Detention (2011)

Riley Jones is the self-proclaimed second biggest loser in the history of Grizzly Lake High School, pipped for the top spot only by the woman who sexually assaulted the school mascot twenty years earlier.  She misses the bus to school and her dad's too much of a drunk to take her, so she has to limp her way there on her broken foot, where she will spend the day mooning over a boy who only has eyes for a ditzy cheerleader.  Really, the last thing she needs in her life is some nutjob dressing up like a killer from some B-grade film and trying to murder her.

Detention is considerably more inventive than its pro-forma slasher stylings would suggest.  It's a film packed with all kinds of oddness.  I have to salute its willingness to mash together a whole bunch of genres and ideas and just go wild with them.

Unfortunately, as bold as all this might be, it's only 5% as clever and 1% as charming as the film-makers evidently thought it was.  I can't blame the cast for this.  Shanley Caswell does her best to make Riley winsome rather than crushingly annoying, but that task is, frankly, beyond human capability, while the rest of the cast don't really get enough time on screen to become much more than props for the increasingly anarchic plot (and it's probably best not to think too hard about said plot afterward, since it makes very little actual sense).

Some might find this an interesting failure of a film.  I think those people would be half right.

Dick Turpin, Season 3 (1981)

Dick Turpin finds himself enmeshed in a colonial affair when feisty Marylander Jane Crosby comes to Britain to present the government with evidence that the Governor of the Colony has been Up To No Good.  The Governor, of course, has plans of his own for young Jane, and has a significant advantage in that he has enlisted the aid of the young woman's amoral fiance in his schemes.  Of course, he doubtless wasn't planning to have to deal with the Old Country's most notorious highwayman ...

I've previously explained that this was the last series of Dick Turpin to be produced, even though it was not the last to be aired.  It's also the only one to set every episode into one single narrative, as Turpin and Jane romp all over southern England in their quest to bring down the nefarious Governor.

So does the shift to a connected narrative have much impact on the entertainment value of the show?  Well not really, to be honest.  It still feels quite episodic in structure, with a series encounters and escapades that constantly tend to reset the main narrative's status quo (a technique that old Doctor Who also frequently used), and several of the vignettes fell rather like padding, at that.  What could have been an interesting experiment in the structure of the show is ultimately little more than a gimmick.

The cast gamely mug it up for the camera (and there are plenty of "Hey, it's that guy!" cameos, probably most notably from Donald Pleasence and Patrick Macnee), but they can't do much with the fundamental lack of ambition showed by the script.

The Fast and the Furious (2001)

Brian Spilner is an car parts salesman by day and a wannabe street racer by night.  This latter ambition brings him into the circle of Dominic Toretto, a tough, gravelly-voiced racer with a knack for winning.  The two have already crossed paths due to Brian's interest in Dom's sister, Mia, and before long Brian seems to be well-ingratiated with all the Toretto family.  But is Brian who he appears to be?

I very much doubt that the makers of The Fast and the Furious expected to launch a multi-billion dollar phenomenon that nearly two decades later would have eight films in the main franchise and multiple spin-offs in the works.  And yes, since you ask, I am looking forward to Hobbs & Shaw.  And yet that's exactly what they did with this combination of fast cars, manly men, and women in short shorts.

The epochal excess of later films in the franchise is not yet in effect here, though.  The stunts are more grounded (though still impressive) and the plot is fairly standard cops and robbers stuff in the same town, with none of the international espionage antics (and increasingly star-stuffed cast) that later entries feature.

But hey, if you want to see where it all began ... or just enjoy a swaggeringly silly bit of car chase silliness ... then this might be the film for you.

South of Nowhere, Season 3 (2007)

Dramatic events at the senior prom (season 2's finale) send a seismic shock through the lives of the students of King High.  Relationships break apart, start up, or are reforged in new ways as the group all seek to come to terms with what happened and find their paths and passions (both romantic and otherwise) in life.

The final season of South of Nowhere runs a few episodes longer than the first two did, but it still feels a bit over-stuffed with ... well, stuff.  There are multiple new characters introduced, new romances begun (and old ones ended or resumed), and pretty much all the drama that comes with the end of high school and the first inklings of "oh jeez, I have to work out what I am doing with my life".

I can only dimly remember that time of my own life, occurring as it did in the Late Cretaceous era, but it was much less fraught than what's going on here.  Of course, none of my friends were emancipated minors with multiple millions of dollars to their name.

Which probably sounds rather soap opera-ish as a plot point ... and well honestly that's what South of Nowhere was: an updated Beverly Hills 90210 with a lot of financially-privileged and attractive young people making out and making mistakes.  The big difference was basically this show's decision to make a same-sex relationship the core of the show.  And hey, for that act of representation I have to applaud it.  Plus, sudsy stuff can be quite good fun, at times.

Cleopatra (1963)

In 48 BCE, Caesar defeated Pompey in the Roman Civil War.  The vanquished general fled to Egypt - then a wealthy kingdom that provided much of Rome's wheat.

Fearing Pompey's popularity with the Egyptian army, and also the risk of making Caesar an enemy if he provided shelter to the fugitive, King Ptolemy of Egypt conspired to have Pompey assassinated: a move that did not win him the Roman favour he hoped.  Caesar took his revenge by supporting Ptolemy's sister in the Egyptian civil war.

That sister?  Cleopatra.  A woman who would go on to (allegedly) bear Caesar's only son, and later wed Mark Antony, one of the two main faction leaders in the next Roman Civil War, some twenty years later, against Caesar's adopted heir, Octavian.

Unfortunately for Cleopatra, that wouldn't go so well ...

This film is a by-word for hubris and fiscal foolishness in Hollywood.  Despite being the highest grossing film of 1963, it still lost money, due largely to the immense sums squandered during its production (not least the fact that they built the sets three separate times in three separate countries).  It's also known for launching the famous Elizabeth Taylor - Richard Burton romance, when the two met on set as Cleopatra and Mark Antony respectively.

But setting aside the real world shenanigans, how is the film?  Well, it's a mixed bag, to be honest.

For one thing, despite the apparent real life chemistry between the two, Taylor and Burton don't really exhibit the same on screen.  Perhaps this is because the Mark Antony we meet in the film is already past his prime, dissipated by his taste for wine, and frankly not at all the match for Cleopatra that Caesar seemed to be.  For another, at 251 minutes, the film is also very, very long.

On the other hand, it's a sumptuous, gorgeous film to look at - they may have built the sets three times, but they built them really well - and there are some genuinely good sections in it (especially in the first half).  If you are in the market for an ambitious historical drama, it certainly is that.

The Dresden Files, Season 1 (2007)

Harry Dresden is a wizard.  He's not a magician.  He doesn't do card tricks, he doesn't teach magic, and he certainly doesn't do parties.  What he does do is use his knowledge of the hidden supernatural world to help the Chicago PD with their cases.  His most frequent associates are Murphy, a female police detective; and Bob, the disembodied spirit of a long-dead sorcerer.

The Dresden Files began life as a series of books that have considerable popularity in the geekosphere.  A lot of these ardent fans were outraged by changes the series made from the books.  I'm not one of those fans, since by 50 pages into the first one I was heartily tired of being told more about the female character's bosoms than ... well, anything else about them, frankly.

*ahem*

In any case, I was resolutely on the side of the TV series when it came out, since Paul Blackthorne was quite fun in the lead role and I didn't give two hoots about whether Bob was authentic to the books or not.  But I must admit that the last 12 years have not been kind to it.  The bar for fantastical film and TV has been well and truly lifted in that time, and the very modest ambitions of the show (and its equally modest budget) are more than a little obvious these days.  It's simply out of its league compared to its more modern competitors and that's why I cannot really recommend it.  You'd simply be better off using the time to watch something like The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina instead.

Mystery Men (1999)

Champion City sleeps easy, protected by its glamorous superpowered defender, Captain Amazing.

It's also defended, albeit a lot less prominently (or successfully) by a number of lesser known wannabe superheroes.  There's the Blue Raja, Master of Fork-fu.  Or Mr Furious, who harnesses the power of his incandescent rage.  Or the Spleen who ... well actually, let's not talk about what the Spleen does.

Anyway, when supervillain Casanova Frankenstein is released from jail, and Captain Amazing goes missing, it seems like the also-rans are now the only guys left in the race to save the city.  Can they combine their admittedly mediocre talents and prevent disaster, or are they destined to be the punchline once again?

It's hard to imagine it now, but 20 years ago the idea that superhero films would soon be dominating the box office would have seemed like a wild fantasy.  Sure, occasional tent-pole releases like 1989's Batman might succeed, but there had been quite a lot more misses than hits.  This 1999 effort to turn spandex into box office gold, alas, ends up in the latter column.  It assembles a great cast and has a pretty funky soundtrack, but it doesn't really know what to do with them, relying on fart jokes and people accidentally sitting on forks as its main vein of "comedy", and failing to offer any fun action sequences to raise the tempo.  After all, these guys are putzes so we can't see them do anything too cool.

Fifteen years later, Marvel would show how to do the "wacky bunch of misfits save the day" thing in fine style, but I doubt they took any tips from the Mystery Men when they did so.

Avatar: The Last Airbender, Season 3 (2008)

The decades-long war between the Fire Nation and the other countries of the world is entering its final stages, and the situation doesn't look good.  Much of the globe is under Fire Nation dominion, and the Avatar and his companions still haven't found a firebending master to complete his training.  It seems an insurmountable challenge: after all, the firebenders are the Avatar's enemies, led as they are by the royal family of the Fire Nation.

Perhaps the only glimmer of hope is an impending eclipse, when all firebending powers will be briefly suppressed.  If the Avatar faces the Fire Lord then, he might triumph despite not yet mastering all four elements.  But if he misses that narrow window, then what?

Avatar: The Last Airbender is renowned as one of the first western animated TV shows to invest heavily in an ongoing story, even as it sought to (with occasional exceptions for multi-parters) tell a complete story in each individual episode.  That shows a refreshing level of trust in its audience, even if it does dip into goofy slapstick a little too often for my tastes.  I mean, I like goofy slapstick, but I feel like the show could be a little more selective about when it uses it.

This is a solid concluding season to the Avatar's quest: if epic fantasy (especially epic fantasy that draws on inspirations other than Tolkien and medieval Europe) is your thing, check it out.

The Post (2017)

In 1950, the first US troops arrived in Vietnam, to "supervise" the use of military equipment the US was providing to France.  Their numbers were small, and at first grew only slowly.  In 1960, there were still under 1,000 of them.

That didn't last.  By 1965, their numbers had gown nearly 200 times.  By 1968, their numbers had reached half a million.  Throughout this massive escalation, the US government (whether it be Kennedy's, or Johnson's, or Nixon's) insisted that war could and would be won.

In 1971, the New York Times began to publish stories based on classified documents that showed that the US government had known for years that Vietnam was a lost cause.  The Nixon administration moved immediately to ban the paper from making further publications about the matter.

For the Washington Post, the situation is tense.  Novice owner Katharine Graham is personal friends with some of the men being indicted by these stories.  Editor Ben Bradlee is seen as a loose cannon, and is personally frustrated that the Times got the story first, and by the government's challenge to the paper's First Amendment rights.  And some of the paper's board are more than happy to let the Times hang alone on the matter, preferring not to attract the ire of the notoriously prickly Nixon.

Of course, none of it matters if they can't find a copy of the classified documents in question.  But if they did, what then?  Would publishing the truth be worth the risk?

I don't imagine that the release of this film - which champions the role of a free press in society - at this time in history is entirely a coincidence.  The Times and the Post have been repeatedly attacked by the current administration, just as they were attacked by Nixon.

Whatever the film's motivations, is it any good?  Yeah, it's well acted and solidly put together, but it's definitely aiming at an audience that likes their films on the talky side of things.