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Reviews
Alien Autopsy (2006)
Why?
I would agree with the other reviewers that Ant & Dec are decent actors - they were decent enough in the unchallenging confines of "Byker Grove" - but their ubiquitous presence on British television has significantly reduced their dramatic credibility. Would you cast Cilla Black or Jonathan Ross in a movie? Exactly. This duo have morphed into television presenters and, sorry guys, there's no way back.
That apart, this movie is a mess - muddled tone, uncertain direction, a lower budget than most people's wedding videos - it's not much more than an over-extended sketch. Die-hard Ant & Dec fans may well find something about it to enjoy, but the rest of us (and the lads' agents, no doubt) will be begging the cheeky Geordie chappies to head back to the Australian jungle - and preferably stay there this time.
Rosemary & Thyme (2003)
Weedy drama
If ever there was a case of commissioning-by-numbers, this is it. You can imagine the discussion at the ITV Network Centre. We've had disabled detectives (Ironside), we've had obsessive-compulsive detectives (Monk), we've even had cooking detectives (Pie in the Sky), what is there left to do? "Hey, I've got a great idea people like gardening
how about gardening detectives?" What any sane executive would have said at this point is: "Go and lie down in a darkened room and come back when you feel better", but no. Here's the truth ITV had two ageing but popular actresses (popular with a similarly ageing audience, that is) for whom they needed a vehicle and short of anything better, they decided to commission this lame excuse for a detective series. Is there a scintilla of realism about it? No. This is televisual wallpaper of the worst sort. When you watch this somnambulant tripe, bear in mind what else you might have done with that 60 minutes of your life, 60 minutes you'll never have again, and weep.
Sweet Medicine (2003)
The worst UK TV drama of all time
Probably the worst UK TV drama series of all time, the short and unhappy broadcasting life of "Sweet Medicine" says it all. The first episode opened in a blaze of publicity at a peak-time slot on Thursday night. Long before Episode 10, the final episode, the series had been buried in the graveyard slot, 11.20 on a Sunday night. Supposedly, a more sophisticated and adult version of "Peak Practice", the popular and long-running show it replaced, "Sweet Medicine" was filled with unlikeable characters doing uninteresting things. It was a monumental error of judgement by Carlton and the ITV Network Centre and fully deserves its place in the "TV Turkeys Hall of Fame".
Wag the Dog (1997)
What happened to the Third Act?
Log line: "A Hollywood Producer. A Washington spin-doctor. When they get together, they can make you believe anything." Produced and directed by Barry Levinson and written by Hilary Henkin and David Mamet, this film is best known for its timing. By a stroke of luck (for the producers and distributors) its release coincided with the outbreak of hostilities against Saddam, following hot on the heels of the revelation of President Clinton's involvement with Monica Lewinsky. Spooky. The blurb on the video box reads as follows: "When the President of the United States is caught in a scandal just two weeks before the election, it's up to his White House adviser Ronnie Brean (Robert De Niro) to clean up the mess. Ronnie joins forces with Hollywood producer Stan Moss (Dustin Hoffman) to divert the country's attention from the President's crime. They decide that what is needed to stop the media spotlight is a war, but lacking a real war, they fake one. Actresses play pretty refugees and rock stars record stirring hit songs about freedom. Soon America is rallying round the President. But trouble arrives when and rough and tough Senator gets wise to the pair's tricks. Meanwhile, Election Day gets closer and closer
" Very odd. It's a perfectly reasonable summary until the penultimate sentence. Having just watched the film I can say without fear of contradiction that there is no "rough and tough Senator" who discovers what's going on. Was this an alternative plot-line that was abandoned? This wouldn't surprise me because the last Act is rather weak. The CIA wrecks the war story by announcing an end to the imaginary hostilities but Hoffman and De Niro, undeterred, come up with a soldier trapped behind enemy lines. It's from this point on that the drama flags. "Schuman", the imaginary soldier, turns out to be a psychotic military prisoner. The plane, supposedly carrying him home, crashes (a very odd sequence because one minute they're flying through a storm and the next our stars are standing, apparently unharmed in the middle of the wreckage I don't think so!) and then Schuman tries to attack a girl at the farm on which they end up. The farmer shoots him and the plan has to change again he'll be brought home in a coffin with full military honours. Then, in the end sequence, Hoffman decides that it's all been so successful that he has to have a credit. As far as he's concerned, this is the greatest thing he's ever produced and he wants everyone to know that he did it as he points out, there's no Academy Award for producing. He's insistent and, as he leaves, we see De Niro indicating to the security men. The next thing we see is the TV announcement that Hoffman has died from a heart attack "at the age of 58 or 62, depending on the buyout". Nice gag, but it's not really a satisfying payoff. I suspect that the real problem is that lack of a Third Act. The end of Act Two should really have been the discovery of the truth by that "rough and tough Senator", with Act Three posing the really big problem of how they get out of that mess. As structured here, each complication is only ever an Act Two build-up the problems change but they don't really advance the plot. It's like the same joke told in different ways. It would be interesting to find out what happened to that elusive Senator. An afterthought: this makes an interesting comparison with "Primary Colours" which, although less overtly funny and farcical, did at least try to make some kind of intellectual engagement with its subject. Never at any point in "Wag the Dog" is the subject of lying in politics for "the greater good" ever brought into focus. On the video box the Times in London is quoted as calling the film "a treat, bright and intelligent". But surely it's not. I've reached the conclusion that film critics only refer to the intelligence of a film in a direct and inverse proportion to their own knowledge and understanding of the subject. In other words, the Times critic knows nothing about White House politics so, to him, obviously, it appears intelligent. Or am I just being cynical?
Egypt (2005)
The BBC at its best
I was not expecting to enjoy "Egypt" as much as I did - Egyptian history was never my thing. But the series started out well, with the relatively well-known story of Howard Carter and the discovery of King Tutankhamun and then got even better as it went on. If you'd told me that I would have been entranced by two hours of drama on the race in the 1820s to translate hieroglyphs I would have laughed - but that's exactly what the concise and intelligent scripts by Jonathan Rich that ended the series managed to achieve. I don't think there's another broadcaster in the world who would attempt something this bold, a series in which the educational content matches the entertainment value and which doesn't talk down to its audience. This is the BBC at its very best and I was delighted to learn that a 2-DVD set of the series will be out in February 2006. This is a series I will want to watch again, and savour.