Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2

Along with just about everybody else on the planet I was incredibly excited about the final installment in the Harry potter film series (until either WB or JK run out of money that is.)

A very enjoyable film. I'm glad that it cuts the crap and gets straight into the action. Within thirty minutes we're in Hogwarts and preparing for battle.

The battle is when it manages to fall apart. David Yates has never been my favorite directer but this is his sloppiest yet. It's almost like he gave up after five minutes and decided to let the film be a success because of the franchises popularity, as opposed to making it a good film in itself. The script was absolutely brilliant as was the acting, Daniel Radcliffe actually managed to look like a proper actor at some points! Direction and editing were the only things that ruined this one. The first couple of scenes were brilliant but as soon as the HP logo appears it all goes downhill.

The Battle of Hogwarts wasn't very well done in the book. But that's because we were following Harry and his quest. It did slightly annoy me when there was one point that we got little more than "And Harry entered the hall. By the way, here's a list of people that are dead..." The film however was built up to have some kind of epic LOTR style battle, even skipping the slightly smaller battle in Hogwarts during Half Blood Prince to increase anticipation. This however never seemed to materialize beyond a couple of lazily thrown together montages with Neville seeming to gain the whit of Roger Moore's Bond, I was almost expecting a 'wand' innuendo. What we did see of the battle was a total letdown. After half an hours worth of setting up, enchanting statues and Voldemort preparing his army for the march on Helms Deep Hogwarts, we were shown a few quick clips. It was just lazy. I think Yates' problem is that he can't handle bigger things. The tri-wizard scenes in Goblet of Fire and the ministry scenes in Order of the Phoenix were terrible when compared to Dumbledore's death in Half Blood Prince and Malfoy Manor
in Deathly Hallows Part 1.

One thing that really bothered me was how obvious it was that Robbie Coltrane was never ever in the same place as Daniel Radcliffe during shooting. Usually some effort is made to hide it, but yet again the post production process seemed to be so lazy that they just didn't bother trying. Something that also affected the final and infamous 'nineteen years later' sequence. When I heard that they were using CGI to make the cast look older I was skeptical. It seems that wearing more adult clothes now passes as CGI as that was the only real visible difference. As sad as it is to say, people in the cinema were laughing at what was supposed to be the sad and emotional scene at the end because of this.

Despite all of this however it was a very enjoyable film. It's a Harry Potter film so it's fair to say that it was almost definitely going to be a huge success. The source material is of course fantastic so they couldn't really go wrong with the story. The smaller scenes between the three main characters along with the Harry/Voldemort scenes were brilliantly done. There were a few nice additions, such as Voldemort massacring Gringotts after the trio get away.

It was also nice to see faces from previous films, such as Professor Sprout. However they tried so hard to fit everyone in that it seemed to turn into yet another lazy montage of poor cameos. When you consider that these are some of the best actors going, a cameo seems a bit underwhelming. None the less, it was a good idea and I'm glad that it did happen. One character that they did give a good deal to was McGonagall, who's almost demented attack on Snape once she hears that he killed Dumbledore is one of the highlights of the film. Julie Walters as Molly Weasley also manages to steal the show in the very little time she has onscreen.

So a very good film flawed by poor direction and editing. It was very fun to watch and it manages to give the 'end of an era' feeling exceptionally well. A welcome addition to the HP series and certainly one of the better ones. It's sad to see it end. Again.

The Green Dagger

Hello all. Long time no post.

I've been working on my latest project being one reason. And this project is a machinima. For those unfamiliar with the term, a machinima is an animated film made using footage from a video game, in this case the ever entertaining Halo Reach. The first episode is being edited right now and should reach a popular video hosting site very soon. After that we'll be working on five more episodes to be posted weekly once they're finished.

The first episode is testing the water slightly really. While I've made a machinima before (albeit a long time ago and on a very different kind of game) I did that on my own and pretty much made it up on the spot. There was no dialogue either, meaning that I didn't get the full production experience of script-to-screen.

A few people have asked me about the writing process of a machinima and I have approached it in quite an interesting way. Reach includes a 'forge world' in which you can effectively build your own map. This is how we created the 'sets' for the film. We created these before I started writing, so I had clear reference points to write to. I've mapped out the overall storyline yet so far only the first episode has been fully written. It's quite dialogue-lite as we're using this pilot episode to get the feel of it. You'll be seeing a large action sequence that won't really be explained until later.

For those interested in seeing my previous effort...

Drat!

Hello anybody reading this.

My lack of posting may have made it look like I haven't been alive. I am.

It's been a busy old month of festivals, writing and return trips to university for evenings out. Alas, my room key has been handed in and I shall not be returning to Stoke for some time.

Still watching 24. I've just finished the third series and will probably do a 'half way there' review at the end of series 4.

I'm also working on a project called Way Station, an idea that I started to develop a while back. The first episode is written (and I'm going to send it to the BBC as a calling-card type of thing). All feedback on that greatly appreciated as I have to completely perfect this script. It can be found here!

Also been looking for a job. That's impossible at the moment unfortunately. Living in a fucked country is no fun.

24

Currently watching 24 and enjoying it immensely. About 3/4 the way through series/day 2. Watching this straight after The Wire has resulted in me needing to suspend my disbelief a fair bit. The Wire was incredibly realistic while 24 is less so.

Still finding it very enjoyable though. Will post about it properly soon.

What Next???

I've been looking at what to watch through now that I've finished The Wire. A few things have been suggested including 24, Babylon 5, Walking Dead and Southland.

I think I'll give 24 a go but throw ideas at me by all means. I'm looking for something a little lighter than the bleak world of 2000s Baltimore as shown in The Wire.

The Wire - Best TV Series Ever?

This is a piece that I've dreaded writing since the moment that I first watched The Wire. There's nothing that I can say about its sheer brilliantness that hasn't already been said 500 times.

First of all, this will contain spoilers so if you haven't seen it stop reading NOW, go on to amazon and buy the complete box set. You will like it and even if you don't, you have to see it. If you have seen it, read on...

At first I didn't connect with it, I even posted on here that this may not be the series for me. But I stuck with it as many people advised me to. By the fifth episode I was completely hooked and I remained hooked throughout the rest of the series. It keeps you going until the very last moment.

It's incredibly well written, you can tell this straight away. There's an enormous number of characters but all of them feel realistic, all of them are perfectly plotted out. We learn things about them very slowly, some things we don't get told until much much later on. This doesn't matter.

The Wire isn't driven by character or plot, both are perfectly balanced. Sometimes the story hinges on one character yet at other times a main character can be simply bumped off, no epic deaths, it just happens. The best example of this comes towards the end of the final season when Omar, a character that has been pivotal to the story on a number of occasions, is shot by a child while shopping. There are literally hundreds of people after him and have been since the very beginning, yet it's a small and simple thing that is his ultimate downfall.

While watching through The Wire I found that some kind of reset button was pressed at the beginning of each series, I lost interest for periods of time before picking it up again. Yet by the end of every series I was hooked, sometimes watching three episodes in a row. The start of a series does see the pace slowed down a bit. This may have been because I was watching series back-to-back and not one a year over five years.

People ask me what The Wire is about, the obvious answer is obviously cops and robbers. However when you look carefully, it's not about that at all. It's about how Baltimore as a city fails to recognize and deal with its own problems and how the system fails those that it should protect. The Wire is really a novel for TV, about how shit life is and how no one can really do anything about it. Every episode is a different chapter and every series is a different volume of the same story, a story that has no beginning and no end and probably never will do.

A brilliant series that is often hailed as 'the best TV series ever' and I can understand why, it's certainly up there with the greats and I would recommend it to anyone and encourage everyone to watch it in its entirety. The ending isn't particularly rewarding but it puts its message across clearly and in a very entertaining way.

Making a film!

I've been here before. A couple of years back a few friends and I decided to make a film. All was going well until we gave up due to it being far too much effort when A Levels had to be focused on.

I went away and wrote 3/4 of a script that could easily be made. I literally wrote it so that it could be filmed in any location at anytime very easily.

And the project is off! People are up for it and now I'm at uni equipment access is so much better.

Here's some of the results of the last attempt, hopefully we'll be more successful this time...

Stop Messing With the Classics!

It's been announced lately that the next failed remake/reboot attempt will be The Black Hole. Not seen it since I was about 10 but I loved it! I still remember the pure bizarreness and creepiness of it all. It wont work, remakes are always crap. The American Italian Job: Crap, Assault on Precinct 13: Crap. It even spreads to TV, no one in the world liked The Prisoner remake. Creatively bankrupt bastards!

Doctor Who - Meglos

Good old Amazon pre-orders, getting the DVD to me on Saturday, two days before release.

Meglos is a 1980 tale featuring Tom Baker's Doctor. This was in his final season and the adventures were a lot darker and sciency. If any of Doctor Who has ever been science-fiction (which I don't believe that it is), this is it. However Meglos presents us with an anomaly, in the sense that it's a fairly light-hearted tale.

First of all, Meglos himself is an evil cactus, a concept that is bizarre even for Doctor Who. In the first episode it's very difficult to take this talking cactus seriously, as you can understand. However when the cactus steals the body of a human, we begin to see the sinister side, even more so when he alters his form to look like the Doctor!

For the first half of the story the Doctor does very little, there's certainly more of a focus on Meglos, the space pirates that he has enlisted the help of and the religion vs science argument that the planet Tigella's society seems to have as the prominent aspect of its planets culture. It's quite worrying to see that all the scientists are blond-haired and blue-eyed whilst the religious Deons are not.

The story is simple enough. Meglos steals something to power his weapon, crippling a planet in the process as the power source is required to power everything on their planet. The Doctor, Romana, K9 and a couple of the Aryan-looking scientists have to follow Meglos back to his home planet to stop the weapon from being fired. All the time the Doctor and Meglos are identical, each impersonating each other to confuse the Tigellans and the Space Pirates. This leads to a number of comic moments. When the two 'Doctors' eventually meet each other the comedy however turns to silliness. By this stage teh Doctor and Meglos are deadly enemies and should be locked in mortal combat, however they spend most of their time complimenting good looks.

There are some odd bits of writing and direction throughout. The fact that the Doctor, Romana and K9 don't even leave the TARDIS until part two should be disturbing, however the space pirates and Meglos provide enough action to keep the pace going. This is unfortunately canceled out by the tediousness of the science vs religion debates on Tigella, the same scene is repeated about five times in different parts of the Tigellan city.

The final episode, despite being entertaining, is a total mess. Lexa, leader of the Deons, played by original companion actress Jacqueline Hill, is killed off in the stupidest of ways. A space pirate that we thought was dead shoots her before actually dying. the scene is rushed and there is no tension at all, when something could easily be made from it, especially when you consider the episode's strangely low running time.

There is also the ending. A rushed scene back on Tigella after the destruction of the dodecahedron (the infinite power source) where the locals have changed their minds about attempting to inhabit the surface, that is covered by the unconvincing killer Bell Planes, and have started to do a bit of gardening.

Meglos is a rushed mess, yet it is still strangely watchable and enjoyable. The acting is on a surprisingly high level, mainly due to Tom Baker playing both the Doctor and Meglos for the majority of the story. There are some questionable moments by the space pirates but nothing that removes the viewer from the story. It's a dark story told in a surprisingly comic way. The only real letdown is the shortness of three of the episodes, all of which are considerably below running time, episode four taking up only 18 of the 25 minutes. If you're willing to overlook things like this then you will find Meglos to be highly enjoyable. 7/10

The Wire

After my doubtful review of the first episode I plodded on and watched a few more and I have to say that my opinion has completely changed. It really is top-notch stuff. Looks like I'm in for all 5 series...

Doctor Who - A Christmas Carol

It's taken me a while to review this, purely because I didn't feel I could talk about it without watching it for a second time. It was just simply too barmy to review after seeing it half-drunk and ill with gossiping relatives in the background on Christmas Day. So after a re watch, here's what I think...

As I already said, barmy. The episode single-handedly threw out about 7 established rules of Doctor Who, much as did the finale to the previous series.

Kazran was the villain of the piece. Or was he? We discover quite early on that it's not necessarily Kazran's fault that he's the miserable bugger that he is, but his fathers. Michael Gambon plays both characters excellently, but he was never going to be anything different.

Katherine Jenkin made her acting debut as the two-dimensional Abigail. Jenkins didn't give the greatest performance ever. The best advice to her would be to stick to singing to the troops. At least the previous two singers in the series (Billie Piper and Kylie) were able to act. On the plus side for Jenkins, she's probably the better singer.

The story itself was engaging if not different. Smith's Doctor decided to have a bit of fun whilst converting Kazran to his way of thinking. Tennant's Doctor would have simply screamed, shouted and used the word 'huuuuumans' a few too many times to get his way.

Keeping Amy and Rory out of the majority of the story was a good idea. We were yet to see Smith's Doctor working on his own. Gloing off evidence of past companionless stories and the way Smith did for 3/4 of ACC, a case for a companionless series could actually be starting to form. Although let's let Amy and Rory's characters to flow their natural course first.

A Christmas Carol was a very mixed bag. It was all over the place and nowhere near generic Doctor Who as many of the previous Christmas specials have been. But it was good. Probably the best Moffat has been since he took over the series, with the possible exception of last series Angels 2 parter. Very enjoyable and light-hearted as a Christmas special should be, A Christmas Carol is worthy of an 8/10, making it considerably better than a fair bulk of the last series.

Next Up...

I'm either going to give Babylon 5, The Wire, 24 or The X-files a look. I'll probably watch the first 2 or 3 episodes from each one and decide then. I'll report back soon. In the meantime, feel free to throw in some suggestions...

Deep Space 9 Final Opinions

The last episode of DS9 was interesting to say the least. Damar should have had more of a death rather than just stupidly running out and getting himself killed. Bashir and Garak's final scene was beautiful. Garak, finally having what he's wanted all the way through, realizes that it wasn't worth it in the end.

Bashir is the character I feel sorriest for. He loses both Miles and Garak, two people that have been his best friends on DS9. Although Ezri does a damn good job of making up for it.

Not moved at all by Worf's departure and it seemed that none of the crew were either, considering that Ezri waving from a balcony was the best goodbye they could muster.

Odo's departure was tragic but very predictable. It's always been made clear that he'd return home if his people weren't a bunch of empire-ruling psychopaths. Interestingly, the Dominion still exists in the Gamma Quadrant as it was only their army on Cardassia that was defeated. In series 6 we knew that they were cloning new troops in the Alpha Quadrant and one can assume that it was they who surrendered on Cardassia. The dominion isn't beaten, just simply shoved back to their side of the wormhole.

Dukat's death was a bit rushed and seemed tacked on to the end. It's a shame that he only got a scene back in Cardassian form. It'd have been criminal to let him die a Bajoran when that look simply took away his evilness. I'd love to know how Sisco suddenly decided to run for the fire caves suddenly, but there'll never be an answer. Weyoun's death was also rushed, Garak suddenly flicking into war-crime mode for a moment wasn't exactly out of character but it could have been handled a tad better. All deaths seemed a bit rushed really, considering that these characters have been villains all the way through or certainly for a good proportion of the series.

Keiko had a mercifully short role in the finale. A total bitch on her first appearance and just about the only character that didn't develop at all. How Miles didn't brutally murder her at some point I'll never know. Just the irritating "Mooooiiiiles" that she starts every complaining sentence with would be enough to drive anyone over the edge. Interesting how the series only letdowns are carryovers from The Next Generation.

The lack of Rom and Leeta in the finale was a shame. Both characters did have their stories tied up in the previous episode but an appearance would have been nice. As would a few clips of Jadzia in the ending montage, she was a main character for 6 of the 7 series after all...

So overall it was good, which is an accurate description for the entire series. There were moments of sheer amazement, such as the series 5 cliffhanger. However there were some moments of pure tedium, usually involving boring Klingons. The characters were engaging and for the most part it was well written. There were a few loose-ends that were left untied but anything of importance seems to have been cleared up. Overall the series gets an 7/10. I daresay that'd be a considerably higher mark if there were two things absent from it: Klingons and Keiko. However if you are able to get past these and the usual crap that comes with any Star Trek, it can be a very enjoyable and rewarding series for the viewer.

Up to the last episode of DS9...

The 8 episodes of the finale so far have been fantastic. I was starting to get bored at the start of the seventh series, it felt like the series was re-treading ground from series 1 and 2, especially with the shape shifter episodes.

Yet again the light-hearted ones were the best, with Badda-Bing Badda-Bang being the best. Vic Fontane truly was an inspired character. It almost seemed daft making Ezri a as Vic seemed to do a better job. 90 minutes for the series to tie up a hell of a lot of loose ends.

Most of all I hope that Dukat taken on Cardassian form again. At the end he should die as a Cardassian, not a Bajoran. That's if he dies at all. This series has been so much like Blake's 7 throughout that it wouldn't surprise me if he didn't make an appearance at all, just like Servelan.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year and welcome to 2011. I hope all readers enjoyed the festive period.