Category Writing

The Nine Lives Of Chloe King

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From Alloy Entertainment, the illustrious YA book/TV packing behemoth behind massive pop culture hits like The Vampire Diaries, The Secret Circle, Gossip Girl & Pretty Little Liars amongst many others, comes The Nine Lives Of Chloe King, ABC Family’s contender for new genre show of the summer.

In truth, it’s much more than just a contender: it fully and skillfully owns its genre DNA, relishing it like few other shows on the air right now. Based on the trilogy written by Liz Braswell, both the show and the source material feel like YA Stephen King, with their rock-solid grasp of genre, and gleeful approach to story.

The show begins with a breathless chase sequence on the morning of the sixteenth birthday of Chloe King, a normal-seeming San Francisco teenager, who is being chased to the top of Coit Tower, from which she falls. And dies.

And then comes back to life.

As in all great YA stories featuring kids with extraordinary abilities, the supernatural changes that Chloe starts to experience dovetail smoothly with the turbulence of adolescence. This combination of the supernatural and everyday is one of the many things the show does brilliantly. Chloe’s relationships with her longtime best friends Amy and Paul, with her adopted mother, with her annoying boss in the store where she works, and with the mysterious guy Brian who shows up in the store one day — all these are given time, depth and convincing backstory. All those scenes have an easy, natural quality that grounds the more fantastic elements of the world.

But the show is about the fantastic. Aside from coming back from the dead, Chloe starts developing speed, agility… and claws. She discovers that she’s the key figure in a prophecy of the Mai, an ancient race of, as you may have guessed from the title, cat people. The Mai are engaged in a war with the Order of the Tenth Blade, a war in which Chloe is the unwilling focal point. The show follows her developing powers, her struggle to reconcile her human life with her new and extraordinary world, and, of course, a breathless and urgent love triangle.

Where this show succeeds (and others fail), is its ability to shift gears on the fly between episodic events, major story arcs, intense supernatural fight scenes, and small, intimate character moments. It has a great genre central story fueled by secrets, revelations and the many intense emotions that make up high school and complex family life. Its grasp of all these elements makes it a natural successor to Joss Whedon’s Buffy The Vampire Slayer.

The writing, directing and soundtrack are all strong, propulsive and highly entertaining, but shows like this also need a solid cast, and in this respect, The Nine Lives Of Chloe King kicks major ass. The show’s star, Skyler Samuels, channels her inner Kate Winslet to portray the simultaneous power and quirky vulnerability of Chloe in a consistently winning performance. As Chloe’s best friend Amy, Grace Phipps is also front and center in terms of performance, bringing an engagingly live-wire chaotic charm and emotional intelligence to the mix. And Amy Pietz brings a complex, deep sense of emotional truth to her portrayal of Chloe’s adoptive mother: their scenes together are often painfully real, and are one of the important grounding elements in the show.

The show is a charming, entertaining mystery with claws, teeth, raging hormones, and a series of engaging plotlines that, thanks to the instinctive understanding of genre and awesome writing of original author Liz Braswell and now Daniel Berendson & his team, all successfully intertwine with the central war between supernatural species.

ABC Family has consistently provided a complementary alternative to the CW’s darker programming slate, by carving out a great track history in teen drama and edgier fantastical fare, such as Kyle XY (exec produced by The Vampire Diaries‘ Julie Plec). The Nine Lives Of Chloe King is another excellent example of that trend.

It’s a perfect summer show that successfully takes the supernatural teen baton from The Vampire Diaries and runs with it. Let’s hope the show itself has more than one life, because there’s more than enough intrigue and story potential for many more seasons.

Torchwood: Rendition / Dead Of Night

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Following on from Russell T. Davies’ powerhouse opener, episodes two and three of Torchwood: Miracle Day continue the blazing momentum, alongside the steady and terrifying extrapolation of the series’ central conceit: no-one is dying, but no-one is healing either.

Dark Angel, Smallville and House writer Doris Egan grabs the narrative baton from Davies for the second episode, Rendition, and doesn’t miss a step or a beat. Egan presses the pedal to the metal from the very beginning, and only cranks it up from there. With the barest of outlines — the Torchwood team are on a flight to America, the conspiracy begins to emerge, the consequences of the miracle continue to unfold — Egan busts out a breathless, frantic and engrossing hour of TV. Her screenplay is nimble, dancing furiously between the strands and keeping them all flowing. Whether it’s the desperately improvised cure for Captain Jack, which is a masterclass scene in itself (blending highly technical dialogue with massively high stakes and a relentless supply of quips and one-liners for the cranky as hell Rex Matheson, and geek goddess Gwen Cooper), or the evolution of Oswald Danes, or the CIA conspiracy, Egan keeps it moving, energetic and alternately entertaining and chilling as hell. Egan also gives Gwen multiple hero moments, and verbal punches that hit as hard as the real punches that Gwen throws, including the standout line of the episode, delivered with awesome style by Eve Myles: “I’m Welsh.” Cue right hook.

By the end of the episode the team have landed, fought their way out of a trap, and escaped. In a Mini Cooper. (And to think some fans have been complaining about Torchwood being too American — (a) duh; and (b) trust me, Davies has made this even more Welsh than it was in seasons 1-3. Which is a good thing.).

From there, it falls to geek TV writing legend Jane Espenson (Buffy, BSG, Game Of Thrones) to take us into the Dead Of Night. For the first time this season, the show pauses to take a breath. It’s an interlude of sorts, although, being Torchwood, all kinds of crazy shit still happens. The change in pace is a good thing: it allows the viewers to really catch up, and lets the devastating implications continue to unravel and sink in. Espenson gets lots of juicy scenes to sink her brilliantly geeky teeth into: the bumpy integration of the new Torchwood team as they learn to work together for the first time (which, as Espenson has noted, could serve as a metaphor for the transatlantic writers room that Davies established for this season), the revelation of PhiCorp’s involvement, and Oswald Danes’ disturbing revelation of his true, dark self.

And an eye-popping double sex scene.

Espenson handles these pivotal moments with skill and gravitas, saving her humor, unleashing it sparingly but in the most brilliant of ways. She deserves an Emmy just for Jack’s “you should see the other guy” (it’s all in the context), which may be one of the greatest one-liners in sci-fi TV history. She also does a wonderful job with continuing Gwen Cooper’s ascendancy far beyond official Legendary status. Eve Myles has never had such great lines, has never had so many brilliantly moving, cool and geeky moments as she has in this season. Myles attacks every scene with subtlety, relish, tongue in cheek when need be, and flat-out heartbreaking acting when necessary.

Espenson, as you might expect, weaves the melancholy and the thrilling both expertly and seamlessly. In midst of it all, in the darkest hour of the night, Jack’s lonely phone call to Gwen was a beautiful piece of dramatic writing. Around that, the heavy lifting of the plot was done elegantly, with the haunting, silent march of the masked soulless, and the great reveal of the scale of PhiCorp’s involvement (done with a huge warehouse vista and Espenson’s other Emmy-worthy, geek-legend line of the episode, “bigger on the inside than the outside”). Espenson also made time for Esther and Gwen to discuss the poet Robert Frost, which provided great shading in the episode, and allowed Alexa Havins to develop her tremulous and vulnerable portrayal of Esther.

Mention must be also made of Bill Pullman and Lauren Ambrose, whose characters’ involvement with the miracle and its chaotically unfolding ramifications has been separate and enigmatic thus far, though their paths and significance have been beginnging to entwine. Pullman is truly extraordinary as the insane child murderer, and Ambrose is deliciously deceptive and shady in her apparent role as PhiCorp’s PR, Jilly Kitzinger. Both of them fully inhabit their roles, investing them with magnetism that is both horrific and hypnotic.

Horrific and hypnotic sum up this season so far: the huge, escalating crisis dreamed up by Davies and his team expands with every episode. It’s an incredible story engine, full of mind-blowing, exhilaratingly scary possibilities. From the writing perspective alone, Torchwood: Miracle Day is a masterclass on many levels.

Torchwood S4: Miracle Day — “The New World”

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The fourth season of Russell T. Davies’ magnificent Dr. Who spin-off Torchwood kicks off with a new world for the characters on the show, and for the show itself, as it transitions from the UK to the US.

Evolution is part of Torchwood‘s DNA: the show has changed channels with every season. It started on BBC3, moved to BBC2, then BBC1, and has now touched down on Starz. It stays alive, much like its immortal, omni-sexual hero Captain Jack Harkness, and, in the premise of this new season, like everyone else in the world. For this is the concept of Miracle Day: no-one dies.

Russell T. Davies has always been one of the greatest chroniclers of the human heart on television, from his earliest days working with that other titan of British TV, Paul Abbott (Shameless, State Of Play). But as Davies’ career developed, he became something else as well: the true master of the big idea.

It first showed most overtly with his TV miniseries Second Coming, where future ninth Doctor Who Christoper Eccleston played an ordinary man living in an ordinary part of Manchester who truly believes he is the messiah, the second coming, come to save humanity. This show clearly marked the new phase in Davies’ progression: marrying the big idea to street-level emotional reality. It’s since become clear that Davies’ signature across the wide variety of his work is this: huge, paradigm-altering concepts with complex emotional ramifications, handled with humanity, grace, humor and heart.

His massively successful relaunch of Dr. Who took this combination to another level, and his creation of sister show Torchwood continued the evolution.

From its earliest incarnation as a monster of the week show for adults, like Dr. Who but with more sex, violence and horror (the more visceral content was why it started on the more experimental channel BBC3), Torchwood has quickly and steadily evolved into something greater.

Amidst the thrills, the scares and the laughs, the show always dealt head-on with melancholy and loss, and with the horror of its events from the human perspective. Seasons One and Two were great, a huge amount of fun laced with heart-wrenching drama, as Davies blended the episodic approach with more lightly serialized story arcs. Always, he allowed the darkness to build and the implications of his narratives to really hit home for the characters and the viewers.

Season Three, which for the first time had a title, Children Of Earth, was magnificent, monumentally so. Ironically, having fewer episodes and a tighter framework allowed Davies to realize his jaw-dropping big idea in a much bigger and far more emotionally devastating way. It marked a new era and template for the show: the broad-format, one-story miniseries.

Torchwood: Miracle Day continues that new direction and hits the ground running, in true Davies style. The big idea, that on this day, the miracle day, no-one dies, is deployed almost immediately, in two creepily effective ways: in the opening moments of the show, a convicted child murder (an astonishing Bill Pullman) receives a lethal injection, while a CIA agent (a perfectly grandstanding Mekhi Pfifer), gets a lethal impalement. Neither of them die, and very quickly, the world realizes that no-one else is dying either. Something has happened to humanity, and at the very moment it occurs, the word “Torchwood” appears on CIA servers; just as quickly, all traces of it disappear.

In the hands of some showrunners, that might be the entire first episode. For Davies, who has a brutally fast-moving, story-burning approach similar to that of Kevin Williamson and Julie Plec on The Vampire Diaries, it’s just the first five minutes.

From there, the episode races in powerful, muscular fashion through the rapidly evolving chaos that ensues. It introduces Alexa Havins in a sweetly soulful performance as CIA agent Esther Drummond. It reintroduces John Barrowman’s charismatic but tortured Captain Jack from the darkness. And it finds generous amounts of time to catch up with the show’s other lead, the incredible, legendary Gwen Cooper (played brilliantly by the never-better Eve Myles), fangirl and fanboy favorite, and one of sci-fi’s greatest female characters — in fact, allow me to apologize for even mentioning gender there — one of sci-fi’s greatest characters, period. Her relationship with husband Rhys (the always awesome Kai Owen) encapsulates everything that is great about this show, and Davies: a myriad of small, intimate, truthful human moments laced with blistering humor amidst the vast sci-fi darkness that threatens to engulf us all.

The move to Starz was a mouth-watering prospect: Davies’ huge vision coupled with a much larger budget than the show had ever had before. And the results are in: Torchwood made with extra dollars works wonderfully. The enhanced production values are in full effect, and the direction is breathtakingly exciting. All the way through to the thrilling helicopter chase at the end, the show is popping and humming and exploding off the screen.

In fact, speaking as a true connoisseur of helicopter scenes in TV shows and movies (I loved Airwolf a little too much as a kid), I can say with authority: that chase scene kicks major ass. It also, thanks to Davies’ frankly brilliant writing, simultaneously serves to throw Phifer’s agent into the Torchwood mix, and is also the scene that brings Jack and Gwen back together for the first time. Davies always does a great job blasting out scenes that work on multiple levels, and this is no exception.

This first episode does an awesome job of setting up the arc of the show, reintroducing the major characters and deftly reaffirming the Torchwood concept for first-time audiences (with some nice callbacks for existing fans, including numerous ‘456’ references, and Harkness using ‘Owen Harper’ as his fake FBI identity). It also has some great Wales jokes (“the British equivalent of New Jersey”).

The stage is fully set for the remaining nine episodes, and there is so much to look forward to: watching Phifer’s awesomely irascible agent Rex Matheson get on board with the Torchwood team, seeing how Pullman’s arc plays into the larger narrative. There is also the glorious prospect of great future episodes from fantastic TV sci-fi writers, including Jane Espenson and Doris Egan.

Above all, thanks to Starz, we get to see Davies really turn up the volume on his terrifying and thrilling vision.

The pedal is well and truly to the metal, sending us headlong into the darkness.

I can’t wait for more.

Let Me In

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When it was first announced that CLOVERFIELD director and J.J. Abrams compadre Matt Reeves would be writing and directing a US remake of the hugely well received Swedish vampire flick LET THE RIGHT ONE IN, initial responses were mixed to negative. The original had been so critically acclaimed, and was extremely popular. The consensus seemed to be, it’s unnecessary and doomed to be worse than the original.

The consensus was wrong.

Remakes of foreign language films are generally not seen to be necessary, in the eyes of purists. And the history of cinema is littered with weak remakes of powerful originals. But history doesn’t make the rules. The fact that it’s happened before doesn’t make it a necessary truth. It’s gone the other way too. With VANILLA SKY, Cameron Crowe’s startlingly original, multi-layered and visionary remake of the Spanish mystery-thriller ABRE LOS OJOS (Open Your Eyes), it was demonstrated that setting a story in a different culture can add all kinds of extra dimensions and layers, to create a richer, deeper, more complex experience. And if that doesn’t sway you to believe that remaking foreign movies can yield powerful, awesome results, I have two words for you:

THE DEPARTED.

It can, clearly, be done. Much in the manner of Shakespeare plays, we can look at movies and their screenplays as texts, open to reinterpretations that illuminate the time and place in which they are remade. It’s like anything: if it’s done well, it’s done well. Talent often makes arguments redundant. With a high level of creativity and vision, extraordinary things can occur (see also, BAZ LUHRMAN’S WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’S ROMEO & JULIET, and OCEAN’S ELEVEN).

When LET ME IN was released, it was clear that Matt Reeves brought several critical advantages to the party: a spare, minimalist yet heartbreakingly emotional writing style; absolute mastery of genre; and a true joy and love for great cinema. You really feel that last one in every single frame of this movie. Reeves loves great movies, and here he has lovingly constructed something truly unique and powerful. Every frame reveals his right-on intuition for gorgeous shot composition in complete service to the story. It’s such a gorgeously detailed film, but in such a streamlined way that it flows seamlessly.

It’s a key point to make: as rich and layered as this film is on some levels, it’s beautifully stark and simple on others — there is nothing superfluous in LET ME IN. Not a single second, element of a frame, moment of sound design, or word in the script.

It’s an emotionally and visually taut, tense experience. Reeves demonstrates throughout one of the key signs of a true master — he knows how to use stillness. This is at heart a quiet, meditative film, in the manner of the original story. But in Reeves’ hands, that stillness is not inert. It’s a lethal stillness that comes with the sure knowledge that when it’s time to strike, the movie’s gonna strike hard. Every frame of LET ME IN is poised, ready to attack. Part of the terror of the movie is never knowing when it’s going to happen. It’s like a black belt sixth dan martial arts master, making only the necessary moves to create devastating effects. It’s like Jason Bourne in that scene where he doesn’t move for five minutes then explodes into furious violence.

This is where Reeves’ sensibilities really come to the fore. Comics, horror and genre are all part of this movie’s DNA. There’s a subtle comic book influence deeply infused within the visual look of the movie, and a real affinity for horror. Reeves clearly had a larger budget than the original, but never before has money been spent so subtly or targeted so perfectly. When Chloe Moretz (who gives a remarkable performance to join her brilliant turn as Hit Girl in KICK-ASS) first shows us exactly what her vampire character is capable of, it’s utterly horrifying, thanks to expertly judicious use of special effects, framing and sound design.

In fact, I’d like to single out the sound effects. They’re fucking disgusting, but that’s how they need to be. Reeves does a remarkable job of balancing the lonely emotions with the savagery of the truth of what Moretz’s character is, and what she and those who bond with her have to endure. It’s true that these are truths contained within the original source material (the novel, then the first movie). However, Reeves’ script translates these elements and re-presents them in a new light. It’s a beautiful example of powerful, stripped-back writing.

Reeves’ version punches up the original movie, without ever trampling on it. It’s as reverent and respectable as it needs to be, without fear of pushing forward when necessary. It’s like a cover version of a song that takes over from the original. Like Jimi Hendrix did with All Along The Watchtower. In most people’s minds, that’s a Hendrix song, it’s his. Of course, Bob Dylan wrote it, which I guess in my example makes Reeves Hendrix and Tomas Alfredson Bob Dylan.

LET ME IN is a genre film of superior quality, with fantastic genes, that has become so much more than its potential. It’s beautiful, terrifying, haunting, poetic and thrilling, by turns, all at once, and in the way it lingers, and stays with you.

Blood Streams: The Vampire Diaries

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Last week’s episode, Klaus, only confirmed what we already knew: watching The Vampire Diaries is an exhilarating, exhausting, extraordinary experience that leaves you drained in the best possible way.

Thanks to showrunners Kevin Williamson (Scream 1-4, Dawson’s Creek, I Know What You Did Last Summer) & Julie Plec (Kyle XY, Scream 2&3, Cursed), and their excellent writers’ room, this show consists of non-stop live-wire storytelling, barreling along and aggressively evolving and phasing on the fly with maximum speed and acceleration. The pace of storytelling is relentless: it’s like a killer act out every 60 seconds. It’s brutal but addictive; which is also how the writers handle the show’s main theme: love. Because for all its velocity of narrative, The Vampire Diaries has a beating heart when it comes to romantic love.

The lushly unabashed romanticism of the show is brutally intercut with swift chest-punching heart-grabbing (literally and metaphorically, because the show is that good). To quote another iconic Warner Bros TV show (SouthLAnd, of course): love’s a bitch. Love will lift you up and enrich your life and take you to beautiful emotional and physical places, but you’d better believe it will kick your ass along the way. That’s just the truth about love (and also about writing, as it happens), and in The Vampire Diaries that huge, resonating truth just happens to be filtered through the awesome genre lens of vampires, werewolves, witches and beautiful people in a contemporary setting. This is a hardcore genre show that is so much fun it’s accessible to everyone.

Kevin Williamson and Julie Plec have taken L.J. Smith’s rich source material, and created a monster, with all the enormous fun and kicking aside of responsibilities that comes with it. There’s a “hell, yeah!” quality to every episode, act, scene and beat in this show. It goes all the way from the season arc through-line, down to the granular level of shots and edits. There’s such a huge, wild enthusiasm for high-octane, wild-eyed with exhilaration storytelling. They build storylines over months to an unstoppable momentum, and then slam you with insanely thrilling reversals that take your goddamn breath away.

The writers take those awesome WTF moments and pile them one on the other, detonating story-bombs with abandon, because they can, thanks to the bench strength of the writing room talent on this show.

From the beginning, the showrunners declared their intention to have an absolute blast. The opening words of the pilot script teaser described the boyfriend driving the car as having that “cute-I’m-probably-gonna-die-soon look,” and his girlfriend as having that “I’ll-probably-live-longer-than-my-boyfriend look.” From there, it’s only gotten to be even more fun, with Damon’s chest-punching and Elijah’s multiple heart-grabbings (again, you know, on more than one level), and the many, many British accents on display (as a Brit, I gotta love that — of course the accent denotes worldly experience, intellectual brilliance and general bad-ass awesomeness. Of course. It just does.).

Throughout, Williamson & Plec and their outstanding team of writers demonstrate an intense sense of glee with their slice and dicing of typical monster tropes, and their manipulation and reconstruction of genre. They’ve taken the twin concepts of genre and love, and spliced them, allowing each to transform the other.

At its heart, this is a show all about transformations, both literal and metaphysical: human to vampire, human to werewolf, innocent to aware, comfortable to world-shattered. Everyone on the show at some point has had to deal with the reversal of everything they thought they knew. This is why The Vampire Diaries transcends genre and achieves vertical take-off into the realm of great drama — it grounds everything in character.

When someone’s world gets upended or destroyed, they feel it, and so do we. And as quickly as this show moves, it knows exactly when to hold a moment too, as we saw in this week’s mind-blowing episode Klaus, which not only seemed to pack in more plot than a season of 24, but also finally gave us Jenna’s reaction to finding out about the existence of vampires and werewolves, and to the fact that everyone had been lying to her all this time. Sara Canning played the scene with simple, heart-rending truth, breaking down inside and out. It was beautifully done.

Thanks to the fantastic writing which delivers kick-ass genre awesomeness and brutal character work week after week, the show continues to work its way into our bloodstreams and has shown no sign of slowing its momentum. The show was just renewed for a third season, and like an insane but thrilling rollercoaster, it’s impossible not to come back for more.