On Crime Drama

There's a quote from the review of a bad film over on Pajiba about crime dramas which I've been thinking about today. Especially, how it relates to Breaking Bad.

"In a weird way, a lot of crime drama is aspirational: even as we rest in the knowledge that the criminals will have to pay for what they’ve done, we also know we’re being invited to participate in a voyeurism where we can imagine ourselves rich and wild, at least for the first two acts. There’s a humming thread of desire, of vicarious triumph, running through most crime stories, whether they’re lighthearted (Ocean’s 11) or gruesome (Scorsese). Just imagine what you could do with all this money or power, the film seems to say. It’s a tease, and it works, because it lets us fantasize on a subconscious level without abandoning our moral compass. Some crimes stories, though, are just the opposite: they never make those ill-gotten gains look like anything but a burden to be dealt with. Instead of asking “What would you do with all this?” they say “How would you deal with this?” It’s not that either type of film is saying crime pays; it’s that the former lets you flirt with the idea that it might, while the latter never lets you forget that nobody gets out alive." (A Single Shot Pajiba.com Review)

Fantasy Football - August 2013/14

The story of GW1 revolved around the DGW for Chelsea and Villa. Everyone in our League had captained Hazard, who played both games and was awarded an assist for an own goal in the second. The popular choice of Lukaku up front turned out a failure, Jose Mourinho only bringing him on as a sub at the end of both games. The real winner was Benteke who scored three goals and was man of the match twice. From the rest, Mignolet also turned out to be a good choice, saving a penalty to save 'Pool's clean sheet and picking up 3bpts.

Andrew won this opening week, the only person with Benteke up front, and more points coming from his three Chelsea players and Soldado. James was second with Mignolet's penalty save and goal scoring Ivanovic to thank.

My week was a disappointing one. Coleman did well for me, scoring and assisting, but I'd left Luke Shaw on the bench after a slight injury worry and that proved a grave mistake. He kept a clean sheet and made an assist for 12pts, but I saw none of it.

The story of the first round of transfers was everyone dropping Lukaku (I brought in Giroud.). Lack of game time and tough fixtures meant everyone who had him got rid. I was the only one to take a -4pts hit to transfer out Hazard, everyone else keeping him in their team and hoping he'd do well in Mondays game against Man Utd at Old Trafford. Paul Hackett used his wildcard to shake his team up, becoming our third RVP team.

As it turned out, I needn't have bothered with the extra transfer. Hazard didn't get any extra points, but neither did David Silva, so I gained nothing for my transfer except four points spent. For GW2, Andrew won again, with James a close second again. They both had Mignolet, who kept a second clean sheet. He's earned 22pts in two weeks! That's 10 more than any other GK in our league, and I've only earned 3pts off my GK pair! They also were the only two to profit from Chelsea defenders clean sheet against Man Utd - had RVP scored Ross and I would've been top with him as captain. But he didn't, and so we didn't, and it doesn't matter "what could have" in the end.

Transfers after the second week were dominated by the dropping of Hazard, as expected. James, Jon, and Andrew all took him out; I'd already gotten rid last week. Jon had some housekeeping to do, taking a -8pts hit restructuring his team, whilst Andrew got rid of Zaha for -4pts.

GW3 was a poor one for strikers, and with everyone except Andrew fielding a team of three up front, the week was won and lost on who was captained in midfield. Mike Hackett used his wildcard for GW3, and promptly won the week (with Walcott his captain). That was on the back of Man City beating Hull 2-0, with Zabaleta and Yaya Toure his stars. Jon came second, thanks largely to Zabaleta. This combined with an average week for Andrew and James to close up the middle of league table somewhat, before the long international break between GW3-4.

The extra transfers Jon and Andrew made proved somewhat fruitful. Jon swapped out Rat (who's not first choice for West Ham) for Lescott who kept a clean sheet. Hazard had no game, and Jon had no options on the bench, so Cazorla's 3pts were important, and Weimann was a holdover from the DGW in GW1 while Anelka is a popular cheap striker. The -8 points is a big hit, but all three were necessary. That's the price of starting with 4 DGW players, you'll have to swap them out at some point. Andrew transferred out Zaha (who's price is plummeting) for Paulinho, and Hazard for Toure. He then captained Toure for a 22 point haul! However, 3 of Andrew's first team picked up zero points, and none of his bench played a single minute. Saved by his Captain, indeed.

The Dream Team so far. Mignolet has been the standout player. No-one in our league started with Giroud or Sturridge.

The gap between GW3-4 also featured Transfer Deadline Day. The biggest move of the day was Arsenal bringing in Mesut Ozil from Real Madrid. Man Utd also finally signed Feliani from Everton, while Chelsea let Lukaku go on loan to the Toffees. Bale made his move to Madrid, but the Suarez and Rooney transfer rumours came to nothing in the end.

The three RVP teams sit bottom of the table. His failure to score against Chelsea and Liverpool bringing into question just how "fixture proof" he really is. Ross suffered badly from this, captaining him both those weeks, for only 6pts reward. In contrast, Andrew earned 38pts from his captain choices (Dzeko & Yaya Toure.) The importance of a scoring captain is massive, and RVP teams can be burnt twice when he has a blank week. Still, with great fixtures coming in september and october, now would be a great time for RVP to find his scoring boots.

Ross sits above me due to the Hazard/Silva -4pts transfer. The RVP teams are a clear distance behind the Non-RVP teams, but it has only been three weeks.

Defiance - Season 1 Review

Imagine, for a second, that you have a birthday party to organise. For this you’ve hired a great chef to help mark the occasion. He asks for flour, eggs, milk, and icing sugar, and you look forward to the great cake he is surely cooking up. But then, when the day of the great occasion comes, there stands the master chef studiously building a sandcastle of flour and eggs, with milk for the moat and little icing sugar guardsmen on the battlements.

It’s a different idea, that’s for sure, but all you wanted was a cake, so I’m sure you’d rightly be more than a bit disappointed.

Rockne S. O’Bannon is that kind of chef. He’s the creator of Farscape, a 1990s cult sci-fi show about an astronaut lost-in-space on the far side of the galaxy. Here, O’Bannon has been headhunted by the SyFy channel to create their big new sci-fi drama, and headline their recommitment of genre television. Instead, he’s made a frontier drama about the troubles of a small town.

Sense the disappointed already? After that exciting premiere three months ago, Defiance has settled down into a weekly rhythm of a plodding anti-climax.

The characters motivations are impossible to pin down and their personalities less even than paper-thin clichés. Logan, our protagonist, is an anti-hero in the style of Han Solo or Malcolm Reynolds but he has almost nothing to do and precious little to say. At the end of the entire series I know nothing about him – is he’s smart or funny or reckless or calculating or broodish or boorish, I couldn’t tell you. He has an adopted daughter, he was a soldier in the war, and now he’s the town “lawkeeper”. But the entire show hangs on the charisma of the lead role and Grant Bowler is so bland, and the scripts so drearily written, that his presence is a void, often devoid of the slightest importance to the story or interest to the audience.

His adopted daughter is an alien, and she’s angry at the world. There is a plot about her species having telepathic and powers of prescience, but she doesn’t react to that discovery with anything more than continued gently simmering anger at the world. She sometimes tumbles into bed with the deputy sheriff, but that isn’t a plot or part of her story – it’s just something that happens.

There are other aliens in Defiance, and although that’s the main hook for the poster, in truth it’s little more than a footnote for the actual show. Aliens showed up, and their arrival sort of ended the world-as-we-know-it. In this near future, the Humans and Alien Races live side-by-side (except where they don’t. We don’t see that.) These aliens are all mostly human, the most interesting ones being too expensive to show. Apart from some cultural differences and some casual racism they may as well all be human for the needs of the story. Their uniqueness is never explored or used as part of the narrative – the largest attraction of cult classic Farscape – and so remains only to be the thin tether keeping Defiance classified as a “science fiction” show.

For example, this is the main season long story: the town of Defiance is having an election, and the mayor may not be re-elected. Meanwhile, the son of a shady businessman is engaged to the daughter of the biggest landowner, causing mild tension. But, with Aliens.

To be perfectly clear, none of this makes this a "bad" show, and I'm actually looking forward to sitting down for season 2 next year. But I couldn't recommened anyone catching up with this show as it is. This isn’t even “bad” sci-fi, but that means it can never be “it’s so bad it’s good!” sci-fi. Terra Nova or Falling Skies are bad, but they had a charm in their awfulness – like watching a bad B-movie where you enjoy mocking the characters while you watch. Defiance doesn’t have that. It’s just dull. It’s a dull frontier western about small town politics, with weak characters.