ON THE RADAR: A New Podcast, the state of Star Trek & the horror of Inside Man
That’s it now. The festive season is well and truly over. The days are cold and dark. We’re all back at work. It’s the January slog which means we’re going to need plenty of cultural fuel to keep us motoring until the clouds part and the first slivers of Spring start to show.
To that end, I’m going to try and talk more regularly about what’s On the Radar, as I’ll call this section. What I’m watching, what I’m pondering, what I’m reading etc… Maybe I can give you some ideas or a reason to run kicking and screaming away from something. Let’s see.
A New Podcast
It’s another day which means I’ve launched, yes, another podcast!
Beyond the Screen has actually been swirling around in the back of my head for years now. Not a super original podcast name but I don’t worry about those things. I wouldn’t copy a famous name but non-famous? Fair game. And this show is a simple premise - it’s me and guests talking cinema. No restrictions. No caveats. The sky’s the limit.
What I am planning is to, where possible, tie the film being covered into a new director or actor with a film out, to give it a bit of extra relevance. Hence why I started with 1997’s classic Titanic, given how James Cameron is back in circulation with Avatar: The Way of Water. My podcast chums Luke Winch & Baz Greenland were roped in for a terrific chat & it’s fun, in this format, to go deeper on the director’s career & the influences etc…
That said, there will also be themed ideas. I’m going to steadily tackle the Sight & Sound Greatest Films canon & expose myself to some of the titanic (pun intended) films in cinema history over time. I’ll be doing runs tied into certain events, such as a month of Royal-focused films when King Charles’ coronation rocks up in May. I have loads of ideas, a big spreadsheet full of films, and lots of enthusiasm. We’ll see how much time I get to churn these out but it’s been a lot of fun so far.
You can get links to whatever platform you’d prefer to subscribe on here but please do follow the podcast. There are bound to be films and chats that tickle your fancy!
The State of Star Trek
You might have heard me talk on one of my podcasts, maybe The Discourse, about my general antipathy toward the modern era of Star Trek. I have to push a bit more these days to watch the new shows. In the last week, I did just that to catch up with animated series Prodigy.
It’s a nice little show, aimed heavily at the kids market, about a crew of teenage and child misfit aliens who take control of a Starfleet ship and learn lessons while uncovering a nefarious plot. 20 minutes, very simple stuff, perfectly charming. But it’s hardly appointment TV. The first season aired (oddly) in two 10-part spans across a whole year, so I ended up stacking them up and watching most of the final ten in one stretch.
It was all fine. Credit to the writers, the Hageman brothers, for not being afraid by the end to mix up the concept a bit. I’ll come back for the next season. Overall though, I just felt rather passive about the experience, as I do most new Star Trek now. It didn’t excite me. It didn’t anger me or anything entitled such as that, rather I didn’t feel any significant emotion for it. More surprisingly, I had much the same feeling for Strange New Worlds a few months ago.
That one ended up disappointing me a little. Promising less serialised storytelling and a back to Trek basics concept, and boasting a cracking opener, I had high hopes it might pull me back in. Paramount’s arse backwards means of giving us the episodes in the U.K., and my disinterest in watching screeners on a small laptop, meant that show too ended up largely being binged. Yet I ended up surprised at how little I was invested in any of it. The structure felt like it desperately didn’t want to be contained in the format the writing staff had promised fans and, as a result, many of the episodes were quite lacklustre.
To be clear, none of this stuff is bad. Discovery - now that’s bad. Largely. I don’t even bother talking about that series now because it so depressingly refuses to learn any lessons, season in, season out. Picard has turned out to be incredibly uneven and, in the main, has never lived up to its potential. Lower Decks is the only Trek show, for all its quirky, grown up animated friendly lampooning of 90s Trek, that truly works on both a storytelling and character level for me. The irony is that it should be the most throwaway show, yet it is often the most rewarding.
Why do I bring this up? Well, Prodigy reminded me of the main reason I find modern Trek so exasperating - the fact it just endlessly cannibalises its own history. The franchise is now one gigantic Trials and Tribble-ations. If we get an episode that isn’t a sequel or a call back or an in-joke, it’s a nigh on miracle to be cherished. The writers of these shows, with Lower Decks excepted because the entire purpose of that series is to spoof, seem pathologically incapable of telling a Star Trek story that has absolutely no connective tissue back to something we’ve seen before. It’s utterly exhausting.
It almost feels pointless to harp on about this these days without sounding like a really tiresome old bore. Loads of people love these modern Trek shows and I’m delighted that they do. I don’t doubt in the 90s there were flotilla’s of 60s purists who decried The Next Generation etc… in similar terms. It’s cyclical and generational to some extent. At the same time, I do think Trek has lost any sense of true originality it once had now, both in style and storytelling. My enthusiasm for the older content remains steadfast (see my recent Deep Space Nine piece) but I’m agnostic at best for this Trek era.
Prodigy, I’m afraid, isn’t changing that any time soon. I doubt the last season of Picard coming soon will either. I remain eternally hopeful a show comes along that reignites my passion for the final frontier in the 21st century.
The Good, the Bad and Inside Man…
As always, I’m watching movies and TV shows with as much speed as I can muster. I’d be here forever if I wrote about everything so before I get into the good (bad, so bad) stuff, a couple of quick recommends from what I’ve seen in January so far.
All Quiet on the Western Front, the latest adaptation which dropped on Netflix a few months ago, is unrelenting in depicting the tragic nihilism of World War One, mainly through the eyes of eager young German recruit Paul (and his friends), who reflect a generation that grew up with stories of valour from 19th century minor wars and conflicts but found themselves plunged into a cold, wet, brutal, pointless Hell on earth. Friends killed in horrific ways, random attacks, grim accidents - it’s all here and director Edward Berger doesn’t shy away from the horror and the claret. Frequently skilled, grand and harrowing filmmaking. It doesn’t necessarily reveal anything new about WW1 but it should stand as one of the finest cinematic documents about it.
Everyone has been banging on lately about Aftersun, the film from Charlotte Wells starring Normal People’s thirst monster Paul Mescal (to be fair, I get it, he’s a damn fine specimen of a man). I do think it’s a bit overrated, much as I did enjoy it. Some of the praise, suggesting its transformative cinema, is a bit hyperbolic. Calm down, Film Twitter. It is nonetheless a skilled, bittersweet examination of youthful parenthood and burgeoning teenage adulthood. Mescal’s Calum grapples with depression as he faces the realities of grown up life (fatherhood, financial security) clashing with his natural youthful desire to be young and free. Frankie Corio’s Sophie, twelve and quietly precocious, through the decaying holiday environment they experience begins discovering her first pangs of youthful sexuality. Her life is ahead, his life he fears is behind. They meet in the middle with a sweet, caring, if slightly unusual & dysfunctional parental relationship. It isn’t mawkish or sentimental. It is moving, however, leaving you with a sense of tender ambiguity about what came next and what comes next, for both of these people. Aftersun gently haunts once it sets.
I’ve also been watching The Rig, on Amazon, which starts as a pulpy, John Carpenter-esque high concept bit of weirdness but very quickly grows duller and less interesting; should have been three episodes max. Started Our Flag Means Death which isn’t that funny yet but shows promise, though it mainly just makes me want a Monkey Island TV series. Hunters is back too - I loved that show, about 70s escaped Nazi hunters, back in 2020. We watched the S1 finale again and it was top notch. Good start to S2. Such a stylish slice of dramatic pulp, with a great cast. Just a shame it’s over now, with no more to come.
Anyway, to the last topic of this roundup, something I had to talk about and will extemporise a bit more on during this weeks episodes of The Discourse podcast. My Vietnam. The absolute horror, the horror, of Steven Moffat’s Inside Man.
Now, I can’t say I wasn’t warned. Friend, podcaster & writer Dan Owen of Frame Rated told me it was terrible. Nonetheless, with a good cast and Moffat—most of whose work I’ve greatly enjoyed—surely how bad could it be? Dan, I am sorry. I should have heeded your warning. Because this is without doubt the worst thing Moffat has ever done and, if he’s lucky, ever will do. This makes his failed The Time Traveller’s Wife adaptation look like King Lear in comparison. Inside Man is the product of a writer with not enough people around him saying no and a BBC too greatly in thrall to his talent. I’d like to think few other writers would have gotten close to this being commissioned.
Why? I hear you chant. Well, I wish I could say it’s so bad it’s good, or fun to watch, but that would be a Pinocchio-sized fib. You don’t have to put yourself through this frankly oddball tale of on the one hand David Tennant’s sexy priest (they call him that in the show, it’s not my opinion) desperately trying to protect a vulnerable verger leading to the most staggeringly contrived crime plot and hostage scenario I’ve ever seen, then on the other Lydia West’s journalist Beth Davenport (they all have made up silly names like this) tapping up Stanley Tucci’s US Death Row prisoner Jefferson Grieff (see?) for his genius in figuring out people who have committed crimes and the, uh, darkness in men’s souls or… something…
Moffat basically wanted to tell a story about how anyone can be evil in the moment and can lose their well ordered, happy lives in the click of a finger, even mild mannered middle-England men like a vicar. INSIDE MAN (title alert) is a beast waiting to snarl. Yeah yeah yeah. It’s just written with such a bizarre lack of cohesion across four episodes that grow progressively dumber leading to a climax that batters you over the head with the thematic message. Just rubbish. The worst TV drama of 2022 by some distance. Moff needs to go off and write some Sherlock or something to get this out of his system and return to form.
Shudder. Anyhow, that’s all from me. Lots of podcast and maybe some more written content to come in January.
As always, thanks for reading & hope all is good with you.
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