Downton Abbey - A Period Drama Worth Watching

It’s 1912 and Robert Crawley has his life in order. He has a loving wife, 3 beautiful daughters and he’s the Earl of massive estate in Yorkshire named Downton Abbey. The show, named after the abbey is a period piece about the class struggles and family drama of the Crawley family as well as the servants who tend to them and work in the Abbey. Robert comes from a long lineage of heirs whose sole responsibility is to manage and take care of the estate. With no sons of his own, the next in line to inherit Downton is a close cousin. Unfortunately said cousin was on board the Titanic and this is where we find the family shortly into the shows premiere. The next in line is an unknown distant cousin to the family, a cousin who has the power to leave the family without the Abbey, and the fortune that comes with it when he inherits. To even hint at where the story goes from here really would be ruining a lot of fun.

Now I’m not the kind of person who usually enjoys period pieces (it took the addition of zombies to get me to finally read Pride and Prejudice) but there’s a way that Downton carries itself that really distinguishes it not just from other period pieces but from most other shows on television. The shows cast is at least double the size of current TV shows and with that comes double the amount of plot lines and undoubtedly double the amount of complications in the writing and planning phases. Yet somehow the shows creator Julian Fellowes has handled it all with ease, floating through the story as multiple plotlines weave, interconnect and influence each other as we follow the residents at the Abbey over the years. What’s even more impressive is that all of these characters and plotlines matter. There are no throw away characters. Whether you love them or hate them each character has been written so well that you’re always wondering what they are up too when they aren’t currently on the screen. Couple that with a fantastic cast including the always excellent Maggie Smith and you have the grounds for what I would consider one of the best shows currently on TV.

I’ve always admired British television and the approach taken to it. There are few series with 20+ episode seasons like you see in North America. Downton has currently aired two seasons with a mere 8 episodes each and a Christmas Special. The shorter seasons are surely one of the keys to its success. It’s never given the chance to let the story drag or ever feel stretched thin and I really appreciate this ‘get-in, get-out’ method of story telling. A shorter time with a story the caliber of Downton just means I’m going to enjoy each minute of it that much more, and of course eagerly count down the days until it’s return with Season 3 in September.  

New Film: 'Sound of My Voice'

Sound of My Voice is a movie about a documentary-making couple who infiltrate a group of people that follows an enigmatic young woman named Maggie, for some reason or other. The couple, of course, thinks she is a charlatan (a fake) but finds, with time, their skepticism suspended. They don't know what to do. They unravel secrets to the things they cannot see upon first glance. 

Seems Sound of My Voice wants us to question cults and esotiricism. But replace those two with hegemony and religion. A movie about two, seemingly sensible people who feign interest in a guru of anything can appeal to those, I think, who secretly want the consolation. I may see this movie. I may not. But -- and I might be wrong, totally, since it's only a trailer -- do not go for some intellectual appeasing. Go to have certain titillating presuppositions reinforced -- that the esoteric really is esoteric, and that some people are more gifted than others.

Honestly, I believe both -- though one more than the other. Guess which!

Wes Anderson's Ads, or My Bane From Opportunists Who Think Technology is Cool.

Here’s a joke. Wes Anderson’s new movie Moonrise Kingdom will be preluded by some fantasy ads for Sony’s Xperia smart phone. 

I hope people don’t fall for this fiction: that, somehow, having a well-respected director direct kids with coy and squeaky voices towards promoting the consumption of a product that --more than likely -- stifles some composite of impoverished people or region, or at least forwards nothing to combat the hegemonic interests of corporations, will be a pretty thing to experience...No, no, no one hundred times. 

He even panders to North American linguistic/cultural insecurities by showcasing kids with English accents, as if we're now supposed to believe it more -- just as we were supposed to believe Love Actually's fucked up 10-year-old and his rhapsody about theories of love. We're not as dumb as we look, Anderson, you Anglophile.

Yes, release movies, Wes. But shut up with this.

21 Jump Street - Review

21 Jump Street isn’t a bad movie, but it’s not as good as I thought it would be.

One problem is the hype behind Jonah Hill. Christ, why do people laugh at the sight of this person? He’s not that funny looking. He’s less funny looking now than when he had excess weight. My cinematic experience in particular was ruined by lots of -- mainly trashy -- girls laughing at him in scenes where he is merely in stasis. They just cannot take him seriously, which ominously speaks to his inevitable type-cast.

I still enjoyed the movie, however. It had occasional moments where I laughed hard. Yet they were not as frequent as they were with, say, Super Bad, Get Him To The Greek, Knocked Up, or Forgetting Sarah Marshall; they’re all better than this movie.  Too much of Jump Street is built around the revisitation to high school, a theme that gets more lame with age. Movies that occur in high school, not through memory, but through the present tense fare better (like Superbad). The only neat thing about this return to high school is that it shows the dialectical life of popularity: the popular kids are vegans, environmentally friendly, not bad at school -- all, basically, unlike the crowd Channing Tatum’s preppy character identified with years ago. But that’s all. 

There were some sad sights in the film too. Its first two minutes are exactly what you saw by way of trailer, which for some reason seems a very cheap moment to witness. Johnny Depp makes a useless cameo in homage to his affiliation with the Jump Street sitcom as a man who complains about having to wield a big nose for five years undercover. That’s not funny. Yeah, the humour just isn’t that pronounced; do I miss something when everyone in the theatre erupts at Hill’s character having a knife in his back and saying ‘that’s awesome’? 

Still, besides the cheap humour and bad promotional tactics (one scene, with Hill smashing a car windshield in jest, isn’t even in the movie), 21 Jump Street is fun. It's better than most comedies, just not those associated with Hill (don't buy any hype about him in this one). 

7.7/10

Wes Anderson's 'Moonrise Kingdom'

When reputable actors pile into one film, fits hit shans. Such is the constant case for Wes Anderson's films: my memories of The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic are couched with darling actors sometimes doing things outside their domains. Anderson's new movie, Moonrise Kingdom, hopes to be the same. It opens the 65th Cannes Film Festival and features perennials Bill Murray and Jason Schwartzman. But it also has Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton, Edward Norton, and, strangely, Bruce Willis, whom Richard Roeper once (contentiously) named the most underrated actor of all time. We'll see about that.

They flank two disparate young people in a New England summer camp, 1965, from which the youths decide to flee.

See what happens. See whether the big actors trump the young people who do what many youths feel they want to do, at some age, in Anderson's way.

MOONRISE KINGDOM will have its world premiere on Wednesday, May 16 in the Grand théâtre Lumière of the Palais des Festivals.