The quiet side of Jónsi

The special edition of Jónsi's new album comes with a little film called Go Quiet. It's from the director of Heima so you can only expect good things. Here Jónsi sings his songs acoustically, using any rickety instruments he can find lying around his house. Stripped of all the bombast and explosions of the album, these songs seem fragile and shy. Jónsi's voice is usually layered underneath the huge audio productions, so these sorts of performances always show the songs in a new light. A similar thing was done in Heima, but this is even smaller. There's no audiences or community halls. It's just one man and an instrument. 'Around Us' reverts to its original quiet piano, 'Animal Arithmetic' is slower and almost relaxing, 'Grow Till Tall' completely bare. That being said, it's definitely not Heima (although most things aren't). There's no journey, no scale. It only wants to be reflective. Which is fair enough.

It's beautifully shot too. Dean DeBlois knows how to frame a shot with some fancy focus, and it's fascinating to watch. There are segments of the New Years Eve party that Jónsi had just held, but they never outstay their welcome. It's not a documentary, it's a short film. One that's been expertly crafted to show off Jónsi's talent and general weirdness. At one point he wanders into a quaint shop full of lamps to find the antique pianos at the back. Why? It doesn't seem to matter. Sigur Rós teach you not to wonder what it's supposed to mean, only what you want it to. Above all it's a fitting accompaniment to the album Go. It's the other half of Jónsi. The quiet half that was forced into hiding. The songs originally sounded like this. Now the album is complete.

How it was made

I've written a lot about the production of how to be god, but none of it has really gotten across how the show was made. This video is pretty accurate. Just imagine a year of it.

Luther doesn't play by the rules

It would be easy to make fun of Luther. He's a maverick detective who doesn't play by the rules. He's a genius with 'emotional difficulties'. He solves a different crime every week. This has all been done before. I would write that review, except for one problem - Luther is very good television. Yes, it's an episodic police procedural, but these are episodes that each build to something extremely tense. It's unpredictable and brave and perfectly willing to kill its cast. The enjoyment comes from the knowledge that, when a deranged serial killer is bashing down a door, the good guys might not actually make it there in time. I'm usually against episodic television because I imagine closed-off, dramatically sterile episodes where nothing ever happens and the right people always win. This is not like that. And to think I only started watching it because Idris 'Stringer Bell from The Wire' Elba is in it. Two shows that are almost structural opposites. Although maybe it wouldn't be so entertaining without this lead. Sometimes he carries the show on his big apparently-British shoulders. Because with one look at the sceen you can tell where this was made. The overriding colour is grey - the sky is grey, the offices are grey, the suits are grey - it's pessimistic and English. And the interesting choice to leave a lot of empty space in the frame makes it even bleaker. The people look small.

But there is an arc going through the series and, like The Wire, you have to wait for it to burst. It's delivered in little nuggets but has now just exploded five episodes in. It's not often that television completely surprises me. I always hope it will, but it hardly ever does. Here there's scenes that really impressed me. The scenes that go 'well he's clearly not going to shoot her. There's no way they're killing - oh, dead now'. Drama that's willing to pull the trigger and go off in dangerous new directions is what I like. I'm hoping the next episode lives up to this, and I'm hoping there'll be more.

Around here the graves eat people

For the new parter, 'The Hungry Earth' and 'Cold Blood', Doctor Who is back in the countryside. Most people are probably bored of it by now, but I don't care, I love it. Sleepy villages and empty fields can be surreal, fantastical and creepy. Cities are usually too loud for this. Unfortunately though, there's not much to like here. There's a city of reptile-people underneath a Welsh village. The humans are drilling down and the reptiles don't like it. Sounds fine, but barely anything happens for an hour and a half. I have no idea why this is a two-parter. The first half is a long set-up for something that never really happens. They're apparently on the edge of war, but there's no tension anywhere near these episodes. It starts to ask questions about whether humanity is ready to share the planet with aliens, but doesn't seem committed to answering it. It shows us vast armies of reptile-men before moving away and going back into small rooms. I was always waiting for it to get interesting and it never really did, which is a shame. The events that do occur are in the last five minutes and completely unrelated to the episode. This could have trimmed down.

More worrying than any of this was that, for the first time this series, I found the whole thing unconvincing. The subterranean alien world never felt real. You could see the joins in the effects. You could tell they'd just dressed up a stage with some plants. The Doctor wanders around tunnels that seem plastic, talking to aliens that aren't original. It's a shame, because up till now the series has been full of imagination and creativity. I didn't believe in this one at all. Even the characters it introduced didn't seem to work. These aren't the 'best of humanity' at all. An irritating mother and a small boy who was just there to get in the way. A grandfather who gets poisoned by the reptiles but is so manly he hardly complains. The most offensive one is Nasreen, the head of the mining operation, who wanders around the alien world like it's a supermarket. In fact, none of them seem phased by this peculiar turn of events. They meet an entire alien civilisation that's been living beneath their feet. The little boy says 'wow'. That's as surprised as they get. Why aren't their mind breaking? In one scene Nasreen casually discusses the fate of the planet with the reptile elder like she does it every day. Nothing gels here. It's all very pretend. You're not meant to notice it's fiction. The only redeeming feature is the Doctor, whose enthusiastic bounding around is always entertaining. Hopefully normal service will be resumed next week.

Two novels by Ishiguro

Ishiguro novels seem to have a thing about the past. The two that I've read, When We Were Orphans and Never Let Me Go, are both written from a point in the future, looking back at what's past. And if Ishiguro didn't know how to hold a story so well, they might be as dull as I've made them sound. He takes something familiar, something everyone has read before, and twists it a little bit to bring reality in. In Never Let Me Go it's clones. Created for organ donations and hidden away in boarding schools. The idea is taken straight out of science-fiction but here it's a placed in a real setting - late 90s England - where their existence seems more difficult. The book is completely uncluttered by science or explanation, it's just about the people. For large sections it'll seem like a story about school, or about 'university', but then they mention their donations. It's all bit sinister. These characters are human, and that's the most troubling thing. After all the childhood games and the (slightly annoying) teenage politics, they're just slabs of meat to be sold off. Their deaths are unceremonious and understated, because that's what they were there for in the first place.

And the detective of When We Were Orphans writes from inside his own fantasies. He's convinced that his parents, who were abducted in Shanghai when he was young, are still being held captive twenty years later. They're clearly not, but he plays out the detective game until it breaks. He's stuck as a ten year old - the entire profession of 'detecting' is a way of delaying adult reality and responsibilty. The language is a lot posher, more adapted to the boring London society. It's rare for a writer to almost completely change their style from book to book. Ishiguro chooses a voice and goes with it, keeping himself in the background. It's not an easy thing to do. But if there's a link between the two, it's that both see childhood as formative and inescapable. It completely makes up who these characters are. Only now it's become a collection of memories that they have to decipher one by one. It has become a story that they have to tell themselves. In other words, it's a big pile of literary stuff that Ishiguro can write pages and pages about and still leave things untold. That's enough for now, but I might read more one day.