with what a fan will surely tell you is a direct homage to episode something of season this or that as Kirk and the crew cleverly maneuver through a chaotic mission on some strange, primitive planet. You don’t have to know the old show to feel the glee with which the chase sequence is constructed, winks and nods are still noticeable even if you’re not in on the joke, but there are references in there to Indiana Jones and Butch and Sundance both just in case certain cineastes feel that they are missing out on the fun. I want to stress that word, fun, because that is exactly what this sequence is: it is heavily sci-fi, has some serious moments of mortality an even hints at pseudo-philosophy but first and foremost it brings the kind of adrenaline to the screen that each episodes adventure must have to the audiences of the past.

Then the opening credits roll and that may as well have been an unaffiliated short screened before the feature for all its tonal connection. We open back on earth with a stunning sequence of a very different sort, a slow, silent orchestra scored story of a man and his dying daughter. It’s an effectively sad and stylish slice of cinema, stylish in a sense that means more than mere visual trickery, which is what JJ traditionally brings as director; but then it introduces Benedict Cumberbatch with an over-held close-up and sinister string work of a strength that would make Bruce,the shark from Jaws, blush. At this stage he has done nothing ‘evil’, he hasn’t even suggested the capability for it; the film is simply aware that we have heard who was cast in the role and decided, ‘Why then bother doing all that leg work?’ This kind of assumptive storytelling plagues the film’s script more and more as the story progresses.

That said Benedict Cumberbatch is pretty good here, charismatically monotone as always, but the direction that his character takes was for me the least interesting of all available possibilities while also being, for the fans, perhaps the most pernicious. His identity is a poorly kept secret but I still won’t spoil it here, I will now however suggest some spoilers through reduction. Had the film done as it almost suggested and had him play a straight ally versus Peter Weller’s admiral, Iron Man 3 style, I would have been much more interested. Instead they play a card meaningful only to half the audience in attendance an for them a potentially aggravating one at that, so the character was only ever Cumberbatch’s delivery of the dialogue, nothing more.

There is another, similarly telling sequence early on in the movie that showcases its other big problem. The first film was, as so many are these days, an origin story; a tale told to get the band together under the banner of Captain Kirk. This one then should simply start off loaded but instead there is an insipid series of events that regresses us back a step by removing Kirk from the ship and disassembling the crew, only to get them all back together again two scenes later; expecting the same slapped high-fives this second time around without putting in any of the actual work.

Chris Pine and the rest of the cast are again quite acceptable in their roles: his dual-shouldered relationship with Spock and McCoy resulting in some strong walk-and-talk scenes in the sleek white corridors of the modern Enterprise while Zoe Saldana gets more to do than expected. Pegg is loveable but little more, the laughs he gets low and murmured when he usually elicits so much more; funny mainly if you enjoy Scottish accents. Their arcs though are interesting only in comparison to prior movies whose plots are here inverted (in my best estimate, though maybe repeated is actually accurate) in what may well be a clever move, but its never a very satisfying one.

That story, while admittedly intriguing at times, ultimately doesn’t amount to very much and I mean that quantitatively as much as I do qualitatively. The film is long but the story rather short, the film itself taking place essentially over the course of a single day in a mostly stationary ship. I might have said that for this second outing they made a sort of bottle-feature but the fact is that the film was still far more expensive than a movie should be, it didn’t bolster anyone’s budgets. All that money though is, as they say, on the screen. Visually the film is huge: high spectacle in high definition. Unlike Oblivion though the effects here catch your eye because they are deafening rather than deft, they wrestle you into ocular submission through their expense and extremely detailed rendering rather than the skillful way in which they are employed.

Overall my biggest problem with the picture, why it didn’t work for me even as peer-through entertainment, was its cowardice. Into Darkness doesn’t boldly go where no-film has gone before, it’s afraid of final frontiers and so it constantly cycles back on itself; undercutting any bold moves made and replacing them with ones that were proven to have worked in the past. The film is too much like Spock and not enough like its tempestuous captain. So sure, I’ve never seen the show but I’ve still seen all this before and Trekkies really have seen it before and better, so I wonder just who this film is for. We can, I think, be united in our vague disappointment with and disenfranchisement by Into Darkness.