What Are You Watching?, Films and TV Options

[Mata]

Well, we've got other threads like this, so let's continue the set.

There are actually quite a lot of series that I'm enjoying at the moment:

Startrek: Enterprise (season 4, 3 was good, four is working out very well. They're finally in their stride and it's a shame that this is the last one)

Alias (season 4, it could do with the Rimbaldi plotline again in my opinion, without it it's still a very stylish spy thriller, but it's lost some of the heart I think)

Dead Like Me (season 2, it's a slow burner this series, but it just keeps getting better. Well worth sticking with and this season has had some real laugh-out-loud moments as well as some genuinely emotional bits. Great stuff.)

Smallville (season 4 I think, maybe 3. Things have got a bit silly this time around, but it's still enjoyable watching all the pretty people, and a bad episode of this is still ten times better than a good episode of something like Mutant X.)

24 (season 4, perhaps this is losing it's way a bit, but I still enjoy how preposterous the whole thing is. Great fun.)

Doctor Who (season umpteen, just fantastic)

I think the last film I saw at the cinema was Constantine, which I really loved. CGI, angels and demons, Keanu Reeves... Great stuff. Just my kind of film!

So, what have you been watching?

[Mata]

I'm going to mention The Matrix

To echo the debating technique of Bill Clinton, that very much depends on your definition of 'crap'. All I tend to ask for from a film is enjoyable hokum, such as seen in the first Matrix film, The Bourne Identity/Supremacy, Collateral, and suchlike. Then you have action films that actually have decent characters as well as hokum, giving you things like Die Hard and Equilibrium.

I think that, almost by definition, action films will have slightly ropey plots because without them the extreme sequences cannot be justified. No-one hijacks an entire building then detonates the roof as a distraction, so does that make the movie that does that 'crap' or just effectively working in the field of the genre? I think it's the latter.

In many ways the only thing that's ever been any good about the Star Wars films is that they stick to the classic structure established for narratives throughout history and summarised in the work of Joseph Campbell. Campbell's 'Hero with a thousand faces' creates a tick-list for the mythic hero's journey, which Star Wars follows pretty precisely. The films are actually rubbish, but the plot that they are hanging on is as old as stories and that pulls them through.

So, it's down to your definition of 'crap'. You could consider it crap to be following such an ancient narrative construction technique that millions of story-tellers before you have used before (which all of the films mentioned above do), or you could say that they should challenge this structure. People do challenge it, and usually their efforts go straight to video. There's a reason that hokey plots reccur, and it's because they work when establishing a hero. A film's plot is usually defined by how well they use the established elements of narrative history, the first Matrix did this well, the second and third ones took too long over each step of the journey and consequently became far less effective pieces of cinema. That doesn't necessarily mean that their plot was crap, it just means that the makers used the plot ineffectively to create their movie.

[CommieBastard]

In many ways the only thing that's ever been any good about the Star Wars films is that they stick to the classic structure established for narratives throughout history and summarised in the work of Joseph Campbell. Campbell's 'Hero with a thousand faces' creates a tick-list for the mythic hero's journey, which Star Wars follows pretty precisely. The films are actually rubbish, but the plot that they are hanging on is as old as stories and that pulls them through.

Ooh, too far

Those films are most certainly not rubbish. Alright, maybe A New Hope is a bit crap, but The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi are both excellent films. Good dialogue (principally through Lucas not writing them), great pacing, excellent performances from Harrison Ford, James Earl Jones and Carrie Fisher (my enduring hatred for Mark Hamil prevents me from mentioning him in the same breath) and most importantly some of the most dramatic scenes ever filmed (Luke and Vader in Cloud City? Brilliant).

I doubt this is something we'll ever agree on, but I do love those films