BAFTA TV Awards 2009

Last Sunday the red carpet rolled out for the 2009 BAFTA TV awards, the annual celebration of big success on the small screen. Having abandoned its usual venue at the London Palladium, this year’s prestigious event took place in the more spacious surroundings of Royal Festival Hall on London’s Southbank. The attending stars and glorious sunshine brought with them the usual throngs of excited fans and media. The atmosphere was jubilant but not quite as frenzied as the hysteria which tends to accompany the BAFTA film awards and its A-list parade. Ant and Dec don’t have quite the same effect on a crowd as Brad and Angelina. The likes of Michelle Ryan, Mischa Barton and Dame Helen Mirren did at least give Sunday’s Red carpet a light splash of Hollywood glamour.

Wearing a shiny silver mistake Graham Norton was this year’s competent but unexceptional host. There were surely many better candidates for hosting duties, but it’s unlikely that they would have wanted the job. At least Norton’s inoffensive and tamely scripted quips kept proceedings going at a brisk pace. Perhaps the organizers were fearful of how easily a genuinely fierce wit could have sunk their teeth into the stars and the ceremony itself. The entire evening is essentially an exercise in vigorous backslapping, as the British TV industry congratulates itself on being British and for making it onto to TV despite the flood of consistently brilliant and popular American programmes.

This year French and Saunders were honoured with the outstanding achievement award, Harry Hill was crowned most entertaining performance and the ‘X factor’ won yet again. No, you’re right... it’s really not good enough is it. The problem is that beyond documentaries and occasional one off dramas it’s hard to find legitimate domestic brilliance on British TV. David Attenborough deserves his rapturous applause for ‘Life in Cold Blood’, but he is in a minority of greatness. It would be worrying if a bald man with ‘wacky’ glasses and a novelty shirt really was the most entertaining thing on British television.

Rounding up the rest of this year’s winners... the Skins cast won the public vote award and went home delighted to be 15 and popular. The Bill won best soap for the first time in 25 years, thus proving the law of averages. Kenneth Branagh failed to make it through his acceptance speech for ‘Wallander’ without referencing Shakespeare. Stephen Dillane (‘The shooting of Thomas Hundall’) and Anna Maxwell Martin (Poppy Shakespeare) collected gilded trophies for best actor and actress respectively. The Comedy awards went to David Mitchell (apparently still funny after those awful PC/MAC ads) and Harry Enfield/Paul Whitehouse (apparently still funny after a 100years).

When the curtain fell, the winners and guests scurried off to the after-party to try and get their picture taken near to David Tennant whilst drinking free booze. Hopefully this year’s marvels and mediocrity will inspire even greater things for British TV in 2010.

Eagle Eye

Making a good technological thriller is a notoriously tricky task; few other genre’s are shamefully responsible for quite so many cinematic atrocities. A frequent problem is that these films are usually plagued by implausible overly complicated plots based around one simple theme, namely what if technology turned evil. Time is also often unkind to such movies, as today’s cutting edge gadgets and science becomes redundant history at an increasingly rapid pace. Watching people in old movies marvel at lasers or explain what a microchip is can be an embarrassing ordeal. It’s like seeing cavemen congratulate themselves on inventing the wheel. I cautiously avoided Eagle Eye when it strolled through cinemas, but as it emerges on DVD I find myself inescapably confronted.

Supposedly based on Steven Spielberg’s first original story since ‘The Goonies’, I was left uninspired by Eagle Eye’s generic premise. Two strangers lose control of their lives to a mysterious voice on a phone that uses an eerie power over technology to manipulate them into doing its bidding. There’s little originality in such a literal representation of the well established cliché that our lives are ‘controlled by technology’. The power to change street signs or remotely operate heavy machinery is unlikely to inspire the desired fear and awe in a savvy technology encrusted audience. These concepts already felt tired and rehearsed even in their mid 90’s heyday.

Unfortunately the film’s cast is just as underwhelming as its lacklustre story. Lead actor Shia LaBeouf is a rising star who has grabbed leading roles in Transformers and the latest Indiana Jones movie. Even Steven Spielberg has an admitted if frankly inexplicable admiration for him. I will admit that LaBeouf’s ‘talents’ are unique. I can’t think of many other actors who can be both painfully melodramatic and devoid of any emotion at the same time. He seems to approach every role with the same combination of flaccid wit and sullen agitation. LaBeouf’s label as the ‘next Tom Hanks’ does a huge disservice to the legacy of a great talent and massively overestimates the appeal of LaBeouf’s ‘everyman’ qualities.

LaBeouf’s co-star Billy Bob Thornton has more screen presence and accomplish as an actor, though his most recent achievement has been to offend the entire nation of Canada with just one disastrously obnoxious CBC Radio interview. The actor apparently took objection to being called an actor whilst pretending to be just a musician. With the myth of his charisma finally exposed there’s really little appeal left in watching Billy Bob play a stereotypical surly FBI agent.

Eagle Eye isn’t unbearably awful; it’s just average and unexceptional. The plot holds very few surprises and hinges largely on the fact that LaBeouf’s character has an identical twin brother. Such a ludicrous cliché threatens to collapse the films fragile credibility into a big pile of silly. The film might actually have been more entertaining if it had been worse. Sometimes it’s better to be memorably terrible than just mediocre and forgettable...

Fast & Furious

By the time most action movie franchises limp to a fourth instalment they’re usually dying a slow undignified death with talentless straight to DVD offerings. It is rare to see a sequel bounce back to the big screen complete with the entire original cast. Perhaps the failing fortunes of these cast members can help explain this strange phenomenon. Michelle Rodriguez got ‘Lost’ then went to prison, Paul Walker swam ill-advisedly ‘Into the Blue’ and most shamefully of all Vin Diesel made ‘The Pacifier’. ‘The Fast and the Furious’ still represents a career high for each, despite being at its best just a hip hop flavoured remake of vintage Keanu Reeves effort ‘Point Break’. You can’t help but feel that if anyone’s careers had taken them where they'd expected, they wouldn’t be back doing this again.

‘Fast & Furious’ finds former friends FBI agent Brian (Walker) and illegal street racer Dom (Diesel) reuniting to take down the vicious drug lord responsible for the death of their mutual friend. Of course the only way to possibly do this is with a series of increasingly implausible car stunts. Why? because that’s just what justice means. Much like its predecessors, ‘Fast & Furious’ is heavily reliant on a distracting mix of gratuitous close ups (of both pretty girls and cars) and pounding hip hop beats to stop its audience from searching for substance. It’s a low brow tactic which has proved resiliently effective and lucrative.

Unfortunately ‘Fast & Furious’ only lives up to its boastful name some of the time. The film’s frequent attempts at character drama are slow ordeals that flirt dangerously with dullness. Without the help of a high octane action sequence the cast are incapable of generating any convincing emotional intensity. It’s unlikely anyone will be fooled that the character’s personal dramas are really anything more than a means of setting up the next enjoyable chase scene.

The film’s well choreographed and CGI enhanced action scenes make it at times an enjoyable guilty pleasure. The film regurgitates the successful components of its popular predecessors, without ever threatening to add any originality or substance. The surprising box office success of ‘Fast & Furious’ show’s there’s a continued public appetite for entertaining eye candy. It will be interesting to see whether the studio is confident enough to risk a fifth instalment and whether its resurgent cast will be quite so quick to abandon a profitable ship the second time around. The question is just how many times the same thrills can bring a smile big enough to make people forgive such obvious failings? The answer appears to be four times... and counting.

Religulous

There are three things you’re not supposed to talk about in polite society: sex, politics and religion. Religion is easily the most controversial and inflammatory of the three, combining issues of sex and politics with dangerous elements of faith and fundamentalism. Political humorist Bill Maher attempts to tackle this most sensitive topic in his brash, opinionated documentary ‘Religulous’. Those familiar with Maher’s abrasive wit may be apprehensive about whether his mischievous hands are equipped to handle such delicate subject matter.

The main problem with Maher’s documentary is that he makes too little an effort to conceal his obvious disdain for religion in all its varied forms. Although it’s less offensive when he finds deserving targets for scorn and derision, we often find ourselves left to watch him bully and belittle people about their most intimate beliefs. The victims of Maher’s mocking cynicism are mostly inarticulate and quite incapable of defending themselves or their ‘irrational’ beliefs from his onslaught. Maher chooses to forsake constructive dialogue and debate in favour of the more entertaining tactics of deliberately provoking and antagonising. This exploitative approach of exposing handpicked stupidity uses too many cheap laughs to make its heavy-handed points about the failings of religion.

‘Religulous’ is not an objective investigation of issues; instead it is simply a blunt statement of the personal opinions of its creators. Like Michael Moore’s ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’, ‘Religulous’ fails as a documentary by allowing itself to be transparently agenda driven. At times, Maher displays exactly the same opinionated arrogance which he himself finds so objectionable in the religious followers he encounters. His motives are not to inspire his audience to ask questions, but to convince us of his own conclusions. Such an attitude would perhaps be more forgivable if the film provided a more substantial examination of the complex social and historical factors surrounding religion, rather than just a superficial glance.

It is admittedly satisfying to see Televangelist con-men dressed in $2000 suits and gold jewellery ridiculed as they should be. However, it is hard not to feel that more creditable theologians would have proved to be a more informative and thought provoking subject matter for ‘Religulous’. The film entirely avoids any debate or discussions about the existence of God as its sole preoccupation is in establishing the collective failings of organized religion. It is a gross oversimplification to blame religion for all mankind’s wars, prejudice and stupidity. There is also a mistake in equating all religious and philosophical beliefs with literal interpretations of arcane religious texts. The narrow scope of Maher’s unsophisticated and generic criticisms place firm limits on the film’s ability to accomplish anything meaningful.

Maher’s more intelligible encounters, along with his flashes of genuine wit and well occasioned sarcasm keeps ‘Religulous’ watchable. However, the film is likely to polarize audiences rather than inform or persuade them. People who agree with Maher’s assertions of the evils and insanity of religion will no doubt be more entertained and empowered by the film than those who find their faith and traditions crudely challenged by it.