HEROES
Season 2
Volume Two: Generations
Chapter Four: “The Kindness of Strangers”
Written by: Tim Kring
Directed by: Adam Kane
(WARNING: SPOILERS)

We rebound from the previous choppy, scattershot chapter to this more satisfying, lean and mean episode.
We drop the feudal Japan and the amnesiac Peter in Ireland subplots, and there’s also no sign of Niki working with Bob. And as the “Salvaje” clue did suggest, the powerless Sylar subplot oh-so-conveniently collapses into the Wonder Twins’ thread, as Maya, Alejandro, and the American kid-in-the-Mexican prison-whose-car-they’re-fleeing-in (aka Derek, played by TW Leshner, soon to be seen in the upcoming Timber Falls) almost run over a prostrate man lying in the middle of the road.
And yes, it’s Sylar, though he introduces himself as “Gabriel.”
Maya, trusting fool that she is, tells Sylar that they’re headed for New York too, since she needs to meet Papa Suresh, brandishing the book for Sylar to see. And when Sylar says that he knows Papa Suresh, Maya is overjoyed, while Alejandro is rightly suspicious.
At a stopover, Derek sees a newspaper with the police sketches of the Wonder Twins and calls Sylar over. Derek says, ironically, “There are murderers in the car.” Sylar tells Derek to call the cops while he keeps the Wonder Twins busy. But he instead picks up the brick that’s being used as a paperweight at the newsstand, and bashes poor Derek’s head in (off-camera).
Back in the car, Sylar confronts Maya with the paper, and when she says, “Yes, that’s us, but it wasn’t murder,” Sylar says, “Well, Derek’s calling the cops on you.” Maya freaks, and her bleeding-black tears-from-the-eyes power kicks in, and Sylar starts to die. But Alejandro does the whole “calmate” thing, and Sylar is saved. Shoot.
He now realizes that he’s in the car with two powered people. So he drives off, while the Wonder Twins think that they’re just ditching Derek, but who’s apparently dead, while a cockroach crawls over the bloodied brick.

Over in post-Katrina New Orleans, Micah is staying with his cousins Monica (Dana Davis, from TV’s The Nine and the upcoming Prom Night remake) and Damon (Carlon Jeffery), and their grandmother (or “Nana,” played by Nichelle Nichols, who we saw ever-so-briefly last episode).
Monica (who has quickly proven to be the most interesting new character this Volume) works at the Burger Bonanza, with high hopes to get her family out of the still-depressed area. But her hopes are dashed at every turn, and all the while, she slowly begins to realize that she is not exactly normal.
Apparently, her power is to insta-learn anything she sees, so she learns how to make a tomato flower and whoop a$$, Rey Mysterio-style, all from the TV. At this point, it’s unclear whether Monica can insta-learn anything she actually sees, or if the TV is the proper conduit. (Micah, her cousin, has an affinity with machines, after all.)

Meanwhile, in Costa Verde, Claire, mindful of her father, at first tries to distance herself from West. But flyboy is insistent and asks her out on a date, and, if she is unimpressed by it, promises to leave her alone.
So West ends up flying Claire to the Hollywood sign, where they sit and bond amidst some good blue screen (a lot better than last episode’s Japan stuff). Claire says stuff happened back in Odessa, and she’s not sure if she can really trust anyone anymore. West, of course, says learn to trust me. Jump off the sign. (Yeah, I say that to all the people I’d want trusting me too.)
And when Claire is convinced, she does so, and of course, flyboy catches her, and there’s a mid-air kiss.
When Claire gets back home, late, she and West realize that her excuse (library) isn’t going to hold water. So Claire, in getting Mr. B off the scent (he suspects it’s a boy), says she tried out for cheerleading. She then manages to convince Mr. B that this is something she needs (“one normal thing”). So Mr. B, poor schlub, relents, on the proviso that she doesn’t start dating anyone yet.
Claire, little liar, agrees.
Oh, and the Haitian shows up, presaged by the wind chimes, and says he has a lead on the other Isaac paintings. They’re headed to Odessa.
Texas, you ask?
Nope. The Ukraine.

Over with the Petrellis, Granny P confesses to having murdered Daddy Sulu, while the wounds she received in the attack two episodes ago appear to have been self-inflicted. It’s clear though that she’s covering something up. (Or perhaps protecting someone…)
Knowing Parkman is reading her mind, she “tells” him to just accept her statement and leave it alone, or everyone will find out about “us” and “what we can do.” (Note though that we have yet to see what Granny P’s power actually is…)
After a brilliant scene between Cristine Rose and Adrian Pasdar, Granny P’s handcuffed and wheelchaired out to the hoosegaw.
Meanwhile, Beardo Nathan first visits his two sons, and tells them their grandmother is in hospital and could use some cheering up. The pint-sized Petrellis don’t approve of Beardo Nathan, so he shaves off the facial hair in time to have his scene with Granny P before she is carted off by the fuzz.
Parkman enlists No-Longer-Beardo Nathan’s help by first revealing he can read people’s thoughts, then showing Nathan the death threats received by Daddy S and Granny P, which both came from a photograph Nathan recognizes. A photograph with his parents in it, that had some “ten, maybe twelve people.”
So let’s review. Daddy S said there used to be twelve, and now there are nine.
Check. Pop Petrelli, Charles Deveaux, and Linderman, casualties of Volume One.
Nine.
Daddy Sulu then does a pavement dive.
Eight left.
Now, when Nathan searches for the photograph, Parkman reveals that the ex-Mrs. Matt was actually pregnant with Matt’s scummy partner’s kid. (How this impacts on the “Five Years Gone” implication that Matt’s kid has powers remains to be seen.)
Then, when Nathan finds the photo, who should be in it as well but Bob, someone who may or may not be Joanna Cassidy, and… dan-da-da-daaan, Papa Parkman!
So Parkman takes the photo home and asks Molly to help him find Papa Parkman, who apparently stole a lot of money from some people, and abandoned his son when Matt was 13. But when Molly sees the photo (and somehow I saw this coming), she throws a hissy fit and refuses.
Papa Parkman is the Sauron baddie, whom Molly dubs “the Nightmare Man.”
Parkman, bull-head twit, tries to strong-arm Mo into making Molly find his MIA father, but in the end, it’s Molly who says, “Okay. I’ll help you find him.”
Molly does the stick pin-on-the-map thing and (yes, apparently we all see this coming except for idiot Matt) gets “caught” by the Nightmare Man, going into shock, while Parkman hears her screaming in his head.
To her credit (and Matt’s bone-headed prodding), Molly gets out city, apartment building, and room number, before she enters Catatonia City.
Repeat after me: Parkman is an idiot.
Oh, almost forgot. Somewhere along the way, Nathan sees Monster Face Nathan in the mirror…

So, I liked this chapter a lot (hey, Mrs. B and Mr. Muggles! Yahoo!), and Monica, as I mentioned above, is an interesting character being played ably by Davis. And though I could have done without the quick snippets of file footage of Katrina damage (which seemed a tad heavy-handed), Monica seems like a very real, honest character, with some nice rapport with Micah, so I’m looking forward to seeing where that subplot goes.
And then there’s Claire, who continues to be a rather substantial, involving character; I think this is the first time I’ve really been disappointed with her, because of that whole lie about not seeing any boy at the moment.
To be fair though, she was lied to for many a year by her adoptive father, so maybe she just sees this as a fair turn-around. And she of course has no idea about the 8th Isaac painting-yet-to-take-place. Though I do suspect that West (as far as the painting goes) is a red herring, and that shadowy someone with Claire is someone else altogether (my pet theory as to the killer’s identity).

I also enjoyed this episode since it feels the least-cluttered since the season began, so here’s hoping there’ll be more chapters like this to come.

(Images courtesy of comicbookresources.com; behind the scene images courtesy of gregbeeman.blogspot.com.)

reVIEW (29)
A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET

It’s been a while since I was last on Elm Street, so when the chance came for a return visit, I took it without hesitation.
I first walked down it in 1984, via the magic of Betamax, knowing this was something new from the man who’d given me The Hills Have Eyes and Deadly Blessing, so I was stoked.
Wes Craven did not disappoint then, and here, now, 23 years later, A Nightmare On Elm Street to a large extent, still holds up as an exercise in scares and chills.

With this film, Craven introduced all of horror geekdom to Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund), child murderer come back from the dead, to haunt the dreams of the children of Elm Street. Freddy, of course, would go on to join Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees to form the Slasher Trinity, all three graduating to Horror Icon status over the course of money-making sequel after money-making sequel.
In Craven’s original Nightmare, Freddy is a darker, more sinister bogeyman, and would gradually transform over the franchise’s length, into the wisecracking death-dealing jokester most know him as, whose puns and one-liners were probably more dangerous than his razor-blade fingers.
Here though, at the very beginning—and in keeping in tone with the film—Freddy isn’t very big on laughs, and this first Nightmare is all the better for it.

From the opening sequence of Freddy assembling his killer glove, through the Last Girl fake, all the way up to that final shot of poor, boozy Marge (Ronee Blakley) going—ha ha—through the front door, A Nightmare On Elm Street is an effectively creepy little number, with a number of scenes and images that permanently seared themselves into my fevered and impressionable horror geek brain. (That singular image of Amanda Wyss’ Tina standing in her bloodied body bag in the school hall still pops to mind whenever I encounter certain lines of Hamlet.)
And of course, given the subsequent career trajectory of one of the film’s young stars, A Nightmare On Elm Street is notable (particularly to the mainstream movie-going audience) as having these three words in its opening credits sequence: “Introducing Johnny Depp.”

As much as I love Craven’s first Nightmare though, I cannot deny it does have a number of warts, among them, some bad performances. Mr. “Introducing Johnny Depp,” in fact, as young Glen Lantz, is one of the few actors that manage to rise above bad in Nightmare. The rest of his young co-stars display questionable acting prowess.
And perhaps most alarmingly, the bad acting isn’t just confined to the youngsters, as even the aforementioned Blakley (who plays alky mother to Nightmare lead Heather Langenkamp) is a train wreck.
This might not have been so great a sin, except for the fact that the pivotal revelation of who Freddy Krueger really is and what the parents of Elm Street did to him so long ago, comes to us (and daughter Nancy) through the bleary “acting” of Blakley. This could have—and should have—been a great scene. Instead, it feels obligatory, more a plot necessity than the gut-wrenching moment of epiphany it must have been on paper.
There’s also the synth score which gets vaguely ridiculous in certain patches, and “Nightmare” by 213, which plays over the end titles is so bad, I’d managed to wipe it entirely from memory till just a few moments ago, when hearing it once more filled me with an entirely different kind of horror.

Still, in the final analysis, A Nightmare On Elm Street is a horror movie that works, that gets the job done, and leaves the audience with a lingering aftertaste of anxiety, which is so much more than can be said of many a horror film today.

Parting shot: The companion piece to this review—The Director’s Chair (3)—can be found in the Archive.

(A Nightmare On Elm Street DVD cover art courtesy of cduniverse.com.)

THE DIRECTOR’S CHAIR (3)
WES CRAVEN in
“MY CRAVEN 3 (SEVERAL HUNDRED MORE WORDS ABOUT WES CRAVEN)”

“Fortunately, somebody always comes along when it’s least expected and reinvents the (horror) genre. And that’s exciting to watch.”
-- Wes Craven (1990)

And that’s kind of what Craven did with Scream, which turned Hollywood back onto horror in a big way. (Even horror icons like George Romero credited Scream for making Hollywood execs start calling him again to see if he was up to anything new.)
Yes, there was some backlash from Scream (including the resurrection of the deservedly dead slasher flick, as well as the ungodly births of TV’s Dawson’s Creek, Wasteland, and the abominable Teaching Mrs. Tingle, whose only saving graces were Helen Mirren, and the Exorcist bit), but it otherwise put horror back on the bankable map, and made Craven a force to be reckoned with once again, over two decades after his unsettling and infamous debut, Last House on the Left (which has the distinction of being on Stanley Wiater’s Disturbo 13, a list of the most “balls-to-the-wall disturbing” horror films ever made).
Anyway, for what it’s worth (and this is, after all, what we’ve come here for), my Craven 3 (in no particular order)…

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984): welcome the razor-fingered Bastard Son of a Hundred Maniacs, as Freddy Krueger gives us our first walking (or should that be, running?) tour of Elm Street (Wes Craven’s New Nightmare—the 7th in the Elm Street franchise—was Craven’s first, badly botched attempt at postmodern horror, which Kevin Williamson showed him how to do correctly in the Scream films)

Deadly Blessing (1981): though Craven isn’t particularly fond of this one, I still think it’s a nice little horror tale that straddles the line, making the viewer wonder whether there’s a natural explanation for all the sh!t going down, or if it really is an incubus haunting the scenic Pennsylvania Dutch countryside (it’s also got Sharon Stone in it, long before she was “Sharon Stone”)

And, two for the price of one! Scream (1996) and Scream 2 (1997): postmodern horror cinema’s finest hour(s), these are horror films for horror film fans, and display Craven’s suspense at its tautest (please disregard Scream 3, with its limp screenplay by Ehren Krueger—who likewise degraded Ringu into its slick Hollywood doppelganger; the only memorable things in Scream 3 are the cameos, and indie queen Parker Posey)

Yeah, The Hills Have Eyes is a classic, but it’s also (like Last House) pretty bleak and hard to sit through. (It’s also pretty much Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chain Saw Massacre, with a social commentary. And this is, after all, the Craven 3. Or 4, if you want to be picky, so I had to make some tough choices.)

And, just to take a peek at the cruddy end of the spectrum, Craven’s also had a bunch of clunkers, the worst quite possibly being Deadly Friend (which was such a crapfest because of studio interference). Sad, since the script was adapted from a novel by Bruce Joel Rubin, who wrote the screenplay for the brilliant Jacob’s Ladder. (Though he also wrote… ulp… Ghost.)
Cursed is also a stinker, but you can read about that in the Archive.

“[Wes Craven] may need a good screenwriting collaborator, the way Billy Wilder needed collaborators I.A.L. Diamond and Charles Brackett to produce his best films.
“Craven’s masterpiece awaits; and I for one am eager to see it.”
-- Ed Gorman
“Several Hundred Words About Wes Craven” (1992)

(I think that masterpiece was Scream/Scream 2, that “good screenwriting collaborator,” Kevin Williamson, but then again, that’s just me.)

Parting shot: In recent years, Craven has been involved with The Hills Have Eyes remake and its sequel, as well as acting as one of the producers of Feast. He also co-wrote the script for the English-language remake of Pulse and contributed a great short to Paris Je T’aime.
He’s now reportedly at work on a sequel to The People Under The Stairs (as producer) and a remake of his own Shocker, which he is slated to direct.
(Reviews of A Nightmare On Elm Street, Cursed, The Hills Have Eyes II, Feast, and Paris Je T’aime can be found in the Archive.)

(Wes Craven image courtesy of webwombat.com.au; A Nightmare On Elm Street, Deadly Blessing, Scream, Scream 2 OS’s courtesy of impawards.com.)

(The above is an altered version of an identically-titled article.)

PAPRIKA
(Review)

I will freely admit I am not a big anime freak. In fact, I came to anime by way of my being a film geek (and a gaggle of college friends who were big anime freaks).
Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira opened the doors for me, of course, as it did for so many others. But my anime hero is, hands down, Satoshi Kon.
Even since he blew me away with Perfect Blue, Kon has consistently amazed and impressed me with his work: Sennen Joyu (Millennium Actress), Tokyo Godfathers, and the 13-part Moso Dairinin (Paranoia Agent).
Now he’s back with Paprika, and I’m just now picking my jaw up from off the floor.

Paprika opens with a familiar circus gag: a clown unfolding himself from out of a car that is far too small to have contained him in the first place. This is, of course, a visual cue to one of the film’s themes: how something vast like dreams can be contained in the tiny vessels of our minds.
Paprika is about the DC Mini, a groundbreaking invention that allows two individuals to share a common dream. Much like the scenario posited in Tarsem Singh’s The Cell, one person can enter the subconscious of another, and interact, not just with that person, but with his dreaming mind as well.
While a Detective Konukawa—stumped on a murder case he is investigating—is helped by the eponymous Paprika, who enters his dreams to see whether the problem is rooted there, a number of DC Minis are stolen from the company developing the technology. Soon, dreams are used to invade people’s psyches, trapping them in a waking state of delusion and mad ramblings, a chilling precursor to a more widespread epidemic that will threaten the very fabric of reality.

While in past films like Perfect Blue and Sennen Joyu, Kon has mined the idea of fiction intruding on reality (and vice versa) and utilized it as a narrative device, in Paprika, he takes that theme and places it at the very heart of the work.
There, at the dreaming center of Paprika, that theme plays with the other ideas that bubble beneath its animated skin—the parallels between dreams and the Internet; truth that can spring from fiction; dream as film and film as modern man’s repository of dreams—and produces a brilliant piece of inspired storytelling that is the latest gem in Kon’s dazzling body of work.

As with all of his films, Paprika is a visually arresting piece, the dreamscapes on view utilizing motifs from myth, fairy tales, and film (which, of course, serves the same purpose today that myths and fairy tales used to in the past). Appropriately enough, the dreams we get to see in the film are unsettling and disturbing, and Kon rifles through imagery normally associated with children (circuses and dolls and parades) and extracts their inherent sinister qualities to suit his storytelling purposes.

But above and beyond the visual, what probably draws me to Kon the most is his clear love of film and how he draws on that for his anime.
In Perfect Blue, he brought Hitchcock and giallo to the animated film in a razor-edged mindf*ck that constantly shifted between fiction and reality as a J-pop singer trying to segue into acting becomes embroiled in murder. In Sennen Joyu, an aging film star reminisces about her past, her life and her films intertwining to form one long, shining reel of memory. In Tokyo Godfathers (clearly a play on a cinematic tradition that stretches back to the 1936 Western, Three Godfathers), three of Japan’s homeless find an infant during Christmas and become the child’s unlikely guardians.
In each of these anime, film is either a crucial plot element or an obvious inspiration, and it is partly because of this clear love for the medium that Kon’s works play so differently than those of other anime heavyweights like Otomo or Miyazaki. There is also clearly a postmodern bent to Kon’s storytelling that serves to elevate his work even more above the average anime.
What can I say? I love his stuff.

Of course, one could argue that Paprika is not his best work—and I’d agree. But as it stands, Paprika is nonetheless better than your average anime, and is another excellent masterwork from Kon. Certainly worth a look, even if you aren’t particularly an anime geek.

(Paprika OS courtesy of impawards.com; image courtesy of outnow.ch.)

AFTERTHOUGHTS (21)

21.1 First, some good news.
This took me a while, but I’d just like to congratulate the following, for winning at this year’s Scream Awards:

28 Weeks Later: Best Horror Movie
300: The Ultimate Scream; Best Comic-to-Screen Adaptation
Kate Beckinsale: Scream Queen (for Vacancy)
Grindhouse: Most Memorable Mutilation (Dismembered In Car Crash); Best Director (Quentin Tarantino & Robert Rodriguez); Best Scream-Play (Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino, Jeff Rendell, Eli Roth, Edgar Wright, & Rob Zombie)
Heroes: Best TV Show
Shia LaBeouf: Sci-Fi Star (for Transformers); Scream King (for Disturbia)
El Laberinto Del Fauno: Best Fantasy Movie; Best Foreign Movie (Spain)
Hayden Panettiere: Breakout Performance (for Heroes)

Harrison Ford and Neil Gaiman were also honoured, with The Hero Award and the Comic-Con Icon Award, respectively.

Again, to one and all, congratulations.

(Reviews of 28 Weeks Later, 300, Death Proof, Disturbia, El Laberinto Del Fauno, Planet Terror, Transformers, and Vacancy can be found in the Archive.)

21.2 Now, some bad news.
The WGA strike that many have feared has come to pass. Depending on how long this strike turns out to be, its effects could still be felt as far ahead as next year’s fall television season. (If the impending Directors Guild and Screen Actors Guild strikes next year also go into effect, it’ll make matters all the worse.)
It’s my understanding that Heroes should have new episodes all the way up to the December break, so we should get to see all 11 episodes of Volume Two. After that, all bets are off, particularly if the WGA strike stretches out over the next few months.
As for the other shows I keep track of here at the Iguana, I’m uncertain where they are in terms of their production schedule for their current seasons.
And as far as series kicking off their new seasons next year (like Lost and Battlestar Galactica), their start dates could conceivably be pushed farther away, should this strike prove to be a protracted one.

Apparently an early casualty of the weeks leading up to the strike, the spin-off Heroes: Origins, which I’ve talked about here at the Iguana, has been shelved by NBC.
It’s been pulled off the schedule at the moment (it was set to air at the end of Heroes’ current sophomore season), though I certainly hope it’s not entirely dead. Maybe when the WGA strike has been settled, and provided next year’s impending strikes can be averted, NBC can resuscitate production on Origins.

Meanwhile, film studios were busy for most of this year gearing up for the possibility of a writers’ strike, and went into hyperdrive on a whole slew of pre-strike priority projects, like the Justice League live-action film—which I talked about in Afterthoughts (19) and (20)—in preparation for next year’s strike possibilities. Scripts for high-profile projects scheduled to shoot next year for a 2009 release (like the aforementioned Justice League) were also stockpiled by the studios.
While some projects are getting fast-tracked though, others could get shelved or side-tracked, depending on where they are in the development phase.
We’ll also be seeing some of the films originally scheduled for a 2007 release (like Michael Dougherty’s Trick ‘R Treat and David Moreau and Xavier Palud‘s redux of The Eye) hit cinemas next year.

There are a whole lot of other ramifications and intricacies to the WGA strike that go well beyond what I’ve mentioned here, so if you want to know more, get on over to variety.com, which has a host of articles covering the strike.
And let’s hope this one gets resolved soon.

(Images courtesy of bloody-disgusting.com [Scream Awards 2007 and Michael Dougherty] and yahoo.com [Heroes].)

CHUCK
Season 1 Episode 4
“Chuck Versus the Wookie”
Written by: Allison Adler
Directed by: Allan Kroeker
(WARNING: SPOILERS)

Trouble breezes into town in the form of DEA agent “Carina” (Mini Anden, seen in the “Malibooty” episode of Entourage), who needs Sarah’s help to steal a diamond from Peyman Alahi (E.R.’s Iqbal Theba), a hairy little man who’s got some seedy connections to opium cartels.
Chuck’s needed on this one to scope out Alahi’s security set-up while the proper agents suss out the diamond’s exact location. The actual procurement of the diamond is meant to take place at a later date.

But as Sarah and Casey know only too well, Carina’s a wild card given to improvisation. She also shows an interest in Chuck, while Morgan shows an interest in Carina. When Morgan asks Chuck to get him a date with Carina, Sarah thinks it’s a good idea, if only to keep the DEA agent busy. The two couples double date with pizza and The March of the Penguins on DVD.
Later that evening, Carina gets Chuck to her hotel room under false pretenses, and tells Chuck that Sarah and Bryce were an item. (Earlier on, when Chuck asks Sarah about her relationship with Bryce, Sarah tells him they were just partners.)

Before the mission, Sarah tells Chuck not to trust Carina. Relieved, Chuck tells Sarah what Carina said, and when Sarah seems taken aback, Chuck asks her if Carina was telling the truth. Sarah says her relationship with Bryce was “complicated.”
When everyone gets to Alahi’s party, Chuck is pissed at Sarah. (He also dubs Alahi “Senor Wookie,” due to the man’s excessive and unsightly body hair.)
Carina then improvises by grabbing the diamond. Then, thanks to Chuck, Carina makes off with the diamond, leaving Chuck and Sarah to Alahi’s goons. But Casey arrives just in time and gets them out. And when Carina calls Sarah on her cell, Casey traces her to her hotel room. As Sarah needs to get back to Wienerlicious or possibly get canned (oh, the woes of having a McJob), Casey says he’ll get the diamond.

Just as Carina is about to get out of the hotel though, Morgan shows up with flowers. So does Casey, with a gun. Carina kisses Morgan (secretly slipping the diamond into his bag), then tells him she can’t be with him, pushing him back into the elevator.
Casey takes Carina back to her hotel room at gunpoint, but when Carina starts getting undressed, Casey winds up handcuffed to the bed in his four-leaf clover boxers, once again falling for Carina’s charms.
When an hour passes and Sarah still hasn’t heard from Casey, Sarah goes to Carina’s hotel, and tells Chuck he’s been benched, till they can talk about the whole Carina/diamond debacle.

Back at Casa Bartowski, Morgan is mooning over getting dumped, and when Chuck goes into Morgan’s bag for a computer game, he finds the diamond, and the Intersect tells him it’s going to be used to fund some Afghani terrorists (so it’s an even bigger deal than drugs).
When he calls Sarah though, it turns out that Alahi’s got her at gunpoint, and wants the diamond back, so Sarah tells Chuck to find Carina and have her bring the diamond to the hotel.
When Carina tries to steal the diamond back, Chuck convinces her to help Sarah (since Sarah saved her life in Pakistan once). So Carina and Chuck go to the hotel, and as Carina weapons up, she tells Chuck that agents always keep their lives secret, that no truth is ever really revealed to those around them.

Shortly thereafter, with the help of Sarah and Casey (who finally breaks the bed’s headboard and uses it as a handy bludgeon), Chuck and Carina catch the baddies and secure the diamond, which Chuck inadvertently Fed-Exes to Director Graham (Tony Todd).
Before Carina leaves, she invites Chuck up to her hotel room. He declines, of course, and when he asks her why, she says it’s because she’s always liked taking the things that Sarah wants. When Chuck doesn’t quite believe her, Carina says Sarah definitely wants him, she maybe just doesn’t know it yet.

The episode closes with a great scene as Chuck goes to Sarah’s hotel room, with an olive-less vegetarian pizza, the only true thing about Sarah that he knows (and that, from observation), that she doesn’t like olives.
He apologizes for not trusting her and asks to know only one true thing about her. Where she grew up, her real name, her real middle name, anything. But Sarah remains heartbreakingly silent. So Chuck drops it, but when he’s out of hearing distance, Sarah says, “Lisa. My middle name is Lisa,” which only we can hear…

So Chuck continues being this great mix of comedy, action, and human relationships, the complex relationship between Chuck and Sarah developing nicely.
There are also nice touches in this show, like Morgan’s really close friendship with Chuck and his jealousy over Sarah’s encroachment on that, and that during the recon to Senor Wookie’s lair, it isn’t the Intersect Chuck relies on to scope out the security system, but rather his retail knowledge from all the tech equipment they have in stock at Buy More.
So, good stuff, people. Keep it coming.

(Image courtesy of nerdherdhelp.com.)

STARDUST
(Review)

Being a Neil Gaiman admirer of long standing (since Black Orchid and Sandman first hit the comic book shelves oh-so-long-ago), I’ve been patiently waiting for his work in film to catch up.
His English translation of Hayao Miyazaki’s Mononoke-hime (Princess Mononoke) didn’t have enough of a Gaimanesque feel to satisfy (and thus, I’ve always preferred watching it in the original Japanese), and Dave McKean’s Mirrormask was one of those films I wish I loved more than I actually do.
Now though, there’s Matthew Vaughn’s adaptation of Stardust, and I’m quite happy now, thank you very much.

For what Stardust, in a not-so-small nutshell, is all about, I turn to Neil Gaiman himself, from his Guardian article, “Happily Ever After”:

“I wanted a young man who would set out on a quest - in this case a romantic quest, for the heart of Victoria Forester, the loveliest girl in his village. The village was somewhere in England, and was called Wall, after the wall that runs beside it, a dull-looking wall in a normal-looking meadow. And on the other side of the wall was Faerie - Faerie as a place or as a quality, rather than as a posh way of spelling fairy. Our hero would promise to bring back a fallen star, one that had fallen on the far side of the wall.

"And the star, I knew, would not, when he found it, be a lump of metallic rock. It would be a young woman with a broken leg, in a poor temper, with no desire to be dragged halfway across the world and presented to anyone’s girlfriend.

"On the way, we would encounter wicked witches, who would seek the star's heart to give back their youth, and seven lords (some living, some ghosts) who seek the star to confirm their inheritance. There would be obstacles of all kinds, and assistance from odd quarters. And the hero would win through, in the manner of heroes, not because he was especially wise or strong or brave, but because he had a good heart, and because it was his story.”

For anyone familiar with his writing, this should sound like vintage Gaiman, and Vaughn manages to capture a brilliant mixture of enchantment, humour, and suspense, to highlight Stardust’s traditional narrative of a boy’s passage into adulthood, of his coming into the man he was always meant to be.
Though it admittedly lacks some of Gaiman’s poetic language, the script by Jane Goldman and Vaughn nonetheless targets Stardust’s heart spot-on, giving modern audiences the sort of fairy tale even adults shouldn’t be ashamed to adore.

It’s all here, from the black nastiness of the ancient witch Lamia (Michelle Pfeiffer), to the transformation of Tristan (Dot The I’s Charlie Cox) from lovestruck fool to honourable, upstanding hero, to the narration by none other than genre icon Sir Ian McKellen.
The story is then ably supported by some fine performances, particularly from Cox, whose innocent and quiet exuberance gives us a Tristan who is never less than convincing, and constantly identifiable. His brash professions of love for Victoria (tabloid regular Sienna Miller, who’d worked previously with Vaughn on his directorial debut Layer Cake, and with Cox in Lasse Hallstrom’s Casanova) early in the tale play off quite nicely against his later actions to defend the star Yvaine (Claire Danes) from the sinister forces that hound her.
It’s clear this is still the same Tristan as before, and yet, it isn’t.
And it’s not just the wardrobe change. That’s the exterior mirroring the internal growth the character has experienced, and Cox conveys that well.

If there’s anywhere that Stardust may not quite hold up though, it’s in Dane’s performance, which may lack a certain level of enchantment for some; it’s not bad by any means, but save for one particular scene where she professes her own feelings for Tristan after she’s fed him some cheese, her Yvaine isn’t quite the blindingly glowing star the character is meant to be.
And then there’s the frankly repetitive score by Ilan Eshkeri (Vaughn’s composer on Layer Cake). Yes, it gets the job done, but does it have to sound so uniform?

Thankfully, Stardust makes up for some of its shortcomings by boasting the added treat of having actors like Robert De Niro (as notorious pirate of the skies Captain Shakespeare), Ricky Gervais of Seona Dancing and The Office fame (as Ferdy The Fence), Vaughn/Guy Ritchie cohort Jason Flemyng, and Madonna cohort Rupert Everett (as two of the lords, now princes in the film), picking up some of the slack.
Vaughn and company are also wise enough to know that good supporting performances should never steal the show, so we see just enough of the actors to want some more, while keeping the focus squarely on the narrative.

With Peter Jackson having wrapped up his epic Lord of the Rings trilogy in 2003, it’s been nearly four years since anything this earnest and magickal has hit the cinemas. The unabashed respect Stardust has for this kind of storytelling, the principal trait it shares with Jackson’s Rings (definitely no snarky, postmodern winks here), bodes well for the future of the fantasy film.
I can only hope Chris Weitz‘s adaptation of Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass—not to mention Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf, whose script Gaiman co-wrote, and Vaughn’s next project, a film adaptation of Marvel’s Thor—continues in this vein.

(Stardust OS courtesy of wildaboutmovies.com; images courtesy of aintitcool.com.)