Torchwood: Miracle Day - The Debate 2

I have never watched a scrap of the first three seasons of Torchwood. I have also never seen more than a dozen of so minutes of the sixty-odd seasons of Doctor Who. First impressions are made early, and I remember trying to watch the show when I was just a kid-- it was in black & white and consisted of endless scenes of a fusty old Brit climbing around an abandoned brickworks or whatever.

So I took in Torchwood: Miracle Day as a complete newbie, having to fill in the gaps as I went along as to who the supercilious gay guy with the wartime coat and the resentful Taff with the freckles were.

Oddly, I think this perspective put me in a position to really appreciate what a remarkable series it was. Russell T Davies and company (notably former Buffy and BSG showrunner Jane Espenson) cooked up a series that is centered an a hard science-fiction concept so simple, so profound and so rich I can't figure out why nobody had done it before.

And moreover, this simple concept (one fine day, for no apparent reason, people stop dying everywhere) is explored thoroughly and realistically. Yes, Miracle Day would seem like just that for most people-- until you start thinking about the consequences of getting injured or incapacitated or shot full of holes or crushed in a car compactor. Play these things out and you get economic collapse, moral panic, and the eventual re-classification of those incapacitated but undying into a category to be disposed of. Immortal life, which is something we mere mortals can only hope and pray for, becomes the stuff of unending pain and horror. That's good, well-thought-out speculative fiction.

Death is a inextricable part of the human condition-- one which everyone would very much love to banish. But take it away-- and watch the chaos spread. It's such a powerful idea to explore somebody wrote a New York Times Op-Ed about it.

I've lost track of how many TV shows that have introduced a world altering concept and were either too lazy or hidebound to thoroughly explore the ideas they are promulgating. The late reboot of V on ABC was a prime example of this-- after a while, it felt like the the Visitors were nothing more than annoying new neighbors everybody had to just put up with.

So I came away impressed by this show. Sure, it was a bit talky here and there-- and the season finale, though it wrapped things up well, was just plain bad. Without spoiling, in the last two acts the baddies, though they are in an unquestionable power position, stand around like a bunch of potted plants while the intrepid Torchwood team undoes all their grand plans basically right in front of them. And of course, they wouldn't be bad guys if they didn't get in some epic monologing beforehand. (And I'm with Dan, we want more Lauren Ambrose. And John DeLancie had the best parting line ever.)

I'd venture to say that the Miracle Day effect was so rich an idea, it made the precedent Torchwood adventures irrelevant. I feel no need to review past episodes. In fact, since it was a BBC Wales show before the infusion of US cash from Starz/Encore for Miracle Day, I'm sure they're just endless scenes of fusty Brits (and a resentful Taff) climbing around an abandoned brickworks or whatever.

Torchwood: Miracle Day - The Debate

Russel T. Davies' Torchwood series is kind of a gauge of your geek cred. I proudly claim to have seen every episode and for the most part, hated all of them.

The premise of show, a spinoff from Davies' reboot of Doctor Who (attention anagram enthusiasts!) is that  the UK government has a top-secret intelligence agency devoted to tracking down and neutralizing extraterrestrial threats, headed by Captain Jack Harkness, an immortal humanoid alien with a penchant for WWII fashion and an unmistakable American accent. And he's bisexual, though lately only interested in men.

In the last two series, Torchwood has been dismantled (aggressively dismantled) and instead of saving the Earth on behalf of the government, it has been saving the Earth because Captain Jack and Gwen Cooper, the only two original team members not assassinated, simply refuse to leave the Earth to its own devices. The latest series, Miracle Day, has just completed its 10-episode run on Starz. It was epic in scope and, as usual, frustrating.

The series, first of all, seemed about 5 episodes too long. The plot engine in Miracle Day is that suddenly, one day, nobody dies. All around the world, at exactly the same time, everybody is immortal, except Captain Jack. Sounds great at first, but of course the devil's in the details. Overpopulation becomes a problem inside of a week, along with the disturbing proviso that mortal wounds never heal. You're just kind of alive, stuck with this oozing gunshot wound or flesh-eating virus or what have you. Good premise but the longer you have to think about the implications, the more holes you're going to find. And there are a lot of them holes. For example the phenomenon seems linked to Harkness, but when he takes a bullet, he just heals. Hell, they blew him up last year! He was encased in concrete for the better part of century once, and it's no biggie. So why not the new crop of immortals?

And my biggest beef with the series is definitely on display this time around: it violates the prime law of procedurals. Okay, it's my law, but it seems to hold: if you do a show about people with a job, they must be really really good at that job. If it's about bus drivers the plots must be how they solve bus driver problems that would flummox ordinary bus drivers. And they have to care about the bus so much that it takes precedence over their personal lives. A bus driver who is neglecting his kids because he's putting in so much extra time to keeping the bus running is a hero in a procedural.

In Torchwood, it's always been a conceit that the team members are people! With needs! So when Captain Jack literally takes an evening off from saving the world so he can pick up a bartender, it sticks in my craw. A good dozen of the plots in the first two series revolved around Earth-threatening conflicts caused by the Torchwood staff. If I were the British government, I'd have taken those guys out around episode 5.

Just Seen: Mozart's Idomeneo

First-nighting a live performance is always a thrill, and it's something I haven't done in quite a while. On Saturday, we had the honor and pleasure of attending the opening night of Opera San Jose's 2011-2012 season at the California Theater. Our attendance of this performance was all due to an incredibly generous gesture by Amanda, a very talented opera singer and member of Opera San Jose's chorus.

For those not from the Bay Area, one would get the impression that Opera San Jose is a sort of small-town affair. It's not: San Jose is a larger city by population than San Francisco or Oakland, and still-flowing Silicon Valley money allows for upper-crust activities such as supporting opera. The problem is one of comparison: 40 miles north of the California Theater sits the War Memorial Opera House, home of the San Francisco Opera-- second only to New York's Met in size. There was nothing second-rate about Saturday's performance: it was a $3 million plus production, backed by Packard family money.

The opera was Mozart's Idomeneo, an Italian-language opera first performed in 1781. Structurally, it's a classic 18th century Opera Seria, full of rich emotional performances and virtuosic singing. And like all good operas, this one was not short on spectacle: Excellent lighting, wonderful costumes and some awe-inspiring sets-- the temple set in act III is three stories tall, eliciting gasps from the audience (I have no idea how they moved it in and out). Archaeologists were consulted on costume and set design, which strongly evoked Mycenian-era Crete.

And the lush orchestral score: Mozart, 'nuff said.

If you're gonna attend a season-opening performance that lasts for nearly three hours and forty-five minutes, you're gonna come out with quite a range of impressions:

• I've always maintained that opera is the ancestor of the motion picture, and Idomeneo was no exception, full of dramatic scenery, emotional exposition, and extras. What I didn't expect is a story that reminded me of a modern romantic comedy. It's based on some of the characters from Homer's Iliad (which makes the story about 3000 years old, well into public domain). In brief, Idomeneo, King of Crete, his son Idamante, his Trojan prisoner/ son's love interest Ilia, and the jealous princess Electra all carry big important secrets. At one point all four characters sing out on how these secrets are making all of them terribly unhappy-- but it does not occur to anybody to disclose these secrets. It's not at all different from a contemporary rom-com where the main character has constructed some elaborate fantasy to woo the girl, and everything would be solved by a short conversation. Then again, I'll wager 230 years ago such hoary plot contrivances were at least fresh.

• Another story element has changed quite a bit from then to now: I'd call it the Homeric element. The prime mover of the story-- the character who basically makes everything happen-- is the god Neptune, a supernatural being. He causes the initial crisis for King Idomeneo at the start, extends it in act II with the introduction of a ravaging monster, then wraps things up nicely in act III. (Neptune shows up with the wordless appearance of a buff actor with a big white beard and a crown: his disembodied voice resolves all the conflicts at the end.) In other words, Deus Ex Machina is not just used to wrap up the plot: it IS the plot. But if you are at all familiar with the Iliad it's pretty clear that Homer had no problem telling a story driven by divine intervention-- or it's evidence of bicameral mentality 3000 years ago.

• Our friend Amanda was not hard to spot in the chorus: Attractive and quite tall, she managed to gain some impressively central stage positions during the arias, standing out in a large chorus. It helped that we had excellent seats in the orchestra. So thanks again.

• In general, it was a delightfully civilized evening of culture. One of the things I really like about these venues is enjoying a sophisticated adult beverage during the intermission. To save time, the bar lets you pre-order your drinks before the first curtain, and you pick them up according to number later. It was perhaps a rude reminder of the moral decline in modern society that when we went to collect our Manhattans at the first interval that we discovered someone had stolen them. The folks at the bar were nice enough re-pour us new ones-- a kind act of non-divine intervention.

At Least They're Consistant

I love bad movies. In fact I once appeared on a game show (when you live in LA it's a matter if IF, not WHEN) and Dick Clark asked me why I like them so much. "They make me feel good about myself," I replied to the delight of a tiny studio audience.

Anyway, it gets harder to find bad movies every year as digital production technique classes up even the cheapest product. Even a cheap monster movie can get a creepy patina added to it in post and suddenly it's not bad, just mediocre. With all the tools at one's disposal nowadays, to make a bad movie you practically have to be aiming for it.

Which is why I was so thrilled the other day when I watched Titanic 2 on streaming Netflix. It's deliciously awful. The acting matches the writing; the writing is crazy stupid. It takes place on the 100th anniversary of the launch of the other Titanic, and the conceit is they have the good sense to avoid icebergs on the route, but global warming causes a glacier at the North Pole to calve so massively that it causes a tsunami that PROPELS THE ICEBERG INTO THE SIDE OF THE SHIP. They shot on the Queen Mary, a ship that has been docked in Long Beach for over fifty years and I have no doubt that had they wanted to, they would have rewritten it so the iceberg would have fallen from space onto the deck.

Somehow they even managed to do what everyone else in Hollywood has avoided - they make the CGI look unconvincing, as is their SFX department is running off a handful of Commodore Amigas. "We need to save this shot! Bring more floppies!"

Full disclosure - I auditioned for a part in this movie last year. I don't blame them for not using me - I was unprepared and got there late to boot. Anyway, I like the guy they did use for first mate, so it's all good.

Anyway, keep an eye out for this movie and any product from The Asylum. I've seen two other movies by these guys and they're always just the right level of bad. I didn't get a chance to catch MegaShark Vs. Giant Octopus yet, but again, it's not IF.

Weekend Box Office

Labor over these numbers!

Labor Day is the only 3 day weekend that reliably delivers NOTHING to the studios. Here's why: September is an enormous dead spot as people focus on going back to school or stocking up on supplies to make it through the harsh winter. They don't go to movies in September. Thus, anything you released this weekend had three days to make its money, and then it's gonna drop like a stone. If you had any confidence you'd have put it out a month ago or you're holding it until October.

So coming in at #2 is Focus Pictures' The Debt, making only $10 million. Then at #3, goofy SF concept Apollo 18, making almost $9 million; at #4 is Shark Night 3D (about Tuesdays at the bar down the street, I think) which only made $8 million. And those are the highlights. Yeah, and The Help came in on top again with $14 million. Some people at Buena Vista are keeping their jobs through the fall!

Worth looking: Robert Redford's The Conspiritor is claiming $24.00 one one screen. That's one couple, or two very, very lonely people.

Apple Comes Out Swinging: Hits Below Belt

One of the biggest changes in the film industry right now is happening outside the general scrutiny of the public. Several months ago, Apple rolled out the highly anticipated new version of Final Cut Studio, thier well-used, well-loved professional-level editing suite. Skipping right over versions 8 and 9 to a cool Roman 10, the new product rolled out as FCPX.

It was a resounding failure.

The new program has a completely different user interface, key shortcuts and throughput capabilities. It won't export edit decision lists, capture video from tape sources, and it's not backwards-compatible-- if you have a legacy project in Final Cut 7 and want to port it upwards, you're outta luck. It bears a strong resemblance to iMovie, the free, consumer-level editing software that comes with your laptop, so much so that post-industry wags dubbed FCPX "iMovie Pro."

At some point, I understand what Apple was trying to do: make a clean break with a system that utilizes a more powerful core engine. The core engine is the video processor system that drives all the renders and makes things like FCP work. From Final Cut 1 to Final Cut 7, they've all been driven by the QuickTime engine, which was state of the art about a decade ago. FCPX utilizes an engine based on AVC and AVCHD, which is state-of-the-art (and is used by most prosumer camcorders these days) and blazingly fast.

The problem here is the calculation Apple made that professional users of FCP, a billion-dollar market, would blindly follow on the brand name alone. These professional users have deadlines, large libraries of legacy projects, and mortgages to pay-- and can't spare the time to dick around with a product that, fast as it may be, is "unsuitable for professional workflow."

People seem to have a fixation on Apple as a cutting-edge, market-making company with unique ideas, and they're right. But innovation is risk-taking, and that means Apple is less a cautious computer hardware company and more based on a movie studio model (As Steve Jobs was a founder of Pixar, this isn't a surprise, I hope.) Invest in a far-out idea, market the hell out of it, shove it out there and hope for a blockbuster. This worked for the iPod, iPhone, iPad and a lot of other stuff. It DIDN'T work for the Apple Lisa, AppleTV, and the Cube. And now it didn't work for FCPX.

If you need an example of a traditional computer hardware company's approach to marketing, consider the Toshiba laptop. They're completely reliable machines, tough and robust-- and they barely change from model to model. a 2011 Satellite looks like a 2001 Satellite. Toshiba bases their business model on market share, not market making.

But innovation becomes something of an ethical issue if you have thousands of users dependent on you for their livelihood. If that's the case, innovation becomes self-serving: killing legacy compatibility and altering features beyond usefulness makes the upgrade risky for most. And there is a definite show-biz angle to this story: A lot of people, from movie studios to indie-film hacks, cut their movies on the Final Cut Pro platform. There is a good chance that TV show you just watched, the movie you just saw, or the DVD you just got from Netflix, came to you through the FCP workflow. (Not your Blu-ray, though: more below.)

And yes, this has affected my business in a big way. I make DVDs for a living, and the suite of programs in FCPX does NOT include DVD Studio Pro. (this is somewhat understandable, as DVDs haven't changed all that much in the last 6 years or so, so upgrading the authoring software is sorta redundant.) Fortunately, the fine folks at Adobe have a wonderful suite of recently hotrodded editing and authoring solutions-- the Creative Suite. They saw Apple stumble badly with FCPX and are sweeping up market share with half-off offers for switching to Premiere 5.5-- and have subtly altered the look and feel of it to something approximating classic Final Cut Pro. I'm already using Premiere and Adobe Encore to author BluRay-- a format Apple still refuses to support! So I'm gonna persevere with FCP7 and DVD Studio pro until they rot off my hard drives (or a new Mac OS refuses to open them anymore) then head across the street to Adobe.

Apple has a right to do whatever they want with their products, of course. But as the legal aphorism goes, your right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose. And there are quite a few video pros out there with bloody noses looking to hang out with a less pugilistic company.

Weekend Box Office

The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the numbers.

And sad numbers they are this week, pushed down by Hurricane Irene which basically closed most of the East. So, meh. The number one movie was The Help again, but we're all about novelty here so the top grossing new picture came in at #2. It is Columbiana and it made $10 million; you can imagine what the rest of the chart is like.

Don't Be Afraid Of The Dark came in at #4 with under $9 million, which still isn't bad for a remake of a TV movie from the seventies. At #5 was Our Idiot Brother with 7 million.

Okay, go back into your homes now where it's safe.