Drop Everything, I'm Here to Fix Your Love Life (If You Fancy Dudes): The Jane Shakespeare Guide to Dating Fictional Men

Valentines Day. Boom. Just dropping that bombshell out there for all of you sad, lonely people too repulsive to find another warm body willing to let you lean against it for the 24 hours it takes not to feel like the unicorn that couldn't find its moving buddy for the Ark. And if you're a couple, go ahead and congratulate yourself on being candidates for contributing to the earth's overcrowding problem, and if you're not planning on having children any time soon, then everyone probably hates you two together anyway and you have to reasonably assess whether you can withstand that kind of debilitating social pressure.

Gosh, Valentine's Day. You thought it was over (this post is so late in the day, I might as well say it's in honour of next Valentine's Day) but I'm raking up those painful memories again because I want you all to feel shame about your life choices.

Not me though, because my life choices are and have always been beyond question or reproach. And you are all very lucky, because I am about to share with you one of those life choices. I was like you once. Lonely. Pathetic. Unable to hold down a good job and a stable relationship at the same time because being a fierce career-driven lady is hard work.* But then I found a light. A path. I started only fancying men who were fictional.

I know what you're thinking. Fucking genius.

A fictional man has never, let us say, forgotten a birthday or, to give another random example that has definitely never happened to me, squeezed your thigh and declared you to be “not that fat”. A fictional man has never seen you walk into a room visibly upset, ask if you're ok, then return to playing iPhone Scrabble when you say, “Sort of, I guess” in a tone that conveys broadly the opposite and when you point this out offers the rebuttal "You said you were fine".

Yes, fictional men have the decided advantage of being fictional. But wait. There are rules to this thing. You can't just make them do whatever you want heedless of the universe from whence they came and inherent traits with which they were gifted.** You must be accepting of your fictional man's flaws. You must love them because of their flaws, not in spite of them. Detractors of the Fictional Man System may say that this is akin to 'real life' relationships, that one must work also at relationships with actual breathing people, but to them I say shut up and you smell. My way is both quicker and easier and therefore correct.

It's important to know the territory, is what I'm saying. Each fictional man carries their own baggage with them. To help you on the first steps to a stress-free world of romance and talking to yourself on public transport, here are the pros and cons of ten of the best:

The Top Ten Most Eligible Fictional Males (from literature)***

A/N: To anyone shouting for Rochester or Heathcliffe: was your favourite film as a child Beauty and the Beast?

10) Satan (Paradise Lost, John Milton).

Why? Everyone loves a rebel with a cause, not least Jonnie Milton himself, who at several points of Paradise Lost clearly panics and throws in some shit about original sin and being the root of all the evil in the world to throw off any delicate female brains that may have been affected by this shape-shifting orator with cunning oral skills. Satan is the thinking ladies' crumpet. He ponders. He broods. Also, have you read the description of Adam and Eve's grown-up make-out fun post-apple? Good times, courtesy of Satan.

Why not? Approximately halfway through the poem, Milton realises everyone's rooting for the fallen angel and turns him into an underwhelming snake-thing. (Calm down, Freudians.) Also there's some minor stuff about raping his daughter Sin to produce his son/grandson Death and Death then raping his mother to produce hell-hounds that live inside her womb. But everyone has baggage.

9) Draco Malfoy (Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling).

Why? Blond. Mainly, blond. And again, blond. Probably more of a fling than anything else but if anyone in Hogwarts is making the most of their common room by installing a hot tub and hiring house elves as the wizarding equivalent of monkey butlers, it is the Slytherins. Malfoy also comes equipped with severe daddy issues, which makes him a shoo in for this list (to new readers, I apologise; to regular readers, you really should just expect this by now). Is willing to commit murder for the sake of family honour or some bullshit like that so presumably easy to manipulate. (What?) Also, blond.

Why not? Cries in bathrooms. Requires henchmen as living security blanket. Daddy issues go hand in hand with definite unresolved Oedipal yearnings: would probably still have been breastfeeding at an uncomfortably late age.

8) Eros (Greek mythology).

Why? Quite literally a love god. Forget all those fluffy little Cupids, before the Romans came along and enacted their subtle foreign policy of killing everything and stealing what was left, the Greek god Eros was all wings and abs.  And if you get bored, he has a twin brother called Anteros who avenges slighted lovers and is the deity actually portrayed in statue form at Piccadilly Circus (Eros has been getting the credit for over a hundred years now, it's time to set the record straight.  OPEN YOUR EYES.  SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE.)

Why not? Lack of experience – in the whole of Greek mythology, is only shown getting it on once, despite being aforementioned God of Love. Will also insist on having the lights off in case you realise the identity of your lover and his mother tries to kill you. And also was regarded as the protector of homosexual love between men.  So the takeaway here is that Greek mythology is not a great place for women.

7) Casanova (Histoire de ma Vie, Giacomo Casanova)(yes I know he was a real guy)(I'm examining his literary persona)(shut up)

Why? Come on now. Self-explanatory. Admittedly this is not for the lady looking for something long-term but I bet you'd have a good time along the way. As well as being world's first lad, he was also a spy, conman, linguist and librarian and spent most of his life rubbing elbows with royalty, popes, writers and musicians like Goethe, Mozart and Voltaire (and rubbing something else with literally all of the ladies).**** Factor in a slamming dress sense, a preference for eloquent woman, and an ability to make money out of basically everyone, including people who fired him, and that's a recipe for a fun weekend that you'll only remember as occasional flashbacks.

Why not? Have fun with all the venereal disease. Allegedly also had a threeway with his illigitimate daughter and her mother. (I must apologise, this list contains a significantly higher degree of incest than I had originally envisaged.) Also, as I said before, fidelity was not his strong suit. That was comic understatement. He had all the sex.

6) Peter Pan (Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie).

Why? Has three women after him for the duration of play/novel and, in most representations, clothes seem to be optional. He would be terribly exciting and there would be a large number of gap year style escapades and you would definitely probably have some kind of journey of self-discovery.  Also, property-owner. Peter has his own island, replete with mermaid lagoon (which must be better than a hot tub) and pirate ship (frankly, 'owns own pirate ship' should be a must on any self-respecting woman's list).  

Why not? Oh, where to begin.  Aside from the obvious fact that liaisons with ‘The Boy Who Never Grew Up’ have bad connotations in this day and age, Peter would be the ultimate bait-and-switch date.  "Come to my magical island where we'll fly into the night together holding hands and ultimately defy death itself and you will never feel so free or young or alive and I'll tell you how you fill this empty aching hole in my life but like would you be a total doll and do the boys' laundry first? Shit, I need to pay the delivery guy, have you got a tenner?" This is a short-term option. Wendy knew it, and you need to know it too – think of it as the best holiday romance ever. Enjoy the mermaid lagoon and get out before he starts encouraging his friends to call you 'mum'.

5) Victor Frankenstein (Frankenstein, Mary Shelley).

Why? It's easy to forget Mary Shelley was 18 when she wrote Frankenstein but I swear, somewhere in her notes is a scrap of paper that reads, “and btdubs, Victor is like totally hot.” Within the first ten pages, the manly and (I imagine) waxed-mustachioed explorer Captain Walton is waxing lyrical about his new bff Victor and the lustrous melancholy of his eyes, amongst other attractions. If you can manage to mentally strip away a few decades of Hollywood-distorted mad scientists cackling in castles, you'll find that Shelley's protagonist is a tender twenty-one years old when he stitches together a bunch of corpses and creates an abomination in the eyes of God. Plus, there's significant textual evidence that suggests Mary was basing some elements of Victor on her boo Percy Bysshe, so I think it's safe to say that in her eyes at least, Victor Frankenstein is one fine piece of grave-robbing ass. You heard it here first. Also Percy Shelley might have been a Romantic proto-douche (and there's a whole other blog post there) but his portraits can confirm that he was, indeed, totally hot.

Why not? Well, he stitches together a bunch of corpses and creates an abomination in the eyes of God for a start. Also, the whole Gothic-Romantic hero thing turns out to be something of a double edged sword because, as a direct result of his 'Fun With Cadavers' science kit, Victor spends significant portions of the novel proving his dedication to being sensitive and shit by fainting, and at the same time blaming, variously, dead authors, living authors, dead scientists, living scientists, fate, destiny, chance, his father, his mother, his best friend and, not kidding, a tree. So a) he probably wouldn't remember to do the washing up and b) when you get home and ask him to do it, he'll tell you all about how it totally wasn't his fault because someone made an offhand remark about Percy Shelley's poetry and that reminded him of sleep and he had to go and do that instead. (Meta-burn. Thank you very much.)

4) Bertie Wooster (many books, P.G. Wodehouse)

Why? Bertie Wooster is a magical human being who attracts charming happenings full of whimsy and gentle confusion into his life, and you could be a part of that.  Whether making off with Aunt Dahlia's cow creamer or concealing the music hall origins of your chum's latest squeeze from the uncle upon whom he is financially dependent, your existence could only be improved by having this man around.  Tell me you wouldn't want to be in a P.G. Wodehouse novel and I'll tell you your soul has withered beyond the point of redemption, you sick, sad bastard.  You would get to be a member of the idle rich.  Your job would be having escapades.  Also Bertie is just, like, the nicest guy. Like, actually.  Not in a Nice Guy way.  He genuinely is a nice guy.

Why not? Here be actually-quite-terrifying-when-you-really-think-about-it-properly valets.  A few women have threatened to intrude upon the domestic equilibrium enjoyed by one boy and his manservant and none were ever heard from again.  And as totes adorbs as Bertie is, things might get a little wearing once you realise that you are being woken up for the hundred and twelfth day in a row by an argument between your significant other and his significant other over his polka dot spats or whatever it is now in the name of christ I'm invisible in my own home help me god please.

3) Odysseus (The Iliad, The Odyssey, Homer). Why? Epic. Hero. Not just any epic hero either, but a smart epic hero. Odysseus is the Batman of the Bronxe Age: ain't no invulnerability or flying sandals here (take that Achilles. And you, Perseus.) Just a really really determined dude. So if he says he's going to put those shelves up, he's damn well going to put those shelves up, but he's probably going to Tom Sawyer someone into doing it for him by, once again, being really smart. And then taking all the credit. Like smart people do. Let's not forget either that there's a slough of goddesses, nymphs and princesses queueing up for their turn at The Odyssey: Boardgame Edition (there are two rules: 1) Abduct hero. 2) Bone.) Foremost amongst these is the goddess Calypso, who keeps the Big O (see what I did there?) on her island as a sex slave for seven years. Got to be a reason. All I'm saying.

Why not? Man, he really wants to get home to his wife. Have some fun by all means, but know you're just a pitstop along the way to an epic book deal and twenty years' worth of reunion sex. If Olympian goddesses couldn't keep Odysseus tied down, you probably won't fare much better. He'll give you some stuff about needing his space and being a free spirit and before you even get a chance to turn his men into pigs again, he'll jump ship (literally) and you'll be left looking for the next epic hero to fix that dripping tap you never got round to.

2) Mr Darcy (Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen).

Why? Self-evident. The ruder you get, the more he likes you in a tortured, brooding sort of way that doesn't involve murdering puppies (Heathcliffe, I am looking at you). Also a self-improving hero – Darcy walks the fine line between sociopath-god-help-you-restraining-order (Lovelace, Rochester, Heathcliffe again) and 'he's just shy' (literally any rom-com based on comic misinterpretation of character) meaning that he's genuinely the sneery hipster in the corner initially, but he works on not saying douchey things like “your family sucks and you're poor” and gets the girl eventually. The girl, incidentally, is too busy repeatedly saying things like, “Wow, I am a horrible judge of character” to fix his faults for him (Jane Eyre, you could learn something here), so just be chill. He'll get there. Also the whole book is basically about him trying and failing to repress his libido.

Why not? I have to say, I don't have much here , assuming you can get past the initial insults to your appearance, family, manners, class, financial status and pretty floral bonnet (probably). Maybe if you like loud music or immoderate drinking or the drugs that all the young people use these days, then he's not the man for you? But then again, Austen says that Lizzie makes him more fun. Damn, she's good.

1) Hamlet (Hamlet, William Shakespeare).

Why? The prince (sorry) of the fictional men. Because, contrary to what I began this list by saying, Hamlet is kind of whatever you want him to be, while also definitely being in possession of cheekbones so sharp they refract light (science). Seriously, the Victorians even thought he might have been a woman, so if you are looking for a receptacle into which, Pygmalion-like, you may pour every quality you have ever desired in a lover, then start with the one who fundamentally embodies the pain and joy of the human condition, and also fights off some pirates.

Why not? Where do you want to start? His in-universe track record isn't great, breaking up with his girlfriend by stabbing her dad through a curtain, which ranks only slightly above dumping via text. There's also some astonishingly good (bad, I mean bad) work going on in the daddy issues department with him being the only one on this list taking orders from a Ghost Dad who may or may not be a fractured remnant of his own tortured psyche. On the plus side, he loves his mother very much. A little too much? Perhaps. Also, in brief: gets touchy when his best friend calls him out on murdering-by-proxy two of their old uni mates, hipster-postures about how poor people totally don't understand art, talks during the theatre, is generally a self-pitying, solipsistic, intellectually superior, emotionally anguished, sexually repressed, arrogant, moody philosophy student. And now I've totally lost my train of thought. I'm sure I was supposed to be listing bad things.

(See also: Constantine from The Seagull, Edmund from King Lear, Prince Hal from Henry IV, Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye, any other character that could feasibly be played by Ben Whishaw.)

(It's possible I may have a type.)

*Was in university, watching Horrible Histories.

**If you find yourself doing this then congratulations, you are a writer of bad fanfiction. Now burn your laptop, you are banned from the internet.

***None of this TV or film bullshit. Characters represented in a visual medium are played by actors and, as we all know, actors are raging whirlpools of neurosis, insecurity and heart-breakingly blind optimism, plus when you Wikipedia them they're always married and at least, like, ten years older than you thought they were.

****Imagine how disappointed he'd be with his present-day descendents. Casanova never had to descend to thinly-veiled homophobia and misogyny. He had books.

Very Boys Such Bromance Wow So Unlikely Alliances Much Cheekbone Part 2: The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

2013: Year of the Colon.

So basically I'm linking together Thor and The Hobbit and Sherlock (forthcoming in Part 3) because they are all such utter sausage-fests about the manly bonds between manly men and why would you think we're gay we're not gay and maybe we should get a new joke for this show, Stephen Moffat.  It's particularly noticeable to me right now because I've been watching Battlestar Galactica again and I have to say, actual realistic representation of women as fifty percent of the population never felt so good. I watched a scene today where three politicians discussed the impact that a particular issue would have on an upcoming election and they were all women and nobody commented on it. I nearly wept.  Anyway, I really enjoyed The Hobbit but Middle Earth sure has been struck by some tragic ovary-targeting wasting disease.

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug: Review: I Knew Aidan Turner Was In It For A Reason

So on the whole, it was a ton of fun.  It has the same flaws as the first film, only bigger, and the same strengths as the first film, only bigger.  It's bigger.  Is what I'm saying.  It also has that Middle-of-a-Trilogy-itis thing where the director gets excited by not really having introduce anything or tie anything up so it's all action, bitches, because it's 2013 (well, it was) and that's what we like, amIright? This is a good thing or a bad thing depending on your tastes - some of the action sequences are epic and beautiful and brilliant and so much wow (the dwarves going all Home Alone on Smaug and DON'T FUCKING TALK TO ME ABOUT THE SPEED THAT GOLD MELTS AT BECAUSE THEY'RE FIGHTING A DRAGON AND THIS IS YOUR BEEF) and some were sort of 'ok so this is still happening' (endless chases through Laketown, endless). 

Like the first film, it's a big, heavy juggernaut and it takes a while to get going and it stutters and chokes a little bit to begin with but then heave-ho, everyone puts their shoulders to the wheel and suddenly its weight is helping it gather momentum and oh wait, I am really enjoying this film, whoosh dragons molten tacky gold dwarf statues fabulous elves OH IT'S OVER.  Which was also exactly like the first film.  But also like the first film, it revels in the delight of this being a familiar universe, deftly balancing new elements with old favourites. Wisely, it doesn't dwell too much on episodes like Beorn's house because it knows that we know - and it knows that we know that it knows - that Mirkwood is just around the corner and that can mean only one thing.

Hey baby.  It's been a while.

Legolas: still sexy.  Still confused as fuck.  What's going on? Who are we fighting now? Legolas doesn't care.  He's going to stand on the heads of two dwarves in barrels and shoot arrows from his seemingly infinite quiver because he literally has no other clue about what he should be doing right now and the soundtrack in his head is going "dun dun dun LEGOLAS dundunnnn".

Stumbling in the direction of something more serious, the Mirkwood elves are a perfect example of what the film does right: "less wise and more dangerous" is how they're described, and it takes everything we love about elves (shiny) and invests it with personality and flaws and other tasty and sumptuous things.  I mean, man, these elves are such bitches.  We always suspected it and we were right.  They are the Regina Georges of Middle Earth.  Take Thranduil, for example.  All he wants to do is just comb his hair because what if it gets a kink in it, and then it won't go with his glittery mini-antlers and god Legolas, daddy is busy right now with his straighteners and for the last time Tauriel, the order of precedence goes Picking Up Robes from Dry Cleaner, Booking Facial, Giant Spider Attack in that order.  If you couldn't tell, Thranduil is my new favourite character.

Sorry, we were being serious.  For me the elves worked particularly well because book-universe-wise, there is nothing to say this wasn't going on, it's a logical extension of the Mirkwood plot, and film-universe-wise, we didn't really get to see communities of other races in Lord of the Rings, just societies of humans and the tagalong duds the other races sent along ("yes Legolas, it is a very special and important mission and you should on no account try to call or write and really, stay away as long as you need to").  If the mission statement behind fleshing one small book into three films is to deliver a richer and more complex universe as a reward for investing our time in it, then showing us not only a community of elves but a community of elves that is specifically different from other elves and have their own customs and hang-ups is a very good use of time and resources.  And now I have to stop typing "community of elves" as I can no longer keep a straight face.

But as well as the excitement of meeting new characters and catching up with old ones, what really made the film worth it for me was the plethora of little moments that just flicked out the paintbrush and added a little more dimension to the cast of fantasy archetypes.  Nearly every character gets one, which is just a nice reassurance that Peter Jackson knows what he's doing as a storyteller and - moreover - has probably spent more time immersed in the Tolkien universe than anyone else ever and really actually deserves to take The Hobbit and spin it into three films of (let's face it) ultimate nerdy self-indulgence.  My favourite of these little moments has to be Legolas literally being so hugged so hard by one of the Big End of Level Boss Orcs that he nosebleeds (well, we've all had that urge).  It's great because, again, it fits with the expanded view of these new flawed, impulsive, human-like elves and along with Thranduil's magicked-away dragon-flamed face (he must get through a lot of concealer) it suggests that actually elven beauty is a very important external symbol of immortality and imperviousness to the passage of time and how elves are a race apart, standing outside the natural ebb and flow of things, but basically also because my viewing companion and I showed our age and simultaneously went "You made me bleed my own blood!"*  And after a cursory google, I found that half the internet thought the same thing, so, Orlando Bloom: bringing people together through looking confused and outraged since 2001.

Speaking of new characters, I don't think anyone was a disappointment. I'm also just not sure how absolutely necessary Stephen Fry as the Master of Clumsy Social Commentary on Good Governance was but hey, it was still all super-delightful in its way.  Bard the Bowman** and his Adorable Children were all you could ask for in the way of good, decent, not terribly interesting salt of the earth folk, even if I did spend much of their scenes going, "Why is Bard the Bowman also sometimes Orlando Bloom but maybe also Welsh?"  He's not though, it's Luke Evans, and he is definitely Welsh.  Maybe.  I mean, his kids were.  But why they emigrated from Wales to Middle Earth, I couldn't tell you.  As a side note, a friend of mine described him as "bang tidy", a phrase which - regardless of whether or not I agree with its application in this particular instance - surely deserves more exposure.  Bang tidy. Hee.

And, of course, everyone is getting their robes in a twist over the inclusion of a character who - gasp -isn't even in the book (Deviations from the source material! Imagine!) and who is - double gasp - a lady.  Well let's all just unclench because Tauriel was basically pretty great and a very welcome addition to the series.  The problem, of course, starts when female characters have to represent their entire gender because they are the only female character in the whole thing and in this respect it would be very easy to bitch about the only significant female character in the film being shoved into a love triangle of sorts*** but you know what? Eh.  Besides, it must require a lot of fortitude being an elf lady in love with a dwarf dude, it is basically like Romeo and Juliet with an added height difference.  I mean, the romance plot was obviously horribly executed, it must be said, and happened in about five minutes flat and everyone was bandying the word 'love' around after a single conversation about the relative descriptors for starlight (dwarf chat up lines, ring a ding ding) but Tauriel as a character, on her own, was boss.  I'm not hugely bummed about the film introducing this warrior-lady and then shoving her into a romance plot as she also had agency and strengths and other stuff going on, whereas ironically it was at this point I went "oh so that's why they cast Aidan Turner" because Kili really was basically there to be dwarf totty.  I was a bit sad that his bromance with Fili wasn't so in evidence but this was also the time at which the film chose to take a firm stance on that particular relationship and went with "definitely brothers, however you may interpret Fili choosing to stay behind with his dying bro instead of going on the adventure of a lifetime to the mountain he has literally been waiting to see for his entire life".  Oh shit, I've just remembered how The Hobbit ends. Oh, fuck you, Peter Jackson.

Martin Freeman and Richard Armitage continued to rom-com it as Bilbo and Thorin, with Smaug as the conniving ex ("oh you think he's into you but you just try and get him to commit, there is no way he's coming all the way down here to save you").  Less smouldering for Thorin this time and more "slow descent into madness" but that sounds like a recipe for brooding to me, so I'm still happy.  Also it must be said that while his plan to get rid of Smaug was flawlessly executed, it was also dumb as shit. Oh Thorin, he has fire literally inside him, all you did was make him more bling.  Also was there just a giant gold dwarf statue hanging around and they melted it? Or - even weirder - a mould for giant gold dwarf statues because they were in such hot demand back in the day? Yeah, that was strange. 

La la la, a quick rundown of the rest because I think you can tell by now that I liked the film and just want to make affectionate sarky comments about it.  Benedict Cumberdragon was on good form, particularly the "I like you" line, a thought which I finished as "In another life, I feel like maybe we could have lived in a flat together and solved crimes."**** The problem is that while his voice is awesome and dragon-y and villainous, he's also - in my mind - clearly actually the nicest guy in the world which kind of confused me about Smaug so I came out of the film thinking of him as that friend who you all know is kind of an arsehole but then, like, he's got a big house and loads of cool shit and he's a bit lonely, and really his douchebaggery just mostly makes you laugh and he only sometimes tries to incinerate you. I actually could have watched Smaug and Bilbo chinwag all day and it was half the movie as it was.  Loved Smaug's design too, that slightly Keira Knightley-esque amount of jaw really putting the smug in Smaug (yeah, SORRY NOT SORRY).

What else? Gandalf, yes, cool, great.  He should be nicer to Radagast, though, since something tragic is clearly going to occur to explain his absence in LOTR.  Also, actual magic! I feel like up to this point wizard-magic in the LOTR universe has been more along the lines of New Age positive thinking and supreme good luck.  I mean, Voldemort would be all up in Gandalf's grill and Gandalf would be all "it is small acts and small people who stand against the dark" and Voldemort would like "Bitch be trippin', I'mma AK that shit."  I'm sorry, I've also been watching a lot of Orange is the New Black lately.

So yeah.  In summary, I couldn't take any of it seriously, not for a moment - but in the best possible way.  It's all so dear and familiar, it basically feels like a constant stream of in-jokes, heightened to increasingly ridiculous levels, and even when it's slow or clumsy, I just - oh, Lord of the Rings universe, I can't stay mad at you.  I just can't.  I'm not sure I'll pay to see it again but when it crops up on Netflix in six months time, I will most definitely grab a bottle of cornershop plonk and be glad to make its reacquaintance.

*If that's the wording you thought in, you're referencing The Simpsons, congratulations.  If, on the other hand, you thought "Nobody makes me bleed my own blood!", you are referencing Dodgeball and might be still in your teens, and also Blades of Glory is the far superior work of that particular cinematic movement. 

**Incidentally, Bard the Bowman is the character that I assumed Richard Armitage had been cast as when I first heard he was going to be in it.  I hadn't read the book for a good fifteen years and filtering amongst my hazy watercolour recollections of it, my brain clearly felt that 'heroic lost prince man who slays dragon' was a better fit for him than 'slightly pompous and kind of useless dwarf king'.

***Personally, I feel like the inclusion of an elf v dwarf love triangle is just Peter Jackson sticking two fingers up at Twilight, but that could just be wishful thinking.
****To be discussed in rabid, devoted detail in Part 3 - coming soon! Actually soon, not 'half a year' soon.

Very Boys Such Bromance Wow So Unlikely Alliances Much Cheekbone Part 1: Thor: The Dark World

Blimey, it's been a while, eh?  Not to worry, adulthood hasn't got me yet.  If you're wondering why I've decided to title this three-part blog post* with a variant on 2013's strangest yet most persistent meme, it's because these three works of media degraded my ability to think in full sentences to about that level.  Really.

...

Thor: The Dark World: Review: Basically I'm Reviewing Loki: Just Loki: Where Do I Stop Putting Colons

Ok. So. I'm going to preface this review by saying that when I saw the film, I was suffering under the combination of having just said farewell to a supremely lovely cast of actors on an excellent production I'd been working on for a few months, and that farewell came in the form of excessive drinking and very little sleep, so my emotions were already dancing a merry dance all over my nervous system. The result of this was that when the film finished, my immediate instinct was to go and light up a cigarette that can only be described as post-coital. I collapsed, limbs splayed in my cinema seat, hyperventilating with the sheer force of ALL MY FUCKING FEELINGS.

And then I snapped out of it and remembered the first half of the film. Because the first half of the film is, frankly, dull as fuck. It starts ok (gratuitous crotch shot of Loki) and then just kind of stops (very little Loki until halfway through and then it's All Loki All The Time).  And for once in my life, I'm not just being a fangirl (I said not just being a fangirl). Basically, there's not enough Loki to make this film deliver on its promises. It was marketed as 'Thor must ask Loki for help, angst ensues' and that's just not really what it is. Tom Hiddleston has been walking the earth like the Wandering Jew with cheekbones, to promote a film that he's barely in.

To be honest with you, I don't even remember that much of the first half (something about Christopher Eccleston's career not quite panning how he expected) and awkward segues into comic interludes, mostly courtesy of Kat Dennings as Darcy, though even her infallible ability to be deadpan and awesome seems strained in the odd, tired energy of the events. There's also a cameo appearance from Chris O'Dowd, going on a date with Natalie Portman and let's all back the fuck up and read that again because CHRIS O'DOWD WHAT ARE YOU DOING ON A DATE WITH NATALIE PORTMAN GET BACK TO THE BASEMENT. So there are more jokes than the first film but none of the effortless delight of, say, Thor walking into a pet shop and demanding a horse. In fact, there are actually too many jokes to sit comfortably with the amped-up grit factor and the tone lurches drunkenly all over the place from the sublime to the ridiculous and back again via a rainbow bridge**.

Part of this is the criminally under explored villain, when the film can actually decide who the main antagonist is - Malekith or Loki.  If the rumours are true that a bunch of Malekith's stuff was bumped from the film to make way for Loki, then it raises the horrifying possibility that Tom Hiddleston's original role in the film was confined to maybe just one eyebrow raise and that is a world that I want no part in.  I am disappointed in the disservice done to both Chris Ecclestone and his character, not least because when they announced him I spent two days in a sort of glee-coma unable to say anything except repeat, "Malekith the Accursed.  Dark elf.  Christopher Ecclestone." But things were always going to be difficult post-Avengers. The first Thor had the advantage of being largely encapsulated in its own universe, the action confined to the remote realms of Asgard and New Mexico. Now the Marvel Cinematic Universe's internal public is aware of superheroes, the threat level has to be very finely judged for solo outings because otherwise just, like, call the other Avengers, y'know? And frankly, all the known universes collapsing in Greenwich kind of seems like at least an equivalent level of threat to a leather clad sociopath letting aliens on flying bikes into New York. But whatever, maybe Bruce Banner was on holiday. 

And I suppose things were also always going to be difficult in terms of how to write Loki. After going gloriously and hammily full villain in The Avengers, giving him any kind of arc must necessitate a little backtracking - bringing him home is a start (and let's not forget the moment in The Avengers when Thor tells him he can stop and come home and goddamit it, you can see in his eyes that that would actually maybe be really nice were it not for the whole attempted genocide and mass murder blips) but in The Dark World, it's just done in far too broad brush strokes. This is where the lack of Loki becomes problematic. There's not enough time to make this film what it deserves to be, which is Thor-and-Loki-go-to-family-counselling. I'm not quite sure that the MCU appreciates what it has in Hemsworth and Hiddleston, which is a few dozen gallons of heartbreak and an effortless chemistry. This film feels like it was written for lesser actors, ironed out into Hero and Villain, and yet the Brodinsons of Sassgard*** run away with every scene they're given (in Loki's case, cackling). Hiddleston's least subtle character elicits, weirdly, his most subtle performance,**** doing more acting with his eyes in one scene than there is in the rest of the film combined, and Hemsworth leads the film with lovely sincerity, retaining the streak of self-effacing humour brought out in The Avengers (I mean, thank all the Nordic gods, because the lack thereof in the first film was what sent me running into Loki's mad arms in the first place).

The fact is, the greatest superpower any of these films possess is humanity - that's what gives us the hook to keep us coming back, and is also why Superman movies are doomed to fail in comparison.  Tony Stark has his inner demons, Bruce Banner has his rage issues, Steve Rogers is a good man in a bewilderingly and increasingly complicated world, and Thor has a dysfunctional family. It's even ironic, maybe, that the most ridiculous Avenger (space-god-thing-with-science-magic) has the most affecting and, dare I say it, relatable backstory. Not so much with the frost giants, obviously, but the fuck-up sibling and the inability to ever really give up on family when they're threatening to take over the world that your signifiant other lives on, well, we've all been there.

Or maybe at this point Hiddleston's popularity with the fan base is just becoming a hindrance to writing a well balanced story.  I mean, there's a right way and a wrong way to love Loki. The right way is to appreciate him for the magnificent bastard he is, in which case you probably like Avengers Loki best, slasher smile, death metal hair, eye-ripping and everything. And there's the wrong way, which is to watch him whilst silently keening "MY BABY YOU JUST NEED A HUG", in which case you probably like him best in the first film, all wobbly bottom lip and palpable and justified sense of betrayal. (I'm somewhere in between the two, since you ask, feeling somewhat relieved at the last second reveal of him finally sitting on the throne of Asgard, with a moment of "oh thank god, that's my clever little psychopath", but far far too many moments of "JUST LET YOUR RIPPLING BLOND BROTHER SAVE YOU WITH HIS LOVE" for me to be entirely comfortable with myself. It is not, after all, a million miles away from "he just gets tense when he's trying to usurp a throne, he loves me really!")

This film was stuck between the two, flirting with both sides enough to be really really frustrating but not nearly enough to be satisfying. What we want, I suspect, is for Loki to be - like any good trickster figure - consistently and ambiguously using his emotions for his own gain. Like Sherlock. Or Artemis Fowl. Or - Loki's classical ancestor - Edmund in King Lear. We want a conman who is always ultimately up to something but in the moments when he displays vulnerability, left wondering whether it was all an act or possibly, maybe just a little bit sincere. We were almost there with this film. His 'death' is a particularly egregious example - the redemption, the regret, it should have been a Type 2 Loki fan's wet dream (and also how I was predicting they would write him out of the franchise). But there just wasn't time to process it. The quick cut to the gags about Chris O'Dowd and Thor hanging his hammer on the coat rack undermined it so quickly that there was no way he was really dead. Similarly, perhaps showing Loki's lonely displays of grief over Frigga's death (Frigga, my thoughts in brief: wow someone had some awesome in their coffee this morning, oh wait look she's dead in order to further the character development of the male protagonists, colour me shocked) would have made the later bluff too obvious, but it was obvious anyway because this film took a fond farewell of subtlety in the opening credits, so lingering just a little bit longer on him blowing stuff up with his mind would have been an infinitely more satisfying exploration of character.  That, in the end, was the core disappointment - everything was undercut so swiftly that you hardly knew how to feel about any of it (ambiguity is great, confusion is not). We're invested in these characters now, and not for the big explosions. Iron Man 3 was a darkly sincere look at the individual, not the costume. The Thor story should be an obvious contender for this type of treatment and yet became something so much less than the sum of its parts.

Look, it's not all bad. It was worth the ticket price for Hemsworth and Hiddleston alone, frankly. From the moment they Reservoir Dogs their way down the halls of Asgard, through the chase on the spaceship ("Well don't hit it, just press it gently." "I AM PRESSING IT GENTLY.") to Loki's deadpan "Ta-da" upon emerging into Vanaheim, the central section of the film is a pure joy. And, crucially, it's set us up for a Thor 3 in which the action is Thor-Loki centric, and me being the eternal optimist that I am, I'm going to hope for all the bickering, sparring, betrayal, game playing, double bluffs and tentative reconciliations we were promised this time. And after all, Loki essentially won this one. I can't really hate that. So until then I'm going to wait for the DVD and play a specific twenty minutes of it nonstop until my laptop breaks (cf also: War Horse) or Gotterdamerung occurs.  Whichever happens first.


*THREE PARTS.  Seriously though.
**A mysterious repaired rainbow bridge - how? It was a massive deal that Thor couldn't go and see Natalie Portman at the end of the first film and there was a shoehorned-in mumble about dark energy in The Avengers and now it sort of turns out that, basically, Asgard engineers totally could have done it, no problem, but the thing is, like, union stuff, and also they'll need to get some parts in.
***Kudos for this outstanding piece of wordplay goes to my colleague, Kate. Good writers imitate, great writers steal etc etc.
****No seriously.  Go and watch his other stuff and tell me he doesn't bring unnecessary melodrama to more conventionally written roles.  Then watch Thor again and tell me why and how he's finding deft emotional complexity in Giggling Space Despot.

Robin Hood, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Really Bad TV Shows

Warning: contains heavy spoilers. But look at this like this, if you haven't seen the show, you're not going to watch it now. If you have seen the show, you already know what happens and you're definitely not going to watch it again. Also, I'll get back to Doctor Who soon. Promise.

In a state of the boredom/nostalgia/procrastination mash-up that I call Netflix Ennui, I wound up watching a few episodes of the BBC's 2006-2009 Saturday evening action adventure fare, Robin Hood. Or rather, re-watching. Y'see, I was a rather ardent fan of Robin Hood back in the day, until the third and final season when everything took a resounding nosedive from 'so bad it's good' to 'so bad it's oh god get it away my eyes my eyes'. Like, I really hope nobody from HBO ever watched this show, because I'm getting second-hand embarrassment just thinking about it. I was surprised to discover that there were quite a few things I'd forgotten about it, my memory consumed by the reckless shark-jumpitude of the final series. And it strikes me that the show had quite a lot of potential at the beginning, if it weren't for a few, damning things:

Things I Had Forgotten About Robin Hood That Fucked Up an Otherwise Solid Show:

• Robin strolls casually in and out of Nottingham, lounging around the town square and infiltrating the castle, week in, week out, with precisely zero effort to disguise himself. Nary a hood in sight. At one point, he rocks up in the Sheriff's bedchamber after dark for some light flirting and doesn't even tie him up or anything when he leaves. I mean – not like that – oh forget it. The point is, this is marginally plausible only because the Sheriff is clearly an unpredictable psychopath and one suspects he quite likes having Robin Hood around in his anachronistically tight trousers, but still doesn't explain why the eponymous hero made no effort to come up with a getaway plan beyond “Walk out of the castle, maybe wink at someone”.
• The attempts to make the setting 'relevant' and 'modern', despite the slight snag of being England in the 1100s. One of the things I do remember about the show is the clothes, which were a) bafflingly anachronistic (Marion in trousers, Marion's camouflage-print dress, Robin Hood being more Robin Hoodie ohIseewhattheydidthere, Guy of Gisbourne's leather daddy get-up, more on which later) and b) laughably cheap. I recognised jewellery from Primark and Accessorize more times than I could count. There's a kid in one episode who they just didn't seem to be able to find a costume for at all, I swear you can see the zip on his hoodie.
• The clothes were part of a wider problem, though, which was that the first series clearly just had no budget. It was filmed in Hungary for cheaps, which is all fine until you realise that the thing nagging away at you every time they cut to the forest is the awkwardly obvious lack of oak trees, i.e. the one thing that English forests are pretty pro at. It also means that 1100s England is full of clearly Hungarian extras who don't speak English, just nod with a look of polite confusion in their eyes. This reaches its nadir in the second episode when Allan a Dale's brother pitches up with two of his own men who have, we are told, had their tongues cut out. Why the script even called for the ill-fated Tom to have his own bros in the first place, I'm not sure, but the production damn well wasn't going to pay for them to have lines. Out with their tongues, cue baffled Eastern European locals looking uneasily from actor to actor, wondering who they're supposed to be agreeing with.
• The modernisation aspect also manifested itself through the camerawork. Each episode ends with a triumphant black and white freeze frame like an 80s brat pack movie. It's a bold move, and I'm not going to pretend it doesn't jar with the decision to film the rest of the show on shaky handycam, with a baffling over-reliance on dramatic zooms when a character is about to saying something profound. It feels slightly like the producers were trying to make it an actual mockumentary, before someone suggested that maybe that was a little too anachronistic, even for this show, and they hastily recut all the footage.

And Some Things It Did Ok:

• Women. Ok, it doesn't pass the Bechdel Test by a country mile, seeing as there are only two women in the whole of Nottingham, apparently, and I think they stand in a room together, like, once. Djaq, the Token Girl Outlaw, is pretty boss – all dressing up as her dead brother and doing Advanced Saracen Science and stuff – but I could have done without her horribly mangled love triangle that just sort of faded into a love...duangle in the second series, at the end of which she announces that she's staying in the Holy Land to take advantage of be-cheekboned jailbait Will Scarlett. And Marion is all kinds of smart and self-reliant – they actually make a pretty decent stab at a spy narrative for her, trying to work the system from the inside to protect her father, compromised loyalties, etc etc – of course, if the show had been made by HBO for grown-ups, instead of the BBC for families, it would have been much more sophisticated and also much more naked. C'est la vie. I also remember hating Marion with a passion when I was sixteen; watching now, I'm not entirely sure why. She's not a great actress, sure, but she's not offensively bad – about the same level of charisma vacuum as Robin himself, which fortunately means you can just ignore the romantic leads and get on with the business of the fine supporting cast.
• And I do mean fine. This is something the show did gloriously right – I swear to god, the burgeoning knowledge of my sexuality that was triggered in my youth by Johnny Depp diving off a cliff in Pirates of the Caribbean was completed here by Richard Armitage swaggering around in black leather and guy-liner*, pinning Marion against castle walls** saying things like “Do you not understand? You mean everything to me”, all accompanied by a gaze so smouldering that you could see the stone melting behind her head. Normally when you have a dastardly villain trying to run off with a blushing damsel, you applaud the hero swooping in on a rope to save her. Richard Armitage, on the other hand, would go around casually stabbing peasants and you'd just think, “Oh, well, he probably had a really difficult childhood.” Maybe that was why Marian was such a terrible actress. Could you keep your sang-froid convincingly in the face of all that?
• And it wasn't just Guy either. Long before I was making jokes about Merlin's Knights of the Round Table being a kind of Medieval Boy Band, the Outlaws were hanging around the forest posing for passing paparazzi (“Just a quick woodcut, be a darling”). Robin is ok in a Justin-Bieber-wishes-he-was-more-grunge sort of way but the show kept insisting that Robin was the most bodacious bachelor Sherwood had ever seen by having women throw themselves at him every two seconds, when this was clearly nonsensical because dude, Alan a Dale and Will Scarlett are right there. Actually, Will Scarlett was my favourite before I saw the light glinting off Guy's black leathers, and then his “What is this thing you call a girl, let me turn my head so you can see the way the shadows fall against my cheekbones, no I don't think my eyes can get any more big or green, I didn't realise my bottom lip was trembling” schtick got a bit wearisome. Alan had to become my favourite in the third series because everyone else good had gone and Guy's hair had taken a drastic turn for the worst, but his twinkly-eyed nonsensically-cockney conman routine was really very diverting – besides, he briefly dumps Will for Guy in the second series and starts wearing black so we're very much on the same page for a variety of reasons.

So thinking about it, maybe the best thing the show did was to arrange a buffet of attractive actors. But hey, that's not be sniffed at – there was clearly something that kept us watching through the bad times and the very bad. I'm inclined to pin it on the accidental sexual tension that seemed to emerge between every single character at some point (I'm talking a Sherlock level of possible permutations), but especially the Guy-and-Marion thing which, by the way, isn't really in the script at all but when you cast Richard Armitage, you cast a tsunami of hormones too. That's probably the area of the script that had most potential: a woman torn between her childhood love that she still carries a torch for, an outlaw on the run, any day could be his last, and a dangerous new man, brooding, cruel, but with a fascinating spark of good in him, a desire for redemption that only she holds the key to, complicated by the fact that he could be the only man truly capable of protecting her. Fuck, that sounds like a good show. I think I might write it. Sadly, the Guy/Marian/Robin triangle came to a rather undignified end when Guy ran her through with a sword that was in no way phallic at the end of Series 2.

The thing is though, I wouldn't want it to be any different. The reality is that if the bad things had been fixed, it still wouldn't have been a great show. It just would have been a much, much more boring one.

*This is actually a really good joke as his character's name was Guy of Gisbourne.

**Oh, maybe that's why I hated her.

Ancestral Voices Prophesying War: 'Cold War' (Doctor Who) and 'Walk of Punishment' (Game of Thrones) Reviews

War is in the air on both shows this week.  I can't think of a better linking factor than that, so let's plunge in.

Doctor Who Series 7, Part 2, Episode 3: Cold War

Well, that was cracking.  That was like Das Boot collided with Alien* via The Thing.  Captained by Davos Seaworth.**

In a continuation of what I have been saying about the show getting all nostalgic about itself, what with the anniversary coming up, we got a revisiting of a classic Who monster this week, the Ice Warrior(s).  And boy, is it working.  Not just the resurrection of an old foe, but the return to 'Monster of the Week' done right - dark corridors, increasing body count, tense stand-off, obvious yet well-conceived metaphor.  This episode also embraced the best of New Who as well by delivering a couple of twists on the old formula - instead of the West, we land on a Russian sub (cue lots of fun with actors shouting "DAMMIT, ONEGIN" and "PIOTR IS IN THE HOLD, COMRADE" at each other), and instead of a suited and booted Ice Warrior, we get a pair of disembodied and touchingly non-CGI claws dangling from the ceiling like the crane in an arcade game.  It was both scary and fun, serious and tongue-in-cheek - in beverage terms, it was a lovely cuppa.

Last week's 'Warm Respect' on the Clara-o-meter is rising swiftly towards 'Soppy Adolescent Puppy Love'.  Is it just me, or is she the first companion in a good long while to actually react like a person?  Her anxieties over negotiating the peace treaty (it was a test, we all know it was a test, Doctor, you have failed at subtlety***), being struck by the realness of the eviscerated bodies as the Doctor dashes off to do something sonic-y because bodies are ten a penny to him, her agreement to actually stay put when told, her tentative mention of Skaldak's daughter - it was all beautifully conceived and acted.  Mad props to Jenna-Louise Coleman, and mad props to Mark Gatiss for knowing how to write Watson right (I guess he's had practice).  Of course, if I am being really and truly honest (and what better place for that than the internet, right?) I know the real reason I like Clara is because she behaves the way I would behave.  The way I suspect most of us would behave, in fact - scared and stupid and making jokes to deflect the mindfuck of the whole TIME-TRAVELLING SPACE ALIEN thing, and just occasionally sharp enough or human enough to spot something important, save the day and comment on it - who wouldn't want to say the words "We save the world" as much as humanly possible? And then hug it out afterwords.  Naturally.****  The whole 'impossible' parallel lives thing is incidental - Clara is good enough to watch on her own merit, and that really is special.

I can't quite work out her relationship with The Doctor yet though.  Most Doctor-Companion dynamics are played as analogies for romantic relationships, if not out and out cases of sexual tension, and while he seems very keen to impress her, there's a sense in which she's something of a specimen because of her time-and-space-and-death-defying tendencies.  That hug at the end was a little bit fatherly, a little bit grandfatherly, and a little bit something else that makes this a very bloody interesting dynamic to watch unfold.  Long may it continue, I say, and drive us all mad with the ambiguity.

The supporting cast was equally excellent.  Tobias Menzies on excellent cheekbone-sharp form as dour, trigger-happy Stepashin - my only complaint is that he copped it too soon, I would have liked to see him team up with Skaldak for some good old-fashioned murder funtimes.  David Warner was likewise underused, I felt, which is only testament to how excellent he was when he got the chance.  I did keep waiting for him to turn into the villain, though, which is maybe Hollywood's fault.  Liam Cunningham is now no longer allowed to play anything except gruff yet ultimately trustworthy sea captains, and long may he reign.  Props, too, to the rest of the sub's suspiciously young, nubile seamen (tee hee hee).

Menzies and Warner's lack of resolution is a symptom of Gatiss episodes in general though: the pay-off is never quite good enough to live up to the excellent situations he creates.  All three of his episodes in the Moffat era have now ended with the villain essentially being talked down and told to be a nicer person ('Victory of the Daleks', Amy convinces Bill Paterson that it's much nicer to be a human than a Dalek robot, and 'Night Terrors', the Doctor tells Daniel Mays to tell his alien son not to be scared).  Gatiss writes people and dialogue excellently, with warmth and heart, and has an excellent eye/nose/ear for the grotesque and absurd but his plotting leaves something to be desired and there's always a point at which his episodes become Scooby-Doo-scary rather than Moffat-scary.  He's been named as a potential successor to the Blessed St Stephen, but I don't see it.  I'm just not sure his imagination is Doctor Who-shaped - it's all a bit too clever sometimes, but without the flare for spectacle that lets Moffat get away with it.  All a bit too grown up, in other words.

But this is a general reflection, and the oddly prescient eighties setting (heaven knows what they would have done with any Thatcher references) coupled with the chilling motif of mutually assured destruction worked on Gatiss' terms.  I do wonder how many seven year olds were nodding along going, "Yes, of course, because the SALT talks failed in 1979 after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan" but hey ho (yes, I know actual history, not just fictional history).  It was a beautiful analogy for how we relate to the unknown, and I suspect Clara's central role in the episode - despite spending much of it waiting backstage, as it were - was due to this.  Lots of funny jokes about Ultravox too.

This may well have been Gatiss' best effort yet, though I'll always harbour a soft spot for Series 1's 'The Unquiet Dead' (Chris Eccleston telling Simon Callow's Dickens that he's a huge fan while in a hansom cab fleeing walking corpses).  He seems to be on a winning streak, actually, after ending Sherlock on such a flawless, ovary-destroying high.  Thus far the series continues to shine in its embrace of its own Glorious History (a mention of Susan last week, and I've just confirmed my suspicion that the HADS was an Old Who concept via the magic of Google).  We know there are Gaiman-retooled Cybermen coming up in a few weeks' time, and an exploration of the TARDIS interior even sooner than that.  Best of all, I've just found out that River Song will be dropping by for snogs and adventure in the series finale, also including a new Moffat villain called the Whispermen.  I'm expecting a barnstormer here, and for once I don't feel over-optimistic about hoping.


Game of Thrones Series 3, Episode 3: Walk of Punishment

And punishment was very much our theme this week with the episode ending on an event I've been strenuously and determinedly not spoiling for anyone who hasn't read the books: Jaime bids a sudden farewell to his right hand.  How great are Jaime and Brienne? Very bloody great is the answer, with their sulky bickering sitting back to back on a horse turning inch by inch towards a mutual respect so grudging it leaves skid marks.  They're finding each other's sensitive spots too, with Brienne asserting that Jaime's best days are behind him (boy, is she prescient) and Jaime suggesting getting raped might go over easier if she imagines it's her Dead Gay King.  Jaime rides in with the most casual rescue imaginable later on (metaphorically, he's chained to a tree), preventing said rape by pointing out she could be ransomed for a hefty sum, then hedging his bets and playing for his own release too, which comes off considerably less well.  Don't worry, it's all character development.  They're Not So Different After All.

Elsewhere in Westeros, the worlds of Doctor Who and Game of Thrones continue to collide with Tobias Menzies showing up again as family fuck-up Edmure Tully.  I don't think the Tullys are really anyone's favourite (their sigil is a fish) but Menzies manages to make the family trait of self-righteousness-in-the-face-of-overwhelming-evidence-of-just-being-wrong sort of endearing, especially as he faces a double dressing down by both his nephew King Robb (what happened to you, man? You used to be cool) and his uncle Brynden Blackfish (an excellently cast Clive Russell - but then, they're all excellently cast).  Actually, Robb recovered a little of his equilibrium this week, without Robb's Non-Canonical Wife to weigh him down - even GRR Martin himself, a man who, after all, is not known for his restraint, kept Jeyne Westerling (Robb's Canonical Wife) largely off the page, knowing that we want to see the King in the North being...well, a king.  One of the successes of that storyline in the books is that what might play out as a tale of love defying fate elsewhere becomes a rash and foolhardy act when viewed in the context of Westeros' special brand of pointy-stick-orientated politics.  The television series' greatest misstep so far has been to take the first view of it, and it sticks out like a chopped off hand.

We're back with Dany again this week, who I'm guessing is cooking up some punishments of her own and developing some much-needed steel ("All men must die.  But we are not men.") as Ser Jorah "Friendzoned" Mormont and Ser Barristan "Obi Wan" Selmy vie for first dibs on the advising.  We get Jorah's pragmatism v Barristan's romanticism; which one will Dany choose?  Well, I already know because I've read the books.  But it's really good.  Anyway, one of the few moments when knowing the series came at a disadvantage as I was desperately hoping we'd get to see Dany's next actions in the same episode but no dice.  Instead, dragon-selling.

Negotiations and machinations took centre stage actually, despite the highest-thus-far injury count (dead slaves, dead horses, dead soldiers, near-rape, Jaime's hand) as we returned to King's Landing for some more Government 101 - this week, finance!  Always good news as it means my pal Littlefinger will be smarming about somewhere (sounding this week like he's lost his voice, but smarming really takes its toll on a person); we get him and Tyrion expounding two very salient views on how to manage a country's finances, it's either "make the numbers dance, fuck the consequences" (Littlefinger) or "really really don't borrow money you know you can't pay back" (Tyrion).  Topical.  Anyone else automatically assume Littlefinger had paid off Podrick Payne's frighteningly flexible prostitutes himself as a means of transferring the debt and being owed a favour? Or was it actually just an opportunity for Peter Dinklage to show us how good he is at being wry and Pod really is a sex wizard?  Anyway, Littlefinger's off to the Vale to woo Lysa "Thousand Yard Stare" Arryn and put his own nefarious plots into practice.  Personally, I hope he gets a spin off.*****

A quick round-up of the rest then.  Stephen Dillane continues to be excellent as Stannis Baratheon, who - next to Daenerys Targaryen - probably has the best actual claim to the Iron Throne yet is a proper hardline bastard, like.  "I want to see Joffrey dead," he says, to the ringing sound of no-one anywhere arguing.  Maybe if he just put a wall up around Dragonstone and took a few days off with Davos and Melisandre, he'd be a bit happier.  Certainly happier than pondering whether he's ready to spill his child's blood for the throne, after Melisandre rejects his advances. ("It would kill you," she says.  Now that's body confidence.)  Not much over the Wall, just more opportunities for Jon Snow to look conflicted and adorable as everyone continues to want to either hug him or slap him or maybe both at the same time, as Ciaran Hinds orders the Wildings off to war against the Night's Watch.  Aforementioned Night's Watch continue to bully Sam Tarly as they return to the home of the monstrous Craster (blimey, it's a good thing I've read the books or it would be really hard keeping all these bearded old white guys straight - I don't want to sound racist but they all look the same).  I spotted Burn Gorman amongst them today too, aka Owen from Torchwood, for whom I have always had a soft spot despite his propensity for playing unpleasant little squits.  No Davos or Joffrey or Margaery this week (boo) and no Sansa or Bran either (some kind of noise that is like shrugging, only noise), with only the briefest of Greyjoys (have a drink on me, show), but really I only notice who wasn't there when I'm writing these blogs and cannot make inappropriate comments about them - another testament to how well balanced this show is.

What really made this episode stand out, though, was the little moments.  There must have always been a temptation to hurtle through the books at breakneck speed, cramming in as many events as possible (including quite a few broken necks), but the series has now fully established itself as an entity in its own right, going at its own pace.  The fact that it can afford to lie back and toss us a delightful scene about Podrick Payne being a sex genius or Hot Pie baking unconvincing wolf bread for Arya (reminding me that Gendry is one of my many favouritest characters ever in the process) is fantastic.  It also brings an actual sense of suspense to a series where, largely, I know what happens: these characters are different, and stand on their own two feet quite apart from their book counterparts.  Because of slight but clever deviations from the source material, I'm genuinely not sure where the whole Theon and Simon from Misfits thing is going, though I have grave (and gruesome) suspicions - likewise Arya and Gendry's jaunt through Sherwood Forest with the Merry Men.  Sorry, Brotherhood Without Banners (but really now).  All in all, another great episode that displays a consummate skill for storytelling.  Is it next week yet?

This week's winner: Argh.  I am starting to see the flaw in trying to compare an episodic piece of new writing with a serialisation of familiar source material, but let it never be said that I don't commit to my bad ideas.  'Cold War' was certainly some of Gatiss' best work yet, and a great showcase for Clara, but with some plot and pacing problems.  'Walk of Punishment' wasn't quite as entertaining as last week's episode, but contained some things I've been desperately hanging on to see and some lovely added bonuses too.  Really difficult, but I'm going to say 'Cold War' just pips it - we already know Game of Thrones is excellent television but I'm still waiting for it to blow me out the water, whereas Doctor Who reached a rare level of sophistication.  Beautiful work on both sides.


*I've just checked and the Guardian's Doctor Who blog has used the exact same comparison minus The Thing, which is a) unsurprising as it's a very good comparison but b) extremely annoying so you'll have to take it on faith that I got there first, and the The Thing reference is all my own work.
**I can only assume his absence from this week's Game of Thrones can be explained by the note he left on Stannis' pillow saying "Gon 2 cptn sub.  BRB.  Miss u.  Davs. xoxo"
***Also a callback to the Christmas episode dialogue on the roof - this is the second occasion that Our Clara has echoed something one of Other Claras has said.
****Totally called that Skaldak's daughter thing, btdubs.  In fact, it's what I would have done.  I definitely would not have, say, whimpered in a corner and then propositioned Matt Smith in light of our impending deaths.
*****With Pete Campbell.  You would definitely watch that gameshow.

The Hobbit: Dwarves are Heroic and In No Way Intrinsically Hilarious Because of Their Height (spoilers)

Spoilers! Heavy, heavy spoilers for The Hobbit.  But it has been around for 60 years so it's your own fault, really.

I swear to god, I have three draft posts sitting in my Posts folder, none of which were good enough to publish, even by my admittedly lax standards.  Please don't hurt me for my accidental five month hiatus.  I'm very sorry and it won't happen again (maybe). (To cut a long story short, life happened in the form of me starting an MFA and even when your MFA is in professionally playing Let's Pretend - or as it is officially known, Theatre Directing - it is still an MFA and demands much more of your time than watching X-Men cartoons and smoking out of your bedroom window.  Who knew?)

But I'm here! I am back this New Year because there has just been so much pop culture of late and I cannot possibly let it go by without whipping up a few rounds of my signature cocktail of capital letters and inappropriate drooling.  Where to begin? There's last autumn's telly-land, which saw The Hour pick up steam after a shaky start dicking about with an organised crime storyline that was somehow less believable than having a Soviet spy in the midst of a fairly inoffensive BBC news programme (um, spoilers?); however, after hanging in there only to see what the offspring of Anna Chancellor and Peter Capaldi might be like and how soon it would be taking over the world, the last two episodes were absolute barn-stormers.  Merlin ended for good with both a bang and a whimper and this truly is a tragedy for those who stuck with it from the beginning.  Although I don't think Arthur took his top off once last season, so maybe it is time to move on.  There's a whole new Twilight film to mock, coming hand in hand with the blessed knowledge that there are to be no more, hallelulah praise the Mormon Jesus that spawned this dust-bunny of menopausal fantasies and unfulfilled life prospects in the first place.  Christmas Doctor Who was tentatively promising for the coming season, starring not only a new companion but Lesbian Silurian and Lesbian Cockney, who are much more likely candidates for a spinoff than John Barrowman ever was.

But before any of that, there is a film that must be talked about.  A film that I have looked forward to, not with the pants-wetting fist-biting glee of The Avengers, but with something far more likely to warm the cockles of my Middle-Earth-loving heart.  And boy, were my cockles warmed.  I'm talking, of course, about The Hobbit.

Un petit confession, as the French say.  I love Lord of the Rings.  That's not the confession.  The confession is that I love the films.  Burdened with an English student's guilt over enjoying an adaptation before reading the source material, I turned to the books at the tender age of thirteen and commenced a three-month project of staring in horror at the bricks of text in front of me listing rhyming dwarf-dad name after rhyming dwarf-dad name.  Why was there another song in Elvish? Was I supposed to read it? Sing it? Perform an interpretative dance to it? Had it really been going on forty pages and these people were still talking about events that not only had we never encountered, but never would and would have no bearing on the plot? Even I have a saturation point when it comes to fantasy.  I OD'ed hard on A Song of Ice and Fire, making a headlong dash through the three-and-a-half-thousand odd pages of the first four books only to have some kind of breakdown around the beginning of the fifth and hurl it across the room crying, "I simply can't bear learning any more awkwardly partnered Latinate and Anglo-Saxon names!  Bear me to the fainting couch, I believe I have the vapours! AND WHO THE FUCK IS ARTHUR DAYNE?" At some point, I will pick up the fifth one again.  When the screams of beloved murdered characters have stopped echoing in the wind.

As always, I digress.  I was saddened that I did not love reading Tolkien because I had very fond memories of The Hobbit being read to me as a child.  The Hobbit is a very simple children's story, certainly not one that seems a natural fit for a series of of epic films.  But Peter Jackson cottoned on to something very clever with the LOTR films, which is that Tolkien is simply not a natural storyteller.  The universe he creates is rich in character and landscape, the morality of the books cleaves to something undeniably decent and stirring.  But by Frodo's quivery bottom lip, he cannot string a story together in a compelling way.  Peter Jackson, however, can.  Peter Jackson can sustain a story as complicated and rich as this one over nine hours and not lose anything from it that was worth keeping.  (Except the Houses of Healing in Return of the King.  That could have been kept in favour of a bit of Liv Tyler looking wry, surely.)  So if Peter Jackson turns to me and says, "Y'know, there's a lot of stuff I wanted to put in those films but couldn't", I am actually more than happy to hand him my copy of The Hobbit and say, "Okay, Pete.  Go to town on this."

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is still Tolkien's Hobbit.  It is not, as some have suggested, Lord of the Rings 4.  Which would be silly anyway, as The Hobbit is set 60 years before. Tch.  At its centre is the comfort of home, the bigness of the world, the notion that it is small acts and small people that stand against the dark.  The Hobbit is a (relatively) small story set in an epic fantasy universe and that is exactly what Jackson delivers.  When Tolkien wrote The Hobbit, he could not have known what it was the beginning of, what Middle Earth would grow to be.  Most of us reading The Hobbit for the first time did not know either - it is rare to find someone who read Lord of The Rings before its predecessor.  But we do know Lord of the Rings now.  Either we have read it or seen it or simply become unavoidably aware of it through pop cultural osmosis.  It would almost be impossible, I think, to create a version of the Hobbit in which we weren't watching it looking for the links with the story and universe we already know, and in which I wasn't asking the question, "Does Benedict Cumberbatch look sexy as a dragon?"*  Jackson has embraced this and turned The Hobbit into a kind of three hour bubble-bath for Lord of the Rings fans with a butler on hand to drop a chocolate into your mouth every now and then.  It is audacious, visually stunning, funny and, above all, surprisingly charming.  Sorry, just gagged on my own gushing there.  Let's fix that.

It's not perfect by a long chalk.  I've seen it twice and it doesn't stand up to second viewing in the way that the LOTR films yield endless delight, especially if you are a bit drunk and making once of your friends drink every time Gollum switches personalities.  After the initial thrill of being introduced to a whole new raft of characters to shout "take your shirt off" at during inappropriate moments, the second viewing had me checking my watch during the long (long, long) first hour and a half.  Then it starts getting really good (like, really good) and it's all slightly obscene looking Goblin Kings and Andy Serkis and fire and eagles and eagles on fire (except the last one) and then it ends.  Gah.  So the second one better be really good is all I'm saying because I remember the plot of The Hobbit as being there's some short dudes who go and get a slightly shorter dude and there's a dragon and some trolls and some goblins and a ring and then the dragon dies and everyone drinks lemonade. Most of those plot points have already been covered in great detail.  Peter Jackson better have something fucking spectacular up his sleeve (actually we already know he does, it's called LEGOLAS).  So if you weren't a fan before then you definitely won't be converted by this but if you were, then see it once in the cinema and then wait for the DVD so you can identify hilarious moments of homoeroticism with your friends (they really need some more women in this universe).  Also, see it in 2D and normal frame rate.  It seems much more like a film and less like a game of 'That was CGI, that was pyrotechnic, that was CGI'.

But.  Enough beating about the bush.  No, that wasn't a euphemism.  Because I know what you really want, you filthy little blog-readers you.  I know what you have been waiting for all these months, and frankly, it disgusts me.  If you think I am going to make a fool of myself disclosing the most intimate struggles of my shattered psyche in the consideration of whether it is a crime against all that is right and good to look at Richard Armitage dressed up as a dwarf and wonder whether a new and disturbing fetish has been awoken in me, well you can look elsewhere for that kind of smut because you won't find it here.  Nor will you find musings on whether Peter Jackson watched North and South before filming started and was so hopelessly smitten with Mr Armitage that he decided to put in a frankly alarming quantity of shots in which Thorin Hardwood or whatever his name is stands atop a rocky outcrop brooding so furiously on his lack of kingliness that Viggo Mortensen is considering suing.  Nor will I comment on how the background music seemed to so taken with him that the Latinate (Elvish?) chanting during that bit at the end where stands up on the tree to take down the Orc-Video-Game-End-of-Level-Boss might as well have been shrieking, "RICHARD ARMITAGE! STANDS ON TREES! RUNS THROUGH FIRE! HE IS MANLY WITH MAN PAIN IN HIS MAN EYES!"  I'm sure at some point they were considering having him saving some baby orphans from the flames on his way to the fight but it was cut for time (it was the only thing cut for time).

Nor will you be hearing anything from me about the startling coincidence that sees the three most eligible dwarves - Thorin, Suspiciously Attractive Dwarf (Kili, played by Being Human's Aidan Turner) and his brother/boyfriend** Less Attractive but Still Doable Dwarf (Fili, played by Dean O'Gorman) - sporting a noticeably smaller quantity of prothetic nose and beard accessory than the rest.  James Nesbitt as Bofur, whilst hiding his everyman charm beneath a hat that I thought was going to take flight and a moustache that looked sad independently of Nebitt's own facial expression, could still legitimately have replaced all of his lines with "I'm James Nesbitt.  And now you want to have a pint with me."  Elijah Woods puts in a brief appearance as Frodo and I had to stop myself from standing up and congratulating Ian Holmes on having such a fine-looking nephew and asking if the cheekbones ran on the other side of the family and, if so, were there cousins? (I, by the way, was convinced that Elijah Woods has a painting in an attic somewhere looking like shit because as far as I could tell, he hasn't aged a day, but everyone disagreed with me on this point and said he looked haunted by the loss of times past.)  All this and the elves won't even make a proper appearance until Part 2.  (Although special points for Flight of the Conchord's Brett Mckenzie reprising his internet-stealing silent cameo from Fellowship of the Ring complete with a new elvish name that means 'singer' and even more special points for Lee Pace who you probably know as the guy who made pies and resurrected the dead in Pushing Daisies as LEGOLAS' DAD ON A FUCKING ELK LOOKING FABULOUS.)

So put that in your elongated Gandalf pipe and choke on it, good reader.  The various aesthetic qualities of the cast will emphatically not be reflected on in any way, not even how good Saint Cate Blanchett is at turning slowly in a shimmery dress (twice).  This is a new, more mature Jane Shakespeare and you can take your filthy gutter-dwelling minds elsewhere for that kind of thing.  Also Martin Freeman just deserves, like, ALL THE HUGS and those pointy little hobbit ears are really working for me.  He is everything you could want and more (less? There's a height joke in there somewhere) as Bilbo, and I very much admired his choice to play his scenes with Thorin as a particularly egregious rom-com. ("I'm just a hobbit.  Standing in front of a dwarf.  Asking him to love him.")

All in all, I really liked it the first time and bit less the second time but, as you can tell, I'm loving the prospect of cracking out the wine and settling down with the DVD to holler in a manner most women reserve for the stripper on their hen night.  Bring on Part 2.  In Pete We Trust.

*In the event, we will have to wait until the next film to find out, and yes, I am aware that Smaug will be CGI and not Cumberbatch in a dragon suit but it should be.
**Seriously, what's the deal here?  I'm pretty sure they're related in the book but they seemed to spend an awful lot of time going off to bond and then coming back looking flustered and out of breath.  Why were they the only two dwarfs up in the middle of the night tending the campfire?  Why were they sharing an eagle when there were clearly enough for everyone to have their own?  If they weren't looking out for the horses, then what were they doing? It's a conspiracy.

The BBC Gives Me a Present: 'The Hollow Crown' Review

A/N: Each mini review was written after the film in question was aired so this is really a record of my week-by-week responses rather than a response to the whole.  Consequently it's quite long, even for this blog.  Epic blogging for an epic series.  That's what it is.

...

The degree of excitement with which I greeted the BBC's announcement that they would be televising the Henriad, aka Shakespeare's Richard II, Henry IV Part 1, Henry IV Part 2 and Henry V, aka some of my favourite plays of all time ever, directed by Rupert Goold, Richard Eyre and Thea Sharrock aka some my favourite theatre directors of all time ever, with a cast that would not only include Jeremy Irons, Ben Whishaw and Simon Russell Beale but would also feature Tom Hiddleston aka my favourite actor of all time ever (I might have mentioned him here a few times) as Prince Hal, aka one of my favourite parts in Shakespeare of all time ever, could, in nuclear terms, have levelled a small conurbation. The BBC, it seemed, was like a drunken uncle in a generous mood who knows that your parents have been arguing: "Would you like a present?  There you go.  No wait, you've been such a good girl, have another.  No, that's not nearly enough.  Here, take my kidney."  Or similar.

I was very excited.  Like, Avengers-level of excitement.  And I'm not ashamed of being so plebbishly thrilled.  History plays were the Dallas and Dynasty of Shakespeare's day: sexy, glamorous men and women shagging and trying to kill each other, all for the benefit of grubby little groundlings like me watching with one hand in a bucket of popcorn (or holding an orange stuck with cloves for the historical pedants amongst you), gaping maw slackened with delight and reverence.  They're meant to be enjoyed, is what I'm trying to say.

Having said that, I didn't want to just come here and flail.  I purposefully have refrained from posting reaction posts or excessive abuse of the caps lock key.  These are my favourite plays, and I want to respond to them like the adult with an English degree that I am.

AND THEN THIS HAPPENED.

The BBC doesn't want me to respond like a mature, intellectual adult.  The BBC wants me to just offer my ovaries up on a plate and say, "I'm so sorry I ever tried to have coherent thoughts about your Shakespeare plays, I'm probably just over stretching my woman-brain."  The patriarchy has a new weapon, and its name is TOM HIDDLESTON IN A FUCKING SAUNA.

Pictured: patriarchy.

I am really quite annoyed.

Despite this obvious attempt by the forces of retrogressiveness to prevent me from giving a considered analysis of The Hollow Crown, I have overcome all obstacles and done so.  I have also rewatched the sauna scene several times in order to prove that its bewitching enchantments have no hold over me, thou foul televisual wizards at the BBC.  So let that be a lesson to you.  Anyway, on with the show.

...

Richard II is a funny old play.  It's full of pomp and circumstance (phrase copyright Shakespeare, cf Othello), and a huge percentage of it is spoken in rhyming couplets which are not the easiest things to make sound spontaneous.  It was slightly to my surprise then that Goold's Richard II was - Act 1 to Act 5 - completely stunning.  I'd like to go into more detail than I can, mainly because I watched it three weeks ago now, but also because there's not much else to say.  The way it was translated into film was gorgeous: long, locked-off shots holding the court inside them like a series of picture-frames, the couplets delivered carefully but fiercely.  The great risk of any production of this play is that it will stale quickly, everyone caught inside the huge, slow-moving machine of the court and its rituals; Goold avoided this beautifully and the whole thing flowed like gossamer.

Whishaw is perfect casting for Richard - a man who is a bad king yet good at being king.  He was perfectly juxtaposed with Rory Kinnear's Bolingbroke, an actor who will never set the world on fire for me but was well cast here.  Whishaw is elegant and neurotic where Kinnear is heavy and direct, Richard's growing astonishment that he could ever be deposed beautifully paralleled with Bolingbroke's astonishment that he must be the one to depose him.  Also Whishaw is beautiful and Kinnear looks like a turnip but I'm sure that's beside the point.  The deposition scene in particular was magic; Richard's unwillingness to physically let go of the crown devolves into a grown man having a temper tantrum - but what a temper tantrum it is.  Goold and Whishaw understand what Richard understands - to be a king requires an essential theatricality, one that Bolingbroke does not have (but his son totally will).  It's not often you can watch an adult man lying on the floor kicking and screaming because someone is taking his toy (really, Richard's whole objection to Bolingbroke taking over as king amounts to "BUT HE DOESN'T LOOK AS GOOD AS MEEEE.  LOOK AT MY BONE STRUCTURE, THERE'S NO WAY HE CAN PULL OFF THIS CROWN.  I WANT A BIGGER LOLLY") and your overwhelming reaction is to hug them.

The cast as a whole is an embarrassment of riches - Patrick Stewart turns up to deliver the 'sceptered isle' speech ("Oh," says everyone with polite surprise, "so that's where that comes from") and then dies.  David Suchet turns up as York, which was actually less surprising than Lindsay Duncan turning up for all of two scenes as his wife and, apparently, mother to the guy with slamming cheekbones from the first series of Silk.  James Purefoy and David Morrissey are also just about discernible under a layer of grime and beards as Mowbray and Northumberland respectively, and Clemence Poesy does a very good job of swanning about being French and beautiful as Queen Isabella.

Speaking of queens, I was both amused and skeptical about the heavy Saint Sebastian imagery: as a play, Richard II owes a large debt to Marlowe's Edward II, which features a similarly idle king insensitive to his kingdom's needs who is then deposed and murdered, this time by his wife (another Isabella, conveniently) and her lover.  Marlowe, let's be frank, makes quite clear the reasons for Edward's wife's displeasure in the form a strapping young lad called Gaveston who Edward seems much more interested in spending time with.  I've always unconsciously assumed similar things about Richard and, it seems, so has Goold, except without the unconscious bit.  Richard lingers around nubile young models being painted as Saint Sebastian - adopted as a gay icon, as I found out when I proudly brought home a postcard of a very lovingly rendered Caravaggio-esque version of the pierced saint from the National Gallery and got some very questioning looks from my family - before dying in a similar fashion, shot full of crossbow bolts.  It's sort of reassuring that someone else had the same thoughts but also I'm still mentally thirteen and all the Saint Sebastian stuff was so heavy handed that it did make me giggle uncontrollably.  Not enough to put me off the production as a whole though: a gorgeous, gorgeous rendering of a difficult play.

...

On first watch, Henry IV Part 1 was a much more mixed bag.  I must confess, the Henry IVs have a special place in my heart, much of which is owed to the wonderful productions at the Globe in 2010, much of which is owed to Roger Allam's Falstaff and a slightly smaller amount of which is owed to Jamie Parker's Hal, who between them stole my affections much more successfully than Falstaff manages the robbery at Gadshill.  That was a joke to show you I've read Shakespeare.  It was a production that could only have worked at the Globe: rowdy, slightly pedestrian in interpretation and thoroughly reliant on a few charismatic lead performances, but ultimately big-hearted and sort of magical.

Eyre's Henry IV was, on a personal level, less successful.  It is a rather chilly, loveless interpretation of a hugely generous play that demands imagination from its dramatists.  The Henry IVs present life in all its little permutations, in all its unimportant nuances.  Perhaps the reminisces of Falstaff and Justice Shallow in Part 2 don't affect the movement of history but I dare you to listen to an actor - any actor - deliver Falstaff's line, "We have heard the chimes at midnight" and not feel like it's important to life.  This, perhaps, is what Eyre misses.  A history play is usually the story of a king; it is no accident that the Henry IVs, that seem so preoccupied with lowlives and rebels and general scum, tell the story of a prince.  The simple genius of these plays is that Hal isn't king yet: he's still a man (well, boy) and he responds to things like a man.  Henry V is a political play about war, no two ways about it, but so long as Hal is around, his drama is that of a man, encompassing life at its grandest and its most trivial and Shakespeare makes every moment of it important.

Eyre's production was a disappointment only in this respect: I simply didn't laugh enough.  I'm not being a pleb demanding more rotten fruit being thrown, it's intrinsic to the way the play works.  There is no other Shakespeare play that draws you so thoroughly into the protagonist's journey - we, with Hal, are seduced by Falstaff (though, thank heaven, not literally) and we, with Hal, are shocked when the cracks start to creep into the relationship even though we, with Hal, have always known that the party has to end sometime because when you are the crown prince the ending is kind of a foregone conclusion.  With Simon Russell Beale's dour, downbeat Falstaff, there was none of this seduction.  I was unsurprised by Falstaff's callous disregard for human life towards his pathetic band of soldiers -"food for power" he mutters as he marches - which is usually the point at we which we (and Hal) start to suspect it's not all Elizabethan Santa Claus and cups of sack.

Eyre's approach to the language was brilliant and frustrating in equal measure. On the one hand, it was treated like actual, living, breathing language that people uttered carelessly while they were riding or fighting or drinking or reigning, which was wonderful.  No-one proclaimed or declaimed or recited; Hal's eulogy for Hotspur after he kills him (roughly translated into modern English as "I'm really sorry I had to kill you so my dad would love me") was all the more affecting because Hiddleston - covered in blood and dirt and sweat - could barely get the words out for shortness of breath and pain from his wounds.  On the other hand, some of Shakespeare's most glorious and inventive language was simply glossed over, lines that held so much potential just thrown away.  In the 2010 production, something was made out of every single line, which may not be the way that people speak but it's a pure delight to watch.  Here, Beale's introspective, insecure Falstaff practically mumbles the man's most audacious and brilliant lie - that he knew all along it was Hal under the buckram cloak robbing him of his own ill-gotten gains.

This is not to say that Beale was a bad Falstaff - no-one was bad.  Jeremy Irons nailed it as Henry IV - though I can only assume that they decided to recast and not have Rory Kinnear reprising the role because there is no way Kinnear's children would be that good looking.  (Wow, he's really taking a pounding here.  Sorry, Rory.)  Joe Armstrong was a strong Hotspur with an enjoyably broad accent, managing to make a lot of out of part that can be fairly thankless and tiresome (but then again, Hotspur is Hal's foil and Hal is great so yeah, suck it Hotspur).  I also very much enjoyed the casting gag of having his real-life dad Alun Armstrong play Hotspur's dad Northumberland (also supposed to be an older version of David Morrissey from Richard II, again I will assume that having an attractive son came into this decision).  There was also a nice little moment for the unfortunates amongst us who happened to become somewhat attached to the BBCs execrable Robin Hood series that ran a few years ago (call it morbid curiosity that kept me watching), reuniting Joe Armstrong as Hotspur/Alan-a-Dale with Harry Lloyd's Mortimer/Will Scarlett.  They even had a little bromance moment.  For a moment, I was seventeen again.  Then when I had finished blacking out from the horror and taken a shower, I carried on watching.

Hiddleston's Hal gave me a multitude of FEELINGS (yes, it has to be in capital letters), most of them signals from my brain to my ovaries telling them to shut the hell up.*  He excels at characters that are hard to read and this ambiguity works perfectly with Hal, a character that writes the book on playing his cards close to the chest.  He tells us in the first scene that he's going to ditch his friends to make himself look better and then does so in a needlessly brutal way, and at the same time he's disaffected, displaced and unhappy, and suffers from a major case of Daddy-doesn't-love-me...itis (this is becoming another Hiddleston trademark, and regular readers will know that you will hear no complaints from me on this front).  Hiddleston is marvellously subtle and compelling and was a canny casting choice in so far as he knows how to use the camera - to the point where this almost overshadows the rest of his performance.  Maybe he's been away from the stage too long, maybe he's not picked up some Shakespeare for a while but there were a few moments of disconnect from the words; the beauty of the performance lay in his reactions, his expressions.  I'm not complaining because it contributed to the great strength of this production: Eyre's translation of Shakespeare from stage to screen.  Shakespeare's characters lie.  They lie all the time - to each others and to themselves and Hiddleston conveys this wonderfully.  Falstaff asks him if he's afraid of Hotspur.  Hal replies, "Not a whit, in faith."  Bollocks.  Hal's clearly shit-scared - and Eyre lets you know that with close-ups that focus on details too small to be read from the auditorium, twitches and half-smiles and grimaces that reveal a whole different narrative underneath the text.  Eyre's other trick of cutting away during monologues, often to the next room, is more frustrating.  It's sort of like someone changing the channel in the middle of your programme.  Hey.  Richard.  I was watching that.  I was also disappointed that Hal and Falstaff's great soliloquies about (respectively) image management and honour were done in voiceover - it's a good trick for the camera but goddammit, I'm an audience member.  Talk to me.  Share with me.  It's what Shakespearean characters do.

...

Watching Henry IV Part 2 made a lot of things a lot clearer.  My general concept of these two plays is as a great duet: major key and minor key, fast and slow, young and old etc etc.  Eyre takes this idea and shoves it out the window, giving us a slow, bitter breakdown of relationships between Hal and Falstaff, Hal and Henry, Hal and himself, Falstaff and the world - everyone and everyone, really.  Unwilling as I am to part with my view of these plays as simultaneously rambunctious, savage, warm, carnivalesque, etc, Eyre's conceit of them is compelling.  It is very much a cold, empty universe that Hal inherits as he steps up to become king; Part 2 is often observed to have a twilight feel to it - by which I mean everyone is tired and conscious of their own mortality, not stalking teenagers and walking around sparkling.

For me, the most electrifying of Eyre's directorial decisions comes in the scene where Hal, believing his father to have died, picks up the crown and puts it on.  Henry promptly wakes up and berates his son for being so eager to see him kick the bucket; it's a great scene anyway but Eyre directs it with incredible nuance, working through its arc beautifully.  Those close-ups I was talking about work overtime to give you Hiddleston wandering from his dead father's bed to the empty throne room, sitting and crowning himself before starting to cry.  By relocating the moment to the throne (in the play, Hal performs his self-coronation by the bedside) Hal becomes isolated and, most importantly, frightened.  It gives the moment a significance I never would have considered: for all his tactics, Hal is deeply insecure of himself.  I have always taken it as read that Hal has an intrinsic self-knowledge that enables him to pull off his prodigal son trick: he can defeat Hotspur in battle and he will be a good king.  Hiddleston's poker-faced prince is revealed to have no such certainty but, just when he should be assuming the mantle of authority, he collapses into grief like the young man that he is.  It's a brilliant counterpoint to Beale's Falstaff, who was immediately more satisfying in the melancholy rural world of Part 2, also playing his own great insecurity: that he is too old.

I am surprised that Part 2 should be more successful than Part 1 - it's a much less substantive play - but perhaps it allows the strengths of the actors to shine through more.  Hiddleston is a cerebral actor and doesn't entirely convince in Hal's carousing scenes, but in Part 2's long, introspective speeches and moments of self-realisation, he shines.  The famous dismissal of Falstaff loses some of its shock factor only because Eyre builds up to it so organically: when it comes, we wonder how Falstaff can have had any other notion of how this story would end.  No-one is suggested to be at fault - there is no calculating, opportunist Hal or sly, opportunist Falstaff - but it is merely the price of kingship.

I would suggest watching both parts of Henry IV together.  It's a long viewing experience, but you need the second part to make sense of the first.  Eyre connects the two stories in a way I never thought possible, not presenting you with a replaying of the same arcs in major and minor key, but the full and dazzling story of a young man's ascent.  Hal's coronation is the dynastic high point of The Henriad, yet it is packed full of attendant sorrows.  This seems to be the best way of describing Eyre's films: the ascent is grim and full of obstacles, but the triumph is earned.

...

It's hard to be really surprised by Henry V anymore.  It's amongst the most adapted Shakespeare plays, with Branagh's and Olivier's being the obvious contenders and massive box office smashes in their day.  All that potential for blockbuster action sequences, all those rousing speeches etc etc, it's Hollywood's wet dream.  I've always found its popularity strange, though, seeing as it essentially starts with a Chorus apologising for CGI not having been invented yet.  The entire play is an exhortation of the imagination, a plea that the audience go along with it - because if they don't, all that patriotic guff about England's favourite warrior-king sounds terribly hollow.  Thea Sharrock's Henry V is, to my very great surprise, my hands-down favourite of the Hollow Crown films.  Why? Because she locates the heart of the play in this: the audience's understanding of Henry as a man.  She refuses to make the play either pro-war (as Olivier does) or a commentary on the horrors of war (as Branagh does).  She simply tells you the story of Henry.  And I was surprised again and again and again.

It is entirely valid to argue that the visual spectacle is what lets this film down: indeed, there is a little of the usual television-epic-army-of-twenty syndrome in the battle scenes and the courts are neither spectacular nor imposing.  I understand that some might be disappointed in this film precisely because it isn't Branagh's huge, roaring blockbuster.  But as I said that's not the story being told.  There's a huge preponderance of close-ups - not just of Harry but everyone, from the high-ups to the low-lives.  Sharrock tells the story of a series of individuals in war.  Of the four plays, it is the most successful in using film to convey the interiority of its players.  Heavily cut down to just over two hours, the paring back of the story to its essentials (the Scroop/Gray treason subplot is cut) allows us to focus on the lives at stake.  For god's sake, I cried over the Duke of York's death (an excellent Patterson Joseph).  I couldn't have told you for certain that there even was a York in Henry V previously but now I don't think I'll ever forget.  Sharrock also navigates the issue of the Chorus being a fundamentally theatrical device fantastically - Olivier and Branagh both took a meta approach, with the film starting on the stage of the Globe, and the Chorus walking through a film set respectively - by having Falstaff's page (usually martyred in the slaughter of the baggage train, an episode which was cut) morph into John Hurt's Chorus, present only in voiceover until that moment, still holding his bloodstained St George armband.  It's incredibly poignant, not because of the George's cross, but because we understand that we've simply been hearing the story of a man told by another man who was there.  Henry V is a mythologised king; Sharrock un-mythologises him brilliantly.

A large part of this is due to Hiddleston's performance, carrying on from the Henry IVs.  I freely admit that I was wrong in my predictions that Hiddleston would make a better Hal than Henry - while he was good in the previous instalments, he's extraordinary here.  Sharrock and Hiddleston explode all my lazy prejudices about Henry being an unsatisfying cipher of a hero; this is a young king learning on the job and all too frequently making mistakes.  "Once more unto the breach" is delivered to a small group of soldiers, each one addressed individually by a king who is clearly bricking it himself.  The threats to rape the women and murder the children of Harfleur are delivered with a desperation and tension that suggests Henry is shocking himself as he speaks.  It stands in beautiful contrast to his later order that all the French prisoners be killed, coming in a fit of rage after York's death and the apparent refusal of the French to surrender.  "I was never angry since I came to France/ Until this moment" he says, and boy do we believe him.  The Agincourt speech is not - as it usually is - a rousing call to the whole army but a quiet and simple exhortation to his nearest and dearest to simply be brave.  It brings out something dazzling in the speech - that Henry never actually says they're going to win.  All he asks is that they do their best.  It is perhaps the most affecting interpretation of it that I've heard.

This is the thread that Sharrock finds in a play usually cast as being pro- or anti- war or patriotism: the idea of courage.  It is never suggested that the English victory is due to Henry - heavy emphasis is placed on his prayers that God be on his side.  Rather than confront the validity of the war, this Henry resorts to something unquestioningly admirable: bravery.  Yet even then, bravery is not presented as morally superior; Paul Ritter's bitter, raging Pistol suffers a form of PTSD - faced with the battlefield, this "swaggerer" from Eastcheap simply breaks down.  Williams, the soldier that questions Harry in disguise, is likewise not condemned for his view that the king has blood on his hands - rather, you get the sense that Henry agrees.  York asks to lead the vanguard and dies - yet he dies at the hands of a rogue Frenchman (damn those rogue Frenchmen) and we never question his sincerity or wisdom.  It is a fantastically nuanced portrait of individual responses to war, from command to foot soldiers.

I'd also like to mention Tom Brooke's Corporal Nim, who was something of a revelation.  I've honestly never thought that hard about Nim before - another Eastcheap tavern sweller who goes off to war because there's sod-all else to do in Medieval England - but Brooke's unhappy, melancholic performance imbued the part with a huge amount of pathos and yet again reminded us not of the 'cost of war' or anything so sweeping, but simply of the single human lives that interweave throughout the story.  Similarly Melanie Thierry's Katherine - usually such a thankless task with the awkward lurching from war drama to rom-com - was brilliantly rendered.  The scene where she starts to learn English was imbued with a tension I'd always suspected was lurking there: she knows that her future is going to involve England in some way, and there's a war going on - something, anything to distract.  It's both pragmatic and strangely affecting.  The wooing scene is less successful but I'm going to blame Shakespeare here - it always seems oddly bathetic after the charge and energy of the battle scenes. Nevertheless, it is charmingly and (remarkably) convincingly done: the pledge of two young pragmatists who understand that their futures are linked and start to see that they could, despite everything, love each other some day.

Ultimately, Sharrock does things I never thought to see in a Henry V. Rather than cutting the play's problematic epilogue, in which we are reminded that Henry died not long after his conquest of France and left his infant son in the hands of the nobles who would begin the Wars of the Roses, Sharrock allows Shakespeare his final note of tragedy.  Opening and closing on Henry's funeral, we are left with a heavy mix of pride and grief: never for a moment is Hiddleston's distinctly flawed and human king anything less than the text's "star of England" - but stars fade, and history marches on.

...

Overall, The Hollow Crown has been stunning television.  It has not only lived up to my expectations, it has surprised me over and over again with its deft, intelligent, even revelatory interpretations from directors and actors.  Is it perfect? No.  Do the four films hang together? Not really.  Could it have afforded a bigger budget?  Almost definitely.  But it has, I think, changed the way we think of Shakespeare on film.  All four are defiantly cinematic envisionings of a series of plays that demand much of their dramatists.  Richard II is slow and gorgeous; Henry IV 1 and 2 is an uncompromising look at plays that usually go affectionately unchallenged; Henry V is a brilliant answer to a play that the nation seems simultaneously obsessed with and troubled by.  I really couldn't have asked for more than this: a series that presents some of my favourite plays beautifully, intelligently and viscerally, yet reminds me that no matter how many times I think I've got the measure of them, the Henriad still has more treasures to give.  Standing ovations all round.

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*It sounded something like this: "oh huh wonder why they cut that line look they gave that bit to Doll oh that's interesting HIS SHIRT IS OPEN ooh I like that interpretation interesting I never thought of it like that OH MY GOD HIS HAIR IS WET AND ALSO HIS SHIRT jeremy irons is great oh look its will and alan from robin hood man that show was bad oh yeah shakespeare FUCK DID YOU SEE THE LIGHTING ON HIS COLLARBONE JUST THEN I wish these soliloquies weren't in voiceover HE JUST LOOKED INTO THE CAMERA oh no why did you cut that speech down HOLY FUCK LOOK AT HIS HANDS SO I GUESS I HAVE A HAND THING NOW OR SOMETHING IS THAT NORMAL LOOK HOW BLUE HIS EYES ARE CONCENTRATE ON THE SHAKESPEARE YOU HAVE A DEGREE OH FUCK HE WINKED AND NOW I'M DEAD".  But also he looked like this:

Oh hello.

And also all the promo shots for Henry V looked like this:

STOP LOOKING INTO MY SOUL.

THAT IS NOT AN APPROPRIATE WAY FOR A KING TO SIT.

So on balance I think I did quite well.