Review: ‘[[[Doctor Who A Christmas Carol]]]’
If a television series lasts long enough, it will eventually get around to taking their turn at retelling Charles Dickens’ [[[A Christmas Carol]]] and after fifty years, it was finally the Doctor’s turn. For its annual Christmas special, Doctor Who offered up a strong hour’s entertainment despite the overly familiar premise. Unlike most other versions, this time the Doctor freely admits his inspiration and has great fun with it.
Scrooge in this case is Kazran Sardick (Michael Gambon), an elderly man on a world where his family has controlled the electrically-charged clouds that perpetually envelope the world. Using machinery that only responds to his touch, Sardick follows in his father’s footsteps, controlling the clouds and inhibiting the lives of the people he considers beneath him. In a typically odd Doctor touch, the electricity coursing through the air also allows the planet’s fish to fly through the air.
All of this becomes apparent when the spaceliner carrying newlywed Amy (Karen Gillan) and Rory (Arthur Darvill) gets caught up in an electric discharge and need to be rescued by the Doctor (Matthew Smith) before the vessel crashes into the planet killed all 4003 passengers and crew.
When Sardick refuses to help, the Doctor visits the man’s past to explore how he grew so sour and in the process alters reality. A giant Shark has become their nemesis and can only be calmed by the singing of Abigail, who resides in frozen storage because her family owes Sardick money. She is promised that for every Christmas Eve Sardick and the Doctor will visit, which happens every year, slowly turning the curmudgeon into a softie. Welsh singer Katherine Jenkins makes her acting debut as Abigail and while her singing is heavenly, the lyrics leave something to be desired.
Steven Moffat has written a touching story mixed with the usual glib commentary from the Doctor so you laugh and your feel the tears well up every now and then. Gambon treads a fine line as Sardick and does a nice job while Amy and Rory are sadly left with far too little to do. Overall, though, the story is very entertaining and is a strong holiday entry. Fans seem to have been taken with Smith as the new Doctor as the 2010 special’s ratings rose over David Tennant’s final special.
The nice thing about the home video release, out this week, is that it is the complete and uncut BBC version as opposed to the BBC American retransmission. As has become custom, we also get the behind-the scenes [[[Doctor Who Confidential]]] and the annual concert,[[[ Doctor Who at the Proms]]]. I’ve come to greatly enjoy the Proms broadcasts because they are artfully presented and we get to focus on the strong music the series normally receives.
And we will have to make do with this before the first half of Smith’s second season arrives in the spring.
How far would you go for a sibling? A lot of drama has been produced of late showing organ transplants and similar sacrifices but while major events, are relatively short-term activities. Imaging spending eighteen years working to help a brother in jail. [[[Conviction]]], a movie starring Hilary Swank and Sam Rockwell as the siblings, takes an amazing true story and turns it into a compelling drama.
Movies and television shows have been created after something has caught the public’s imaginations be it a Twitter feed, a commercial, or a persona. Perhaps the best of the lot, though, is [[[Machete]]], inspired by a fake movie trailer. The film, now out on DVD from 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, came about when director Robert Rodríguez fashioned a B-film trailer as part of [[[Grindhouse]]], the homage to trashy films of the past, made with Quentin Tarantino. Machete, with Danny Trejo in the lead, captured imaginations so Rodriguez and his brother Alvaro wrote a film to do the trailer justice.
When a show deviates too far from the source material, its fate is in the hands of the writing staff who can take the raw elements and run with them or spin their wheels and grind the freshness out of the subject matter. Much as [[[Smallville]]] ran out of steam six seasons back, its spiritual successor, the BBC’s [[[Merlin]]], quickly lost its way in the first season. The second season, out on DVD now from BBC Video, takes great legendary figures and turns them into maudlin soap characters. When the first season came to America, NBC tried it out and the low ratings relegated season two to SyFy where the mediocre can rule.
The original [[[Wall Street]]] was a reflection of the times, showing how enticing working in the financial sector can be and how the huge sums of money involved can blind people to depths they will sink to chase it. It was a story about seduction and about family. That it came out when the markets were in the headlines gave it additional strength coupled with Michael Dogulas’ winning performance as Gordon Gecko. His “Greed is Good” was the most overused catchphrase in America until “Show me the Money.”
The final chapter in The Good Neighbors trilogy brings to a close the story of Rue Silver, a somewhat typical young adult fantasy heroine. She discovers that she is actually a human/faerie hybrid destined to be heir to the faerie throne. Of course, the faerie in general don’t like the humans and there’s a movement at foot that endangers Rue’s friends and neighbors. She’s trapped between opposing forces that have been moving ever closer to a final conflict.
Its always a challenge when reading the second part of anything without knowledge of the first. Its also a good test of the creators to see if they’ve done their job of informing readers, new and old, of their characters and world. In the case of the French graphic novel [[[Miss pas touche 2: Du sang sur les mains]]], the creators failed.
Walt Disney saw possibilities where others did not. He turned Mickey Mouse into an American icon and launched a bustling animation business, but wasn’t satisfied with his amusing shorts. Instead, he wanted more and defied the critics who thought a full-length animated feature would hurt viewers’ eyes and test their patience.[[[Snow White]]] proved them wrong. Emboldened, Disney spent the 1930s experimenting with animation in ways none of his peers tried. He adapted classics and he gave us indelible characters and song. He even tried for Art with a capital ‘A’.
People have been adapting works of art since time immemorial adjusting the details for the era and culture. There appear to be countless versions of what happens when a sorcerer leaves his apprentice alone to complete his chores. This led to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1797 ballad, which was adapted into a symphonic poem by Paul Dukas in 1890. In the 1940s Walt Disney used both as an inspiration for the most beloved sequence in [[[Fantasia]]], as Mickey Mouse plays the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. These days, with everything from the Disney vaults ripe for reinterpretation, it was inevitable that someone would turn this enchanting sequence into an over-the-top spectacle.
Reading the reviews about previous editions of James Kochalka’s Superf*ckers I was thinking this was going to be an amazing satire of the super-hero genre, poking fun at teams from the Justice Society of America to the Thunderbolts. Over the years, Kochalka had been doling out one issue at a time, starting with Superf*ckers #271 in 2005 and released a fourth issue in 2007. Top Shelf has collected the four issues with the previously unpublished [[[Jack Krak #1]]] in a new collection released earlier this year.
