Anna Chen discusses Chris Rock Asian joke on BBC World Service
Well, Chris Rock REALLY wanted that gig, didn't he? With the eyes of the world on this year's Academy Awards ceremony following the 'Oscars So White' campaign and boycott, how's a chap to hold onto his integrity and reputation and still get to play the big time?
With a shocking number of African American deaths at the hands of cops, the Ferguson protests and the Black Lives Matter campaign coming to a head, the issues of black worth in US society were highlighted by the casual exclusion of a major section of the population from one of America's top cultural prize-giving ceremonies. This was the crisis moment that had so much riding on it. Would Chris join the boycott even if it meant giving up his role as MC for one of the most prestigious events in the showbiz calendar?
What Chris did was to take the job, aim a few soft balls at the white establishment and then show them he was only kidding. For is he not the house clown? He made his bones by reserving his keenest viciousness for Will and Jada Pinkett Smith, the very couple who raised awareness of the total absence of any nominations for black actors at this year's Oscars. The most effective assassins are always the ones from the doomed victims' own group, as it comes with an extra serving of relish. He did what no white person could have achieved: shooting the messengers from the lip. Greater love hath no man than he lay down his fellow black performers for his place at the top table. How the white audience laughed.
It was gruesome to watch, like some sort of a human sacrifice of Jada and Will. And then, in case they missed the point he was making, he tossed in three Asian children as dessert for whichever lower order daemon it was that he was ingratiating himself with on the night.
Hope the crumbs tasted swell, Chris.
I remember when Chris Rock was good. We liked him a lot in our house. The missing link between Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy, Chris combined savvy sharp wits with righteous indignation over injustice. His documentary, Bad Hair, made me quite tearful thinking about his daughter coming to terms with her own black beauty and the rancid creatures for whom her black African hair is a mark of inferiority.
I wonder if Chris saw his child in the eyes of the three Asian kids he humiliated on stage at the Oscars. Oh look: Price Waterhouse Cooper clones because, as any fule know, we Asians are all corporate breadhead whores without an ounce of concern for our fellow humans. One of the kids was given a Jewish name, thereby gifting Chris with two racist insults for the price of one.
Then there's Sacha Baron Cohen at the Oscars, another swinging dick hiding his uber-dickness behind insults about Asian guys and small dicks. So brave. "Do it to Julia," screamed Winston Smith in George Orwell's 1984, and here they are as broken and willing to pass the pain on to others in order to escape it themselves.
Anyhow, here I am in last night's World Have Your Say debate on the BBC World Service on the subject of the Chris Rock Asian Joke.
2015-09-30 10:17:08 CRIENGLISH.com Web Editor: Li Shiyu
Anna Chen presents her multi-media one-woman show: Anna May Wong Must Die. [Photo provided by Anna Chen]
Anchor:
Chinese people are among the fastest-growing ethnic minorities in the UK. However, in areas such as arts, media and politics, they are still the quiet section of the population.
But London-based writer, performer and broadcaster Anna Chen is reluctant to remain silent. Actively involved in comedy shows and radio programs, she is using her voice to conjoin the British Isles with the Middle Kingdom.
Let's follow Li Ningjing to learn her story.
Reporter:
In a dimly-lit room in Beijing, accompanied with rhythmic music, stand-up performer Anna Chen rapped a trenchant, witty song on Anna May Wong, a Hollywood legend and one of the most misunderstood talents back in the Roaring Twenties.
"This is what fascinated me about Anna May Wong, who was Chinese movie star, Hollywood's first Chinese superstar (and) the most famous Chinese woman in the world in the 1920s and 30s. And the things she was up against then, I felt I was still bumping up against at the end of the 20th century. "
Off the stage,Anna acts like a typical Londoner. But born to a Chinese father and British mother, she admits that she has always been conscious about her dual identities.
"I grew up as an English girl, feeling very English, but also very aware of the Chinese side of my family. So I always say that I have Beatlemania yelling at me in one ear, and Red Guards yelling at me in the other. It's a very, very strange mix, but I think it's quite interesting."
Immersing herself in the cultural extravaganza in the UK during the 1970s, Anna Chen has developed a strong interest in the entertainment industry since an early age. But when she started to go to auditions, this fledgling performer was not satisfied with the stereotyped roles being offered.
"One of the things that I came up against with was (that) there were no parts written for Chinese women. The only Chinese women you saw on the screen, either on film or on TV, were very demeaning roles. See, (there were) either the Dragon Lady: evil, being destructive; or else you were the Lotus Blossom: very delicate, in the need of help, and a little bit feeble; or else, the third thing (is that) you are completely invisible. So after a while, I wrote my first show called Suzy Wrong-Human Cannon."
In 1994, Chen took her show to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the largest arts festival in the world and thus became the first British Chinese comic to do so. A few years later, she also made her acting appearance in Stewart Lee's Fist of Fun. That experience not only granted her as the first Chinese comedienne shown up on British television, but to a certain extent, it also promised her future opportunities in broadcasting, particularly after successfully launching her first radio program on Yoko Ono.
"I started to make programs for BBC, for Radio 3 and for Radio 4. One of the things I always enjoyed was making programs about Chinese culture and Chinese people that showed in a positive light. I always said that if you dehumanize a group, if you make them just a blank canvas, if you create a vacuum and all sorts of really unpleasant monsters fill the vacuum, so I think it's very important to humanize. Because we are! That's the reality. "
Besides offering her voice as a regular guest talking about Chinese matters and current affairs, such as the Morecambe Bay cockling disaster and the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Anna Chen has also written and presented China-related documentaries and drama for BBC and London-based radio station Resonance FM. From her screen heroine Anna May Wong, China's manufacturing industry and its relationship with Britain, to Chinese sci-fi and chinoiserie cliches in music, the topics are diverse while her style is frequently labeled by critics as "witty, wisecracking and sophisticated".
One of her most well-received programs is a ten-part BBC series named "Chinese in Britain". Presented in an anecdotal manner, the program explores the lives of Chinese people who came to the UK before the immigration boom in the 1960s and unveils some less-heard-of truths. For example, the earliest Sino-UK cultural exchange could be traced back to the 17th century, when the Jesuit scholar Shen Futsong met King James II; while during the First and Second World Wars, actually there were a great number of Chinese sailors who joined the British merchant navy and contributed a lot to the British victory in those turbulent times.
"I do get people coming up saying: 'You know, we really, really enjoy your program.' 'Cause it's such a rarity! 'Cause what you normally get is that if they do look at Chinese, it is normally from the outside, from their point of view looking at something strange, rather than what we did, which is saying: 'This is us. We are here. Look, this is us telling you our story and just making it normal. '"
From stand-up, theatre to poetry and radio, this multi-talented artist is using her voice to "grapple with issues of politics and identity, subvert stereotypes and poke the status quo with a sharp stick" warts and all. Thanks to her projects, Chinese are no longer the takeaway owners or inscrutable Kung Fu experts, but ordinary people with diverse characters.
Anna says her role model is Prometheus, who inspires her to do her best to conjoin Chinese with the rest of the world.
"I think I am planting seeds. So whether it germinates, I don't know. But this is how I think of myself. I think with this next generation, we are starting to see more people coming up. So I think time is on our side."
Beside hosting her weekly radio show, Anna Chen is planning to write a memoir, which documents her life as a British Chinese.
So THAT'S what Blackstar was about. David Bowie, who died yesterday aged 69 after a long illness, said farewell in the most eloquent, meaningful and stylish way possible with his last album released only days ago. He left his fans a valuable parting gift that will speak to us for as long as there's music and human beings to listen to it.
We did a collective "Aaah" as we learnt the worst and realised he was talking to us beyond his mortal death; Blackstar is a letter to us written over the 18 months since he was told that the cancer he'd been diagnosed with four years ago would kill him in a year. (The exact timeline of his illness is unclear at the moment of writing.)
Last night, the night he died, journalist Charles Shaar Murray and I were grooving to the CD which had just arrived. It's deeply saddening to know we were dancing along to it even as he took his last breath. However, now that we do, a whole new dimension has opened up where we can still be with him, fathoming the unfathomable, working out his puzzle, reading the hieroglyphs he left us.
David entered my life before I even hit puberty and has never left. I was transported to heaven in 1969 by his single Space Oddity and again when it was re-released in 1972. My cousin bought me a cassette of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and I never looked back.
Ziggy kid and lifelong Bowie fan
If you were a dreamy, creative kid who didn't fit in, David was your guide, big bruv and your own personal Starman. It wasn't just that he was supernaturally gorgeous: he exuded love and that's what we valued. Of course, I know he was a chameleon who you could project yourself into and onto but I won't call him a blank canvas because he was anything but blank. He had the ability to hook out your innermost best and make it fly.
And the music ...
He gave shape to the inchoate and told us 'Oh no, love, you're not alone'. It's hard not to embrace that when you're convinced that you are.
'Life on Mars' made me cry because I was the girl, maybe not with the mousy hair, but with the dysfunctional family in a world of which I was desperately trying to make sense. David was steering me from a sunken dream to the seat with the clearest view, and I was indeed hooked to the silver screen which was my escape.
'Her mummy is yelling no,
and her daddy has told her to go.'
Okay, it was actually the reverse, but parental rejection was so familiar to me that for a long time this was MY song.
A major part of David's appeal was that he was looking up at the stars away from the sailors fighting in the dance hall and wondering if there was life on Mars way above the daily turmoil. The highest note in the song is that soaring MA-A-ARS at the peak of the chorus that lifts you into another realm of consciousness, like he's waking you up and leading the way out. And we eagerly looked up there with him. (In 'Blackstar' he's doing it again, still our leader — well, more pioneer than leader — but with us quivering in fear behind him as he prepares to make his final journey.)
I'd dance myself into a Rite of Spring frenzy to 'Rebel, Rebel', 'The Jean Genie' and 'Width of a Circle'. I felt the torment of the singer in 'John, I'm only Dancing' being drawn to someone he shouldn't, and behind it all, that guitar that could wail and chuck out a stomping rhythm. On TV, 'Starman' introduced us to David's blonde guitar-toting sidekick, Mick 'Ronno' Ronson, who was also the recipient of our powerful young emotions. I can remember most of the lyrics up to and including the Diamond Dogs album even when I can't remember what I had to eat last night.
I missed the legendary Rainbow gig where his mentor, mime artist Lindsey Kemp, shared the stage and Roxy Music was the support act, but I was determined to make up for it when more London dates were announced. Under age I may have been but I was a girl on a mission. I bussed it from Mare Street in Hackney and queued overnight at the Kilburn State Gaumont and the Hammersmith Odeon in order to secure front-row centre seats.
We early birds at the head of the queue bonded tightly, guarding each other when we went to pee under Hammersmith Bridge, saving each other's places in the queue and sharing provisions. It's lovely to watch the DA Pennebaker film of the final Ziggy gigs and spot everyone forever young and filled with love. (I can be seen briefly during 'Width of a Circle'.)
The build-up was spectacular. David's frocks annoyed the hell out of elderly relatives when his photos were published in the tabloids, confirming to us that he represented something a world apart from their rigidly oppressive minds. At Hammersmith we buzzed with anticipation. Someone read out a piece in the NME about David announcing he was retiring, shock, horror, the first time I ever heard the name of the journalist, Charles Shaar Murray.
Quick, there might not be enough of him to go round. But thankfully there was.
We all dressed up. There were all sorts of variations on David's iconic haircut and Angie Bowie's platinum white do. Angie was Bowie royalty, being married to him and very much part of his creative team, much loved by the fans. I still vividly recall her in a red and white striped top and white pants, walking from limo to the glass doors while we squealed with excitement and craned to get a peek. The Mainman crew (Warhol's Cherry Vanilla and Leee Black-Childers et al) were all there. Lulu turned up. Wow. I mean, she was a mainstream entertainer and even she was entranced by the outsider transitioning to insider and cultural icon.
Of the fans, I made close friends with Dena, on whom I developed a crush, and her mate John Shipcott who would later babysit Zowie (Duncan Jones) and thrill us with tales of hanging up David's wonderful costumes and, glory of glories, show us photos of the house interior on pain of death if we told anyone. And Debbie who had the best Angie haircut thanks to an indulgent mum. I remember a guy called Henry who was a dead-ringer in his carroty spiked hair and Ziggy flash. It was all sparkle and glitter, lurex and spangles.
For the final three gigs at the Hammersmith Odeon I sprayed my green peplumed leather jacket silver (the one I wore to school instead of the requisite green serge blazer) and wore it with white trousers. My mother allowed me to wreck our beautiful Chinese parasol that smelt strongly of mothballs by gluing on big silver letters that spelt 'David is my Nirvana', 'cause I'd just learnt what Nirvana meant and felt this was an appropriate time to use it. When I opened it in the front row, I was rewarded with a kiss blown directly at me. I still recall the sensation of my heart thumping through my chest, tears wellng and my spirit soaring out of the top of my head. David had NOTICED me!
Buying front row tickets was a bit of a waste for as soon as the lights went down and Wendy Carlos's 'Ode to Joy' (from Stanley Kubrick's movie of Clockwork Orange) struck up with its 'bom, bom, bom, bom', everyone rushed the stage anyway. This was quite dangerous because the orchestra pit between us and beloved David was guarded by an iron rail that came up to mid-thigh, way below your centre of gravity. Your legs were seriously in danger of being broken in the crush. The security guards — who were far from modern thug bouncers and looked after the fans — regularly had to drag us over the rail and out of the melee.
Some harboured fantasies of then being led backstage where they could meet our hero but I suspected they'd just be released into the wilds of Hammersmith outside the back door and have to start all over again from the main entrance. I spent long periods of the three shows bracing myself on the shoulders of security, several of us sometimes leaning on each bloke. This meant that I could barely use my 8mm Bolex movie camera but I surreptitiously shot a fair bit and would take it to all my 1970s gigs. Sadly, my mother threw out my film years later, but that's a horror story for another time.
The climax and moment of greatest tension ... well, there were a few of those. 'My Death' when David left the longest pause and we all yelled, "ME!". David going down on Ronno's guitar. Or the end of the show wondering if there would be an encore and they'd all come back on and thunder through 'White Light, White Heat'.
On the third and last night when my legs could no longer take it, I wandered into the almost empty Odeon lobby and perched on the Herbie VW car doing promo service for the movie due the following week. A tall bloke wandered over and struck up conversation and eventually asked me if I wanted to go to a party that night. I said yes and that's how I ended up at the Café Royale in Regent Street for David's retirement party. I may have been traumatised along with everyone else by his onstage confirmation that this would be his last gig, but going to the party was a powerful consolation prize.
Here we were in one of Oscar Wilde's hangouts. Brian Conolly, blonde singer of The Sweet, was not terribly nice but Lulu, Angie and Mick Ronson were so kind. I was filming Lulu and Angie with my little Bolex when Angie said something I couldn't hear and Lulu repeated it, saying, 'She said you're too gorgeous.' By now I was feeling like Cinderella with three hours to go before pumpkin time.
When David walked in he filled the room which was already rammed with stars. He was short in stature but huge in spirit.
I was too shy to crash into his conversations but I did chat to Mick Ronson and took a selfie movie, now sadly gone with all my other 8mm footage and belongings in the Great Mother's Purge.
I took the film and projection kit into school when it came back from the developer's for anyone who was interested – about half a dozen of us — and it dawned on me. Whatever the imagination-free say or do in their efforts to crush you underfoot or drive you under the tread of their tanks, there was indeed room in this world for someone like me.
At my lowest, when all the nightmares came today, his single 'Ashes to Ashes' was riding high in the charts. It formed the second bookend on my hopeful childhood and youth, the first being 'Space Oddity'. I needed an axe to break the ice but that wouldn't be happening any time soon. In the meantime, David provided a musical memory from which to draw strength and I thank him for that.
Why has Jeremy Corbyn's election as leader of the Labour Party with a massive 59.5 per cent provoked more fury among the centre-left than the predations of the right which still overwhelm us?
I'm bewildered by the preoccupation among good friends with diversions that have little to do with the big central crises facing us: worsening poverty and wars.
Broadly speaking, my anti-Corbyn friends are focusing on Westminster-bubble concerns such as the cabinet reshuffle; personalities (they don't like Corbyn or his cohort); plus JC's sympathy for the Palestinians and his criticism of Israel. What is going on with this endless stream of pieces on a reshuffle in which he sacked one person (shadow Culture Secretary and former SpAd/corporate lobbyist Michael Dugher) and moved another?
Compare this with Tony Blair's nights, weeks, months and years of the long knives, when Blairites were parachuted into constituencies against the wishes of locals, and his removal of the authority of Labour Party's National Executive Committee (NEC) as a means of centralising his power along presidential lines. Were Seumas Milne even half as thuggish as rottweiler Alastair 'sexed-up dossier' Campbell, the media would be having a conniption. Oh, they already are.
The rest of us see Corbyn as representing the first real hope for people devastated by decades of intensifying Tory and Tory-lite policies: food banks; the breaking of the NHS; ATOS savagery towards the disabled; the transfer of wealth from poor to rich as "austerity" (for us!) while the super-rich TRIPLED their wealth since the 2008 crash; the break-up of education (academies — imagine Toby Young as your mentor); crippling tuition fees; neglected flood defences; banking scandals where no-one is held to account; tax avoidance by massive corporations; a tanking economy disguised by various financial tricks and an artificially inflated housing bubble; another crash on the way but without the safety net of a China powerhouse this time; wars without end; a destroyed manufacturing base since Thatcher and now steel, coal and a burgeoning green energy industry killed off; fire sales of public assets; ownership of the media by a handful of moguls; increased poverty, homelessness, debt and hunger; hefty wage rises for the political class while we're pauperised; and general selfish corruption permeating every walk of life.
However, in the official narrative the realproblem is ... Jeremy Corbyn. We're told that he's so weird-beardy extreme that he couldn't possibly win a general election, but the consequence of their efforts to undermine him could well be the creation of a self-fulfilling prophecy, and an unintended demonstration of a contempt for democracy – remember, Corbyn's leadership has a greater democratic mandate (almost 60 per cent of the selectorate) than any Labour Party leader of recent times, including Blair – which matches that of the Tories. Meanwhile, the notional 'centre' of British (and American) politics has moved so far to the right than it currently enshrines policies and attitudes at which even Thatcher and Reagan (during their first terms, anyway) would have baulked.
When the right and the soi-disant 'moderates' attack Corbyn, we see an attack not on one individual and his cohort, but on everyone trying to mount a challenge to the rich who are taking everything that isn't nailed down, and damn the rest of us to hell. This is class war and it's being waged unopposed by the richest class against us. We're not allowed to defend ourselves. And whilst the membership of the Labour Party swells, the degree of influence which the party establishment wishes to allow that membership to wield proportionately decreases. In other words, STFU and stuff those envelopes!
Even conservatives like Nick Robinson and Peter Hitchens are worried by the concerted media assault on JC, while mainstream journalists Roy Greenslade and Nic Outterside are questioning the ethics of our partisan press. The blogosphere has rushed to ensure that the public is kept informed of the truth ... which should be the BBC's job, but – as that ship has sailed – we're largely reliant on blogs such as evolvepolitics.com to fill in the gaps.
Laura Kuenssberg, BBC hit-woman for Cameron
VERY posh girl Laura Kuenssberg, BBC News Political Editor, was only serving her class when she and Andrew Neil facilitated Cameron's ambush of JC and the rest of us by orchestrating the resignation of Labour MP Stephen Doughty in the studio five minutes before PMQs. Their boast of how they achieved this interference with the democratic process was deleted from the BBC website but you can read a cached version of it here.
So far over 10,000 people have signed the Change.org petition to sack Kuenssberg and Andrew Neil for manipulating the news rather than reporting it. BBC impartiality is now a joke. Instead of speaking truth to power and challenging it, they suck up to it. Although, given Kuenssberg's background, she's not so much twanging the vocal cords of her masters' voice as much as taking a vocal solo with it. I am sure her rewards will be great now she's made her bones with her class peers. Has she reserved a space on her office wall for the wooden shield on which she'd like to display Corbyn's head as a hunting trophy?
One of the comments at Nic Outtenden's incisive piece reminds us: "Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." ― George Orwell.
I always wondered what kind of sicko poked out the eyes of women communards with their parasols when the Paris Commune was crushed in 1871. Now I feel I know. And it's not a pretty sight.
BBC political editor @bbclaurak tweets in 2016: Floods-2 EU-10 Economy-3 Housing-0 NHS strike-0 Saudi/Iran/Korea-0 Reshuffle-56
It is always good to be brought into the light, even though it may take an age: better late than never. And so the theme of Heaven Sent, the penultimate episode in the latest series of Doctor Who, brings me to my knees in grateful awe. Heaven Sent knocked me off my cynical perch where I've been nailed ever since Russell T Davies rebooted the Time Lord franchise to dreary derivative effect. And may I say I have never been happier to have had my opinions reversed so totally even if this turns out to be one glorious, single, solitary, diamond-perfect episode before it all goes back to normal.
Quite staggering in its concept and clever in its execution, this episode never makes a wrong turn. Blessed relief to find histrionics kept to a minimum, only reflecting the Doctor's impossible predicament and thus earning him the right to emote furiously, epically and truthfully. At last, Steven Moffat gives Peter Capaldi a script worthy of his talent and our expectations.
A grieving Doctor is deposited in a vast unrealisable castle, who-knows-where, which turns out to be a gigantic puzzle reminiscent of the classic The House That Jack Built episode (1966) that had Diana Rigg's Emma Peel so thoroughly trapped and beaten in The Avengers series.
Pursued relentlessly by The Veil, a monstrous shade of Death, it is only when the Doctor solves the first bit of the puzzle that we realise how difficult this challenge is. He is forced to struggle across all his levels of existence, from his deepest inner nightmares, to engagement with the ghost of Clara, to his survival on a colossal cosmic scale, and is tried to his utmost ingenuity and courage.
"How many seconds in eternity?", he asks. Not such an empty question as you might think.
A truthful confession dredged out of his deepest recesses stops The Veil in its tracks and resets the castle, whose floors and rooms rotate and move, for the next stage of the chase. Here, even the constellations are all wrong: the stars tell him that his very own torture chamber is 7,000 years in the future. How long has he been playing this game? Will he work out his ultimate escape? Will he run out of confessions?
Piece by piece he solves the puzzle and escapes death time and time again. Who was the owner of the skull he finds at the top of the tower still attached by electrodes? What is the meaning of the word written in the dust? He discovers that the castle is an island surrounded by a sea of human skulls. What cruelty has the castle's creator unleashed on these poor souls?
And yet, as in all the best stories, beneath the byzantine puzzle, there is a simple explanation whose driving force shoots this episode to the front of the SF screen rankings.
Our Doctor finally reaches the Home room, the square at the end of the game, where the Tardis and escape is set tantalisingly the other side of a crystal wall. At 400 times the hardness of diamond and twenty feet thick, it is impossible to penetrate. And yet, this surely has to be the moment he vanquishes? Well, yes, but not in the way you might expect.
What follows is a tour de force sequence that satisfies every demand for great story-telling. The moment you realise how the Doctor is going to win takes your breath away and is beautiful in its simple, profound truth. Here is eternity in a grain of sand, heaven in a flower. You could almost call this Triumph of the Will, but let's not go there.
So, bravo, Steven Moffat. It didn't take you a billion years to get here after all. It only felt like it. Salud.
Oh the excitement as the Amazon package containing another 3D blu-ray movie drops through the door. This week it's the fifth in the much-loved Terminator franchise, Terminator Genisys which I've had on order for weeks and which was at long last released on November 2nd.
But yikes ...
After a promising start with Arnie doing a decent job reprising his original role as a craggily Johnny Cashesque aging Terminator, the movie ultimately proves itself a truly godawful stinker.
There's no sense that smug well-fed Jai Courtney as the tragic Kyle Reese is a top trooper who has endured a lifetime of apocalyptic nightmare under the tyranny of Cyberdyne and their Skynet artificial intelligence system. Instead, he looks like a jock goon straight out of a National Lampoons movie, dishonouring the memory of Michael Biehn, who wrung our hearts in the original.
It took me a while to realise that the one-note brat playing Sarah Connor is Emilia Clarke, Danaeris from Game of Thrones. I may have to wait and forget her performance in Genisys before I resume watching GOT season 4 but I fear my viewing may be irreparably harmed by her feisty feistiness. I may even take to referring to her as Her Feistiness. In case you hadn't guessed, I HATE feisty. Too cutesy, and insufficiently endowed with guts to be as truly challenging as demi-goddess Linda Hamilton (all hail).
What happened to Clarke's GOT co-star, Lena Headey, who made such a magnificent Sarah in the TV series The Sarah Connor Chronicles? Did she take one look at the script and scarper?
Both Courtney and Clarke lack sensitivity and depth, and fail to recreate the mythical grandeur of the original movie, not helped by witless lumpen dialogue that a smart 11-year old would find embarrassing.
It says a lot when, aside from Arnie, the best acting comes from the T-800 (Brett Azar with Arnie's CGI'd face) and the T-1000 (Lee Byung-hun doing a great Robert Patrick). Not to mention JK Simmons spanning the years as Detective O'Brien.
The writers should be made to sweep streets for turning out this time-travel mess in which five dates figure: 1984, 1997, 2014, 2017 and 2029, plus the year when Sarah Connor was nine years old and got herself a pet "Pops" — an Ah-nuld Terminator. Got it?
The film opens with the messianic leader of the Resistance, John Connor (played by the decidedly UN-messianic Jason Clarke, meh!), sending his best buddy Kyle back in time from their offensive in 2029 to 1984 to protect his mum. So far, so like the original. However, in this timeline, it's all different and in the new 1984, Sarah is already hardass and familiar with the plot (aren't we all, dear) and now has that (rather emasculated) pet T-800 in tow. The other thing that is different is that Sarah and her cyborg minder have knocked up a little time machine. In 1984. Yeah, right. Never mind protecting Sarah, protect the crock of a plot at all costs.
Anyhow, I digress. The subsequent John Connor twist is severely mishandled, throwing away this key character. And the plot holes ... So if John Connor is transformed into a nanocyte prototype Terminator-3000 and goes back to 2014 in order to develop Genisys, Skynet's global operating system, in time for its deployment in 2017, and also to kill his parents, how can he be born and go back to 2014 in order to ... This conundrum is crudely plugged by nicking directly from the charmingly effective method in the original to the effect that someone says, "a person could go mad working this out". It's meant to work under cover of a witty callback to the first movie but just ends up calling attention to its own ineptitude.
There's not enough emotional pacing to transmit the horror of the situation in which JC and the family finds itself and results in just another over-complicated blah sci-fi movie when I wanted epic SF that explores big themes. In the wake of so much brilliant writing emerging from America, from Buffy to Breaking Bad, this is unforgivable.
I was optimistic about this movie, having seen what a glorious job the makers of the new Mad Max, Fury Road, did with the franchise. Terminator Genisys may have done well at the box office but I wonder how many viewers were pleased with the experience.
The brief presence of Matt Smith as the evuhl T-5000 who turns John Connor into a machine indicates intentions to make another sequel. It'll be back.
