Got a lot of work done on the work in progress. Crossed the 15,000 word threshold this morning. Better than I anticipated.
The heat has returned and we’re scheduled to reach or surpass 100° over the next few days. No rain. Never rain. Any time I run the sprinkler (only allowed on Thursdays and Sundays due to water restrictions), the bird frolic.
Without planning to, we watched two movies this weekend that had major sections set in Berlin. The first was Hanna, starring Saoirse Ronan, Cate Blanchett and Eric Bana. This was an unusually stylistic film about a young girl who is wanted by a manic CIA operative played by Cate Blanchett. For a good part of the movie, we’re never quite sure why this is, nor what she intends to do once she catches her. Hanna has lived with her father in a hut in the Arctic since she was very young. He trained her in languages and fighting, and a little bit about the real world, but she’s never heard music. Once she thinks she’s ready (I kept thinking: Grasshopper, when you can snatch this pebble from my hand…) she activates a beacon that lets Blanchett know where she is, and thus begins an interesting cat-and-mouse game that goes from Morocco to Spain and ultimately to Berlin. Along the way, Hanna tags a ride with a somewhat scatterbrained family on vacation in a microbus. There are some great scenes in the Grimm Brothers house in Berlin and others in an abandoned theme park in the former East Berlin. Some fun action sequences and enough of a story to keep it interesting, coupled with artistic cinematography. The “beacon” thing seemed a stretch, as did the English family’s willingness to accept that Hanna was wandering Europe on her own, but other than that we enjoyed it.
The second film was a Liam Neeson vehicle called Unknown, about Dr. Martin Harris, a scientist in Berlin for a biotech conference who is injured in an accident and ends up in a coma for four days. When he recovers, his wife (January Jones) doesn’t recognize him and there’s someone else in his place. The film does a very good job of portraying a twist on the Hitchcockian trope of the innocent man unjustly accused, and his situation keeps getting worse all the time. He ends up allied with the (very attractive) taxi driver (Diane Kruger) who was behind the wheel at the time of the accident and who saved his life. Something seems a little off about Harris. He can drive a car like nobody’s business, especially under duress. As the truth is revealed, the tension gets ramped up, with some excellent performances from Bruno Ganz as a former Stasi agent now working as a detective, and Frank Langella as one of Martin’s colleagues. Berlin is well used in the film, and it is all very thrilling. I’m not a big fan of January Jones—she always seems a little cold and aloof and untrustworthy—but otherwise the film was enjoyable. The logic of what really happened to Martin doesn’t stand up to close scrutiny, but there’s enough other stuff going on that you don’t get to dwell on that for long.
I enjoyed seeing Berlin in these films. I was there in 1986 for a couple of days and actually passed through the Berlin Wall at Checkpoint Charlie (pictured) and spent the better part of a week on the other side.
Caught up on some recorded TV shows, too. Haven was interesting. Directed by Justin Timberlake and featuring a lockdown in the police station to contain some sort of viral epidemic associated with the Troubles. More intrigue involving the minister and Duke, plus the death of a semi-regular. I like the character of Dwight, the fixer, whose trouble is that bullets tend to find him.
Almost all the way through the third episode of The Hour. Burn Gorman (Torchwood) makes a good bad guy. He looks weird, especially in that movie clip that Ruth recorded. Freddy Lyon is still a little hard to like—and hard to understand at times because of the way he mumbles. The scenes in the country house were interesting. Does the upper crust really brush their teeth before dining?
We watched two weeks’ worth of Doctor Who last night. First, there was the one about the little boy with Night Terrors. A definite improvement over the previous week’s episode, which felt too much like an info dump to me. The build-up of tension was well done, the little boy was charming, the old lady was a hoot, and they let us figure out some of it on the fly. As soon as the Doctor opened the cabinet, my wife saw the doll house and knew where Rory and Amy were. Then I guessed that the real monster was the little boy. I was close there. The wooden dolls were typical Doctor Who creepy things (far better than the fat monsters), and I thought the wrap-up was a little too neat, but I liked the father and the Doctor’s promise to check back when puberty hits.
Even better was this week’s episode, the Amy-centric The Girl Who Waited. Or, perhaps, Rory’s Choice. This one gave Karen Gillan a chance to show her acting chops and she rose to the occasion. Good spotlight for Rory, too, who gets mad at the Doctor for putting him in that situation. It was a genuine love story and a tear-jerker to boot. Loved the alien landscape with its Dr. Seuss hedges, and Amy’s Rory-bot. Killing with kindness never seemed so credible. Really respected the way Amy became hardened and bitter, then softened when young Amy explained her relationship to Amy. The aging process was fairly well done. OK, so those were never the legs of a sixty-year-old. I loved the way the episode ended. Does Amy remember Amy Sr? Or is she thinking about her daughter? If the former, Rory and the Doctor are going to have some explaining to do.
And now to the finale of Torchwood.
I wasn’t sure how they were going to resolve everything in just one hour, but as it turned out they had ample time. In fact, I found all the stuff that went on once Jack and Gwen reached the Shanghai pole and Rex and Esther reached the Buenos Aires pole of the Blessing to be a little drawn out. There was an awful lot of standing around and making idle threats instead of taking action by both sides.
I liked the old Chinese lady Gwen met when she GPS’ed her way through her shop on the way to the Blessing. Limited English but they eventually connected. “Sad girl,” the woman said before handing Gwen a cup of tea. “Crazy girl.” Gwen didn’t disagree. A couple of fine exchanges between Jack and Oswald, too. Oswald recognizes that Jack’s friends are, at times, afraid of him. “I spent a lot of time in prison and I know the smile of a man who’s done terrible things.” Then Jack explains things to Oswald. “I’ve seen the human race become vast and magnificent and endless. And I wish you could see it because then you’d know how small you’ve made your life.”
Best John De Lancie line of the finale: “Charlotte. Oh, fuck.”
There’s a nice personal conflict involved in the resolution. Gwen knows that by carrying out this plan, her father will die. And many others as well. The Buenos Aires representative of the Three Familes ups the ante by shooting Esther. Abandon the plan and they can heal her. Otherwise she dies.
A good twist, too, when Jack and Gwen learn that to succeed they have to introduce Jack’s blood at both ends of the Blessing. Hmm. How’s that going to work, since the suicide bomber took care of the Argentinian batch? Well, as it turns out, Esther and Rex aren’t stupid. They transfused Jack’s blood into Rex, which explains why he’s been reacting to the Blessing, too. Rex could survive this random transfusion because of the miracle.
Of course, Oswald is in at the end. Jack turns him into a suicide bomber. “I might question your choice of weapons,” Jilly says. “You brought the world’s biggest bastard, wired him up to a bomb and showed him his soul. Good work. I feel really safe now.” As it turns out, Oswald isn’t all that disturbed by what he sees. “I guess I’m accustomed to sin.”
Loved Jack’s smile when he relived all of his lives. “Hey, not so bad.” And when it came time for him to sacrifice himself for the world, he said he’d lived long enough. Gwen won’t let him commit suicide: she volunteers to shoot him. She almost did that a few episodes back, too. Now she gets to do it. And it becomes the day that death comes back.
But the Three Families aren’t done. This was Phase 1 of their scheme to ruin the economy so they could control the banks so they could control the government so they could ultimately control people. Jilly says, “The family wants to make the world fitter, more compact, more disciplined. That sounds like salvation.” She’s definitely drunk the Kool-Aid. Having failed, the Three Families recruit Jilly again for Plan B, allowing for an eventual sequel, I guess.
Alas, poor Esther didn’t make it, and Charlotte had the gall to go to her funeral. Fortunately Rex figured her out, but took a bullet to the chest before he could nab her. When will people learn not to yell after people while they’re still out of reach? Intriguingly, the transfusion gave Rex the same power/curse that afflicts Jack: he keeps coming back from the dead. “World War II,” he says to Jack. “What the hell did you do to me?”
Final analysis: not quite as bleak as a traditional Torchwood season, and there were a number of side plots that didn’t really amount to much in the long run, but a decent season. Glad I watched.
