The End of Time — It’s Complicated

We had a very Doctor Who Boxing Day evening. BBC America re-ran the two most recent specials as a lead up to part one of The End of Time, the two-part swan song of David Tennant as the Doctor. I noted with displeasure that they edited down the previous shows, cramming them into an hour with commercials. All discussion of the need for bicycles was missing from The Waters of Mars, for example. I’m not sure what else was sacrificed.

The new special was very much a mixed bag. I’m a big fan of John Simms, especially from his roles in State of Play and Life on Mars. (I was amused to see frequent ads for a new show with his frequent co-star, Philip Glennister during the evening.) Still, the first half of the episode dragged badly, especially the scenes in the junkyard where the Doctor marched as Simms leapt around. It just seemed like a waste of good screen time. The two disguised aliens seemed like it was a rehash of earlier material. Delightful to see Donna’s grandfather again, and glad to see that he finally got a brief jaunt in the TARDIS. The episode picked up a bit in the second half, after the rather jarring interjection of James Bond before the commercial break. I appreciate their efforts to turn Simms’ character into something of a tragic figure, and there was much merriment at seeing him in all of his various guises at the end, but I’m hoping for something big and grand in the second part and that it won’t be over-run by this new resurgence of the long-gone Time Lords.

I’ve only watched Graham Norton a couple of times, but the Doctor Who special that aired after The End of Time was pretty hilarious. I have no idea who the other people were on stage with Tennant and Tate, though. I guess we were meant to figure that out by ourselves. The TARDIS bits were amusing, and the personal ad “sketch” was funny and audacious, too. I laughed at Tennant’s aside about the licensing folks for Doctor Who having a cardiac after he posed for the bawdy photo.

We went to see It’s Complicated yesterday. We hit the early matinee and the theater was cram packed. Average age of attendees: over 40, at least. If you could get past the pervasive infidelity concept, the movie had some extremely funny moments. Steve Martin was charming and funny without being silly. No pratfalls–even when his character was stoned he played it straight. Alec Baldwin was smarmy and charming and shallow, but delightful, and Meryl Streep was very good. Not stellar, not award-worth, but very, very credible, since it was upon her to play the movie’s tormented conscience. Her future son-in-law, Harley, almost stole the movie several times.

We watched a two-hour History Channel documentary about Woodstock that filled in some of the gaps in fact left by the movie we saw earlier in the week. The whole concept of hiring a bunch of people from California who had experience with handling people on bad LSD trips (they set up the so-called “trip tent” where these people could go to be brought down safely) is amazing. You couldn’t imagine getting away with something like that now, but they seemed to handle it well. If there were people whose lives were scarred by their experiences at Woodstock, their story wasn’t told, either in the movie or in this documentary.

We also re-watched Howard’s End. My memory of the plot was faulty — I thought a lot more of the story took place at the eponymous house, but in fact very little of it did. One of the fascinating plot devices is the fact that a “stolen” umbrella ultimately caused such complications for the two intertwined families.