Orphan Black, Season 2 (2014)

One of the challenges facing any show driven by a core mystery / conspiracy is that it has to find a way to provide some sort of forward progress and answers, without blowing its big question.  It's a difficult line to walk.  For my money most often shows fail this task by devolving into a series of largely meaningless plot twists, losing momentum and my interest along with it.  Yes Lost, I am talking about you.

Season two of Orphan Black doesn't do a perfect job of walking the tightrope, I think.  There's a bit too much wheel-spinning activity where lots of stuff happens, but the end result of all that kerfuffle is that things are pretty much exactly where they were before it all happened; a few too many "dun dun dun!" moments that are resolved less than half an episode later.  I'm reminded in some ways of the old serials that used to play before the main feature at the cinema back in the 1930s and 1940s.  These would often consist of 10-12 twenty minute episodes, but the end of the second episode and the beginning of the second last would have the characters in exactly the same places.  This meant that you could drop all the stuff in the middle and make a movie out of the first two and last two episodes, and the story would still make sense.  So from episode 3 to episode N-2 was just filler.

Now this show doesn't quite go that far, as there is stuff that happens in each episode that advances the story in various ways, but when a character gets kidnapped by group X, then escapes, then voluntarily returns to them, then changes her mind and escapes again ... well, it does feel like at least a bit of padding is going on.

Fortunately Orphan Black has some sharp writing and a fine cast.  On the latter front, Tatiana Maslany has rightly been acclaimed for her performance as multiple characters, but I would be remiss not to also mention Jordan Javaris and Skyler Wexler, who are excellent in their supporting roles.  On the former, pretty much everything this season that involves uptight soccer-mom Alison is pure gold.

There's definitely a wobble or two here as Orphan Black walks the mystery high wire, but it hasn't fallen off it.  I'll be coming along for next season to see if they can keep the balancing act going.

Battle of Britain (1969)

In June 1940, Nazi Germany reigned supreme in Europe.  They'd swept through Poland, Denmark, Norway and France, defeating all in their path, and driven the British Expeditionary Force from the beaches of Dunkirk.  All that stood between the United Kingdom and the seemingly unstoppable blitzkrieg was thirty miles of water.

In earlier times, the might of the Royal Navy would have meant that the UK was inviolate, but in this new era of warfare it had already become clear that air power could dominate a surface navy.  If Germany would win control of the skies, an invasion might be possible.  This is a very big "might", to be honest, given the Nazis' lack of proper troop transports, but nobody wanted to test it to find out, so the country's first line of defence became its newest, smallest military service: the Royal Air Force.

For five months, until winter and then Hitler's scheme for an invasion of the Soviet Union rendered British shores safe, a vital struggle was waged in the air.  This film chronicles that conflict.

Like The Longest Day, this is the kind of war movie they don't make any more: one where the progress of the war itself is the focus of the narrative, and the characters we meet exist only to provide a context to that conflict.  They may have their own miniature storylines within the film, but the emphasis there is on 'miniature'.  For instance, we might meet a pilot in a scene, learn some particular tidbit about them in their second scene, and then see some kind of fallout related to that information in the third.

This is not to say that the film doesn't give you characters to care about: just that it does so not by providing us with deep insight into them, but by using instantly recognisable archetypes and scenarios in their individual tales.  We get the struggling marriage, and veteran officer, the plucky young pilot, and so forth.  Many of these characters will experience less than perfect outcomes, of course.  There's a war on, after all.  But the film also injects a few moments of levity to change up the atmosphere, where it is appropriate to do so.

If you've an interest in a period of war that led to one of Winston Churchill's most famous speeches, this is certainly worth your time.  While the style of film-making is one that has gone out of fashion, it is still an effective one.  In addition, being made less than thirty years after the events it depicts, the movie has the advantage that much WW2-era equipment was still available for use on screen, and people who lived through the actual events were on hand to provide expert advice.  This provides it a degree of verisimilitude that I expect a more modern film would lack, even if it ultimately had more spectacular visuals.

Bride and Prejudice (2004)

Yes, this is another adaptation of Pride and Prejudice - this time giving it a Bollywood-style makeover.  By this point you may be wondering how many versions of this story I'm going to review, and the answer is ... well, pretty much all of them, really.  I have at least two more to come, though neither is likely to happen for a while as I haven't actually purchased those movies yet.

So we're transported here to Amritsar, India, where the Bakshi family has four beautiful daughters, but not much in the way of dowries to offer with them.  Their mother is desperate to find them wealthy, respectable husbands, and soon sets her targets on British-Indian barrister Balraj, who has recently come to town with his American friend Will Darcy.

Balraj and eldest daughter Jaya immediately hit it off, but the sparks that fly between second daughter Lalilta and Mr Darcy are of the rather more adversarial kind.  She finds him arrogant and intolerant of Indian culture.

And from there, we're basically onto the standard narrative of the book, albeit with numerous musical numbers added - it is a Bollywood style film after all - and with suitable adjustments for the change in setting and time period.  The result is a pleasantly engaging film with a charming cast (I particularly liked the unusually sympathetic Mr Collins-expy), though it is perhaps a bit slight in substance when it comes to resolving the Wickham storyline (which is shame, because it did quite a good job of setting it up).

If you want a feel good diversion and don't mind musicals as a format, this is a sound choice.

The Wire, Season 1 (2002)

Avon Barksdale has quietly accumulated control of almost the entire Westside drug business in Baltimore.  He and his people are organised and careful, and they've so far gone under the radar of almost everyone in law enforcement despite being responsible for over a dozen murders.

Baltimore PD are finally going to take an interest in Barksdale, though.  This isn't always entirely willing; many on the force think the investigation is a Quixotic waste of time and money that would be better spent on securing routine 'buy-bust' operations; but if the men and women on the case can thread their way through the political minefield that is the police department, and find the evidence they need to nail Barksdale, they might just manage to land a career-making conviction.  The only question is what it will cost them ...

I originally saw the first season of The Wire about ten years ago.  I quite liked it - enough to buy this DVD set, as well as the other seasons, when they became relatively cheap - but I never felt a particularly strong urge to prioritise the show over other things on my shelves, so it has taken a while for me to get back to it.

Presumably I'm the one who has changed in the decade since my initial viewing, rather than the show mysteriously transforming itself on the discs, but I found it thoroughly compelling this time around.  Complex characters with conflicting agendas; an refreshing absence of 'idiot ball' moments, and a skillful ability to present deeply flawed but still sympathetic people on all sides of the situation.

Excellent stuff.  It may be a bit of a challenge if you struggle with shows that have a lot of bad language, or where there are few if any wholly admirable characters, but it's exceptionally well put together.

The Frighteners (1996)

Twenty years ago, when Peter Jackson was still required to make movies that had a sensible run time, he produced this comedy-horror film starring Michael J Fox.  I dread to think what bloated mess we'd get these days, or what contortions would be required to justify 40 minutes of Legolas stealing everyone else's thunder.

Fox plays Frank Bannister, a "psychic detective".  This job is of course a scam, but not in the way you might expect.  Frank really is psychic: or at least, he can see and speak to ghosts.  The scam is that Frank has a couple of friendly spirits stage a haunting for him (though other people can't see them, ghosts can move physical objects around), then he turns up and "exorcises the restless spirits".

Unfortunately for Bannister, not all ghosts are as friendly as the ones he works with, and he is about to stumble across a particularly malevolent one.  This ghastly ghostie likes to squeeze the hearts of human beings until they die from cardiac arrest.  Which would be bad enough all by itself, but (a) the bad spirit's about to go on a tear through people to whom Frank has some connection, and (b) Frank's wife died in odd circumstances some years earlier, all of which makes him the prime suspect in the eyes of local FBI man Milton Dammers.

Side note: Dammers is played by Jeffrey Combs, who should be familiar to pretty much anyone who watches much geek-friendly TV, and he totally steals the show here as the embittered and neurotic agent.  Just a wonderful performance.

Anyway, Frank now has to try and prevent the actual murderer - who no-one else can see, let's remember - from continuing its killing spree, while staying one step ahead of the authorities.

The Frighteners does a good job of blending the comedy and horror genres, mostly by keeping the majority of the former in the first half of the film, and by making the humour that does appear in the later stages be more and more dark and twisted.  The overall result is pretty solidly entertaining, though there are a couple of minor plot issues that you need to hand-wave away, and the final victory is a bit too neat and tidy for my tastes.

Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons (1967)

There are some obvious similarities between this show and later Gerry Anderson offering UFO, as both feature multinational organisations (called SHADO in UFO, Spectrum here) attempting to thwart a technologically superior alien menace.

There are differences, of course, the most obvious of which is that the later show was live action, whereas this is Thunderbirds-style "Supermarionation".  Also, UFO lacks the superhero-like protagonist we have here: due to his encounters with the Mysterons, Captain Scarlet can recover from pretty much any injury.

There's also the fact that this - despite its more "kiddie" format - is actually a considerably darker show.  In UFO, the aliens' motives for threatening us are unknown, and at the end of each episode their hostile intentions are thwarted by SHADO.  In Captain Scarlet, the Mysterons' hostility stems from the fact that we made a panicked and unprovoked attack upon them.  And while Spectrum often wins the day, the Mysterons do sometimes win a partial or even complete success in their schemes.  You don't often see a kids' show where the bad guys successfully carry out an assassination!

Unfortunately, despite its refreshingly 'grown-up' elements and the inevitable cool model designs that you'll see in any Anderson-led show, Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons suffers from two significant issues that prevent me from recommending it.  The first of these is that it lacks any kind of satisfying conclusion: in fact the very last episode is a clip show, while the second last is revealed to all be a dream at the end!

The other major issue is the writing.  Leaving aside that the Mysterons' demonstrable technological advantage is such that they could smash us like bugs whenever they wanted - we could perhaps excuse this by saying that they are deliberately drawing out the process of destroying us as a means of punishment - there's just some sloppy work here from time to time.  Like, you know, after 20 episodes of the Mysterons killing people and then replacing them with evil duplicates, your characters probably shouldn't be shocked when they find the dead body of someone they just saw in a seemingly hale and hearty condition.  And if you have the Mysterons say that there plans rely on capturing someone alive, they should probably not have tried to murder that person in a prior scene of the same episode.

If you grew up with Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, I could see buying and enjoying it for the nostalgia factor.  Otherwise you should probably skip it.

I should note that there is a more recent (2005) CGI version of the show, which at the very least addresses the "doesn't have a proper ending" issue.  I may pick it up someday and see if the writing in general is any better.

Patton (1970)

General George S Patton was a hugely divisive figure in the Allied war effort of World War 2.  He was arrogant and insubordinate, frequently clashing with other commanders, and when receiving orders he did not like, was not above claiming that the message had been "garbled" and then doing what he'd intended all along.  He also had a tendency to make controversial statements in public; to openly spurn representatives of the Soviet Union, despite them being allies in the war; and on more than one occasion was known to strike soldiers under his command for "cowardice" when they suffered from battle fatigue.  These misdemeanours, along with his aggressive strategic approach, saw him relieved of command for months at a stretch, and excluded from the D-Day landings in Normandy.

On the other hand, Patton was also an extremely effective commander.  He defeated the Afrika Korps in Tunisia, captured Messina in Sicily, and rampaged through France once finally reappointed to command, culminating in a vital role in defeating Hitler's Ardennes Offensive.  Such was his ability that the wehrmacht considered him to be the best commander the Allies had.

This rather lengthy biopic (it runs over 160 minutes) covers Patton's career from his arrival in North Africa to his final dismissal after the Nazi surrender.  It is anchored by a masterful performance by George C Scott as the man in question, for which Scott justly won an Academy Award.  The film itself also picked up the Best Picture gong and five other Oscars.  It's an engaging and authentic-feeling work, though how authentic it actually is, is somewhat more doubtful.  Patton was long dead and the producers did not have access to his diaries.

As is becoming a theme with this set of films, this is worth seeing if you have an interest in the period it covers.