An Interview with Lisa Cholodenko, writer/director of The Kids Are All Right

Lisa Cholodenko isn’t a household name as writer/directors go, but that may change somewhat after her latest film, The Kids Are All Right, which was released smack in the middle of the summer, and recently came out on DVD and Blu-ray. The movie features three of our greatest actors – Annette Bening, Julianne Moore, and Mark Ruffalo – doing some of the most astute work of their careers. Expect the movie to snag some Oscar nominations for one or more of the trio, and if there’s any justice, Cholodenko and co-writer Stuart Blumberg will be nominated for Best Original Screenplay as well.

The movie is blisteringly funny while at the same time painfully honest. It tells the story of a lesbian couple (Bening and Moore) who’ve been together for 20 years and raised two children (played Mia Wasikowska and Josh Hutcherson) who are now at an age when they’re interested in meeting their sperm donor (Ruffalo). Human comedy ensues with unexpected results. The Kids Are All Right is one of the best movies of the year, and Cholodenko, whose previous films include High Art and Laurel Canyon, is a huge factor in its success. Now you might be thinking that a movie about two lesbians and their kids isn’t exactly what you’re looking for. If so, you’re exactly the person who should see this film, because it’ll change your ideas of what makes a family in this day and age. And it will make you laugh – loud and hard.

Cholodenko took some time out to talk to Bullz-Eye on the occasion of the film’s home video release and after some introductory chit-chat we discussed the lesbian right, gay porn, and new meanings for the word “tribe.”

Bullz-Eye: The Kids are All Right was like this oasis of reason in an ocean of CGI and fart jokes this past summer. Do you get frustrated when you look around see the types of movies that rake in the big bucks these days?

Lisa Cholodenko: I wish we would kind of go back to the time where there were more interesting, idiosyncratic human kinds of comedies and dramas, and not such the kind of broad and farcical, box office driven fare, but that’s where we are right now, so, I just accept it, and I’m glad that there’s space for films like this.

BE: Well, so am I. There was some fairly vocal criticism of the film from the most unlikely of places – the lesbian community. Where do you think that kind of outrage comes from and, outside of raising awareness for the film itself, does that kind of anger serve any worthwhile purpose for a thoughtful movie like this?

LC: I keep referring to them as the lesbian right (chuckling), and I think that in any kind of group there’s going to be a contingent of people that are more extreme in their views of things, and more politicized and so, I think there’s room for everybody, and I don’t have a problem with that. It’s gets a little tedious speaking to it – not to you – but when I’ve heard it in Q & A’s and stuff, but I’m sympathetic. There’ve obviously been no great representations of lesbians in cinema, or certainly there hasn’t been in a long time, and it’s kind of an old school doctrinaire, “Oh of course the lesbian goes off with a man.” But if you look at the film with any kind of care, it’s really not about that at all.

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Doctor Who: The Big Bang

And so we come to yet another season finale of the greatest science fiction series ever created. This is the recap I’ve been both anticipating and dreading writing in equal parts since first seeing “The Big Bang” some weeks ago; anticipating because of how much I adored this finale, and dreading because there’s no way I can do it justice in a mere recap. It’s not even an issue of space or time (or is it?), it’s a matter of the story, as well as the 12 episodes prior to it, being too dense to dissect thoroughly. You’ll have to forgive that this doesn’t resemble a recap proper, and I instead ramble on about other issues.

I didn’t go into “The Pandorica Opens” and “The Big Bang” expecting a whole lot, conditioned as I am on Russell T Davies’s extravagant-yet-ultimately-lightweight season finales. Don’t get me wrong, they were most always a great deal of fun, but they most always left me somewhat wanting – excepting Season Three’s Master trilogy, although I’m not sure that’s in line with popular opinion. Oh, and “The Parting of the Ways.” Wait a minute…I loved most of his finales! But I often felt as if they didn’t go as far as they could. Part of the way through the current season the Pandoricrack, as I’ve come to call it, started to annoy me, and I began not so much resenting the thread, but rather simply dismissing it – assuming that whatever it was about wouldn’t be terribly thrilling. It turned out to be not only thrilling, but strange and deep and stimulating. This was Steven Moffat’s trademark “Wibbly-Wobbly, Timey-Wimey” taken up to 11. (Maybe next year will go to 12?) This two-part finale forces viewers to go back and reexamine most of the season, and that isn’t something that can really be said for the Davies finales, which isn’t to imply they’re inferior. More on that later…

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Doctor Who: The Pandorica Opens

From the very first scene, “The Pandorica Opens” is an ominous piece of work. France, 1890. Vincent van Gogh (Tony Curran) writhes in mental torment, presumably in the last days of his life. It appears that he actually did paint another piece, and it’s somehow tied to the Doctor. After the Doctor and Amy left Vincent at the close of “Vincent and the Doctor,” the Time Lord asserted that “we definitely added to his pile of good things.” Maybe they did, but it appears they added to his pile of bad things, as well. The implication even seems to be that by introducing Vincent to his universe, the Doctor may have played an inadvertent role in the artist’s suicide. Dark stuff indeed. But what is the painting? Bam! All of a sudden we jump to London in 1941 and we’re with Winston Churchill (Ian McNeice) and Professor Bracewell (Bill Paterson), who now have the van Gogh painting. Bracewell insists that it’s Churchill’s job to deliver the art. Bam! A containment facility in 5145. River Song (Alex Kingston) is on the receiving end a phone call from Churchill meant for the Doctor. Swiftly she makes an escape thanks to the hallucinogenic lipstick. Bam! The Royal Collection, still in 5145. Presumably we’re back onboard the Starship U.K. and the van Gogh painting waits for River, having been added to the collection by Churchill 3200 years prior. Liz Ten (Sophie Okonedo) makes a reappearance. Bam! Still in 5145, River blackmails an alien dealer into giving her a vortex manipulator. Through this series of efficient sequences, it’s as if Steven Moffat is asking, “Have I got your attention now?” He most certainly does.

In the TARDIS, Amy (Karen Gillan) ponders the wedding ring, while the Doctor (Matt Smith) hatches a plan to take her to the oldest planet in the universe to see the oldest piece of writing, which is chiseled onto a cliff face. The TARDIS doors open and the translators show that the words as “Hello Sweetie.” Bam! Britain, 102 AD. The TARDIS arrives in front of a Roman army, and Amy mentions that Roman soldiers were her favorite topic in school. A soldier, whose face is smeared with lipstick, mistakes the Doctor for Caesar and takes the pair to see Cleopatra, whom River is impersonating. Finally we get to see the painting, which shares its name with this episode, and it’s a vision of the exploding TARDIS, painted exactly as we’d imagine van Gogh would paint such a vision. (Surely poster prints of this will be available for fans to hang on their walls any day now? I know I’d buy one.) Finally, seven minutes into the episode, we get the opening credits.

And thus begins what’s easily the most ambitious setup for a season finale the new series has yet done. “The Pandorica Opens” is positively cinematic in scope, direction, editing and, of course, writing. These setup installments were never this good in the Davies era, and it’s almost a shame it isn’t the season finale proper, as it would be an unbearable, months-long wait to see the resolution to everything this episode does. It would be the Doctor Who equivalent of Part One of “The Best of Both Worlds,” which ended the third season of Star Trek: The Next Generation. In fact it’s somewhat strange that Doctor Who – a show infamous for its end of episode cliffhangers – has yet to end a season on any kind of serious hang (stuff like regenerations or Donna suddenly appearing in the TARDIS doesn’t really count). The feeling I got watching “The Pandorica Opens” is the exact same feeling I got while watching the last 20 minutes of “Utopia” from Season Three – only this thing kept up that level of intensity for nearly a whole hour.

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Doctor Who: Vincent and the Doctor

If somebody asked me to make a short list of my favorite writers and/or directors working today, Richard Curtis isn’t the first person who’d leap to mind. He might not even be the fifth. Despite that, I count myself as a big, big fan of his stuff, going all the way back to Blackadder, and right up to his most recent work, Pirate Radio, a movie which didn’t do well at the box office and got some fairly tepid reviews upon release. Like Curtis’s Love Actually before it, I suspect Pirate Radio (or The Boat That Rocked, for those of you in the U.K.) will go on to become a favorite of many, many people, because it’s an utterly charming, daffy piece of cinema that doesn’t want to do much more than entertain the hell out of you for a couple hours. And that it does. When it was announced that Curtis would be writing an episode for this season of Doctor Who, naturally I was interested in the prospect, but if I’m being totally honest, I didn’t expect all that much from it, and even less so once it came out that it would be about Vincent van Gogh.

For starters, Curtis has no track record writing science-fiction or fantasy (at least not the type one thinks of when bandying about such terms), and while it seemed gratifying to have such a high profile writer onboard, nothing in his works indicated that, with only 45 minutes to play, he’d likely create anything more than an amusing romp. Perhaps it was less Curtis himself, and more the new series having a pretty bad track record when it comes to tackling historical figures, regardless of who’s writing them. In fact, they typically seem to end up…amusing romps. Probably the best was the first one, “The Unquiet Dead,” which featured Charles Dickens, and from there they’ve kind of incrementally gone downhill. I didn’t think the formula could get much worse than “The Unicorn and the Wasp” with Agatha Christie, but along came “Victory of the Daleks” with Winston Churchill to prove me wrong. So imagine my surprise upon discovering that Curtis trashed my expectations by creating a deep, lovely, tortured thing of beauty that reduced me to tears. I have really got to start trusting this guy. His name is a stamp of quality no matter what “they” say.

Vincent and the Doctor” is the new standard by which these types of stories will, or at least should be measured. I have never quite understood the point of the Doctor meeting up with famous figures from the past only so that we can laugh at them and their quaint, backwards ways, all while cramming in little in-jokes that play off of what we know about these people from today’s perspective. Curtis presents us with a fictitious riff on van Gogh that lays waste to the previous approach. His story demands that we feel for van Gogh and his problems, which in turn gives the episode a gravitas that’s lacking in stuff like “The Shakespeare Code,” in which young Will was little more than a smarmy Casanova. Curtis comes from a place that has a huge amount of respect for this artist, as well as understanding that van Gogh’s troubled history was a big part of what made him the artist he was. Curtis also wisely avoids tackling the infamous ear-cutting incident, which is something a lesser writer would’ve worked into the story by having the alien lob it off or some such nonsense.

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Doctor Who: The Hungry Earth / Cold Blood

Last week I posted a quick update saying that I would wait until this week to write about both of these episodes, but that “The Hungry Earth” was a “very good setup.” Having had a week to reflect on that, I’m not so sure that’s the case, and yet I still think “The Hungry Earth” is a very or at least reasonably good episode, but perhaps not an effective setup for “Cold Blood,” unless you enjoy bait and switch. The tone and feel of “The Hungry Earth” is vastly different than “Cold Blood” (how about from here on out I refer to the episodes as THE and CB respectively?), and a fairly inconsequential amount of the information the episode delivers has much of anything to do with the second half. Probably the single most important bit that carries over from one episode to the next is the Doctor, Amy, and Rory seeing future versions of Amy and Rory off in the distance at the very start, but we’ll get to that in due course.

THE plays like one part spooky horror story and one part scientific fiasco. It’s a clear homage not so much to the classic series Silurians tales, but other stories from the Jon Pertwee era like “Inferno” and “The Daemons.” Heck, even the earth swallowing people up takes me back to Peter Davison’s “Frontios.” One of the things that I’ve really enjoyed about this season is the conscious decision to go for more rural settings, as opposed to the urban backdrops which so dominated the Davies era. It’s given the season a much different texture, and one that’s a welcome change, and you can’t get much more rural than the countryside, an old church and graveyard, and a tiny cast. In so many ways both THE and CB are perhaps the closest to classic Doctor Who the new series has yet produced, which I’m not entirely sure is a good thing, because trying to hammer an old formula into a new box is an often dicey proposition, and I quite honestly am not sure if it works all that well here. The best episodes of the new series have been the ones that did something with Doctor Who that we’ve never seen before, and if the new series has proven anything, it’s that it’s best to keep moving forward.

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Doctor Who: Amy's Choice

Here we are, more or less mid-season, and as someone who’s recapping this block of episodes week in and out, as well as someone who’s been deconstructing this series for years now, I’m frankly a bit flummoxed by Steven Moffat’s inaugural year. It’s starting to feel as if the season is only going to make total sense once it’s over and done with. Some time ago, long before the season began, Moffat was saying that he wanted the season to be referred to as Season One, rather than Season Five, and that’s starting to make a whole lot more sense. Aside from the occasional references to the past, everything about this year feels as if some kind of reset button has been hit, and yet it remains difficult to watch without bringing the baggage of the last five years into the equation, even though I’m fairly certain Moffat would prefer that we didn’t. I mean, it’s hard to picture a character like Mickey Smith, for instance, fitting into any part of this narrative in any kind of believable manner, and yet you almost want somebody like him to turn up in a scene just to remind you that you’re still watching the same show.

I continue to want to compare this material to stuff from seasons’ past, and yet this nagging feeling keeps telling me that’s just an unfair thing to do. I wonder if Moffat’s even got some kind of grand master plan that extends beyond this block of 13 episodes? None of this means I’m not enjoying the season, just that it’s a much different kind of enjoyment than what I’ve become accustomed to during the Davies years, which began feeling predictable about three years in. Say what you will about this season, but, at least at this stage, it is most certainly not predictable. In some ways watching this season is as disorienting as the predicament in which our heroes find themselves in this week’s episode. As viewers, we’re experiencing a new reality of the series, while we keep thinking back on what we came to know prior to this season’s start. Which is the real “Doctor Who?” The Davies or the Moffat era? Both, or maybe neither? I’ll likely elaborate on all of this further during the final recap of the season.

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Doctor Who: The Vampires of Venice

I was sold on “The Vampires of Venice” (not “Vampires in Venice,” which is what I mistakenly called it at the close of last week’s recap) by its beginning – well, its second beginning, since there are two. In the first, we are in Venice of 1580 and Guido (Lucian Msamati) has brought his daughter Isabella (Alisha Bailey) before Signora Rosanna Calvierri (Helen McCrory). He wants for her to be a part of Calvierri’s school, so that she can have a better life. Since we’ve all seen plenty of Doctor Who at this point, we know this isn’t going to end well for Isabella, and since we’ve seen the previews we also know that Calvierri, as well as her son, Francesco (Alex Price), are vampires (or are they?). So there’s precious little that’s surprising or of interest about Beginning #1, although the sequence ends with a lovely little smash cut from Isabella screaming to Rory (Arthur Darvill) screaming at his stag party, which is Beginning #2, and the point at which I was won over. The two beginnings are also the jumping off points for what end up being the episode’s A and B plots, but more on that later.

Ah, the stag party! Drunken friends, cardboard cakes and the clichéd sound of “The Stripper” wafting through the proceedings. The Doctor may rescue the human race from all manner of grotesque alien creatures and life threatening situations, but this is the first time he’s rescued a human from this occasion that’s grotesque in an entirely different manner. From the moment Matt Smith pops out of the cake, he’s bloody brilliant, simply because he chooses to play it straight, in what’s a thoroughly absurd setup. Many actors would’ve mugged and tried to add to the already ridiculous situation, but Smith (or perhaps freshman Who director Jonny Campbell?) allows the scenario to happen around him, and in the process the joke becomes about five times funnier than it has any right to be. I’ve been trying to figure out for weeks now how to explain precisely what it is about this actor in this iconic role that I find so very appealing, and this scene offers up the best example yet of why this guy is the perfect Doctor for his time. Smith’s very much the anti-Tennant, which isn’t to bag on Tennant, but the series really needed this kind of change coming off Tennant’s tenure, and it’s a decision that’s shaping up to be the best one Steven Moffat made for his inaugural season.

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Doctor Who: Flesh and Stone

Now I’d had a little bit to drink – OK, a lot to drink – before I watched “Flesh and Stone,” and when it was over I swore it was the best episode of new “Who” ever. Upon sobering up, I watched it again. It was not the best episode of new “Who” ever…but it was still pretty damn great, and certainly both parts of this story combined make for one helluva sterling example of what makes the new series tick. Indeed, from now on, when I want to turn somebody on to this show, it may very well be through this two-parter.

I’ve written before about my theories of “Who” cliffhangers, which essentially boils down to “the resolve is rarely as good as the hang.” In this case that probably still holds, but Moffat came awfully close to equaling the hang by delivering a way out of an impossible situation that was surprising and fun. I’m not sure it made a whole lot of sense – the destruction of the gravity globe gave them an updraft? They must make this shit up as they go along (of course, how else do you do it?). The shifting of the camera turning around to show the group on ceiling was gorgeous and great little reveal. But the save is short-lived, and the Angels are restoring themselves via the power of the Byzantium. Everybody follows the Doctor into the ship, and once again, the camera has a lot of fun here – the shot of the Doctor standing upright as Amy looks down the hole at him.

Octavian: “Dr. Song, I’ve lost good Clerics today. Do you trust this man?”
River: “I absolutely trust him.”
Octavian: “He’s not some kind of madman then?”
River: (beat) “I absolutely trust him.”

Then the story shifts into an action flick.

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Doctor Who: The Time of Angels

After being so thoroughly underwhelmed for the past two weeks, “The Time of Angels” almost leaves me speechless. I wish I could just write, “Man, that was so fuckin’ cool” and be done with it, since anything I’ve got to say isn’t going to make it any cooler. With this episode, we’ve finally gotten to material with major promise – probably even beyond promise, but since it’s only part one of a two-parter, everything could fall apart in the second half. But man oh man, what a setup!

The opening sequence – which begins with a man tripping balls – sets the stage for a whacked-out adventure. He’s been dosed with hallucinogenic lipstick by River Song (Alex Kingston). Was the field he was standing in part of the hallucination, or was it a part of the spaceship Byzantium? Clearly River has been up to something on the ship, but we don’t find out what that is straight up. 12,000 years in the future, the Doctor (Matt Smith) is showing Amy (Karen Gillan) a museum, and pointing out all the objects he’s had in hand in saving, which is really quite funny, and vaguely romantic, but mostly just boastful and stodgy on his part, especially since what Amy really wants to see is an alien planet. They come across an ancient home box on which some Old High Gallifreyan is written – it amusingly says “Hello sweetie.” The Doctor steals the box from the museum, which leads him to a rendezvous with River right outside the Byzantium. River, on the run from powers that be, releases an airlock and flies straight through the waiting, open TARDIS doors, and lands on the Doctor. The Byzantium flies away, and River issues a single order: “Follow that ship!” It’s an exhilarating start and very James Bond-like, directed by Adam Smith with precision and thought, as is the rest of the episode.

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Doctor Who: Victory of the Daleks

“Daleks. I sometimes think those mutated misfits will terrorize the universe for the rest of time.”

Peter Davison’s Fifth Doctor, following yet another skirmish with the cockroaches from Skaro, uttered the above quote near the end of his reign as the Time Lord. If he’d known then that he’d still be dealing with them in his Eleventh incarnation, he may well have decided to forego his impending regeneration, and just gone ahead and called it a millennium. Many “Doctor Who” fans would likely have sympathized with him had he done so. Having been writing these recaps for five years now, I am exhausted by Daleks as well. What else is there for me to say about them that I haven’t already said, or hasn’t been said by countless others time and again? And yet here I am, once again backed into a corner by some angry pepperpots demanding that I find something fresh to say on the subject. Of course, if the series can’t be bothered to do so, I don’t really see why I should, either.

Surprisingly, “Victory of the Daleks,” written by Mark Gatiss, is drenched in promise at its start. Surprising not only because all ground concerning the Daleks seems so thoroughly trod at this point, but also because the last thing Gatiss wrote for the series, “The Idiot’s Lantern,” was a forgettable misfire. The idea of subservient, benevolent Daleks isn’t a new one. It was first explored in Patrick Troughton’s first story “The Power of the Daleks,” but since that serial was junked by the BBC ages ago, only the most hardcore of fans are going to care about this. For all intents and purposes the idea is new, or at least new to us. And the show has a field day with the notion for about ten minutes. Professor Bracewell’s (Bill Paterson) Ironsides are going to win the war against the Nazis, and they’ll serve you tea as well. Just the notion that the Daleks will become this story’s Inglourious Basterds is a fun one, since the Nazis are what the Daleks were based on in the first place. With “Victory of the Daleks,” on some obscure meta level, the entire concept of the Daleks has seemingly come full circle.

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Doctor Who: The Beast Below

After gushing over the season premiere last week, it pains me to find “The Beast Below” is lacking. One element of the episode I found to be a huge letdown, and one that’s critical to the story is “the children,” and I had a bad feeling about this as soon as the episode started in a classroom. Now it’s not necessarily that the children angle of the story is sloppily plotted, it’s that I’m annoyed by Steven Moffat’s ongoing insistence at using kids as pivotal elements in his stories. I realize that last week I went on and on about how magical the stuff was between the Doctor and the young Amelia Pond – and make no mistake, it was – but with “The Beast Below” I found myself instantly bored with the angle. Of the four stories he crafted during the Davies era, three of them involved children to one degree or another, and the first two stories of his own era have now featured children.

My problem with this is that even though Doctor Who is a family series, and that children are a large part of the viewing audience, that doesn’t mean children must be a component of the narrative. It becomes doubly irritating when you’ve already got a lead character who acts like a kid much of the time anyway. Somebody might argue that they’re used as audience identification figures for younger viewers, to which I say balderdash. For 26 years Doctor Who hummed along quite nicely, rarely making anyone younger than a teenager part of the storyline. Kids, I believe, are perfectly content to watch adults on the tube and in film. They don’t long to see other children involved in these types of adventures. Somebody else might argue that Moffat uses children in order to help adults find their inner child. I can actually buy that more than the former proposed argument, but it needs to be used sparingly and smartly, and hot on the heels of the young Amelia Pond is hardly sparing, and the climax of “The Beast Below,” which hinges on crying children doesn’t strike me as particularly smart.

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Doctor Who: The Eleventh Hour

It feels like it’s been forever since Steven Moffat was announced as the new showrunner and Matt Smith as the new Doctor. It hasn’t been, of course, but well over a year in both cases is nothing to sneeze at. For some fans, the anticipation has been damn near excruciating. Another very vocal minority had little interest in the continuing adventures of the Time Lord without David Tennant steering the TARDIS. And yet another group – perhaps the most important, due simply to the fact that they comprise a huge segment of the viewing audience – were understandably nervous that a new Doctor alongside a new head honcho might lead to a series that was somehow lesser than what had been seen over the past five years.

I’d like to believe that everybody was as utterly intoxicated by “The Eleventh Hour” as I was, but that’s probably wishing for too much. On the other hand, I can’t really see that it offered up anything that would possibly alienate audiences – not even in the form of the new Doctor, who’s not such a drastic departure from the antics of Tennant so as to drive viewers away. Indeed, the differences between Eccleston and Tennant are far more tangible than the divide between Tennant and Smith. All that said, Smith definitely has something of his own going on, and whatever that “something” is will most certainly grow as the season progresses. Both Eccleston and Tennant each took about a half season to find their Time Lord groove; Smith found it by the end of his first episode. I was wholly won over by him upon his delivery of “I am definitely a mad man with a box,” which was followed by an uneasy cackle that seems to imply this Doctor is not quite as right in the head as his recent predecessors.

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Doctor Who: The End of Time Part Two

Last week, when writing about the first part of the Tennant/Davies swansong, I talked about not making any predictions, as well as the possibility of expectations not being met. On the predictions front, I’m glad I didn’t bother (although one of the few that I did make may actually be true – more on that in a bit), because there’s really no way I could have predicted the bizarre manner in which this tale concluded. The narrative meat of this episode – the stuff involving the Time Lords, Gallifrey and the Master – was quite frankly difficult to wade through on the first viewing; a second viewing alleviated some of that, and yet I’m still not convinced it all makes perfect sense. Perhaps I’m looking at it too deeply, and wanting more than there is?

I’d also be lying if I said I went into this episode without any expectations – I mean, how can you not? Many, if not most of them weren’t met, although there were plenty of other treats on display that made up for that. Indeed, this episode was hell bent on subverting expectations. “The End of Time” as a whole, which is how it should be judged, is a landmark slice of Doctor Who, even though the writing isn’t as tight as the intricate standard set by “The Waters of Mars.” Oh well – based on previous finales, I didn’t really expect it to be, and on that level it can’t be called a letdown. It’s so steeped in the mythology of Davies’ vision of Who, that it’s difficult to imagine it could possibly work as a piece of standalone drama for anyone unfamiliar with the past five years of the series. But that also can’t be a criticism, since what it really is is a jagged love letter to everyone who’s been paying attention during that time. Davies really backed himself into a corner with this one, because “Journey’s End” very much felt like the end of the era, only it wasn’t. So this proper ending, which feels more like a coda or an afterward, had to be a horse of a different color, and it most certainly was.

The episode wastes no time addressing the final moments of “Part One” by diving straight into the Gallifrey situation. Before going further, let me just say how incredibly fucking cool it was to have James Bond playing the Time Lord President. If someone had told me 20 years ago that Timothy Dalton would someday be playing such a role on Doctor Who I’d have thought them bonkers. Sure, it’s not as if Sean Connery is gracing the screen, but anyone who really appreciates the Bond franchise knows Dalton got a bum deal, and that both of his outings were pretty damn good entries. Anyone who appreciates both Bond and Who will also acknowledge how the two concepts – which, aside from their inherent Britishness, really only have the changing of lead actors in common – have worked oddly parallel to one another over the past 40 some-odd years. Dalton is terrifying here, especially for anyone who doesn’t know the history of the classic series, and expects the Time Lords to be the good guys. Even as an old school fan, it was shocking to see the Time Lords as they’re presented here, but the more I thought about it, the more it was perfect and right. These guys – even from their very first outing, “The War Games” – were bad news. It’s just that they were so passive in their assholedom before; here they’re proactively destructive. Even though it’s never stated in the episode, the old Time Lord decree of “non-intervention” was obviously filed into 13 once their existence was threatened. And then there’s the Deus ex glove! Oh, how I loved and hated that stupid glove! (Maybe it’s a relative of the glove from Torchwood?) My teenager hilariously dubbed it “The Glove of Time.” He started making up dialogue for Dalton: “I am endowed with The Glove of Time!” and “The Glove of Time will smite you!” We got, and will continue to get, a lot of mileage out of that silly glove.

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Doctor Who: The End of Time Part One

Before moving on to the actual write-up, let’s take a moment to offer some high praise to BBC America for showing this episode a day after it first screened in the U.K. A day! For the first time on American TV, we aren’t seeing the premiere of a Doctor Who Christmas special when it’s warm outside, and the Christmas-themed portions of the story don’t seem hopelessly out of place. Back when I wrote up “Journey’s End,” I pleaded with Syfy to show the various David Tennant specials in a timely manner, so that audiences wouldn’t be forced to go elsewhere to get their Who fix or, even worse, get bored and forget about the show altogether. Good thing Syfy no longer has first-run rights here in the States, because I highly doubt they would’ve made the same programming move that BBC America made. Further, BBC America is committed (at least for the time being) to showing the episodes uncut, which is just as if not more important. Keep it up BBCA, and you’ll keep building a devoted audience. Heck, even a week or two after the U.K. premieres would be more than acceptable in my book.

It’s always difficult to write about the first half of a two-part finale, and never more so than in this case. This episode is all over the place in tone, and yet hangs together quite nicely, although it took me two viewings to realize the latter. Yet whatever one might think about “The End of Time Part One,” there’s no denying that the bigger picture has yet to be seen, and what Russell T. Davies unveiled in this hour is only a setup for the real finale. About the first 15 minutes of this thing just zoom by, setting up one aspect of the story after another. In fact, there are so many elements that are set up throughout the hour that one wonders how they can all be addressed in the finale proper.

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Doctor Who: The Waters of Mars

When it was first announced that Doctor Who was taking a break from normal seasons in 2009, I thought, “I can handle that – not a big deal.” After all, aside from the Fox TV movie with Paul McGann in 1996, I’d lived without new televised Who for 16 years before the show came back in ’05. Each new season since then has been like a little gift. Surely one year with “only” four specials would be a breeze? As 2009 droned on, however, it seemed an interminably long wait for new outings of the series, and it didn’t help matters that the one outing we did get – “Planet of the Dead” – was a subpar piece of storytelling at best. The other three specials are all being unveiled on BBC America in the last weeks of the year (actually, the big finale will play on the second day of 2010!). Anyway, this was my roundabout way of illustrating how much I’ve come to take the new series for granted, and thankfully “The Waters of Mars” is as strong a slice of Who as just about anything the series has done up to this point. It is, in fact, everything “Planet of the Dead” wasn’t, which may very well have been the point.

The Doctor (David Tennant), still traveling alone, lands on Mars in the year 2059. He trudges across the desolate, red landscape and bumps into a robot, called Gadget, that takes him to its leader on Bowie Base One, which is a clever enough joke – although one that’s a bit old hat for anyone who’s basked in the wonder that is Life on Mars, which coincidentally (or not) starred John Simm, who we’ll be seeing more of next week. Inside the base, the Time Lord meets the crew, led by Captain Adelaide Brooke (Lindsay Duncan), and quickly realizes who they are, and is as awestruck as any fanboy we’ve ever seen. Bowie Base One holds humanity’s first group of colonists on Mars, only the Doctor knows they all mysteriously died on the 21st of November, 2059. Guess what the date is? He quickly realizes that he should go, as this is an instance where he shouldn’t meddle with time. He sees it as a fixed point in the universe, and, as he explains later in the episode, “What happens here must always happen.” But events conspire to prevent his exit, and before long the crew begins succumbing to what ends up being a virus – it transforms them into hideous, zombie-type creatures, with cracked faces and the ability to use water as a deadly weapon. Only Doctor Who can find an inventive, frightening way to use water as a killer, and its ideas such as this that make the show the unique concept it is.

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Nip/Tuck: Season Five, Part Two

The press release for this set finishes up with two sentences: “And Liz says ‘I do’ to the last person you’d imagine. Time to stretch your imagination, fans.” When even the marketing department can no longer take a show seriously, it must be Nip/Tuck. As a fan since day one, I’m past resenting the show for failing to be as good as it once was, and have moved on to embracing Nip/Tuck for the freakshow it’s become. How freaky you ask? Well, in one episode, when Dr. Troy (Julian McMahon) refuses to give a woman an unnecessary mastectomy, she performs the surgery on herself – in the lobby of McNamara/Troy – with an electric carving knife.

Never a show to be too far behind the times, another installment features a pair of lovers who’ve taken their vampiric bloodlust a bit too far. You’ve seen these folks at goth clubs, I’m sure, but have secretly hoped it was all an act. Nip/Tuck is here to show you that the freakshow never ends, and that people do indeed partake in mutual bloodsucking. Surely the most outrageous display of hedonistic debasement comes in the form of the guy who likes to fuck furniture. If I hadn’t been laughing so hard, I might have turned away. What’s most noteworthy about this block of episodes, is that there isn’t a villain in the traditional Nip/Tuck sense – no Carver, or Escobar – although Eden (AnnaLynne McCord) does show up a couple times to fan a few flames.

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The Last House on the Left

It used to be said that there were only two things you could count on in this life: death and taxes. We should probably go ahead and add remakes to the list. They’ve become a fact of life – something we cannot escape, no matter how hard we try and how much we complain. They just simply are. Great. Now that we’ve accepted that remakes are going to be a big part of moviegoing culture for the foreseeable future, we can get down to the business of figuring out which ones are good and which ones are not. Surprisingly, The Last House on the Left, a remake of Wes Craven’s 1972 debut, is actually one of the good ones. Not great, mind you, but good – especially when one considers the source material was flawed to begin with. The new movie, on which Craven has a producer credit, manages to actually outclass the original on numerous levels, although there are still a couple areas of the old movie (which was produced on a shoestring budget) that are more interesting than what’s presented here.

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And click here to read a short review of Wes Craven's 1972 version of The Last House on the Left at Premium Hollywood.

Land of the Lost - Season Three: Enik the Dick

The third and final season of Land of the Lost is often considered the ugly, misshapen, redheaded bastard stepchild of the series. Indeed, if the 13 episodes of which it consists were the only Land of the Lost ever created, the show would have been long since forgotten. But it’s worth mentioning that the initial impetus for doing this three part retrospective came from the desire to come to the defense of Season Three, and try to give a little bit of respect to the episodes that are routinely shunned even by the people who display their love of this show as a badge of honor.

Season Three again saw shifts in the production team, and even more noticeably, in front of the camera. As I understand it, Spencer Milligan couldn’t reach an amicable contract agreement and so he abruptly left the show. With his departure came new lyrics for the opening credits:

Will and Holly Marshall

As the earth beneath them trembled

Lost their father through the door of time

Uncle Jack went searching

And found those kids at last

Looking for a way to escape

From the Land of the Lost

Uncle Jack replaced Ranger Rick, and he was played by Ron Harper, best known to genre fans as astronaut Alan Virdon in the TV series incarnation of Planet of the Apes. He was a true uncle, rather than a father – instead of being preachy and bestowing wisdom, he was more often than not a man of action; a guy trying to get things done. I like Ron Harper, and if there’s a reason I’ve got some love for Season Three, much of it’s due to his presence. Would Spencer Milligan’s Rick have been as believable in many of these situations? Likely not. He’d accrued too much info during his time in the Land for these stories to work. In contrast, Uncle Jack was experiencing this madness through fresh eyes, and so he was more accepting.

Behind the scenes, Jon Kubichan and Sam Roeca took over as producer and story editor respectively, and between the two of them, they scripted the majority of the season. Their vision of the series was quite the departure from the two seasons that came before. Nearly everything - including the iconic elements such as the Sleestak, the Pakuni and the ubiquitous dinosaurs - got a major overhaul.

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Land of the Lost - Season Two: "Mysterious Forces"

Before jumping into Season Two, allow me to discuss the Land of the Lost movie for a bit. As you might glean, I’m a pretty hardcore fan of this show. Yes, believe it or not, we do exist; Land of the Lost has a small, but fervent cult following. The last thing fans of this series ever wanted to see was a comedy send-up of the premise. No, most fans had minor dreams of someday seeing a big-budget, sci-fi movie created by people that took the concept as seriously as David Gerrold did back in the day. But, alas, that did not happen, and instead we’re getting a movie that’s likely closer in tone to some of the other Krofft properties, rather than the one it’s actually based on.

All that said, any amount of money that can be made by this movie must be positive for Land of the Lost as a brand name, and if the movie does well, you never know what the future might hold. Personally, I’d like to see the movie do so well that somebody decides to greenlight a new version of the series for Sci Fi, which would be the obvious network for it to end up on (indeed, Sci Fi has even been running Land of the Lost marathons as of late). I mean, really, how many steps away from Primeval - an enormous success for ITV in England, as well as here in the States on BBC America - is a serious version of this concept? So if you’re a fan of the series, don’t be so quick to skip the movie, simply because it isn’t what you envisioned. Grab some friends and a few beers and head out to the movie theatre this weekend, because the future of Land of the Lost probably rests in the obnoxious antics of Will Ferrell. (That is, admittedly, a sentence I never in my life thought I’d have to type.)

Now back to your regularly scheduled breakdown of Season Two of Land of the Lost…

David Gerrold left the series after the first season, and so a new story editor was hired in the form of Dick Morgan, who’d written such Season One offerings as “Album” and “Follow That Dinosaur.” Clearly Morgan had a lot of respect for what Gerrold had laid down, but it seems that he perhaps didn’t have a big vision of his own. (In all fairness, this is an unfair supposition on my part; as with any TV show there are many fingers in the pie, and who’s to say who’s to blame?) Part of the problem with Season Two is that it frequently tries to expand on ideas from the first season, often without success. This isn’t to say that the season isn’t any good; in fact, you’ve got to be a bit obsessive about the show in order to notice a big difference from the first season…but, then again, that’s why I’m here sharing my insights with anyone who cares to listen.

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Land of the Lost - Season One: "It's Not Just for Kids Anymore"

If there’s one thing the upcoming Land of the Lost movie can be counted on to do, it’s generate some long overdue interest in the classic Sid and Marty Krofft series upon which it’s based. Viewers of the new film, starring Will Ferrell, will largely be made up of two groups: those who watched the show back in the seventies, and those who have no idea the movie is even based on a TV show. With a sweet new “Complete Series” box set currently in stores, there’s no better time than now to look back at the show that began scarring many a young psyche when it was unveiled in 1974.

The Kroffts unleashed all manner of trippy live action television fare on Saturday morning viewers back in the ‘70s, but the majority of their output was campy and comical. Land of the Lost really stood apart from most of their other productions with its far more serious themes and dramatic approach. The first season of Land of the Lost is often times seriously thought-provoking science fiction, wrapped around a fair amount of fatherly advice, sibling friction, and heaping helpings of action & adventure and thrills & chills. Rick Marshall (Spencer Milligan) and his teenage children Will (Wesley Eure) and Holly (Kathy Coleman) are, as the famous theme song goes, on a routine expedition when they go over a waterfall and end up in a strange place populated by dinosaurs, monkey people, and a slew of lizard men that gave a generation of kids nightmares that lasted for years.

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