The West Wing: Season Six

After a period of not much happening in Season Five, the sixth is where everything seems to happen at once. After the first few episodes most of the cast are in hospital (alright, two, but they were in perfect health until now). Leo's near-death is especially powerful. You could watch the end of the 'The Birnam Wood' fifty times and still be convinced he's going to die. Nobody's supposed to come back from a heart attack in the woods. There was even soft piano music. This kick starts the season, which is defined by job changes and elections. CJ's first days as the new Chief of Staff are a highlight, showing that these super-human people do feel stress after all. They were starting to get a bit too comfortable. When it's all shaken up the show seems fresh again. If the fifth season was the transition, this is the confident start of a new era. Half-way through you suspect that the show might have changed for good, as it focuses on Josh's campaign with Santos (played by Jimmy Smits, who dubiously appears in the credits before he's mentioned in the show). Now Will's departure from the White House begins to make sense, as the division between the Russell and Santos camps is made clear. It almost starts to turn into the Josh Lyman show, as the other characters are pushed to the side. Poor Toby is left behind, and his and Josh's relationship never really recovers after they actually start hitting each other (although arguably it was never that good to begin with). And Vinick is the Republican who sounds like a Democrat, meaning that the other side look like a credible threat for the first time. The campaign is compelling stuff, but completely alien. When the show shifts back to the West Wing it's like settling back into a comfy seat, where nothing has changed and everything's (mostly) in its place.

The real joy of The West Wing doesn't come from the events, but from the strength of the writing. In that respect this season makes back a lot of points. It remembers how to be funny, even if it's sometimes a bit inappropriate (why are CJ and Josh arguing about donuts when Leo's close to death?). It starts to reference season one when Leo gives another 'let Bartlet be Bartlet' speech. It remembers how to be a bit subversive. It remembers how to be energetic. The middle episode of Season Five was called 'Slow News Day', here it's called 'A Good Day'. This is more like it.

The best films I've never seen

Even though film criticism is subjective, I'm not about watch a film that received entirely poor reviews. Sometimes a pile of critics could have the opposite opinion to me, but I'm not going to risk two hours on something I'm probably not going to like. The 'reviews' on this blog range from positive to indifferent; I very rarely come across something I dislike, because I'll only watch it if I've heard good things about it. Usually. I've seen some 'bad' films by accident - maybe because I'd never heard of them, or I just disagree with everyone else. Sometimes you have to watch a bad film to know what a good one looks like, and they're always easier to write about. But without critics, and ratings, and the realms of everything on the internet, I probably wouldn't know what films I wanted to watch. There are things I will watch soon. I want to see more Studio Ghibli. I want to see if there's a film that actually scares me. I want to one day understand what '3D films' are meant to be. There's good television I've never seen too: Mad Men, Deadwood, Dollhouse. These things take up days, so I have to choose carefully.

That was all a long introduction to asking you what films I should watch. People are better than critics after all. If you recommend a film I'll put it on a list somewhere, watch it, then pour my thoughts out onto these beige pages (according to Wikipedia, beige is quite close to the 'average colour of the universe'). You can also recommend bad films if you like. That way I don't have to be so nice all the time.

Not as clever as Cumberbatch

Sherlock Homes would have been more interesting if I hadn't seen the whole thing done a lot better. There's no Cumberbatch here. The film exists in a time when everything was brown and Sherlock Holmes didn't wear such a cool coat. Robert Downey Jr and Jude Law are the squabbling couple that Holmes and Watson should be, but they also beat a lot of people up. Rather than playing games of Extreme Deduction to outwit the criminals, they're more likely to wrestle with them. I didn't really believe that this man was a genius. He has moments where he works out the best places to punch people, but that's about it. He is good at disguises though. All the ingredients are here, pumped up by a lot of Hollywood action. It's not bad, but Moffat's series was second and better. Of course it's important to appreciate every film on its own merit, but I'm unfair like that. The BBC's Sherlock must be available on DVD by now, so watch that instead. It must be good, because it's taken over my thoughts on a completely seperate film. There'll be more of each adaption, which'll be nice, even if I am completely bored of the Sherlock Holmes franchise (I'm calling it a franchise). I don't want to know which quotes are from the books, or who Moriarty turns out to be. I only want something mysterious to happen.

To be fair, there's a bit of mystery here. A bad man comes back from the dead and starts doing magical things. Disappointingly though, Holmes figures it all out after the big confrontation. He's not as clever as Cumberbatch. Nowhere near. Cumberbatch would have cleared the whole thing up in a day.

Why the Russians can't be trusted

It seems like a long time since the Russians were the baddies. These days action heroes are going after the evils of their own government, the inner layers of their psyche, or anybody from the Middle East. James Bond killed Xenia Onatopp all the way back in 1995. Salt refers back too a time when the Russians were very bad indeed, and the reveal of the Big Bad is a man changing his accent and saying 'My name is Dmitri'. Then a countdown starts on a computer screen, the end result of which will be total annihilation. All tense stuff then. Angelina Jolie is in the middle of it all, jumping around on top of lorries and trying on various disguises. It feels like a film from fifteen years ago, but with modern explosions. You can work the plot twists out from the first twenty minutes, and then put them to one side until you're proven right. It's obviously not a bad film, it would just be more comfortable in another time. Harrison Ford would have been good in this film. Harrison Ford from the 90s. He could have played Salt, or the President, or maybe the CIA guy with a heart. He definitely wouldn't have been Dmitri though. Harrison Ford would have saved everyone from total annihilation. Angelina Jolie is okay, but who would you really want to do the job when nukes are being pointed at millions of innocent people? Exactly.

The CIA seem to be no better at their jobs these days. They definitely didn't see all this coming. Nobody suspects the Russian sleeper agents. They're the ones that pretend to be your friend, then they kidnap your husband and steal the nuclear launch codes. I wonder what Natalya Simonova is doing these days. She was useless. I also wonder what the Russians are planning right now. They're clearly up to something.

Van Damme complains and cries convincingly

I've written before about how all this meta-fiction confuses me. Even Jean-Claude Van Damme is doing it in JCVD. After making ten years of straight-to-video films, self-reflection got him back on cinema screens. Here he plays himself - a tired, exhausted actor who's sick of all these rubbish films. He walks in on a bank heist and, instead of beating everyone up, is thrown in with the rest of the hostages. It's a long way from an action film, as it moves back and forth through shifting perspectives and timelines. It also has chapters with artistic titles, like 'stone falls on egg, egg breaks' (yes, I suppose it would, but what does that have to do with the film?). This 'art' probably also explains why everything looks so washed out and blurry. But never mind, because if nothing else, this film shows that Van Damme deserves to be in better films. He can obviously act, and is a likable enough screen presence to be in the mainstream. I don't think I've seen any of his action films, but watching this made me feel like I had. It starts with a sprawling shot of him in full karate mode, dancing past explosions and throwing people around. When he finishes, the petulant director tells him to do it all again. Van Damme explains that it's difficult for him to do that, as he's forty-seven and quite tired.

If this is all peeling back one layer of fiction, it goes even further by giving Van Damme a six-minute monologue, where he breaks down all sorts of fourth walls (what are the first three?) by talking straight to the camera. He talks about his life in a cryptic way, and seems to get all emotional about it. It's a film making all sorts of points about the relationship between fiction and reality, but I'm not going to go into that - I've finished my English Literature degree now. And it doesn't look like it's started an art-house career revival for Van Damme, so this may be all the crying we see from him.