“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. 

“The Addams Family” (1991)

Being a great enthusiast for the “spooky comedies” subgenre (The Haunted Mansion, and the great art to be found there, whether concept- or fan-, are what got me into it; Vincent Price is largely what made me stay), I easily let myself be persuaded by my sister to watch the 1991 big-screen The Addams Family feature last weekend. At the very least I would then finally discover the context of the large amounts of gifs that Tumblr has wrung out of that poor sod of a movie. Like a distressing number of 1990's movies, you'd be forgiven, judging from Tumblr, for thinking that half this films's dialogue consists of lines designed specifically to be quoted later at comically-appropriate times.

After watching it in earnest, I can testify that, unlike with most of the 1990's movies which get this treatment on the Internet, this sentiment would be entirely accurate. 

But let it be said that those are some damn fine quips, too! Let not the above jaded opening give you the impression that I disliked the movie; forsooth, I liked it quite a bit.

I scarcely think that there is much cause to explain a fairly self-explanatory premise: the titular Family are a jolly ol'bunch of grotesques enjoying the “end-of-the-rope Bela Lugosi who dressed and lived like Dracula” lifestyle to the fullest, and not caring one bit that everyone else finds them utterly creepy. Less straightforward is the plot of the attempt to bring it to the big screen, a rather confused affair of mistaken identity centering on the figure of the Nosferatu-like Uncle Fester. But of course, it is no more confusing, nor farther-fetched, than a lot of Shakespeare plots; if you can sort-of-buy Twelfth Night, you can sort-of-buy this too. The place of the Bard in the realm of literary posterity suggests most people can indeed sort-of-buy Twelfth Night. So, let's move on. 

This Fester character is here played with marvelous, inventive twitchiness by the great Christopher Lloyd. (I have not seen many films with the man; I have not even seen any of those Back to the Future films everyone kept banging on about three years ago. But I have seen Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and Don Bluth's animated Anastasia, and that would be sufficient data to declare Lloyd a great actor, in the over-the-top category, whether or not the Internet was already screaming at me that he is one of the greats. Which it is, very loudly too.) Fester spends most of the movie as an amnesiac impersonating himself at the behest of a mother who adopted him in his 50's — don't worry, it makes just as much sense in context — so as to serve as our introductory “viewpoint character”. And — it's not that it doesn't work — but I'm not entirely certain we needed a viewpoint character. Designed for nigh-worldess newspaper cartoons first, and a 1960's sitcom later, the Addams Family are an extremely self-explanatory bunch; in truth, by the time Fester comes in, we already have a pretty solid idea who the Addamses are and what the tone of the film is going to be.

Though Lloyd is the “big name carrying the movie with a daringly different reinterpretation of one of the franchise's originals” (this is a trick that would be tried again with other fun-gothic films of this movie's generation: it sort-of-worked with Jim Carrey as Count Olaf in the 2003 Lemony Snicket flick, and failed horribly in the Haunted Mansion feature the same year), the rest of the cast is pretty uniformly stellar, from child actress Christina Ricci as the memed-to-death, but truly very entertaining, Wedsneday Addams, to Elizabeth Wilson as our villain, the Mme-de-Tremaine-esque Mrs Abigail Craven. (Craven not a very interesting villain, more as a result of with who and wirth what she's sharing the movie; Joan Cussack in the movie's sequel was dealt a much better deal with not a doubt. But Wilson plays her quite well still.) Anjelica Huston and Raúl Juliá as Morticia and Gomez Addams, in particular — I cannot judge them in comparsion to the televised originals, for I have not watched the TV series; but on their own terms, it is glaringly obvious that they are the most perfect realizations imaginable of what they are trying to be. 

The plot may be a little meandering, but that's never been a problem in a comedy so long as the meat is peppered with enough jokes at a good enough pace; The Addams Family does that. It has the good sense to borrow a fair few of its jokes from Charles Addams's original cartoons, and the rest are very successfully funny too; it also sometimes leaves the funny actors to do their funny things, and they do that very well too. There are a couple of jokes that don't land, or at least not with me (sadly, the last joke in the film is one of them), but aren't there always? 

The direction was handily recognizable as Barry Sonnenfeld to me, from his work on the 2017 Series of Unfortunate Events television series, and Sonnenfeld definitely knows what he's doing, creating a nice tone in almost every scene. The set design in which he's playing around is frequently gorgeous, though some bits of the Addams Mansion are a bit too much of a “boilerplate haunted house”. (There is one other exception I'll save for the post-scriptum.)

The Addams Family is also, of course, an effects picture; so I suppose I am expected to make a statement about those special effects. Well, the most obvious show of said SFX is ‘Thing’ the disembodied hand (it wasn't actually a disembodied hand in the source material, but rather a creature who was so hideous that we could only ever see its hand, the rest being too horrible; this is a vastly more creative concept than "disembodied hand"; but I shan't blame the movie overmuch for that, as that ship had long sailed by the time the movie rolled round, with numerous jokes back in the television series revolving around Thing's hand-ness). It works in most of its scenes, though it feels oddly weightless whenever it's crawling about; there is one exception of terrible greenscreenery, and that is that brief sequence in the climax where it's searching the swamps. But it lasts barely five seconds, so I'll excuse it. Similarly, of all the non-Thing effect, there is one laughably bad one, a computer-generated fire effect supposed to burn down a wooden statue in a few seconds. But it's a brief cutaway gag. 

All in all, it's not perfect, but I solidly recommend it. I look forward to watching the sequel, the amusingly-titled Addams Family Values, next weekend; I don't know if I'll have enough material for another review (we'll see), but for now I'd tacitly recommend it based on the quality of its predecessor and the presence of the great Joan Cussack in it (I know and love her from that other Sonnenfeld project, the Lemony Snicket televisions series). 

Post-Scriptum: 

• So what is up with the Addams Family Graveyard, anyway? Not only are the statues in a weird, 20th-century-ish style that would scream “Anachronism!” if it had working lungs, but most of the tombs inexplicably bear the sole name of Addams. Guys, sorry to break it to you, but again… this is the Addams family plot. You're not actually telling passersby a whole lot by labeling the tombstones with their occupant's last name. This is one respect in which the Gracey Family Plot in The Haunted Mansion (ride, not film, of course) is indubitably superior, as it instead features first names to the exclusion of last names. 

          (Oh, well. It's a nice enough setpiece to look at, at least; reminded me a bit of Phibes's lair.)

“Middlemarch” (1994)

This review will be a little special, for the reason that I do not feel qualified to talk about the BBC's 1993 Middlemarch miniseries at length, not nearly. For one thing, I have not read the classic George Eliot novel on which it is based; by all accounts this is a fairly accurate adaptation, but it could be that some key detail (or, more insidiously, the general tone) has been drastically altered, and I wouldn't know; and I would feel pretty bad if that were the case. So what I do is I'll lay off talking about the plot and the tone; both seemed very good to this phillistine, I'll leave it at that.

Nevertheless: Middlemarch. I have seen it, and as a piece of television it is truly marvelous. 

This treatment of Eliot's story was written by Andrew Davies (I want to say skillfully; but again I lack the knowledge to say whether it was a skillful adaptation; I can but say that it is a skillful screenplay, and that is undeniable), whom the cover of the DVD box set on which I watched it loudly hailed as the writer of some other thing I haven't watched. I found that fact rather peculiar. How often is the big name-pull in a project like this the adapter? Is there such a thing as a celebrity adapter? Well, there is now. The direction, meanwhile, is the work of Anthony Page, one of the myriad surprisingly competent unknowns that the BBC is apparently bursting with at all times. The direction in Middlemarch isn't anything special, but there's a great many nice shots and well-edited moments; and that's all it needs. Likewise the production and costume design is very good without being so stunning as to lead you to notice it; not the stuff of awards, but it's not trying to be, and what it is trying to do it does superbly. The music is extremely pleasant, between the title theme by the great Stanley Myers and the incidental instrumental score by the alsl-great Christopher Gunning (of Poirot fame, among others). I read the latter received an award for this, and he totally deserved it.

The true stand-out, though, is the cast; both main and supporting, they are truly excellent. Of Juliet Aubrey (Dorothea “Dodo” Brooke, our kind-of-protagonist, though Middlemarch isn't really concerned with having a ‘main character’), Patrick Malahide (grim-faced scholar, and careless husband of the former Edward Casaubon) and Douglas Hodge (Dr Tertius Lydgate, our other kind-of-main-protagonist), I have only to say: that they play their roles to perfection, and (but this is incredibly flimsy and superficial, I know; I'm putting out there anyway, because, one, my blog, and two, said blog does have 'random' right there in the title) that their general demeanors reminded me, respectively, of Allison Williams's Kit Snicket, Richard E. Grant's Doctor Simeon, and Colin Baker's Sixth Doctor. 

Jonathan Firth manages to make the audience care about Fred Vincy from the beginning, which is no mince feat; Trevyn McDowell is likewise a pretty good Rosamund Vincy. She does at least look gorgeously. I must give also give massive props to John Savident (you may recognize him from his minor part in A Clockwork Orange) as a delightfully loathsome, scummy John Raffles who reminds me of nothing more than Timothy Spall's Peter Pettigrew if were more expansive and less cowardly. As for Rufus Sewell's Will Ladislaw — well — everything about him is designed to make the female fanbase fancy him (or male, if so inclined, of course, but he feels particularly fangirl-oriented), but that aside he too does very honorably. 

As the stern, complex, very realistic Scrooge-like figure of Nicholas Bulstrode, we find none other than Peter Jeffrey, whom we left back in 1971 unraveling a series of fiendish Biblical murders. And no matter what a fun presence Jeffrey was in Phibes, there is no denying that he's given many more things, and more interesting things at that, to do here as an actor. By god he pulls it off, too.

And lastly I want to talk about the late, great Robert Hardy, here as the hopeless, but endlessly, thoughtlessly optimistic wannabe-politician Arthur Brooke. The world will remember him mostly for his take on Minister Cornelius Fudge in the Harry Potter movies, because the Harry Potter movies strived on sucking the reputation of esteemed British actors like some sort of fame-vampire, leaving them puppets to its own growing fame forevermore (poor Michael Gambon, poor Jim Broadbent, poor John Hurt). He is quite good at it mind you; we'll get to that whenever I get around to reviewing the Harry Potter movies. 

But oh, that he should be famous for that bit part when this exists as a more fleshed-out, fully realized version of more or less the same character (Fudge is somewhat older than Brooke, but it hardly matters). He feels, like every other Middlemarch character to the possible exception of Ladislaw, like a real, fully-realized human personality; and at the same time he is a fascinatingly good comic relief, the only real full-on comic relief in the entire series. I knew already that Hardy was one heck of an actor, for having seen his take on Shakespeare's Sir Toby Belch in a televised Twelfth Night, but this seals him as one of my favorite lesser-known English actors altogether. Really, really quite good.

So all in all, obviously, I highly recommend Middlemarch to any prospective watchers; it's a very rewarding experience. As to telling any great enhtusiasts of the book whether it's a worthy adaptation of it, I can make no definitive pronouncements. Nevertheless, again: it's very very good. 

Post-Scriptum: 

• Why yes, I do like, and review, “serious” things as well as wacky pulpy stuff. Have I not warned you that I contained multitudes? MWA HAH HAH. You have no idea. 

• There is one thing “wrong” — or at least something weird — about this excellent miniseries, and it is that at the end of the last episode, we are treated to a ‘where are they now?’ voice-over, which the credits tell us is supposed to be spoken by George Eliot herself. It's read by Judi Dench, which is nice and all (way to cram one more big British name in there!), but there has not been one minute of narration at any time prior, and it just starts abruptly. It's a bit jarring is what it is. This is a pet peeve I have with movies: either you have a narrator or you don't. Pick one.

“Franz Kafka's It's A Wonderful Life”

As a Whovian for whom Peter Capaldi is one of the greatest actors ever to portray the title part on Doctor Who, imagine my surprise and glee when I discovered that Capaldi was also a successful director in his own right; and furthermore, as a fan of Franz Kafka and Frank Capra, imagine my surprise that he had won an Academy Award in 1993 for, well, this. Which, as the icing on the cake, happens to feature great actor (and fellow once-Doctor) Richard E. Grant in the title part of Franz Kafka, which is perhaps the most genius bit of casting I've ever seen in a Kafka movie. 

So how does it hold up, really? Pretty good!

Those accustomed to the endless variations on the “What if you were never born?” sequence of Capra's 1946 picture It's A Wonderful Life will be surprised to note that there isn't really any of that in Capaldi's film; instead, what it takes from the 1946 feature is the general structure of “things are miserable for a self-loathing protagonist who makes it harder on himself, until they are not, as all his gathered friends come together at the end to save both him and the day”. 

What remains is this premise: in a beautifully German-expressionist rendition of Kafka's Czech hometown, the writer is about to begin work on his masterpiece, Die Verwandlung (ye Brits and colonials know this as The Metamorphosis), but can't seem to figure out precisely what it is that Gregor Samsa wakes to find himself transformed into. There are frequent cutaway (as pictured above) to various preposterous options Kafka considers before scrapping them. As the tortured soul tries again and again to fulfill his destiny, and despite the insect imagery constantly staring him in the face, he can't seem to lay a finger on it. What's more, he keeps getting interrupted by various things (a Christmas party going on in the flat below his, a caller come at the wrong address, etc.). 

It is utterly brilliant. 

The thing about Franz Kafka's It's A Wonderful Life is that it's basically the most Kafkayan film I've ever seen, and yes, that includes Orson Welles's outstanding 1962 version of The Trial. Even it didn't quite reach this level of — of — how can I put it? In The Trial, it soon becomes clear that you're in dream logic, with these sprawling vistas of absurdly long corridors and absurdly large halls. In Franz on the other hand, there's nothing explicitly fantastic, or at least, it doesn't seem so until you've finished watching it and reflect back on it. It perfectly channels the weird and unpleasant experience of a bad dream, that cramped feeling, that nagging sensation that none of this is quite right, quite real that you keep mulling over without actually doing anything about it, because you can't. It's what Kafka was a master of turning into words, and Capaldi turned it into film reel. 

And what of the cast? Well, the line of celebrities does not end as Grant & Capaldi, as you'll also recognize Phyllis Logan and Ken Stott in varyingly-incidental parts. But really, a lot of credit must also go to a frightfully young Richard E. Grant, who looks sickly and disturbed without even trying, and without losing the audience's sympathy in the process, which is key to successfully playing a Kafka protagonist. (And to play Franz Kafka in such a picture is to play a Kafka protagonist, since all Kafka protagonists are basically Kafka. The short cleverly spells this point out by having Kafka's neighbors colloquially refer to him as “Mr K.”) This is, perhaps not the part, but certainly one of the parts that Grant was born to play. 

It's also a frightfully witty film, when it's not plunging us in the precise atmosphere of a nightmare; the Capra in its DNA means it has a happy ending and is overall slightly lighter-hearted than a pure Kafka picture, and all the better for it too. I won't spoil too many of the jokes, but perhaps my favorite concerns Franz's timidity about telling the partygoers below to knock it off: after he speaks his mind to the host of said party, the host, who has not lost her smiling demeanor, agrees to yield to his commanding nature, but then asks him “if this is a hypothetical conversation or a real one”. “Hypothetical, of course,” says Kafka. And the host: “Oh, good. Because I'm quite enjoying this party. Goodbye.” She walsk back in, closes the door, and so it's revealed that this scene was all Kafka's fantasy of what he wishes he had the backbone to say. 

Add to this a great visual direction, and music that, while never genius, does its part without distracting for the whole, and you get a real gem of a short film, highly recommended to anyone who enjoys Kafka, Capaldi, Richard E. Grant, or off-kilted filmmaking in general. 

Post-Scriptum:

The underwhelming music aside, I have exactly one (1) issue with the short, and that is that the visual of Samsa-as-Bug we eventually get is pretty bad. Being about pillow-sized, and with spindly long legs, the cockroach-head-thing is nothing like the many-legged pillbug I've always imagined, and nowhere near massive enough. (It is my belief that the creature in which Gregor Samsa was transformed once existed: it is the arthropleura.)