He’s an objectionable young man.

The Avengers

2.14: The Big Thinker

With a plot revolving around a super computer, one would be forgiven for thinking we might be due a proto-Proteus, a WOTAN, a Colossus or a Joshua. Instead, The Big Thinker is all about a big performance, and Anthony Booth more than delivers as abrasive, narcissistic, angry young Dr Kearns, plugging the gap where the teleplay falls short on outright intrigue.

Cathy: I see what you mean about the boy wonder... Are you always like this, or haven’t you had breakfast?

Booth has the dubious claim to distinction of playing Sidney Noggett in the Confessions… movies during the ‘70s, but is probably best known as the lefty son in Till Death Us Do Part. Here he fully embraces the plum, scene-stealing part of a young scientist vital to the functioning of Plato, a cryogenically powered computer. Kearns knows his value is intrinsic, so has no compunction in treating his colleagues like dirt (he’s guilty of “rudeness, irresponsibility, a lack of maturity”), except for Cathy, whom he attempts (badly) to charm. He loses interest in her on finding she is married, regains it on learning she is widowed, even slurs her beloved anthropology and loudly drops hints in public as to the top secrets things they are doing (“I’m ballistic, sweetheart. I’m ballistic”).

Martin Woodhouse previously contributed the standout Mr. Teddy Bear to Season Two. The Big Thinker isn’t up to that standard, lacking clear focus, but it is at least distinctive. This was director Kim Mills first of ten episodes, and his work is reasonable, if failing to give a sense that “Plato is this building – the whole building”.

Cathy: Snap! Would you like me to try for an ace? I expect you’ve trimmed the short side for the aces.

Much of the proceedings are preoccupied with the activities of a trio of card sharps, whom Cathy, professedly intent on using the computer to translated dead languages, must put off their game (Kearns is racking up debts with them). Broster (Allan McClelland), Blakelock (Ray Browne) and Clarissa (Penelope Lee) intend to squeeze Kearns once he owes them a shedload, leading to a satisfying scene in which Cathy trumps the sharp, immediately figuring out how he is loading the deck (“Clever, dead clever” responds Broster, moments before Cathy offers a judo chop to his arm and walks out with the winnings).

Steed: Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. The amateurs are still hard at it.

Later, when Bakelock and Clarissa break into her flat to snoop around, she handles them deceptively casually (“Would you like a cup of tea” she asks Clarissa, before the latter flees). They return for thirds (well, Broster and Clarissa), and this time Steed is on hand to put them in their place (“My dear, that is quite ineffective beyond a range of three feet” he advises of Clarissa’s gas gun).

Steed’s very much on the fringes here, overseeing how Cathy does on her own, it seems; he keeps claiming to be off to the Middle East but never actually departs, and playfully irritates Cathy by referring to Kearns as her boyfriend. He also has a new pooch, Freckles having been replaced by Sheba, calls the police under the name Caruthers, and persuades Cathy to cook him a plain omelette. Finally, he lets her keep the five hundred pounds she recovered from the sharks; having near frozen when trapped in the main computer room, Steed suggests “Buy yourself a fur coat. You know, you might have another cold snap”.

The episode features a range of good performances, from Lee and McLelland to Walter Hudd as benign chief scientist Dr Clemens, Marina Martin (Drahvin One in Galaxy Four) as Janet, besotted with the brash boy wonder (Cathy has a scene convincing her she is no threat to her would-be man), and Tenniel Evans (Major Daly in Carnival of Monsters) as Dr Hurst.

Farrow (David Garth, Solicitor Grey in The Highlanders, a Time Lord in Terror of the Autons), a recent addition to the team, immediately comes across as suspiciously genial (he’s using Plato to calculate star velocities?) so it isn’t exactly out of the blue when he’s revealed as the saboteur. Although, his last minute hack attempt with a crowbar is a rather hasty bodge even for The Avengers. The motive, Steed surmises, is that the computer is best used for missile defence – which certainly is a very common plot motivator – but this isn’t exactly foregrounded. I was also unclear if he was supposed to be connected to the card sharps.

On the face of it, then, this is a more of science fiction tinged episode, but it’s actually very down-to-earth; the characters and performances drive The Big Thinker for the most part, and it only really falls down in some of the execution.

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She writes Twilight fan fiction.

Vampire Academy (2014)
My willingness to give writer Daniel Waters some slack on the grounds of early glories sometimes pays off (Sex and Death 101) and sometimes, as with this messy and indistinct Young Adult adaptation, it doesn’t. If Vampire Academy plods along as a less than innovative smart-mouthed Buffy rip-off that might be because, if you added vampires to Heathers, you would probably get something not so far from the world of Joss Whedon. Unfortunately inspiration is a low ebb throughout, not helped any by tepid direction from Daniel’s sometimes-reliable brother Mark and a couple of hopelessly plankish leads who do their best to dampen down any wit that occasionally attempts to surface.

I can only presume there’s a never-ending pile of Young Adult fiction poised for big screen failure, all of it comprising multi-novel storylines just begging for a moment in the Sun. Every time an adaptation crashes and burns (and the odds are that they will) another one rises, hydra-like, hoping…

Courage is no match for an unfriendly shoe, Countess…

No, it’s not about the bunny.

Twin Peaks 3.3
If the first two episodes tend to the weird/dark, then the second couple are more in favour of the weird/light, once we get past the Eraserhead stuff with the girl in the radiator, I mean Naido (Nae), who is replaced by Teresa Palmer doppelganger American Girl (Phoebe Augustine). The proceedings come complete with staggered editing that’s enough to give you rolling vision and detached retinas, if you’re lucky, as we continue Cooper’s extended mission to return to the real world, or something approximating it.

American Girl: When you get there, you will already be here.
Some of this material is impenetrable and will surely remain so, as he and Naido go up to the roof, which is floating amid the stars, to connect circuitry that will allow Coop to journey back via the mains, and she is thrown off, only for him to now encounter American Girl down below (“You better hurry. My mother’s coming”). The device(s) that sucks Cooper in alternately displays the numbers 3 and 15 on it …

Rejoice! The broken are the more evolved. Rejoice.

Split (2016)
(SPOILERS) M Night Shyamalan went from the toast of twist-based filmmaking to a one-trick pony to the object of abject ridicule in the space of only a couple of pictures: quite a feat. Along the way, I’ve managed to miss several of his pictures, including his last, The Visit, regarded as something of a re-locating of his footing in the low budget horror arena. Split continues that genre readjustment, another Blumhouse production, one that also manages to bridge the gap with the fare that made him famous. But it’s a thematically uneasy film, marrying shlock and serious subject matter in ways that don’t always quite gel.

Shyamalan has seized on a horror staple – nubile teenage girls in peril, prey to a psychotic antagonist – and, no doubt with the best intentions, attempted to warp it. But, in so doing, he has dragged in themes and threads from other, more meritable fare, with the consequence that, in the end, the conflicting positions rather subvert his attempts at subversion…

What, no cheese and crackers?

Twin Peaks 3.4
If anything, the fourth episode goes even goofier than the third, before sobering up dramatically for the final scene. There’s at least one innocuous cameo here, Richard Chamberlain pulling the equivalent of George Hamilton in The Godfather Part III, but it’s most notable for the arrival of Naomi Watts and Robert Forster, and the return of Dana Ashbrook and David Duchovny. And… Michael Cera?

Wally: My shadow is always with me. Sometimes ahead. And sometimes behind. Sometimes to the left. Sometimes to the right. Except on cloudy days. Or at night.
Maybe the battiest thing in the third season to date, and that’s saying something, is Cera’s appearance as Wally Brando (born on the same day as Marlon), Andy and Lucy’s son, his appearance plays like an extended skit, with Lynch cackling away behind the camera, eager to see how long he can string it out. You pretty much get the impression that, when Forster’s Sheriff Frank Truman, Wally’s godfather, turns heel and walks off, For…

You’re never the same man twice.

The Man Who Haunted Himself (1970)
(SPOILERS) Roger Moore playing dual roles? It sounds like an unintentionally amusing prospect for audiences accustomed to the actor’s “Raise an eyebrow” method of acting. Consequently, this post-Saint pre-Bond role (in which he does offer some notable eyebrow acting) is more of a curiosity for the quality of Sir Rog’s performance than the out-there premise that can’t quite sustain the picture’s running time. It is telling that the same story was adapted for an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents 15 years earlier, since the uncanny idea at its core feels like a much better fit for a trim 50 minute anthology series.

Basil Dearden directs, and co-adapted the screenplay from Anthony Armstrong’s novel The Strange Case of Mr Pelham. Dearden started out with Ealing, helming several Will Hay pictures and a segment of Dead of Night (one might imagine a shortened version of this tale ending up there, or in any of the portmanteau horrors that arrived in the year…

I'm Mary Poppins, y'all.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017)
(SPOILERS) Most of the time, we’ll settle for a solid, satisfying sequel, even if we’re naturally going to be rooting for a superlative one. Filmmakers are currently so used to invoking the impossible standard of The Empire Strikes Back/The Wrath of Khan, of advancing character and situation, going darker and encountering sacrifice, that expectations are inevitably tempered. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is indebted to at least some of those sequel tropes, although it’s arguably no darker than its predecessor, if more invested in character development. Indeed, for a series far more rooted (grooted?) in gags than any other in the Marvel wheelhouse, it’s ironic that its characterisations thus far have been consistently more satisfyingly realised than in any of their other properties.

Perhaps the most significant aspect writer-director James Gunn is clearly struggling with here is how to keep things fresh knowing he’s developed an instantly satisfyin…

I’m supposed to watch the box and see if anything appears inside.

Twin Peaks 3.1 & 3.2
(SPOILERS) Well, Lynch hasn’t lost it, that much is clear. Not his marbles, which he never had, of course, but his capacity for weirdness, hilarity, discord and the outright disturbing, all of which are brewing away potently in Season Three of Twin Peaks. What’s most striking, though, and something I’ve occasionally found a detraction from his work, is that the presence of Mark Frost ensures there’s a lucid narrative thread upon which to hang his strange fascinations. It means that, even when we go on a diversion into five minutes of plot-free surrealism, or one of Lynch’s trademark crawl-act comedies (which are sublime, as long as you’re willing to pace yourself), it won’t be long before (potentially remaining unanswered) mystery and intrigue will pull us back on track.

I’d read, not least from Lynch himself, that his prequel movie Fire Walk with Me would indicate the tone of Season Three, but that might be a touch misleading. If you took the first act, the no…

Slice him where you like, a hellhound is always a hellhound.

Jeeves and Wooster 2.1: Jeeves Saves the Cow Creamer
(aka The Silver Jug) Season Two of Jeeves and Wooster continues the high standard of the previous year’s last two episodes, appropriately since it takes after its literary precedent; Season One ended with a two-part adaptation of Right Ho, Jeeves, which PG Wodehouse followed four years later with The Code of the Woosters. Published in 1938, it was the third full-length outing for Bertie and his genius gentleman’s gentleman, and the first time Plum visited Totleigh Towers, home of imperious nerve specialist Sir Watykn Bassett. If I say “Spode”, and add “Eulalie”, its classic status in the canon will no doubt come flooding back to you.

Sir Watkyn has already graced our screens, of course, in the very first episode, adapting Bertram Wilberforce’s recollection from this very The Code of the Woosters of his policeman’s hat-stealing incident, and for the most part, like the season finale before it, Clive Exton recognises a good thing when he …

Jeeves, you really are the specific dream rabbit.

Jeeves and Wooster 2.2: A Plan for Gussie (aka The Bassetts’ Fancy Dress Ball)
The cow creamer business dispatched, the second part of this The Code of the Woosters adaptation preoccupies itself with further Gussie scrapes, and the continuing machinations of Stiffy. Fortunately, Spode is still about to make things extra unpleasant.

Sir Roderick delivers more of his winning policies (“the Right to be issued with a British bicycle and an honest, British-made umbrella”) and some remarkably plausible-sounding nonsense political soundbites (“Nothing stands between us and victory except our defeat!”, “Tomorrow is a new day; the future lies ahead!”) while Jeeves curtly dismisses Spode trying to tag him as one of the working masses. It’s in Spode’s ability to crush skulls that we’re interested, though, and it looks as if his powers have deserted him at the start.

Jeeves has given Gussie a pep-talk in how to get over his terror of Spode (“We don’t fear those we despise… fill one’s mind with scorn…

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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