In this strange complex of time and space anything can happen

21. The Love Witch (2016), dir. Anna Biller

This was the first film I saw with ladylugosi_1313 after I got back from Australia, and we were both baffled by its apparent critical reputation. According to its Wikipedia page, the director "Anna Biller is a feminist filmmaker whose take on cinema is influenced by feminist film theory" and the consensus on Rotten Tomatoes is that "The Love Witch offers an absorbing visual homage to a bygone era, arranged subtly in service of a thought-provoking meditation on the battle of the sexes." We just couldn't see the intelligent, nuanced film these quotations seemed to be speaking of for the life of us – and it's not like we were a hostile audience, because everything on paper said that we should have liked it. It is pitched as a homage to the very horror films we most love from the late '60s and early '70s, after all.

Half the problem, perhaps, was that although it appears initially to be set in the late '60s / early '70s, it transpires not to be. After a bit of scene-setting, characters start driving up in obviously-later cars or whipping out mobile phones, and we are gradually invited to realise that we are actually seeing a community in which everyone dresses and behaves as though it were the late '60s / early '70s, even though it is in fact the present day. If I wanted to be generous about this, and to see how feminist film-theory had informed it, I might suggest that perhaps it is supposed to prompt the audience into an uncomfortable realisation about present-day sexism. All those blatantly-sexist views we hear characters espousing in the film are not actually relics of another age, but – ta-daaa! – happening all around us right now. The problem is that they are such a caricature that they don't ring true even for c. 1970 in the first place, and are also fatally undermined by none of the characters having any obvious warmth, depth or plausibility to them anyway. I didn't have this comparator available to me at the time I saw the film, of course, but in retrospect it felt a lot like the characterisation of the poor old First Doctor as a cartoonish chauvinist in Twice Upon A Time for the sake of a few jokes about embarrassing sexist old uncles, when he wasn't actually at all like that in the first place.

It didn't help, either, that the main character (Elaine) experiences no obvious character growth, despite having gone through a set of experiences which really should have made her consider her life choices by the end of the film, and nor are we ever offered any convincing sense of the allure which that lifestyle held for her in the first place. In short, it just all felt rather pointless, and I won't be bothering to watch this film again. There are plenty of actual late '60s / early '70s horror films I could watch instead, with fully-developed characters in them and satisfying narrative arcs. Speaking of which…


22. Witchfinder General (1968), dir. Michael Reeves

I watched this one with my old chum hollyione when she came to visit me in late August. I have seen it plenty of times before, and reviewed it at least once in these pages (LJ / DW), but it is of course always wonderful to revisit, especially with a friend who appreciates the genre as much as me. Our main query on this viewing was: when Sarah sees Matthew Hopkins torturing and burning women as witches in Lavenham, knowing all that she already knows about him by that time, why on earth doesn't she hide in a cupboard until he's gone, rather than going out and about the place shopping as though she were perfectly safe? Anyway, it doesn't really get in the way of one of the all-time horror greats. They wouldn't be as enjoyable as they are without their occasional plot-holes (a rather different matter from the pervasive implausibility affecting the entirety of The Love Witch).


23. The Sorcerors (1967), dir. Michael Reeves

hollyione and I watched this one together too. She hadn't seen it before, but was interested when I explained that it is one of only a handful of full-length feature films which Michael Reeves completed before his untimely death, and agreed that while quite different from Witchfinder General, it is also very good. Again, I've reviewed it before (LJ / DW), so needn't repeat what I've already said about it. hollyione did comment that the film would probably benefit from a little more time spent on the establishment of Ian Ogilvy's character (Mike) before he goes home with Boris Karloff, and I think she's right. We know that he is bored and directionless, but it would be helpful to have some sense of how much the potential to commit the crimes we see the old couple telepathically commanding him to commit was already within him - i.e. to what extent are they able to do this so easily because he is partially complicit? Some nods to this would have added a little to the moral and pscyhological complexity – but regardless, it remains a very clever story about the temptations of power.


25. Dark Prince: The True Story of Dracula (2000), dir. Joe Chappelle

Not to be confused with Dracula: The Dark Prince (which I reviewed a couple of days ago), this is sort of like an earlier shot at Dracula Untold (LJ / DW), in that it largely tells the story of the historical Vlad III Dracula, but also attempts to explain how he became a vampire. The vampire thread is much lower in the mix here, though, coming into play only at the end of the film, and explaining it as a consequence of Vlad's excommunication by the Orthodox Church after converting to Catholicism in order to secure an alliance with Hungary. So, for the most part, it presents itself as a non-fantastical historical drama. Unfortunately, though, it isn't very good on that level. A lot of the history is over-simplified or just plain made up – so, for example, Janos Hunyadi and Matthias Corvinus are merged into one generic Hungarian king (played, rather inexplicably, by Roger Daltrey) and there's a whole invented plot-line about Vlad's wife being driven mad by his atrocities. More seriously, it isn't very good as drama either. The actor playing Vlad (Rudolf Martin) appears to have been chosen more for his dark, Gothic good looks than any ability to express passion or emotional range, and indeed the whole production is much as you would expect it to be given what it is – a made-for-TV movie. The best thing it has to offer is some nice location footage of actual castles and monasteries in Romania. But Vlad Tepes (1979) (LJ / DW) is better history, despite its pro-Ceaușescu leanings, and Dracula Untold is better fantasy.


26. Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt ('Berlin: Symphony of a Great City', 1927), dir. Walter Ruttmann

Finally, for a total change of tone, I saw this with lady_lugosi1313 at the Hyde Park Picture House, complete with a very interesting introductory talk by the lovely IngridESharp. Basically it is a day in the life of Berlin in its many aspects, covering industry, street-life, transport, office work, leisure pursuits and night-life. Much of it is clearly unstaged, with the cameras simply capturing contemporary real life, but we could see that some elements must have been set up – for example, a fracas in the street which the cameras were just too neatly-set-up to capture in the first place, and during which they cut between different angles. Ingrid's introduction pointed out that some critics have found the film to approach some of Berlin's problems in this period, and especially its massive wealth inequalities, with too much moral neutrality, simply capturing them side by side as though that were just the natural scheme of things. But we felt this wasn't quite fair – at least one scene of a little match-boy having a car-door slammed unceremoniously in his face and being left alone on the pavement as the car sped off seemed to us to have been designed quite deliberately to show up his situation as an unhappy one. Anyway, the footage was enthralling throughout and very beautiful, and certainly prompted much engaged discussion in the car on the way home. It was a pleasure to be able to see it in such detail on the big screen.


Once again, that's it for today, and probably for a few days now as we are off to my sister's for Family Christmas tomorrow. I've still got another ten of these buggers to do before I'm actually up to date, and that's just the films (never mind books). But at least I have made some progress...

OK, so here's me trying to catch up with Doctor Who reviews. I'll aim to keep them short(ish... for me), as there are so many to catch up with. And obviously, I'm now doing this with hindsight, so I'm unlikely to be saying the same things here that I would have said if I'd written about each episode at the time. But I do have the notes I wrote while watching each episode to hand, so can see what I thought about them on initial viewing.

Between its Viking setting and its explicit concern with the consequences of time travellers changing history, the first half of this story reminded me strongly of The Time Meddler, and was clearly supposed to. My own notes for the latter remind me that it was the first Doctor Who story to articulate the idea that time travellers shouldn't change history, as opposed to the idea that they can't (which is what we get the very first time the issue comes up at all in The Aztecs). As the Doctor says to the Monk, "You know as well as I do the golden rule about space and time travelling - never, never interfere with the course of history" - though it's noticeable that this rule has only ever applied to Earth history, as known to a contemporary TV audience. The Doctor can clearly change history on other planets as much as he likes!

This story is all about the Doctor breaking that 'golden rule' and creating a tidal wave where he should leave only ripples. At the time of broadcast, this was clearly signalled as a pivotal moment both emotionally for the Twelfth Doctor, and structurally for New Who as a whole - particularly through the explicit flashbacks to his decision to save the Caecilius family in Fires of Pompeii and his self-identification as someone who 'saves people'. And now in retrospect we can see how much it foreshadowed, too. The first half of this story put a lot of emphasis on how in saving Ashildr by using Mire technology, the Doctor had created a hybrid of the two races, and the second had Ashildr referring to herself simply as 'Me'. To join those dots, the closing words of Heaven Sent:

You got the prophecy wrong. The Hybrid is not half-Dalek. Nothing is half-Dalek; the Daleks would never allow that. The Hybrid destined to conquer Gallifrey and stand in its ruins is me.

Of the two halves, I preferred the second. That's not to say I disliked the first, and especially its core idea of the Mire being defeated with the power of imagination, stories and spin rather than brute force. But the second half appealed more aesthetically, offering a lot that was Hammeresque or generally Gothic, while its explorations of the consequences of immortality were suitably emotionally weighty. I also liked many of the smaller touches in the second episode - like comedy highwayman Sam Swift, Ashildr / Me trying out life as a man for a while (very Orlando), or her use of journals to work around the problem of a limited memory but an unlimited life-span. I'm only 39, but I am beginning to know the feeling!

Meanwhile, I found myself wondering whether both halves of this two-parter could actually have been handled as pure historicals, rather than pseudo-historicals. This takes us back once again to The Time Meddler, which was the first Doctor Who story to insert an alien threat (the Meddling Monk himself) into a story set in Earth's past. Both halves of this story qualify likewise, thanks to the presence of fake-Odin and the Mire in the first and Leandro and his people in the second - but could much the same plots otherwise have unfolded without them? I'm pretty sure it could have done for the first episode, with Ashildr's village simply facing down a more powerful neighbouring warrior tribe instead of the Mire and making them look like fools to be laughed at around camp-fires up and down the land. The only adjustment needed would be to establish that the Doctor carries medical chips of some kind around on the TARDIS which could take the place of the Mire chip - but that wouldn't be hard.

It would perhaps be slightly harder for the second episode, as it's important to Ashildr / Me's emotional arc in this story that she is trying to find a way off the Earth to more exciting prospects beyond - this is what makes her collaborate with Leandro, kill Sam Swift and then realise that she has done something awful in a flawed cause. But I should think a clever story-teller (not me!) could still come up with some way to put her through that arc which didn't involve aliens. Perhaps she could instead have ended up aspiring to some kind of apocalyptic destruction-of-Earth plan, in the hope that it would put paid to her own unwanted and unending life along with everyone else's, but realised once her plan began to unfold that she didn't want this after all, and needed the Doctor's help to stop it? (Though that may be too utterly dark for Doctor Who, even now - defeating an alien-of-the-week is always a much safer bet for a feel-good story.)

But my point is that I felt that we were dancing on the edge of not really needing the alien element in either of these episodes - like it was there because that is simply the accepted Doctor Who format, rather than because it was actually necessary to what the stories were trying to do. Certainly, these weren't celebrity historicals - indeed, they stayed well clear altogether of touching on any specific Earth history as it might be known to a contemporary TV audience, which as I've suggested above is the real 'golden rule' of time travel. The matter of whether or not a particular Viking village was defended successfully against attack, or whether someone called Sam Swift was or wasn't hanged at Tyburn, wouldn't break our suspension of disbelief about these stories (and thus the whole of Doctor Who) taking place within our history, and our universe as we know it. And if we've got to the point where Doctor Who is producing historical stories that barely need aliens in them to work, then could it be possible that some time soon we'll take the next step onwards from there, and get to the stage of having a historical story which doesn't have aliens in it at all? That's something I have to say I'd really like to see after all these years without one.

Finally, I don't really watch Game of Thrones properly, though I've seen enough of it to have been able to recognise some of its musical cues in The Woman Who Lived in particular. But I enjoyed Maisie Williams' performance last year as the central character in the Channel 4 film Cyberbully, and was impressed again across these two stories - and of course Face the Raven, which I've also seen since. She has already appeared in the 'next time' trailer for Hell Bent, and I'm glad that we will be seeing both her and her character again.

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Yes, I thought I might want to write a little about this. I'm still concerned that I might find tonight's special a little disappointing (though also still hopeful I won't), but even if I do, this went a long way towards marking the anniversary appropriately for me. I do very much love the William Hartnell era after all - enough that that is where my LJ username now comes from. And it is a great pleasure to be able to use the Doctor Who anniversary to help develop and refine my work-related thinking about anniversary commemorations, as well.

It's fair to say, as Laurence Miles has done most forcefully (in a post now sadly deleted from his blog), that An Adventure in Space and Time both ( mythologised and stereotyped some of its main characters )

Anyway, as both a work of drama and a nostalgic tribute, ( An Adventure in Space and Time was brilliant )

( Fannish tick-boxes and tributes )

( Cameos and casting )

Anyway. 50th anniversaries are funny ones, I think. They stand on the cusp between memory and history. Enough time has passed for things to have changed a great deal, for memories to have become distorted, and for the need to reinterpret the past in a way that makes sense now in the present to have arisen. But it is generally not long enough for all those involved to have died, so that there is also a need for negotiation between direct memory and reinterpretation - sometimes both at work within the same people. If Doctor Who marks its centenary, which I very much hope it does, the line of direct memory to its origins will by then have been broken. It will all be about second-hand interpretation of the recorded past, via archives and photographs and interviews and of course the show itself. But it will be enriched by the fact that the 50th anniversary has served as a prompt to add to our collective store of direct memories, now while we can and before they are gone forever.

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Yay! For the first time this season I was able to watch Doctor Who live on broadcast, it was a good episode, and I have time to write up my thoughts this evening! Happy times.

I am so glad that the Jenny, Vastra and Strax Show is becoming a regular feature, and even more so that we haven't had a weak episode with them in it yet. I wouldn't call this episode mind-blowing, but it definitely qualified as a really good romp, and because it didn't try to position itself as anything more it left me well satisfied. The running jokes around Strax's battle plans and Mr. Thursday repeatedly fainting, the proper mad-scientist-style steaming coloured liquids in conical flasks, and the brilliantly groan-worthy satnav urchin all helped to seal the silliness deal. Meanwhile, Diana Rigg and Rachael Stirling both entirely lived up to their promise, were done great justice by the script, and delivered the proper character-driven drama which I craved and missed in Cold War and Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS.

We have seen the 'crazed villain tries to enslave humanity with the help of an alien parasite' plot a quazillion times before on Doctor Who of course, but by framing it as a Jenny, Vastra and Strax story, keeping the Doctor off-screen for the first ten minutes and even then revealing him as helpless and paralysed, it felt fresh enough to capture the attention. I loved the flashback scenes in which the Doctor explained how he and Clara had arrived in Yorkshire, too, with their fake 'old film' look - a classic device. That said, I wasn't too sold on the magical machine which could undo the effects of the red poison, which felt like a rather easy cop-out - although I suppose it could reasonably be explained as the end result of the experiments which Mrs. Gillyflower performed on Ada. I also wasn't sure what we were supposed to make of the Doctor kissing Jenny, followed by the rather teenage joke involving his sonic screwdriver when she stripped down to her leathers. Matt Smith's Doctor has reacted uncomfortably in the face of previous romantic advances from both Amy and governess!Clara, and has shown no interest (that I can remember) in Jenny before, so it seems oddly inconsistent to have him suddenly going all Benny Hill over her.

Still, it was great to have a story set in Yorkshire, and some fab northern jokes to go with it as well (Bradford - "All a-swarm with the wretched ruins of humanity"). 'Sweetville' wasn't just riffing off local industrial magnate Titus Salt's planned workers' village Saltaire. It used the design of the factory there directly, with even the concept drawing unveiled at the talk which Jenny attended clearly based on the real equivalent for Saltaire. Apparently the actual filming happened in Bute Town, though, which would explain why the stonework on close-up shots of the cottages looked wrong. People were very into regularly-laid square-cut stone in Victorian Yorkshire, but the cottages of Sweetville have irregular stone.

Finally, sure enough, as I predicted earlier in the week, we had a prominent reference to the Fifth Doctor era, in the form of the line about struggling to get a 'gobby Australian' (i.e. Tegan) back to Heathrow. But, as you'd expect with a series that has as much back-catalogue to draw on as Doctor Who, and a writer who knows that catalogue as well as Mark Gatiss, there were other nods and winks for the knowing as well. The gramophones playing fake factory noises in particular reminded me of the Meddling Monk's recordings of Gregorian chants in The Time Meddler, while the line about the red leech growing fat on the filth in the rivers recalled the eco-warrior stories of the Pertwee era - and especially The Green Death, which seems to have inspired the structure of the title as well.

I feel much better for that episode, and am actively looking forwards to next week's now. Having actual children in the TARDIS promises to be interesting, and certainly something which I don't believe has ever happened before outside of the two films made with Peter Cushing. I wonder if it is in part a reaction to the fact that The Sarah Jane Adventures sadly cannot continue any longer, with the format of the spin-off being folded back into the main show? Anyway, it is certainly something new for new Who, and I hope it makes for interesting new story-telling possibilities as a result.

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And now, for my return train journey, let us consider the matter of A Town Called Mercy.

( History and past continuity )

( References beyond Who )

( Kahler Jex and the Doctor )

( Weaknesses )

( Cool bits )

( Future implications )

And now I think I deserve to finally watch The Power of Three...

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Right then. This is me trying to catch up on unwritten book reviews from 2010. Today, that means reviewing a book which I read last April, and took no notes on at the time. So that's bound to go well...

I've only read a couple of Target's Doctor Who novelisations before, so I'm not intimately familiar with the genre. But my understanding is that they were usually (though not always) written by the same person who produced the original television script, and basically aimed to present the same story for fans to enjoy a second time in a context where home video was not yet the norm.

This one is indeed written by the original script-writer, Donald Cotton, although at a distance of twenty years from the original time of broadcast. And presumably that means even he could not have rewatched the original story when preparing the novel, since it must already have been destroyed by then. Rather cleverly, though, he actually integrates his own distance from the original broadcast into the novel, by having the whole thing narrated in a first-person format by 'Homer', himself looking back over events which he had witnessed some forty years earlier. This means that any deviations from the story as broadcast instantly become excusable - they are simply the effect of Homer's faulty memory. And that in itself fits in beautifully with Cotton's general approach of treating the Greek myths as garbled versions of real events which I commented on in my review of the TV story.

That same approach is at work throughout the novel, too - mainly as applied to the same ideas and events, since the plot is pretty close to the original broadcast story, in spite of the time-lag before it was novelised. But the device of inserting Homer as a character into the story does allow Cotton to be a bit more explicit about what he is doing. At the end of the novel, Homer reports that he later wrote up what he had witnessed at Troy as The Iliad, but explains that he left any references to the Doctor and the TARDIS out because 'the public expects' the gods instead. The implication is that what we have just read is the 'real' version of events, and that they were consciously altered to better suit the conventions of the literary genre when the epic poems were composed.

That said, I didn't find the use of Homer as a first-person narrator entirely satisfactory. For one thing, it means that he needs to witness every event of the broadcast story, on both the Trojan and the Greek sides, in order to be able to recount what happened. Cotton tries to make this work by merging him with the character of Cyclops from the original TV story - a sort of mercenary go-between, who is sent from one side to the other on spying missions. But that isn't really enough to explain the extent to which Homer seems to rush back and forth across the plain of Troy from one camp to the other. The reasons why he might do so began to seem awfully thin and unconvincing before very long.

Cotton also seems to have been rather ham-strung by the fact that the one thing everyone 'knows' about Homer is that he was blind - which is a real problem in a first-person narrator. He seems to have decided to handle this by having Homer blinded, first in one eye, and then the other, during the course of the story. This is mildly clever on one front, since he loses his second eye just before Achilles is killed and Troy is sacked, offering one explanation for why neither event is included in the Iliad or the Odyssey. But it also means that we have to believe that he carries on rushing back and forth between the two camps after having had one eye poked out with a marlin-spike by Odysseus about two-thirds of the way through the novel - which doesn't seem entirely credible, for all the character's references to being in terrible pain and fear as he does so.

Anyway, in the novel, Homer remains behind with Troilus and Cressida-Vicki after the departure of the TARDIS crew and the end of the TV story, so that his narrative is able to tie up a few loose ends which the TV broadcast could not. He relates how the Greek forces carry their booty (including Helen) down to the shore and sail away, while he himself leaves with Troilus, Cressida-Vicki and the other surviving Trojans to found a new city - via, of course, a brief detour to Carthage. And at the very end of the story we discover who the mysterious visitor to whom he has been relating this whole story in an olive-grove actually is - the Doctor, unrecognised by Homer because of his blindness, and come back to catch up on the aftermath of his own adventure. I like the idea of the Doctor in those odd, quiet moments of his which we never see on TV, mooching through time to relive former adventures - and especially to find out what happened to former companions after he had left them behind.

All told, I enjoyed reading this, and certainly felt that it had something more to offer beyond the TV broadcast version of the story. But it's hardly a great work of literature, and given how little and how slowly I read, I don't think I'll be rushing to work my way through the other Target novelisations any time soon. If I do read more, though, I will definitely continue to select from the early historical stories, mainly for the little extra insights they can provide into how the script-writers / authors were thinking about the programme's approach to the past in this period (as I'm very aware is discussed explicitly in the introduction to The Crusaders). Indeed, I already have Marco Polo lined up for that very purpose. :-)

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The plot of this story has to be ( one of the most non-sensical Who has ever served up )

( The Cybermen )

( Earth in the near future )

( The First Doctor's last story )

( Ben, Polly and brewing up coffee )

( General Cutler and Agamemnon )

( The handling of black characters )

Not perfect, then, but overall a pretty good story. And with that in the bag, I have now seen all of the First Doctor's televised stories - at least as far as that's possible today. That makes him the third Doctor for whom I've reached that position, the previous ones being the Fourth and the Sixth. I've really enjoyed this era of Doctor Who - the historical stories, the character of Barbara and Hartnell's Doctor himself have been particular draws, but really it has been consistently good on almost every important level. I think it deserves a proper overview eulogy post, just as I did for the Fourth Doctor. But this has been quite enough for one entry!

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So with all the historicals covered now, and my paper delivered, I can go back and fill in the stories which I had to skip over before the CA conference.

( First Doctor: The Savages )

( The Doctor as intergalactic hero-figure )

( Steven )

( Dodo and gender divisions )

Still, on the whole, not a bad effort, and certainly an important step forward in the grand tradition of rebellion-fomenting Doctor Who stories.

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Basically, I loved this episode, except for some reservations about the way the black characters were handled. Because unfortunately both of them ( succumbed to a spoilery racist trope )

Other than that quite serious flaw, though, ( it was a really good story )

( The story as a historical )

( The Doctor )

( More on the handling of Earth history )

( Amy and Rory )

( The plot arc )

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So this one is from the same hand as The Myth Makers (Donald Cotton) - and to me, that means: Do. Not. Underestimate. On one level, Cotton does here what I thought he was going to do in The Myth Makers (and which was really pioneered by Dennis Spooner in The Romans, anyway) - that is, he gives us a story which draws broadly on the Wild West films and TV series that the audience will have been familiar with, serving up a sort of pastiche while showing scant regard for the real history of the era. But I don't think what's going on here is quite as simple as a case of just ignoring the real history of this era (this time known, of course, with a security that was never possible for The Myth Makers) and having a laugh. To me, this story also demonstrates much the same kind of knowing commentary on what he is doing that Cotton presented in The Myth Makers.

( A fancy dress party gone horribly wrong )

( Lyrical narrative )

( Comments on the Doctor Who format )

( The Doctor's double (again) )

( The Doctor out of his depth? )

( The Doctor's new ethical stance )

( Audience reaction )

Heh - it's been a busy weekend, during which I've done virtually nothing but watch and write about Doctor Who. But that's pretty much my ideal weekend anyway. As a result I have at least got myself into a situation where there are only two of the early, 'pure' historicals left for me to watch - so it is perfectly possible for me to do that (though probably not also to review them here) before leaving for the CA on Wednesday morning. OK, so there are also four other stories in between them which I really ought to watch for total familiarity with this era. But I think I can hold my own now.

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