“Asterix: The Secret of the Magic Potion”

A film which is not, as most talks of it on the Internet would have you believe, Asterix and the Secret of the Magic Potion. Huh. I wonder why, actually, because it's a much better title.

This latest installements in the comical Gaul's animated adventure is the first since 1978's outstanding Twelve Tasks of Asterix not to be based on a corresponding comic book, and that had an original script by René Goscinny himself, so this (written by director Alexandre Astier) is in a sense the first truly theatres-only Asterix story. How does it fare?

Well, as a story, it is a strange crash between modern animation's tastes and the Asterix universe — the result hangs together well enough as a standalone feature, but there's a strange disconnect between the elements that are truly faithful to the continuity of the comics (such as a cameo by Aplusbégalix, the renegade chieftain from The Big Fight) and the modern humor, the modern pace of the storytelling, and most importantly the nature of the villain, an outright sorcerer in a way Getafix/Panoramix never was in Goscinny and Uderzo's conception. I should also mention the nature of the climax is, to say the least, not something you could imagine in an Asterix comic-book… the one with aliens apart, of course, but that… thing… really shouldn't count. That being said, albeit in a very different way, Twelve Tasks's story really didn't feel like one of the comics either, so let's be lenient. I shall be less lenient of the shameless clickbaity nature of the title, for while the passing on of the recipe is admittedly a big part of the storyline, the actual recipe itself is not given to us as the advertising tricked us into hoping. 

That bsaid, albeit in a very different way, Twelve Tasks's story really didn't feel like one of the comics either, so let's be lenient. What of the animation? It is CGI, and that loses it some points in my book, but for what it is it's very well-done. The human characters have a vaguely blocky look to them that reminds me of a high-quality video game's cutscenes more than of a film, but the movements itselfare very solid, the designs of the new characters are great, and there's some really nice effectswork in there too; I love how they did the Magic Potion, which never really had a standard appearance before now, that I know of. This one is likely to become the gold standard from now on (and the use of the word 'gold' is quite deliberate).  

As concerns the cast (I speak only of the French cast; being French, I had little incentive to track down the English dub of all things)… oh my. Bernard Alane is back as Panoramix and does quite good, though he takes some getting used to, being very much unlike the previous Panoramixes of the cartoons. But the absence of Roger Carel as Asterix is very sorely felt, and his replacement Christian Clavier, fresh off butchering the role of the Count of Champignac in another Franco-belgian-comic film (the dire Spirou & Fantasio live-action film), isn't even remotely up to the task. 

The one true stand-out in the cast is Daniel Mesguich as the villainous Sulfurix, a character who is best described as “the Soothsayer, except actually magical”. The character is well-designed and well-thought-out, with an interesting backstory and motivation (even if it's not kept coherent the whole way through; being that his thing is that he wants to spread use of the Magic Potion to all of Gaul so that it can take over Rome and end all wars forever, the movie struggles to explain why he ends up allying himself to the Romans, something apparently done only so Caesar could be in the movies for a few minutes because we gotta have Caesar in any Asterix picture whatsoever now), and his voice is a masterful effort, even managing to sell a few dodgy lines along the way. I should also point out that while the voice he uses there couldn't be more difference, I get the impression that a Carel-accurate voice would totally have been within Mesguich's ability, and that we got freakin' Clavier instead just makes me so mad. 

There's also one Lévanah Solomon as the kid Pectine, who isn't very deeply characterized and seems to exist mostly as a setup for other, better stories about her. Certainly she's more of the concept “Panoramix's youthful-inventor apprentice” than she is a fully-realized character for now, and she feels a little bit shoehorned in the plot. Not wholly bad at all, just… a little fuzzy around the edges. Solomon herself is pretty good, if nothing stratospheric. 

So that's Secret of the Magic Potion — certainly not the new Twelve Tasks of Asterix, but some of the voice cast aside, a pretty fun adventure, and as good an occasion as any to return to the Gaulish village while the comic authors take their time to get the new book together. 

Post-Scriptum:

• Instead of a full-on comic adaptation, the movie is getting a picture book adaptation. Kind of lame, but at least, the cover looks gorgeous. 

“Eighth Doctor Adventures” - Part 1

In vaguely anachronistic order, I have begun reading BBC Books's Eighth Doctor Adventures from the second half of the 1990's, the medium by which Paul McGann's take as the title part in Doctor Who was to be developed after his planned TV season went bust. (I say "was to be" because there is heated rivalry between those who consider the Doctor Who Magazine comic-strips, the BBC Books Eighth Doctor Adventures, or the Big Finish audioplay Eighth Doctor Adventures the official continuation of the Eighth Doctor's story, being that the three accounts are often as irreconciliable as those things get in Doctor Who.)

The Eight Doctor Adventures have a complicated reputation, but for the moment I don't find them nearly as bad as people say they are. So:

Terrance Dicks's The Eight Doctors is often described as "bad fanfiction". I wouldn't say "bad" — but it's very, very obvious that it is "fanfiction" when compared to the real novels that were to come, the ones with an actual narrative structure, the one with an actual story that isn't just a reflection/"greatest hits compilation" of preexisting episodes. You know what, though? I like fanfiction quite a bit. 

What The Eight Doctors does most of all is try to be a sequel to The TV Movie, The Trial of a Time Lord and The Five Doctors simultaneously, and take that opportunity to smooth over continuity issues in those two stories. The way this enterprise is disguised as a story is extremely clunky, yes, but not enough credit is given to the fact that it's a pretty good attempt to make sense of those two stories. I did not believe it was possible to simplify the Valeyard as much as this does. 

The characterization is somewhat weaker. The past Doctors are done well enough, with the potential exception of the Seventh, who is sadly in his terminally unfunny Virgin New Adventures incarnation and whose story doesn't really lead anywhere. But… for one thing, it's a truism that no one really knew what to do with Rassilon until the new series recast him as a straight-up villain in The End of Time; he was dangling on the fence between good and evil, not in an interesting sense of moral ambiguity some much as in "the writers themselves aren't sure if he's a villain or not, and therefore try to sound as noncommital as possible". Add to that the even greater confusion on whether he's dead or a god or a ghost or an artificial intelligence or what in Gallifrey's "present-day", and it's no surrpsie that his Deus Ex Machinesque appearance here is nothing if not confusing. 

And the Eighth Doctor? A blank slate, very self-consciously. Dicks wipes his memory at the beginning of the story, to make sure he doesn't actually have to do any characterization on him. This is a patently stupid move — you can't have the main character of your new book series as a nonentity in the first book — and if you're going to do it anyway, you definitely shouldn't do it by having him lose his memory again after The TV Movie was already all about an amnesiac Doctor. That's just lazy. 

New companion Samantha Jones is not bad, at least. Some people think she's annoying, but not me. 

Now there's a novel. Perhaps my favorite of the Who novels I've read so far, Vampire Science actually succeeds in being a sequel (a good sequel) to The TV Movie, even sharing its San Francisco setting. It has all the good parts of that film (chiefly the slightly gothic atmosphere and the Eighth Doctor's character; also a campy-yet-scary villain, though not the same one) and none of the bad parts or occasional clumsiness. Sam is better than ever, the Doctor is fantastic… and it's also a heckuva good vampire story. The worldbuilding and characterization of the story's vampires is excellent; tasteful unique without at all trying to be a radical reimagining. 

The "head vampiress", Johanna Harris is a complex and immensely likable presence throughout the story, and the way her plotline plays out is full of twists and turns and unique ideas and defied expectations. After five seasons of Steven Moffat, it's also nice to have a sympatheitc villainess who isn't either koo-koo or trying to shag the Doctor (not that I hate all, or even most, of the various characters of that description; Missy's a fantastic version of the Master, and played to perfection; but it does get tiresome). 

Author Jonathan Blum also took the opportunity to canonize his earlier, unlicensed fanfilm Time Rift by having his character from there, Brigadier Kramer, appear in it. I can but applaud this, for Time Rift, terrible picture quality aside, is a very good piece of television, which it is not hard at all to imagine as a real 1980's episode of the series. This despite my apathy to Kramer as a character, who is little more than “the Brigadier, but American and a woman”. 

Genocide is another very good novel, very much apiece with Vampire Science (if you like one, I can't see why you wouldn't like the other). The characters are once again quite good overall, though the cast is more uneven; we get another fantastic villainess, in a completely different register from Johanna (variety, Mr Moffat, variety), but her human henchman is very one-note, and I couldn't help but conflate him with the much-despised Krasko in my mind, which… isn't a good thing. The worldbuilding is marvelous, though. Truly marvelous. 

It is strangely prescient of things to come (¨cough cough¨ Time War ¨cough cough¨) in the sort of moral dilemmas with which it presents the Eighth Doctor, but somewhat bungles up the delivery thereof. It looks good on paper, but then the detail is added (for urgency) that the timeline will crumble and the universe cease to exist unless the Doctor acts, and thus there's only one real option left, and no moral quandary. Oh well, points for trying. 

I like the way this story does australopithecines as characters, also. I feel like this is largely how talking to australophithecines would go. 

War of the Daleks gets a lot of hate as another, even more egregious case of "hacky fanfiction" than The Eight Doctors. Not altogether deservedly. Yes, the story exists in part to retcon a bunch of previous ones, chiefly the destruction of Skaro in Remembrance of the Daleks, but, with apologies to all the people who love said event and wish it hadn't been so unceremoniously undone, bugger that. I love Skaro as a setting, and cheered when it became apparent the new televised series had picked up Peel's decision to bring it back. Is the way in which it was brought back a bit clunky? Yeah, but it was always going to be clunky, and Peel at least wrings some decent character moments for the Doctor and Davros out of this. 

Yes, did I mention the characters? The first half of War's plot is kind of nonsensical (the Thals' motivations are meandering and daft), but things pick up immensely once we land on the resurrected Skaro and a triplefold battle of wits gets underway between the Eighth Doctor, Davros and the Dalek Emperor. The Dalek Emperor (a hugely magnetic presence in his two only real screen appearances, one of which was yet to come when War was released) has never been better than here; far from just an archetype, he is a fully-realized character, as deep and complex as non-redeemed Daleks get. 

All in all, it's not perfect, and its retcons are more or less as clumsy as everyone says they are… but that excepted, this isn't a bad book at all. If you like stories about Daleks as characters with agencies, rather than mindless monsters (and sweet Rassilon I do), this is the one for you. 

Paul Magrs's The Scarlet Empress isn't actually as revolutionary and postmodern as it's made out to be. The setting and atmosphere of the planet Hyspero is no different than what the televised story would revisit in The Rings of Akhaten, for one thing. What it is is a slightly absurdist version of Arabian Nights In Space, and that's always fun, innit? 

The big attraction of The Scarlet Empress is of course the proper introduction into Doctor Who (the careful phrasing is firstly because she actually began as a solo character elsewhere, and secondly because she had even actually already encountered the Doctor, albeit in a long-forgotten short story) of Iris Wildthyme, the Doctor's timey-wimey old bat of a fellow Gallifreyan. A Time Lady who exists as a shameless, dingy parody of the Doctor, Iris draws her appeal from how very self-conscious she is of the aforementioned fact; she's not quite fourth-wall-aware in this story (she is elsewhere), but her relationship with the Doctor is precisely that of an affectionate parody personified meeting the original. The Doctor is vaguely irritated by her existence, and something keeps nagging at him that's not 'right' about her; she, for her part, keeps criticizing his various flaws, and shamelessly steals and corrupts his trademark features, but she also loves him deeply without daring to say so out loud. It's all very clever. 

The plot is kind of meandering, but that's to be expected in an Arabian Nights-esque stories. There are a few other choice meta-moments in the story (such as a merciless satire of "canonicity" as a concept: a Lewis Carrol-esque visit to an alien library whose bigoted librarian insists it contains all the knowledge about th euniverse, which must be read in chronological order or not at all, and who cannot bear to think about "unreal things" without a dozen reminders and qualifiers that they are "imaginary stories"), too, which do get a chuckle. 

“Vanity Fair” (1998)

The 1998 adaptation of W. L. Thackeray's Vanity Fair is the latest in the series of BBC adaptations of classic literature that I have been devouring; its script was produced by the selfsame Andrew Davies who adapted that Middlemarch I reviewed earlier, though in truth this couldn't be more different from that, in terms of tone. 

For true to the book, Vanity Fair is a satire, or at least it is for its first two episodes; the last two fall more on the side of drama as Becky Sharp's schemes finally lead to grim consequences for everyone involved, her included, as the life she built for herself out of lies and manipulation starts to crumble — and the middle two episodes, therefore, fall somewhere in-between. A satire it is, and Marc Munden directs it as quite broad; he is unafraid to be vulgar (the first shot is of a woman picking her nose, for Rassilon's sake), and while I do not like this, I understand where he's coming from. Similarly, there's lots of unattractive close-up, and violent, fast-paced editing, and so on; the message is clear that this isn't one of yer well-polished pieces of Victoriana. I do think the viewing experience would be improved if this were toned down, but that does not mean it's done artlessly, nor that it makes the viewing truly unpleasant at all; everything else is plenty enough to carry the picture. 

The cast, as always in these things, is superb. Natasha Little as Rebecca “Becky” Sharp herself is a stellar effort, sufficiently charismatic to carry the series without compromising the fact that when push comes to shove, she is a very nasty piece of work underneath the varnish. I could go on and on about how well-cast and well-acted everyone is; I'll be content to mention David Bradley (Sir Pitt Crawley) and Jeremy Swift (Jos Sedley), for I had seen them both in other things before, and therefore I can appreciate that both show much more range than these previous outings of theirs led me to believe. It genuinely took me a moment to realize the coarse, warm-yet-threatening, grotesque Sir Pitt was the selfsame David Bradley whom I had seen as the distant, airheaded old scientist he played in Doctor Who and An Adventure in Space and Time; though it is closer to his bit part as Argus Filch in the Harry Potter pictures (and there's out quota of there being at least one HP actor in any given 1990's BBC production, by the way).

What else is there to mention? One thing, and one I am sorry to say it, but I must. The music is by Murray Gold, in one of his earlier efforts; Murray Gold, whose work on Doctor Who is among my favorite television soundtracks of the modern era, whose leitmotifs are ever so memorable and charming and fitting. It is also utterly dire. Only in very few (and uninspired) moments does Gold remember there are other instruments in the orchestra than brasses; and the rest of the time, he rehashes one endless, tango-esque theme that has bugger-all to do with the 1810's time period, and which one truly comes to loathe by the end of those punishing five-and-a-half hours of ear torture, for not only does it only very rarely fit the tone of what is onscreen, but the orchestra blares it out in a shrieking and utterly wretched fashion; it's badly-designed and that is one thing, but there is also the fact that it's very, very badly played. No hard feelings, Murray, I hope, but this is quite horrible. 

And I felt I had to tell the world, because Wikipedia informs me that some-ruddy-how, this aural hell of a soundtrack got nominated for a B.A.F.T.A. award back then. (Only nominated, thank the Nimon.)

Still, even Gold at his worst can't spoil a jolly solid piece of television; as a certain amusing, though sometimes unfair, video channel likes to repeat, “no movie is without sin”. All in all, I can but recommend the 1998 Vanity Fair, if you care to check it out. Just be warned that the music may not be everything one hopes for, and the direction takes some getting used-to. 

Post-Scriptum:

• It too took some getting used-to, but I can safely say in hindsight that I quite like the way this series does credits. It's very good for bingewatchers like myself, and saves us the agony of a few minutes of pure Bad Murray Gold. 

Fanny Ferré, “Tribal Crossings”

RANDOM reviews. It's right there in the title. I have every right to go review modern fine art by some French sculptress, if I like. I could post a review of the color orange if I liked and still not be betraying the core concept of this blog.

So!  Traversées Tribales (Tribal Crossings to non-French-speakers) is a series of very beautiful, very skillfully-made terracotta statues by contemporary artist Fanny Ferré. Whilst vacationing in Honfleur, I stumbled upon an exhibition of the collection, and took a number of pictures of it (all the pictures below are mine), and therefore decided I might as well blog about it.

Ferré's statues mostly depict humans (some life-sized, others delicate miniatures of exquisite detail). It is a little hard to tell what sort of humans — a prehistoric sort of civilization, as the title implies; one is tempted to think Neolithic, and there are some figures who are not unlike Neanderthals in their facial features, though the sort of animal life depicted — and, indeed, the general feeling one gets — should place them further south. It does not really matter; what matters is the feeling they give off, and that feeling is a charming sort of nomadic Neolothic. A lot of the figures are bathing — some of them in the nude — and I do not quite know why, save perhaps that Ferré enjoyed the challenge of depicting bathing in a medium where liquid water itself cannot be convincingly rendered.

Gangly, exaggerated, with their legs at odd angles, Ferré's human figures are not what you might call ‘realistic’, though they do feel 'real' and 'alive' on an emotional level — they do feel as though they are mare of flesh and blood. It's quite an amazing trick. Indeed, they are quite beautiful. It is not unlike some examples I've seen of prehistoric art and sculpting, which I'm sure is no coincidence. 

There are objects, too, and animal figures, mostly barnyard ones. They too are extremely well-done — Ferré's is truly an excellent depiction of fur, better than one would assume possible with roughly-modelled terracotta — though in a surprisingly different style from their human masters. Which is not to say they don't fit in with the rest of the artwork, mind you; somehow, they do. I'm just stating facts.

So… there you are. What I say is, hallelujah, for there are still good artists in the world, and some of them even get exhibitions to their names in French seaside resorts!…

Post-Scriptum:

• The below life-sized terracotta goat is a beautiful artpiece, yes, but the expression on its face also looks like an Internet reaction image. Doesn't it? 

“Resolution”

Alright, so Chris Chibnall promised Daleks, and delivered Daleks, and therefore was not set on fire by the enraged Doctor Who fandom. What else?

A very good episode of Doctor Who, is what else. It does not altogether feel like a “special” in the way the Christmas Specials did (I suppose New Year's is even more of a formality for most people than Christmas; I suppose pledges of doing one's chores are somewhat poorer at stirring the heart than love, family and hot cocoa), but it's quite a good one-shot Dalek episode. The acting from the guest characters is great, Akinola's music is mostly unobjectionable this time around and has a few legitimately great moments (short though they are), the direction is up to the usual Series 11 standards, and… Chris Chibnall turned in a good script.

I know, I know. But it can happen! The Silurian two-parter from Series 5 and Dinosaurs on a Spaceship, for example. And I think Resolution is actually a better than those, even if it still has the Chibnall trademark of a science-fiction story and a relationship-drama story mashed together with a sledge-hammer (one scene from one, cut, one scene from the other) as opposed to actually being welded in any significant way. Resolution, in fact, has got that particular problem more than any of his previous episodes you'd care to name. But perhaps this is in fact a good thing, for it allows each side to stand on its own, leaving one with the somewhat boilerplate, but not really unpleasant, "Ryan's Dad" subplot, on one side, a frankly great Dalek story on the other. 

So the plot: on New Year's Day 2019, two archeologists, an immensely likable pair played by Charlotte Ritchie and Nikesh Patel, who, I'm sorry to say, are a billion times more interesting to watch than Ryan & Yaz for most of the time they're onscreen) dig up an ancient burial site beneath Sheffield — yes, of course it's beneath Sheffield, it's Series 11… or good as. Among the weird things they find is a fragment of a Dalek-creature, who has been buried on Earth since the 9th century, having been one of the first Dalek scouts sent out from the Planet Skaro way back in the day. A veritable army had, at the time, managed to subdue the Dalek and destroy its casing, but even after hacking the mutant blob apart, it still lived and twitched (as per The Witch's Familiar's addition to the Daleks' lore; gotta love that continuity), so they buried the pieces in the far corners of the Earth and founded a secret society (the Order of Custodians) to keep them separate. 

I should hasten to point out that this "buried in the four corners of the Earth", "Order of Custodians" nonsense is of absolutely zero importance to the plot, for the Reconnaissance Dalek promptly puts itself back together through some weird, ill-explained teleportation ability of his,  andwe never meet the Order, nor do they do anything of importance in the backstory that comprises their entire appearance. It's just daft, and probably the writing's capital sin, though it is one that's easily ignored.

“ExterminHEeElLLlllPPpPPP!!!!”

On the other hand, I've seen criticism of the idea that any number of 9th century warriors (even an army) would be able to destroy a Dalek's casing — but this is actually a nonissue, for it is the later, Time War Daleks who were practically indestructible, whereas the Reconnaissance Dalek is explicitly "one of the first to leave Skaro", meaning that A) it got there without time travel and B) it is therefore a thousand years older than the relatively-easily-destroyed models from The Dalek Invasion of Earth (who got to Earth in the 22nd century!). Most likely it was basically identical to the original The Daleks Daleks, and those guys could be destroyed by kicking them and making them fall down elevator shafts, or just pushing them against a wall really hard. See above.

So, having pulled itself back together, the Reconnaissance Dalek proceeds to possess Charlotte Ritchie's character (because yes, Dalek creatures can do that now, shaddap) and drive her around like a puppet in an effort to get her to build it a new and improved casing — the whole sequence with single-minded, possessed-Lin is truly glorious, and Nicholas Briggs as the Dalek's voice reaches new heights. The way Lin is made to speak along with it also extremely effective. One is truly saddened when it is over, though the product of Lin's smelting (the parallels to the Doctor's creation of a new Sonic Screwdriver in The Woman Who Fell to Earth are obvious) is quite a sight to; a misshapen, rusty Dalek clearly built out of spare parts, yet still fearsome enough.  

The reconstructed Reconnaissance Dalek has a verbal showdown with the Doctor, as Team TARDIS (who has been frantically tracking the Dalek thus far) finally catch up with it just a moment too late. It's an effective scene, though there's little that makes it stand out from earlier "the Doctor defies a Dalek" moments (the gold standards for those, of course, being Christopher Eccleston's turn in Dalek, which everyone else has just kind of been shamelessly copying). Whittaker's Doctor finally gets to show a bit of menace, an element which many critics agree was missing from her performance thus far. The Doctor has to deserve that “Oncoming Storm” title the Daleks give him/her.

(Speaking of which, if this is truly a pre-Dalek Invasion of Earth Dalek as we're led to believe, it does not entirely make sense that it would so readily recognize the Doctor, for at that point the Daleks had only met Hartnell's Doctor, and presumably didn't know about regeneration. Oh well.)

Unfortunately, this is where things take a turn for the… well, worse, though that's not to say the resolution of Resolution (heh) is bad per se. It soon becomes clear that we're not just trying to stop the Reconnaissance Dalek because the Reconnaissance Dalek might kill people (though it does do that, too, mind you). No, the Reconnaissance Dalek must be stopped before it highjacks all radio-transmitters in Great Britain in order to send a signal to the main Dalek fleet.

Whut? 

There is so much wrong with this idea. For one thing, considering there was an entire Time War in-between the Reconnaissance Dalek's arrival on Earth and the events of Resolution, and the Daleks changed leadership, like, ten times, it is no guarantee the current Daleks would even listen to that half-dead relic of their ancient times. It's a bit like worrying that one of Napoleon's army scouts, cryogentically frozen since 1807, might, if thawed-out today, lead the modern French Army on the warpath overnight if he's allowed to reach a telephone with which to call the French Minister of the Armies. 

Furthermore, the modern Daleks know full well that Earth exists and would be suitable to Dalek conquest. In fact, they've tried. Repeatedly. And the Doctor has stopped them. If he got the Reconnaissance Dalek's message of “I HAVE DISCOVERED A PLANET WE MIGHT CONQUER! IT'S CALLED EARTH! COME DOWN HERE!”, the Dalek Emperor would probably answer, as patiently as he could manage: "YES. WE KNOW EARTH EXISTS. WE KNOW. THERE'S A REASON WE STILL HAVEN'T CONQUERED IT YET; IN FACT, I THINK YOU'VE MET HER. BUT WE KNOW.” Hardly that scary an event.

The Dalek's final defeat (no, don't worry, the above picture isn't it) begins amusingly, but is by the end dull and a little bit confusing. It is praiseworthy that Chibnall tried to involve Ryan's Dad and his microwave-oven into the proceedings, but it only works the first time around; by the time the Dalek has lost its casing again and tries to possess Ryan's Dad, who inexplicably manages to fight it off better than Lin because……the power of love……?……, you just wish the microwave had been enough.

Still, in terms of tone, Resolution is everything you could want, and with strong actors and Series 11's ever-reliable visuals to go along with it, why deny yourself? It's one of the best Chibnall-era stories yet in my book, though perhaps not the best (I think I'd still rank Demons of the Punjab and Kerblam! above it, not necessarily in that order).

Post-Scriptum:

• Dear entertainment industry, could we just stop defeating bad guys by judicious opening of airlocks? Or other "irresistible sucking force" plot devices? Doctor Who, you, in particular, already played that card in Doomsday, and much more impressively than here. So enough.