Some Reviews of British Television
Nov. 24th, 2008 03:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skywaterblueFirst I saw 'The Devil's Whore', which was surprisingly crap. ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
selenak did a good round up on why it was crappy. Let me just say that the English Civil War is far too early to be making Goya references. I'll probably watch the rest of it though, given there's only three more parts and there is quite literally, nothing on American television that remotely interests me at the moment.
Second, I saw 'Einstein and Eddington'.
So this film was really enjoyable, and how could it not be? Andy Serkis lives and eats in the 'mad tortured genius' archetype, and Einstein was kind of nothing but the prototype for mad science. Serkis milks every minute of Einstein's outsized personality. One of the redeeming points of the film is that it goes out of its way to let you know that the real Einstein was a bit of a creep: serial womanizer, abandonment of child, ill behavior towards first wife and all.
Irony, then, that David Tennant kind of steals the movie from him with the understated performance as Andrew Eddington, who is someone I didn't know anything about prior to the film. Even though his character is kind of the SERIOUS BUSINESS version of John Smith in 'Human Nature/Family of Blood' only this time he's likable because he's a Quaker leading a quietly repressed life.
Anyway, it's a rather disjointed film as it's always bouncing between Einstein working out the cause of gravity, and Eddington, struggling to find a quantifiable way to test Einstein's theory in the universe.
As I was watching, I was sure it was going to come to a great close, in which quiet Eddington finally gets to meet brash Einstein and the clash of their personalities comes to a head post facto of Eddington proving General Relativity to be correct.
OF COURSE, THAT IS WHEN THE FILM DRAWS TO A CLOSE. And you never get to see Eddington and Einstein exchange any sort of serious moment! EVER. What a failure of the script to resolve into a narrative whole. There's a time, in scriptwriting, that fucking with history can be good for the story. Even if it doesn't happen in real life, the two meeting and exchanging words needed to happen to resolve the story.
Bah.
Made even more frustrating to me by the fact they work in Einstein sticking out his tongue at reporters about four decades before it actually happened.
And then at the end of the film's postscript, they describe Eddington as retreating into his private life to work on resolving his faith with physics. 'What curious phrasing,' I thought, so I hit wikipedia only to find out that this refers to the fact that Eddington got obsessed with what we would call the Grand Theory of Everything towards the end of his career.
This is not exactly what I would call unusual, and it frustrates me to draw a difference between the two men when Einstein himself spent most of his latter years obsessing over the Grand Theory of Everything and God's place in the universe.
Frustrating, very frustrating.
Here is my problem with math and disaster films: So there are about thirteen million people who live in the London metro area. If the flu has a kill rate of 90% of all people infected, with 100% infection rate, that still leaves about 1.3 million people in the London metro area.
Obviously, a lot more people than that died in 'Survivors'. So what if it was 99% of people? That leaves 13,000 people. Which is not a lot, but it's a lot more fucking people than you see in Survivors.
I say this only because there are so fucking many of us by this point that it would be really difficult to kill off all humans in one fell swoop and it always really bothers me to see plagues reduce the population to television portions. Especially since there's basically never been any disease (knock on wood) that was so virulent as to have that high a fatality. Battlestar Galactica did a good job by saying there were several thousands of survivors but never showing us them.
Really long. No one in this movie watches zombie films, because everyone's convinced that splitting up is a really good idea. At least Greg has the bright idea that they should go take over a farm somewhere and that farms are hard work, but he seems to be under the delusion he could run a farm with cows on his own.
Everyone keeps taking cars and pulling dead bodies out of the cars to get their keys and fighting over gasoline. At one point, Abby, who they elect leader despite the fact that she's easily the dumbest character in the show (my son with a known immune deficiency who I was told was deathly ill is so obviously still alive, I don't care what you think camp survivalist!) walks right out of the house past a pair of really good bikes to drive to a different city.
My least favorite character is Al, who has Gaius Baltar's apartment in mid-London, and is played by the male hooker that Julia fell in love with on 'Nip/Tuck'. Either he must die soon, or Abby will, since both of them can't keep the Child of Innocence as a Redemptive Plot Device. (Unless they start fucking and form a nuclear family, but they've established Abby as the mumsy one.)
The reveal at the end was interesting, in that apparently the virus was genetically modified by some creepy organization! Who are they, what do they want? What possible evil scheme could come from winnowing down the earth's population so much?
Anyway, I'll keep watching this. It's only six episodes. I hope the next episodes are shorter than an hour and a half, though, because that was far, far too long for the material covered.
selenak did a good round up on why it was crappy. Let me just say that the English Civil War is far too early to be making Goya references. I'll probably watch the rest of it though, given there's only three more parts and there is quite literally, nothing on American television that remotely interests me at the moment.Second, I saw 'Einstein and Eddington'.
So this film was really enjoyable, and how could it not be? Andy Serkis lives and eats in the 'mad tortured genius' archetype, and Einstein was kind of nothing but the prototype for mad science. Serkis milks every minute of Einstein's outsized personality. One of the redeeming points of the film is that it goes out of its way to let you know that the real Einstein was a bit of a creep: serial womanizer, abandonment of child, ill behavior towards first wife and all.
Irony, then, that David Tennant kind of steals the movie from him with the understated performance as Andrew Eddington, who is someone I didn't know anything about prior to the film. Even though his character is kind of the SERIOUS BUSINESS version of John Smith in 'Human Nature/Family of Blood' only this time he's likable because he's a Quaker leading a quietly repressed life.
Anyway, it's a rather disjointed film as it's always bouncing between Einstein working out the cause of gravity, and Eddington, struggling to find a quantifiable way to test Einstein's theory in the universe.
As I was watching, I was sure it was going to come to a great close, in which quiet Eddington finally gets to meet brash Einstein and the clash of their personalities comes to a head post facto of Eddington proving General Relativity to be correct.
OF COURSE, THAT IS WHEN THE FILM DRAWS TO A CLOSE. And you never get to see Eddington and Einstein exchange any sort of serious moment! EVER. What a failure of the script to resolve into a narrative whole. There's a time, in scriptwriting, that fucking with history can be good for the story. Even if it doesn't happen in real life, the two meeting and exchanging words needed to happen to resolve the story.
Bah.
Made even more frustrating to me by the fact they work in Einstein sticking out his tongue at reporters about four decades before it actually happened.
And then at the end of the film's postscript, they describe Eddington as retreating into his private life to work on resolving his faith with physics. 'What curious phrasing,' I thought, so I hit wikipedia only to find out that this refers to the fact that Eddington got obsessed with what we would call the Grand Theory of Everything towards the end of his career.
This is not exactly what I would call unusual, and it frustrates me to draw a difference between the two men when Einstein himself spent most of his latter years obsessing over the Grand Theory of Everything and God's place in the universe.
Frustrating, very frustrating.
Here is my problem with math and disaster films: So there are about thirteen million people who live in the London metro area. If the flu has a kill rate of 90% of all people infected, with 100% infection rate, that still leaves about 1.3 million people in the London metro area.
Obviously, a lot more people than that died in 'Survivors'. So what if it was 99% of people? That leaves 13,000 people. Which is not a lot, but it's a lot more fucking people than you see in Survivors.
I say this only because there are so fucking many of us by this point that it would be really difficult to kill off all humans in one fell swoop and it always really bothers me to see plagues reduce the population to television portions. Especially since there's basically never been any disease (knock on wood) that was so virulent as to have that high a fatality. Battlestar Galactica did a good job by saying there were several thousands of survivors but never showing us them.
Really long. No one in this movie watches zombie films, because everyone's convinced that splitting up is a really good idea. At least Greg has the bright idea that they should go take over a farm somewhere and that farms are hard work, but he seems to be under the delusion he could run a farm with cows on his own.
Everyone keeps taking cars and pulling dead bodies out of the cars to get their keys and fighting over gasoline. At one point, Abby, who they elect leader despite the fact that she's easily the dumbest character in the show (my son with a known immune deficiency who I was told was deathly ill is so obviously still alive, I don't care what you think camp survivalist!) walks right out of the house past a pair of really good bikes to drive to a different city.
My least favorite character is Al, who has Gaius Baltar's apartment in mid-London, and is played by the male hooker that Julia fell in love with on 'Nip/Tuck'. Either he must die soon, or Abby will, since both of them can't keep the Child of Innocence as a Redemptive Plot Device. (Unless they start fucking and form a nuclear family, but they've established Abby as the mumsy one.)
The reveal at the end was interesting, in that apparently the virus was genetically modified by some creepy organization! Who are they, what do they want? What possible evil scheme could come from winnowing down the earth's population so much?
Anyway, I'll keep watching this. It's only six episodes. I hope the next episodes are shorter than an hour and a half, though, because that was far, far too long for the material covered.
