Rupert Galvin (Philip Glenister, front) leads the fight against the forces of darkness in Demons. His team includes (L-R) Ruby (Holiday Grainger), Luke Rutherford (Christian Cooke) and Mina Harker (Zoe Trapper). Photo copyright of ITV

THE battle against the dark underworld of half-lives, monsters and inhumans lies deep beneath the streets of modern-day London in the U.S. premiere of Demons. This contemporary spin on the character of Van Helsing features Luke Rutherford (Christian Cooke) as an average teenager, but with the arrival of his dead father’s best friend Rupert Galvin (Philip Glenister, Life on Mars, Ashes to Ashes), Luke’s life is about to be flipped upside down. Galvin is a straight-talking, headstrong American who has come to tell Luke his secret destiny – he’s the real-life great-great grandson of Abraham Van Helsing, the vampire hunter in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Luke’s destined to inherit the family mantle as a warrior in the coldest of wars against the supernatural entities behind every myth and legend from vampires to werewolves and all things that go bump in the night. Demons premieres Saturday, January 2nd, 2010 @ 10:00 p.m. EST/PST on BBC America. 

Christian Cooke as our young hero, Luke Rutherford. Photo copyright of ITV

Just another day (or night) on the job for Luke and company. Photo copyright of ITV

Richard Wilson as Father Simeon. Photo copyright of ITV

As noted above, all photos copyright of ITV, so please no unauthorized copying or duplicating of any kind. Thanks!

One of the most interesting things I found on my trip to the USA recently was the difference between our knowledge of American culture vs their knowledge of ours.  It makes perfect sense of course, a huge percentage of our entertainment comes from the US.  We’re saturated from a really young age and there has never been quite the same reciprocal arrangement.  So what’s interesting is realizing how little the average American knows about us in comparison to how much we know about them and that what they do know comes from a very select few sources.  Benny Hill (not been on TV here for a gazillion years dudes), comedy shows which seem to translate well and the occasional crossover movie.  Which as we all know is usually some terrible Richard Curtis version of the UK, not one that actually exists.   The difference I found in TV especially was a lack of centralized entertainment, everything is cable, networked and even state specific unlike here where we all have (except me) 4 channels which dominate most of our television watching as a nation.  There are also less season based TV dramas which makes it harder to pick UK equivalents of the shows in my last post.  So leaving out the previous 65 years of classic TV which we don’t need to go into and perpetuate the myth that’s it’s still 1972 here.  Word up, it’s really not.  I’ve chosen these few shows from the last couple of years which for whatever reason really stood out as being great and being British.

Life On Mars.  Ok so it is 1972 in this show, or 1973 to be more precise.  There’s also an American version which I haven’t seen and don’t want to see quite frankly. I find it sad that all our best TV has to be remade for an American audience, how will they learn haha?  Sure, I would imagine as an American it is fairly hard to follow because of the constant references and accents, you kind of had to be around in 70’s /80’s Britain to get it but you know, I’ve never been to Baltimore and I still love the Wire.  This show is about the UK.  It’s about the north, it’s about police corruption, it’s about Ford Cortina’s and a man in a coma who has somehow time travelled back to 1973.  Or has he?

Being Human.  Yet another show being remade in America, I’m actually interested to see how this one will turn out but watching the original is totally necessary.  So there’s a vampire, a werewolf and a ghost and they all live together in a house trying to be as ordinary as they can.  The vampire and the werewolf work in a hospital together while the ghost, trapped in the house, endlessly makes cups of tea.  It’s SO British it’s almost silly.  It’s also really, really good.  The right amount of comedy vs serious drama, the right amount of supernatural vs mundane, great cast and story.  I’m beside myself waiting for season 2 in 2010.  You can watch it here and I’m sure there are other free places on the net.

Red Riding.  Based on the novels of David Peace these three films were shown on Channel 4 earlier this year but I didn’t get round to watching them until they came out on DVD, not having a TV an all.  Dark, dark stories set during a dark time in British history.  I heard that it was actually due a big screen release in the USA which surprised me, hearing that Ridley Scott was lined up to make yet another remake for Columbia somehow didn’t.  I can’t imagine how they will make this one American, I really hope they don’t.  Without a doubt one of the best things I’ve seen made for television in a long, long time.  It also cemented Paddy Considine at the number on position in my favorite contemporary Brit actors.  He’s ace.

Not quite a drama, not quite a comedy and about as likely to get the American remake treatment as Coronation Street.  Shameless. NOTHING more ridiculous on TV, nothing else which actually shows what a huge percentage of this country is really like.  Watch it with subtitles.

The Devil’s Whore.  Oh hey Dominic West, what’s that? You’re not from really from Baltimore?  You’re actually an Eton educated Englishman?  Well you’ll always be McNulty to me.  However you did a great job of playing Oliver Cromwell in this classy Civil War rompette.  Shame you were outshone by John Sim, he of Life On Mars and Michael Fassbender (le swoon).  We love making historical television over here, it’s pretty unrelenting to be honest.  At least in the USA you only have a limited amount of history (sorry) from which to recycle endless TV ideas.  So, it was nice to have a change and go for the old civil war, not exactly a very glamourous period of history.

Skins. Nothing quite like this has ever been on TV before, not here, not there, not anywhere.  This is the teenage life we all wanted to have but didn’t.  The sex, the drugs, the clothes but couldn’t because we were lame teenagers.  It’s fantastical and absurd.  You pretend to hate it but actually it’s so well done you get sucked in and can’t help loving it.

♥

Com a internet, P2P, torrentz, DC++, … cada internauta tem a sua disposição, quase em tempo real, as melhores produções de TV do mundo, o melhor do cinema, quadrinhos, música. Ou seja, ele possui uma quantidade de possibilidade muito maior do que tempo para consumir tudo que quer.

O novo consumidor cultural é obrigado a escolher  o que quer assitir e sua principal moeda é o seu tempo.O mesmo tempo que ele tem para trabalhar, dormir, fazer exercícios, namorar,… portanto cada minuto na frente da TV tem que ser muito bem gasto, temque ter um alto retorno emocional.  Esse caso se agrava com as séries de TV, pois se umn filme for ruim, o espectador só investiu 2 horas de sua vida, mas se a série for ruim, o espectador terá investido 1 hora por semana nela. É muito mais tempo. Seriados tem que entregar cada vez mais para o espectador não se sinta  desrespeitado pel otempo que gadtou assistindo.

Já comentei aqui que  o motivo pelo qual Dollhouse foi cancelada é que eles apresentaram um 13º episódio alucinante e na segunda temporada voltaram pruma história sopinha de bebê. Fringe é outra série que está fazendo o mesmo e sua audiêcnia está despencando. Fringe apresenta universos paralelos, guerra dimensional e na temporada seguinte segue nos casos da semana contra o garoto -topeira, o garoto-mental, o observador que se apaixona, etc… Assim não dá, tem que avançar na história e não ter medo de tomar decisões ousadas.

The Mentalist consegue fazer isso. Cria-se um time inteiro de personagens no CBI apenas para poder usá-los de maneira dramatica para avançar a história. Quem assistiu o destino do time do Bosco, sabe do que eu estou falando. Excelente.

Por esse motivo é que tenho preferido  cada vez mais assistir séries inglesas. Elas são menores em tamanho, portanto não precisam de episódios tapa-buraco com tramas garoto-topeira.  Fora isso, como não possuem grandes orçamento, suas tramas tem que estar muito melhor calcadas no roteiro. Life on Mars, Ashes to Ashes, Being Human, Doctor Who, Torchwood, The Office, Skins, Primeval, Jeckyll, Mifits e Paradox  São todos exemplos de séries recentes inglesas com uma qualidade média de roteiros muito maior do que as séries americanas. Dê uma chance as séries inglesas, você vai perceber que não é perda de tempo.

feita com o melhor dos anos 70

juntem-lhe uma fotografia de excepção, bons actores, um argumento muito bem escrito e não se esqueçam do nome: yep, Bowie, Honky Dory, Life on Mars all over the place.

yep, i’m hooked.

Not since Charles Darwin discovered the process by which life diversifies has a more important discovery been made (and I include relativity). In fact, part of me almost wants to say this is the most important discovery ever. Almost.

Nasa scientists have produced the most compelling evidence yet that bacterial life exists on Mars.

It showed that microscopic worm-like structures found in a Martian meteorite that hit the Earth 13,000 years ago are almost certainly fossilised bacteria. The so-called bio-morphs are embedded beneath the surface layers of the rock, suggesting that they were already present when the meteorite arrived, rather than being the result of subsequent contamination by Earthly bacteria.

No, no, no. Stop. You didn’t let it sink in. Even if you’re amazed, you still haven’t let it sink in properly. It’s good evidence for life on another planet. LIFE ON ANOTHER PLANET.

This meteorite has actually been known for some time on Earth (1984), but it wasn’t until recently that better technology (thank you, science) made it possible to carry out far more detailed tests. The likely conclusion appears to be that this is, in fact, evidence for life.

As always, scientific excitement needs to be tempered with an eye toward always needing greater evidence (and there is some in the form of two separate meteorites). But that doesn’t make this any less exciting for me. It is crashingly obvious that life is wholly tenacious, so its existence elsewhere – in a Universe with more stars than grain of sands on all the beaches of Earth – is practically expected. Its close proximity and initial discovery is where the excitement really rests.

Then we have one of the archetypes of glamrock – David Bowie with the great Life on Mars

Title: Life on Mars: Series 2 (UK)
Starring: John Simm, Philip Glenister, Liz White, and Dean Andrews
Running time: 468 minutes
MPAA: Not Rated
Release date: November 24, 2009
ASIN: B002AS45NI
MPAA: unrated
Studio: Acorn Media
Review source: Acorn Media
Rating: A-

Life on Mars is a surreal, gripping and sometimes amusing [the writers chose the 70s for a reason] BBC original series, Detective Inspector Sam Tyler [John Simm] gets hit by a car in 2006 and wakes up in 1973 in his own Manchester precinct. He cannot believe it is 1973 or any of this is real. This is the nightmare from which he cannot awake. Everything is foreign to him and he cannot grasp how outdated and seemingly backwards everything is in 1973. The other detectives behave boorishly and in an unregulated manner that often does not sit well with Tyler. Yet to work with this force, he has to come to terms it. And in Series 2, he looks the part even though he acts much more modern. Tyler’s friendship with Annie [Liz White], an officer in the women’s division of the force [he treats her as an equal and values her input on cases], blossoms into a romance. Finally! There was so much will they/won’t they in Series 1. Life on Mars makes everyone in 1973 daft, chauvinistic, and almost savage. Tyler has managed to break many of his fellow officers’ of their bad habits but he still has issues. Now Tyler is back out on cases, trying to stay sane from the voices he hears in his head [hospital monitors beeping, his mother calling his name] and strange people in the street and television characters talking to him. In the past, he runs into his greatest case from the future who he now believes is tormenting him at his bedside. Tyler is obsessed with taking this guy down NOW in the 70s. He’s in limbo: getting called into the future but physically stuck in the past. Life on Mars is a well-written, clever program with a mix of vintage and present tone and style. The tense storylines and unpredictable nature of the show will keep you on edge, particularly with the intense ending.

Bonus Features:

“The Return of Life on Mars” documentary (45 min.)
Bonus behind-the-scenes footage for episodes 3, 5, and 7 and tour of the set (48 min.)
“The End of Life on Mars” featurette (28 min.)

 –review by Amy Steele

So… Zadie Smith is publishing – that is, she has written, so Hamish Hamilton is publishing – a book of essays, and thus has essayed to write an essay about it, which is in yesterday’s Guardian. Most of her essay is about the essays of one David Shields, whose book of essays on the essay (or “stupendous conterblast to all conventional literary pieties”) will be out in February, simultaneously here and in the U(essay).

Zadie, like everyone else who is anyone, has been reading Reality Hunger lo these many weeks in proof. (She was given it by a student, apparently, but to read the HH website is to feel sadly out of the loop if one has not been given a copy. Not only do they reference Smith’s piece, a month ago, but they talk excitedly about all the people who have been reading Shields in proof, as well. I for one fall well outside this beautiful circle, but I’m blogging here anyway.) So we have to go with what she says; not yet is it for us to have an actual position on things. But we can read, and think on however little. It is a subject never very far from my mind, in fact, the stuff she’s writing about here: it’s about what I write, and why.

She  says she disagrees with much of what Shields says, even when she finds him interesting: “Shields likes to say such things as ‘Story seems to say everything happens for a reason, and I want to say No, it doesn’t'; to which I want to say, ‘Bad story does that, yes, but surely good story exists, too’.” Referring to a quote from no less than JM Coetzee, where he also laments the rise of the “well-made novel,” she says:

This easy dismissal of well-made novels deserves a second look. In the first place, “well-made novel” seems to me to be a kind of Platonic bogeyman, existing everywhere in an ideal realm but in few spots on this earth. Reality Hunger wants us to believe that this taste for “novels that don’t look like novels” is in some way unusual, the mark of a refined literary palate.

According to Smith:

Shields argues passionately for the superiority of the messy real – of what we might call “truthiness” – over the careful creations of novelists, and other artists, who work with artificial and imagined narratives. For Shields it is exactly what is tentative, unmade and unpolished in the essay form that is important. He finds the crafted novel, with its neat design and completist attitude, to be a dull and generic thing, too artificial to deal effectively with what is already an “unbearably artificial world”. He recommends instead that artists break “ever larger chunks of ‘reality’ into their work”, via quotation, appropriation, prose poems, the collage novel . . . in short, the revenge of the real, by any means necessary.

So naturally this is where Ms Baroque wades in! Because I have this very love-hate relationship with the novel. There is a kind of politeness in the novel, or at least in most contemporary UK novels that I’ve read (which, okay, isn’t very many in the scheme of things, as every time I do read one I regret it bitterly, thinking Why, WHY did all those reviewers and everybody think it was so flipping great??). It’s a politeness that extends even (or especially) when the auther thinks he or she is being really iconoclastic, blowing away the cobwebs of taboo, etc etc. It’s a paleness, a predictable mannerliness; I’ve battled with it for many years and find it almost impossible to articulate what it is I mean by it… sort of, as I used to put it, the thing where the novels feel they have to tell you what colour the person’s front door is. It’s so tiring. Who cares?

It’s this detail, which every writing workshop will tell you is better than just the facts (not just cereal – what kind of cereal?), which to my mind takes one further and further away from what the story is supposed to be about. The story is clearly not about the front door, or the minutiae of utilitarian life. It’s an intrusion of the kind of clutter and noise we all seem to think passes for “reality” these days. And it’s the kind of reality we all know human kind cannot bear too much of.

One exception to this is The Corrections, a masterful work about which I will brook no dissent, and another – ditto – is The Ice Storm. But in those books that is the whole point: the intrusion of the noisy external world into people’s inner imperatives, with – in both cases – pretty dark results. (And of course both Franzen and Moody are great stylists.)

I think, thinking about it, that there are two things to say about Smith’s essay. One is about her definition-confusion about the word “essay” itself:

For Samuel Johnson in 1755 it is: “A loose sally of the mind; an irregular undigested piece; not a regularly and orderly composition.” And if this looks to us like one of Johnson’s lexical eccentricities, we’re chastened to find Joseph Addison, of all people, in agreement (“The wildness of these compositions that go by the name of essays”) and behind them both three centuries of vaguely negative connotation. Beginning in the 1500s an essay is: the action or process of trying or testing; a sample, an example; a rehearsal; an attempt or endeavour; a trying to do something; a rough copy; a first draft. Not until the mid 19th century does it take on its familiar, neutral ring: “a composition more or less elaborate in style, though limited in range.”

(I love that cosy “of all people”: why??) The thing is, as I’ve tried to say in my title, the word has a simple, clear meaning, “to have a go at.” The archaic “assay” is related, clearly. Sure, it’s old. To use it as a synonym for “try” would be very anachronistic now, but in terms of the written thing, the written article, it is still very much in the way of an attempt upon a subject. I can barely see that the meaning has changed at all, except to develop another sense in relation to this specific usage. It’s not an “unstable history” in the slightest. It’s just that we like things literal and plain now.

Like fiction, like poetry (an alternative to fiction that barely gets a look-in in this discussion, even though the author is married to a well-known poet), essays can take many forms. When I was at school we were taught to write “compositions” which were essays. There was a form. Say what it’s about, then lay out your items for discussion in  paragraphs, with each item containing all its subsidiary points, and finish with some kind of conclusion. In practice it can be memoir, philosophy, free-association, scholarly, newsy, scientific. It can be like the long essays by John McPhee, that went all over the shop, or like Annie Dillard’s spiritual-biological musings on life and nature, or like Lamb’s amazing shaggy dog story, A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig, which made me weep with laughter in school at 14. It can be a book review (or “book report” as we called them), or high-falutin’ critical analysis, or polemic.

But listen. The other thing Zadie mentions, as quoted above, is this big thing we are all too much in the face of. Reality. There’s a very interesting sentence embedded in the quote above, which goes:

He finds the crafted novel, with its neat design and completist attitude, to be a dull and generic thing, too artificial to deal effectively with what is already an “unbearably artificial world”.

This is it.

The mediated, postmodernist, commodified, photographed, regulated, politically correct, plastic world. Think about it. And I mean plastic in both senses. Firstly it is largely made of plastic these days. Look at your nearest bus, or what your apples came in, or warehouse store. Secondly, everything is endlessly plastic, malleable, conditional, attributed, relative, up for reinvention, redefinition, redesign, restructure, realignment, reassigment. Even personal relationships, even gender!

There is now, more than ever, no such thing as empirical reality. So we are lost in a cacaphony of processes, procedures, targets, objectives, appraisals, reviews, emails, brands, cultural signifiers heaping up and up and up in an endless mountain, jargon, disposable coffee cups, fan crazes, other people’s mobile phone conversations, and a complete fall in standards of behaviour – which means that, among other things, other people are just in our faces more than they used to be.

Oh yeah, baby.

I mean even Jack Kerouac didn’t used to text on his BlackBerry while Neal Cassady was trying to talk to him, and crazy as they were I bet they didn’t eat fried chicken from a (plastic) box on the bus and then leave the box under the seat.

And their girlfriends did not talk in an endless infantile highpitched nasal whine, that went up at the end of every  phrase, like the annoying actresses in Mad Men (and every other current American TV show) do?

Ranting? Maybe. But I think fiction can’t cope any more, because frankly we just don’t want to know. There’s too much of it. It’s all too irritating. Fiction either becomes just as shallow as the so-called reality TV we now watch – as if only what you can see is real – or it tries for the historical effect and as often as not wears its research naively on its sleeve. (I don’t mean Wolf Hall here. And I don’t by any means mean all contemporary fiction, either. There are a handful of novelists I would follow around the supermarket, hoping to hear them say something to an aisle attendant.)

Ranting aside, all this imageness and process and positioning, and the way fiction publishing is being run by marketing teams and brand-builders, mean we are hungry not for “reality” – not as in “reality TV,” which is another kind of mediated pre-packaged unreality – but for the real. Something real in our literature. After all, literature is our letter to ourself, that tells us where we are and how to get along there. Fiction used to do that for us.

The fiction Zadie lists in her article does do it. It engages with the inner life, the real imperatives, as reflected in the external. But it’s all old; she ducks out of her own argument a bit to give us classics instead of taking an unflinching look at the now. After all, it’s the now that David Shields is talking about.

Our external now is so managed these days that fiction can’t cope; we need a place to process it and have a think. Because everything else – even the education system itself – is set up to mitigate against thinking. Our society has grown terrified of thought, of deep reflection, in favour of “skills” and “results,” and our literature is desperately trying to regain a foothold. It comes to something when the narrative imagination, which used to be the way to pattern reality in prose and make it bearable, is no longer enough. Franzen writes brilliant essays, for example.

John Gardner saw all this coming decades ago, with his famous, churlish remark that if the New Yorker published any real fiction at all the Steuben paperweights in the side columns would explode. So did Cheever. So did Marshall McLuhan. (So did TS Eliot.) Well, it was the mid-century lament, and Mad Men (whose women speak so differently from the women of that day) charts it too. Life on Mars was a reaction to it. (In Life on Mars the John Sims character literally gets to go back to 1972 and have a think from outside his own life.)

Now, what is most needed I think is a good step back from the clutter and noise and static and trappings, of which there are just so many. And some quiet in which to reflect and think and find ourselves, away from the shopping channel. (Everything is the shopping channel.) A chance to look at it, instead of watching it, and to assimilate.

And that’s why I write poetry. And essays. And a blog.

Even my much-vaunted half a novel was half assemblage, scraps, un-permissioned quotes, pages and pages of them; it was simply not possible to do what I was trying to do as straight linear narrative. People keep telling me to have another go but I don’t know. This article is one of the first things I’ve ever read that comes close to describing why I feel so conflicted about novels. I do kind of miss them; recently I read The Thin Man and The Turn of the Screw…

Thank you Zadie and good night.

So I see the Marks and Spencer people are under fire (from 8 people) for casting Gene Hunt in their Christmas ad this year. Well, they should have known really. He was always going to be crass and insensitive, and make the advert revert back on itself. (I would like to point out that I have been accused of looking for any excuse to write about Philip Glenister and Gene Hunt. I am very hurt by this accusation and find it offensive.)

The whole point of his line in the M&S ad is that he’s drawing attention to the fact that every M&S ad has a girl prancing about in her underwear, especially the Christmas ones. What he’s doing is drawing attention to the fact that, as the ad starts, “Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without…” – the M&S girl in her underwear. It’s kind of like saying, it’s not Christmas season until the Coca Cola ad is on the telly.

But of course, there are always a few naysayers and demons of political correctness on hand to put a dampener on something that really shouldn’t even merit discussion. I mean, the ad is, for the most part fairly standard, the kind of thing you expect from a department store where the subtext is “Spend money in here please”.

I wonder would there have been as much consternation had it been a woman drawing attention to the underwear model?

Of course, there’s no disguising the fact that the need for utter and total political correctness has gone completely off the wall of late, hasn’t it?

We had the situation with Jonathon Ross, Russell Brand and Andrew Sachs and yes, fair enough that was actually a situation that needed to be dealt with and it was out of order. But it seems that it has opened a whole can of worms in terms of what people perceive to be inappropriate. Who at the start of the year would have believed that M&S would come under fire for inappropriate advertising?

Of course, following that controversy, we had Jeremy Clarkson making a comment about truck drivers, something clearly based on films like Duel and other such films. For the love of God, the remark he made was based on the already present pop cultural references to truck drivers as opposed to an actual personal remark. It’s akin to asking an Irish person why they aren’t drunk and red haired, and we don’t get worked up about it, do we? Or at least most of us don’t.

Another instance was in a recent episode of Ashes to Ashes in which, Gene Hunt (Philip Glenister again – making a habit of popping up in political correctness issues, so he is) shoots a dog that’s about to attack them. I remember reading that there were complaints about it, mostly based on the idea that it was setting a bad example for kids. I remember thinking; Ashes to Ashes goes out at 9 o’clock on a Monday night. So firstly, it’s after the watershed, which pretty much means unless you’re strangling puppies with your own overlong hair, you can broadcast whatever you want. And secondly, it’s a school night, kids should be in bed! And, of course if that argument fails, it’s up to parents to monitor what their kids watch. Once the watershed hits, it should be a creative free for all.

In addition to that, if you actually watch the scene, the dog is clearly still moving when they walk in past him!

But, after all of my examples and such, what the whole thing comes down to is perception. How many of us have perceived filth or double meanings in a sentence or a scene when someone else hasn’t? Anything can be perceived as sexist, or too mature for its audience but at the end of the day, it’s the audience that perceives it that way. I’m forever doing it, as are, I’m sure many others. We complain about certain ads because we don’t like that they alert us to how our own minds work and jump to the less PC conclusions.

Why were/are Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes so wildly popular? That’s another blog but I’m just putting the question out there. (I have an essay about this which I’ll blog once I discover its whereabouts on my new ‘I like to hide things’ laptop.)

At the end of the day, coming back to the Marks & Spencer ad: it’s Christmas. And we always see that girl prancing around in her underwear? Why should this year be any different?

A handful of people have complained that Philip Glenister’s comment in the new M&S Christmas ad is ’sexist’. Eight to be exact.

I would expect a handful of people to complain. I would also expect a handful of people to complain if they were handed a cheque for £5 million. Here’s a thought: there will always be at least a handful of people, probably about eight, who can find fault with anything. Eight people do not a critical mass make.

I think the fact that Gene Hunt IS sexist, is the entire point of his being in the ad and if what he was saying WASN’T sexist…well, we wouldn’t quite get why he was there in the first place? Clearly M&S are guilty…of overestimating the British public, or at least eight of them anyway.

This country is going insane…

I bet it wasn’t hard to find a 70s office block to film this episode in. For all the fuss about how the Ashes to Ashes researchers had trouble finding filming locations in London that haven’t changed beyond recognition since the early 80s, I bet they too had no trouble finding dingy mildewed offices.

Anyway, it’s Ray’s birthday and Sam’s not invited to the party. He’s not making an effort to fit in, you see, and the ‘Happy Birthday Ray, you poofter’ banner almost seems designed to purposely offend a 21st century PC PC.

Of course, not fitting in won’t get him out of there any sooner. so his subconscious decides to tell a tale of another misfit.

On arriving at the hostage scene at the local newspaper offices, Sam approaches Reg’s van with extreme caution, almost as you might a suspected terrorist’s holdall. This kind of stakeout looks completely at odds with 1973. Sam suggests that the team form a ‘donut’ around the hostage location, to everyone’s amusement.

Jackie Queen, later to reappear in Ashes to Ashes, is far softer and professional in LOM. What happens over the next 9 years? Is there more to her relationship with Gene than we think? Is she the reason his marriage falls apart? Or the reason he moves to London? She clearly becomes fond of Sam, when he ‘dies’ does she blame Gene and force him to relocate?

Reg quotes the Connecticut Yankee – ‘A man out of time, stranded in a heathen world.’ Then exchanges a knowing look with Sam. But which world is he referring to? Surely not tame old 1973? This is the first point in the series where I wonder if Sam is really from 2006 after all. And how does Reg know? Like Martin Summers, he seems pretty keen to get out of there…

The handling of the hostage situation invariably results in Sam, Gene and Annie locked in a room, awaiting their fate. They share the images that they think will flash before them as they die, fearing the worst. Sam’s flashback is his most recent birthday in 1973. Is that the reason he’s ended up there after all? Is he just caught in a never-ending flashback?

I agree there may be a possibility of life on other planets, or there may be another universe other than our solar system. But I do not think that if we give theory of life on other planets then water is the only proof for survival of life. Scientist and research is spending money wastefully to find water. There may be completely different means that are present for the survival of life on other planets or universe. We cannot necessarily relate our earth with other planets where life is possible.
There may be other sources that we may be unaware of that can sustain and nourish life. We need to find life rather water. And even life that we assume exist on other planets may have very different and strange form than what we always try to relate with our earth. I doubt even if we find traces of water on other planets that can validate possibility of life as if its like Dead Sea on earth. Therefore we need to broaden our thinking and lets not try to relate life on earth with life on other planets or universes.
God and his angels are also somewhere there is also a different kind of life there. That is one possible example of life other than on earth. May be life on other planets is not a kind of life that we used to live. May be we can survive there or may be we cannot survive there but still other forms of life that belongs to that world can live happily there. May be those forms of life can survive on earth or they may cannot also survive on earth. I name this theory UnBoxing life. We do not have to box in the very word life, let us unbox this concept and do not bound it with temperature, water and all the reasons we have for it on our planet earth.

Unboxing Life by Rehan Munir is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

It’s Friday.  I am in need of a little eye candy.

Mrow!

Julie Benz.  You either know her from Dexter or Buffy/Angel (6 eps for Buffy/20 eps for Angel as “Darla”).  She’s been in a bunch of other stuff, (you can check her out on IMDB for a full list of TV appearances) and I’m half tempted to check out Boondock Saints 2 because she plays Special Agent Eunice Bloom.  I can’t find the link, but there’s a video clip of her online doing an interview about the role and they show a scene in the film where she’s a.) a bitch and b.) a real gun slinger.  Totally hot.  Something about a chick with a gun.

Speaking of a chick with a gun…

Detective Rush

Kathryn Morris.  FYI, I only like her up to Season 4.  After that she loses about 40 lbs and looks really sickly and thin and less attractive.  Kinda like she’d turn to pink dust if you hugged her too hard.  Still, she could haul me in for questioning any time!

Speaking of coppers…

On the Left...

No, not the angry cougar on the right hand side.  The hottie on the left.  That’s Liz White portraying Annie Cartwright on the UK version (and clearly the superior version) of “Life on Mars”.  She’s not technically a cop, she’s a WPC.  It’s about all women could do via the police force in the 70’s in Britain.  Great show, check it out.  Don’t go by the TERRIBLE Americanized version.  (And let’s get one thing clear, I have no qualms with cougars.  Hot ones, anyway.  Cougars need love too.  Hot cougars.)

Speaking of British Babes…

Detective Alex Drake

This is Keeley Hawes (voice of Lara Croft in the Tomb Raider video games).  She’s Detective Alex Drake in the “Life on Mars” spin-off, “Ashes to Ashes” which takes place in the ’80s.  There are some really great photos of her she did when she was younger in bondage and various stages of undress.  I’d post em, but I’m at work.  Maybe later.  Anyway…fantastic actress and not hard to look at either.  Another great series out of the UK.

Clearly, I have a thing for powerful women.

After “bombing” the moon in early October, NASA now confirms they have discovered water there (see related blog post, Oct 9 below).

A month ago, NASA’s “LCross” space craft accomplished extensive mapping in orbit around the moon, and then its two sections crashed directly into a lunar crater. Only recently have scientists even questioned if the moon might be anything other than a dry, dusty rock, but analysis of the residual dust clouds from the two impacts confirm; water is indeed present.

“We are ecstatic,” said NASA Principal Investigator, Anthony Colaprete. “Multiple lines of evidence show water was present… “

Colaprete goes on to hint the moon may contain even more surprises: “The full understanding of the LCross data may take years – the data is that rich.”

Finding water and other useful material on the moon should enhance NASA’s efforts to fly manned missions not only back to the moon, but also Mars some time in the next decade.

NASA had previously found evidence water was once on Mars, but new images indicate it still flows at the surface, if only for brief periods before it evaporates or freezes.

Scientists say the crater shown left was photographed dry in 1999, but the second image indicates water flowed through the same area as recently as 2004.

The presence of liquid water raises the probability that microbial life may exist on Mars.

Reading Eye Weekly I came across this article about the disappearance of manliness. It appears to have been spawned by a film based on the exploits of a loutish sort of blogger named Tucker Max who freely admits that he is an irresponsible, mocking drunk whose sexual habits are a recipe for STIs. Writer Edward Keenan  points out that Tucker Max is a hero to a cadre of young men and that is a symptom of, “the slow, steady disappearance of manliness — and with it a popularly accepted, socially worthwhile role for men — in North American culture.”

Now being written in an alt-weekly, you know that this article is not going to be a simple pining for the “good old days” of yore. Keenan recognizes (rightly, in my opinion) that the old-time patriarchy had plenty wrong with it as well. I commend to you Mad Men or the UK version of Life on Mars if you start getting nostalgic for a time when women “knew their place” and so on. What happened though is that as women broke out their old roles confined to homemaking and child-rearing, men have sort of given up. Says Keenan:

“[M]en in increasing numbers have just decided to kind of drop out of the whole battle of the sexes thing and play videogames (or beer pong, or fantasy football, or Dungeons and Dragons, or just their iPods) instead. When women decided to stop taking orders from The Man, men decided to stop being The Man and focus on being The Dude. As women have realized that with great freedom comes even greater and more frustrating responsibility, men have increasingly realized that they can chase their bliss and reach self-actualization without owning up to any responsibilities at all.”

Keenan goes on to suggest that this isn’t because men have stopped being men, they’ve just continued to be men but in a more useless way:

“It’s not as if men have dropped many of the old annoying characteristics of manhood. They are as competitive as ever, they are as lustful as ever, they still shun emotionalism and embrace codes and statistics and structures. It’s just that all the socially redeeming things that used to accompany those easy-to-spot external characteristics — things like a sense of honour and a feeling of responsibility to something greater than oneself, be it family or society at large — have been shrugged off like so much paternalistic baggage.”

This is true in virtually every expression of 21st C. North American masculinity – video games along could be a case study: There’s competition, gratuitous cleavage, dispassionate killing, and of course any good first-person shooter game will break down the numbers after each round – how many kills with each type of weapon, how many head shots, accuracy and so on. Blogs, ahem, aren’t much better, WordPress, like any good blogging platform has all manner of statistics, many of which can be published to the actual home page of one’s blog so that one might boast about them.

It might be worth noting at this juncture that Keenan is careful to point out that these are of course tendencies and not universal truths, but that tendencies, like how men tend to be taller than women are not to be overlooked. There are of course slacker women and career-climbing men out there, but increasingly it seems like both of these are exceptional cases. Keenan has numbers: Women are more likely to attend university, more likely to graduate, and more likely to go into professional schools like law or medicine.

Keenan argues that we have our definitions wrong, that when we today speak of masculinity, we think of “shallow displays of toughness and vulgarity, of an obsession with balls (of various kinds) and breasts and booze and brawn” while earlier generations would have probably associated masculinity with responsibility to their families and communities. Moreover, one should not contrast masculinity and femininity: “Men haven’t avoided manliness to become more like women — if they had, we’d have no problem, really. They’ve avoided it to become more like children.”

Some Theses About All This:

• We cannot go back – even if we would want to. Young women – even many of those who I encounter in evangelical church settings often have solid careers that I do not see them forsaking for 1950s family roles. Moreover, there’s a reason I put Don Draper up at the top of this post – there was lots to dislike about the “good old days” and certainly lots of men were reprehensible cads. No nostalgia, please.
• Traditionally masculine values such as courage or responsibility have been subject to all kinds of abuse. My great-grandfather returned from Passchendaele physically (and likely psychologically) wounded – and for what? To protect the lands of Belgium’s monarchy? To stop Germany from threatening British naval hegemony? World War I was a complete waste of blood and treasure at the behest of incompetent upper class twits like Douglas Haig. Men were often just as exploited by the old patriarchy as women. If I had to choose, I’d rather my generation of men and our sons grow up as video gamers than as imperial cannon fodder.
• The recent past is not the whole history of gender relations: for most of human history most men and women worked side-by-side in predominantly agrarian societies. That is not to say that gender didn’t serve as a means for the division of labour, but it would have been incoherent to say that one sex “stayed home” and the other “went off to work.” Even with the advent of industrialization, many women worked in factories (mainly in textiles). As the nature of work continues to change it is anachronistic to suggest that there are fixed gender roles regarding work. Who does what work is always up for negotiation.
• Men dropping out and women picking up the slack goes a long way in explaining the so-called happiness gap. I am referring to the fact that since the 1960s women have reported being less and less happy with their lives while men’s happiness has generally increased. Obviously if men are focused video games/bands/the internet while women work on their careers while still doing the bulk of the household chores/child-rearing it’s no secret who will, in the short term at least, be happier.
• The cohort of boys born in the late ’70s and onward and who had grown up in North America probably had, on average, the best material childhood and adolescence in human history. We enjoyed the best toys, games, and gadgets ever. Boys playing with the tin or wooden toys of yesteryear had mediocre simulations of real trucks or real soldiers or whatever. We had Nintendo, we had toy cars that became robots, we had, in short, playthings that were better than “real life.” It’s no wonder we don’t like the idea of growing up, it’s a downgrade from childhood. Girls meanwhile were still being exposed to the intense pressure to be physically attractive while simultaneously being expected to run for student council, play sports, and get into a good university. For girls growing up didn’t remove those pressures, but at least it afforded them a sense of autonomy.
• If men are afraid to compete with women when women are on an equal footing, well, it should be obvious which is the weaker sex. Men were not defeated or victimized by feminism, rather we appear to have unilaterally surrendered – you can have the perfect kids and the great career – but we just unlocked the bonus level on this game. Is it any wonder, given the way we behave, that women want daughters more than sons? While some cultural conservatives want to depict men and boys as victims of feminists or something, my generation – men now in their 20s and 30s – did this to ourselves.

“Mi nombre es Sam Tyler. Tuve un accidente y desperté en 1973. ¿Estaré loco, en coma o he vuelto al pasado? Sea lo que sea, es como si hubiera aterrizado en otro planeta. Quizá, si encuentro una explicación, pueda volver a casa“.

Sam Tyler (John Simm) es Inspector Detective en Jefe de la policía de Manchester en 2006. Tras un accidental atropello de coche, Sam despierta en Manchester, sí, pero en 1973. Ahora es Inspector Detective (sin lo de Jefe) a las órdenes del Inspector Detective en Jefe Gene Hunt (Philip Glenister).

Un tremendo salto temporal y sobre todo cultural a pesar de que sólo haya retrocedido 30 años en el calendario. Y es que las modas son muy diferentes, la música no tiene nada que ver con la que escuchaba en su iPod cuando ahora debe conformarse con un radiocasete destartalado -en el que suena, entre otros, el temazo de David Bowie que da título a la serie-, los delitos son distintos de los que estaba acostumbrado a investigar y, sobre todo, los procedimientos policiales son, ¿cómo decirlo?, menos remilgados y un pelín más violentos que aquellos que aprendió en la Academia del siglo XXI.

Este es el planteamiento de una de las mejores series de los últimos años, emitida por primera vez en la BBC (lo que ya supone cierta garantía de calidad) y que en España se pudo ver a través de Antena 3 y Antena Neox (eso sí, con una difusión penosa que hizo que pasase tristemente desapercibida).

2 temporadas, 16 capítulos en total, excelentes todos ellos. Luego vendría la versión USA -protagonizada por Jason O’Mara y Harvey Keitel- y la española, titulada La chica de ayer -Ernesto Alterio y Antonio Garrido-, y de la que, por no hacer mala sangre, diré simplemente que lo mejor es tratar de olvidar y pensar que nunca ha existido.

Desde luego, quedémonos con la original (en todos los sentidos) Life on Mars.

Si no la viste en su momento, hazte con ella: no te arrepentirás.

A rede norte-americana CBS planeja estrear em 2010 uma nova versão de Havaí 5-0. A NBC prepara um remake de Arquivo Confidencial (The Rockford Files). NCIS: Los Angeles é um sucesso nos Estados Unidos. Melrose Place ganhou temporada completa e 90210 segue com boa audiência para os padrões do CW.

O fã de séries que é esperto já acendeu a luz amarela. A crise de criatividade que assombra o cinema há alguns anos começa a bater à porta das séries. Se os produtores não abandonarem a fórmula fácil dos remakes, dos spin-offs (seriados derivados), das versões norte-americanas de atrações internacionais e dos roteiros adaptados, tudo o que foi construído nos últimos anos pode escorrer pelo ralo.

Sim, eu sei que é financeiramente seguro produzir The Vampire Diaries. Mas não foi graças a Kath & Kim, Life on Mars ou Worst Week que as séries chegaram a um dos maiores índices de popularidade da história do formato.

Os seriados são objetos de culto graças a apostas ousadas como 24 Horas, Desperate Housewives, Família Soprano, Sons of Anarchy, The Shield e outras atrações.

O comodismo dos produtores de Hollywood sacrificou a qualidade em nome de algumas boas bilheterias. Pense rápido e me diga um verdadeiro clássico nos últimos cinco anos. Que longa-metragem vencedor do Oscar merece lugar no ranking dos filmes realmente memoráveis?

Em uma coletiva do Warner Channel realizada há algum tempo, o crítico Rubens Ewald Filho me disse que as produções para a TV andavam mais interessantes que muitos lançamentos do cinema.

Concordei com ele. Não foi à toa que atores consagrados, como Glenn Close, migraram para a telinha. São raros casos como Damages ou House no cinema recente. Não consigo pensar em um filme de impacto, que realmente impressionou as pessoas ou contribuiu para uma mudança no modelo de negócio, como Lost e sua interação com outras mídias.

Remakes e afins são ótimos para saudosistas. Não para quem realmente gosta de TV e quer atrações de qualidade.

* Texto originalmente publicado no blog Poltrona.