Review - Doctor Strange

Of all the Marvel characters to headline their own films, Doctor Strange is without doubt the most naff. A superstar surgeon who wears a sentient floating cape and casts spells by waving his hands around was always going to be a harder sell than Iron/Spider-Man. Unlike these films, where powers are usually as simple as ‘very strong’, ‘very rich and very smart’ or ‘knows how to use a bow and arrow’, Doctor Strange’s setting and powers are focused around alternate dimensions and magic. In introducing the character, Marvel also have to jump through hoops explaining the world he inhabits. The studio has previous experience in taking characters audiences are unfamiliar with and crafting a hit with films like Ant-Man and Guardians of the Galaxy, and the formula is repeated again here with a degree of success.   

Marvel also have to make this goatee believable 

The film’s plot is particularly generic, even for an origin story. Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) is a brilliant but self-centred surgeon, who, following a horrific car crash, journeys to the Far East to regain his purpose. Along the way he discovers he is destined for wizarding greatness, combats evil and even learns some humility. Well-worn tropes such as the mentor with a deep secret and the villainous former pupil who lost their way are all present and accounted for. 

The extent to which you’re willing to forgive the story will be dependent on how much you enjoy Cumberbatch in the role. Full disclosure – I find Cumberbatch to be a bit of a tit and have rarely enjoyed his screen presence. His Strange is intolerably one-note, and, for lack of a better word, a dickhead. We are used to narcissistic characters in comic book movies, but Cumberbatch and the screenwriters imbue Strange with such little empathy that by the time he finally puts his ego aside for the greater good I found it impossible to reconcile with his earlier behaviour.  

Chiwetel Ejiofor pulls the short straw as Strange’s sidekick Mordo, sadly lumbered with the lion’s share of the exposition. Mordo is clearly supposed to be the most sympathetic character, but we learn so little about him in-between his explanations of portals, relics and dark dimensions that we never get to care. This is particularly disappointing as the film sets him up for a key role in the inevitable sequel. Rachel McAdams, Strange's surgeon colleague and love interest, is also massively underserved by the script. Over roughly fifteen minutes of screen time we don't learn anything about her or understand her inexplicable loyalty to someone so deplorable.

In spite of all of the above, I couldn’t help but enjoy Doctor Strange. Shaven-headed Tilda Swinton is clearly having a fantastic time throwing punches and spurting Yodaisms as Strange’s mystic mentor ‘The Ancient One’. Benedict Wong excels as a warrior monk/librarian and Mads Mikkelsen elevates rudimentary villain Kaecilius simply by virtue of being Mads Mikkelsen. Though the script’s characterisation is poor, the usual quota of Marvel quips is accounted for, and it does well to acknowledge that the entire concept of a hand-waving inter-dimensional magic man is inherently silly.

Warrior Monk/ Street Countdown Aficionado 

It’s greatest strengths lie in its visually dazzling action sequences. Drawing from the source material and heavily influenced by Inception and Interstellar, Doctor Strange’s world is unlike anything the target audience are likely to have seen before. Standouts include a showdown in an Escher-esque rendition of New York and an hallucinogenic trip through the multiverse. As with Ant-Man and Guardians before it, the film benefits from being largely disconnected to the greater Marvel universe. Such imagery and invention would not be possible if the film also had to serve the over-reaching narrative of Earth-bound Marvel characters.

This sort of thing - with plenty of hand-waves

The film’s Hong Kong based finale is also a refreshing twist on the exhausting city-wide destruction of other comic book films, finding an enjoyable intersection between brains and brawn. The detail and wit of such scenes demonstrate that director/screenwriter Scott Derrickson has talent to spare. With an original plot and a script which fleshes out its lead roles, Doctor Strange could go on to be the wonderfully weird sibling of its Marvel counterparts. 

Three and a half Bald Tildas out of five

Review - David Brent: Life on the Road

Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant's The Office is as close to perfection as sitcoms come, and the Christmas special was an as-yet unbeaten marriage of humour, embarrassment and heart. Brent's sign-off gave great closure to the character, so I was cynical about Gervais, without Merchant, returning to visit his most famous comic creation thirteen years on. Sadly this cynicism was well placed, as Life on the Road is a retread of the special with none of the wit or subtlety.

The film charts Brent, now a sales rep for a sanitary product company (selling tampons is clearly supposed to be hilarious), cashing in his pension pot for a final stab at music stardom on tour with a hired band and rapping protégé - played gamely by real life rapper Ben Bailey Smith.

All the character development that Brent exhibited over the course of the series and special, culminating in television's most satisfying 'fuck off', is out the window. Brent is once again the man-child from the first episode, except he now constantly looks at the camera with a contorted, constipated grin, his every sentence punctuated with an ear piercing nervous squall. Gervais clearly wants to portray him as a lovable loser, but over 90 minutes we are given no convincing reason to root for him as he moves through the world in a self-deluded haze.

This pose for 90 minutes

The Office was anchored by Tim and Dawn, and even caricatures such as Gareth and Keith rang true to life. The supporting characters in Life on the Road are completely two dimensional, alternately bullies or inexplicable Brent devotees. Bailey Smith does his best as rapper Dom Johnson, and is rewarded with some of the film's best lines, but the suspension of disbelief required to imagine that a young talented rapper would stick with Brent through his egotistical episodes and constant gaffes is too much to ask of the audience.

The biggest issue with LOTR is that it's thin on the ground with actual jokes. Punchlines are substituted with embarrassment and offence. Just saying that someone is a ‘fat bird’ isn’t a joke in itself, especially when followed with the aforementioned withering grin. Humour of this caliber is recurrent throughout the film, and it became clear to me that Gervais' tank is running on empty when I noticed the script recycling gags I'd heard on his XFM shows from 2001.

The songs are generally amusing, but as with the rest of the film, the songs that land, such as Equality Street and Lady Gypsy raise more of a wry smile then a belly laugh. The opening song 'Life on the Road' is a funny-enough checklist of overlooked satellite towns, but all merit is lost when Gervais rhymes Gloucester with Costa, then holds up a Costa cup to the camera. Later in the film he holds up his loyalty card and says coffee is on him. The product placement and cross promotion are so egregious you wonder how much Gervais struggled to raise finance for what was clearly an unpolished script.

The inevitable sentimental payoff isn't earned. Characters' motivations and emotions change between scenes without impetus, and the optimistic tone is at odds with a main character who doesn't appear to have learnt anything on his journey. Life on the Road just about gets by on some residual good will, solid songs and a few satisfying gags, but when Gervais tempts fate with a few seconds of Handbags and Gladrags, it's impossible to not consider what this could have been with the involvement of Stephen Merchant.

Two and a half Oggmonsters out of five

It’s About Time You Watched: Justified

When recommending a TV show to someone, a high concept is much easier to pitch than something which at first glance seems to be relatively by the books. “Oh, it’s about a chemistry teacher who finds out he has terminal cancer so starts cooking meth in the desert to provide for his family,” is a lot more arresting as a premise than “this US Marshall is reassigned to his home state of Kentucky to avoid the heat from a controversial Miami shooting.” Convincing people to watch Justified reminds me a lot of trying to convince them to watch Veronica Mars back in 2006 – every sentence of explanation followed by “but trust me, it’s much better that it sounds.”

Fish out of water police dramas are nothing new, but Justified’s razor-sharp writing, electric performances and precise direction form such a brilliant whole that it is deserving of a far wider audience. Airing in the US on the excellent FX network (also home to The Americans, Fargo and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia), Justified is an adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s short story Fire in the Hole, about US Marshal Raylan Givens (played here by Timothy Olyphant) returning to the crime-ridden backwaters of his hometown, Harlan, and his encounters with the outlaw class that populate it, chief among them Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins). Crowder is the dark mirror to Raylan’s lawman - the pair grew up together, and the interplay between them as contemporaries, adversaries and occasional allies has driven the plot for the last five seasons.

Raylan is something of a modern-day cowboy, rarely seen without a Stetson hat, and an expert at the quick draw. This is TV, so naturally his methods are not always by the book, but refreshingly, instead of being one of the complex and tortured anti-heroes who have almost become a cliché of prestige television, Raylan is very much one of the good guys, operating within the confines of the law. Olyphant plays Raylan with great aplomb, delivering threats, quips and justice with a cocksurety and arrogance, his banter with both his colleagues in the Marshal’s office and Harlan’s bandits endlessly quotable. In a particularly memorable scene, he proclaims, “If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you’re the asshole”, in the process revealing more about himself than the criminal he is chastising.

Much like Leonard’s other work (Get Shorty and Out of Sight, to name but two), Justified has a thick vein of comedy running through it. You’ll find yourself laughing more over the course of an episode than during some of your favourite sitcoms. Grounded in reality, the criminals the marshal service encounter are more often than not distinctly moronic. One great episode sees perennial hick Dewey Crowe (Damon Herriman) convinced by an unscrupulous surgeon that he has removed his kidneys, forcing him on a crime spree across the county to raise money for his ransomed organs without him ever considering if they’re actually still in place.

Peppered in amongst the simpletons are Justified’s great eccentric villains, such as softly-spoken Mafia subordinate Wynn Duffy (Jere Burns), who lives in a motor home and has a penchant for women’s tennis, barbecue-obsessed Ellstin Limehouse (Mykelti Williamson) and the thunderous Mags Bennett, adept poisoner and matriarch of the dim-witted Bennett clan, played by the phenomenal Margo Martindale, who rightfully won an Emmy for her performance. But weaving a thread amongst this criminal fraternity and Raylan is Walton Goggins as Boyd Crowder, for many the true star of the show.

Goggins has been under the radar for many years, but his brilliant turn in Justified has made people stand to attention, Tarantino recently casting him in a central role in his table read/live rehearsal of The Hateful Eight, which seemed tailor-written for the actor. His Crowder is wild-haired, fluorescent-toothed and silver-tongued. His position is not ambiguous - he is a cold-blooded killer and the ultimate villain of the show, but every time he talks his way out of a life-threatening predicament or enacts revenge upon those he perceives to have wronged him, you can’t help but cheer. This is why Justified, amongst the Mad Men and True Detectives of our time, has become one of the best television shows on screen: in amongst its serious stories of crime, family and loyalty, it never forgets to entertain.

“Your car is your only avenue of escape”: Travel tips from John McAfee

Everybody’s favourite computer security pioneer, yoga author and murder suspect John McAfee took a brief hiatus from his intercontinental hijinks last week  to sit down and answer some reader questions on Slashdot. Notorious for his adventures in Belize and his affinity for guns, gangs and teenage girls, McAfee’s life has been far from monotonous.

Of particular interest in the Q&A were his tips for people attempting to travel across Central America with a boot full of illicit material and an Interpol notice to their name. If like me the majority of your experience with authoritarian checkpoints is limited to petty squabbles with nightclub bouncers, then McAfee’s words of wisdom will be particularly eye opening although, of course, they should be taken with a liberal pinch of salt. A titan of paranoia and self-aggrandisement, his recommendations paint a romanticised portrait of life as an outlaw on the dusty roads of Belize and Guatemala which entertain regardless of the truth behind them:

“Documentation is the polite word for ‘cash’”

McAfee is keen to stress the distinction between what we would call corruption – accepting cash bribes to look the other way – and what he calls a smoothly functioning  ‘system’ – accepting cash bribes to look the other way. The key to this system is producing the correct amount of money, not too small and not too large, in order to avoid disrupting the delicate balance in place. Like a GCSE maths problem, the traveller must take into account traffic density, police rank and time of day when making his final calculations, so it is advisable for aspiring smugglers to keep a calculator alongside any weaponry in their glove compartment. If the above doesn’t work, a cold beer out of a cooler is the recommended back up option as, according the McAfee, the majority of police encountered at these checkpoints are little more than lazy simpletons.

“Remember:  50% of the police who stop you in some countries can’t read”

Exploiting low levels of literacy in the developing world is another powerful tool for easy travel. McAfee recommends that any cash handed over should also be accompanied with a hefty booklet, in his case an old camera manual with the cover taken off, to lend an air of authenticity to the proceedings. The guard will hopefully be dumfounded by the inanimate squiggles on the page and, believing that you are on important business, let you on your merry way. A polite smile and a wave is the last thing needed from you as you ride in to the sunset, chuckling away about this supposedly ingenious deception.

“The most powerful tool a traveller can possess is a press card”

If you come across a guard who appears to be mildly savvier than his cohorts a fake press card is recommended in lieu of the tattered instructions from your old Nikon. McAfee, with his boundless paranoia, claims to have dozens stashed across his vehicles, wallets and trouser pockets. Those who find themselves questioned as to the purpose of their travels are to say that they are doing a piece on corruption for an American newspaper and ask the police if they’d be interested in conducting an interview. Seemingly counter-intuitive for someone who wants to quickly get away from a checkpoint rather than hanging around, McAfee insists that this method is almost foolproof.

“Your car is your only avenue of escape. It’s a ton of steel capable of doing serious harm”

Should all else fail, it’s important to remember that you’re behind the wheel of a motorised battering ram. The aforementioned lazy checkpoint guard has no interest in losing one or several limbs and filing reams of paperwork in order to prevent your passage across his nation. He says that if you drive away, you’ll most likely be met with a collective shrug rather than a Fast and Furious escapade across the plains of Central America. It’s a shame really, as an explosive finale to McAfee’s 2012 flight from Belize to avoid questioning about his neighbour’s murder would have been far more exciting than the reality of his deportation back to the US. Now that he has settled down in Portland he’ll have little use for his assortment of tricks, but they just might give an entrepreneurial drug dealer the leg-up they need in order to thrive in the over-crowded marketplace.

Originally published on www.planetivy.com

7 Buzzfeed cliches that prove we're all wasting our lives

Sites like Buzzfeed are slowly strangling the internet into a glut of drip-fed, list-based, lowest-common-denominator news articles. Popular thinking apparently dictates that if your idea can't be communicated in 24 animated frames then it probably isn't worth listening to. The proliferation of such simplistic communication has sadly blighted almost all news sources. Take for example The Huffington Post, which originally set out to provide an engaging alternative to print-based media, but has sadly succumbed to click-baiting and the cult of search engine optimisation.

As long as there's ad revenue to be earned this disturbing trend will sadly continue. It's not all doom and gloom though; one large positive to be taken away from from the rapid spread of listomania is that anyone with a tumblr account, or at least a basic grasp of google image search, can be a journalist too! For all would-be online hacks I've distilled the essence of Buzzfeed into seven clear tropes that should form the backbone of any article. Utilise just a handful of these, sit back and watch the retweets roll in:

1. Firstly and most importantly, there are always a seemingly random number of items in the list. No doubt these correspond to the amount of equally cretinous websites said list has ripped off. Bonus likes if it isn't a multiple of five:

2. Jennifer Lawrence, completely free of any context, acting in a manner strikingly similar to a 'normal'. This used to be Emma Stone's forte but her star has faded in the fickle cycle of internet fame:

3. Fucking Glee. Does anyone even still watch Glee? Why is it still such a cultural touchstone? Where are all the Glee fans?

4. Someone from a popular American drama crying, preferably in black and white. Glee can stand in again here if there isn't a convenient 90210 or Gossip Girl moment too hand:

5. A picture embedded from one of our favourite celebrities' Instagram. If they're holding a fluffy animal all the better. In this example the dog is making up for not being a cat with its melancholy human eyes:

6. A jarringly still jpeg which reminds us of a horrific time (the 90s) when a picture could only tell a thousand words. Look how sad and lonely it is, clicking on it doesn't even direct you to another website! 

7. Disney. If in doubt everything can be somehow related to Disney. Look out for '13 things Up teaches us about the Bedroom Tax' and '9 ways The Little Mermaid reminds us of the Scottish Independence Referendum' on your newsfeed any day now:

P.S. If anyone at Buzzfeed or a similar site is reading and wants to give me a job I'll more than happily work for you. I know how to use Photoshop and can name at least 10 Beyoncé album cuts offhand. Thanks.