House - Watch This Show!

If you haven't seen Hugh Laurie as Dr Gregory House, and I still see George from Blackadder whenever I do, you really have to see this fantastic TV series.

The acerbic wit of the writing, matched by the cleverness of the directing, make this for incredible TV drama.

It is great to see more and more high class powerful actors going to TV in this day and age. It really allows them to craft and create wonderful characters that develop and evolve over time. You only have to look at The West Wing, The Sopranos and Arrested Development to see how well it works. Of course, Arrested Development is being cancelled, and I can't see another series of The West Wing next year, but hey, there's always reality TV.

A good film marathon

Sat down with a friend the other night and watched a couple of great films.

TV writer Paul Haggis's Crash is a fantastic early directorial outing. About the lives of a number of Las Angeles residents and how they each interact with each other over one day. This is a film about racism in America, and could at times feel like it's slipping into cliche, but I felt engaged throughout by his beautiful direction and clever writing. All of the characters are in some way un-redeemable, and yet they all redeem themselves in some way. A film that continued to surprise me throughout, wanting me to hate and then realising that the emotion is only self-destructive. As Australians we can look at a film like this and dismiss it as American racism and we don't experience stuff like that here, but to do so is dangerously naive. There's a little bit of racism in all of us, and we all have within us the potential to hurt and to heal. A wonderful film highly recommended.

Zach Braff's directorial and writing debut is a wonderfully imagined film called Garden State. Great performances by the three leads and wonderful support from Ian Holm, made for an incredibly engaging piece of cinema. I saw this at the cinemas when it came out last year, but watched it again with Blackers as he hadn't seen it before. I loved it then and still do now. My favourite thing is the way Braff builds his story. As his main character comes out of his anti-depressant numbness so does the film. Set off by a wonderful soundtrack, this is a special film about roots and friendship and how feeling pain is as important as feeling love.

So hire these couple of films. You won't regret it.

Harry's Back...

The fourth installment of JK Rowling's immensely popular books is out at cinemas now and I went and saw it with Hayley the other day.

I came out fairly disappointed. Goblet of Fire was my favourite books of the series so far, the two following it didn't do a great deal for me, and for me the film didn't manage to emulate the things which I enjoyed in the book. My favourite thing about the novel was how she moved the narrative away from Harry a little bit more and fleshed out other characters. Sadly, most of this was cut in the film, and so we got another Harry-centric outing.

My biggest problem with this is that the more we get to know Harry, the more I find him self-centered and annoying as a character. I understand that the book is a marathon and if they needed to cut large parts of the the first three books when they made those films, this one was going to suffer even more. But for a director that is all about characterisation, I didn't get the sense of involvement that I wanted. At the end when one of the characters dies, I got no sense of mourning or loss, because I simply didn't have any personal involvement with him. Newell hadn't let us get to know the character, so asking me to feel something was asking a bit much. Let alone asking me to believe that Harry felt something when he'd said barely 5 lines to him all film.

On the plus side the visuals remain beautifully created, and the world seems a little bit more deep in conception now.

Still, you can make something as pretty as you want, but it don't make it better.