COMMENTARY AND CHEERLEADING: WINTER OLYMPIC NOTES II

The Winter Olympics is a good way for us to test the quality of commentators, because in both the UK and USA most of the sports are not things television covers regularly, and they are not sports with which the audiences are familiar. Figure skating has a wide appeal; when I worked for ABC and we were programming the Calgary games, we aimed for figure skating and the US hockey team for our prime times every night. The skating would rate about 50% higher—remember hockey is basically a regional thing in the US, while skating has the broad, cross-gender appeal that made gymnastics such a big thing in the post-Korbut, Comaneci era.

Figure skating is basically bowling alley ballet, a sport with the dual drawbacks of first requiring make-up, sequinned costumes, music and choreographers to perform and second being subject to judging, with all its attendant history of corruption and fraud. Yet if anything, skating is more popular now than ever, thanks to 'talent' shows like Dancing On Ice. When you think about it, the Olympic format is almost as close to Ted Mack's Amateur Hour as Dancing, or Strictly, or X Factor. The biggest difference being the figure skating judges are locked into a 1950s aesthetic, and susceptible to bribes, but are not fed clever lines by the producers for the audience's entertainment. If anything though, the 'kiss and cry' area at the Olympics is even more OTT than X Factor.

When I covered Lake Placid, there were 35 medal events; in Sochi there are 98. Sports have been expanded, not often for the better (cf: classic vs freestyle cross country skiing; 'team' figure skating) and new sports have been added, including more judged sports, like freestyle skiing and snowboarding. Of course there are also a couple of events that excite me the way roller derby did when I was 11 years old: short track speedskating and snowboard cross, which are basically the same kind of Ben Hur races, one on ice and the other on snow. But with new sports has come a new, younger audience and a problem for commentators, as I've been discovering watching the BBC coverage.

Snowboarding is analogous to surfing, and the lingo seems to have been built on a gnarly surf base. But surfing has never been in danger of reaching the Olympics. Snowboarding is one of the few sports at the Winter Olympics where the competitors don't dress in lycra bondage gear, and the only one where a competitor (in Vancouver) was barred from the games after testing positive for marijuana, which would imply that it is the only sport where pot is a performance enhancing drug. So it's a young, groovy thing, which means BBC commentators appear to be determined to do the verbal equivalent of a 1440 Yolo flip on every routine. This Jonathan Pearce approach might work on radio, and attract a lot of attention, but it doesn't do much to enlighten the audience. On the other hand, I once asked a snowboarder, while I was doing commentary at the 2005 Winter University Games, what 'huge air' meant, and he said, 'well, like, the air, it was huge'. So now we knew.

On the other hand, you'd think curling would be a natural fit, partly because the Scottish (whoops, I mean British) teams are quite good, and partly because it has the same sort of appeal as snooker, lawn bowls, or even darts. Which means the BBC commentators approach each end with a sort of genteel calm, regardless of how tight the competition is, and even in celebration of a British win have all the reserve of Phil Drabble commiserating with the second place finisher at a sheepdog trial. What would be instructive would be to swap the snowboarding and curling commentary teams around, if only for a day.

Meanwhile, Great Britain & Northern Ireland picked up its first gold medal Friday, in skeleton, and I watched Lizzy Yarnold's impressive win to prepare myself for chat on Saturday morning's World Service Weekend programme. Skeleton bob is basically going down a bobsled run on a sled, head first the way you would on your own Flexible Flyer as a kid. It's been in the Olympics before, on the Cresta run in St. Moritz, and it's probably the most accessible and human of the bob run events: the bobsled itself being conducted inside a bumper car, while the luge, in Tony Kornhesier's great phrase, resembling Dracula going downhill in his coffin.

I caught the last of the four skeleton runs, and it was gripping stuff—with the difference of third and fourth places coming down to .04 seconds (four one-hundreths of one second) over the combined FOUR runs. But when it got to Yarnold and the final run, there was little grip left. She had built up a huge (0.78 seconds!) lead over the first three runs: all she really needed to do was get to the bottom without crashing to win.

This was pointed out, hesitantly by Amy Williams, the skeleton expert commentator, which then set Colin Bryce off into a mad effort to rebuild the tension. Fair enough, because the pair had been pretty good in explaining how the event worked, and the way in which Britain, just like East Germany thirty years ago, had identified athletes to draft into the sport and concentrated on sled technology, so despite not having a track of their own to practice on they had achieved remarkable success. They also drifted into those areas that make you wonder what 'experts' are for. Yes, the racers will enjoy the podium, they will be happy, and yes, they'd really like to win. You do not have to have raced at Olympic level to provide such insights. But once the race started, all explanation was off anyway. 'Speed will be crucial here,' said Bryce, which was self-evident enough, but actually wasn't the most crucial thing. Then he pulled out the commentator's greatest enemy, the cliché's cliché, just before the start. 'Lizzie GOES FOR GOLD FOR BRITAIN' he said, a verbal tabloid headline simple enough for any audience to understand.

The rest of the run was basically Amy Williams cheering Lizzy down the course. This raises the interesting point of why you need an expert commentator to cheer. Why not have Lizzie's husband, or grandmother, or next-door-neighbor, or Brian Blessed instead? At one point Bryce interjected 'she's flying now', which was daring in the sense that he didn't have David Vine's Ski Sunday tape delay to prove him hundreths of a second right, but basically anyone going down a bob run on a skeleton is figuratively flying. It is a difficult thing: momentum means some bumps will slow you down less than you might think, and there's no way for the naked eye to calculate how many hundreths of a second may have been gained or lost. Yarnold won by almost a full second (0.96) but remember that's a full second after FOUR runs. And as she celebrated, Amy Williams was 'crying for her, crying for everyone' which maybe Brian Blessed could not have done better, and I appreciated her tears for me.

Yarnold herself seems completely likeable, a great person for a great story, and I suppose we can expect the Seoul Hockey Syndrome to mean she will appear on a lot more BBC in the future than she has in the past. But I was amused by her nickname, which is 'The Yarnold'. I have written before about the remarkable flatness of British nicknames. If Mean Joe Green had been British, his nickname would have been 'Greeners'. Cool Papa Bell would have been 'Bellsy'. And Broadway Joe Namath would have been lucky to be 'Joe'. Or maybe 'The Namath'.

JOHN CARTER (NOT REALLY OF MARS)

John Carter opened to some of the worst reviews I've ever seen, including a monumental raspberry from the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw. So I wasn't surprised that when we went to see it in Paraparaumu, New Zealand, there were only two other people in the crowd (not that there are many Guardian readers in Paraparaumu). I was surprised, however, to find that the film was nowhere near as bad as the critics would have you believe. For sure it's easy to understand the roots of complaints like Bradshaw's, because John Carter is overblown in any number of ways. It's too long, because of repetition; it's too big, with too many scenes or situations there seemingly only to find a way to use the expensive CGI (apparently much of the cost overruns involved re-shoots to merge up the live action with the animated backgrounds, and one wonders how much of the film's expense is intra-studio anyway) and it tries to do too much, indicated primarily by the contrasting acting styles of heroes and villains.

It was also a film marketed ass-backwards. John Carter is based on the first of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom novels, set on Mars, and titled A Princess Of Mars. It's an interplanetary love story as well as a prototypical lost city adventure novel, but looking at the film posters and trailers you'd think it was about a muscle-bound guy trying to drag a huge rock away from animated monsters. Has they featured Lynn Collins, as the erstwhile titular princess, in her Frank Frazetta-style battle gear, they might have drawn a female audience and they certainly would have drawn every teenaged male with hormones pumping through his body. Even though Collins at times looks like a more muscular Minnie Driver, which is not necessarily the best thing, but she survives somehow anyways.

It's as if, while Hollywood continues to pillage the adolescent reading (and watching) habits of Baby Boomers, they want to deny its adolescent nature. Perhaps it's the dynamic of the industry itself that inflates cinematic versions of pulp (in the real, generic sense) fictions, like actors taking steroids to play muscle man roles. In effect, this is a huge-budget adaptation of a low-budget adventure story, and it battles against itself in its ultimate unwillingness to surrender to its material. ERB's Martian novels, like most of his work, drive a hero through a series of encounters. On Mars this involves the battle between the vari-coloured races which make up the red planet, and analogies to 19th century perceptions of white men and lesser races are made clear early on in both book and film: Burroughs served out west and had great respect for his Indian adversaries; the fact that John Carter is a former Confederate officer sets him up as a rebel, yet willing to ally with the racial underdogs while always remaining part of the overdog club. Which is exactly what happens to him on Mars—fighting with the underdogs but allied, via the comely Deja Thoris, the red-skinned princess, to the overdogs.

It's a great set up, and the makes the most of its conflicts. John Carter must prove himself to the 15-foot tall, multi-armed Tharks, then lead them in battle on the side of their traditional enemies. The script, co-written by Mark Andrews and Michael Chabon, hews pretty closely to Burroughs' basic tensions: Chabon has already shown himself to be a faithful yet telling interpreter of such material. And director Andrew Stanton, as you might expect from the guy who did WALL-E, has considerable sensitivity too. Action scenes move simply and dynamically, and the framing story, involving Carter's nephew Edgar Burroughs, are well done.

Taylor Kitsch is surprisingly good as Carter—in the TV series Friday Night Lights he never seemed quite solid enough to be the Dillon High fullback, and occasionally he seems too light for Carter as well, but he manages to carry off the action while catching the lighter tones of the character just as well as he does the sombre. Just before seeing John Carter, I watched Kitsch playing another character named Carter in Bang Bang Club, this time in Martinborough when we were literally the only people there. I worry about the future of film in NZ. Here Kitsch is a sort of more muscular Johnny Depp. He's a specialist in the heavy-browed pout to display internal emotion, but John Carter doesn't ask for an overdose of that. I read a lot of criticism of the Tharks, but Willem Dafoe as Tars Tarkas and Samantha Morton as his daughter Sola may well be the best part of the film; the simmering feud between the wise old chief Tars and the war-hungry young brave Tal Hajus (Thomas Haden Church) is a parallel to the main story, and the fact that these CGI characters are easily the most 'human' in the film is an irony Hollywood and critics alike seemed to miss.

The real problem is on the villain side. First because Dominic West seems to be enjoying himself too much to take it seriously, and seems also to believe in the essential dumbness of his character Sab Than. You wonder why the all-powerful Therns would have chosen Sab as their vehicle, and why their boss, Thern, wears that stupid earclip. I wonder if there was a trans-Atlantic disconnect going on during filming, because Cieran Hands seems intent on channelling the awesome talents of Brian Blessed into his role. Maybe the clip was the best Strong could do to keep the noise out. You also might wonder why the boss Thern, Shang (Mark Strong) never seems to use his greatest powers when he needs them. Perhaps there is a subtle existential problem being worked out, about over-manipulating societies, but if there is I missed it. I did get the parallels with Earth society, however, on both the 19th and 21st century levels, though that seems to have passed the critics by as well. It should be noted that the straight-to-video Princess Of Mars (2009) starring Traci Lords as Deja Thoris (!), set John Carter in modern-day Afghanistan before his transport to Mars. (As an aside, it's a shame Lords wasn't still doing adult films, as a cheapie porn ripoff of Princess Of Mars could have been called Deja Throatest). Back to the original point—Carter's final ploy at the end of the film would seem useless if Shang and the Tharns were really as powerful as they say—why would they not have simply killed John Carter as they did Sab Than? It's like the way Carter's ability to leap great distances (like the original Superman, by no coincidence at all, since this is where Siegel and Shuster got the idea) due to lesser gravity gets greater and greater as the film goes on, and how, towards the end, we also see the final reel compression of distance which allows the ride to the rescue. These things are common in big action movies, and they are not the real problem, nor the cause of the film's bad reviews.

The point, in the end, is that John Carter can be fun if you relax and let it take you with the ERB flow. The problem, in the end, is that the film itself conspires not to let you do that. It doesn't want to think of itself as John Carter of Mars, and it tries too hard not to be. Hence the reviews. It all depends on how sturdy your suspension of disbelief really is.