This has nothing to do with the column, but holy shit do I want to see Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist. Anything that makes critics freak out this way has got to be something special. Here’s the second trailer -

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And here’s a link to the latest Television of the Weak at The Factual Opinion, where I write about the episode of The Mighty Boosh that most resembles Von Trier’s Antichrist (hint – talking fox).

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On the recommendation of both Bot’Swanna Beast of the Mindless Ones and David Allison, I watched the Channel 4 series Red Riding, based on David Peace’s Red Riding quartet of novels. The way it’s presented is kind of new – three 2hr movies all by different directors and with completely different  styles and filming techniques. 1974 was shot on 16mm, 1980 was shot on 35mm, and 1983 was shot on Redone digital – the technique really sticks out because each of them are all intent on distancing you from the story. The old filmstocks do it to a time and place, (actually the 35mm seemed a lot more of-its-time and ramshackle compared to the 16)  but the digital puts this gorgeous haze and fade to it – there’s too much light without glare, everything is so blown out. It’s an alienating device in a very subtle manner, and just to analyze the framing without getting into the story, that’s already something kind interesting. Because so much of Red Riding is texture, it’s about minor details – some are period and place like the suits and the haircuts – but some of it is just the weird way a camera drifts across a field or the nasty, unflinching way interrogation-room policies are shot.The shifting POV is probably it’s best attribute – the flat aesthetic of 1980 goes hand in hand with Paddy Consindine’s tightly-strung performance, the blurry impressionistic of 1974 with it’s telephone cords fading into the distance and long zooms reflect the precariousness of Eddie and Paula Garland find their way into, and the weirdly open washed out HD works perfectly for the flashback-laden and non-pov (tetherlessnes) of1983.

The story is a long-played series of awful crimes and a society that can’t deal with them – a series of murders and mutilations of young girls and the Yorkshire Ripper murders. The three segments all concern themselves with men with different positions concerning the law but all are outsiders returning to “The North” and flailing against a community that wants trouble quieted down so they can live their lives and make some money. It’s good, old-fashioned noir – down to the disabled character standing in for all the fucked up morality of everyone else. Everyone is doomed, in the nasty brutal way that even when someone finally does something right it’s after so much terrible shit that it’s not even close to breaking even.

The comparison that’s popped up often is with the Wire, or as Duncan put more precisely “Only thing we [the UK] could conceivably stand beside The Wire without being laughed out of town.” It works, simply on a sophistication level. The thing it rang closest to on my watch was David Fincher’s Zodiac – particularly with the way the perspective shifts between a reporter, a detective, and a lawyer – but also in it’s insistence on leaving these stories unresolved. The use of music as well – never hitting the Scorsese/Anderson/Tarantino “holy fuck that image couldn’t exist without this music” mark, a lot more subtle – like the way that Donovan singing over a murder in Zodiac freezes the moment without ever taking you out of the movie – all of Red Riding is like that, especially the moments with Mark Addy just playing music to distract himself. Longstanding psychological effects completely ruining young men’s lives – that’s here as well, only it’s not the guy from Always Sunny In Philadelphia so you can take it seriously.

Like all good filmmaking, the whole thing rests on casting – and the casting here is wall-to-wall great actors. Sean Bean as a kind of paunchy fascist by way of jocky talk show host, David Morrisey as a reticent cop who’s in deeper than he’d like to admit, Mark Addy turning in a hell of a dramatic performance, Paddy Consindine maintaining his street cred by playing restrained better than most, Sean Harris playing an unhinged maniac to scary accuracy. And of course Rebeca Hall. I’d like to say this to the world – if you put Rebecca Hall in your fucking movie, I am going to watch it. Rebecca Hall is the Jason Statham of good acting. She is fucking amazing,  The only weak link in the the entire production is Andrew Garfield’s Eddie Dunford. Garfield is the only actor who seems like he’s on television, and he’s probably the only actor here who isn’t at the top of his game – probably because he looks 15.

It’s very much a procedural, in that it’s concerned with methodically following through the events that follow murder – the inciting incidents are always secondary to their effects on people. Naoki Urasawa’s Pluto has a similar approach – at least in it’s somber tone and the lingering guilt that hovers over his characters.Pluto is essentially “ultimate Astro Boy” which I know sounds like a terrible idea. In execution, this huge expansion of “The Greatest Robot on Earth” is the kind of revision that you always wish for but rarely receive. The biggest change here is that instead of an old-school punch-em-up, the whole series is recast as a serial killer mystery. Actually, it’s less of a serial killer mystery than a novelistic science fiction noir. Astro Boy is relegated to a minor character, but there’s no real protagonists here – it’s like Altman directed a mecha story. The cast is huge, the fantastic elements all have a physicality to them that grounds it – it’s not really adventure fiction in any way so much as it is traditional scifi. The tech is played as a fact of life, and all the flourishes are really just set dressing for a story about what it is to be human, and the real meaning of technology with the power to decimate entire countries. It’s the kind of sf that I’ve always loved – Urasawa seems to come down on the side of the tech being kind of meaningless unless it means something or it looks amazing.

side-by-side comparison via Xaivier Guibert

It’s also noir in the best sense – most of the large cast is attempting to put either what they saw or what they did in the 49th Central Asian Conflict behind them. It’s Tezuka’s original story by way of post-traumatic stress, and the characters who didn’t participate in the war (which is played out as essentially the Iraqi Invasion) are coping with their own personal horror. There’s a somber tone to the books, and there’s some haunting images – the blurred frame of a body leaping between two buildings, a battered and decaying robot criminal permanently run through, a mutilated body strung between two trees, a basement full of robot corpses, streams of smoke descending from the sky, Mont Blanc sitting alone in the middle of a battlefield, a massive mech (Bora?) rising from the middle of a sandstorm, a sea of cockroaches escaping from a man’s mouth. Urasawa is definitely more drama-oriented than Red Riding. It’s pacing is intentionally episodic, Gesicht’s investigation is suddenly supplanted with several chapters concerning the retired North No. 02 and his final days spent with a film composer – it’s the kind of move you have to respect. Even when diverting from the a-plot for such a long chunk the book remains gripping. Maybe it’s just because I’m really not as experienced in manga, maybe the pacing isn’t something special. Beyond that I really love that in a story where robots essentially stand in for WMDs, that the entire cast is made out of people. That’s where the Altman comparison comes in. While Urasawa is a lot more polished, it’s a book about people. Even Astro Boy is presented as a child, possibly a troubled child who’s scared to talk about the war, but he’s enthusiastic and intelligent. He’s a child character that you couldn’t level Guillermo Del Toro’s criticism to – he’s a real child not a cutesy plothammer. Brando is an arrogant family man, but he’s not cartoonishly arrogant. Brau 1689, even though he’s played as the Hannibal Lecter of robots, is scary because Gesicht can’t understand what he’s done. Even Pluto, when we finally meet him in a disembodied state he’s never played as the unknowable evil that you expect. The thid volume is the most quit of the three so far,and some of it feels like elements being positioned in order to bounce off each other in further volumes – but I’d say it’s my favorite of the set so far. The theme introduced with the composer in vol. 1 of childhood trauma echoing in broken adults – only this time show a member of a KKK-style anti robot organization. There’s a dark core to Pluto – a futility to all the action and violence, and now with the sympathetic flashback to a hate monger (even for something as fake as robots)  – we can see that Urasawa is interested in behavior as much as plot manuevering. It’s masterful stuff, as you’ve probably heard from someone more authoratative than my unschooled ass. You should read it.

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Next week – maybe that Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill thing that came out a while ago. Or not.  maybe more tv, as it seems that all I do is watch and talk about television. And I know, I should read Monster but it’s like 40 volumes and I could barely afford to go see a matinee of Star Trek. I’ll read that shit when I’m wealthy.