REVIEW: 'Divide' by Ed Sheeran

Education in the UK is fucked. This may not seem relevant to Ed Sheeran (though the word 'fucking' is always used whenever I discuss the man) but let me explain.

REVIEW: 'Harry Potter And The Cursed Child'

Surprise! Another Harry Potter! In 2016, this awful, awful year where in order to fill a nebulous void that threatens to engulf us all; every intellectual property from our childhoods is returning. It reminds me of just before the fall of Narnia, when Aslan summons back everyone from the previous books to witness this destruction together - as time itself seems to unfold. Star Wars is back. Ghostbusters. Pokemon. Star Trek. And now Harry Potter.

My Experience As A Film Critic

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No One Knows What They're Talking About

For a while I was a critic. I do still sort-of consider myself an unpaid critic even though I've never been paid in the first place. I cannot help but view a piece of artwork and judge it even though I know that people have worked hard on it and I don't want to crush their dreams. There's a reason why artists hate critics, which is why I'm surprised so many artists are also critics themselves.

The Trouble With 'Sherlock'

So I no doubt offended half of the world by saying that not only is current Doctor Who severely flawed, but the show has never been perfect. Now, I might as well offend everyone else in the world by being possibly the only person on the internet to criticise Stephen Moffat’s other massively successful BBC show: Sherlock.

Perhaps Sherlock would be a far better show if I wasn’t overly-familiar with Moffat’s work. If the opening credits said that the show was written and produced by Sheridan Ponsonby, I would probably look upon the whole thing more fondly. But, the fact is that Sherlock himself is stuck between two worlds: intentionally flawed, and unintentionally heroic.

Sherlock is emotionally oblivious, self-absorbed, and constantly endangers others for the sake of the case. These are all character flaws created to produce drama and tension as Sherlock attempts to function in the real world. This is a good thing, and was something sorely lacking during Matt Smiths reign of Doctor Who – as the Eleventh Doctor was basically a god of time and space.

But that’s the problem – despite the base flaws, Sherlock is perfect. He can solve cases in a matter of seconds. He walks into a room and knows everything about it. He’s anti-authority. He has a fussy, mother-like figure look after him. He has at least two women perpetually attracted to him despite him acting like a jerk to them. The closest thing he has to a female antagonist is one who constantly flirts with him. He rents a flat in the heart of London, and never has to worry about money. He’s portrayed by a curly-haired heartthrob with a voice that’s ruined a thousand upholsteries. He does science, but not the icky kind of science where he dissects things but the sexy kind of science where he wears goggles and fiddles around with tubes. He can play the violin so well that he actually composes his own music. He even comes back from the dead! He also evades arrest at the end of series 3 because he’s just so awesome we can’t possibly punish him for MURDER.

He’s actually the most intelligent version of Holmes since that one time Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation cosplayed as him in one episode…and Data was an android capable of learning every language in the world in a matter of seconds (hence his name).

Sherlock is a fantasy. Specifically, it’s Stephen Moffat’s fantasy. He’s created a character that’s perfect in the sense that he has no responsibility or care for anything other than the thrill of the chase. Women find him attractive, and everyone else sticks by Sherlock despite the fact that in reality Watson would’ve left after the first series and Sherlock would’ve been kicked out of his flat the moment he started putting heads in the fridge – then would have been dropped by the police after he almost gets innocent people killed

Out of interest, I took this Mary Sue* test for Sherlock, and got a score of 125. The test says that anything above 50 is a very bad Mary Sue. I think that says everything, really. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to board up my shattered windows in preparation for the next wave of abuse. 

*A ‘Mary Sue’ is basically an author surrogate, or self-insert character. It’s a character who’s idolised by the author despite being poorly written and shallow.

The Trouble With ‘Doctor Who’

…what happened?

Doctor Who Christmas Specials are reliably awful, to the point where despite watching every episode during the rest of the year I will refuse to watch the Christmas special because I don’t want to ruin my Christmas.

They conform to every whimsical cliché associated with Christmas whilst attempting. This year I managed to get to the 12 min mark before shutting off iPlayer. My palm immediately hit my face when Clara awakes to find Santa crashed on her roof.  Then we have a sudden shift in tone to deathly-serious, then back to painfully unfunny comedy, then to deathly-seriousness, and then Santa rides in on a reindeer. Then he gets off the reindeer and uses a remote control to lock the reindeer like a car. It’s at that point I turned off. I then looked at the reviews to find that the critics had obviously seen a completely different episode to the one I did.

I wasn’t invested. The tone was jumping from your typical snow-encrusted magic to hard sci-fi with no transition or space to breathe. And within the first ten mins we had already seen the monsters in full-frame with clear bright lighting. Not to mention these monsters were blandly designed and had a telepathy-related power that I swear every alien in series 8 had.

What happened? How did we go from An Unearthly Child to this?

Of course, Doctor Who doesn’t do hard sci-fi anymore. That’s fine. Doctor Who has endured for over fifty years because it’s evolved, and if you want to see how quick and readily the show evolves: look at Tom Baker’s run. At the start the show was a gothic horror, then showrunner Peter Hinchcliffe was fired because people were accusing Doctor Who of being ‘too dark’ – which is ironic considering that Tom Baker’s first few years were in hindsight the best the show has ever gotten. Then the show became a pantomime in space, which is clearly what inspired current Showrunner Stephen Moffat to include a central-locking Rudolph. This era was awful, and so Doctor Who was dragged kicking and screaming into the 80’s with a brand-new theme tune and a new hard sci-fi tone. Tom Baker was still on board, but his characteristic joy was gone – mostly because Baker was ill during shooting.

The show had radically re-jigged its theme and tone thrice, all with the same lead-role. And each era had it’s good and bad stuff, though the panto-era only had one good thing in the form of The City of Death.

Because, and this is the most crippling thing: Doctor Who is and has never been perfect. What sums up the show for me is how The Caves of Androzani – one of the best episodes not just of Doctor Who but of any sci-fi show – being immediately followed by The Twin Dillema…which is one of the worst episodes not just of Doctor Who but of any sci-fi show. This tragically funny sequence of events demonstrates how Doctor Who has the potential to be (and at rare moments is) a truly fantastic show, yet it so often hides behind the sofa of shlock. The good/bad ratio is probably at 1:50.

But there are times when one series as a whole will be better than others. As I said, the Hinchcliffe-era was the golden age of Doctor Who. Meanwhile, everyone can agree that the Peter Davidson-era was bland with a handful of exceptions, the Sylvester McCoy-era started as awful then suddenly became good, and we don’t mention the Colin Baker-era. It makes us want to hurt people.

The last series showed promise with Peter Capaldi’s Doctor, who is vastly different from any other incarnation – but the problem is that the show is turning into Sherlock In Space…only written by a ten year old with a fetish for middle-aged women. Moffat once again claimed that the show was ‘getting darker,’ yet we opened with giant dinosaurs and closed with Santa Claus Conquers The Bland Aliens.

Can someone please pull this man away from the writing desk?  

'Ten Years From Now' - A Review

I only occasionally visit ‘The National Organisation For Marriage’ (or ‘NOM’ as they un-ironically call themselves) the same way I occasionally follow ‘The UK Independence Party’ – because it’s a scavenger-hunt for hypocrisy. There is no such thing as a wrong opinion, yet there are bizarre opinions suspended only by flawed logic. And the only way to rid society of said opinions is by exposing the flaws in this logic through critical discourse.

Normally I wouldn’t foul my blog with this nonsense, but NOM has recently penned aliterary work that they’ve shared with the world. Since my blog is supposed to be about art, I may as well review this piece.

‘Ten Years From Now’ is a dystopian flash-fiction told from the first-person perspective of a concerned parent (read: author surrogate) whose sixteen year old daughter has been suspended from school for apparently bullying a transgender student. This could be an interesting tale about how a parent has to explain that the mind is a separate entity from the body, yet the parent does not want to jeopardise his relationship with his daughter. Instead, it’s a context-less spiel about “kids these days.”

The opening shows signs of promise, yet throws its cards on the table by using air-quotes in the sentence “he has chosen to "identify" as a "she"” meaning that the protagonist is transphobic and believes his daughter to be right in her protests, thus making her suspension unlawful.

This would make sense if there was some sort of fictional law introduced, decreeing that those who self-identify as female are immediately permitted to use the female facilities on-campus. Instead, the story draws to current events by saying that “the school district adopted the Ontario, Canada construct.” Said construct only decrees that there are five genders. It does not decree that males are allowed to use female toilets. The logic behind trans pupils being allowed to use facilities assigned to the gender they identify as is that these trans pupils have appealed to an authority to receive explicit permission. Again, if there was a fictional law introduced that changed this, then fine. But there isn’t one. 

The story also suggests that this trans pupil is only pretending to identify as a female so he can spy on the women changing without repercussions. This would make the daughter justified in her protest – but the story is not explicit. It needs to either refute or embrace this possibility, as it’s too strong to leave open.

It’s not even said what stage of the transitional process the pupil is in. Does this pupil still dress like a man? Has this pupil applied to have her passport changed? Has this pupil had any surgery or hormone-treatment? Has the protagonist’s daughter protested against a boy in lipstick, or a woman without breasts?

In fact, if gender “is no longer particularly relevant in the public schools” then that means toilets would be different. If gender is now a binary construct, then toilers surely would not be split into ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ – particularly if, according to the story, the government has now eliminated the expressions ‘boy’ and ‘girl.’ This means toilets would no longer be assigned to a gender, and thus would have to be re-built. I guess every toilet would be contained within some sort of cubicle, as would the showers and changing-rooms.

Thus, the trans pupil would not have been using the wrong toilet and therefore the daughter would have no reason whatsoever to protest. The conflict this whole story is based around is null and void.

Need I go on? The story’s logic has collapsed in on itself within the first four paragraphs.

For a story set ten years in the future, not a single ‘futuristic vibe’ is present. The only hint that we’re in the future is the vagueness of the statement “I read an article on my device.” This probably just refers to a phone or tablet, but there’s the possibility he’s reading on a holographic projection or perhaps cyber-vision goggles. Aside from this, the piece doesn’t feel even vaguely futuristic. The story even says that the school has adopted “the Facebook model,” meaning the world hasn’t moved onto a new plain of communication. The world depicted here is a vacuum where only marriage appears to have significantly changed anything – where if we look to the past ten years, our society has been radically changed by technology, the economy, conflict, and transitions in political parties. These are extremely large constructs. At the start of the story, it appears that changes in marriage laws have only had a partial impact on this teenager’s first-world existence. It’s only when the story draws back at the conclusion to reveal that the world is a barren wasteland of poverty and drugs because the definition of marriage has changed.

Which leads me neatly to the ending. At the last moment, the story forgoes the basic ‘show don’t tell’ rule to dump a vast amount of exposition without any explanation.

The story boldly claims with no justification that “Teenage drug use, criminality, truancy and suicide were on the rise, while educational attainment is declining.” How? “More people are living in poverty than any other time in my life.” How? How is a change in marriage laws more damaging to the economy than the stock market crash of 2008? It’s possible that this law has created a domino-effect, but that effect needs to be explained within the story. And it needs to be explained in a way that doesn’t have our protagonist quote a Fox News article. The line: “I read an article on my device” suggests that the protagonist merely read a random article, rather than “I read an official report” or “I read a government study.” And it’s because of this random article that apparently the world is falling apart. The protagonist has read the article, so therefore the article is true. I read, therefore I am.

This summarises the whole problem with the piece. We read what the protagonist is thinking, and therefore it’s supposed to be true within the world created. He says that Christian Unions are being disbanded all over the country, therefore it must be so. The possibility that the protagonist could be mistaken, jaded, or a bigot is never bought into question – which is a huge flaw considering that, like it or not, this protagonist is expressing a view only present in a minority. An average reader will be quick to dismiss his views because they are not the norm. In order to make us sympathise with this characters unorthodox views, he must be presented with more distance and more characterisation.

We don’t know the person speaking. How old is he? Where does he live? What’s his job? Does he have a wife? Because the story is so short, and the story attempts to cram so many ideas without explaining them, we have no sense of character. There is no room for character. I can only assume he’s an author surrogate because there is so little characterisation. There is absolutely no context here, and as such I’m inclined to immediately disagree with the person speaking because I have no clear mental picture and no sense of time or place.

Finally, the story goes as far to say that the President him/herself is planning enormous changes, and as a result taxes would be raised. Never in the history of politics has a president outright said that taxes are being raised – and this will never happen because it would be career-suicide. Never, ever will the president step out in front of the nation and say: “Hey, there’s a huge reform in healthcare, education, and law-enforcement coming up…and guess that’s paying for it? IT’S YOU!!” This is the sort of vision only conjured up by a writer with no idea about politics or even reality.

So, in conclusion: I wouldn’t try to submit this for publication, guys. Regardless of the extremely flawed views presented, this is just a really bad piece of prose – failing on every single level possible. Stick to the political rhetoric…