I feel lazy at present. So, this post will act as a musical interlude. We open with the dark:

And move onto the slightly strange and fantastical:

And finally, an entirely superior remix of an otherwise cancerously irritating piece:

A proper bassline makes everything alright, you see.

Apparently:

The Tories had their own meeting between Obama and David Cameron, at which the senator was overheard congratulating Cameron on ‘all your success’. The two spent 20 minutes chatting about juggling fatherhood and politics and discussing Afghanistan and the economy. Cameron gave him a box of CDs including albums by the Smiths, Radiohead and Lily Allen.

This man’s sinister genius knows no bounds. Obama will listen to our powerful music output and have Cameron to thank for this exposure. Labour members, despair.

Or rather, The Dark Knight: A Review. In which there may be spoilers, so avoid if you’re interested in watching it uncorrupted.

Heath Ledger may well win an Oscar for his role as the Joker in the latest Batman film. And he may well be posthumously accused of winning that Oscar purely because of its posthumous nature. That’d be a shame - as he probably deserves it.

James made me promise not to include spoilers, so I won’t*. Suffice to say that Ledger’s performance dominates, from the enjoyably confused opening to the character’s eventual demise. From behind the smudged chalk mask which adds so much to the impression of mania comes sheer, random danger, almost throughout. It’s there in the movements, and in the voice. Ledger’s tongue lolls and flaps, barely able to stay inside the Joker’s mutilated lips. The body twitches in line with the character’s own mind, while limbs appear to have a mind of their own on occasion - look for an excited Joker, and they’ll be somewhere else. The voice, meanwhile, sums up the character itself; a low, unsteady croon skittering into gibberish in moments of excitement. Very dark, and very effective.

That’s not to say that the other performances are bad. They’re not; most involved either manage to pull of strong performances, or have roles so peripheral that it doesn’t hugely matter. Christian Bale follows his previous take on Batman well. Aaron Eckhart makes Harvey Dent so irritatingly perfect at first as to make Two-Face seem yet more vile. The rest of the cast - and the film in general - take Ledger’s dark lead, and work it into something worth sitting through. But Ledger’s Joker does set that tone, and so tends to dominate.

And, inevitably, there are problems. Some are mere irritances. Bale’s gravelly monotone when in Bat-mode pushes the stereotype a little too far, while at one point a defendent pulls a gun on the prosecuting attorney while in the dock. I’m happy to suspend disbelief for Batman, or the Joker, or anything that forwards the plot entertainingly - but sometime, it’s just not possible.

Other flaws are more serious. The film’s chaotic motif of fallen heroes and human fallibility should fascinate me; and yet it all felt a little tedious at times. Dent’s fall is done well, and the Joker’s psychotic tricks blur Batman’s lines of right and wrong enjoyably - but it happens to much. The film comes in at a very long 2 hours and 32 minutes and features dilemna after dilemna after dilemna for the forces of law and order. The moral mazes begin to feel forced, included for the sake of pushing character’s boundraries but failing to do so. And with that, the film drags at times. The contrast between the Joker’s capricious anarchism and Batman’s struggle with his conscience is compelling - but if it weren’t for the cracking action scenes that accompany each eruption of that contrast, they’d just get tiring.

Nonetheless, it’s a film worth seeing. Heath Ledger’s swansong as the Joker is superb, and the rest of the cast do enough to not look complete amateurs beside him. It might not be what the pre-release propaganda campaign hyped it to be, but it’s a fun little flick with lots of big explosions and dark plot hooks - enough to fill a long afternoon. And, probably enough for a sadly posthumous Oscar.

*(much)

As Douglas mentioned them I can’t resist posting moar:

It truly is remarkable that this sprawling mess of influences is possible, as well as entirely pleasing.

That memo I mentioned yesterday turns out to be even worse than suspected. To summarise; it gives the BPI the ability to monitor the internet activity of suspected filesharers. The BPI then passes their details onto ISPs, who first send threatening letters, before slowing and then cutting off internet connections.

That’s a scheme flawed on many levels. The BPI’s powers to monitor internet users and share their details forms an outright assault on their liberties; it’s in effect allowing a private organisation to police behaviour. Their solution, meanwhile, is simply draconian. The move targets suspects rather than the definitely guilty - sound familiar? It then seeks to disconnect them, and anyone else in the same household. That you might have fallen victim to malware or someone else in the house might have done the sharing doesn’t matter. You’re on the same ISP - so they assume you did it.

Nor will any of this actually work. Record companies seem completely blind to the motivation behind filesharing; its ease and speed. It’s the difference between pressing a button and a half-hour bus journey to the nearest music shop and back. That filesharing, much like borrowing a CD, allows consumers to sample entirely new realms of music before splashing out on several albums also gets ignored. Record companies claim filesharing eats into their profits - but it seems unlikely they’d sell as much as they did without this interaction between consumers.

Of course, this blinkered approach to filesharing could well be selective. As Billy Bragg points out, the internet benefits two main ends of the music industry; producers and consumers. Artists can connect directly to listeners through social networking and online stores - and cut out the middle-men of record companies. They’ll retain some power through the offer of improved marketing and better recording facilities, but the internet challenges their grip on the music industry as never before.

Take three examples, from the top and bottom of the scale in terms of size. At its largest extent, bands such as Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails have bypassed those middle-men entirely, putting their music online and allowing downloaders to set the value. At the other end, and smashing the myth that the internet only benefits wealthy groups like Radiohead who’ve already made it, come whole genres which developed on and through the internet. Dubstep began in Croydonian basements and spread across the world through the power of filesharing, to the extent that one of its most inspired disciples hails from Japan. It’s only since that electronic rise that solid CDs have begun to appear on shop-shelves and the music made its way into meatspace.

So, when record companies attack filesharing as it is, it’s with a mind to maintaining their corporate power. That certainly looks to be the motive behind the rather measly carrot offered to consumers under the Memo; legal filesharing through passworded monopolies owned by the companies. They keep their cut, and artists and consumers get the same raw deal as before. And the internet loses its most powerful edge of being open to anyone with a connection. Hardly a move, then, born out of the concern for artists Undertones corporate frontman Feargal Sharkey so frequently whines.

This memo serves one purpose; to retain the iron grip of recording companies on the music industry. It fails to exploit the internet at its best, and so fails artists and fans. Do we really want that?

No, I really don’t’ have an excuse to post this. Oh well.

I have a secret love. It is marketed for middle-aged parents who want to enjoy watching Saturday evening television with their children. It costs about £1,000,000 for each 45 minute installment. It is possibly the best thing on TV at the moment, but its latest run has just ended. Dr Who is one of the best defenses of the License Fee I can think of*.

TV these days leaves a lot to be desired. Entertainment is usually nothing of the sort: drumbeat-filled minutes before some nonentity is announced as the next big forgotten sat-that-could-have-been; gaudy sets masking vacuous presenters; plotlines so deliberately nonsensical that reality actually seems preferable again. Children’s’ TV is charitably described as patronising. Children watch post-watershed programmes, and anybody thinking that school films of you average school playground at lunchtime could be shown before 9pm need to emerge themselves in modern childhood. Children’s TV is no longer relevant to children, and yet parents do not want to accept adult TV as standard fare for their offspring.

Step in Dr Who. Nothing is quite like it. Deliberately pitched at the adult as much as the child, the resurrected TV classic has breathed new life into television. Just when MySpace looked like it could tear kids away from BBC1’s latest dramatised children’s novel, Dr Who came out all guns blazing. There is something here for everyone.

It appeals to the child in everyone. The hero arrives somewhere unknown at the beginning of each episode, and when it’s planet Earth he still has the task of figuring out just when. The Doctor emerges from his phonebox in an ancient Roman market, and we have just about clocked where and when by the time the Doctor declares “we’re in Vesuvius – and it’s volcano day!”. He knows nothing of the challenge he faces in the next three quarters of an hour, but he will learn just one second quicker than we will – always cleverer than the viewer, but not such that we can’t think we can get ahead once in a while.

Adults remember Dr Who from its old incarnations, with its shaky sets and whisk-clad dustbin monsters. Now they can indulge in their favourite activity of reliving their childhood through their children in a way their children appreciate. Dr Who is socially acceptable. Playground talk can divert from sex, drugs and knives to matters of televisual entertainment with a seamlessness not possible with soaps or CSI – simply because Dr Who is about neither drugs or sex or knives. The Doctor never carries weapons, and he refuses to fall in love because he will outlive any suitor. As for drugs, who needs them when the entire universe and several parallel ones are at their fingertips?

Dr Who delves deeper, too. Everybody has a tortured soul trying to break out, and the Doctor is the ultimate focal point for character association. Because he refuses to love, yet cares deeply, his life is somehow eternally unfulfilled. Sure, he can charge throughout time and space stopping intergalactic wars and freeing races of cloned slave creatures, but he will never catch every atrocity or stop every death. Dr Who teaches that some things are right, some are wrong, and that some things are just meant to be whatever morality dictates. He let a Roman township burn alive in AD79 for the sake of saving the rest of the world: an unpreventable crisis, but one in which the alternative was too dire to contemplate.

A less personal morality is rampantly pushed through the programme, not so much searching souls as ravaging them. To the Doctor, every species matters. Daleks are as important to him as Ood, although he clearly has a soft spot for humans. In Saturday’s stunning series finale, Davros finds his world collapsing around him, and laughs manically in the knowledge that the Doctor caused the destruction of an entire race. His final victory was condemning the Time Lord for a brutal genocide: “you are the destroyer of worlds”. The programme-makers, of course, were unable to fully apportion blame to our Doctor but the sentiment remains. Death is the Doctor’s worst nightmare, and death at his own hands is an impossible burden to bear.

One burden is more challenging still, though. In the finale to the current series, “the Doctor’s soul was revealed”. He is challenged for not carrying weapons, but making weapons out of bystanders. He survives because of the self-sacrifice of those around him. Davros again heaps on the morality: “How many more? How many have died in your name?” Cue montage of character deaths from the last four series, and a bleak-looking David Tennant suddenly realising that the weight of the world rests not on his shoulders, but on the trust others put in him. This latest series has promoted him from demi-god to quasi-messiah, as the Doctor watches the end of the universe approach from the safety of a forcefield on a Dalek spaceship. His loyal followers (not quite twelve of them, and no betrayer) unite to save the universe from the pure evil of Davros and his satanic breed Dalek demons.

The average tweenage viewer may not appreciate the subtle moral indoctrination here, but they soon know right from wrong. Some of the more powerful philosphical arguments might pass unnoticed, but that is no reason to keep them away. The programme is good, clean TV – no blood or gore or swearing. In fact, Gordon Ramsey’s effing souffle looks rather trivial compared to the Doctor’s c-word free end of the world scenes. Week in, week out, he watches peril the likes of which Ramsey’s kitchen staff could only imagine, yet he keeps his mouth clean and his head straight. Realistic it may not be, but it gives parents the sense of safety they so desire. This is TV that parents actively want their children to see: high drama, intelligent, and above all clean.

Of course, Dr Who is tacky – the poor man’s sci-fi. The plots rarely make sense, and there is a constant annoyance of major advances in the narrative being made by some thought process or memory the viewer is not party to. This is a great shame, as even the most intelligent and alert viewers are left reeling from sudden jerks to the narrative. But the joy does not come from following the story. It comes from watching a man in a blue box zip about time and fix things, with all of the drama that entails. With, of course, a meaningful dollop of morality thrown in for good measure. We are, of course, talking of that ultimate hero, the quasi-messiah, the tortured soul, “The Doctor – the man who keeps running, never looking back because he dare not… for shame.”

Dr Who is perfect TV because the Doctor is the perfect hero – the guy you are tempted to want to be, but eventually decide is probably better left being himself. He is an enigma, sure, and one we would love to delve into. He seeks to make content people, but he is not a content man. Ultimately, it is the Doctor’s eternal lonliness that keeps the viewer happy. Davros, again, articulates it well: “who have you got? All those friends of yours?”. The Doctor’s response satisfies anybody tempted to think of filling his shoes: “they’ve all got someone else”.

For logical storylines, look elsewhere. For good, wholesome entertainment for all the family which delves into deep emotions and jiggles with your sense of morality, there is nothing better on TV. If Dr Who can keep advancing and not slip into a self-parody of its former self, I hope it is here to stay for many series to come.

- - -
*BBC 4 being the other big one.

Shinichi Osawa {who I’d never heard before} unleashed a compulsively catchy remix to Felix Da Housecat’s most recent single Radio recently that left the song almost unrecognisable. The melody he introduced was downright contagious and it’s well worth a listen or twelve hundred:

Watch out for the drum hook halfway through, it snags.

The marvelously named Clay Shirky has created a blog to accompany her new book Here Comes Everybody.

In perhaps the finest post so far she explains how the sitcom was the new gin but how television producers don’t quite know what’s hit them. Amongst other things. Really, there is no substitute for reading the article in question.

There are so many reasons why this film should not have been made.  The Rule of Three suggests that a fourth will not work.  The fact that the Last Crusade was released in the year I was born suggests that the world has moved on.  And no film of any description with such comprehensivly poor dialogue should not make it beyond crumpled yellow paper.

Given the circumstances, nobody was expecting the film to work.  But it did.  It couldn’t be bad, because it wasn’t trying to be good.  This is not an action film - it is an Indiana Jones film.  Just as one watches the latest James Bond because it is a James Bond film, this film must be approached in context.  It tries so hard to be an Indiana Jones film that it is almost self-parodying.  And it’s no bad thing.

There is a stupid plot (this one far worse than the ludicrous Nazi seizure of the Ark of the Covenant), and pointlessly long and directionless action sequences.  The score rises and falls in such textbook movie fashion that you know exactly when to expect the next thing that is meant to take you by surprise.  The Russian accents are about as believable as Lowestoft-born Tim Westwood’s ghetto lingo.  If you want a good action movie, stay at home.  This is an Indiana Jones film: watch it with that in mind, and you will love it.

I wouldn’t want to spoil the vacuous plot line (and admittedly it is far too flimsy to be put into words).  I will, however, touch on two (of many) moments which made me laugh out loud.  The first is during Jones’ first dramatic escape from the clutches of death.  A sequence already saturated with cliches climaxes as the archaeologist swings limply from a chain, mildly landing on a Star Trek-looking desk.  Suddenly, from nowhere, a big red clock suddenly lights up, counting down from 30 seconds.  The unashamed cheapness of it was amazingly funny.  Minutes later, Jones finds himself in an atomic bomb testing site, and - who could imagine - a siren sounds.  He leaps into a lead-lined refrigerator just as the blast whips through a model town, and the fridge is tossed through the air like Dr. Who’s Tardis.  Jones spills out of the makeshift nuclear bunker and looks over his shoulder to see a mushroom cloud.

Every plot and sub-plot leaves the viewer in bewilderment.  But the film is extremely well made, and has an air of fun about it.  It is a good couple of hours, meant to be enjoyed not analysed.  So I shall not begin to try.  Instead, I suggest that you go to watch the film with an eye open for tongue-in-cheek moments, and then enjoy them.