Rob's Review of the Year - Part One

The futuristic wonders of 2010 are fast approaching their end, and soon we will be plunged into the frankly unbelievable post-apocalypse of 2011. To mark the end of this, the most peculiar of years, I shall be doing a series of little reviews.

Many of us, trapped in conversation with someone - perhaps whilst being held hostage in a skyscraper or such - will find ourselves at a loss as to how to describe the highs and lows of our cultural lives. Well, worry no more. Over the next few weeks you will know exactly what to think about everything that matters. Opinion be damned, these are facts, and people who disagree and simply wrong. And sexually deviant.

I have devised a simple rating system for All Things. Everything we come across fits into one of four categories: 'rubbish', 'meh', 'quite good' or 'awesome'. Today we will deal with the first, and worst, of these.

Things that were Rubbish in 2010.

Overall, 2010 has been a pretty positive experience for me. I have had significant joy a number of occasions, and on the whole had a pretty good time, apart from that black cloud of all consuming angst in early Spring. There were some things, however, that got on my nerves.


1. Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland

Yes, you are pretty and colourful and ever so whimsical. But are you any good? No. You are not. You are a smug, self satisfied film that relies entirely upon overt quirkiness at the expense of plot, character development and tension.

I like Tim Burton a lot, and count many of his films among my favourites ever. Edward Scissorhands is a masterpiece, Ed Wood is insightful and clever, Mars Attacks is enjoyably bonkers. Burton has the ability to suffuse whole films with his idiosynchratic sensibilites, wrestling the unwieldy apparatus of movie-making into submission and making it obey his peculiar whims. He stands with Terry Gilliam and David Lynch as a director who is somehow able to express his dreams and nightmares through sound and pictures.

Here, though, he has produced something unforgiveably dull. There is no engagement with the story - no sense of what is at stake, or why anything matters. When people are captured, or threatened, there is no sense of real peril or consequence.

There are a number of reasons why the film fails. I think the biggest one is technology. CGI and 3D are fine tools as far as they go, but here they seem to have dominated the storytelling process to its detriment, everything acting in service of the next set piece or special effect. Another problem, for me, is Johhny Depp, who seems to have slipped into an incredibly lazy groove of 'Tim-Burton-film-crazy-schtick'. Compare his idiot WillyWonka/Mad Hatter pratting about with his wonderfully subtle performances as  Edwards Wood and Scissorhands. Bleh.

The film also suffers from post Lord of the Rings syndrome. Someone somewhere looked at those films and went "Ah! Success at the box office = big battle scenes. I am a genius and will be made King of Hollywood". And so now every film with the vague whiff of fantasy has to end with a huge battle between opposing armies, no matter how irrelevant.

Boo to you Tim Burton. Stop remaking things and get back to your own vision. I, Rob Reed, command it.

2. Iron Man 2

Iron Man was fun, and mostly because of the inspired casting of Robert Downey Junior. It felt fresh and different, and I liked it. The sequel is fat, lazy and not-very-good. It has a couple of good set pieces, and some decent performaces, but it takes audiences love for granted and doesn't bother to make its story engaging. Shame.

3. The Prisoner remake

To be fair, this was never really going to work. And to be even fairer, I didn't get through the whole series, so maybe it turned out wonderful at the end. But I think a show needs to hook its viewers farily quickly, and this didn't.

I'm not sure how it could have worked. The original 60s series is unique, and very much of its time. A straight remake would have been pointless, and irrelevant. A recontextualisation of the ideas, which is what this remake seems to be trying to do, risks not really being the Prisoner at all. Calling it a different name might have helped. Casting someone interesting in the lead role certainly would have. Cavaziel may give a good Jesus, but he's no McGoohan.

Either way, this left me cold. And I hate being cold.

4. Caprica being cancelled.

Oy! I was watching that!

Few things make me as cross as the timid, limited souls of American TV executives. It's as if the industry is run by idiot children. "Oh no - this series, which has been on for about a week, is not instantly, massively successful! Quick - cancel it and replace it with another show about murders and the police."

Things need time to bed in, you dicks. Many really successful and enduring shows have performed relatively poorly at first. Don't you study the business you are involved in? Don't you realise that DVD sales and timeshifting  have fundamentally changed the way TV audiences operate? Did you get your job in a bloody raffle? If you want to sell beans, go do that, and let someone who cares do the job.

Pricks!

5. Politics in general

Has there ever been a year it which the democratic process in the UK felt less relevant? No-one voted for the government we got, yet they're acting like we all said 'I'd really like a bunch of bastards to come and piss in my face'. We didn't. Did we? Maybe we did and we forgot.

6. Solicitors in particular

I always knew solicitors were expensive. What I didn't expect was that they would also be absolutely bloody useless. I'm sure their legal knowledge is good and fine and that they passed all their solicitor exams, but my experiences of one Wakefield solicitor this year have show me that they:

* can't do sums
* can't spell (including, wonderfully, the word 'solicitor' on their own header)
* don't read your instructions, preferring to make up their own
* forget to pass stuff on, sometimes for six weeks
* sulk profusely when the above are pointed out to them


I have since changed solicitors, to one that does not so closely resemble my own name.

I think that's enough bile for now. These are my biggest losers of the year. No doubt I will think of others later but, like I said, it's been a pretty good year overall. Coming soon: things that made me go 'Meh.'